I used to think, as a child, that Norman Gunston was real. Not even his parody song Kiss Army in 1980 at the height of Kissmania disabused me of this illusion.

It was only much later that I discovered that Norman Gunston was a fictional character, just like some others nurtured by the ABC, such as the other classic 1970s comedic creation Aunty Jack.

I find it reassuring that the ABC has not abandoned its sense of humour, nor its desire to nurture comedic talent in Australia. This was revealed this week when, on its show The Drum, the ABC introduced us to the fictional comedic character ‘Professor Noreen Young’, an excessively woke individual to the point of hilarity, whose back story includes a close friendship with our loveable and (until recently) cuddly Opposition Leader, Anthony Albanese, and who makes broad declamations of an ersatz Marxist variety.

On the recent admission by the Prime Minister that he eats white bread rather than sourdough or multigrain, our new comedic genius ‘Professor Noreen Young’ told viewers the follow pearls of wisdom:

“I think the comment about white bread was really interesting. Who eats white bread in this country? Anglo men. I come from a working class background.

“We had brown bread because we were healthy. I think it shows a deep lack of understanding about who works in this country.

“I think that there’s a deep intersection of race and class… I do think that there are some politicians who understand what the working class looks like. It’s not white anglo men.”

I look forward to more utterances from this great new comedic creation.

I am certain that she is a fictional creation because she claims to be close friends with Anthony Albanese. Until his recent weight loss, it was quite clear that Mr Albanese was excessively fond of eating white bread, yet Mr Albanese is Italo-Celtic in origin, not Anglo at all. Yet much as she is so clever about nutrition, she is not claiming credit for the loveable Albo losing so many kilos lately. A real person, rather than a fictional character, would be talking about that quite proudly.

Otherwise, the thought processes behind a real person dividing bread into the woke (ie brown) and not woke (ie white), does descend from the risable into the seriously disturbing.

And not for the cultural appropriation of what it means to be working class, something which Professor Young can no longer claim to represent.

Do you know what a Kulak was? They were independent peasant wheat farmers in the Russian Empire prior to the Russian Revolution. At the time of the Russian Revolution, the new regime twisted the term to mean people who withheld their grain from the new regime. Lenin and Stalin came to denounce and persecute them.

As many as six million were murdered by the Soviet regime, and millions others imprisoned or deported to Siberia.

All for the crime of growing wheat for making bread.

Bread, and the grain we used to make it, is a matter of life and death – of plenty, or starvation. To talk flippantly of class hatred, and smugly of whether a bread fits a politically correct line, whether of race or class, is to ignore the historical lessons of the past, where matters of race and class have led to the withholding of bread, or the killing of those who make it.

And so it is for that reason that I hope that Professor Noreen Young is a fictional character, not a real human being. For if this Professor Noreen Young really exists, with her ignorance of history and her clear hatefulness towards those different to herself, then it truly marks that we still have those walking amongst us with the zealotry to inflict the sorts of horrors seen in the workers’ paradise of the Soviet Union.

I received an email this afternoon advising me that the Kiss End Of The Road Tour has now been delayed from next month to August (it was originally due to occur last November).

The reason for this latest postponement is Premier McGowan’s announcement that he is keeping the WA borders closed indefinitely.

Thank you Premier McGowan, for ruining this for the rest of us. As JRR Tolkien once wrote, you cannot fence the world out.

I am not exactly high brow in my musical tastes, and I have a very sentimental place in my heart for Kiss. I was in grade six when they toured Australia for the first time, to promote their totally misleadingly named Kiss Unmasked album, and Kissmania swept the nation in anticipation of their tour.

Much as there was such great hype, the band actually was imploding at the time. Peter Criss appeared in the film clip for Shandi, but did not play on the album due to his infatuation with the bottle, and he was sacked and replaced by Eric Carr before the tour started. Ace Frehley did not last too much longer in the band – just another two or so years.

