The Garden Gnome Gets my Vote

Election update: Last night the deputy leader of the opposition went on national television to conduct a staring competition with a garden gnome. This is what passes for serious political debate in my country. A series of intimate leaks from the heart of the government have so infuriated our prime minister that for a short while during a press conference she actually looked alive. Hopefully she can ride this newly discovered pulse registration into an election victory. Tony Abbott the leader, for want of a better word, of the opposition (again, for want of a better word) has been making great play with the fact he has a wife and several daughters to try and dispel the belief that women don't like him.

It has been accepted as a fact that women don't like Abbott. That is to say the media have repeated it so often that even they believe it. Tony's support does seem to be down among women but its always possible that his support is simply higher among men. Possibly men don't like Julia Gillard, nobody seems to have thought of that. I used to like Julia Gillard until she launched her election campaign, now I'm largely indifferent but I suspect that the media witchdoctors surrounding her would prefer us to be indifferent to having a strong opinion either way. The fewer opinions we have the less likely it is that we will notice that neither of our political parties seem to have any either.

In lighter news a man in Austria has been eaten by maggots. Seriously, he went to bed one night and got seriously chewed up by the chitinous little beggars and died in an ambulance on the way to hospital. His partner is being questioned by police. What exactly are they going to ask her?
"Did you see which way they went?" Apparently the man had had a stroke some years ago and had got out of the habit of washing.

Still on things carnivorous, Austrian style, a fisherman in the south of the country caught a piranha the other day. It was the second piranha to be caught in the last couple of weeks. Obviously the Austrian strain of piranha is somewhat stupider than its South American cousin. The only other explanation is that the waters of Austria are swarming with devil fish. If so then the maggots have serious competition. The next headline out of Vienna will be "Man eaten by piranha while he sleeps".

They do things a little differently in Austria; they are German but not really, they had an empire but a very silly one and the cleverest police officer in the country is a dog. Although perhaps this doesn't matter too much if the most important cases he has to investigate are the Mystery of the Hungry Maggots and the Case of the Seriously Lost Piranha. We do things a little differently in Australia too but the truly surreal stuff we leave for election campaigns. Like staring competitions with garden gnomes. How can you not vote for someone like that.