ALIAS POOR YORICK

Of course I fought at Gallipoli. I was only a fetus, so I had to lie about my age. And my height. I had to lie about a lot of things. I hated the taste of beer and I didn't know the words to Waltzing Matilda, but I was buggered if I was going to let that stand in the way of dying for my country. Or someone else's country. War isn't supposed to make sense. They say the first casualty of war is truth. In my case the first casualty of war was a Louis Vuitton trunk containing my best dinner suit, three ounces of Turkish opium, and a particularly fine collection of Persian erotica. Sunk without trace after a luggage tender capsized at Alexandria. A tragedy. I was on my way to Paris to cover the war as a freelance correspondent and I had no idea of the horrors I was to face. Without a decent dinner jacket. You people have no idea. Gallipoli. It was hell. When I say I fought at Gallipoli, I really mean I saw action at Gallipoli. Well, I mean I saw some photos of the plac...

Guest columnist Elton McGrievance Cohen II Good afternoon class. I am Elton McGreivance Cohen II, Emeritus Professor of  Divergent Cohesive Reasoning & Coffee at The Sorbonne (2025 -2025). If the name sounds familiar, you may have encountered my annoyingly famous father Elton McGrievance Cohen, author of the runaway best-seller "What the Fuck is Going On Here" an incisive and widely misunderstood satire of geo--political economics in the wake of the first Trump Presidency, you know, the one where he was content just to bask in the glory of being declared a stable genius. Oh happy days.   This time round some damn fool has taught him how to pronounce macro-economics without spitting out the spare adderil he keeps in that pouch in his cheeeks and he's off to everywhere all at once to fix everything before next Tuesday... "Hey Fritz, nice little economy you've got here, be a shame if anything happened to it, a damn shame" But back to me.    As most of you p...

 It's Day 1463 of the Tour de France. Your Facebook feed is full of promos for Lifestyle Community real estate opportunities and funeral plans. And it's your birthday tomorrow. Your spouse got Putin & Rasputin the Borsoi Hounds and the fake Brett Whiteleys in the divorce settlement before buggering off to Noosa to spend some quality time with her Pilates instructor Pieter the former Olympic gymnast and professional Scandinavian. And it's your birthday tomorrow. You wouldn't mind so much if they hadn't fucked off with the last of the cocaine and your best three bottles of Grange Hermitage. And your favourite corkscrew. And it's your birthday tomorrow. You've spent the night watching Inspector Morse and repeats of Parliament Question Time. Bob Katter has just asked his usual colourfully incoherent question, rabbiting on about the contribution of Christianity to Modern Society. Something to do with having got rid of human sacrifice, Snake River Gods, and Sa...

  1. Stop taking drugs 2. Go to gym 3. Get haircut 4.  Have lunch with David Bowie 5.  Have another, better haircut 6. Write music for some movie about the internet or something ( note to self: what is Social Media 1!!?? 7. Eat two kilos of raw meant, go back to gym 8. Ring Gary Numan. Tell him "Cars" is a great song 9. Go on Ebay. Look for reasonably-priced domestic unicorn

You'll need some fanatics. Bunnings has a good selection but if you're shopping on a Friday you'll be wanting to get there early as the best ones are usually taken by sundown. Keep women out of it as they tend to have a moderating and ecumenical approach, which is the last thing you want. Beards. You want as many beards as possible. Blokes with beards, automatic weapons, and a family history of mental illness going back at least three generations.                                          Next. Right. You've only got a couple of hours left so get a move on, lickety-split, and pick a fight at the UN in the morning session. Anything'll do. Complain that China's trying to keep you off the Security Council because you've been buying all your catmeat from Taiwan. Lodge a formal motion of censure. Then do a weird long and rambling lunchtime interview claiming that the Koran is a deep fake I...

