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The above video, in which Australian(*) comedian John Clarke gives a witheringly succinct summary of the present European fiscal crisis, has been making the rounds of certain parts of the internet in recent days. It is great to see Clarke’s work getting attention in the world outside Australia, because he has been putting stuff as good as this out on a weekly basis for decades now.
In fact it would be nice if Australian political satire became better appreciated in the world outside Australia more generally, because the totally tactless take no prisoners approach that much of it has can at times be refreshing in the world of bullshit in which we live. (Seriously, can you imagine anyone of any other nationality pulling off this?)
While John Clarke’s mock interviews are often hysterically funny, perhaps his greatest piece of work is the television series The Games, that ran on Australian television in 1998 and 2000. This series was a mock documentary that supposedly chronicled officials organising the Sydney 2000 Olympic games. It showed idiotic bureaucrats getting into all kinds of dubious scandals of incompetence, massive waste, and corruption. The first series of this program ran several years before the Sydney games, and was met by a certain amount of bafflement by audiences as the fact that the Olympics were indeed being run by incompetent idiots was not at that point widely appreciated. By the year 2000, actual scandals had occurred to such an extent that the program looked like a rather mild reflection of reality. The second series ran immediately before the Olympics in 2000, and people watched it, nodded, and rather wished that reality was not like that.
Two years out from the London Olympics of 2012, we have seen nothing anywhere near this harsh in the British media. Perhaps this is because British television lacks the viciousness of certain parts of Australian television. (Print media are completely the other way round. Australian newspapers entirely lack the viciousness of the London tabloids). If the BBC or any of the other television networks over here had any style, they would simply take the Australian program from 1998 and run it. In prime time.
(*) Clarke is actually a New Zealander, in about the same sense that William Shatner is a Canadian.
I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.
– Groucho Marx
As seen in a signature on a Star Wars: The Old Republic games forum:
[Luke:] I can’t believe it.
[Yoda:] That is why you fail.
[Ayn Rand:] Success does not come from believing in a steaming pile of mystic gibberish, you stupid little green man [ignites her lightsabre and advances threateningly]
– Act IV, The Fountainhead Strikes Back
It has been said elsewhere that the Leader demanded ‘cash’ from the Icelandic types, and they thought he said ‘ash’.
– Commenter ‘Chuckles‘
Well, as it is St Patrick’s Day, I cannot think of a person more able to sum up certain features of Irish culture than Denis Leary.
(Not safe for all work environments).
Well, the days are getting longer, I have even seen quite a bit of the yellow thing in the sky, and I was woken up this morning by some randy pigeons on my terraced roof, so let’s take it away, Mr Tom Lehrer:
Spring is here, a-suh-puh-ring is here.
Life is skittles and life is beer.
I think the loveliest time of the year is the spring.
I do, don’t you? ‘course you do.
But there’s one thing that makes spring complete for me,
And makes ev’ry sunday a treat for me.
All the world seems in tune
On a spring afternoon,
When we’re poisoning pigeons in the park.
Ev’ry sunday you’ll see
My sweetheart and me,
As we poison the pigeons in the park.
When they see us coming, the birdies all try an’ hide,
But they still go for peanuts when coated with cyanide.
The sun’s shining bright,
Ev’rything seems all right,
When we’re poisoning pigeons in the park.
Lalaalaalalaladoodiedieedoodoodoo
We’ve gained notoriety,
And caused much anxiety
In the audubon society
With our games.
They call it impiety,
And lack of propriety,
And quite a variety
Of unpleasant names.
But it’s not against any religion
To want to dispose of a pigeon.
So if sunday you’re free,
Why don’t you come with me,
And we’ll poison the pigeons in the park.
And maybe we’ll do
In a squirrel or two,
While we’re poisoning pigeons in the park.
We’ll murder them all amid laughter and merriment.
Except for the few we take home to experiment.
My pulse will be quickenin’
With each drop of strychnine
We feed to a pigeon.
It just takes a smidgin!
To poison a pigeon in the park.
If you want an, er, interesting take on the global warming alarmist/doomonger/population-controller mindset, check this out. Not safe for work, well, at least not in some offices I know of.
Trawling around some sites to find a corporate statement, I came across this gem:
“Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Attend The Daily Beast’s Women in the World Summit.”
Blimey. Is the writer of that headline channelling the late Evelyn Waugh?
The Nobel Prize winning economist and columnist, Paul Krugman, does his best to annoy crusty free market ideologues such as myself with his sheer, implacable wrongness. It stuns me that the craziest remark in the post I link to here is not actually made up, but something he actually wrote.
Perhaps he should do Saturday Night Live.
Hitler finds out Obama lost Massachusetts… hehehe.
In Scott Brown we have an irresponsible, homophobic, racist, reactionary, ex-nude model, teabagging supporter of violence against woman.
– Keith Olbermann, MSNBC host.
To which Mark Steyn responded, under the heading “Homophobic Nude Teabaggers on the March”:
That’s certainly why I’m supporting him. But who knew there were so many of us?
Hilarious (H/T, Glenn Reynolds).
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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