The latest circulation numbers are in, and it’s a kamikaze death-dive race to the ground between The Townsville Bulletin and the Typo’s Gold Coast Bulletin. Also some things in the federal budget you didn’t hear about – including money to make sure the sky isn’t falling on you, and protection for Joe Public against being ‘injured or damaged’ by, would you believe – politicians! – No joke, it’s true.

And Senator Jan McLucas comes up with a doozy or two of her own in the twisted linguistic stakes when trying to defend her government’s 'Peter robbing Paul' policy on education.

But another senator of a different persuasion,  Ian Macca Macdonald, is crystal clear in his opinion of a prize piece of inhumane bastardry by the feds.

On the local scene, Townsville Enterprise’s Director for Disappointments Ross Contarino bites the dust – almost certainly shafted. The Magpie looks at TEL’s value - and values - in this latest downsizing-by-stealth exercise.

And if you think the Cowboy’s stadium name is a bit off-putting, wait until you see what others have come up with elsewhere around the world. Something for everybody in this week’s nest at www.townsvillemagpie.com.au

Here’s a couple of things you didn’t hear too much about in the budget, but they’re in there amongst all the verbiage.

The Goose has allocated a piffling $500,000 to plan – that is, plan not implement – the relocation of a C-band space surveillance radar to WA, in conjunction with the Yanks. The radar will ‘track space assets and debris (and give) warnings of possible collisions between space objects, thereby reducing the danger posed by space debris’. We feel better already, no more Chicken Little the sky is falling.

But the most mysterious one which will require one of those famous ‘clarifications’ is government funding (amount so far unspecified) for new public liability insurance for MPs for claims made against them for injury and damage ‘caused to members of the public by senators and members’. Sounds a bit back to front, but if that’s the new rules, could it not be argued that every single Australian could sue every politician in Canberra for ‘injury and damage’? Ya’d reckon, wouldn’t ya?

But it was the Law of Unintended Consequences that exercised Bentley’s crayons this week.

But the best line which could be applied to this week in Canberra and even in this neck of the woods, came, from of all places, an American TV show. The ‘Pie mentioned the following in a comment during the week, but just in case you missed it, it rates up there with the very best of the linguistic muggings we get from politicians.

In an episode of the American version of the excellent political comedy/drama House of Cards, the mesmerising Kevin Spacey plays a senator accused of lying. He briskly dismisses this with ‘I didn’t lie, I revised the parameters of my promise’. Sweet.

Bet Foolya Duckbutt wished she’d thought of that.

In terms of double speak, it was left to the endlessly nattering Senator Jan McLucas to make her modest entry into the crowded field of the week's Best Insult to the Intelligence. Speaking with the ABC’s Paula Tapiolas, she sounded like a prime candidate for a spell in the Home for the Perpetually Confused.

Senator Jan 'McMuddled' McLucas

As you will know, the government intends to take money from universities to fund the Gonski school reforms, which is akin to building a 'you beaut' bridge two-thirds of the way across a river – logically this policy means we will have scads of super educated kids who, to quote that nice Mr Loaf, will be ‘all dressed up and no place to go’, unable to find a place in a depleted uni system to continue the fruits of Labor’s largesse.

But wait . Senator McMuddled set us straight – there were no budget cuts to uni, you old sillies!!! She took a school marm warning tone to the questioning, which is a very unwise idea when talking to The Mauler. Here is the exchange last Wednesday morning.

Paula Tapiolas: The Gonski funding relies on stripping some funding from universities – JCU is a major employer, also an important source of job skilling locally, so won’t the budget cuts to universities have a major impact locally in terms of  education and jobs?

Senator McLucas: We have to be careful when we use budget cuts when we’re talking about funding to higher education ….

PT: But it was removing some money that was to go to universities?

Sen McMuddled: Basically it’s a pause on the growth … now I know that sounds like politician-speak, but if you can imagine a graph that’s heading upwards and we just tilt it down very very slightly, that’s in fact what we’ve done. Yes, there is less money going into the universities than we wanted to  …….. but I do understand this is difficult and we continue to work with the university (JCU) to make sure they can manage this …errr … pause of growth.’

So from the folks who gave us ‘new taxes are actually budget savings’, we now learn there aren’t ‘budget cuts’, there are actually ‘pauses on growth’.

Another senator of a different persuasion, the Libs Ian Macdonald didn’t have any problem with the correct use of language when he quite rightly rounded on Gillard and the cretinous Tony Burke over the issue of allowing starving cattle to to temporarily graze in national parks. 