  Yesterday, 23 June, 2025, I bought a brand new second-hand Chinese quartz watch from an op-shop for $5. Today I put a !5$ battery in it & we're good to go. Is it now already ? Yes. Yes it is. Most emphatically. Our story starts in Wellington, on Wednesday 4th June on the Interisland Ferry, but if it's anything like the rest of the narrative, it will quickly grow restless and want to go back to Fri 30th May, which is when I flew into Wellington to attend the 50th Anniversary of   TVNZ's AVALON STUDIO COMPLEX where 50 years earlier colour television was unleashed on an unsuspecting public. Along with a second channel. Yes, count them folks, you now have TWO television channels to watch at any given time. Well up until midnight. Yes midnight. Late enough. Why anyone would want to watch television after midnight instead of getting a good night's sleep is perplexing, even a little worrying, but we'll say no more about it, but I think some of you people need to take...

LT COLONEL WARBURTON SMYTHE-SMYTHE, SPECIAL UNDERCOVER ENVOY APPOINTED BY UN SECURITY COUNCIL TO TALK SOME SENSE INTO THESE  The President is sitting at his desk in the Oval Office, nibbling on unicorn-liver pate and quince jam while effortlessly completing the Times Cryptic Crossword and occasionally picking at his teeth with a gold toothpick. His 23 year old Chief of Staff, Jeremy, is brushing down the familiar lumpen blue suit, too-long red tie, and orange fright wig poking out of the breast pocket. He is holding the outfit out at arms length, his disgust evident. JEREMY  I wish you didn't have to wear this.. this clownish costume, sire, God it's awful TRUMP     It is truly fucking awful. That's why I gotta wear it. The people they see me wearing that and they think He is one of us. We can trust him. Tell you what Jeremy old bean. I turn up in Armani, this White House is fucked.  JEREMY   You are, my liege, in all things, wise & witty &...

                                                                            Or should that be 'are 14 coffees too many ?' Are we talking about a situation or a quantity or in fact a situation caused by a quantity or a quantity as a result of which the situation has evolved. Or is it an amount in which case 'is' would theoretically be correct but you have to ask yourself as you teeter between 13 and 14 coffees, is correct grammar the thing to be really worried about ? And really are we talking about an objective situation here ? Some of us can drink 14 or 15 coffees and barely notice it. Is 14 coffees too much for who ? Or is that whom ? and does it matter. Is it too much for you and does that as a result automatically mean it's too much for me ? And what exactly do we mean when we...

  Two tours of Nam back in 66 & 67 ? Pshaw. Six months in Afghanistan embedded with some fucking suicide mission US Marines half of them addicted to smack & the other half packaging smack up to ship back home 2 kg at a time inside each body bag ? Yeah nah. Oh sure you've probably got PTSD, but you think you've been through hell ? You know nothing. You have not taken a three year old to Billie Lids in Preston East on a Sunday morning. At ten-thirty. You do not know. You can never know know. Not unless you were there, man.  1030 hrs Sunday June 15. "Billie Lids" is a medium-security indoor adventure playground, entirely covered in vinyl and small children. Sartre in Hui Clos (No Exit) said hell is other people. Hey Jean-Paul, I see your "other people" and raise you twenty kids and thirty parents who've gathered to help Tallulah celebrate her fourth birthday with bells and whistles and pate and Peppa Pig I'd got the call 30 minutes earlier. Just...

                                       Please insert table wine joke of your own choice I know what you're thinking - Day on a Plate; isn't that one of those lightweight pieces usually found near the back of the fluffy magazine in the Sunday papers ? What on earth am I, a decorated war correspondent, media mogul, billionaire bitcoin curator, and prize-winning comic novelist doing piss-farting about with this sort of pap. Isn't this beneath me ? Well that, my friend, is where you are wrong. Here at ALIAS POOR YORICK we take diet, dietary-focused philosophical schools, and auxiliary concerns very seriously as part of a new holistic approach to the sometimes brutal business of satire, comedy, and general funniness. Steve Martin once remarked that "Comedy is not pretty" & a former literary associate of mine, Bob Leamen (RIP) often advised  me "Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke" Bob ...

