Bronwyn Bishop, government television advertising as a health initiative, and another red letter day for how to vote advice ...

(Above: a red letter manuscript. An excellent collection of medieval European manuscripts here, though a tad slow to load).

We've hung out the flags and bunting, and hunted around for red letters to celebrate.

Yes indoody, it's always a red letter day when Bronnie goes on the prowl.

But then we got to wondering. What on earth was a red letter day and why was it so significant?

Come on down wiki and illuminate us. It turns out that red letter day comes from medieval church calendars, when the illuminated manuscripts often had initial capitals and highlighted words in red ink. The First Council of Nicaea got the routine running in 325 for saint's days, feasts and other holy days, but it really got going when the first Book of Common Prayer in 1549 showed special holy days in red ink.

Yes indeed, and I regard it as a complete failure on the part of The Punch, Australia's now one year old contribution to tedious conversations throughout the land, and funded by the smell of an oily Murdoch rag, not to have red letters scattered throughout Bronwyn Bishop's missive to the Australians, Since when is an ALP crisis a national emergency?

Bronnie is wrathful that the ALP has done a John Howard and spent up big on taxpayer dollars to justify their tax on big mining.

Of course this righteous attack led a few punters to get upset as they remembered the good old days of John Howard spending a heap of moola selling the GST, and a lavish amount of cash selling the dead on arrival notion of WorkChoices, but I remember those times fondly.

So awful were they that I switched off the television, started to take long walks, and became a fitter human being while becoming aware of the charms of the inner west - though I must say stray encounters with hippies and students and tattooed types and gloomy goths meant that I carried a sturdy stick capable of killing snakes wherever I went. And all these wretches alive and pleased with themselves in John Howard's Australia!! It made the head spin, to think of such things, all the beasts and wriggling, squiggly things, an affront to every right thinking latte hating commentator in the land.

Now Chairman Rudd and his minions are just taking John Howard's health initiative a step further, as is the mining industry as it takes a tax break for its own advertising campaign. We can never have enough of this kind of 'switch off the telly and take a walk' health initiative.

Some failed to see the bright side:

Do these Liberal parliamentarians really write the stuff that is served up in Punch every day? I really feel that the Liberal and National party hacks write it and just assign names on a rotational basis.
What new information is contained in this piece? Absolutely nothing.

What a gherkin. Fancy failing to understand Chairman Rupert's deep and clever plan to get us all out and about and reading anything other than The Punch on the intertubes. You see, Chairman Rupert's minions get the Bronnie hay, the fodder, the bulk for the trough, for free, and it's put up on the intertubes to fill the already overflowing tubes even more full with a dire waste of digital space.

Confronted by another Bronnie outburst, you might decide to take a walk in the park, and be reminded that there's a dire national emergency in relation to dog lovers failing to pick up their merde.

There is of course nothing new or interesting in Bronnie's outrage at Chairman Rudd, except of course to note that she never discovered the same outrage when Chairman Howard was doing the same. Here at the pond we simply remain outraged at the lot of them, and in need of a good walk.

Whatever you do, we strongly suggest you avoid reading Peter Hartcher's Big miners gave Rudd the fight he was looking for. Actual political analysis is simply not a viable alternative when confronted with Bronnie's musings.

But there was one little plaintive poignant plea that struck deep at our heart strings:

And a P.S for Senator Brown of the Greens (now there is a contradiction in terms). It’s no good crying out about how bad the government is if you simply remain the conduit for delivering your preference votes to Labor.

People would take you more seriously if you adopted the Democrat’s position of not directing your preferences but letting the voter decide. By all means put on your how-to-vote, a how to preference Labor, but add how to preference the Coalition.

What a hoot of a classy joke. Brown being leader of the greens! Hey I haven't had that kind of chuckle since reading the best of Billy Bunter. Yaroop garooah.

Oh you fickle perverse perverted greens, dressed up as earthy browns. Let your people go! Let them be free to think! Unleash the shackles binding them in chains.

You see, Liberals are completely incapable of doing anything other than follow the Liberal how to vote card by rote. They grunt, perplexed and alarmed when confronted by five names on the ballot paper, and if asked to think outside the square, there's a good chance they'll deliver a donkey vote. That's why they must be told, and their voting procedures must be explained in fastidious detail, so that they can get it right.

It seems that the greens exercise the same kind of insidious capacity for mind control. By putting down the suggestion that people vote in a certain way, they exercise a stupendous hypnotic control over their subjects. As a result, greens voters are congenitally incapable of going against the how-to-vote guide, but instead unfailingly decide to follow instructions.

Let there be no leaking, let there be no rampant individualism, let there be no voters deciding to vote anyway they like. You know, like putting the Loon Party first, and then voting Greens, and then putting the Liberal party last! You see, greens are congenitally stupid, and so must be given a "how to preference the coalition" guide, or they might never do it. And so the world might come to an end.

Yep, it's always a red letter day when Bronnie speaks. Come to think of it, we're now working on a proposal to suggest an initiative which might even devolve into a concept whereby voters can have candidates picked out on the ballot paper by red letters ... Then every time you vote for a politician it's a red letter day.

And now as is our wont, we've updated Dorothea MacKellar's poem to better reflect Bronnie's sense of humour and anti-brownist tendencies:

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror --
The wide green land for me!

Hey, that should fly.

Now send in the mining companies to dig up that wide green land and ship it overseas, and make haste, for fear the Chinese bubble will burst ...

(Below: dinkum Bronnie approved bunting available at only seven bucks a metre. Make it a red letter day in your dinkum Aussie green land. Oh it's all kinds of colours day on the pond).