Mr John Clarke

We had a fantastic response to our last quiz and we thank everyone who entered. The winner was Edith Vale of Edithvale. For the record, the answers were as follows:

1. Correct. The Bureau of Meteorology has announced Australia has just experienced its hottest decade since records began a century ago. Please; not a word of this to Senator Fielding. It might be best not to mention the tooth fairy either.

2. Anti-hoon laws. These are being introduced by Police Minister Tim Holding to distract attention from the Pro-hoon laws being introduced by Planning Minister Justin Madden.

3. Alexander Downer. He is the UN Special Envoy in Cyprus, charged with resolving issues between the island’s Greeks and Turks. He works part-time, speaks neither Greek nor Turkish and is from Adelaide. Bookies have him at 400/1 and drifting.

4. Kathryn Bigelow. Julia Gillard was busy.

5. False. John Howard did not take out the Man of the Match award. He scored a pair, dropped nine catches and his two overs included 63 wides.

6. True. It was John Brumby. Someone has since explained to him that knife crimes are not caused by live music any more than tank warfare is caused by the early recordings of Tex Ritter.

7. Jim Courier. Nobody knows.

8. Hailstones the size of golf balls and serious flooding. Mobile phone videos of locusts, toads, volcanoes and the parting of the Red Sea are not authentic although the dinosaur eating Fed Square is very well done and not a bad idea.

9. False. This photo is also obviously a fake. Julie Bishop does not have jets of solid flame coming out of her eyes. Stand up the girl who did that.

10. False. When Tony Abbott said ‘Sex is one of life’s great pleasures,’ he was not endorsing the Darwinian view that breeding is an instinctive aspect of natural selection and genetic survival. From the waist up, Mr Abbott is a creationist.

11. Also false. Mary McKillop was canonized. Breaker Morant was shot.

12. The Rudd health plan is being considered by the states. ‘Up In The Air’ is a George Clooney movie.

13. The Luge is an event in which the participant slides downhill feet first at very high speed. Peter Garrett was simply moved to a slightly different portfolio.

14. Barnaby Joyce. He is now the Opposition spokesman on regional development, infrastructure and water. Workers in these areas have been asked to hide anything sharp.

15. Docklands. It is the envy of the civilized world and is being moved to a new position up behind the Windsor Hotel.

16. (l to r) Bog Man, Cro-Magnon Man, Homo Erectus, Wilson Tuckey, Homo Sapiens, Brendan Fevola, Modern Man.

17. Melbourne. The other cities, Tokyo, Paris, London and Toronto, all have public transport systems and rail links to their airports.

18. The Coalition is made up of the Liberal Party and the National Party. The All Ordinaries is a financial index.

19. The Grand Prix. It loses about $50million a year and NSW wants to steal it. Perhaps if all the children join hands.

20. False. ‘Whip till frothy, adding sugar’ is part of a meringue recipe. Max Markson is some kind of businessman.

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We had a fantastic response to our last quiz and we thank everyone who entered. The winner was Cam Perdown of Camperdown. For the record, the answers were as follows:

1. The building, an astonishing feat of engineering, is in Dubai. At 2,727 feet, it is the most bankrupt building in the world.

2. False. While it is true that boatloads of asylum seekers cause a song and dance from the Australian Government; and while it is also true that Japanese whaling ships ramming other craft and splitting them in half cause no significant response from the Australian government; it is not valid to conclude that asylum seekers should kill whales and ram other vessels in order to gain approval from the Australian government.

3. Also false. The baggy green is a cap awarded for cricketing prowess. Bob Brown is a senator.

4. Tony Abbott. He has reversed his previous position and put the smugglers in mothballs. Sadly for his obsession with privacy, photographers have now worked out where he secretly rides his bike before dawn in yellow lycra past their cameras.

5. Joel Fitzgibbon. No-one knows. Perhaps he’s glued in.

6. True. It is illegal to ride on a tram without paying an amount you don’t understand into a machine that can’t explain, in order to travel on the wrong route to somewhere you don’t want to go.

7. It was b)The media coverage of Prince William’s visit. David Cassidy wasn’t in Australia at the time and ‘Bambi’ is a movie about a fawn.

