Paul Colgan, and a valiant Punch trying to prove drivel is what makes for the best conversation in Australia ...

(Above: damn statistics. More xkcd here).

Whenever I read Paul Colgan, I get the satisfying sense of being in company with a genial twit.

Here he is scribbling Great country, shame about the hoons for The Punch, Chairman Rupert's contribution to the great blogosphere of loons. Naturally it's statistically based:

At first it might seem staggering that 45.3 per cent of Australians say hooning is a problem in their neighbourhood but when you think about it, how surprising is it really? How often are phone conversations or the break-up line in Sex and The City drowned out by some tool gunning his Subaru down the street? And for every single person in the street who has settled in for the evening, the experience is exactly the same.

(While we’re at it can I add to that the guys noodling about on their Harleys, not just the bikies who have an excuse but the middle managers from accounting firms who take out the Chopper after a stressful day of Excel.)

I know, I know. Your immediate thought is what a pathetic, half-assed, narrow-minded suburban Pooter. I mean, throw him to Tim Blair, and let the pair sort it out on the street, with Blair kitted out in a mean machine. Shoving the hot pulsing chrome up the Colgan's woolly jumper.

This particular part of the Crime Victimisation report by the Australian Bureau of Statistics suggests that dangerous and noisy driving is the number one anti-social issue in the country today. Hoons are public enemy No.1.

And what are our main weapons in dealing with it? Traffic-calming measures from local councils - some speed bumps here, a mini-chicane there.

Noise is the number one anti-social issue in the country today, along with associated dangerous driving?

Just as well you don't get anxious watching Air Crash Investigations and wondering when the engine might land Donnie Darko style in the loungeroom. Or whinge about aircraft noise. Because Colgan can't stand whingers about noise.

Ain't it grand what a difference a few days will make, as Colgan proudly shouts to the heavens Let the aircraft noise roar:

Aircraft noise is a hot backyard political issue in many Australian towns and cities – notably Sydney, Adelaide and Brisbane. It helped Kevin Rudd build his political profile in his Brisbane electorate. But the attention it gets is thanks to the efforts of coalitions of obsessives whose biggest problem, as far as I can see, is they cannot find the remote to turn up the volume on their TVs and forget about it.

Would that be the same remote Colgan couldn't find for the hoons?

On and on he rants, producing a fine flurry of floozies, to explain why noise is good, especially aircraft noise, but of the many tasty examples he lined up - tourism, an elderly couple dewy eyed at the sight of the Opera House, cats turning their heads upwards to improve their maths by counting the rivets on the underbelly of passing aeroplanes - I liked this one the best:

A recent story in the Adelaide Advertiser illustrated just how absurd and counter-productive the complaints of aircraft noise campaigners are becoming. A council mayor, Robert Bria, said he had started noticing more aircraft precisely because people had been complaining to him about it.

Huh? Say what? He never noticed that 747 thundering overhead until someone told him about it? What a deaf eared Adelaide gherkin.

Now it so happens that I live under the third runway, but once upon a time once lived within the airport surrounds - the old houses knocked down to make way for a taxi standing area - and I still remember with fondness the incredible whining of the Constellations as the engines warmed up.

And yes, I make use of the airport regularly - it's nice that it's handy - and I can live with the noise.

But when twits say that the airport was here first, they clearly can't remember that the third runway was the runway we had to have in lieu of a second airport back in the nineties, and they also probably haven't lived in areas newly stricken by aircraft noise as flight paths got tweaked away from the Bennelong funnel to make sure all might suffer more equally. And of course the smug never have to fear that Macquarie and aircraft operators will have their way and - under necessary pressure of tourism and gouging visitors and driving the economy forward - the current curfew will be lifted.

And what these twits never seem to notice - as they head off to the airport to have their pockets picked by Macquarie for coming and going - is that the current airport is an overgrown, unwieldy mess. Sensible planning would have seen a second airport, serviced by decent public transport, established decades ago, back when Gough Whitman first had a passing thought about it. The first airport would have remained - perhaps servicing domestic flights - while the second could have taken care of international flights and freight, or smaller aircraft movements.

