OK ... so enough opera!
And I certainly won't be mentioning a certain piece by that hack Joe Verdi.
But readers will still need to know that Norway opened its national opera house just recently (April 2008) after a 127-year wait.
Are there any Norwegian operas, I wonder?
If so, that will be a definite reason to return to the topic.
[Late update: yes there are!]

Had a spat in the pub last night with Spooky and Chopper as to who is/was/will be the funniest person in Australia.
We dismissed Judith Lucy right away -- too maudlin.

Lots of bets on Humphries and Hogan, but I went with another H: John Hepworth.
John was born in 1921 and, as far as I know, is still on the planet despite massive loads of booze and a spell in the nick.
He wrote the back page of Australia's first blog-zine: the much lamented Nation Review, with pictures by a (then) little known artist called Leunig.
I fondly remember John's reflections on the scientific discovery that sharks bite people mostly around the midriff.
Which is where sharks bite each other during foreplay.
Leunig had a cartoon to accompany it: a line of people at the beach, with the head of the queue jumping in and shouting "Hooray, Ferk!"

So I crawled back home from the Minjup pub to find my copy of Hepworth's His Book and (after crawling back) regaled them with the story of the long-handled shovel ploy.
In short, John, when in the army, has a sergeant who is totally up himself -- as sergeants across the world tend to be.
During said sergeant's morning sojourn to the woods for a crap, John sticks a long-handled shovel under his bum as he's doing his business and withdraws the deposit.
Sergeant looks around, as one does, to see ... precisely nothing.

From that moment on, now I quote, "he was a changed man.
"He became silent and distracted.
"Somehow or other the arrogance faded out of him.
"He had all the air of a man with a secret sorrow.
"He never mentioned it; but many a time they caught him revisiting that spot in the scrub.
"He used to stand there for long periods gazing down at the ground with a deeply troubled expression on his face, as though he had misplaced something dear to him". (p88)

Natch, the other two Hs faded by comparison and I won the beer.

Sledge