Celeb sanctions

A VITAL ingredient naggingly missing from this space has been Olivia Newton-John, so it was with relief we noted she was with Victorian Premier John Brumby yesterday.

A VITAL ingredient naggingly missing from this space has been Olivia Newton-John, so it was with relief we noted she was with Victorian Premier John Brumby yesterday.

Brumby was announcing an extra $44.7 million for her cancer and wellness centre, under construction at Austin Hospital, but Our Livvy was careful not to gush. Or at least not too much. "I don't live here and I don't vote, I don't want to sway anyone's vote," she said. "I'm just very grateful to him." She said she hadn't spoken to the opposition in case it won on Saturday, but "for selfish reasons" she would like to see Brumby re-elected. Compare and contrast the sort of celebrity endorsement Brumby's South Australian counterpart, Mike Rann, is used to collecting. Who can forget cyclist Lance Armstrong's prediction his mate "Ranny" would win the state election? As Armstrong added at the time, "To be honest, I don't know who he is running against."

House calls

WE fear we're getting closer to the day when ever grumpier Harry Jenkins simply has each MP's seat in the House of Representatives wired into the electricity grid to give them a jolt as the mood takes him. (Positive or negative? Discuss.) Yesterday's surliness did at least provide the spectacle of Jenkins trying to sound friendly in his acknowledgment of James Bidgood, former member for Dawson, and failing spectacularly. His "On behalf of the house, I extend a warm welcome" came out sounding like a diagnosis for something particularly unpleasant. Altogether more successful was his barked "Sit down", which did indeed sail from the Jenkins lips fused into a single-word bullet with Christopher Pyne's name engraved on its side. Pyne himself was turned into a projectile soon after and fired from the house. We can only be grateful the same didn't happen to Simon Crean or we would have been denied the spectacle of him instructing Malcolm Turnbull to put his mouth where his money was. Not one to recommend the conventional route, is Crean.

Soft focus

AS struck as we were by the PR efforts of the publishing house behind William & Kate: The Love Story (Strewth, Saturday), we bow before the superior efforts of HarperCollins as it prepares to launch William and Kate: A Royal Love Story. "This will be the definitive story behind the most remarkable romance of our times," we are informed, but that's just the warm-up. "Prince William and Kate Middleton's fairytale romance is the greatest love story of the century - from their first meeting as students at St Andrews University in 2001, it has been played out under the scrutiny and expectation of the watching world. Through myriad obstacles, including the strain of the paparazzi, the social chasm between their families and the increasing importance of Wills's military career, Kate has proved herself a fighter." One paparazzo who, alas, won't be adding to the strain is veteran celebrity snapper Peter Carrette, who died at his Bondi Beach home yesterday. While Strewth generally has little more than a dim awareness of who's who in the paparazzi world, it's hard to forget the name of a bloke who, in a move National Lampoon cartoon character Politenessman would have saluted, squirted Heath Ledger with a water pistol in a bid to teach him manners.

A minefield

WHILE the New Zealand mine business drags on, we were struck by the restraint of one of the officials fronting a press conference yesterday afternoon. Placing diplomatic emphasis on his lack of any desire to tell professionals "how to suck eggs", he did, after what he gently termed feedback from the Greymouth community, ask that any journalists doing vox pops identify themselves before tackling locals with questions.

Temporal lobby

AS part of our continuing time travel series, we present this headline from rugby365.com: "Japan prepare for 1919". If it were only the headline, it could be dismissed as little more than an amusing typo, rather than a far more exciting and candid acknowledgment of chronological commuting capability. The lead paragraph takes care of that: "Japan's preparations for the 1919 Rugby World Cup took a step forward with the naming of a president, some highly placed persons and a general manager for the organising committee." Given the inaugural World Cup wasn't until 1987, we hope it's worth the effort. The website's slogan is "moving with the times".

A few regrets

A CORRECTION job lot The New York Times (via Regret the Error): "An article on Tuesday about the foolishness of making precise predictions in science misstated the number of developments that the writer said would not come true in 2011. There were nine, not 10. The article also misstated the date of a correction in which The New York Times finally apologised for having ridiculed, in 1920, the idea that rockets would one day be able to leave the surface of the Earth. The correction was published on July 17, 1969 - a day after the Apollo 11 moon mission began; it was not published on June 17 of that year."