ALIAS POOR YORICK

Thank you, welcome, and congratulations for choosing Nirvana for your complete home renovations. Relax. Nothing can possibly go wrong. And if it does, rest assured we will spare no effort to send people round to apologise profusely and explain that this really shouldn't have happened. And that it's never happened before & is extremely unlikely to happen again in the future. And to assure you, our valued customer, that we will find someone to blame by close of business. Because we care. HOW DOES IT ALL WORK ?  ... Well, it's frighteningly simple: The contract allows for one easy payment of all monies due. This is to be in the form of bank cheque, tax-franked Euros, or certified Krugerrand and is payable now.  Thanks. Now we have that ugliness out of the way we can relax. Time to let you meet the team who are going to make your house renovation dreams come true ! DAVE will come round fifteen minutes late looking a little teary & design y...

 GOVT MOVES SWIFTLY TO COMBAT ZEBRA SHORTAGE

There's no business like snow business. Oh shut up, this is serious. It's almost all over at the Winter Olympics and all Australia has won is a tin of biscuits in the Demonstration Curling. It's a disgrace. It's an outrage. But is it a surprise ? Well hardly. Australia is crap at this sort of thing. I blame the government. The government blames the unions, and the unions are busy looking for misplaced credit cards but they're pretty sure the whole debacle can be sledded home to smarmy ski-instructor  Raoul Sleaze who failed to sleep with any members of either sex of the Winter Olympic team thus causing a massive wave of shattered self-esteem, & considerable surprise from casual observers. Raoul could not be reached for comment. Now I'd love to be able to accept bizarre and simple-minded thinking like this, and if I can't do better in the next four or five hundred words I'll certainly be coming back to it, don't you worry about that, but I t...

AUSTRALIAN GRAND SLALOM COMPETITOR EXPLAINS THAT DASTARDLY RUSSIANS HAVE STOLEN THE SNOW, WHILE PLAINCLOTHES POLICEMAN WARNS OF HEAVY PENALTIES FOR DOING PISTE JOKES

(* For those of you whose idea of learning French was smoking Gitanes behind the shed du bicyclette this pretty much translates as "I Remember Yesterday Like It Was Yesterday". Actually that's not true: it's the name of a book by Marcel Proust which is so long and boring that no-one has ever read it. There's thousands of pages and Proust admitted he regularly fell asleep while writing it. It's about a girl called Madeleine who drowned in a cup of tea, which made Proust very sad. And a bit sleepy) I miss the old days. They were so much better. And they lasted longer. Not like these cheap and nasty days you buy in shops nowadays. An afternoon started around lunchtime and went well into the early evening. I remember an afternoon back in the eighties that seemed to go on forever. This may have been at a Neil Young concert but that's beside the point. Everything was better back then. You could smoke everywhere. On planes, in restaurants, in the shower...

Don't hate me because I'm beautiful. Don't hate me because I'm young and beautiful and Australian. That's how I came to be here in the first place. People just hated me. And they weren't that keen about the boogie board either. Those baggage handlers must have really hated me. I blame the unions.   I am now free after my long and sometimes really quite troubling incarceration. There have been time when I have been denied access to make-up and cable television. I have been denied basic human rights like visits from my media and financial advisers, which I think is against the Geneva Convention.  Now I know how the Pussy Riot Grrls and Nelson Mandela felt. Power and kisses to you, grrls and I hope you get out of jail soon Mr Mandela. Unless you've been a political prisoner like us you cannot truly understand my pain. Channel Nine truly understands my pain. Or rather they did until it became clear to me that Channel Seven understood my pain a bit better....

Bring me another kale milkshake, that was a truly horrible year. 2013 you sucked. But to be fair I accept blame for pretty much everything that went wrong. And did I mention that pretty much everything went wrong. How can this be, I hear you say ? You're all thinking how amazing the life of  billionaire blogger must be. Oh sure, I get to sit around on yachts with George Clooney and Julian Assange eating gourmet dishes made from the brains  of endangered species and brushing my teeth with cocaine  while we discuss trickle-down economics with  Lady Gaga, but this can get old. And it doesn't stop you from making a series of poor personal choices leading to metaphysical and financial disaster. Otherwise known as my fifth marriage. The divorce was the high point of the year, which should give you a clue about the rest of it. Anyway. She got the helicopter, the fake Brett Whiteley's, and our collection of vintage Latvian cheese. And a half a billion in bitcoin. I...

Well it's that time of the year when we here at Alias Poor Yorick traditionally offer up  apologies and excuses for being late to press. It's February already and nary a post to be seen. It almost goes without saying that we were waiting for parts to arrive from Sydney. It's an old excuse but a good one. Besides, I like it. Our team was also frightfully busy writing jokes for Sir Peter Jackson's third installment of the Hobbit trilogy "The Hobbit: Shit, It Goes on a Bit Doesn't It ?" Anyway, this year for something a little different I thought we'd try apologising for a couple of things which aren't in any way our fault but it just seems like someone should apologise for them. And I've picked: (a) The invasion of Abyssinia in 1935 by the Italian Army under the direction of Mussolini (b) Dr Geoffrey Edelsten (c) Matchbox 20 Three ghastly pointless horrible detours on the road of life. Sorry. Really really sorry. And finally, sorr...