Richard Farmer’s chunky bits

The menu “joke”. It’s a trap for the young players in the political media business to confuse what they think people should be like with what they actually are like, and this week I’ve seen it twice.

The first was the general reaction of the media commentators to the Brisbane menu Twitter event. Bad taste. An appalling example of s-xism. A complete disgrace. With the sounds of indignation ringing in my ears, off I went to a friendly Vietnamese restaurant to be greeted with my smiling host in somewhat broken English asking if I would like to see his new menu. New menu — gettit. Ha, ha. We have new menu, too. And so to the club to hear more of such “light-hearted banter”. Plenty of misogyny there, let me assure you, and quite a different reaction in the Canberra suburbs to that in the hallowed halls of the parliamentary press gallery.

And so to the appalling rudeness of Howard Sattler with his show of complete disrespect for the nation’s leader and another burst of justified outrage from the commentators. And when I front up for Friday night drinks I expect to overhear another dose of the same kind of Sattleresque comments.

The gulf between ordinary people with their cruel commentary about politicians, female and male, and what the commentators say and write might not be pretty, but it is as large as ever it has been.

Newspoll to have Labor doing worst. The initial findings of my little survey into what readers expect the pollsters to be showing early next week:

If you have a view I’d love to have it because the bigger the sample, the better the expected result. The form is here.

Toss a coin. No doubt the polls will play a big part in determining whether there really will be a serious attempt to dump the Prime Minister before the election. At the moment it looks like a case of even money and take your pick.

The Crikey Leadership Indicator based on the market currently shows:

In perpetual mourning. I know it is in its death throes, but does the Melbourne Age always have to look so gloomy? All those black backgrounds with the reverse type and the dark blue banner make its front page look like a daily invitation to its funeral.

News and views noted along the way.

• Netanyahu opening new Holocaust display at Auschwitz
• The secret war — “Infiltration. Sabotage. Mayhem. For years four-star general Keith Alexander has been building a secret army capable of launching devastating cyberattacks. Now it’s ready to unleash hell.”
• Egyptian author sentenced to prison for book Where Is God?
• Economist still chicken: botches sentence rather than split infinitive — “The Economist has a style guide of its own, and that is even more open in its cowardice and the totality of its avoidance policy: Split infinitives — Happy the man who has never been told that it is wrong to split an infinitive: the ban is pointless. Unfortunately, to see it broken is so annoying to so many people that you should observe it. A pointless ban on a natural syntactic possibility that has never been authoritatively declared to have anything wrong with it in grammatical terms, but you should observe the ban anyway. Is this a sensible way for a great magazine (my favorite magazine) to make its decisions about how its writers should phrase things in their native language?
• Why Bill Gates is investing in chicken-less eggs
• Unpaid no more: interns win major court battle — “A federal court in New York has ruled that a group of interns at Fox Searchlight Pictures should have been paid for their work on the movie Black Swan. The decision may have broad implications for students looking for their first job.”
  
• Nicaragua Congress approves ocean-to-ocean canal plan
  
• China’s demography and the Lewis turning point — “Back in the 1970s and 1980s, the China’s working age population was growing at 10-15% per year. But as the effects of the one-child policy began to bite, growth in the working-age population is slowing, and will start to shrink around 2020.”