Karma Election Konnection

SATURDAY's Australian Federal Election sweeps aside a conservative government in what must go down as a karma election.The Liberal-National Party won the 1904 election on the back of a largely fraudulent fear campaign that interest rates would rise sharply under a Labor Government.It was fraudulent because who was in political power was way down the list of determining the level of interest rates.Half a dozen interest rate rises since the 2004 conservative victory hurt the incumbent government severely. Karma Konnection #1.IN 2004, the Coalition won control of both houses of Parliament: the House of Representatives and the Senate, considered a house of review.Even Conservative voters expressed their concerns about the control of the Senate rather than having a balance of power, through the Greens, the Democrats and independents.Prime Minister John Howard was one who relished control of both houses.He introduced draconian workplace industrial relations changes in the form of WorkChoices.He had not discussed the legislation during his election campaign and he would never been able to introduce the legislation in a hung senate.Most Australians hated the new legislation which took away income and conditions from workers to give bosses more profits and control over their employees.Howard, a political opportunist its of the highest calibre, has made similar misjudgements in the past and been able to recant near an election.But because this massive piece of legislation had passed through both houses and was implemented in all its complicated glory, it could not be unravelled.The fortune of Coalition control of the Senate became the misfortune of an electoral nightmare as Australians took their revenge against WorkChoices. Karma Konnection #2.Cunning was one of the hallmarks of a the Coalition government and one its strategies was to make members from previously marginal seats Ministers.Examples of these in the State of Queensland were Family and Community Services Minister Mal Brough, Queenslander Assistant Treasurer Peter Dutton, while Theresa Gambaro was a parliamentary secretary.Brough and Gambaro are gone and Dutton will probably go too.In New South Wales Special Minister for State Gary Nairn and Roads Minister Jim Lloydlost their seats.These people were appointed mainly for short term electoral gain of retaining semi-marginal seats.The loss of their seats will hinder the long-term operation of the Coalition in opposition when it has to retrain people for its front bench. Karma Konnection #3.Look out the window: something might be blowing in the wind.

Australian Federal Election

I WAS more nervous than I thought I would be at the prospect of interviewing Australia's next Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.
I'm Bernie Dowling, 53-years-old, and I have been a newspaper reporter for half my life.
We are three-weeks into a six-week election campaign to decide whether Australia has had enough of a conservative Liberal Party government and wants a slightly less conservative Rudd-led Labor Party government instead.
The newspapers I write for are the Wednesday and Friday weeklies, the Pine Rivers Press and the Northern Times.
We receive the call on Thursday morning. Labor leader Kevin Rudd is on the hustings in our shire that arvo.
He is doing the rounds of three shopping centres, in three electorates, none held by his Labor Party, and all within an area of 30 kilometres.
Westfield Strathpine, bang in the heart of the electorate of Dickson and also our shire of Pine Rivers, is his third port of call.
We arrange a couple of photographers because it is basically a photo-op gig, but I tag along, anyway.
Almost all of the electorate of Dickson, held for the conservatives, or rather the more-conservatives, by ex-copper and junior Minister Peter Dutton, is in the shire of Pine Rivers, our turf.
I am hoping it is an easy gig where I watch and record, as Rudd and Labor candidate Fiona McNamara press the flesh, bounce the bubbas and smile for the shooters, using cameras not guns.
Peter Dutton has to surrender an 8.9% lead to lose his seat, an impossibility in normal times.
It is not normal times. The Liberal-National Party coalition is on the nose because of its WorkChoices industrial relations system, an income redistribution scheme to take money from employees to give to employers.
Fiona McNamara is a likeable candidate with the common touch, and she seems to be running a genuine grass-roots campaign, rather than just saying she is.
I have the feeling she is going to set me up with an interview with Rudd.
Not because she respects me as a bright insightful reporter.
Certainly not because she wants to see me on the TV news with her champion. I am a pretty scruffy sort of bloke. I have a haircut 1-3 months after I need one. I wear the best shirts China can make to retail at $10 a pop. In short, I have a great look for radio and most of my newspaper headshots are embarrassing.
I have already given the reason Australia's next Prime Minister Kevin Rudd wants to talk to me. Our newspaper the Pine Rivers Press reaches most of the voters of Dickson.
We in Pine Rivers are just north of the capital of Brisbane where the State of Queensland's major metro daily, the Courier Mail is based. Rudd and McNamara probably might think a few lines in the prestigious Courier-Mail are worth more than a page in the Pine Rivers Press, even though the Press raches a lot more Dickson readers than the Courier. And they know they can have that page in the Press and only salivate over those lines in the Courier.
Come in wild-manicured reporter Bernie Dowling and his nervous interview with Kevin Rudd.
I am unsure why I am nervous. I am a true democrat, valuing character over social position. Perhaps it is I have never met Rudd or I am wary of his social conservatism. It is probably I am just scared of authority, like a lot of us.
When a copper comes knocking on your door or a teacher asks you a sarcastic question, it is never going to end well.
My interview with Rudd is always going to end well.
As soon as I am asking the questions, I am in the groove. Asking questions gives you a bit of an edge, a piece of authority.
I have not prepared any questions, but then I do not do that much anymore, anyway.
I am not a big-city TV talking head, trying to catch the pollie out on a question I know the answer to only because a research assistant told me.
I do not ask Rudd what is the next railway stop, north of Strathpine. I ask him whether Fiona McNamara can take Peter Dutton down.
I am impressed with Kevin Rudd's answer, after the usuals spin of how wonderful a candidate Macca is, followed by a delightful and accurate working-class horse-racing analogy of how she is going to take Dutton down to the wire.
Maybe Kevin Rudd has a little pride in his working class background, after all. Our last Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating chastised working-class Australians for not aspiring for more than living in fibro houses.
A lot of good people lived in fibro houses. It is a shame they had to risk cancer from asbestos doing it.
On the Tuesday after our interview, Kevin Rudd backs the winner of the Melbourne Cup. The horse is named Efficient, in a week when the two major parties are arguing which can better manage the Australian Economy.
Efficient is alright as far as an image goes, but, at its best, it is a trifle dull; and at it worst, evokes pictures of efficiency experts, stop watches in hand, ringing blood, sweat and tears from honest toilers.
It is a pity but no horse called Visionary runs in this year’s Melbourne Cup.
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Bernie

