Thursday 30 October 2008

The Big Issue

Posted by speedygeoff on Thursday, October 30, 2008 with
The ACT election results have just been finalised. A summary for non-ACT readers: the first mob campaigned on how bad the second mob were. The second mob campaigned on how bad the first mob were. The third mob were a group of hippies who relied on voters being stoned to get any votes. There is no fourth mob. Yet to be determined is which two mobs are going to get together to form government, or whether they will give up trying and instead gather in three corners of the room shouting at each other.

The elector knew what the big issue was.



Spoilers Ahead
I hate having to explain a joke. Usually it spoils the joke. So before you read the "spoilers" ahead, have another look at the cartoon above, enlarge it, see if you get the joke. I should explain that non-ACT readers will not get it in its splendid entirety. If at all.

Here is an explanation of why it is so funny.
1. Mark Carmody is the local ABC news weather reporter. Virginia is the newsreader.
2. Mark wears a different flower each day, usually large and ostentatious.
3. Mark is genuinly entertaining, and as a result receives a lot of flak from the general public, because ABC presenters are meant to be bland and boring.
4. The flower Mark is wearing today is a cactus.
5. The "Garnaut report" is a report on global warming completed by Ross Garnaut for the Rudd Australian government.
6. Mark has an unusual way of pronouncing many of his words.
7. Most of the comment in the letters column of the Canberra Time during the run-up to the elections focused on whether the writer approved or disapproved of Mark the weatherman. Which was so far removed from any of the election issues, it was just as if the voter was sick of hearing about the elections!

I certainly was, and I was out of town for three of those weeks!

In the cartoon one also sees the four horsemen of the apocalypse, referred to recently by Scott in Ewen's popular blog, which made me recall this cartoon. The cartoon appeared in the Canberra Times a month ago.

As a footnote, is there nothing more boring than hearing incessantly news about other countries' elections?