8. False. The coal lobby is not a carboniferous reception area. It is the government’s peak advisory body on global warming.

9. False. The US Administration has tightened its intelligence procedures and is no longer recruiting counter-tenors. It is now looking for experts in counter-terrorism.

10. False. Re-gifting refers to the practice, often undertaken over the period following Christmas, of passing on gifts previously received. The Australian Taxation Office is a different enterprise altogether. It receives money from taxpayers and gives it to business.

11. John Alexander. All the others are tennis commentators.

12. Channel 7. The highlight of this year’s Australian Open Tennis was the superb men’s quarter-final match between Home and Away.

13. The photo shows a Collins Class submarine, a vital part of Australia’s defence capability. There are six of them and in order to retain the element of surprise, four of them work. The one pictured is patrolling the main street of Holbrook.

14. John Howard. He has firmed as Australia’s nominee to the International Cricket Council. Australia’s nominee to the International Gymnastics Federation is Amanda Vanstone and its nominee to the International Convention on Crippling Personal Shyness is Gerry Harvey.

15. Lyn Kosky was the Arts Minister. ‘The Drowsy Chaperone’ is a stage show.

16. Correct. The coalition accepts that sea levels have been rising for decades, initially by very small amounts and then by larger increments. These rises are measured scientifically and calibrated as follows: ‘Crap’, ‘A lot of crap’, ‘Complete crap’ and ‘Bullshit.’

17. The Office of Police Integrity. It is run by unicorns using invisible nets to catch sea breezes, which they later release into the wild.

18. Kevin Rudd’s boredom index was today lifted from Moderate to Extreme. If he gets on to art and literature, authorities are expected to raise the index to Code Red/Catastrophic, in which case residents should leave the area immediately.

19. Bernard Tomic. Every other 17 year old throughout history has believed it is deeply unfair and a calculated personal insult to be told to go to bed before midnight.

20. The photo shows the crowd enjoying the recent one day cricket fixture at the MCG. They were Dave Ingram and Ian Whittaker. Dave is a gas-fitter and Ian runs an IT business in Clayton. And sorry girls; both are taken.

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We had a fantastic response to our last quiz and we thank everyone who entered. The winner was Chelsea Heights of Chelsea Heights. For the record, the answers were as follows:

1. True. The new myki public transport payment system, which will be introduced over the next thousand years, is named after its inventor, Mr Michael Mouse

2. False. Mary McKillop has not been spotted in pre-season training at the Junction Oval.

3. Telstra. Carthage was sacked, the Titanic sank and Dresden was reduced to rubble.

4. Copenhagen. Mt Disappointment is up past Kinglake.

5. Correct. ‘The rich nations’ include the UK, which is broke, and the US which owes $3 trillion.

6. The Berlin Wall. It came down in 1989. Kevin Rudd was unable to attend celebrations but has put in an offer for the wall, conditional upon the completion of sea trials, a strong set of anchors and a suitable parking place north west of Ashmore Reef.

7. Correct. The debate on Climate Change will take place at the Town Hall on Tuesday night, between Tony Abbott. He will argue for and against each proposition, making a distinction between his actual beliefs and his political posturing. He will also discuss the term ‘actual beliefs’. It starts at 8. He’ll get there around 9.

8. False. Despite having fulfilled the qualifying requirements with flying colours, Tiger Woods currently has no plans to play in the NRL next season.

9. False. John Brumby is the Premier of the state. James Packer just runs the casino.

10. Nick Minchin. The character who stole Christmas was The Grinch.

11. False. Mr Sheen was a cleaning product and hugely popular. He otherwise lived a relatively quiet life and was never arrested, charged or responsible for coke-fueled idiocy.

12. False. If children don’t want to eat their greens, they should mount a convincing argument against vitamins. Simply repeating over and over again that lettuce is a massive great big fat huge new tax is just silly.

13. Sophie Mirabella. She is the Shadow Minister for Being Opposed to Science.

14. False. Salvador Dali did not ever produce a work featuring Phillip Ruddock criticising the Rudd government’s Immigration policy.

15. The Heene family. They pretended their son had been swept off in a runaway balloon. He was actually hiding in the house. The Heenes were subsequently convicted on a charge of fooling the media who didn’t check anything and kept filming for four days.

