"Crazed Weapons Bearers"

There is almost a need to begin this post with an apology, or at the very least an explanation, because once again the topic is Daily Life, where lunacy's lily lacks not for the gilding of further comment. That Fairfax engaged the service of an editrix who is either deeply cynical or certifiably insane has been evident since she was charged with planting the company's flag in the hip new world of digital publishing. That she then engaged the services of writers with more loose screws than Bunnings tends to suggest the latter diagnosis, for if she was aiming to recruit gibbering frothers to attract an audience of gibbering frothers then a little voice must surely have whispered that she would be able to push that agenda so far and no further. With Clem Bastow making common cause with the Salafist weird beards who have visited grief upon the Miss World pageant, it is once again clear that no nuttery is beyond Daily Life's pale. And if there is slightest doubt remaining, Peter Giugni's thoughts on the Kenya massacre will dispel them.

Let us start with the headline, which should have been rendered thus:

How not to respond to a humanitarian crisis another Muslim massacre

Then it gets worse. Here is the first pragraph:

It is an unfortunate truth that tragedy abounds these days. Sometimes in the form of unavoidable natural disasters. Or the most abhorrent man made events, such as the one we have just witnessed in Nairobi over the weekend, where crazed weapons bearers chose to assault innocent civilians.

"Crazed weapons bearers" indeed! Couldn't Giugni have been a bit more accurate. You know, "mad Muslim butchers"? Perhaps he was worried that mentioning the Religion of Peace by name might see Bastow's front-invitation to the next burqa fashion show invalided.

It gets better, though. With all those infidels bodies clogging Nairobi's morgue,  Giugni seizes upon a tweet, one of several billion sent every day, as his launching pad for some thoughts on the rug-kissers whose creed inspires them to execute anyone who cannot name Old Mo's mum.That he manages to do this without once using the word "muslim" is quite the achievement.

"I doubt they’ll have a great deal of time for your anxieties," he tells the tweeter, "over visiting a coffee plantation cum family heirloom cum relic of international imperialism that arguably accounts for some of the tensions in Somalia today which led to the creation of Al Shabaab as a militant insurgency in the first place."

Clear on that? Scores have been murdered in cold blood because Pommy planters with a taste for gin, polo and other planters' wives planted coffee seedlings in a country with but the slightest connection to Somalia, whence the latest batch of bearded animals emerged.

Giugni piles more fashionable obscenities and circumlocutions each atop the next, pausing only to upbraid his tweeter for not being a master of thumb-typing and spelling. This from a man whose first paragraph is an end-to-end fender-bender of verb-less "sentences" and who has not grasped that compound adjectives need hyphens. Neither has Daily Life's editrix, apparently.

So Daily Life, edited by a nong, also publishes nongs. What's the surprise there?

Just this. When not writing for Daily Life, Giugli is a lawyer and globe-trotting field operative for the Red Cross, with a special and recent interest in Afghanistan. Can't you just imagine the conversations with "clients"?

"So, Mohammad, you blew up an Australian troop carrier."

"By the beard of the Prophet, indeed I did!"

"Well that's not nice, but it is understandable in light of what happened to poor Truganini."

Dribs and drabs of charity flow to worthy causes from the Billabong, and quite a few of those over the years have gone to the Red Cross. There will be no more donations to that particular charity from this point on.

UPDATE: When not making excuses for murderes, Giugli is a pretty cool guy -- so cool there is even a little song about what a cool guy he is.

Peter Giugni is a pretty cool guy
He wrote to his girlfriend over three hundred times
A letter for every day he's away
Saving lives and slaving away
Some might call him Korny
But I think he's pretty fly
Peter Giugni: The king of Generation Y
Peter Giugni: He'll troll you till the day you die
Peter Giugni: He doesn't even have to try
Peter Giugni: He's a pretty fuckin' awesome guy
ؤ نهٔ ؤ يو سړی ؤ چې فلټر نومېدهٔ
خوست پهٔ ښار كې يې كار كاوهٔ
ډېر ښهٔ سړی ؤ
د كنجوسۍ ډېر سخت خلاف ؤ
ډېر خلكو سره يې مرسته كوله
او همېشه عجيب و غريب تحفې انډيوالانو ته يې وركولې
(Once upon a time there was a man called Peter
He used to work in Khost City
He was a very good man
He was strongly against tight-assery
He really helped the people there
And he was always giving his friends all sorts of wondrous presents)
Peter Giugni
Talkin' 'bout Peter Giugni

The "so completely true" Fairfax dirt on Abbott

Not to go on about Fairfax, but it’s hard not to if you are an adult. Here is a company that used to be of the left but was still relatively sane and semi-reliable in the retailing of information. Yes, they had Alan Ramsey doddering away and A Dill Horin very lightly paraphrasing the latest plea for cash, understanding, and more cash on behalf of ASSWIPE (Australian Society of Social Workers Inventing Problems Everywhere). And of course there was Margo, whose tenure at the original Web Diary probably marked the point where Fairfax abandoned any pretense that sanity was a prerequisite of employment.

Poor Margo is long gone but the madness continues, albeit with a greater grasp of the apostrophe, and it can be observed at Daily Life. Now it is not a bad idea having a website for women, who like to read about shoes and celebrities, salads and what the stars have in store for them. Daily Life has all that, and you can only imagine such material attracts its fair share of readers. But being Fairfax, leaving it at that would have been too sensible, so the company installed an editor who gussied up the standard offerings with a bevy of prolix harpies, all given free rein to go on at great length about the things modern women need to know. “Your Vagina Is Not a Car”, for instance. One of the site’s more memorable scoops, such news must have come as a gross disappointment to a certain small subset of DL visitors who imagined they would no longer need to hail cabs.

How anyone could publish such piffle would be a great mystery but for the suspicion that DL’s editrix, the ardent Sarah Oakes, is even more unhinged than the writers she hires.

Take her yesterday offering as an example, “Is Penny WongThe New Ryan Gosling?” Not unless he is a hypocrite, which may well be the case, and a lesbian to boot, a somewhat less probable attribute. Ms Oakes vapours through several paragraphs that explore and expand her theme before climaxing with the name of Tony Abbott on her lips (emphasis added):

While Penny Wong has the credentials to be a new Australian gay-feminist superhero we're not sure she'll gain the international traction of your-boyfriend-Ryan-Gosling. However she's definitely a candidate more worthy of a Hey Girl Tumblr than say, Tony Abbott, who's parody version is kind of a misfire. It's a sad fact that it would probably be a lot more funny if it wasn't so completely true.

As per a Fairfax editrix,  here is a sampling of “so completely true” stuff about Abbott, who is apparently a sex-mad lecher and, placing him entirely beyond redemption, a Catholic

Now remember, all of the above -- and scores of other, equally slanderous slurs -- are "completely true", at least as seen from the sheltered workshop for half-wit propagandists that Fairfax has willed itself to become.

Roger Corbett, Fairfax's chairman, once ran a large supermarket chain. How long long do you think one of his store managers would have stayed on the payroll if he or she had decided to stock the freezer cabinets with dog dirt and soiled toilet paper?