ALIAS POOR YORICK

 "LIFE, DEATH, PRIZES" : I swear to you this is true. It was the masthead on a magazine called CHAT. I remember when papers had proper mastheads with Latin stuff like Verita Vino et Alia, which roughly translates as "our reporters are drunk half the time but they have a theoretical commitment to the truth". Now we're down to "Life, Death, Prizes". Then again, that pretty much covers it all, doesn't it. A sparse but complete cosmological view. I swear to you this was a real magazine. I saw it in a servo on Canterbury Rd in Bayswater. One of those I'm in the waiting room and I've got five minutes I'll read this load-of-crap magazine. And you know five minutes is about all you've got before your brain turns to maggot-infested mush and you start thinking things like "Gee that Zumba looks like fun and I've heard it's great exercise. Just the thing for a fifty-six year old white man " Anyway, I swear this was a real

 Is weasel word a euphemism ?  Or is euphemism in fact a weasel word ?  Or the other way round ? Am I talking complete cobblers ? I reject this. Reject is the new deny. There's no confirm or deny here. You just simply whack the white ball off the table. As in 'the Japanese whaling companies reject the accusation that 'scientific whaling' is the biggest load of  cobblers since someone suggested Shane Warne's tweets were a form of writing. Reject. It's brilliant. Mr Hitler and Mr Goebbels would have loved this shit...... "Hitler today rejected accusations that he had invaded Czechoslovakia and Poland, explaining that his neighbours had gone out leaving the lights on and he'd popped in to switch them off . And what's this? Oops, France, you've left the back door unlocked again. Careless .." And moving right along to the relatively trivial, we here at ALIAS POOR YORICK are a bit tickled at a local theatre company's warning that their

           If you thought the only thing Aldi was good for was buying up a shitload of cheap chilli-cherry chocolate you are wrong my friend. For only $29.95 I bought a universal remote control that actually works. Tried it out over the weekend. Set it to Egypt: Mubarak gone. Push of a button.  Brilliant . Okay, back home: Push a button : Get a bunch of emails from everyone I've ever known approving of everything I've ever done. And the Jag XK 140 is on the way. Now if I can just figure out which button gets Shane Warne to shut up on Twitter & which stops Andrew Bolt talking complete bullshit, we're getting somewhere. This is going to be fun. Requests anyone ?  Today's thought is from Mr Ramshackle McThought of No I've Never Heard Of It Either who says "Fools rush in where angels check with OH&S and negotiate an equitable hourly rate" Finally, another entry into our "Satire-is-basically-redundant" file. Ripped from today's he

Hi my name's Fuchsia Arpeggio and I'd like to thank ALIAS POOR YORICK for this opportunity to become their Culture Editor-at-Large. A little about me. Starship Trooperess for Gen Z. I'm nineteen and I'm finishing my PhD in drug & alcohol counselling at Wedgeburn Tafe. My thesis is Freud & Cocaine: What's Up With That ? So like anyway anyway my POD (partner-of-today) Frinton says that's what I should write about first time up. He's so cool. He's my spiritual quantum spanner. And he's such a beautiful man - he looks like Justin Bieber only not as tough. How like lucky am I. Anyway anyway. Freud. Cocaine. Like Huh !!?? I mean he had a beard and a medical degree and a three-piece suit and everything. I thought he was like a proper doctor. But like Frinton says back then cocaine wasn't actually a drug. It was nineteenth century cocaine so it was more, like,  therapeutical. Which I guess makes it all right. I hate drugs. I've always treat

Ferengi on the starboard bow. No need to arm the photon torpedoes, they're just having a half-price summer sale on unobtanium. Damn those Ferengi. They think of everything. Not that they have anything to do with today's story - I've just always wanted an excuse to write .."Damn those Ferengi". Thanks. I feel better now. .  . First however, a message from Ron Comic-Relief of Not Far From There, who tells us that Tony Abbot is an anagram of Boy Not Bat. Who I'm pretty sure  are playing the orange stage at the Big Day Out. And Ron, come on mate. Don't try and screw us around because spellcheck on this thing is crap. You owe us a "t". Anyway. Yes. Sorry. Where was I ? Right. So sometimes I am required to collect delinquent accounts from people in the paint & panel-beating industry. Don't ask. We live in a multi-tasking world. Making ends meet and all that. At least since I got this fabulously well-paid job editing this blog I've been