But of course such talk is heresy to the ears of the Macquarie rip-off machine.

Naturally thought of a second airport has recently passed again, and so it has continued to pass every politician who's ever had anything to do with it, Liberal or Labor.

But then this is NSW, so what do you expect? The vision shown by Melburnians in 1970 when they decided to downscale Essendon, and set up Tullamarine?

19 fucking 70. Who'd have guessed that Ming the Merciless would have set the show in motion in 1962 by announcing a plan to give his local flock a handsome "jetport"? And bugger Sydney, while we're at it. Meanwhile, the talk of a Sydney solution? Expand Bankstown. Head out to Richmond, ruled in and out more times than Colgan changes his mind about noise.

So it goes, but the amiable twittering of Colgan, as he berates whingers about noise shows exactly why Sydney gets the infrastructure it deserves. Because we get the twit media we deserve.

Fuck the dear absent lord, I'm so over ignorant twits twittering on about enraged people in Petersham tucking into their cornflakes. Can't they even get their fucking useless stereotypes right? It's muesli and original genuine fruit flavoured Greek yoghurt, you useless dipsticks.

Meanwhile, as the red slowly slinks out of the cheeks, there's even worse nonsense going down in The Punch, and I cite What voters really think of Tony Abbott's religion.

I have some sympathy for the authors - apparently Nic Christensen is studying for a Masters in journalism at UTS, while Tina Tek is doing media and law at Macquarie - but really someone should tell them to stop writing this kind of stuff, or they'll go blind. Here's their pitch:

Religious epithets like the “mad monk” and “captain Catholic” are routinely applied - usually as negatives - to Tony Abbott in coverage of the alternative Prime Minister. So we wanted to find out if they resonated with voters.

A Punch poll of 100 voters across Sydney found that Labor and Green voters despise the way Abbott injects religion into his political campaign and policy. On the other hand, Liberal voters respect Abbott as a ‘conviction politician’ who is firm on his beliefs.

An abjectly, absolutely irrelevant, useless and meaningless poll of 100 voters? I tend to look askance at surveys conducted with 1,000 people claiming a variance of plus or minus three per cent, but one hundred names in the hat is simply tragic.

All it allows them to do is blit blat around the kind of stuff you'd normally write about Abbott and Rudd and religion, but under the guise that somehow the figures mean something:

A total of 11 people out of 100 said Abbott’s views on other social issues such as gay marriage, climate change and inequality against women were a negative. With the exception of two, these were all committed Labor or Greens voters.

Bugger me dead, I could get more sense out of the local cats if I herded them together and asked them about the percentage their arithmetic skills had improved by counting the rivets in low flying aeroplanes. 2 of the 11 said they still yearned for the good old days of Snappy Tom. Sharpened the mind, they said, made counting a breeze.

Well you can read more of the gibberish here, and its rigorous Punch-style quantitative scientific basis, with 64% here, 24% there, only six people here, and two over there, and 8% wondering what the fuck it was all about, since they knew little of Tony Abbott's religious views. Clearly demonstrating that the survey found a couple of ringers from Venus and Mars loitering in the streets of Sydney.

Enough already. I know The Punch is too stingy and tight-arsed to pay them, and way too tight-arsed to spring for the cost of a real survey, and it's a credit on their CVs in these tough times, but in the end we're left with this kind of absent-mindled doodling, which passes for journalism all too often on the pages of Chairman Rupert's contribution to over-filling the intertubes.

As a result, I decided to head outside with the cats, count the rivets, share their Snappy Tom and yowl at the moon. Living in Sydney can do that to you ...

And now it's time for your assignment. That's right, you don't get away without doing some homework. Please count the number of rivets on this plane, multiply by the number of cats in your neighbourhood, compare and contrast with Paul Colgan's wavering tolerance to noise (using extrapolation techniques), to arrive at a correct percentage of sense to be derived from The Punch. If you got over 50%, you've done it wrong. Please start again! And remember there's no dog nearby salivating over your homework and the cats to save you ...

Alternatively why not write a column for The Punch, and add to the burden on the tubes' sewerage system?