LORD PEMBERTON SMYTHE-MACGREGOR PhD And yes, that is my great grandfather, a lifelong advocate of the benefits of curating diet and exercise in order to thoroughly interrogate major contentions of philosophical enquiry.  He attended Edinburgh University for half a decade without enrolling or paying fees. He submitted a doctor al thesis on "The Haggis; Political oppression or Cultural Embezzlement by the Fucking English Who Else, They Really Are Bastards, along with an IOU for seven years of fees, payable (next Tuesday when ma benefits re paid ) He was awarded his doctorate in 1908 and had great success when the thesis was published for the general public as "Haggis. WTF". He became rich, famous, and vigorously pursued by the Tax dept. In 1913, with the war in sight and the sky full of  looming cliches, he took a job as Ship's Philosopher on the SS Noel Coward and sailed for NZ, where, in 1954, he became my great grandfather. He was a bit dead by this time but that di...

Welcome to THE FORK the future of food blogging. We don't just get in there and review. We are total Ninja. We work by night.  Invisible. Deadly. You'll never know we were there. We may not even be there, but you will be judged. This is no place for the weak of heart  or stomach. This is food-blogging as martial arts. This is war. MKR ? I don't think so pal. Your Kitchen doesn't even rate.  MasterChef? Don't make me laugh. forget Iron Chef, forget Guru Chef (yes I know it hasn't happened yet, but forget it already). The future of cooking has been here since yesterday and I've dined at his temple.  His name ? Artemis Artaud . He's young, major-talented, and borderline psychotic. He's an Olympic pistol gold-medallist and a heroin addict. He's perfect. A young flawed guru figure, he's not God but you get the feeling he might have God's private mobile number. Well, at least conceptually.   Artaud has taken over at Proust's Kitche...

POPE YORICK II     I shouldn't really be talking about this yet, I mean nothing's confirmed.... you didn't even know I was papabile did you ( for the tiny minority of my readers who don't already know, this means shortlisted for the pope gig, one of the chosen few, a likely contender, and while we're on the subject it's not too late to get a few bucks down on me, I think you can still get 12 or even 15 to 1 odds, money for jam because it's pretty much a lock, just a couple of contractual details and your humble but incredibly talented managing editor will be installed as Pope Yorick II. I'm not saying money has changed hands, I'm just saying this is a bet you can't lose )  But wait, I hear you say, you're not a Cardinal, you're not even a catholic, you're a lapsed Presbyterian. The cardinals are going to spot this. And you're right, and my point is, so what ? You've had an all-catholic team in the Vatican up to now, and...

  EDITORIAL APOLOGY & MEA CULPA MAXIMUS     Finally, a mere seven  weeks after the event, our  FNQ Editor-at-Large, Chip Le Mans Beauregard Jones- Smythe-LaCroix (ex Woodville Racing Quarterly)  has filed this on the spot report from the the scene. He assures us that this extraordinary delay was unavoidable because the piece required extensive polishing and further fact checking. We here at Alias Poor Yorick are not in the habit of harassing professional freelancers or questioning their bar bills, however it must be noted that the bulk of this polishing was done at the Byron Bay Hilton and involved interviewing forty-three known drug dealers I'm sorry I mean film production advisors, two palm readers, and a Reiki practitioner who nearly worked for the Bureau of Meteorology but turned down the job when they realised that BOM was a bit hung up on the science stuff and didn't listen to the secret true voice of the universe. I knew Chip in the old days...

BUT FIRST A JOKE :  How many Australians does it take to change a lightbulb ?  What's wrong with the lightbulb ? That's a bloody good Aussie lightbulb. I dunno, you come over here, get on the dole, steal our women, and then have the cheek to whinge about our lightbulbs. My father died in the war for that lightbulb. Well okay he didn't die in the war, but he once got so pissed on Anzac Day that he had to take three days off work. And let's not even talk about Vietnam. He went there on a Tiger Airlines tour once and got so bloody crook from a pork roll we thought he might lose a kidney. And all you bloody foreigners can do is criticize our lightbulbs !  You can all bugger off.   PROFESSOR JEFRI L'ÉSTRANGE, SENIOR LECTURER IN SOME SORT OF BULLSHIT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WEST RINGWOOD At first glance, it might seem that anyone as screamingly flamboyant as this would be a shoo-in for this honour, but it's not as straight-forward as ...