Don't talk to me about the Sex Pistols. Posers. We invented punk right here in Mildura back in 1973. Real punk. We didn't even have a name for it. We were too busy being authentic. We just turned up and drowned in each other's vomit. The lead singer would bite his own head off, regurgitate it and kick himself in the face till he was covered in blood. The band was so loud every time they played planes would fall out of the sky. The manager was some rat bastard called Rat Bastard. Got a contract out of Virgin Records paying the band fifty grand if they never played again. So they spent all the money on ferrets  & drugs then put out a record called Ukele Genoicide. Forty-two minutes of a recording of ukeles being feed into a big meat-grinder. F--- it was unreal how much they kept it real. They used to get so drunk they'd smash other people's instruments. That's punk. I remember they had this rotting pigs head on a stake on stage every time they played. Same one

And no, I don't want to talk about that guns-for-jokes deal the team here at Alias Poor Yorick tried to set up with the Taliban. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Lateral thinking, comedy-cash-and-peace-in-our-time, all that stuff. What can I say. Hearts in the right place, brains somewhere in the Cayman Islands getting a tan. Anyway.  Still in the spirit of international peace and friendship, I'd been hoping to work up a joke or two especially for our Slovenian readers. Hello Slovenia. How are ? Where are you ? Details a little hazy but I remember the joke was going something like Q: How many Slovenians does it take to change a light bulb ? A: Never mind about that, this is the Russian Mafia here. We want to know where you got the light bulbs, 'cos not from us for sure. Russian Mafia not happy about this ... (Well look it was a work in progress, gimme a break) Anyway. No sooner had I keyed in "Russian Mafia" for the second time when I got an urgen

During our recent enforced layover in the Northern segment of the South-Eastern Quadrant, Ensign Precocious Youth asked me to explain 'satire' to him & whether in my opinion 'satire' was dead. And of course Satire is not dead. It's merely tuckered out and lying gasping on the chaise- longue over there demanding mint juleps. Or should that be mints julep? One never knows. And what's buggered Satire ?  Real life, that's what. It's just impossible for your common-or-garden satirist to keep up with a world where a fake Taliban negotiator takes the UN for a bucketful of cash. Satire, as most of you will know, originated in Ancient Rome & was developed by two key figures - Pliny the Elder and Frankie Howerd. Modern satire, or satire as we recognise it today, is of course named after the famous French humorist Jean-Paul Satire who kicked the whole thing off with his seminal comic work EVERYTHING IS BAD, THERE IS NO GOD, & I'VE RUN OUT OF

I didn't choose ferrets, they chose me. It started that day I was driving through Boronia and saw a rough, handwritten sign that just said "Ferrets" and a phone number. You can imagine the rest. Then that defining moment driving down Ferntree Gully Rd behind a car with a window-sticker that read "We'll see what my ferret has to say". Clearly one of those super articulate ferrets I'd heard about who hang around in cafes in Northcote saying things like ... " It's time for a paradigm shift in our thinking about social-networking". Since then I've made it my business to get inside the ferret mind, and it's time to share these insights. Ferrets are widely misunderstood. For instance, did you know that no ferret has ever been a member of the communist party ? Nor has any ferret ever been convicted of major drug-trafficking. And, more importantly, no ferret has ever dressed up as Santa Claus and interrupted the writing of this blog. They

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                     Hey Daryl yes Ossie                       John Blackman remembers             Every joke, ever

          ..... today's contribution to "who needs a guru ?" is from Enrique Hyphen-Hyphen of  Quite Near There "If Joshua had learnt the violin, the walls of Jericho would still be standing" I think there's a lesson in that for all of us. I have no idea what it might be. I think we could all do with some time alone with Mr Leonard Cohen. See you in the "Tower of Song"