On this definition most of the press, radio and television – at least the “popular” versions – are very small indeed.

So are most of the politicians who spewed their vitriol over the last week, including especially Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, Wayne Swan and the country’s most boring politician since Barry Unsworth, Simon Crean. Tony Abbott has rarely if ever talked about anything but other people and what is wrong with them (unless he’s talking about B A Santamaria or George Pell).

Some recent politicians have talked about “things”, but it’s rare that those things are anything but “Jobs Jobs Jobs” or “Teh Economy”. Or Pink Bats.

Australia has had politicians great and small. And very, very average. The Great politicians Australia has been blessed with are few and far between. In fact there are only two in Sir Roger’s living memory. And of course you can’t guess. Under the above definition the only truly great Australian politicians in the last 50 years have been Gough Whitlam and Paul Keating. And what is wrong with that? Well, people have hated them passionately. And the reason most people who dislike(d) them is that “most people” are small, or average at best if they are lucky, and couldn’t quite grasp the concept, or value, of talking about “ideas”.

Anyway, it’s just a definition and an idea someone made up.

Sir Roger has just received a request from Canberra saying that the National Library of Australia wished permission to include ValuesAustralia.com in the PANDORA Archive of Australian websites. So … Sir Roger … archived in perpetuity. That’s a kind of immortality. Fame of a sort, one supposes. It’s better than not being archived at least. Although, as Woody Allen said, “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.”

So that’s nice.

(Sir Roger said yes.)

Where has Sir Roger been? Why has he been absent from his adoring public?

Well, first and least, how could Sir Roger satirise Australian politics any more than Australia’s laughingstock politicians were doing by themselves? How could he point out the ridiculous any more clearly than the ridiculous politicians themselves? It is an unavoidable fact that Australian politics in 2012 are beyond absurd.

It is also an unavoidable fact that the Australian people do not deserve these appalling, self-serving, lying, cheating, machine room rabble.

There are various intelligences. Ordinary general intelligence is one of them. It may be necessary but it far from sufficient. More important are emotional, moral and social intelligence.

Sir Roger is also totally conflicted. He can’t stand Gillard or Rudd both of whom have above average general intelligence and both of whom lack emotional, moral and social intelligence. How can one vote for such awfulness and allow them to ionflict themselves any longer on Australia? But then Tony Abbott lacks all four modes of intelligence. He is terminally gullible and intellectually dishonest apart from being transparently dishonest. Abbott is impossible to vote for.

So who is left? The Greens? They’re certainly more honest and more intelligent in most ways but they can’t step up in their present state especially with the extremists hanging on.

So that’s one reason why Sir Roger has been silent. What could he say?

The big reason for Sir Roger’s silence is that he has been working on his weight loss book, Weightloss Without Willpower. Sir Roger hasn’t made much of it here but he has lost a lot of weight recently. Intentionally, of course. And he decided to share his system by writing a book. It will be available on Amazon and as a .pdf and probably on Kindle.

But for now it will be available for free download here. You can also download the coaching audio for free. Check it out!

And welcome back, Sir Roger!

Sir Roger Migently is not angry. He is over it.

According to Friday’s ABC 7.30 Report

The Government is pushing ahead with its demand that dozens of dentists repay $20 million claimed under Medicare for treating people with chronic diseases.

Here’s how it is: Few people can afford dental service, not even preventive.

Just to open your mouth for a dentist will set you back over $70. To have any work done will cost you a lot more.

People who have low-paying jobs or none at all, especially if they have, for example, parental responsibilities, simply can’t afford to go to a private dentist.

They can go to the Dental Hospital (if they happen to live in a capital city) and wait for two or three years in some cases to complete a series of consultations.

Meanwhile, people with missing teeth can lose jobs, miss promotions or, if unemployed, find it extremely difficult to find employment. This is especially serious for people whose work involves standing up in front of people, or managing them: trainers, coaches, teachers, actors, etc. etc. etc.

