Even as we write, a feature film is being made, for release next year, of Timur Vermes' just-published novel Look Who's Back and we look forward to the ACT Liberals, led by humourless and indignation-prone Giulia Jones, trying to ban it here. The book and the film laugh at Hitler, but Ms Jones' histrionic fuss over the Hitler stripper at the Fringe Festival shows she can't see the big difference between portraying Hitler and barracking for him.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
or signup to continue reading
On to Hitler in a moment, but first we notice that the first roars of the first leaf blowers (Husqvarna suburbiaensis) tell us that autumn in our leafy city (with all those falling leaves to be blown hither and thither) is upon us.
We need to laugh at the leaf-blowing classes if what they do and the noise they make in doing it isn't going to upset us. And so we refer you to Vermes' very funny novel .
In it, Hitler (physically and ideologically exactly as he was when he died in 1945) has woken up in modern-day Germany. He makes Nazi sense of every new thing he sees and hears. Woken on a windy autumn morning by an ''infernal din'' and looking out and seeing the madness of a hotel employee operating a leaf blower (''How absolutely preposterous it was to blow leaves from one place to another on a day like this!'') his first reaction is fury. He is fuhrious. But then he wakes up to himself.
Yes, the employee is (just like a leaf-blowing Canberran in autumn) doing something pointless and preposterous, ''but the man had been issued with an order. And he was [mindlessly] executing that order with a fanatical loyalty my generals would have done well to imitate. Was he complaining that it was a pointless task? No … That is just the fanatical will this country requires.''
Hitler is ''so moved'' that he dresses quickly and hurries out to the worker and thanks him, saying: ''It is for people like you that I will continue my struggle. For I know that from this leaf-blasting apparatus … blows the red-hot breath of National Socialism.''
Look Who's Back is published by MacLehose Press.
Going gah-gah over beautiful gang-gangs
With fiendish gang-gang smugglers about (''International smugglers targeting Canberra's favourite parrot'', The Canberra Times, February 27) we're not going to say where in Canberra these two youngsters were photographed by Andrew Garrett.
But the picture of the exquisite pair (it wouldn't surprise if the male and female gang-gangs were easily Noah's favourite pair of creatures aboard his ark during its crucial voyage) gives us yet another excuse to remind Canberrans that you're invited to help with this year's gang-gang survey, a sustained collection of information about the mysterious species.
You'll find everything you need to know about the survey at the Canberra Ornithologists Group website, canberrabirds.org.au, and everything you need to know about Noah's voyage in the Bible's book of Genesis, chapters 6-8.
Tournament of ennui requires revival
Last week's items about the stimulating Blow up the lecture? forum at the ANU, at which it was argued that the traditional, student-anaesthetising, 50-minute university lecture delivered by an old bore has had its day, has rung some bells in some readers' belfries.
Some remember how in the 1990s the Australian National University, the University of Canberra, the Australian Defence Force Academy, and the School of Art and Music staged the most boring lecture of the year competitions.
Academics and postgraduate students were invited to compete.
The inspiration came from a British competition, started at Leeds University, where past competitions had been won by the lecture Discussion on how to tell right from left - illustrated with slides of billiard balls, and the lecture Marxist interpretation of a joke about bananas.
The rules of the 1991 competition in Canberra stipulated that lectures should be up to 10 minutes long and that a contestant would face the ''gong'' (disqualification) if his or her lecture began to arouse any interest in those listening to it.
The Canberra Times reported that 1991's competition was about to happen (at a dinner at Burgmann College) and that the occasion would raise money for Community Aid Abroad, but then, with that sad want of news sense that alas did characterise the Times of that time) didn't seem to report the event and its result.
We do know that one of the entries was a lecture called Stochastic linkages between sexual abstinence and skiing injuries in wet rice growing areas of South-East Asia, but that sounds so intellectually exhilarating that one imagines it got gonged.
But what became of the tournament? Can we revive it? Those same teaching institutions still abound with tenured bores and could stage a terrific, tedious tournament.
