Just give 'em the monorail Bazza ...

Oh come on Bazza, if the Hobartians want the monorail, and offer to take it down and cart it away at their cost, give it to them.

You'll save a penny or two, and Sydney-siders will look on Hobart like fond aunts watching their relatives tool around in a hand-me-down, clapped-out, broken-down three cylinder vehicle.

Don't be mean. Then at last everyone will know that Tasmania clutches the real Springfield within its ample bosom, and Tasmanian tourism will surge ahead in leaps and bounds as tourists go on "find the Hobart Simpsons hunt". Giant doughnut sales will lead to an economic revival and save the forests and avoid the scourge of wood-chipping.

It's the least that Sydney can do ... remember the bonus chortles at a town with a second-hand monorail. (Put Sydney monorail on eBay - alderman).

Meanwhile, the war of the rags has started to warm up. The AFR has gone into a front page frenzy flaunting its Pay-TV piracy story so all can see:

While The Australian sticks its response behind the fickle finger of gold bar fate:
The story is of course just a series of denials, and if you can be bothered, all you have to do is type the header into Google search, and go read the story, but followers of Bart Simpson will already know the riff. "I didn't do it. Nobody saw me do it, you can't prove anything."

Followers of The Simpsons - ironically financed by Fox - will never forget the "I didn't do it guy' episode in which Bart gets famous.

Meanwhile, there's another apostate within the Murdoch camp on climate change. There's poor old Daniel Piotrowski scribbling Climate change isn't rocket science. Oh wait, it is, and talking about 'belief' in relation to science.

It seems Daniel thinks that climate science might be real, yet somehow public acceptance of the validity of the science (we'll leave belief to religious fanatics) has diminished. Hmm, whatever could be the reason?

Let's revert to The Australian leading the way with its highlighted piece for today's opinion pages:
Oh dear, more blather about alarmism, happily locked away behind the fickle gold bar finger of fate.

But you know the drill. If you want another dose of The Australian tackling climate science, google away. Make sure you take in Tim Blair and the Bolter, tremendously well qualified scientists, right up there with Cardinal Pell.

Ever so happy to print the controversy they are, at the lizard Oz, and at other hackeries run by molochs of Murdoch, while you might just hear an eerie Bart in the wings murmuring "I didn't continually print denialist stories. Nobody saw me do it, you can't prove anything about climate change, anything at all."

But enough of all these light snacks because we just have to mention an arch bit of trolling by Mark Christensen, gearing up for the 2012 atheist convention in Melbourne with Life redeemed by a grander scheme beyond things.

Christensen is one of those angry Christians who likes to shout a lot. He seems extremely irrational about irrationality.

Well maybe he isn't a Christian, maybe he's just a confused angry puppy of the kind that infests The Drum these days and sets up an incessant bashing and clanging and dinning of noise.

There are many highlights and non sequiturs in the piece, but this is surely the pick:

Many atheists are fond of equating God with Santa Claus, along with other pejoratives like fairies at the bottom of the garden and the flying spaghetti monster, whatever that is. A child wonders how it is a jolly old man in an airborne sleigh is able to procure and globally distribute so many gifts without ever being found out. It seems an unachievable task, and it is, which is exactly the point. The impossible is what "defines" Santa.
Children readily accept real magic is both undetectable and incomprehensible. It's a rational response to the subject matter.
It doesn't dawn on atheists – or perhaps it does and they just don't like the answer – that God may well be in the same (non) category.

Yes putting god in the same sleigh with Santa is wonderful logic. But does it ever dawn on Christensen that if god is Santa (or Santa in the same non-category as god), then the way the fat old bastard stiffed the pond with a second hand bicycle and a cheap Coles stocking was the beginning of the end ... though I suppose that's not up there with genocides, holocausts, world wars and the whole damn thing.

There's plenty more silliness, including the notion that god is some kind of de-bugger, some kind of code monkey with a tech fix for what ails us:

Reason rips us from an unconsidered life, often revealing awkward conclusions, including this: once aware of the pain, suffering and brokenness in this world, how does a thinking person flatly reject the likelihood of a remedial mechanism capable of making things whole again? The gap between heaven and Earth must surely come with a fix, a restoration process that most probably involves representation from both here and the other side from whence we came, before time and space.

Yep, god as a remedial mechanism, a fix, a fixer, sort of like the main spring in some eighteenth century watch-makers device.

It seems woolly thinking doesn't just grow on sheep. The funny thing? A few pars before Christensen had been berating atheists for deistic thinking, then comes up with the notion of god as a remedial mechanism.

Truly the intertubes is full of people blathering at great length for no particular purpose, and at least half of them seem to have been driven mad by Richard Dawkins, proving if nothing else that Dawkins must be responsible for the full to overflowing state of the intertubes.

Unless it happens to be the ning nongs and dingbats at your ABC's The Drum, which will publish anything provided it's free and it serves some kind of cosmic ultimate trolling purpose ...

It got so that the pond read Chris Berg's Tasers: the non-lethal force that kills, and felt a surge of libertarian sympathy and camaraderie.

See, see! That's where reading a comparison between god and Santa will get you.

Oh just give them the monorail Bazza, make things right ... show 'em you can play Santa, and maybe someone in Hobart will mistake you for god.

(Below: well at least it isn't a Santa Claus lolcat).