Top 10 greatest popular song lyrics of all time

I think they should be one or two lines rather than full stanzas, because brevity is the eternal soul of wit. But that's up to you.

1. Substitute you for my mom;
At least I'll get my washing done.
From Substitute by The Who.

2. Dialing for Dollars is waiting to find me.
I wait for delivery each day until 3.
From Mercedes Benz by Janis Joplin

3. An' tell me, over and over again, my friend,
You don't believe we're on the eve of destruction
From The Eve of Destruction by Barry McGuire.

4. And run, if you will, to the top of the hill, pretty Jean.
From Jean by Oliver.

5. Get up, stand up for your rights.
Don't give up the fight.
From Get Up, Stand Up by The (Original) Wailers.

6. Don't it always seem to go
You don't know what you got 'til it's gone.
From Big Yellow Taxi by Joni Mitchell.

7. There's room at the top, they're telling you sti-il
But first you got to learn how to smile as you ki-ill.
From Working Class Hero by John Lennon.

8. Say it in bro-oken English.
From Broken English by Marianne Faithful.

9. Wake me up when September's gone.
(It lacks timelessness but it's perfect for our times.)
From Wake Me Up When September's Gone by Green Day.

10. Watch the butcher shine his knives
And this town is full of battered wives.
From The Streets of Your Town by The Go-Betweens.

I've left out Dylan, Zappa, Eminem, Rodriguez, Patti Smith, Neil Young, Carole King, Billy Bragg, Paul Kelly, Eric Burdon, Iggy Pop, The Beatles, The Doors, The Rolling Stones, Steppenwolf, The Grateful Dead, Velvet Underground, Talking Heads, AC/DC, The Clash, Dire Straits, R.E.M., U2, Crowded House, NWA, Faith No More, Nirvana, and so many more. What have I done?
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Bernie

From genre to v. good

WHENEVER you feel you might be writing something hardly worth reading, you can always quote American author Gore Vidal.

Vidal said: 'American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither.'

I wonder whether Vidal was commenting also on American foreign policy since that country long ago dumped the philosophy of isolationism into history's dustbin. A monstrous heroic adventure is easy to justify in terms of greatness, while finding the goodness in doing the right thing can be a pains-taking task.

Thankfully, I am not pursuing such weighty moral questions here, but glancing at what makes good writing.

My novel Iraqi Icicle is from the detective thriller genre which began with the works of Raymond Chandler last century after World War I. I have tried to transcend the genre to make my novel good, or, I hope, verging on the very good.

