The Pigpen Pundit

UP until yesterday afternoon, when Gerard Henderson's latest Media Watch Dog became available, it was the great Lennie Lower who laid pre-eminent claim to having penned Australia's most pithily poisonous paragraph. Jack Gudgeon, hero of Here's Luck, speaks of his mother-in-law:

In this description of my mother-in-law's mode of life, I think I have written with a certain amount of tolerant restraint. She is an old lady, and the age of chivalry is not dead while a Gudgeon lives. Perhaps a different son-in-law might have described her as a senseless, whining, nagging, leather-faced old whitlow, not fit to cohabit with a rhinoceros beetle. But I wouldn't.

Lower now has some competition. Henderson writes of scruffy Scott Burchill:

Then, when Dr Burchill gets really down and dirty on the News Breakfast set, this is a sign that his ute outside the Southbank studios is loaded up with a dysfunctional worm-farm, three pre-loved busts of Lenin which have been attacked by Maoists  and perhaps a dead cat or two. That’s how he presented earlier in the year.  The only time Dr Burchill wore a suit and tie was when he was heading off for a job interview – presumably for a lectureship position at Deakin University’s Department of Applied Garbage. [Do you mean Deakin University’s prestigious Department of Humanities and Social Sciences? – Ed]

Every tart word of the new Media Watch Dog is a gem, and don't miss the letter from Terry McCrann.