What can they do? Until some time ago if you had rotting or broken teeth you could go to your GP and make a case that your dental condition was life-threatening – which it can be because, for example, of gum disease which can be linked to heart disease. Your GP could create a Patient Management Plan which included dental work.

Dentist could, with this Plan, provide their services under Medicare. The problem was that they could claim only one item at a time. Therefore some dentists, if they had to do two extractions in a sitting, chose to space them over more than one date. They weren’t claiming or being paid for work they were not doing.

And even then, if a prosthesis was needed – false teeth – only the prosthetist’s services were covered. The false teeth themselves could cost $2000, which is a lot for an unemployed person.

Older (especially pre-fluoride), less-well-paid Australians have dreadful dentition. This scheme was the only possible way to stay in the employment game, not to mention to cling onto some sort of quality of life, self-esteem and respect.

It was, frankly a crappy scheme put together by the coalition years ago. It was, in conscience, the least they could do. And they did the very least they could.

Now the Labor Party thinks even that was too much and wants to junk it.

And on top of that they are punishing dentists with fines for making it possible for that scheme to work.

The most likely reason Health Minister Plibersek has taken this action is as part of a larger strategy to claw back outgoings so that Treasurer Swan can announce his surplus in 2012. This surplus is supposed to prove his economic management credentials (and to poke his tongue out at Fatty Joe Hockey who said Labor would “never deliver a surplus”). But that Labor might win the next election, surplus or not, is a vain hope.

For Sir Roger, this action is the last straw.

With this there is no policy area remaining in which Labor can claim moral or political superiority over the coalition.

On every important issue Labor is in a panicked race to the ethics-free bottom to appease narrow-minded, ignorant, cashed-up bogans who are already, not rusted-on, but welded-on to the coalition.

Gillard today announces a tax-benefit bribe to low-income families with teenage children.

Labor has been in power for three and a half years. They could have done this years ago. Why didn’t they?

They’re in panic.

Do you think immediately, as I did, of Gillard and Abbott (not to mention almost their entire front benches) when you read this from the final chapter of Kevin Dutton’s Flipnosis?

“If experience teaches us anything, it’s this: behind the façade of assiduous, fumbling accomplishment there shimmers a realm of despicably effortless incompetence. An imperishable array of faux-pas, cock-ups and howlers that clunks into mortal existence at the whim of the cognitively challenged.”

So who is left to vote for? Who is left with the moral authority to manage a country for the welfare of its people? Not the Coalition ptui! ptui! who lost their moral compass years ago – so who is left who might keep them both honest?

Bugger.

He walked away. He walked back. He could not look at her. He could not look away. He began to say something. He could not say anything. What could he say? Whatever he said must appal Elenora, perhaps disgust her. Certainly discomfort and embarrass her. The last thing he wanted was to cause her pain or discomfort or embarrassment. Certainly it would embarrass him. Nothing he could say about his love for Elenora could possibly be appropriate. And, though he longed to say something of his love, he said nothing.

This was the first of what were the very few wise decisions he made from this fateful day forward.

He did not know what to do. He could not sleep. Every evening he went home delirious with desire and aching with yearning. Each night he dreamt of Elenora. Each day he woke early with anticipation and hope in his heart at the thought merely of seeing her again, even if only fleetingly.

Until this day, this butter-fingered Cupid’s tragically clumsy day, Hamgar had been upright and self-possessed, knowing and capable, confident with his students and even a little proud, for there were things, so people said, for him to take pride in. How had he deserved this terrible punishment?

Today, just a day after the failure of industrial negotiations between itself and the Unions, and with people still furious only three weeks after CEO Joyce gave the finger to its entire customer base, the Prime Minister and Australia generally, the Qantas social media uber-geniuses began a twitter campaign with the hashtag #qantasluxury, asking tweeple to tweet “creative” ideas about – um – Qantasluxury, in order to win, honestly, a pair of Qantas pyjamas, and a “luxury amenity kit”.

