Bananas & Hard Boiled Eggs

It was Kermit the Frog who said "It's not easy being green", and he should know. He's spent half his life with one of Jim Henson's hands up his bottom passage, which explains why his eyes are so bulgy. He also gets a hard time from his porcine pal Miss Piggy, who is just a little too handy with her fists for my liking. I can't help thinking that many other folk in the "Green movement" make life hard for themselves by appearing on television dressed like people who have spent several nights up a tree or chained to a bulldozer. Often they have indeed done just that, but it's hard to tell the difference because mostly they seem to dress like that anyway. Others dress as though they have been dragged backwards across a ploughed field and through a hedge by several burly policemen. Still others appear to have spent at least forty-eight hours in a cell without a wash. They probably have, but again, it's hard to tell because they all look the same.

Now, nobody is more in favour of saving what little is left of our environment than this particular little piggy. I'm all for preserving every single gay and lesbian, differently abled, Indiginous whale that there is. Everybody knows that Australia and most of the rest of the world is currently run purely to benefit big business, but there has to be a better way of going about changing things than dressing up in funny outfits, dying one's hair pink or green, tattooing some appendages and piercing others. Australia at least, is still a deeply conservative nation and if you want to be taken seriously you have to dress like a deeply conservative person. Australian Greens Senator Bob Brown has realised this and wears a suit and in doing so has had far more influence on the political direction of the country than a million "scruffy oiks" chained to bulldozers could ever have. He's articulate, even if you don't agree with what he's articulating, and you can at least understand even his madder statements because his lips and tongue aren't handicapped by chunks of stainless steel.

As it is, at least half of Australia's farming community is convinced that the whole climate change thing is a marxist, pinko, leftist plot to extract more tax. Meanwhile that same 50% are quite happy to claim drought and flood assistance from the government whenever there's one of the increasingly common severe weather events. Wouldn't you think that the very people whose living is most vulnerable to climate change would be happy that at least some politicians are taking the problem seriously, instead of whinging about the "bloody greenies." all the time. But then, as I said, the "bloody greenies" are partially to blame for their own marginalisation.

Now, on a more serious note. Overnight, Australians received some disturbing news. An Aussie by the name of Cadel Evens has won the Tour de France cycle race. This is very bad news according to my male staff, who predicts a substantial increase in the Australian MAMIL (Middle Aged Men In Lycra) population as a result. He reckons they'll be porky executive types with red faces and pounding hearts clogging up the roads on their hugely expensive bikes in an attempt to emulate Cadel's success and to impress their personal secretaries. Worse still, the MAMIL invasion is likely to take over the coffee shops. My male staff says that before long there'll be great piles of bikes worth thousands of dollars outside of every cafe, and one of those silly aerodynamic helmets on every table. Meanwhile herds of MAMILS will be waddling about about in their clumpy cycling shoes,their hi-vis Lycra outfits stretched almost to breaking point over their beer-guts.

I saw some MAMILS myself just the other day when I went to the vet. They'd obviously just come out of a shop because it seems they'd all bought the same thing for their lunch - a small banana and a couple of hard boiled eggs which they had secreted in the front of their Lycra shorts for safe keeping. It would be safe too. Certainly I'm not going to stick my paw down there to steal it. Many MAMILS also seem to have incontinence issues. The ones I saw were obviously wearing some sort of pad on their nether regions. Maybe that's why all had bananas and hard boiled eggs for lunch.