Fake Andrew Bolt pranks the real Andrew Bolt and so spreads a little joy in the world ...

A lot of young 'uns are too young to remember the good old days. I guess that's because they're not old enough to want to be young again.

But everything old is always new again, and so it is with the Yippies. Running a pig for president, calling themselves the Groucho Marxists, tweaking the beards of the establishment and the solemn. You can find their wiki here, and then of course there was Ken Kesey and his merry pranksters, and such other bouts of lunacy.

Well such madness has its ups and downs - Kesey never wrote a decent book after One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - but his cross-country trip made a good short piece for Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

What got me drooling about the good old days, apart from a silly James Valentine piece on the radio about "in my day" that I caught while braving Sydney traffic?

Why it's the splendid bit of prankster carry on celebrated in Real Andrew Bolt is wrong, says Fake Andrew Bolt, featured in today's Crikey.

Did someone mention Andrew Bolt?

Talk about solemn. Or more like it a pompous populist preening with self-righteousness and a permanent sense of his self-importance. Never has such a sense of self-esteem so infested a commonplace hack scribbler for a tabloid, with delusions of being an expert scientist, politician and sociologist.

As a result, we might dub this bit of pranking as the sublime in the chase after the ridiculous.

Well we're not going to steal fake Andrew Bolt's thunder or steal clicks from Crikey by slicing and dicing the yarn and running it here. But do give it a read. If we twittered - we're too twittish for that - we'd have fake AB at the top of our tweets ...

Bolt's response to the tweaking of his (metaphysical) beard confirms everything we think about the dolt, and why we can't bear to read his pompous prattles, even in a quest for satire.

As you'll see from the read, the dolt is impossible to satirise:

Tom Lehrer is often quoted as saying satire was dead when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize. A major commentator threatening a parody because he thinks their views are too closely aligned certainly backs up that theory.

Pranksters 1, dolts nil.

And remember it's only ten more months to the most important national celebratory day in the calendar, beating Xmas and the Easter bunny hands down (and more First Dog here).

Now to prove that I have the bad taste to listen to James Valentine while driving - is this why the traffic is so fraught in Sydney? - here's my offering of 'in my day' to irritate young 'uns. Yes, in my day, people preferred to read Alfred Neuman to Andrew Bolt, and as a bonus, got more insights into humanity while doing it ...