16. Tony Blair. He was the British Prime Minister who went into Iraq with George W Bush on the basis of intelligence information which was incorrect. He recently tried to become President of the European Union. He was not successful. The other photographs show a fruitcake and a bag of mixed nuts.

17. Barnaby Joyce. He was encouraging the government to scrap its ETS legislation, shut its face and announce the date of the next federal election. The other footage was of Mt Vesuvius.

18. Cardinal Pell. His Christmas massage was broadcast around the world live on the internet, in a tradition as old as time itself. The other photos are of Mae West and Isadora Duncan.

19. St Paul. He was on the road to Damascus. Justin Madden was coming through Pakenham on his way back from Kilcunda.

20. Kevin Rudd. He will speak on ‘Australia’s Moral Landscape’. Take something to read.

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We had a fantastic response to our last quiz and we thank everyone who entered. The winner was Tim Boon Of Timboon. For the record, the answers were as follows:

1. The Ashes. It is the most famous rivalry in cricket. A test series occurs every four years between the Australian side and a team made up of South Africans, Indians and a couple of English players with names like Badger, Roadworks and Turnip.

2. True. Michael McGurk was a Sydney businessman whose name was not Michael McGurk, who was not from Sydney and was not a businessman.

3. True. The inquiry looked at the impact on problem gamblers of an additional 150 gambling tables at the Casino. The Inquiry found that the extra tables could go ahead. The Inquiry looked at the matter very seriously indeed. The Inquiry begins on Monday.

4. True. The Murray Darling River system, rising sea levels, coastal erosion, the loss of species and increasing oceanic and atmospheric temperatures will be fixed by a market trading in emissions. No worries.

5. Elton John. Apparently he doesn’t meet the requirements set down by the Ukrainian authorities for turning up with a phalanx of western media and announcing he’d like to adopt the boy third from the left in the back row. No, not you; next to you. Yes, you.

6. AFL Grand Final umpires. Anyone who’d like a run next year, ring Andrew. Must be able to tell the difference between a goal and a point.

7. Ron Walker. His place on the Fairfax board will be opened up for development. Plans currently include a luxury boatel with gaming facilities and a car race through a celebrity lion park. STCA.

8. The stock market. It’s completely different. There’s no track, no birdcage, the weather is not a huge factor and the brokers are not weighed afterwards.

9. Lot 63. A handwritten document. In good condition. Signed at the bottom by Mrs Minchin. ‘Please excuse Nick from Science forever. He has a virus’.

10. False. Bart Cummings has never won the Premiership Cup. He is also yet to win the Stawell Gift, the Archibald Prize or the Australian Open. (He has withdrawn from Dancing with the Stars citing some soreness in the off foreleg).

11. Ruddabilitation. So far Robert Hill, Brendan Nelson and Peter Costello have entered the programme. All have struggled in pervious employment and with supervision and proper training it is hoped they might all make some sort of return to normal life.

12. Kevin Rudd. So little to learn. So much time.

13. Amanda Vanstone. For a full scale of our fees go to the website.

14. Paint drying. The Brownlow Count is an intensely interesting top-flight television show in which the numbers 1, 2 and 3 are repeatedly read out to a room full of adults for seven hours.

15. Alexander Downer. Bob the Builder was unavailable.

16. Australian bank charges. The pole vault is an athletics event.

17. True. The biggest spectator sport in Victoria is Rain. At the first few drops people rush to their windows and jockey for viewing positions, whooping, yelling encouragement and pointing out highlights. The score is updated live on-line and when it’s all over, kids are often allowed out on the ground to have a few kicks.

18. Tiger Woods. He is being paid an appearance fee of over $3m. The Gulf Crisis is a different matter altogether.

19. False. Julie Bishop did not appear in ‘The Stepford Wives’ and nor did Wayne Swan feature in ‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,’ although Wilson Tuckey did make a brief appearance in ‘Deliverance’ and Barnaby Joyce performed a lot of the stunt-work in ‘Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.’

20. Paul Keating. He was expressing his opinion on Peter Costello’s appointment to the board of the Future Fund, when it went off. The fire brigade say the area is now safe.

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