Genres rarely rate much above a pass mark from critical judges. In many cases, you can see why. Thriller writers, even the best of them, tend to attain their loyal following by repeating a winning formula. We have the hugely ironic situation that most of the world's leading novelists achieve fame and fotune by producing books which are not novel; which are, in fact, the antithesis of newness. Their successful novels should be called repetitives. Don't miss Dan B. Rowling's latest blockbuster repetitive.

I believe this phenomenon of successful writing is tied to readers' comfort in the known rather than being a shortcoming of genres.

My favourite analogy on this topic is the career of British rock group The Beatles who started as imitators of the American genre, rhythm&blues. That was 1950s R&B, not the modern one where young Black, and sometimes, White women sing out loud on a beach or on the street where they just happen to have 33 people dancing sexily behind them.

The Beatles transcended their choice of genre to produce greatness. I would like to do that with the detective thriller genre. Only, remembering Vidal's warning, I am only after very goodness.
Irai Icicle is available in Europe and the Americas from www.Amazon.com www.Abebooks.com www.Alibris.com and www.Borders.com and www.lulu.com and www.lulu.com/uk and in Autralia and Asia from www.digitalprintaustralia.com
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Bernie

Drugs 'n' sex `n' rock `n' roll

BLUES-rock diva Janis Joplin liked to shout at her concerts that drugs 'n' sex `n' rock `n' roll would get us well; would get the whole world well.
Joplin died of a heroin overdose at the age of 27.
Janis was not around Brisbane between 1986 and 1992, the setting and time frame of Queensland journalist Bernie Dowling's first novel Iraqi Icicle. But drugs `n' sex `n' rock roll certainly were. In spades. Along with war.
In October 1970, when Janis died, heroin was an international scourge and America and its allies were prosecuting the Vietnam War.
In January 1991, heroin was an internatonal scourge and America and its allies were prosecuting the first Iraq War, also called the Persian Gulf War.
Janis Joplin rates a passing reference in Iraqi Icicle, a private detective thriller with an unlikely sleuth, Steele Hill, an orphan who claims to be John Lennon's love child and lives for gambling and altrnative rock music.
``I am interested in how popular culture, such as music, film, television, theatre, the internet, gambling and even drug use, intersects with mega social events,'' Dowling says.
Brisbane rock band the Go-Betweens is a symbolic character with the novel asking why the Aussie alternative guitar popsters never gained the success of their American contemporaries R.E.M. or even Britband The Smiths.
A Go-Betweens gig at the University of Queensland is in the mix as well as the destruction of Brisbane's hilltop rock concert venue Cloudland where the Go-Betweens supported Brit ska band Madness in the early 1980s.
The novel questions whether rock music lived up to Joplin's boast of it changing the world.
Whenever he drives by, Steele Hill shakes his fist at the yuppie white apartments which replaced Cloudland and he says the Go-Betweens wrote a song about the ballroom's demolition.
He is referring to a few lines from the band's most successful single The Streets of Your Town.
Dowling's novel never leaves Greater Brisbane but it includes Steele Hill's take on the rock music mythology of the 1989 American invasion of Panama.
The pretext for the action was to bring Panamanian president Manuel Noriega to justice for drugs and arms trading.
The international media reported, with varying degrees of accuracy, how American troops blasted rock music at the Vatican embassy where Noriega had refuge before he surrendered.
Steele Hill calls it ``rock's part in Manny's downfall'' and suggests Noriega begged the invaders to stop the music. ``No more Twisted Sister; no more We're Not Gonna Take It,'' Steele Hill imagines Noriega pleading.
Iraqi Icicle is a darkly humorous novel of a period which saw the explosion of personal computers and mobile phones in Australia, and, in Queensland, the Fitzgerald Inquiry into police corruption which toppled the long-serving Joh Bjelke-Petersen government.
Iraqi Icicle is available from www.digitalprintaustralia.com www.amazon.com www.abebooks.com www.alibris.com www.lulu.com/uk and www.borders.com

Self publishing

THE put-down merchants call self-publishing vanity press, but maybe that should be insanity press, because it is damned hard work.

I grew up in a sub-culture which praised self-production by indie musicians, but the same generosity of spirit was not extended to self-publishers of literature where the general feeling was the product was not good enough to be bought by a mainstream publisher.

