Pastor Danny, John Safran, and a few witches for what ails you on a Sunday on loon pond

(Above: we always find that images of female witches take on a genteel air of prim historical research if given the patina of age. Anything that upsets Pastor Danny is worth a run).

For salacious souls interested in a little tabloid lip licking, it's a surprisingly slow Sunday.

Fortunately the Sunday Terror doesn't disappoint, with John Safran's new show low, but I'm wondering if that should read new spelling low, since here's their splash to the story online:


Ethinicity? And a sentence that verges on incoherence. "Did you mean 'ethnicity'"? Google search asks, but no dammit, I'm looking for news of panty sniffing. I know the law that says anybody who calls out a typo will be caught in a typo, but dammit, these people are paid to panty sniff out typos.

It seems that the Daily/Sunday Terror is self scourging itself into a frenzy as Safran's air date looms closer.

It turns out if you read the text that the underpants sketch was set up, and that singer Mahalia Barnes wasn't personally offended, but that doesn't stop the Terror from reverting to an old quote by Australian Family Association spokesman that the show is filth, the lowest point in Australian television history.

Where's all those conservatives bemoaning a lack of humiliation in humor these days?

And there's funny old Tim Blair in Big Hits getting agitated about Islamics rounding up women to check the firmness of women's breasts. Seems he can't read his own rag as it gets excited about the smelling of women's panties on the taxpayer funded ABC!

Never mind, being eternally optimistic, we were hoping that this Sunday would see a flood of nude pictures from the top of Mount Ainslie as Pastor Danny Nalliah arrived in Canberra to exorcise the demons in charge of our national life.

The result? Despite scouring the intertubes, all we could find were few short pars in The Canberra Times:

This may have been the strangest protest Canberra has seen in a long time.

Sex workers, satanists, pagans, atheists, witches, gay rights activists and curious onlookers mixed with more than 100 Christians from as far as Melbourne at controversial religious figurehead Daniel Nalliah's ''prayer offensive'' on Mt Ainslie.

What followed was an afternoon of prayer, exorcism, shouting, flag-waving and nudity.

And then this messsage:

For more, pick up a copy of today's Canberra Times

What, take a trip to Canberra to pick up a copy of your Sunday rag in the vain hope of being able to scan a few shots of nude witches for my gentlemen readers?

Well no link for you, you Fairfax dorks.

As for News Corp, they seem to have gone silent on Pastor Danny, and his antics. For the moment at least.

Which is a pity really, but whatever, here's the stain splattered ritual killing site that inspired Pastor Danny's trip to Canberra to clean it up:

By golly, it looks like our bathroom after my partner's attempted a little housework.

Never mind, let's take a trip back in time to the good old days of Peter Costello and Pastor Danny, here under Preacher 'prepares' Costello:

The leader of a Christian group that advocates the destruction of mosques, casinos and bottle shops has met Peter Costello to "prophetically prepare" the Treasurer for the prime ministership.

Hah, I guess that's a prophetically dingbat useless piece of preparation, though who knows, the lord works in mysterious ways, like choosing Pastor Danny as his anointed vessel:

Mr Nalliah said in a letter to Christians that the Lord had told him to spend "personal time" with Mr Howard and to prepare Mr Costello as the "future prime minister".

He had a "one-to-one meeting with Peter Costello on Thursday, August 9 and John Howard on Friday, August 10".

Did he give Costello a plan B as future loser, and future blatherer in Fairfax Media?

Mr Howard would not comment and Mr Nalliah did not return calls.

A spokesman for Mr Costello confirmed he had met Mr Nalliah many times.

Many times! Well never mind, Costello will shortly be out of Canberra, and that's one less demon the nation's capital will have to worry about.

Meantime, at vast expense, we've scoured the web for substitute images for our few loyal gentlemen readers and come up with this blog Sexy Witch, dedicated to sexy witches of all varieties. Not all of it's safe for work, but as a celebration of witches certain to send Hal G. P. Colebatch and Pastor Danny (and perhaps Peter Costello) into a frenzy, we thought it worth a link.

Well we'll keep on with our John Safran and Pastor Danny watches to ensure that the finest local tabloid titillation is referenced in these pages (keeping tabs on worldwide tabloid titillation would require ten lifetimes).

Meantime, can we leave you with Five rules for better sex and romance, including the news that washing up can be aphrodisiac? With not one mention of oysters or champagne or olives!

From where I sit it's five reasons not to buy a hard copy of the Sunday Telegraph and five reasons never to buy content hidden behind a paywall, for fear that you might get fleas, but then I'm inclined to wake up a little slow after spending the night riding the world on a broomstick (take that Tom Cruise, so little you know about levitation).

Come graymalkin, fair is foul and foul is fair, hover through the fog and filthy Tim Blair air, and then ... exeunt.

