When Grandad went to bed
He took his teeth out for the night;
Grinning in the glass
They were a terrifying sight.

Then on his bedside table
Grandad put his specs,
Followed by his toupé –
His hearing aids came next.

He lay down on his pillow,
Pulled the sheet over his head,
None of him was visible
As he slumbered in his bed.

Grandad’s disembodied dentures,
Topped off by his hair,
With his glasses in the middle,
Gave the grandchildren a scare.

Johnny screamed, “Oh! Grandad
Has taken off his head,
It’s on his bedside table
Instead of in his bed!”

But Jenny said, “Don’t worry,
Grandad’s head’s still there –
That one on the bedside table
Is the one he keeps for spare.”

Christmas cheer had eluded me when I walked into the tinsel festooned Lismore pharmacy. In fact I’d been feeling dispirited for some time. Isolation on a steep bush block, distance from friends, lack of city buzz, and a bad case of writer’s block had got to me. My lifelong desire to find myself at the pulse of a literary cultural life, or by this time any cultural life at all, had taken on a Quixotic quality without the romance of that eternal dreamer tilting at windmills from his wobbly horse. I was over grappling with heat and floods and weeds and reading about hugely successful writers in the weekend newspaper supplements.

The vista of Christmas glitz; the press of the sick, the anxious and depressed milling about at the prescriptions-out counter and the clamour of carols billowed towards me. The service number slip I’d been holding so optimistically seemed to…

It’s unarguable that Prime Minister Tony Abbott has set his sights on the ABC.

Abbott claims the ABC displays what he terms “lack of affection for the home team” in its reporting of events such as the Indonesian spy scandal, allegations by asylum seekers that Australian navy personnel caused them to suffer burns (earlier described as “sledging the navy” by Immigration Minister Scott Morrison) and, perhaps most heinously, “advertising” the work of whistleblower Edward Snowden whose disclosures led to so much trouble in the first place.

The Prime Minister would like it much better if we were all kept mushroom-like in the dark and showered with LNP shit, rather than informed by the national broadcaster of what our government is actually doing.

Somehow, the inanities, incompetencies and illegalities of the Abbott government are not the problem. The problem is the ABC reporting them!! Who would have thought!!

This reminds me of…

The recent events on the high sea, with border incursions by Australian Navy vessels, called assets, into Indonesian territory, led me to rethink as to what had happened at the outbreak of WW II on the 1. September 1939.

As we all know Adolf “the friend of all people” Hitler was deeply disturbed when he heard, that German tanks, oops, border control assets, were found out to have  inadvertently crossed into Polish territory. German units were only at the border training for the eventuality that Polish cavalry units could attack Germany.

The training exercise became  necessary as it was Germany’s intention to stop the flow of future asylum seeker boats that might come across the river Vistula.  While  Adolf „the Great“ bluntly reaffirmed  his policy it  immediately prompted a diplomatic response from Poland. 

The Führer said Germany was entitled to protect its borders and would continue to do so, irrespective of Polish concerns over…

Edit February 06 2014: Since I wrote this on January 23 I have added links at the end of the article to later media reports. Today a new report has been published which casts further shadows on the whole debacle.

Details aside, though, his account has been consistent from the first. He says he has no doubt that what he saw at close quarters on about January 3 was three people’s hands being deliberately held to a hot exhaust pipe by Australian naval personnel to punish them for protesting, and to deter others from doing one simple thing: going to the toilet too often.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/investigation-burned-hands-on-the-high-seas-20140206-hvbdl.html#ixzz2sWjrPkQv

As an Australian I still want to believe our Navy personnel, however now, two weeks after I wrote this original article, I am no clearer on what happened, despite the pressure put on the ABC to apologise for the initial reports.

The…