(Above: Eastre by Jacques Reich. Please note that as Tim Blair explains below, the bunnies are really only bunnies, and the stork is a stork, and the babies are babies with wings, which is how babies get down the chimney and then lose their wings to turn into the babies you all know about).
After the excitement of the rumble in the jungle, the smackdown in which Annihilator Janet Albrechtsen took out the Determinator Michael Duffy's civil liberties (and landed a few illegal blows as payback for him always whining), it's a quiet day on loon pond.
After the excitement of the rumble in the jungle, the smackdown in which Annihilator Janet Albrechtsen took out the Determinator Michael Duffy's civil liberties (and landed a few illegal blows as payback for him always whining), it's a quiet day on loon pond.
There's the occasional squawk, or three, but soon the pagan festival of Eastre will be upon us, rife with fertility symbols and chocolate-laced sexuality, and that has a quieting effect on the loons.
Sure there's Miranda the Devine over at the SMH hacking into the feminists and the home birth hippies, in A home birth is not a safe birth, in which she tastefully uses the death of an activist woman's baby in a home birth as a way of hammering Joyous Birth and its home birth philosophies.
No doubt she'll get a lot of responses from loons provoked by her joyous bashing of the home birth brigade, but as I've always preferred to pick up golden staph in the hospital system to the feeble germs we have in the home, it's not a major controversy for me.
Over at The Australian we have the ever reliable Greg Sheridan spluttering on like a Gilbert and Sullivan figure, in Israeli leaders mislabelled by foes.
The trouble is, to write anything about Sheridan, you have to actually read Sheridan, which is a bit like trawling through a mugwump swamp in the hope of picking up a delicacy or two.
The good Sheridan is keen to establish that Benjamin Netanyahu's government is centre-right. "This question of language is of the first order of importance", he bleats, quoting Confucius no less, when I would have thought his exercise in semantics needed to revive memories of our old friend Humpty Dumpty, and his way with words. Impenetrable, I say.
Yes it seems Netanyahu's own supporters, who think he's a right winger, don't know what they're talking about, but wise old Greg does. Why even that first ranking loon Avigdor Lieberman isn't an extremist, even if he might be a right winger. He's just a hard liner who's also a social liberal.
Why sure he might be a polarizing figure, but by broader Middle Eat standards he's an extremely mild politician. Sure he might insult Israel's Arab citizens, but while that might be unhelpful and unnecessarily polarizing, it means he's somewhere in the centre, or a little to the right, and let's face it, he's an equal opportunity loon, insulting both Arabs and orthodox Jews.
Yes siree Bob, labeling these fine chappies as extremists is as absurd as calling the government of John Howard or Malcolm Fraser hardline right wing, when we all know they were pussy, weak, effeminate right wing, while calling Helen Clark in New Zealad hardline left wing barely begins to capture the demonic, dehumanizing form of left wing socialism she practised (or at least so Piers Akerman tells me).
And so on and on, interminable hair splitting which makes you think Sheridan is determined to lift the title of prattling Polonius from our very own Gerard Henderson.
Well I think I can disagree with Sheridan on one crucial thing (and it doesn't involve me cheering on the 'terrorist death cult Hamas', which strangely won an actual election, suggesting that name calling is indeed counter productive when seeking engagement). It'll be a slow cold day in hell before loons like Netanyahu and Lieberman manage to sit down with the Palestinian loons and work out a peace settlement.
Of course I could be wrong, but Netanyahu's track record to date has been remarkably hostile to the notion of peace, and he's built his career out of committed disdain for the peace process (and I'm not just relying on the Clinton administration bad mouthing him as a cheat and a liar to describe his erratic and baleful ways).
Another thing you can say is that with friends like Greg Sheridan doing the two step Orwellian redefinition waltz, whereby left is right, and right is left, and put any foot you like into the centre, Israelis might learn a heck of a lot about double speak from reading him, but bugger all about a path to peace.
And what else have we got? Well over at Tim Blair's blog, the sharp lad gets terribly upset about the fuss The Age has made over a chicken film put together by some North Melbourne footballers - Degrading, Menacing, Distressing Chickens.
Blair cries out to high heaven that the video is only about a toy and a frozen chicken, who have a drink in a pub and then go off to have sex in the toilet.
Blair's terribly upset for the players, but what's most amusing is that he seems incapable of understanding that in art, there is a representational aspect involved. Thus and so, an actual headless plucked chicken might stand in for an actual headless plucked vagina, and in it being given a good rooting, it represents the human sexual act (indeed I'm told that some footballers don't bother with the representational aspect, and just go hard at the chicken, at least when there's not a poddy calf available to give them a good sucking).
As a petrol head, Blair makes a wonderful art critic, and in his meandering way, he manages to evoke surrealism, absurdism, expressionism and post modernism without trying. That's right Tim, next time you go to the cinemah, and see an animated film, remember that while you indignantly splutter that the things up on the screen are only digital doodles, some people actually think they are up there to represent human actions and human emotions.
I know it's terribly hard and extraordinarily opaque, but in a film, a chicken having sex can in fact be taken for a human having sex. You know, art is full of symbols Tim. That's how the toy and the chicken can have a drink in a pub. They're not really having a drink, because headless chooks can't drink, but they really are having a drink, just like humans, and then they have sex, in a metaphorical, symbolic way. In a toilet. The best place to have sex by far, at least for footballers.
Still not getting it clear am I. It's, oh heck, it's like when you slide a finger up and down inside the neck of a bottle, with a leer on your face, it evokes something or other. If only Marcel Marceau were here to show you what I mean ...
It's like that American Pie film, where the lad did something with an apple pie ... as American as ... Okay, let's think Aussie. It's like you stick your finger in a squishy warm steak and kidney pie and move it all around, and it's sticky and gooey and ... nice ... somehow ... erotic. And the next thing you know, you're a wild thing, out of control, off to the toilet and gobbling down that ever so tasty pie.
Ah forget it, we need Bettina Arndt in here to explain the coital aspects of metaphorical celebratory art. Still it sets the tone nicely for the next four days, which are of course all about fertility rites and sex and chocolate and hot cross buns (the cross being symbolic of the acts of some fertility rites with an advanced BDSM sense of humor).
You can of course mix sex, chocolate and buns together, but please make sure not to stain the bed, and anyhoo, enjoy a quiet (or raucous, as the case may be) happy holiday away from the loons, and their soft seductive cawings that right is not right, left is not left, the centre is the left and the right, and chickens is chicks, except of course when they're headless chooks.
(Below: Salvadore Dali and a chicken. And we know what he's thinking about with that chicken don't we? No, it isn't food, you dummies. Did you think those strange sex toys in his left hand were just props for a North Melbourne footy film?)
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