Just when you thought I couldn’t get any less holy – I open a post with a Team America reference. For those of you who haven’t seen the movie… don’t. I can’t recommend it in good conscience. However, I will continue to quote it because it’s actually very funny, and now surprisingly (well it’s actually not really a surprise) relevant given situations in North east Asia. It seems the craziest man ever to wear platform shoes has taken short man syndrome to the next level. Crazy Kim the coiffured nepotist from North Korea has decided to flex his military muscles by sending 7 really expensive missiles to the depths of the Sea of Japan. It says a lot about a man’s character if he’ll gladly waste seven missiles when his people are starving. There were plenty of better places to aim the missiles. The Big Brother house maybe. Channel 9. Boy, am I mister current events or what… Why didn’t he test them by firing them at a terrorist you might ask? Well for starters Hazem El Masri was indoors… and secondly Kim Jong Il is a terrorist in training. He’s just not very good. Yet. He clearly needs more practice – the US reported that one missile fizzled just 40 seconds after launch. There’s a lot of places you can take missile jokes. But I won’t. One can only hope his missiles didn’t harm any whales. I suspect that’s why the Japanese have imposed trade sanctions – it’s certainly the only reason anyone can think of for imposing sanctions on the Japanese. I think the popularity of karaoke would be another one, and the popularity of anime… and those stupid game shows… and umm… well I guess there are lots of potential reasons actually. But I feel sorry for the poor Japanese, not only do they have to put up with a crazy irascible despot on their doorstep, they’re not allowed to snack on their favourite meal in the whole world. Whale. For some reason the rest of the world doesn’t see taste testing as a scientific test. Last I heard science was the use of the senses (observation) to test a hypothesis. I think on that basis Japan can eat all the whales they want.
Another man who is apparently lonely at the moment, allegedly, is Michael Costa. The New South Wales politician who bares a striking resemblance to Dr Evil (oh no, now I’ve also referenced Austin Powers… I’m scraping the bottom of the pop culture barrel tonight)
has apparently (allegedly) been visiting ladies of the night. More specifically a lady of the night. An anonymous lady of the night. An anonymous lady of the night who anonymously made the announcement on talkback radio. Rather than letting the event fade into obscurity Costa decided to sue for defamation – now everyone knows he was the politician named (Merrick and Rosso cut the caller off almost immediately and released an apology without naming said politician). Costa needs a new PR adviser. I fail to see how suing a radio station where the hosts were clearly not culpable (they could perhaps have beeped out the name if their production team had been working on the industry standard 3 second delay) will achieve anything. Particularly if Merrick and Rosso can prove the claims to be true – truth is a defence to defamation provided it’s in the public interest (and the moral conduct of a politician probably falls into that category – some would argue that this shouldn’t be the case, but if you’re going to hold yourself up as a public figure of good moral stature then there has to be accountability). Thankfully we now have uniform defamation laws to make defences easier to remember – it seems these new laws scrapped the public interest element too. Hooray. Defamation was the one area of law I was actually good at. I figured it might come in handy.