Without boring you with all the details, the economics of music production and book publishing are similar. The physical reproduction of a CD or a book is only a minor part of the cost for a big record company or book publisher with economies of scale. For the music company, recording and promotion are big ticket items, while for the book publisher, editing and distribution are costly.

Another common feature is music and book publishers having a poor history of predicting a hit, so they tend to try to reproduce past hits with a twist rather than take a chance on the new.

The muso or writer can do recording or editing a lot cheaper, if often less effectively, than the corporates. But of course, indie artists could never hope for economies of scale in production which also allows multiple distribution of review copies. But the production-cost gap has narrowed with greater economy in short-run CD pressings and the development of printing on demand.

Enter Bent Banana Books and its publication of my novel Iraqi Icicle, a detective thriller with a difference, or quite a few differences, really.

Don't tell anyone, but I am Bent Banana Books.

I am producing my novel Iraqi Icicle through printing on demand and the production cost per unit is only four times or so that of the big publishers. This might not sound good but it is. Before POD, it was seven or so times the cost.
Now, I can see how I go against the majors in marketing my novel in a crowded marketplace. Which is what I am doing with you, right now.

You can buy Iraqi Icicle in soft cover from www.lulu.com or www.lulu.com.uk
If you like the sound of it, buy it or if you would like to have a nibble first, buy Iraqi Icicle Book One At Play as an e-book from www.lulu.com It's inexpensive and the first of a four-part series.

Tell all your friends and make up for those misguided hip people who have been deriding self-publishing for years while they have supported independent record production.
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Bernie

Write on!

I've got writer's blog. Sorry about that punishment; I couldn't resist.

I have recently self-published a novel Iraqi Icicle, set in and around Brisbane, Australia, from 1986 to 1992. Like my play, Tosh: the Musical (visit www.toshthemusical.com ) it has popular music history central to the fiction.

In the play Tosh: the Musical, I look at Peter Tosh, Bob Marley and the Wailers, and the Jamaican reggae scene from its beginnings with ska in the 1960s until Tosh's murder in the 1980s.

In Iraqi Icicle, I am, in part, into the history of Brisbane alternative guitar pop rockers The Go-Betweens which formed in 1977 and broke up in 1990.
The band reformed a few years back with its songwriting nucleus of bassist/lyricist Grant McLennan and guitarist/music writer Robert Forster.

McLennan was born in 1958 and died in autumn, 2006. If you do the maths, he did fulfil the hope of dying before he got old, as the Who's Pete Townshend wrote in My Generation.

I am a few years older than McLennan but the novel is not about my generation. It might strike a chord with any fans of indie rock music between the 70s and 90s. Or those interested in the place of popular culture in the world. Or anybody who has ever pondered the relativity of good and evil. Or someone chasing a bit of black humour to light up our dark times.

I am a journalist by profession or trade or job or whatever. As well as doing general reporting, I write a couple of columns a week and they usually have a bit of a giggle in them. I find it hard to resist and both Tosh the Musical and Iraqi Icicle have humour.

I've an idea the novel Iraqi Icicle might appeal to the present generation of alternative music lovers throughout the world. I wrote both Tosh the Musical and Iraqi Icicle, in part, to give hope to (or at least entertain) teenagers and 20-somethings of today. They have got the rough end of the pineapple, as we like to say in Australia, living in the most despicable of times.

That's probably enough of an introduction, except to say you can buy Iragi Icicle in soft cover from from www.lulu.com or www.lulu.com.uk or, as an ebook, it is serialised in four parts at www.lulu.com

It is published by Bent Banana Books which is my own publishing house, but do not tell anyone that, as they might think Iraqi Icicle is less than a professional publication.


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Bernie

Voters might mention the war

WITHIN the next 12 months or so, voters elect governments in the US, Britain and Australia.

The three incumbent governments are in (Basil) faulty towers and are exhorting people not to mention the war.In the instance of the comic John Cleese creation, Basil Fawlty, the conflict not to mention was the World War of the II persuasion.

For President George W. Bush and former Prime Minister Tony Blair and Prime Minister John Howard it is the Iraqi War MkII.

It seems the world's people are in a mood to change governments at the moment.A few years back, Spain elected a left-wing government because its citizens did not like the consequences of the Iraqi invasion. Just recently, France elected a right-wing President, despite its citizens not liking the consequences of the Iraqi Invasion.

All this must put Bush, Blair and Howard on edge.