What happened next was salutory. Derisory tweets were flying within minutes and hours later as Sir Roger now dips his quill it is still the No. 2 trending topic in Australia.

According to the SMH:

Within an hour, the hashtag was trending across the country, but the tweets were not quite what management expected.
@GrogsGamut tweeted: “#QantasLuxury- when the passengers arrive before the couriers delivering the lockout notices do”.

ABC radio’s PM presenter Mark Colvin, @Colvinius said: “Getting from A to B without the plane being grounded or an engine catching fire. #qantasluxury”.

And @the-aaron-smith said: “#qantasluxury is chartering a Greyhound bus and arriving at your destination days before your grounded Qantas flight”.

Social media expert James Griffin from SR7 said that, by about 1pm, Australians were sending out 51 tweets a minute on the hashtag. Most of these were tweets making fun of the idea of #qantasluxury.

But Sir Roger’s favourite response is not on twitter:

In less than a heartbeat it was done. The Cupid’s, Bertrand’s, tiny arrow was buried deep in his heart.

Cold as deep blue ice. Hot as white hot gold.

From this moment there was no hope of Cupid’s cruelly-barbed steel ever being removed without tearing his heart out with it.

And Hamgar looked up.

And there was Elenora.

And he loved her.

Suddenly.

Unexpectedly.

Astonishingly.

Unforeseeably.

Unasked-for.

Unrequitably.

Unrequitably, for he knew Elenora. She was a good woman, a private woman, with a love and a home and family of her own.

From his grey hair to his brown sandals Hamgar was shocked, ashamed and confused.

Hamgar was ashamed because he knew his hair was grey. While Elenora’s hair was shiny and black. She was young. She could not love him, he knew. Indeed she hardly noticed him.

He could not love her. It was impossible.

And yet he did. Suddenly and shockingly he loved her with his entire being.

Hamgar did not know what to do, where to look, what to say. It made no sense. Why Elenora? She was nice; she was friendly enough in her way; he had always liked her. Indeed, from the moment he first met her on the day she joined the workshop he had had that feeling you get, don’t you, when you feel you have known someone all your life, in a pleasant, comfortable sort of way. He had always thought Elenora was pretty, it’s true. And she was clever, it’s also true, with a quick and sometimes wicked wit. Yet these things are not on their own enough to lead to Love.

But the Elenora he now saw was beautiful and wonderful and he longed and ached for her, with his body and his mind; with his heart and his soul; with the parts of himself that we will not mention here.

In his daze he forgot where he was; he did not care where he was. He forgot what he was doing. He cared not at all what his life had been, what his life had meant before this moment. There was nothing else but the wondrous Elenora, standing in front of him, blissfully unaware of what felt to him like the volcanic eruption of his heart.

Desire and Doom tore him between them on their torturers’ rack.

There was no way forward. There was no way back. What was he to do?

Today as Hamgar was admiring Elenora’s miniatures, Bertrand, unnoticed by the artisans below, was beginning to get it.

His little wings began trembling with excitement.

His arrow slotted onto the string and with frowning concentration Bertrand began to draw it slowly back.

But his cute little pudgy fingers couldn’t hold the arrow and suddenly out twanged the arrow towards the ground. Through the nets and the draped hangings it flew. Straight into the breast of Hamgar, who looked up in astonishment to see before him the face of Elenora.

And so began the Tragedy that Hamgar’s life from that moment became.

Qantas Chief Leprechaun Alan Joyce says today that he “had” to ground Qantas to restore certainty to the schedule.

He’s certainly done that!

In other news:
the Qantas brand is shit, shit stinks, polished shit is still shit, chocolate-coated shit still tastes like shit and the Queen farts.

Also now known:

Without the Qantas brand (or what we call “Brand Australia”)

Thanks Alan.