Rudd's sainthood

DID Kevin Rudd set off for the northern hemisphere with this basic plan: If the climate thing doesn't work out, can he at least come home with a sainthood?

DID Kevin Rudd set off for the northern hemisphere with this basic plan: If the climate thing doesn't work out, can he at least come home with a sainthood?

The PM is rumoured to be dropping in to Rome after Copenhagen, a visit that we hear will coincide, with maximum convenience for the hectic prime ministerial travel diary, with the Vatican's announcement of the canonisation of Mary MacKillop. After all -- and it gives Strewth tingles writing this -- even sources close to the Sisters of St Joseph are expecting an announcement on Sunday morning. Rudd's press secretary pointedly refused to rule out the plan when questioned by Strewth yesterday. "Not that I am aware of," the staff member said, a comment that almost could have passed as innocent except for the loaded afterthought that followed: "I will let you know if my state of awareness changes." Hmm. Sounds to us as if there's a solid chance Rudd won't have to come home empty-handed. At the very least, he'll get to hang out with Tim Fischer. In the meantime, while we hesitate to use the term "media strumpet", Tony Abbott did have this to say: "It's not something that Mr Rudd should exploit. But you know what Mr Rudd's like. He can't resist the opportunity to hold media conferences outside a church."

Bishop gets twittery

SPEAKING of Abbott, we were pleased by the speed with which Julie Bishop reacted to our item yesterday about how the Opposition Leader, unlike his shafted predecessor, Malcolm Turnbull, wasn't in the select group she followed on Twitter. The Bish swiftly boosted her Twitter follow list by a whopping 100 per cent. That's right, she's now following a full dozen and, going by her list, the first person she added yesterday was one Tony Abbott. That said, "Bishop follows Abbott" does sound oddly like a chess manoeuvre.

Naughty and nice

AMONG the many services on Airservices Australia's website, there's a Santa '09 section you can click on that features a "Have you been naughty or nice?" assessor. All you have to do is enter your name, click and hope. Was this going to be spookily accurate, we wondered, or just a bland everyone-is-a-winner sort of affair where everyone is in Santa Claus's good books? Wishing to test its accuracy, Strewth pretended for a moment to be Tiger Woods: "Oh dear, Tiger, you're on the naughty list." So far, so good. Jumping to the extreme end of the bad scale, we tried Joseph Stalin and got the same result. So for a proper test, we entered Julie Bishop's name -- only because we had her in mind -- and it reckons she's been naughty, too. Airservices Australia, incidentally, is a government-owned corporation.

Village of spammed

IT'S amazing no lives were lost in the avalanche of spam (a spamalanche?) from the federal Department of Health and Ageing yesterday when an email accidentally got sent to everyone on its mailing list. Yes, it caused a few problems -- privacy was breached, would-be spammers were handed a vast ready-made contact list, inboxes overflowed as hundreds of the spammed opted to hit "reply all" -- but it wasn't all bad. The responses started normally with a growing stream of "This email wasn't meant for me" messages, followed by plaintive cries, such as "Omigod everyone stop replying to this email!!!!" Some tried to have sympathy for the originator of the cock-up, albeit in a barbed way: "You sound like a very normal person for someone who lives in Canberra . . . Incidentally, how did you come to have my email? Do you have a file on me?" Then something almost magical happened as that vast mass of unintended recipients morphed into a virtual community -- a village of the spammed -- as people began chatting with their "neighbours", comparing holiday plans, trying to flog second-hand cars and even suggesting a reunion this time next year. But given that the original email was a request for the transcript of a radio program about the rising suicide rate among young men, our favourite reply was this: "Sorry, as an aged-care facility manager I do not have a lot of exposure to this subject. "

Flogging Fairfax

CHRISTMAS may not have come early, but the weekend certainly did for Fairfax broadsheets The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. Despite yesterday rather notably being Friday, they started flogging their "special editions", which is newspaper-ese for flogging largely the same pile of weekend content for three days in a row. We're sure they won't be using it to do anything tricky with their weekend circulation figures. Cough.

Red shifts

IS it time to start keeping a closer eye on Julia Gillard and her fellow bloodnuts? This tweet yesterday from Lateline host and noted ranga Leigh Sales: "In our pre-interview banter last night, the Deputy PM & I wondered if anyone would notice if she hosted Lateline & I showed up at cabinet." Surely worth a whirl?