Time for a salvaging strike. So Labor is being left carrying the can for the public anger at the bipartisan proposal by the major parties to put extra millions into their bank accounts. I can think of only one proper reaction to this treacherous reneging by the Coalition on its agreement. Labor should naturally drop the extra funding part of its proposed changes to the electoral laws but drop the maximum non-disclosable donation level to the $1000 that the Liberals consider unfair and Labor reluctantly agreed to reduce only to $5000 as the price of getting the bipartisan approach.

Talk first, think later. Before being too harsh on Eddie McGuire we should remember that he is a radio talk show host. That breed spend hours every day chattering away, and my own experience in life is that the more I say the more likely I am to come out with something stupid or worse. So I’ll cop the grovelling apology as being heartfelt while continuing to hope his team gets the Colliewobbles.

Getting the excuses ready. The preparations for victory are reaching a new stage. Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt this morning:

A grumpy old columnist brings you …  A phonetic description of annoying sounds teenagers make.

In this video James Harbeck gives us precise phonetic descriptions of those rude sounds adolescents make that he also explains in writing. One example of what he describes as “a linguistic dissection of 7 annoying teenage sounds”:

Voiced alveolar stop and breathy-voiced low-back unrounded vowel, sometimes with advanced tongue root – This is normally spelled duhhh. The vowel is a low-mid back unrounded sound, sort of like the vowel in “or” but without the lips rounded. The breathy voice is used to give an extra dull sound. Sometimes the tongue root is advanced to make it even hollower. A variant is to make the vowel a diphthong ending with a high front vowel, sort of like duhhyy. The idea is to sound as stupid as possible. Of course, the stupidity they are communicating is not theirs; it is attributive — specifically, they’re attributing it to you.

News and views noted along the way.

  • I’m afraid I thought this one as dire as its title — In May of 1974, after reading through a pilot script written by John Cleese and his then-wife, Connie Booth, a clearly unimpressed “comedy script editor” by the name of Ian Main sent the above memo to BBC Television’s Head of Comedy and Light Entertainment — a Letter of Note resurrected by BuzzFeed “t0 give solace, and hope, to creative people everywhere”.
  • What is the difference between Sunni and Shia Muslims? — “[W]hile Sunnis rely heavily on the practice of the Prophet and his teachings (the ‘sunna’), the Shia see their ayatollahs as reflections of God on earth. This has led Sunnis to accuse Shia of heresy, while Shia point out that Sunni dogmatism has led to extremist sects such as the puritanical Wahhabis.”
  • Why Turkey is thriving — “There is nothing flashy about Turkey’s rise, which has been based on fundamentals, rather than bubbles or resource discoveries. Indeed, Turkey lacks its neighbors’ oil and gas resources, but it compensates for this with the competitiveness of its industry and services. Tourism alone attracted more than 36 million visitors in 2012, making Turkey one of the world’s top destinations.”
  • Distorted stats: Europe’s youth unemployment fallacy — “A closer look at Eurostat’s statistics outline reveals that these rates do ‘not necessarily mean that the group of unemployed persons aged between 15 and 24 is large.’ That’s because many in this group are full-time students and are “neither working nor looking for a job.” Students are therefore omitted, though they account for more than half of those under 25.”
  • A Pollock restored, a mystery revealed