Penburthy, Bachmann, Delaney, and a standard load of croc ...

(Above: more Doonesbury here).

Thin pickings on the pond today, which in its own way is a blessed relief.

Sure if you like travel, you can find plenty - but what with all the happenings at Qantas, not the airline it once was, travel doesn't feel so appetising.

Still there's travel in the mind, and that way you can catch up with Michele Bachmann blithely asserting that Obama and his entourage are spending US$200 million a day on his trip to India (here, with more links). And naturally if Bachmann parrots the estimated cost of a day's fighting in Afghanistan as being roughly equivalent to the cost of travelling a Kenyan Muslim to India - just where is his birth certificate anyway? - then little sir echoes are sure to follow.

"I will tell you unequivocably, I am not making this up. This has been reported. Go to the Internet. Go take a look. "
— Fox’s Eric Bolling, repeating untrue story that Obama trip to India will cost $200M a day

(quoted in the Say What? part of Slate which will lead you also to Doonsebury here).

Eric Bolling, it turns out, is listed as "a financial news television personality" on Fox News. Go on, go to the Internet, go take a look.

Only in America, or should we say, god save America.

Meanwhile, sustaining the theme of travel, over at the punch-drunk Punch, David Penberthy has decided that his real job is being a flack hack for Qantas, as he assumes the role of national brand saviour with a flourish of jingoism, by scribbling A brief message on behalf of Qantas: harden up Australia.

Penberthy's sensitive response to people caught next to an exploding 380 engine?

Clearly the incident with the A380 over Indonesia on Thursday was heading towards the more troubling end of the air catastrophe spectrum. But given the extraordinarily long and proud safety record of our national carrier, you could forgive the people at Qantas if instead of stumping for the aforementioned conciliatory tone, they paraphrased Chopper Read and suggested we should all harden up.

I guess he couldn't bring himself to say harden the fuck up, in true Chopper style, perhaps because then he might be told to fuck off.

If there was a just god, of course, next Qantas flight, Penberthy would be situated next to an exploding engine, which he could then turn into a column for The Punch, no doubt entitled "how I hardened the fuck up, for Australia's sake, and for Qantas".

Penberthy's bizarre idea of balance even extends to slipping in a story from the Congo:

There was a story in Africa last month which only got a tiny mention in the Australian press where a man had taken a crocodile on board a flight in the Congo. The croc escaped and in the ensuing panic 19 people were crushed to death on board the plane.

Uh huh. Must be true. No doubt he went on the intertubes, and took a look.

Time then for a bit of balancing humour. Nothing like nineteen dead in the Congo for a laugh:

You have to wonder how you get a crocodile on board a plane as hand luggage anyway – “OK sir, as long as his jaws are taped shut and you stow him in the overhead cabin and not under your seat, that should be fine” – but in the Congo it doesn’t appear to be an issue. They probably even let you take nail clippers on board, which as any traveller in the namby-pamby west now knows, have been deemed a prohibited weapon in this age of terror.

Of course if you do go on the intertubes to check out the croc story, the story gets a slightly different re-telling at The Guardian, here:

A plane crash which killed a British pilot and 19 others could have been caused by an escaped crocodile, it was reported today.

The aircraft plummeted to the ground in the Democratic Republic of Congo when the reptile, which had been smuggled into the cabin, sparked panic among passengers, the unnamed sole survivor told magazine Jeune Afrique.

A British expert, who is investigating the crash for the Department for Transport (DfT), said he could not rule out a crocodile as the cause, but added it would be "extremely unlikely".

But at least we know where Penberthy gets his intellectual fodder from. Yep, the NT News, which naturally was all over the croc story in Croc causes plane to crash, killing 20.

Only in Australia. Sorry, amend that, only in the Northern Territory. Sorry, amend that, only in the Murdoch rags. God help Australia.