Bush should be the calmest because he is going anyway and he can take solace he is not the Republican who will be whipped at the polls. It is the first time, in my memory, that the next US President will be voted in through the Democratic Primaries, because after that it is a formality.

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair also will not lead his (New Labor) Party at the next polls, but he will likely be upset if the voters mention the war and savage Gordon Brown led Labor. Blair strikes me as someone who wants everyone to like him, a supremely difficult task, if you have had a hand in the slaughter of tens of thousands of Iraqis.

In my country, Australia, the Labor Opposition clearly leads the opinion polls over the Government of John Howard, a few months out from an election. Labor has not mentioned the war much yet and may never mention it very loudly, seeing they brought up little opposition to Australia being part of the coalition of the swilling which invaded Iraq.

The voters, on the other hand, may mention the war. Before the unmentionable, Australians were opposed to an invasion without US sanction, though some swung around when they realised the invasion was inevitable. Some of these people might be angry at being duped.

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Bernie

Laughing at the Disabled

AN academic squabble from Brisbane, Australia, is entertaining consumers of popular media.
Former journalist and current doctorate film student at Queensland University of Technology, Michael Noonan, is making a film called Laughing at the Disabled as a large chunk of his thesis.
Cultural Industries academics Dr Gary MacLennan and Dr John Hookham have been suspended without pay for six months for criticising the film and its auteur in the national newspaper The Australian.
I have connections with some threads of the drama.
As a journalist, I worked for the same newspaper chain as Noonan and I worked alongside the sports reporter on occasion though we were never based at the same office.
Gary MacLennan I knew from the civil liberties campaigns in Brisbane during the 1970s.
Like MacLennan, I have a disabled family member, in my case, a 10-year-old son with an intellectual disability.
Unlike MacLennan, I have not seen the early rushes of Noonan's film, so I cannot pass judgement on its content.
The film's title Laughing at the Disabled does not offend me because I believe it needs to be judged in the context of the film.
Champions of the rights of the disabled cannot have it both ways. You cannot say they are marginalised and made invisible and then condemn a film title which places them front and centre.
Maybe the title is only undergraduate attention-seeking. Maybe its confrontation has a more positive aim.
While I cannot, through lack of evidence, support MacLennan and Hookham in their condemnation of the film, the university's penalty seems outrageous.
The gist of their crime seems to be expressed in similar terms by QUT Vice-Chancellor Professor Peter Coaldrake and Noonan who was quoted as saying ``criticism..... should be channelled through the appropriate academic forums''.
Ah, what goes on at uni stays at uni and violators of this principle will have the book thrown at them.
In my novel Iraqi Icicle (available at www.lulu.com/uk ) I have my street-wise protagonist Steele Hill invited as a guest speaker at a university lecture in cultural studies.
A student asks Hill a question about sociologist Erving Goffman's study of total institutions, such as prisons, the armed forces and mental hospitals.
Of course, Hill has never heard of Goffman and asks what he was in prison for, but the astute reader might suspect I am raising questions about whether universities have elements of total institutions about them.
As a great academic institution should, QUT, its staff and students appear to be contributing to that debate.

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Bernie

10 best books ever written

IN Australia, our national TV and radio broadcaster asked viewers and/or listeners to name their favourite book.

I am sure many of you would have been invited to frolic in a similar exercise in your own countries.

It is chewing on a piece of gum for the mind, because

a. popular books will fare better than the classics and
b. more recent books will fare better than the classics and
c. most viewers have not read the classics or, if they have, it was long ago.

Academics like to make lists and they love to be considered smart so, they too, are sometimes invited to compile their 10 best books ever written.

It takes the fun out of it, if you cite criteria for what is a great book, but it would be interesting to see what the general public would nominate as their favourite 10 books if they could not list a book written in the last 50 years.

Of course, your 10 favourite books are not necessarily the 10 books you consider the best ever written. Sherlock Holmes books are fun but not fantastic as imaginative fiction

Go to it. Name the 10 best books ever, not including any of the past 50 years.

The real buzz about a compilation like this is reading someone else's might prompt you to discover a gem or re-evaluate something you have read.

The downside is you cannot imediately remember all the books you loved.
I will start the list with this proviso, if you asked me next week, it might be different.

1. The Adventures of Don Quixote by Cervantes
2. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
3. The Nigger of the Narcissus by Joseph Conrad
4. The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
5. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
6. Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence (Could be just my associating because Lawrence and Huxley were mates.)
7. The Trial by Franz Kafka
8. A James Joyce novel though I have never got past the first five pages of any.
9. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos because Joyce preferred to have that read to him, when he was near blind in his old age.
10. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett because a book can be play.

