Osama drama

SPEAKING to an American Chamber of Commerce lunch yesterday, Aunty boss Mark Scott said the ABC received one complaint about it not crossing immediately to the news of Osama bin Laden's expedited exit.

SPEAKING to an American Chamber of Commerce lunch yesterday, Aunty boss Mark Scott said the ABC received one complaint about it not crossing immediately to the news of Osama bin Laden's expedited exit.

But when Aunty finally took the plunge and cut into a rerun of Monarch of the Glen in the process, there were 15 complaints. (Just as well it wasn't Play School.) Still, Aunty has well and truly latched on to the bin Laden thing now, deploying him whenever possible. Take this tweet from yesterday: "How are our Doctor Who fans holding up? Looking forward to episode 2? Osama is dead but is

the Doctor?" While in the department, here's a slightly belated missive from reader Michael Cunningham, still in shock at Strewth's absence on Tuesday: "Turning to A Plus the other day and finding a full-page obituary of Osama bin Laden, I thought 'When an arch-terrorist dies, the first casualty is the Strewth.' "

Dismanagement

IT may sound small, but we're sure a lot of sweat went into this note from the Department of Parliamentary Services: "The Facilities Management Section of the Department of Parliamentary Services has been renamed the Facilities Section." By such flashes of light does our universe keep expanding.

Don't bother

CONSIDERING the carnage at Fairfax, which is chasing the goal of quality journalism via the bravely counter-intuitive method of ditching its quality controllers, more commonly known as sub-editors, this ad from one of the company's regional NSW titles comes as a surprise: "Southern Highlands News is a regional tri-weekly newspaper that is a part of Fairfax Media. We have an exciting position available for a sub-editor within our editorial team based in Bowral."

Ends in view

MAINLY because we believe in its potential as a character-building exercise, we trooped off for our annual dose of Sydney Fashion Week yesterday: a swimsuit show by Lisa Blue Swimwear dubbed Call of the Whale. It has to be said this is not the first creature that springs to mind in these settings. Still, the company is giving a chunk of its profits to whale conservation, so we thought we should mention it, not least because the future existence of our cetacean friends is now linked, in some minute but important way, to the persuasive powers of models tottering up and down the catwalk with, for example, images of Shiva the Destroyer across their derrieres. As they say in New Zealand, every little butt counts.

Sending a message

IN late 2009, it was reported taxpayers would be funding an exciting new branch of the arts: street theatre in Sri Lanka to dissuade people from using the services of people-smugglers to get to Australia. 2UE broadcaster Michael Smith and his team have been toiling away to see how it went, asking Immigration Minister Chris Bowen's office, "Did the department employ any independent theatre critics to provide a review of the work? How many more people would have arrived illegally if the Australian taxpayer had not invested in this element of its border protection arsenal?" Bowen's office sent them off in the direction of Home Affairs Minister Brendan O'Connor's office, who in turn sent Smith and co off to a Customs and Border Protection flack, who replied, "This street theatre was a grassroots community activity conducted in developing areas of Sri Lanka. No 'critics' were used; however, a formal evaluation was conducted at the completion of the public information campaign of which the street theatre was a component." Nice to see the words "formal evaluation" and "street theatre" together at last in the same sentence. Anyway, the flack says 96 per cent of those surveyed said they'd been dissuaded, confirmation that street theatre is off-putting.

In a whirl

FEDERAL Resources and Energy Minister Martin Ferguson - or Shiva the Destroyer, as he is known among the vowel fraternity - must have been particularly jet-lagged while addressing the South Australian Chamber of Mines and Energy gala dinner on Wednesday night. He struggled with SA Mineral Resources Minister Tom Koutsantonis's name, saying it wasn't as easy as saying Nick Bolkus. He called former SA minister Paul Holloway Paul Holiday and stumbled over Woomera. All this coming from a man who Premier Mike Rann praised to the point of saying "no man has done more for South Australia than Martin Ferguson". Ferguson failed to return Rann's love. Or maybe he was just tired after catching a 5.20am flight the day before, then travelling back to Canberra, and back to Adelaide again on Wednesday.

A gift of words

CONGRATULATIONS to the possibly blind and deaf bus driver in Sydney's Annandale yesterday morning who did his best to pulverise our car. Not once but twice. As unnerving as it was, there were some positives: our five-year-old son has had his vocabulary radically enriched.