He concisely summed up that the idiotic, Green-inspired ban on live cattle exports has caused the current overstocking, unsustainable in drought conditions, but this uber-urban government refuses to right their own wrong, which they could easily do.

The Gillard government was quite happy to ruin the Northern cattle industry on the strength of cruelty to a few hundred cattle reported in a television program in 2011,’ Senator Macdonald said, ‘ but they have no hesitation in sending millions of cattle to a gruesome death by starvation in 2013'.

He said the Gillard government’s caving in to political expediency has resulted in a ‘cruel and inhumane’ situation.

“For a government allegedly concerned about animal cruelty, where are their priorities?

Hey, Macca, The Magpie to the rescue. Here’s what you do.

Get a film/video unit to get some graphic footage of graziers shooting their dazed and tottering cattle and bulldozing them in graves or creating funeral pyres of what could be perfectly good beef. Produce the blazes out of it, music, tearful graziers, the sheer waste – then send it up to Indonesian television to show those Neanderthal bastards how this government expects the Indonesians to behave towards imported animals.

And by the way, where are the animal rights foghorns  now that tens of thousand of animals are going to be needlessly bumped off here in Australia? The quick mercy and non-ritualistic delivery of a bullet apparently doesn’t excite them enough, and anyway, f-ck the farmers, right?

........

Now , in a not totally unrelated matter, here is a fact that ain’t fiction, although it sounds like it, especially coming in federal budget week.

No, this is fair dinkum.

This weekend May 17 in the US, is officially Headless Chook Day.

Well, it is in Fruita, Colorado, where they more staidly call it Mike The Headless Chicken Day. It honours the town’s most fabled denizen, and is celebrated with events such as a 5k Run Like A Headless Chicken Race, an egg toss, ‘Pin The Head On The Chicken’, a chicken ‘cluck-off’ and best of all, Chicken Bingo, in which chooks poop on a numbered grid to choose the numbers.

And to think they said there wasn’t much to do in Fruita!

Treasurer Wayn ... err ...
Mike the Headless Chook

But Mike was real, although initially thought to be a hoax until university tests proved otherwise – if you trust acadils and boofademics.

In 1945, Mike was minding his own business when farmer Lloyd Olsen had a ‘chicken tonight’ moment. These were of course in the DIY days, but Farmer Olsen botched the job. The axe missed the jugular vein, leaving one ear and most of the brain stem intact.

The long and the short of all this is that Mike lived on, adjusting to his unorthodox rural surgery, and  once he proved to be no hoax, he toured the country for the next 18 months, in some months making more than the current equivalent of $48,000. Here’s the whole fascinating story from Wikipedia.

Of course, we have a parallel version here in Australia, only not a chicken but a swan. He’s due for the chopping block in September to put him – and us – out of our headless chook misery.

Politics doesn’t have an exclusive on the cranially challenged poultry division. Ya gotta laugh … you’ve just gotta sometimes. It is almost at the stage where you have to start feeling sorry for that special brand of headless chook down at The Daily Astonisher … and this time, it ain’t the journos in the crosshairs. If you are the dwindling band of people who bother to buy the paper, you may have noticed this puffery, the latest in a series ….

… which The ‘Pie has previously pointed out is almost an admission of defeat (who else would the paper be for if not it’s own circulation community? And why would they have to go to considerable expense to tell us if they didn’t realize they were on the nose big time?) But if that sounds like supposition, don’t take from The ‘Pie, take a closer look and note the paper itself makes a clear and blunt admission …

They said it!

There it is in black and white by their own hand – being bravely frank and telling us what we already know ... they get things mixed up, and are proud of it!

And that bit of self-promotion was just a couple days before The ‘Pie got a 7.30am text yesterday from a long-time home delivery subscriber out near the Ross Dam which read ‘No end to the f-ck ups at The Bulletin – we have just been delivered the Cairns Post’. Well, the upside is that it was probably a better read.

Now for those who might think The ‘Pie was being a disparaging  a-hole with the crack about dwindling band of readers, ponder the following. The latest audited circulation figures tell the sad truth of the matter.

The Townsville Bulletin sales are down 7%, with weekdays shedding 1612 copies to 23,186,  and the flagship Saturday(Weekend) edition a sphincter-puckering 2724 to a circulation of 36,140. Think you might get a new rate card soon, reflecting the tough times? Dream on, the gouging will continue to the bitter end.