But there we were in 1980, and as primary school age kids we were all oblivious to those intrigues. There were Kiss cards to collect – three different sets of 66 each (if I recall, number 65 was almost impossible to find, which made getting the set very challenging), the last set of which featured the exciting new face of the replacement drummer and therefore caused renewed enthusiasm for collecting!

The school music room (and probably a lot of the classrooms) was covered in Kiss posters, and kids wore their Kiss t-shirts to school.

Then the concert came, and about six weeks later, school ended for the year and then Kissmania was over. Forever.

Many years later, in the middle 1990s, I went to the Kiss Reunion tour, when the four original members played again. Then, just before the Kiss Farewell tour (rather misleading as it turns out), Peter Criss tried to hold out for more money so they got Eric Singer to put on the Catman makeup. He probably did a much better job than Peter Criss anyway on the drums.

There is just something about Kiss, this manic kaleidoscopic clown circus of rock music, which fascinates so many of us. Aside from the nostalgia for 1980 Kissmania, I have never quite gotten what it is for me.

Perhaps it is Gene Simmons’ unquestionable Will To Power and New York Chutzpah that drives the band onward like a perpetual motion machine.

Maybe it is the great live stage show. Gene’s fire breathing act never gets passe. Nor did Ace’s guitar shooting rockets after he riffs Beethoven’s 5th on it (yes, I do know some classical music, I am not a total philestine!).

And possibly the music is good. I know that I enjoy it.

But whatever it is, I am looking forward to the concert, whenever it happens.

About 18 months ago, I admitted that watching The Australian edition of The Masked Singer was one of my more juvenile pleasures, and that I had speculated on whether embarrassed (rather than disgraced) former politician Sam Destyari had been the person inside the Wizard costume.

The Masked Singer is one of those shows which is so abysmally bad that it is good, the sort of crony TV where D-list celebrity has beens both ‘compete’ and ‘judge’. You can reflect on the desperation for cash and media attention which has caused some of these people to agree to inflict themselves upon the viewing audience once more.

In the USA, the current edition of this show is going to feature former New York mayor and trial attorney Rudy Giuliani. His reveal last week during filming caused ‘judges’ Ken Jeong and Robin Thicke to storm off the set – the type of free publicity which would have caused the producers to rub their hands together with glee.

This is just the latest stage in a very sad behavioural and reputational decline on the part of Mr Giuliani. His work as a legal representative of President Trump in seeking to get the 2020 election results overturned in court underlined the start of that decline.

As the porter in Macbeth (Act 2, Scene 3) put it when describing the legal profession:

Who’s there, in th’other devil’s name? Faith, here’s an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale, who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven…

Lawyers sometimes get paid to argue that night is day and the like, but they do not get applauded when they do so, particularly where the impacts of such arguments could have serious far reaching consequences, and so it went for Giuliani.

At the time he was doing such laudable public lawyering, he also allowed himself to become the figure of ridicule when newly applied hair dye started to stream down the side of his face, and he engaged in some bizarre on camera behaviour with a young actress who was involved in the new Borat film.

So now, he appears on The Masked Singer and causes someone like Robin Thicke, whose most innocuous recent behaviour involved a public twerk with Miley Cyrus, to storm off the stage in indignation. What is going through Giuliani’s mind and why is he behaving so erratically?

His legacy as mayor of New York at the time of 9/11 and his previous prosecutions of mob figures is now buried by all the bizarre behaviour of his dotage.

Back when AM radio was still in existence, back in the 1980s, I used to regularly listen to 3XY, the predecessor to FOX FM, particularly whilst doing my home work in high school or writing my uni essays.

There was a vibe amongst the DJs which was good humoured and good natured. When they got callers online, and they clowned around with them, you got the general sense that they were laughing with them, rather than at them.

Fast forward to about 16-17 years ago, circa 2005. I had long gotten out of the habit of listening to radio, and happened to tune in to FOX FM sometime out of idle curiosity. There was some show on where people were being encouraged to call in and share some intimate personal problem with the radio host, in between the occasional song.

