Ashes and dust

ENGLISH cricket writer Simon Barnes has attempted a shameless piece of reverse psychology by exaggerating the terrors of the Gabba where the first Test begins today.

ENGLISH cricket writer Simon Barnes has attempted a shameless piece of reverse psychology by exaggerating the terrors of the Gabba where the first Test begins today.

"People tell you that the Gabba is soulless. They're wrong. The Gabba has a soul all right. It's just not a terribly nice one . . . Australia haven't lost here in more than 20 years," Barnes notes in The Times. "It's hard, the Gabba. Even the grass is hard." Doubtless, the England team will be on the paper's website to read Barnes's dispatches before they face up to the new ball. Derek Pringle in The Daily Telegraph sounds even more negative, writing about how the "stomach-churning reality of an Ashes series" hits Andrew Strauss's team in "their collective solar plexus" and referring to the Gabba as the Gabbattoir. The Guardian's Mike Selvey attacks the Gabba for being a "charmless, characterless concrete bowl" where Australia has been "nigh on invincible. And they know that since Len Hutton's 1954-55 England side lost by an innings but won three Tests thereafter, no visiting side has come unstuck at the Gabba and recovered to win the series."

Bob and the beauties

IN Geelong yesterday, the nation's beloved former prime minister Bob Hawke was hard at it, campaigning with John Brumby. If occasionally Hawkie had a faraway look in his eye pressing Victorian flesh, he might have allowed himself to think back to last weekend when he was pictured by Papua New Guinea's Post-Courier newspaper, stunningly dressed in all-white tropical gear, with his arms around two Miss South Pacific Pageant contestants. Miss Fiji, Sera Tikotikoivatu, said: "It is always bad things that attract attention, but so far it has been good, and I thank God that I am in PNG. Wow, it's going to be a lovely week." Hawke looks as if he's in heaven. Of course, he and his former wife Hazel once lived in Port Moresby while he was advising trade unionists on a fair-pay campaign. And he once unsuccessfully stood for the federal seat centred on Geelong. Hawke reckons Ted Baillieu has no "zing", "zip" or "zoom".

Sarah Standardised

ONE of Sarah Palin's earliest admirers, The Weekly Standard magazine, appears to have joined the growing gang of anti-Palinists. The magazine's Matt Labash has written a review of Palin's reality show that neatly dovetails with her new book, America by Heart. To say Labash mocks Palin could be construed as an understatement, and he skewers her by suggesting reality television and presidential gravitas are an uncomfortable fit. Her show involves "seein', and doin', and experiencin' things that don't require a g on the end of them, such as shootin', and rock climbin', and snow machinin', and clubbin' halibut over the head ('let me see the club, you look crazy', says Bristol Palin to her mom when they do the deed on a commercial fishing boat) and media-critiquin' and BlackBerryin', which Palin gets caught doing even in the midst of wilderness adventures." Does that mean that Palin's original name was Paling?

Dog day for crocs

WHEN he was prime minister, Kevin Rudd let it be known that NT News was his favourite newspaper. Perhaps it still is, for it has a remarkable record of unearthing crocodile stories such as the beauty it delivered yesterday under the headline "Ruff tuff Woof" in which Woof, a red heeler, breaks into a crocodile enclosure. Luckily for Woof, the crocs were only 1m long so couldn't eat him whole, but he was bitten several times before finding refuge on a shelf and waiting to be rescued. Woof's master, police sergeant Sean Stanley, told the News it was lucky Woof didn't stumble into a breeding pen housing a bull croc. "It would have been all over, red rover then." Apparently, Woof runs away whenever there is a thunderstorm, which at this time of the year is a daily occurrence in Woof's part of the world.

Borrowed tribute

FOR those who missed our obituary for distinguished Australian scientist Frank Fenner on Tuesday, it's worth repeating what the Australian Nobel laureate for medicine in 1960, Macfarlane Burnet, said about their time working together at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne. "I regard Fenner as the most accomplished investigator I have ever worked with," Burnet once said. Fenner, who died on Monday aged 95, is credited with eradicating smallpox and controlling the rabbit plague of the 1960s. A great Australian. Yesterday, The Sydney Morning Herald ran an obituary not written by one of its team of busy journalists but sourced from Britain's The Daily Telegraph.

The wrong stuff

THIS ought to be an urban myth. Two bad guys held up a New York pizzeria and made off with the dough. One Salvatore LaRosa (no relation to sundry mafiosi of the same name) and an accomplice donned masks, pointed their guns at the pizzeria manager and demanded the bag he was carrying. Acute readers will have seen this coming. The bag was full of dough - pizza dough. LaRosa is on bail but believed to be hiding from shame.