Alias Poor Yorick CEO JEFF BROWETT WEARING A 5th Century BC SUMERIAN  APOLOGY HELMET  I'm sorry. We're all sorry. Traditionally ALIAS POOR YORICK publishes several apologies each year. Good apologies. Well-written apologies for badly written posts. Apologies for the lack of posts. We have prided ourselves on our apologies, and now I must apologise for the complete lack of apologies in the calendar year so far. I'm sorry. We're all sorry. Not even a traditional apology for things we've had nothing to do with, like the Boer War. A silly war. One of those daft bullshit conflicts which inevitably occur when you have an empire stretched so far across the globe that you've run out of pink paint and start blaming the natives for your own administrative inadequacies. Yes Britain I'm talking to you, stop trying to hide down the back of the room and pretending that Baden-Powell and the Boy Scouts weren't your fault. I mean there's that prize dufus Baden-Powell...

  Have you ever found yourself asking why Jesus had to go and get himself crucified right at the beginning of our biggest and best public holiday ?  I mean what was God thinking ? What is Easter about anyway, and how come it never gets a mention in the bible ?  Is it possible then there is no such thing as Easter, God does not exist, and all of you who think he does are really dumb?  We are indebted to the Richard Dawkins' Big Bossy Blog of Science for this masterful bit of rational thinking. Back to the factoids. It's time to get to the bottom of this whole Easter mystery. The resurrection. The rabbit. The eggs. The ferrets. In fact pretty much every mystifying detail about Easter and its celebration can be laid at the feet of Irish Catholic alcoholics and ferrets, Somewhere between crucifixion and chocolate came the Easter Ferret. It may surprise you to know that the very first "Easter Rabbit" was in fact an Easter Ferret who wandered into Jesus' emp...

                                                  Office Manager Mr S. Unra (Chartered Accountant) PONYTAIL, COCAINE RESIDUE, & BOTTOMFEEDER  Attorneys-at-Law To:  Donald J. Trump, POTUS, The White House, America Dude, In the matter of Browett v. Trump you have been found guilty of recklessly and wantonly operating an economy while being totally fucking incompetent to do so, thus causing our client to lose approximately $10563.72 from his superannuation account. You are hereforetowith required to reimburserate our client immediately. Look normally he wouldn't be that fussed but he's buying a little granny-flat and he's got a wife and daughter to support and well you know, the advertising revenue on Alias Poor Yorick isn't what it used to be, so look; Mr Trump, can I call you Don ? Can I call you Donnie ? Donnie Baby ? the thing is you're bloody lucky...

   So this is what happens when you get stoned at MIP-TV with a dodgy Australian producer called Root MacPherson. We were playing Two-up behind the Lionsgate pavilion. It hurts to say this, but I was losing. I'm pretty sure they were changing the rules every time we smoked another joint, but I may be confusing contiguity with causation here. And forgetting that I was playing a game of chance with people from a country where they win philosophical arguments by saying Mate that won't pass the pub test. For those of you unfortunate enough to live in parts of the world where "pub" is not in common usage, a pub is a place where people gather possibly too often and drink possibly too much alcohol. Hey. No judgement here, but in my experience The Pub is not in fact a place of Higher Learning where things are discussed in a calm and logical fashion in order to reach conclusions which are both sound and agreeable. Australians do not in general agree with me on this. And someti...

  Good morning, And I mean that. I'm Peter Dutton, the Leader of the Opposition, which means you can trust me when I say Good Morning. Not like that shifty Anthony Allebreezy or whatever his name is, you know, that chap who'd have you believe he's the Prime Minister. Well what I'd like to know is why he doeasn't just get on with the business of being Prime Minister instead of buying clifftop mansions for $4.3 million and flying all over the place First Class and being charming and funny on Spicks and Specks that well-known hiding place for communists and terrorist-sympathisers. That Adam Hill I don't trust him at all, he's only got one leg you know. And he keeps growing a beard which is how you can tell he's a terrorist at heart because well we all know terrorists have beards so they can hide weapons of mass destruction strapped to their necks instead of wearing a shirt and tie like normal people like me. Bloody foreigners. They come from overseas you kn...