Tag Archive for 'Agincourt Awards'

She shot an arrow in the air…

Published
by
Mercurius
6 months ago
in Levity
. 8 Comments

Gather ’round, ye lovers of the ludicrous, ye delectators of demonologie! I have for you a tale as twisted as a fakir’s rope, as misconceived as Leda’s progeny, as labyrinthine as the guts of a gorgon!

Do not lightly look upon this miasma of misappropriation! It hath rendered dark the brightest of minds, and driven the most sanguine logicians to babbling madness!

Behold! The third nomination for the famed Award d’Agincourt, for the longest bow in journalism:

We need tough love, not bad parenting

The fair lady Elizabeth de Farrelly hath, from the insubstantial air, summoned a swarming hornets’ cloud of distract’d notions to sting and prick away all the noble faculties that give sense to reason.

The lady doth detest too much. From Peter Garrett to Wollongong council. From primary school citizenship to fuel prices. From eating too much fat to Aristotle. No segue is too tangential. No bird in the hand goes unturned. No picnic proceeds – thus! - with all its constituent sandwiches.

I know not where her arrow fell to earth. Look fast, but don’t look long, lest it pierce thy pate and dash out thy brains!

The second Agincourt Award nomination

Published
by
Mercurius
7 months, 3 weeks ago
in Levity and Media
. 24 Comments

OK, admittedly this is an easy target, but Piers Akerman deserves a special honorary nomination for the Agincourt Award for the Longest Bow in Journalism (honorary because nobody would mistake him for a journalist).

To attempt to summarise the piece that earned the nomination would only rob you, dear reader, of the surreal delights of attempting to discern the unifying theme in this meditation that draws together these disparate events and blames them all on (boo! hiss!):

“years of politically correct indoctrination from Left-leaning social engineers particularly in the media, legal and teaching professions, which have left many gravely dysfunctional people in their wake”:

  1. The Merrylands machete-gang attacks.
  2. Indigenous grog problems, which are Gough Whitlam’s fault.
  3. A US transsexual who got some media coverage, apparently.
  4. A WA Senator-elect who is in a relationship with a transsexual.
  5. The 60 minutes story of the father-daughter incest couple.
  6. Some problem with the ABC’s coverage of 10th anniversary of the MUA waterfront dispute.
  7. Dawkins reforms.
  8. The Stolen Generation.

That’s right LPers, it’s all your fault that John Deaves screwed his daughter.

Based on Piers’ impressively broad source material, it seems that since nobody in Canberra will take his calls any more, he just occupies his time channel-surfing and reading the more lurid sections of USA Today.

But we shouldn’t be too hasty to dismiss Piers’ thesis here. He may have tapped some deeper zeitgeist, along with the wild-eyed and disheveled man who regaled my subway car between 42nd and 86th street this week, making essentially the same points as Akerman did in this tract.

The piece stands as a stark warning of what can happen to one’s faculties during a bibulous decline into soapbox raving. You have been warned.

Perhaps Piers can now go gently into retirement with one more trophy – an Agincourt Award – to adorn his cabinet?

**UPDATE** Agincourt Award nominations are open to all-comers. If you spot a candidate in your travels, please bring the article to the attention of LP Admins and it too can join the finalists!

Announcing the Agincourt Award for the Longest Bow

Published
by
Mercurius
10 months ago
in History, International, Levity, Media, Relationships and Sexuality
. 90 Comments

Gentle readers, I beseech you to consider the following five seemingly unrelated phenomena:

  1. The Ishmael Beah alleged sort-of hoax (or is it?)
  2. The fourth estate’s duty to be skeptical and seek the truth
  3. Margaret Mead’s 1920s anthropological research in the South Pacific
  4. The ‘sexual revolution’ of the Baby Boomers
  5. The conservative moral imperative to bring pregnant women back to the kitchen, which is their rightful place in the natural order of the universe where they belong, which is true, and which everybody knows and secretly believes to be true if only they would search their hearts and admit it. We also secretly know that homosexuality is unnatural, that sex is dirty and shameful and wrong and should only be between a man and woman for the purpose of procreation and you know you’d all be much happier if you just did it with the lights off in the missionary position.

If you think these things have nothing to do with each other, well, you’d be right.

But that didn’t stop Simon Caterson from making an heroic effort to draw them all together in this marvellous piece of post-facto sophistry that has earnt him the first nomination in LP’s inaugural Agincourt Awards for the Longest Bow in Journalism.

Continue reading ‘Announcing the Agincourt Award for the Longest Bow’