Bad News Is Good News

Just a couple of days ago Badger and I were shredding one of my male staff's favourite childhood books. He'd foolishly left it laying around on the living room floor while we were out foraging. I can't remember what the book was called, but it was I believe, a compilation of short murder mystery stories by a bloke called Alfred Hitchcock. Badger was just about to shred the final story in the book when something interesting caught my eye, and I'm not talking about Badger's butt. Not this time anyway. No, it was a sentence in the book.

 "It was mice........." It read. These apparently were the final words of a murder victim in the USA to the person who was unfortunate enough to discover him.
 "How typical of humans." I remarked to Badger, who was a bit cross because I'd stopped him from shredding the page in question. The bloke is sitting there in his armchair with his throat slit from ear to ear, blood congealing around his feet and making a hell of a mess on the carpet, and what does he do with his dying, gurgling breath? He blames his demise on rodents. Now I'm quite a large, powerful specimen as rodents go, but I think I'd struggle to overpower and cut the throat of an adult human, so how is a psychopathic mouse going to manage? Does it crawl up the dude's leg clutching an open razor blade between clenched teeth, then deftly transfer the blade to his tiny paw when he reaches the man's shoulder before drawing it across his victims throat? And what about motive? Perhaps the victim caught the killer's wife in a trap. Revenge!

I read on, holding Badger back with a paw in his face, making sure I kept my digits away from those gnashing teeth. I really didn't need another visit to the vet. Anyway, it turned out that the victim was an Englishman in America and his killer was his own lawyer. Actually, slitting the poor man's throat was unnecessarily messy, when he could just as easily have killed his victim with shock just by sending him a bill. What confused the poor American chap who found him was that the dying Englishman was trying to say "It was my solicitor," but he was cut off in his prime so to speak and only managed "It was mice........." before breathing his last. Being in America, what he should have tried to say is "It was my lawyer." If only he'd remembered where he was the police wouldn't have had to waste hours of their time searching for a killer mouse clutching a blood stained cut-throat razor. Yet another example of Britain and the United States being divided by a common language.

And now for something completely unrelated.  It's no wonder my male staff suffers from depression, he keeps watching the TV news. It's a miracle that every single human on the planet hasn't gone loopy in the same way. His biggest mistake is watching and (worse still) listening to the financial analyst. These guys are determined to talk Australia into a major recession. I think this is because they are worried that we have one of the strongest economies on the planet at the moment and we just don't fit in with other less fortunate nations like Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland. Few nations have a triple A credit rating. Australia does, and yet these financial gurus keep trying to drag us down, and won't be happy until we are much further down the alphabet. It's as if they think we might be getting too big for our national boots. Maybe it's another incarnation of our cultural cringe. The finest exponent of this is ABC News' Financial Editor, Alan Kohler. This is the kind of thing he comes up with.
 "You can see from the graph behind me that Australia's economy has been growing steadily over the last six years despite the GFC, but now as you can see, last month's growth was point zero zero one percent less than the previous month. This could be the start of a great depression, worse than the one we experience in the nineteen thirties. And the news is no better on the employment front either. The merchant bank Pompous-Smirk has revealed that in it's latest survey, although more than ninety thousand jobs were added last month, the Brussels sprout jam manufacturer Stenchfart Pty Ltd may be forced to close its factory at Pong near Adelaide with the loss of almost seven jobs because of government anti-greenhouse gas legislation." And so on and so forth. It's as if there is never, ever any good news. Well, there you are. I suppose the only good news for TV and newspapers is bad news

Brussels sprouts. The only food every to be banned under the Geneva Convention. It's a little known fact that this is what the allies were looking for in Iraq when searching for Saddam's chemical weapons stash.

BADGER'S FOOTNOTE
I really wish Billy wouldn't put his paw in my face like that. His feet always smell of bush chocolate.