Penberthy goes stridently libertarian in his vigorous defence of an airline which has chosen a wacky zany scientologist as its public relations representative (ladies and gentleman we're comfortably cruising at thirty five thousand feet and if you hook yourselves up to your e-meters, we're likely to meet Xenu). And of course he's resolutely against taking sensible precautions:

This latter point goes to the hyper-sensitivity of Australians to questions of safety. Be it the cars we drive, the food we eat, the paint we use inside our homes, the stuff we buy our kids, in the space of one generation we have turned into a nation of wusses. Thirty years ago there were plenty of fathers who would drive home from the RSL with one eye shut so they could see the road, in cars made entirely out of metal, with the job falling to the non-seatbelt-wearing older child in the back seat to hold on to the wire bassinette containing a baby sibling, just to make sure they didn’t slide into the door of the old Kingswood as Dad swung around a corner. If you tried any of that now you would probably get charged with about 27 different offences.

For fuck's sake. Could someone please give Penberthy a gallon of lead paint to drink, perhaps followed by an asbestos chaser, before plunging him into a car crash without benefit of seat belt or airbag?

Yes, what a laugh it was in the old days to drive as pissed as a parrot on the road. No doubt Penberthy is totally in favour of the drunk as a skunk driver doing fish tails and burn outs before taking out a six year old.

And wouldn't you know, a bunch of wusses getting a little agitated about it!

Sigh. Must remember it's Sunday, not the day for a total melt down. Fuck off Penberthy ...

By the end of it all, Penberthy was offering to knock up a powerpoint demonstration on how wonderful and safe it is in Australia - presumably because all the wusses have had their safety-conscious way.

Sit through a pile of powerpoint crap like that?

I couldn't imagine a more succinct evocation of hell on earth ...

Still if you want an intelligent insight into the world of aviation, you can go look it up on the internet. Why not start with Ben Sandilands' Plane Talking, which substitutes knowledge for gibbering and punch-drunk gibberish?

After the Penberthy load of croc, it was time for a sorbet, and how better than to indulge in the fairy floss of Brigid Delaney's Hipsters in firing line in 2010's culture war.

Delaney has it both ways, by hanging off critics of the newly discovered tribe of hipsters (never mind that you could find more hipsters in Regency times with dandies coming out your ears) and by offering up a set of her own satirical flourishes at coffee lovers. Ah yes, more latte jibes, and this time from someone who passes herself off as a novelist, rather than a member of the commentariat ...

Delaney in splendidly superficial fashion berates the modern hipster for their dress sense, and said taste for coffee in trendy caffs (oh the nausea of reading the word 'caff'), and for a smothering sense of irony, and the resultant risk of remarking that something might be banal. Which of course is a clever pre-emptive move against calling Delaney's scribble "compellingly banal", not to mention "relentlessly, upliftingly superficial" in a way that any hipster might envy.

After imbibing Delaney, the appalling taste of sickly sugar on the tongue led to a desire for a little salt, and so off to that splendid ironist and satirist Ambrose Bierce and his Devil's Dictionary, available at Project Gutenberg here:

FASHION, n. A despot whom the wise ridicule and obey.

SATIRE, n. An obsolete kind of literary composition in which the vices and follies of the author's enemies were expounded with imperfect tenderness. In this country satire never had more than a sickly and uncertain existence, for the soul of it is wit, wherein we are dolefully deficient, the humor that we mistake for it, like all humor, being tolerant and sympathetic. Moreover, although Americans are "endowed by their Creator" with abundant vice and folly, it is not generally known that these are reprehensible qualities, wherefore the satirist is popularly regarded as a soul-spirited knave, and his ever victim's outcry for codefendants evokes a national assent.

AUSTRALIA, n. A country lying in the South Sea, whose industrial and commercial development has been unspeakably retarded by an unfortunate dispute among geographers as to whether it is a continent or an island.

In his preface, Bierce made reference to books that were merely stupid, noting that some of them had the added distinction of silliness.

What would he make of today's world, and its scribbles? Likely he'd settle down with a strong coffee, and think that many merely stupid bunches of croc, though some have the added distinction of being hide-bound ...

(Below: what next? Well surely a sequel scripted by Penberthy, containing the immortal line "I'm tired of these mother fucking crocodiles on this mother fucking plane!" Harden the fuck up airline passengers, and stop your bleating about Qantas, even if it's not the airline it once was).