We posed a question about Matty…

We asked the question and all along we knew the answer - not very steep at all. The path to redemption is flat and short if someone can profit from making it so.

Public Hospital Outrage as Wrong Baby Given to Mother

Calls for the NSW and Federal Health Ministers to resign have followed revelations of a scandalous incident at Broken Hill Hospital in which a mother was given the wrong baby to breastfeed, for 5 minutes.

The woman given the child in the very early hours of the morning noticed it wasn’t hers and altered hospital staff.

“I was totally disgusted. I mean, it saw me half starkers. It even touched my nipple.”

The woman, who prefers to remain anonymous until she has spoken to A Current Affair, has demanded an apology from the Governor-General.

The nurse has been counselled and procedures reviewed to ensure this atrocious infringement of human rights can never been repeated.

The baby was unavailable for comment but was said to be considering all its options.

In what authorities claim is an “unrelated incident”, two visitors to the hospital cafeteria were allegedly given the wrong meals.

“We was here visiting me mother who was gettin the boils under her back fat squeezed out and we got real hungry. I ordered lasagne n chips and Josie aksed for chicken schnitzel, chips n salad”, said Bevania Slap.

“When they handed us the tray the lasagne had the salad on it and I hate salad. It’s todally unaccepal”, she added.

Ms Slap has not ruled out legal action.

Therese Rein – That letter of apology in full

Dear Premier,

I was mortified at Kevin’s behaviour in Sydney on Friday and I extend my sympathy for the discomfort and embarrassment he caused you. After the first 5 years of our marriage I gave up apologising to people he was rude to as it began to occupy too much of my time, but seeing his treatment of you was enough to make my blood boil.

We were having coffee in the living room when it was replayed on the Insiders program. As the segment started, Kevin got up to scuttle out of the room but I told him to sit right back down. Of course, he busied himself behind some papers and didn’t emerge until the whole show was over.

At the end of the program, I asked him what he had to say for himself. He said he had to ring Wayne urgently and began walking out but, thanks to my new lithesome frame, I got to the door first and blocked his escape.

I offer the exchange which followed verbatim as, I hope, you will find some comfort in it.

“Kevin, what do you have to say about the way you treated that lovely Kristina?”

“Who?”, said Kevin, looking at his shoes.

“Kristina Keneally.”

“Who's that?”, he said while removing some invisible lint from his shirt cuff.

“The Premier of NSW to whom Australia has just seen you being rude.”

“She’s a poo. And she smells.”, he said to an area just over my left shoulder.

“Kevin, don’t be ridiculous. You were horrid to her.”

He stamped his foot and closed his eyes and shouted, “She started it!”

“How did she start it?”

“She was all smiley and looking.”

“What do you mean ‘looking’?”

“She was looking at me in my face and I didn’t like it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“She was looking at me. I hate it when people look at me. I bet she was looking at my fringe. I hate my fringe and I hate her and I hate you!”

Anyway, Kristina, this went on for some time but you get the general idea.

If it’s any comfort you’ll remember he’s treated another charming, polite and intelligent woman this way. That time it was on the BBC when he refused to look at the Chinese Foreign Minister.

I apologise for Kevin’s incivility. I understand how you feel. After all, I live with the odious little twit.

Yours sincerely,

Therese Rein

Canada: New Zealand with moose

An irrational jealousy (is there a rational kind?) came over me when an extremely attractive American girl said she found New Zealand accents very sexy. She might have been English, it was long ago. I can’t even recall what she looked like, though I know I wanted to get close to her that night, until she said that.

I don’t find the New Zealand accent sexy. Nor does any of Australia’s fauna. New Zealanders are friendly and, particularly in their own country, incredibly helpful and inexplicably cheerful. That’s also my experience of Canadians, other than Norm Verdec, my high school chemistry teacher, who was a fat, box-headed imbecile.

Canadians and New Zealanders share other traits. They both have bigger and richer neighbours and lots of people who poke fun at them and their accents. Both have tried to reach agreements with those who occupied the country before European settlement and both seem willing to embrace policy for the furtherance of mushy, non-specific ends such as social justice.

Most importantly, Canadians and New Zealanders share irrepressible smugness.

They’re smug because of what they are not. Canada isn’t the USA and New Zealand isn’t Australia. Turning a negative to a positive is a common survival technique of the relatively weak. Note that they’re not elevated by superior virtue, intellect or management but by what they lack. That is, neither is materially or spiritually big enough to blunder like their neighbours. Any mistakes they do make cause barely a ripple. Their smugness at big brother’s excesses, in reality, is driven by inability and insecurity.

The people of these lands of lakes and mountains have a lot in common. To flip it, their differences seem few. Indeed, all that springs to mind is that seal isn’t on the menu in the New Zealand Parliament and New Zealand’s vice-regal representatives don't rip the hearts from baby seals. Oh, and moose are scarcer in New Zealand - at least, in the wild.

Sadness anticipated in the belly of a mountain

Sparklehorse may not have been my favourite musician but he was the only cure at certain times and this news has hit hard.

The gentle beauty of his music offered this listener the glimmer of first light, the fragility of a new day and an affirmation of the primacy of love.

But this was an illusion.

The songs of love were reflections of loss. Those suffused with the promise of morning, in truth, chased in vain the evanescent light of a dying day.

Listen when very late.