Homing in

FOLLOWING the soft landing that was Johnny Young's interview with the freshly returned Tony Abbott, it was inevitable things would get rougher.

FOLLOWING the soft landing that was Johnny Young's interview with the freshly returned Tony Abbott (Strewth, yesterday), it was inevitable things would get rougher.

And so it proved yesterday; we just didn't expect the one swinging the mace to be Today's Karl Stefanovic:

KS: "I think, it's your first day back, Tony, and you're not answering my question. I am getting very cranky."

TA: "Are you getting cranky, Karl? Oh come on, mate, I would have thought . . ."

KS: ". . . this is me getting cranky."

TA: ". . . you know, absence would have made the heart grow fonder, surely, mate. I thought you would have missed me, you would have yearned for me, and I guess you're happy to have me back now, mate, that's how you should be."

KS: "I can't do that. I'm happy to have you back, but you have to answer my questions when I ask a very basic question."

Whereupon Abbott opened his mouth anew, but what came out of it clearly struck his exhausted interlocutor as insufficient yet simultaneously too much. Said Stefanovic, "All right. I can't

push you any more. You're just going to repeat that line over and over and over again. So, I am going to ask you, how was your holiday?" Things went swimmingly after that.

Granny all aflutter

SOMETHING rutting in the state of Fairfax. Here are three unrelated blurbs from the main page of The Sydney Morning Herald's website yesterday: "Porn for powder hounds: the best of this season's ski films"; "Sexual timing: to do it, or not to do it?"; "Ardour starts to cool in our frenzied affair with bricks and mortar."

Wrong figure

MENTAL image of the week, courtesy of Henry Ergas (columnist with this august organ) and Nationals senator Ron Boswell as the latter struggled to remember the name of the Treasury official responsible for the economic modelling of the carbon tax, with whom he'd had a robust exchange. "Meghan, Meghan," he tried. Ergas, who we're pleased to know doesn't draw artificial boundaries between different types of modelling, helpfully suggested, "Gale?" Said Boswell, "That's right, Megan Gale." Close, though Meghan Quinn would have been closer.

No mess, some fuss

SPEAKING of looting, there was during the week a lovely open letter from Nathaniel Tapley to the parents of British PM David Cameron, taking them to task for letting him run with a bad crowd. In case you missed it, it partly focuses on some of Cameron's angrier colleagues and their past demonstrations of tidier and more tasteful ways of getting one's mitts on loot: "There's Michael Gove, whose wet-lipped rage was palpable on Newsnight last night. This is the Michael Gove who confused one of his houses with another of his houses in order to avail himself of pound stg. 7000 of the taxpayers' money to which he was not entitled . . . But, of course, this is different. This is just understandable confusion over the rules of how many houses you are meant to have as an MP. This doesn't show the naked greed of people stealing plasma tellies. Unless you're Gerald Kaufman, who broke parliamentary rules to get pound stg. 8000 worth of 40-inch, flat-screen Bang & Olufsen TV out of the taxpayer."

No trouble at all

WE'RE getting the impression some of the rugby unionists of our acquaintance are struggling in their quest to enter a state of denial about the fact we have a Kiwi as our rugby coach. Not just a Kiwi, but one from the South Island, arguably the closest thing to Scotland in the southern hemisphere; two headaches for the price of one. We can only imagine the Australian Rugby Union was trying, in a helpful way, to burst this unhealthy bubble this week when it issued a press release quoting coach Robbie Deans as saying that one player "has been troubled for a wee while now by a shoulder niggle". The rugger fans will thank the ARU for this one day, just not now.

Let it rip

GIVEN that looting has been repopularised, we thought it bravely cutting edge of JB Hi-Fi to headline the front page of its new sales catalogue, goodies arrayed across it like a shop window, with "SMASHING PRICES!"

Ask the Texan

FORMER Macquarie banker turned author and publisher John Green has had something of a bipartisan week, his new political thriller Born to Run launched in Byron Bay by lapsed Labor premier Bob Carr, then in Sydney by the Liberal incumbent, Barry O'Farrell. Also in attendance at the Sydney launch was former NSW chief justice Jim Spigelman. "He's apparently especially intrigued by the US constitutional crisis I created in Born to Run. Good thing I had a US constitutional law expert check my interpretation; he was chief counsel to the US Senate's Constitutional Law Committee, he'd actually written a learned article on the point, and is now Texan Solicitor-General, so I think I'm on safe ground to weather any legal challenge from Spigelman," Green says.