Leaking All Over The Place

How bloody selfish and grasping can the south-east corner of this state get?

Now they've pinched our weather.

Listen you lot down there, that sort of storm and flash flooding during the week is our go up here. We demand that you return our whingeing rights, and reserve any `super cells' down there for the likes of Gordon Nutall.

And that's not all.

Even worse about this weather theft,  21,000 lightning strikes in Brisbane on Thursday and not a single bloody one could hit a politician!!! Memo God: stop being a tease and get with the program, give us something to believe in.

On the international scene, the Almighty has worked the miracle of getting radicals of all stripes and media moguls into an unlikely alliance on one issue at least.

Everything seems to be dominated by Magnetic Island's most infamous son, the pallid and mildly creepy Julian Assange, who right now is under the loving eye of the Pommy wallopers.

Assange must be as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.

The Swedes, who unsurprisingly seem to have turnipheads for prosecutors, are still trying not look like the legal twits they obviously are, and want Assange back to have the chat he openly offered to have for some weeks before he left Sweden.

Now, if he is squirted back to Sweden to face what appear to be trumped charges of unauthorised rumpy-pumpy with a couple of local politically-planted trollops, he faces the far more serious prospect of being extradited from there across to the Yanks to face charges of  - umm - rooting them in a different sense.

Apparently, Assange is a bloke who, if his previous cyber surfing for gals is any guide, uses - in Mongrel the Barrister's unsavoury term - his cock as his compass. And blokes generally know that leads to an altared/altered way of life  - your choice of spelling, both are right and both carry expensive but different outcomes.

Every angle of this unfolding melodrama has been chewed over and masticated in the feeding frenzy across all media, but The Magpie now goes one better and looks down the track at some ripper marketing opportunities that are there for the taking.

Here's just a random sample of the endless possibilities, and feel free to add to the list.

Perfume: Eau d' Piscine from the House of Assange (`For those who know when something smells fishy')

Dating Service: Assange-ations (`…you never know your luck, just don't put anything in writing.')

Condoms: Willy Wikis (`…safely stores all willy leaks')

Big Julie hamburger (`positively leaking with our own sources')

Tourism: `Want a tan like Julian Assange's? Holiday on Magnetic Island - in the rainy season!').

But all this droll drivel aside, there are a few aspects of this whole affair that The Magpie doesn't quite get.

They've banged up at least two blokes for stealing documents and handing them on to Assange. When not dressed up in self-serving faux-intellectual twaddle, the basic fact is that this is stolen material, and Big Julie may well be for the high jump if the very peeved Americans get their hands on him.

But here's the thing, as illiterate teenagers are given to saying: aren't newspapers like The Guardian, The New York Times and the Sydney Morning Herald just as culpable for publishing stolen material, much of which is merely titillating tittle-tattle and can't be defended as being in the community interest?

And some of which is likely to be fatal to the poor benighted buggers who trusted the Yanks and became informers in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Now they've been identified, they and their families shouldn't start watching any Arabian Idol television series, they don't have a realistic chance of seeing the grand final.

The papers around the world chosen by Assange to receive his purloined  goodies are having a field day in circulation and sales (of ads), enjoying the double whammy of leaking the leaks themselves, and following the day-to-day trials and tribulations of the man himself, as well as doing extensive gossipy backgrounders on him.

If and when Assange is stitched up by the Yanks, are we going to see journalistic double standards, prompted by self interest (read profits), come into the equation? Will any government be game to take on the media?

The morals of this modern morality play are getting blurred by the minute, and it ain't over by a long chalk, the fat lady hasn't even gargled yet.

Speaking of a media coup (and here The Magpie makes his usual leap from the sublime to the ridiculous) Typo Gleeson at the Townsville Daily Astonisher has worked a neat no-lose no-brainer in his lop-sided campaign against the city council.

On Thursday, we had the story of the council workers nicking stuff to sell, supposedly for Chrissy drinks. The workers in question, and the paper,  decided it was $54 worth of stuff, the council CEO said it was $1200 worth, that it wasn't just the claimed scrap metal and `was being taken very seriously' because the gear was assets belonging to the community. 

Even the union representing the blokes was at best luke warm on the issue, saying it was just hoped the men could keep their jobs.

The Astonisher poster on Thursday screamed `Council Workers Fight To Save Jobs', whereas one would've thought it would've been far more honest (ha!) if it had read `Council Thieves Fight To Save Jobs'.

But it's hats off to Typo, for his cunning plan worthy of Black Adder's Baldrick.

Because if the council administration - this really has bugger all to do with the elected councillors - ignored the matter or gave the thieves a wrist slap, he would have gone on the attack anyway, under the banner of the council letting staff steal from the ratepayers, dereliction of duty, just you wait until the next election, dirty rotten scoundrels blah blah yawn blah.

Interesting to see the paper apparently endorsing thievery.

And just to follow up on a matter The Astonisher refused to cover recently (see recent post All The News That Fit To Print … But Isn't), real estate top gun Richard Ferry has arrived back in Townsville, still suffering the after-effects of a near-fatal bug or spider bite during a holiday in South Africa. He has fought back enough to make finally make it home and those of us who know of your ill fortune wish you well, Richard.

Another matter of local note is - as … ahem …  accurately predicted by The Magpie a month ago - that the florid Mad Max Tomlinson was to go up against Cuddlepie Wallace for the seat of Thuringowa at the next state election.

But then he wasn't! Max prematurely ejected himself from the race on medical advice less than a week after being pre-selected. A new candidate will be chosen early in the New Year. Popular publican Wayne Macca McDonald might get a second bite at the political cherry, if his name has remained in what is said to be a considerable field.

The latest polling by Labor itself has Thuringowa at 50/50, and the party has at this moment written off Townsville and Mungdinburra.

But The Magpie is sorry that Mad Max won't be donning the leathers, boots and helmet and roaring off to the hustings of Upper Ross on his trusted old Harley. Would've been fun, because this clash of the titans would have been a contest perhaps best characterised as a Meeting Of Two Great Mounds .. err … Minds.

But enough flapdoodle for now, it's away to Poseurs' Bar where The Magpie hopes for something similar if some buxom gal is of a mind to entertain thoughts of this moulting old mound.