And there’s no cheering from this nest – watching a paper being run into the ground by headless chooks in editorial management is a distressing sight for any journalist but even more so for those who can remember when the Townsville Bulletin was a respected and trusted pillar of the community. There are global factors at work here, that is true, but The ‘Pie is sure that if the paper had remained in a local hands, instead of being betrayed to Murdoch by a double-dealing and double-crossing senior executive, the paper would not be in such an extreme state of decay.

As it is, the current presentation of the paper is the equivalent of dressing a terminally ill cancer patient in a clown suit.

All that be as it may, the man who accelerated the Bulletin’s decline dramatically, Peter Typo Gleeson, has just learnt the wisdom of pride coming before a fall. Late last year, Typo took to the pages of his new charge, the Gold Coast Bulletin, to honk on about a ‘turn around’  in the beleaguered paper’s fortunes, (based on some thin and very questionable figures where he apparently got readership – which heavily involves guesstimates  -  mixed up with circulation , which is as rock solid as can be in the industry).  He gurgled on about how great the paper is, and named six areas which he thought had brought the GCB back to life, just about all of which were self-promoting puffery and highly challengeable. It was all a bit ludicrous, but in light of solid facts emerging just a few months later, it will be interesting to see how this workplace bully will handle the stark numbers just published. Look back at the cir list.

The Gold Coast Bulletin slumped a dramatic 11% (just under 4000 copies) in its weekday sales, to 32,391. But it was the Saturday cash cow which is most likely to turn Typo back to the bottle (at last report he was a teetotaler) – the weekend edition dropped an alarming (even in this day and age) 7510 copies to 46,908. That 14% drop was by far the biggest among News Ltd’s regional mastheads, and the second highest of all the regionals in Australia. And this in a circulation area of almost 600,000 – that’s a market in which businesses can turn to other media with their advertising dollars, so a revised rate card is a more serious possibility on the Coast. 

There is a pattern here, but it would be hard to quantify how much of this is to blame on Peter Gleeson’s sock-puppet role ever since he became an editor. His first gig in the chair was here in Townsville, under managers Jason Scott and then Michael Wilkins, where editorial decisions were made by management for commercial considerations. Now down on The Coast,  Typo is seen in some quarters as the marionette of retired journo and News Ltd legend Bob Gordon.

Laughing all the way to the bank?
 Bob Gordon (L) with former CEO John Hartigan at Gordon's farewell in 2009.

When Typo went feral and banned any reporting about Mayor Tom Tate because of disparaging comments the mayor had made about the paper, The ‘Pie hears News Ltd heavies called in Bob Gordon to engineer a truce – he was ideally positioned to do so, having run Tate’s mayoral campaign. Honeyed words were exchanged, peace was achieved, and some believe that because of his continued clout within News Ltd, Bob has not such got Typo’s ear but more his goolies, applying a gentle squeeze now and then. The pro-Tate, development-at-any-cost bias in the GB Bulletin is almost embarrassing.

Back to the local scene.

While the Federal Government has been getting all the attention regarding fiscal matters, there was an interesting development on money matters here in Townsville a few days back.

Townsville Enterprise Limited (TEL) lost , or more likely dispensed with, the services of their Director for Disappointments, Ross Contarino. officially known more primly as the Manager for Economic Development. He was perpetually ‘disappointed’ that this didn’t happen or that proposal fell over etc.

Although the official line is that Contarino resigned of his own volition, there is a nasty rumour going around that when Julia Gillard was in town recently, TEL’s Daddy Warbucks, David Kippen, bought a spare knife from her (‘Almost brand new, Kippers, only been used once and did the job noicely’.)

No one is sure what really went on, but the MagpieFone has been chattering away with stories that Mr Contarino was less than judicious in his choice of words around the workplace, especially when there were impressionable junior staff around. Two callers reminded The ‘Pie that a few years ago, Mr Contarino suddenly left a similar position in Cairns in unexplained circumstances before being picked up by TEL a while later.

What The Magpie found more interesting was The Kipper’s bumbling public reaction to the ‘resignation’. Paula Tapiolas (she's been an invaluably busy gal this week) asked him if Mr Contarino was going to another job, to which he floundered through a hesitant answer, saying that Mr Contarino hadn’t discussed that, and obviously The Kipper hadn’t asked him.