Won't you return the ball: what's your 10 best?

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Bernie

The lessor of two evils

The concept of the lesser of two evils fascinates.

Even lukewarm supporters of the TV forensic show CSI were drawn to the double episode directed by Quentin Tarantino who also wrote the story line.

In the yarn, a CSI officer is buried alive in a glass coffin, but left with a gun to shoot himself: ah, the lesser of two evils.

I recall an old joke which lacks a little in logic, as they sometimes do, when they are transferred orally and not subject to the scrutiny available to the written word.

I will try to repair the logic of the joke which is rather juvenile and not that funny, but suits our purposes, here.

Oh alright, I'll just tell the joke; no one likes a preamble anymore.

A man catches his wife having adultery and the outraged husband grabs her naked male lover down to a shed and puts his penis in a vice. The husband turns on a welder and naked man screeches: ``you are not going to burn me with that thing?'' No, the husband replies and he uses the welder to burn the handle off the vice.

To the relief of the naked man, the husband leaves but he returns with a huge kitchen knife and places it beside the penis of the naked man who screams: ``You are not going to cut it off, are you?'' The husband replies: ``No, you are; I'm going to burn down the shed.''

The lesser of two evils, you see, as well as men's fear of castration. How could a joke like that fail, even when it's juvenile and not too funny?

Let's switch to real life. I wouldn't be the only one this happened to.

You have a landlord who is buddy-buddies with you and says you can lease the comfortable abode he owns for as long as you like. He is not going to sell.

Lease renewal time is nearing and your buddy tells you he has an offer too good to refuse on the place and you will have to go. But this bloke is your eternal buddy and he will make it up to you by giving you the choice of leasing one of two other properties he owns.

Only, neither one is near as good as the one you are about to be kicked out of.

But you know you have to take one of them as you need a roof over your head. In making the choice, you, silently but mightily, curse your landlord who is the lessor of two evils.

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Bernie

Armenian zoo buys long-necked lizard as giraffe

A RECENT fable, passed around as true, had Japanese dog fanciers buying sheep, thinking they were expensive poodles.

The story leapt across the international news wires into world-wide newspaper and TV before it was exposed as an urban myth.

These creatures are the facts, stranger than fictions, which turn out to be fictional. I fancy their being erroneously called only ``urban'' myths could come from rural mythology: you know the yarns about travelling city slickers who imagine themselves as sophisticates only to turn out to be dumber than dog do.

The sheep-poodle myth was somewhat racist in that it had rich Japanese being stupid enough to be sold, not a pup, but a lamb.

As a practising journalist, I have come across these urban myths from time to time. I was working on a provincial paper which ran a staple: a family dog kills a deadly snake threatening a baby. The canine saves the infant's life but, unfortunately, dies in the process.

I did not tell the editor of my suspicions he had been conned because I had previously felt the wrath of people when I suggested they might be duped.

Urban myths have symptoms of untruth. These include imprecision of detail and the story being second or third hand: `my cousin's best friend saw it'.

I have always thought to expose urban myths is more laudable than to spread them but I may be responsible for creating one.

I have been writing a humorous column in our local newspaper for six years. When our State of Queensland was hunting down icons to venerate, I proposed two French poodles, Fi Fi and Fa Fa, which, in 1954, won the sheep dog trials at our annual show.

It was all a bit of fun, but months later, I found my brother, who also lives locally, read my yarn and actually believed it. What's more; my sibling, who is of above average intelligence, told others of the wondrous exploits of the fictional poodles Fi Fi and Fa Fa.

If any of you have been seduced by stories of French poodles winning your sheep dog trials in the dim past, you can probably trace them back to my article and I apologise.

What is your favourite urban myth and how was it exposed? In the meantime, have you heard how Armenian zoos having been buying long-necked lizards passed off as giraffes? You haven’t? Good, let's keep it to ourselves.

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Bernie

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Hi,
I am Bernie Dowling, a 53-year-old journalist from Pine Rivers outside Brisbane in Australia.
Iam married with a 10-year-old son. I will be using this blog to promote my novel Iraqi Icicle and to tell you about my musical Tosh the Musical (www.toshthemusical.com).
But more on that later. This intro is just tio say hi.
Hi,
Bernie