Are We REALLY All Looking For That New World in the Morning?

There is a proud (why?) tradition in Australian pop music of releases by soapie actors. Sometimes the songs are not that bad; former Neighbours actor Natalie Imbruglia's rendition of Torn is a case in point. Sometimes the songs are a musical manifestation of the smegma scraped from beneath Satan's foreskin; Stefan Dennis - also of Neighbours - released a, a thing called Don't It Make You Feel Good, and let me tell you, Stefan: No, it bloody well DIDN'T! The whole thing is pathetic Eighties sleaze-cheese with a lame attempt at raunchiness in the accompanying film clip, which appears to be ripping off Duran Duran's Girls on Film.

I'm guessing it's not widely known that Neighbours was not the genesis of this phenomenon. Who remembers No. 96?  Who remembers Abigail's insipid cover of J'Taime? Well, it was nowhere near as awful as Joe Hasham's turn at New World in the Morning. For some reason, I thought about this dire ditty the other day, and gave it an airing. I called in Mr Bingells to have a listen, and his face practically folded in on itself; he looked like he had bitten into a wad of aluminium foil. He pleaded with me to make it stop, and slunk out of the room in a cloud of delirium. If you ever decide to listen to it, and you've been warned, you will understand Mr Bingells's reaction. You listen to it, and find yourself wanting to say to the hapless chanteur, 'Hey, Joe? Have you lost something? You know, like some tone?' Maybe he was trying to sound like Bob Dylan, and it strays dangerously into Lee Marvin Wanderin' Star territory.. Anyway, it's the kind of appalling number that ends up an embarrassing guilty pleasure. Listen if you must, but if you want to give the actual song a fair chance, try Roger Whittaker's version.

Who is writing Trump's speeches? Has this cretin ever opened a history book? Here's a quote from Trump at the press conference with the Italian President: "The United States and Italy are bound together by a shared cultural and political heritage dating back thousands of years to Ancient Rome."

Um, what? Seriously? Maybe the writer should have written: 'The United States and Italy both have an ancient cultural and political heritage.'

More accurate would have been: 'Italy has an ancient cultural and political heritage, so does the United States to a degree, and I am a complete scofflaw who is completely out of my depth and I look like I've been bukkake'd by a packet of Doritos.'

Oh well. That's all for now. It's been a big day for me because Mister Eighteen started his HSC. This is new territory for me as a parent. What was also new for me today was that I underwent a mammogram (took advantage of the free screening offered to women of a certain age). It was not as painful or as uncomfortable as I had feared it might be. It involved lots of soulless squeezing from the apparatus, but all that really did was remind me of being groped outside the school dance when I was fifteen.