Something about the general tone and attitude of the radio hosts appalled me. They were taking advantage of some naive or misguided caller with a problem and generally making fun of them on air, subjecting them to a sardonic ridicule.

I switched it off, appalled. The general nastiness of that radio show and its host was something which I, as someone who had gotten out of the habit of listening to the radio routinely around 1990, was shocked by.

Which is a good way of segueing into the news about the temper tantrum thrown on live radio earlier this week by shock jock Kyle Sandilands, who, over a trivial matter (a discussion of a news story) engaged in a 12 minute expletive laden tirade at his co-workers, Jackie O (his regular on air partner in crime) and the newsreader.

I was not surprised about this. The general reputation of Mr Sandilands is that he and his side kick are shock jocks. His lack of on air empathy when interviewing a sexual assault survivor several years ago resulted in a minor career speed bump in that he was sacked from being a judge on Australian Idol – but this did not retard his general career trajectory for long.

But this does lead me to wonder why such people still get so much oxygen on the air waves? There obviously is a profitable market causing Kyle and Jackie O to be eagerly sought after media personalities, despite their nastiness. and general bitterness about the world (although lack of money is not a cause) and general toxicity Why is there such a market?

Obviously, and it is sad to say, that despite the general dislikability of these shock jocks, we love to hate them, and that people generally tune in to listen to them because they are rather nasty, and people relish their nastiness. As a result, they remain on air instead of staking supermarket shelves.

We are all familiar with the childhood tale of the Emperor’s New Clothes, where the Emperor so wants to believe that he is wearing a fine new material, and his subjects are too scared to speak truth to power, that it takes a child to point out that he is naked.

Hoaxes are much like that. People really want to believe something, particularly if they are powerful in a particular context (usually wealth or academic prowess or political power), that they ignore the evidence to the contrary and engage in confirmation bias.

About 7 months ago I wrote in this blog about some of the biggest literary hoaxes in Australia, namely Ern Malley, Helen Demidenko, and Dark Emu:

Dark Emu and Other Great Australian Literary Hoaxes

These hoaxes pale in comparison to that of the 19 year old William-Henry Ireland, who, in 1795, had the audacity to impersonate William Shakespeare, to the extent of ‘discovering’ a long lost play by Shakespeare, Vortigern, which he had indeed written himself. The play was actually performed, once, in Drury Lane, starring the actress mistress of the future William IV (who was in the audience both to support his mistress and because he believed it to be a genuine Shakespearean discovery).

Whilst there were some very determined skeptics, including the one who published a rebuttal of the authenticity of the rediscovered documents, two days before the play was staged, there were even more people, including not only royalty, but most of the leading lights of the English intelligentsia of the era, who were willing to believe in it.

I have just finished reading The Boy Who Would Be Shakespeare, the most recent and possibly sympathetic of the three accounts about that affair which I possess (the other two being called The Great Shakespeare Fraud and The Great Shakespeare Hoax).

I find it an extremely amusing episode, the more so because I believe that the only real damage done may have been to the relationship between William-Henry Ireland and his emotionally distant and excessively credulous father, and even then, I think that the relationship was, from the context framed in this account, doomed to estrangement regardless of whether the son ‘discovered’ a magical trunk full of lost Shakespearean documents or not. No one seems to have been hurt by it, and five thousand ribald members of the opening night audience for Vortigern seem to have had a hilarious time watching the show.

Of course, the ‘bardolaters’ of the time would have taken great offence at the misguided hoax, more so given some of them had uncritically accepted the documents as real, and been taken for fools. But I think that anyone who is both pompous and that careless deserves that, just like the Emperor with his new clothes.

That today, we get new hoaxes and are too eager to believe preposterous things, and to allow those who consider themselves cleverer than us to shut down or otherwise cancel discussion on the authenticity of such assertions is a sign that in about 225 years, we have not grown much wiser than William-Henry Ireland’s father and the others who so eagerly accepted a nineteen year old’s clever new forgeries as the real deal.

