Respect for the dead

In the poem The Quality of Sprawl, Les Murray says that hitting animals is not part of it. He’s right. Animal cruelty is very not cool. But it can be funny in the same way that zombie movies and racist jokes are funny. The sheer outrageousness, the fundamental wrongness (mixed with more than a frisson of audience guilt), gets the laugh.

The story of the famous footballer reaching into a bird cage, biting the head from the budgie and returning the stump to the perch still makes me smile. A mate drop kicking a cat from a verandah, another place kicking a pigeon with a toe to the date – were hilarious at the drunken youthful time. Cleese smacking the rigid parrot on the counter top remains extraordinarily popular amongst those suffering arrested comedy development.

The last couple of weeks haven’t been the best for inter-species relations. Aussie teens made the US news for smacking around a kangaroo and a pissed Pom popped a hamster in a microwave. Neither was funny, though I warrant a few smiles flickered across lips upon reading about the last.

Better to be speedily zapped than slowly suffocated in a movie star’s poop chute, you might think.

Now, now, that’s enough.

The hysterical reactions to these events are funny. Most are of the “jail’s too good for ‘em” kind. The anthropomorphism on display is staggering as it is delightful and the high level of inter-species telepathy is impressive.

The Pom got nine weeks in the slammer for killing a rat.

But most outrage seems to be have been reserved for the Kiwis (I love Kiwis) who raised money for the local school with a good old possum toss (as in, throw). I wasn’t even too outraged when I thought the possum was alive. They’re extremely agile and have tough tails. Indeed, they’re perfect candidates for a fling (as in throw, not movie star tryst). The possum wasn’t alive. Sure it had to become not alive, but it didn’t suffer while it was being chucked around.

So, lighten the fuck up.

If you anthropomorphising nutjobs want to pick on someone, pick on the killer whales. Now that’s mean. And funny. At least to them.

What’s wrong with this picture?

There so much of interest in the weekend protest by some members of Sydney’s Muslim community.

For a start, this sign caught the eye - “You ban ‘Quran’ you burn in hell. United in Islam we stand”.

A weird feature is that each letter is balloon shaped and alternately rendered in a different primary colour. This lettering was last deployed by hippies in the late 60s and early 70s to preach love or peace, man. Here it’s been used to convey eternal and fiery damnation.

Perhaps small Muslim children were encouraged to join in the fun of the protest against oppression. Or is it a reflection of how entrenched and, therefore, pro forma Muslim protest is that it didn’t strike anybody as odd that the message of damnation was made to look so friendly. Naïve or malign, it’s bloody peculiar.

Could the explanation be that the sign maker was only allowed out of the house if she tricked her sensible but illiterate parent that she was off to a school sports day? It’s hoped so.

Then there’s the message. The protest ostensibly was against moves to ban the burqa. So what’s Quran burning got to do with it?

But, hang on. According to the SMH, the NSW Premier, Kristina Keneally, has recently made a statement re-affirming the right of Muslim women to wear the burqa. So what’s the point of any of it?

Weave all these strands together and surely one gets closer to the truth. This fight has nothing at all to do with Australia. It’s about reflexive Muslim grievance, some strange desire to paint yourself as oppressed.

Sure enough, the give away is not far off. As the spokeswoman, Ms Ardati said, the support of key politicians did not mean Muslims could ''relax''. ''Even if this bill is not passed in NSW now, who knows what will happen in one week, one month or one year?''

But the suspicion is that the whole thing really was just an elaborate ruse by the poor protesters to get out of the house and express themsleves in the only way their men permit.

Soccer skills impaired by shagging. Religious skills, not.

Experts have stunned the medical research community with the discovery that infidelity, particularly with prostitutes, might adversely affect the coordination, speed and tactical decision making of elite sportsmen.

In related research, the ability of church representatives to provide moral and spiritual guidance has been found to be unaffected by the representatives' acts of sexual depravity and breaches of trust.