UPDATE: Good old Fairfax has come to the rescue, in the shape of Bella Counihan dressed up as the Goanna. Not only does she offer up What the Hex is going on in Canberra?, posted at 1PM, but there's also a picture gallery here. Sadly the six tatty pictures on view are truly hopeless - the sort you'd expect from a low quality fancy dress barbeque - and sadly Counihan's report isn't much better. The poor dear seems to be upset at the treatment dished out to Pastor Danny, as if ... gasp ... he was some sort of loon.

By 2009 we might be done with these kinds of ideas but there are still people desperate for answers no matter how ridiculous they sound. Meanwhile the mainstream sits on a secular high horse poking fun at such bizarre behaviour. But Nalliah has developed a presence in Australian public life, not only in the Christian evangelical world but also links in the political world (see here and Peter Costello's message to a ministry gathering on Australia day, here).

Media reports of this "prayer offensive" have become the darling of the off-beat section, ridiculing the event and its prayer vs. black spells premise. But this being the age where you can be believe in spells and be totally in touch with media and the interwebs, Catch the Fire has cottoned on to the rest of Australia's mocking pretty quickly (see here).

They've caught on? A secular high horse? Dearie, careful or you'll be off with the pixies and the fairies and the loons. Or with Peter Costello, as if quoting him gives a loon some kind of certificate of sanity. When it actually gives him a triple gold plated platignum entry ticket to the Willy Wonka hall of fame.

Confirming the tendency, the desire, the need to balance the books, Counihan cranks herself up into tabloid overdrive:

Witches of course do exist, although the more PC way to describe the group these days is Wiccans or Pagans and according to the Pagan Awareness Network, the pagan religion is one of the fastest growing religions in Australia. In the 2006 census, 1000 declared themselves Druidists, 15,000 belonged to the pagan religion and 8,000 were Wiccans. The total of all of these rivalled the amount of declared atheists (although fence-sitting agnostics totaled 20,000 and those that chose to declare no religion or did not state were around 6 million). It seems more people believe in Magick than emphatically believe there isn't a God.

Oh lordy, this Magick is really a serious problem! And yes, Virginia, witches do exist and so does Santa Claus. Whether witches deliver in quite the way Santa Claus does must remain a mystery for another time. Perhaps they're even now rampaging through Canberra.

But one of the fastest growing religions in Australia, doing down atheism, secularism of whatever? More believe in Magick than the absent god? Well more believe in Santa Claus than the absent god, if we allow under tens into the sample. Dearie me, a job at the Terror awaits for this pious Counihan tortured by the sight of tortured Christians.

Sadly, along with this desperate attempt to bend over backwards, Counihan manages to miss most of the color and movement of the Saturday event, as if troubled at the fate of the Nalliah devotees:

Entering into the crowd of Nalliah devotees, Christian and Australian flags waving, was akin to going to a pokies venue on Christmas eve - people desperate, alienated and confused participating in something that gives them hope. Nalliah at the centre of it dressed in white suit jacket, shades and a small mega phone permanently in front of his face spoke much of forgiveness and healing of the nation, interjected only with the odd "hallelujah" and "praise Jesus". Many in the crowd spoke in tongues or mumbled prayers, the first of a series of communions on different parts of the hill, the relocation of the prayers perhaps to do with the spiritual mapping (which would be?) ....

... Pre-exorcism, Nalliah explained to his followers "If the Muslims can go all the way to Mecca, are we willing to sacrifice a bit to save our nation?" Well apparently yes, many are willing to sacrifice their time and energy to go to a car park at the top of a Canberra hill to fight invisible spirits affecting our policy makers. Among the reasons for being there given by observers, one man expressed concern about Nalliah's influence (he was relieved the "sane people" had outnumbered Nalliah's group). And one witch/Wiccan repeated the truism that there's not usually much on in Canberra.

The "sane people"? And the inverted commas mean? Here's a tip for Bella. When you go to the circus, just enjoy the clowns. Don't worry about being too even handed, and don't bother to suggest that the "sane people" are more of a problem than "Nalliah's group".

Oops, sorry, I added inverted those inverted commas for pastor Danny's group. Sheesh, in the land of the hoot, it's all a hoot ...

Now pardon me while I get back on that secular high horse ...

(Below: perhaps for any lady readers - oh weren't the old days such grand days for name calling - the best sexy witch image is the one where the sweet thing is forced to ride a vacuum cleaner. Neo realism at its finest. Oh Darren and Samantha and Endora, have you ever really left us? For any stray gentleman reader we've also put up a NSFW image of sixties witches along with a redeeming historical insight which makes everything okay).

(Below: and just to assert that we're only doing all this from the finest socio cultural sexanomic explorative motives, here's the full lithograph made in 1755 by Jean Jacques Aliamet, after David Teniers the Younger from which we excerpted our first image. A click will hopefully make it larger).