Christopher Pearson, Ruth Ostrow, Jim Schembri, and the battle to be top dog on the feral cat pond ...

(Above: I can't believe it. My first legitimate reason to run a lolcat, and I owe it all to Ruth Ostrow. Is not the world a good place?)

We were exceptionally pleased to read that Mike Carlton has instituted a "loony of the week" award. When talking about his email correspondents, he noted 80% hit the spot, 10% came from barking mad High Tories, and then there was another unhappy differently barking mad 10%:

The bottom 10 per cent, I have to say, are barking mad, and from them I like to choose a Loony of the Week. This week's winner frothed that I hate the Premier because ''Kristine [sic] is Catholic and right wing.'' Amazing.

The rest of the column - Savaged by a mincing poodle with his finger on the mouse - begins with an amusing take down of Christopher Maurice Pyne, but we were more excited by the notion that "loony" could become an exemplar of political discourse.

We've long held the view that it's the right of everyone to be as loony as they can be, and for looniness to be celebrated, revered and enjoyed. Let loons everywhere flourish and compete for the Mike Carlton award.

That said, this weekend is a very disappointing turn out of competitors, a bit like holding a winter Olympics with too little snow so the home country can win all the gongs. Go Canada.

Oh sure, there's Christopher Pearson, offering up PM's face is smiling, his mind is not, but he spends his words carelessly, for the second week in a row tediously explaining how Chairman Rudd is terrified and on the run and a rising Tony Abbott - when not lost amongst the fossils - is rampant.

Then he wheels in Rod Cameron to explain why Rudd is doomed, and then has to spin his way out of what Cameron said about Abbott being unelectable, by criticising Cameron for partisan spin. Not that someone who boasts of his friendship with Tony Abbott and a shared passion for the Latin mass could ever be accused of partisan spin.

Did someone pass me the kettle when I specifically asked for the carbon-stained pot?

Cameron is a long-term Labor strategist and allowances have to be made for the partisan spin that comes as second nature while sifting his remarks for substance. For example, the suggestion that Abbott is unelectable flies in the face of the polling but consoles the party faithful that everything will turn out well in the end.

Well played, a nice double twist with pike, but not quite what the judges were looking for, since it somehow evokes the need to sift Pearson's commentary for substance.

How about determining what the election campaign will be about?

The fact that the Prime Minister repeatedly recommitted to enacting an emissions scheme on Insiders last weekend means that, health and tax policy notwithstanding, the election campaign will be a referendum on the issue.

Sorry, a private fantasy life and wish fulfilment might be personally satisfying, but can only be seen as a gutter ball by those without a religious belief in denialism. As if the matter of climate change was now done and dusted, in the way that the issue of limbo has been resolved.

No, these days we need to step up to some real meat, and who better than Ruth Ostrow. I confess I've ignored Ostrow for way too long, but she's shaping up as a real contender.

Take Born to be wild. Yes, you can take it, and bury it out the back with the kitty litter if you like, or you can read it.

If you decide to ruin your eyeballs, you'll get a harrowing story of a lion tearing the head off a woman, and then a harrowing story about how Ostrow's docile, ever so cute Persian fluff-ball cat, when confronted by a snake in the garden, took an attitude to Ostrow's intervention:

My motherly instincts took over and I shot across the garden and grabbed the cat. The feeling of something coming up behind must have seemed like certain death and my right arm was ripped from one end to the other, as the cat, operating from terror and adrenalin, attacked its captor.

Wow. Powerful stuff. A suburban tragedy, and surely the logical conclusion is that lions should be banned, and cat owning relegated to the realm of witches. There's simply no reason to allow the keeping of these Ostrow-ripping urban terrorists, so they can live in the city, tom catting on the tiles and killing birds like Terminators determined to eradicate our feathered friends (myna birds excluded of course).

Sure, cats purr, and look cute, in a remote Mehitabel kind of way, but they're killers, still strolling the savannah in their mind's eye. No wonder Ostrow demands they be banned:

I don't begrudge fiery dogs their right to be wild creatures or to have adrenalin surges out of fear or rivalry. I just don't think humans should own them.

Que? Say what? WTF? It was the cat that done it, and dogs should be banned? And the cat walks free? Saunters outside to think of another excuse for an arm ripping?

Oh the humanity.

Next week, a call to ban bicyclists for running their bicycles into hapless, quivering jellyfish owners of Hummers, who only drive them because the size of the exhaust pipes prove they have a big penis? Deep down they're sweet little pussy cats?

Well I guess you could always find yourself reading Jim Schembri. Unlike Miranda the Devine, in her wonderful and insightful Hit by the leftie sledgehammer demolition, shock and awe flattening of the evil greenie James Cameron's socialist propaganda film Avatar, covertly funded by Mosfilm, Jim is terrified the show might win best picture or best director Oscar.

In Pray that Kryptonite is Avatar's undoing, Jim is particularly upset by the notion of floating mountains:

''Really? That bothers you?'' said Cameron. ''There's floating mountains in the movie and that bothers you?''

Well, yeah, because it doesn't make any sense. Story coherence has nothing to do with floating mountains.

Um, Jim, let me break this to you gently. The hero turns into a blue CGI, and mates with another tall blue creature, who isn't a CGI, except she is, not being an avatar, but real in a blue kind of way. These blue creatures ride dragons, and do mind fucks by entwining their tails with themselves and other creatures (and never mind the bestiality implications).

All this talk of the Na'vi mind link, and avatars and the Omaticaya way of knowledge, and the Tree of Souls, and god knows what else in the way of mystical gibberish, and you suddenly baulk at floating mountains? Sheesh, if that's the only thing that didn't make any sense to you, you were on a winner.

Then he added: ''That's the most minutia-based question I've ever received doing hundreds of interviews whose sole purpose was to talk about Avatar.''

There it is, folks, confirmation from the biggest filmmaker in history - Titanic, True Lies, Terminator 1 and 2, Aliens - that story matters less than floating mountains.

Oh dear lord. I'm suddenly with you Jim. No, not you Jim, the other Jim. James. Give James Cameron an Oscar, if only for plausible denial. And get Jim Schembri back on his medication quickly, before he falls off a floating mountain.

And there you have it. Week after week, valiant protagonists, like natives trying to defeat cruel miners hunting for unobtainium, wage desperate battle to become 'loony of the week', and thereby bring a smile to the face of devotees of looniness everywhere. Long may it continue ...

And now, Mehitabel the cat takes a walk on the dark side (here):

one day she was talking to me
of the kittens
and the next day when i asked
her about them
she said innocently
what kittens
interrogation point
and that was all
i could ever get out
of her on the subject
we had a heavy rain
right after she spoke to me
but probably that garbage can
leaks so the kittens
have not yet
been drowned

(Below: eek, it's a floating mountain. Please explain why James Cameron had to ruin his intensely neo-realistic, emotionally convincing study of blue people and their flying dragon friends with the risibly unrealistic concept of floating mountains? Instead of making the first science fiction Bicycle Thief, he's ended up with a gross travesty of story telling. Take out the floating mountains Jim! Do a recall and scrub them out with your whiz bang CGI skills. But whatever you do, however you cope, leave in the blue creatures and the dragons. Keep the realism! And don't try and tell me that the unobtainium in the floating mountains is what fuels the anti-grav devices in the interstellar time warp space ships. I've seen Star Trek - the warp drives tap the energy released in the deuterium matter-antimatter annihilation process, with the aid of regulating 'dilithium crystals'. Keep the science real Jim. Use deuterium! Stay coherent!)