Who's that man?

THERE'S a school of thought that says Kevin Rudd speaks like a robot on his good days, like an anaesthetic canister on his bad ones.

THERE'S a school of thought that says Kevin Rudd speaks like a robot on his good days, like an anaesthetic canister on his bad ones.

Yet, behold the words of the so-called Ruddbot in action yesterday as he addressed schoolchildren gathered to honour Nobel prizewinner Elizabeth Blackburn: "When I was your age, learning about science, I sometimes found it confusing. Like learning about the law of gravity. I mean, it's really important, because if we didn't have gravity, when birds died, they'd just stay right up there." That's no robot speaking, that's Julius Sumner Miller filtered through the brain of Spike Milligan. We're sure he was underselling himself when he went on to declare, "I might not have been the best science student in school, but I did learn one very valuable lesson after a year 8 chemistry experiment that I still remember to this day: never, ever lick the spoon!" We just hope he didn't inhale.

Real Joe

THAT tutu business continues to hover over Joe Hockey, with a reporter yesterday raising Wayne Swan's Tinkerbell crack, and asking Joe if he had any regrets. Replied Joe: "I think it would do Wayne Swan well to wear a tutu and wave a wand. It's important to be real and I was asked to go on that show and it was charades. I'm a human being, I'm not going to pretend to be something I'm not. I'm a real person. On one hand they claim I'm Tinkerbell, and last night Lindsay Tanner said I was an upstart, well-heeled corporate lawyer. I guess I'm not the first corporate lawyer to wear a tutu, but I am who I am."

Yes, it should

ON ABC News Radio yesterday morning, the announcer had bishops in Rome demanding Catholic clergy guilty of sexual abuse apologise for their "abdominal" offences. The announcer quickly corrected himself: "That should be abominable." Perhaps the church's prime abdominal offender would be, ahem, Pontius Pilates?

Hate object

SOUTH Australian Attorney-General Michael Atkinson, who just a fortnight ago caused a stir over his law (and backflip) to censor political comment on the internet, now claims he feels safer with bikies than video gamers. (Having just read Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels, we're as intrigued as we're alarmed.) Atkinson holds the national veto over any change to video game classifications and is stridently opposed to the introduction of an R18+ rating. He is also the man who led the Rann government's agenda to introduce tough anti-bikie laws. Now he has opened his heart and his mouth to ABC2's Good Game program, declaring: "I feel that my family and I are more at risk from gamers than we are from outlaw motorcycle gangs, who also hate me."

Will, but no way

A TRIP to Sweden to study the sex industry? You just never know what the Australian Christian Lobby's going to think up next. The ACL has put the suggestion to Tasmanian political leaders in the hope that Tasmania and the rest of the nation will adopt the Swedish model of tackling prostitution, which focuses on penalising the punters, rather than the sex workers. Liberal leader Will Hodgman is willing to set up an inquiry to examine the model, but did not think the junket was such a good look. Hodgman reckons he can see the headlines now and it isn't going to happen. "I'm not signing up for that one," he said.

Down on our Luck

WE thought our piece on a "Peter Luck" filling Twitter with grumpily profane reflections on the state of television (Strewth, Monday) was clearly tongue in cheek, not least because this is Strewth. We thought mentioning it in the same breath as Fake Stephen Conroy and the tweeting ghost of Samuel Johnson ought to take care of things, though it's faintly possible we may have pushed the boat out a touch far when we pondered, "Is it someone pretending to be Luck? Or is it Luck hoping we'll think it's someone pretending to be him, while he gets one or two things off his chest?" It seemed obviously ridiculous as a line of thought to us, but as they say, bewdy! is in the eye of the beholder. The real Luck -- who is clearly underwhelmed at the thought of his identity being borrowed for so base a purpose -- told Strewth: "You surmised correctly about the unchecked tweets you published -- they are fakes. So why run them? I am so ancient and so long retired from TV -- 10 years, this year -- that I don't even know how to use Twitter, Facebook, YouTube et al. An apology for publishing such feral and fraudulent material in so august a journal as The Australian would be nice."

Hughes your daddy

IF you believe your family is unusual, let three generations of the Hughes clan set you straight. You Only Live Twice, which screens on ABC1 tomorrow night, tells the story of jazz star and regular Strewth adviser Dick Hughes, his father Richard Hughes -- foreign correspondent, spy, double agent, friend and inspiration to Ian Fleming and John le Carre -- and his daughter Christa Hughes, the Machine Gun Fellatio singer and fearless performer, who is endorsed thus by Barry Humphries: "She has given vulgarity a good name." So she's clearly always welcome in Strewth.