Just finished reading a book about Rockefeller associate and eventual Standard Oil Chairman Henry Clay Folger.

Whilst a lot of other industrial tycoons were putting their money into building giant palaces in New York City, or otherwise showing off their wealth in other ostentatious ways (Veblen’s phrase ‘conspicuous consumption’ was inspired by that era), Folger and his wife had a different interest in how they spent their wealth. They bought rare early copies of Shakespeare plays, particularly the First Folio and various of the early Quattro editions of some of the plays.

Until late in life, when he endowed the Folger Shakespeare Library, he kept his collection in crates in warehouses in New York.

When you look at that time, from around 1890 to 1920, when Folger was collecting so intensely, paying $100,000 for a particular rare book is rather impressive, and Folger ended up spending millions on rare Shakespeare editions.

For those who are not that knowledgable about Shakespeare, the First Folio, which was printed by his friends in the 1620s as a posthumous memorial to the Bard and which contains almost all of his acknowledged plays (except for Pericles) is the main reason that the works of Shakespeare have survived instead of mostly being forgotten.

Folger appreciated that, and in the course of his life he collected 82 copies of the First Folio, approximately 40% of the surviving number of those books.

They are now held in the library he endowed, in Washington DC.

I have a lot of books on Shakespeare, particularly as I find the Authorship question both amusing and fascinating, and three hard back copies of the Collected Works, as well as an RSC edition of the apocryphal plays, and various paperback editions of the plays for when I feel like reading them. However, Folger’s obsession with collecting the rare works makes my interest in Shakespeare seem quite mundane in comparison.

The current controversy at The Australian Open over the suppression of freedom of speech in the form of the ‘Where is Peng Shuai?’ t-shirts has got me and other people thinking.

Peng Shuai is only one of many possible topics which would offend the authorities in the PRC, and which they would like to keep from the attention of the Chinese public.

The creators of this slogan are particularly clever in that they picked a tennis related topic to raise when making their statement at the Open.

But there are other topics which might be less relevant to the tennis world, but even more unpalatable.

The following easily come to mind:

. Free Tibet

. Falun Gong is harmless

. End Uighur Genocide

. Mao murdered sixty million

. Remember Tiananmen Square

Just thinking about the context behind the above five bullet points is quite sobering. Communist China is and has been over the 70 plus years of its regime a menace to its own people in particular, as well as conquering a near neighbour. It is a tyrannical dictatorship, whose idea of soft power is to get controllable Chinese corporations to sprinkle millions of dollars on sporting sponsorships as a form of sports washing.

Queensland student activist Drew Pavlou has been an articulate critic of the PRC regime and its influence on our nation. Here is a link to his page on this topic:

https://www.drewpavlou.com/stand_up_to_china_and_protect_human_rights

For the sake of balance, I will include a link to a piece recently republished by the CCP mouthpiece the Global Times, which was written by a retired Australian diplomat with definite opinions on our China relationship:

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202201/1246609.shtml

I leave it to you to judge for yourself as to whether that piece is a voice of reason or an apologist for tyranny.

Tennis Australia’s latest overreach has been to ban people at The Australian Open from wearing T-Shirts asking ‘Where is Peng Shuai?’

The resulting publicity and unanimous criticism about the heavy handed action by tournament security – including claiming that they have the legal authority to permanently confiscate banners with this burning question – has backfired to the detriment of Tennis Australia.

The justification for this action is that a condition of entry is that people do not wear apparel with commercial or political messages on them. I suppose that people wearing hats with beer logos on them (I personally own and wear a lot of those) would not be able to wear those hats.

And what about Peng Shuai? Would her own appearance at the Open, aside from answering this question, constitute a political message unacceptable to the organisers of the tournament?