So let’s get this straight – one sunny morning, one of your senior executives in one of the most pivotal roles among the Dudley Do-Nothings at TEL House rocks in and says he’s resigning forthwith – and you don’t ask him what has happened, why are you leaving and where he’s going, has he got a better position??!!?

Pull the other leg, David, it yodels. (Christ, you really do need a media officer – and no, The ‘Pie isn’t offering, you’ll continue to get his opinion gratis but after the event.).

It’s been commented on more than once in the past few months that you and Contarino have appeared uncomfortable in each others company for a while now, and its been suggested you both went to some lengths to avoid each other when glad-handing and platituding at functions around town.

However, two other matters have been highlighted by these developments. 

The Kipper tried to appear cool and laissez-faire, suggesting there was no rush to fill what has been one of Townsville’s key economic development jobs. So much for what he thinks of ‘one of Townsville’s key economic development jobs’, although (shudder) he said he might now have to do a bit of that portfolio himself. 

Very relaxed, Kipper, but that is precisely what you won’t be when you shortly trundle along to Walker Street with your begging bowl to rip off undeserved ratepayers money to keep you in the style to which you’ve become accustomed. They’re onto you, Davy boy, let’s see if you’ve got the fancy footwork to keep rorting your a quarter a million salary out of the ratepayers.

All the chats with the councillors will be behind closed doors … including with the deputy chairman  of TEL … that would be …ummm … let’s see, ah yes, Mayor Mullet. No conflict of interest there is there, dear? Not bloody half.

But some of the councillors might like to settle the truth or otherwise of some creditable reports that TEL's staff bill is up in the high 40%s of income – some say as high as 48%, if not more. As any corner store businessman will tell you, staff costs approaching anything around 30% are disastrous and unsustainable. But even if the question is asked, we the great unwashed will not be graced with an answer of what’s happening with our money. ‘Commercial in confidence’ is rorter talk in some circumstances to avoid examination and revelation of the real situation. TEL claims it is a private business based on membership, as well as grants of public money. Wouldn’t that make every ratepayer in Townsville a de facto member, and as such, like other members, be privy to how ‘our’ business is being run? And financed?

Well, we elected councillors to find these things out for us, so over to you, folks.

Now a rare foray into the world of sport.

When the Boys (The ‘Pie refuses to use the more popular Cows) run out onto the turf of their home ground this season, they will try to ignore the sniggers about the game being played at something called 1300 SMILES Stadium. Ironically, 1300 may soon be the crowd size, and they won't be smiling. Being the Cowboys, it was bad enough that Dairy Farmers Stadium saddled them with the abbreviation 'the Cows', now they have to put up with an orthodontic moniker which their recent performances make highly unlikely. (The Toothless Tigers, maybe?)

But if you think that’s a problem, it is nothing to some of the accidents or excesses in overseas sporting grounds.

Strange names have always been around in association with sporting stadia, like The Dripping Pan, a football ground in East Sussex – that’s what it has been since it opened in1885. Mongrel the Barrister reckons any soccer field could be justifiably named Prozac Park.

But it’s when commercial interests, blind to the backlash of everyday folk, get in the act that the fun really starts. So we have Pizza Hut Park in Dallas Texas, where soccer fans reckon if the players turn up 30 minutes late, you get your ticket for free. (Dear Mystified of Mysterton, that is a witty play on Pizza Hut’s offer of free product if it arrives more than 30 minutes after being ordered.)

In fact, food is a constant if unfortunate theme, as in Whataburger Field in Corpus Christi, also in Texas, and Cleveland had for a time the KFC YUM! Arena – but a more self-fulfilling prophecy comes with Bargain Booze Stadium in Northwich, England. Kit Kat Cresent was home to York City until a re-think after a five year ‘break’, and The ‘Pie rather likes the euphonic Hotto Motto baseball park in Japan, which is one supposes a step up from the previous Yahoo Baseball Park.

 In The Netherlands, the city of Almere boasts the Mitsubishi Forklift Stadium – helps the fans lift the roof? 

But the real trouble comes when foreign words come into play.  So we learn of Denmark’s Middlefart Stadium, guaranteed to have a heady atmosphere. The Swiss, not known as a nation of thigh-slappers, have given the world Wankdorf Stadium, which is one thing but on the other hand, it is the home ground of soccer club Young Boys of Berne. 

But Indianapolis, Indiana, might have the famous Brickyard of motor racing, but it also boasts – or tries to ignore - the sporting arena whose benefactor insisted it carry his name. Thus, the locals flock along to  Kuntz Stadium.

Must be rotten players.