News (and Fairfax) judgement. There was great drama in Victorian State Parliament yesterday when independent MP Geoff Shaw, who holds the balance of power, declared he had no confidence in Speaker Ken Smith. Pretty exciting stuff, especially since it means the Coalition government can no longer rely on Shaw to pass its legislation and will have to reach out to Labor instead. News Corp tabloid the Herald Sun put the Shaw-Smith fracas on its front page with a jump to page two. But former broadsheet (and now “compact”) The Age buried the story on page 8, putting stories about a tweet from a federal Labor MP and a new trend of eating crickets further up the front. Seemed odd to us …
Name, please? News.com.au ran a small item in its “Brekkie Wrap” section yesterday about the funeral of a British veteran, attended by about 500 people. The serviceman had no close friends or family, but after the call went out on social media hundreds of people, including current servicepeople, came to the funeral. Who was this veteran? Well, it’s not clear. In the text he is called both Harold Pervical and Harold Percival, with the headline opting for Percival and the photo caption going with Pervical …
AFR maths. Subscribers to Fairfax’s financial broadsheet Australian Financial Review are being offered AFR Weekend for “less than 80c a week”, according to the marketing. The subscription costs $69 …
Hang on a minute. Last time we checked there were 52 weeks in a year, which would make it $1.32 a week. Maybe the AFR is not so good with numbers after all?
Oh so punny. We love a good pun. We even love a bad pun. But the rule of pun headlines is that they have to make sense. We think maybe subs on The Australian became tangled up in puns and lost sight of that rule on a story about a tweet from Labor frontbencher Tony Burke comparing Speaker Bronwyn Bishop to Harry Potter witch Dolores Umbridge …
Video of the day. Philippine delegate Naderev Sano choked back tears as he spoke about Typhoon Haiyan at the climate change summit currently taking place in Warsaw. He declared he would go on a hunger strike for the duration of the 12-day conference “until a meaningful outcome is in sight” to manage climate change and prevent such disasters in future …
“Mrs Thatcher takes Umbrage” was an ancient Monty Python sketch when she was just a back bencher but proclivities well noted.