I strongly suspect that The Australian Open’s zeal for suppressing freedom of political expression amongst those Australian citizens who are currently attending a tennis facility owned by the State of Victoria, whose taxpayers support the tournament, has got something to do with the fact that there are several very lucrative sponsorship deals involving Chinese companies. Those sponsors want their signage to be displayed prominently on TV to Chinese tennis fans back home – and the appearance of embarrassing questions amongst the live crowd could prove awkward.

https://www.news.com.au/finance/business/other-industries/displaced-fandom-why-chinese-liquor-and-water-are-some-of-the-most-prominent-brands-at-australian-open/news-story/73854d7319bd0e1cb16ecb39de8403ae

So Tennis Australia is happy to spout empty platitudes about the welfare of Peng Shuai being their top priority, provided that it does not impact on the sponsorship dollars coming from communist China. It is probably not 30 pieces of silver but rather $30 million (my guess) which is the price for Tennis Australia’s commitment to the values which Australians value.

And in its own not-so subtle way, Tennis Australia is now Finlandizing, self-censoring itself and tennis fans so as to placate a communist tyranny. This is a serious matter, as this sort of behaviour, this sort of self-limitation on freedom of expression, is exactly what Communist China wants Australia to engage in as a price of trading with the PRC.

We need to call this behaviour out as soon as it occurs. It is both un-Australian and an insidious threat to our freedoms.

Let me start by saying that some of my best friends are Sandgropers. There is Michael who lives in Williamstown, and Jeff who lives in Niddrie, and Bill who lives in Hong Kong.

What do they all have in common? They were mostly born and raised in Western Australia, but decided to make their lives elsewhere in the Commonwealth.

Indeed, most of my friends from WA have spent a large part of their lives outside WA.

This does say something about Australia as a Federation. People from each state, especially from the peripheral states, gain greatly from the existence of the Commonwealth of Australia, It broadens their horizons, whether they like it or not, and gives them greater opportunities.

My friend Jeff even still supports Carlton, the VFL team he adopted before the AFL (and West Coast) came into existence. Supporting your team is a seriously emotionally intense matter, and it does transcend state boundaries. [Happily two of his kids support the Bulldogs – even though he warned them in the 1990s that they would not see any success – haha!]

So the issue of the extension of the hard border closure between WA and the rest of Australia by the expatriate Queenslander who is now WA premier, McGowan, is something which we do need to look at more closely.

Does this create a crisis in Federation? Why are the rest of us forcibly separated from our Sandgroper (and all Western Australians are Sandgropers, if you look back a couple of generations, even the truly rich ones) friends?

I like to think that whilst Sandgropers (as we like to call Western Australians, and it is a shorter term) like to express a chip on their shoulder about their separateness, it is mostly rhetoric. They gain much from being united with the eastern part of the continent, which has, for many years, subsidised them whilst their mineral wealth was unrealised.

There have been many tax subsidies, as well as the benefit to them from the unified defence of the entire continent.

The existence of a unified nation has also enabled them to both benefit from and contribute to greater leadership in Australia.

John Curtin, who was originally a Victorian, is revered (probably excessively) as a great wartime prime minister, and who lived in and represented WA in the federal parliament for many years.

Bob Hawke, who definitely was one of the three best peacetime prime ministers of Australia, was born in South Australia, grew up in Western Australia, spent most of his working life in Canberra, and represented (without actually living there) a Victorian seat, before retiring to a happy dotage in Sydney. Whilst he belongs, across his entire life, to most of Australia, he has more claim to being a Sandgroper than most do.

We have a hard border with WA now – a COVID proof fence if you will – but the reality is that over the long term for the past 121 years of Federation, both Western Australia and the eastern states in general have benefited greatly from the unity of the nation which has existed over most of that period, both in terms of the movement of people, and the shared values. That benefit is much greater than would have occurred, to the detriment of both sides of the continent, if there had been a permanent hard border.

Having said that, I am not going to drink any Western Australian wines (even the ones I love like Peel Estate) until the border is open again. McGowan makes Dictator Dan look like a democrat.