Disaster, death, destruction. In the past few months every time you turn on the TV or open the laptop, there they are, laid out in colour, with a perfectly groomed journalist helpfully front and centre of the story. Which is pretty revolting, but not as much as the endless clips of that teenage brother and sister weeping for their mother killed in the Christchurch earthquake - now available with Touching Musical Accompaniment!

Politics is not a game. It is an earnest business - Churchill

Canberra seems to have forgotten its Churchill quotes again, as the feverish party games continue. Julia Gillard is stumbling around playing blind man’s buff with the Real Julia; Tony Abbott is stuck in an endless Pin the Tail on the donkey loop and he still can’t work out which ass he’s playing with. Joe Hockey, Wayne Swan and Nicola Roxon are re-enacting a Play School tea party while Malcolm Turnbull and Bill Shorten mutter sulkily in a corner and wait for Musical Chairs to start again. Meanwhile, the Canberra press gallery plays tiddly winks in front of a mirror and the electorate gives them all a resounding ‘meh’, then turns to the likes of Andrew Bolt and Mia Freedman for analysis on policy and international affairs.

Know what I hate? Of course you don’t and it’d be pretty presumptuous of you to think that you do, unless you’re psychic and you’re not, because nobody is and people who say they are are something I really hate. But that’s not what I was hating in the first sentence back there, I was hating something else, which I guess just goes to show one very important fact: I hate an awful lot of things. Hundreds, in fact, one of which is positive attitudes towards life.

But the one thing I hate that I am choosing to focus on is this: Successful people.

In essence, my message is, Successful people? What the fuck?

What’s the most soul destroying career that you can imagine? Doctor at a tobacco company? Head of light entertainment at Channel Nine? Opinion writer for a News Ltd tabloid? To my mind they’re amateurs and also rans when you put them up against what’s arguably the most destructive force in western society: the self help industry.

Will Australians’ faux environmentalism derail our greenhouse effort?

It seems the Government’s proposed flood levy has tested the limits of Australians’ willingness to help others. While many thousands voluntarily gave money, supplies and physical support to those affected by the floods, opinion polls show around half the population has balked at a modest Government levy to share restoration costs.

Here’s a thought swingers. How about we grow a pair and start stepping up to the crease? Why don’t we stop trembling in the corner like aspidistras with Parkinson’s disease and actually take the fight to some of the festering rodents who somehow managed to get elected to our federal parliament, despite their multitudinous social handicaps and glaring ineptitude?

In the beginning, Q and A was unmissable TV. The panel format wasn’t new, but with the gravitas provided by the ABC and Tony Jones, the quality of guests was unprecedented. Then, when the Twitter feed turned it into one of the most interactive hours of Australian television, Q and A was hovering on the edge of something truly ground breaking.

In 1995, as the twentieth century’s decade of meh drew to its middle, it seemed music was drowning slowly in the muddy, swirling waters of the Wishkah. The era of glam rock had passed and arenas, once heaving, lay empty and moribund. Angsty, moody, stubbled bands of thin angry-naughts had taken over the radio and were busily grunting out the soundtrack for a generation of ‘misunderstood’ teens to hate their parents to.

Despite doing everything the guide books told me not to do, which meant I caught a shonky taxi and paid well over par, the drive into town from Tan Son Nat International Airport was a wonderful introduction to Ho Chi Minh City.

Unlike the drive into Bangkok (where you contemplate self immolation through a mixture of sheer frustration and the narcotic effects of two-stroke exhaust fumes) the trip into Vietnam’s largest city, otherwise known as Saigon, had me sticking my head out the window in wide-eyed wonderment.

Admittedly, I’m not good with deadlines.

I was on the train to work today, wondering what the angle should be for my next piece, when I fell into conversation with fellow twitterer @Morgwn, the artist behind last month’s Assange cover.

Anyhow, we were talking about the amount of coverage given to the Dickileaks scandal versus the popular revolts currently spreading through the Middle East. We came from it from our different angles – I thought that in covering Dickileaks we at least had something we could use to make some change in our community. He, quite rightly, pointed out that the birth of democracy in the Middle East could be a little more important in the grand scheme of things.

I ask you… what kind of person wants to come and do a house evaluation at eight o’clock in the morning? And indeed, what kind of person arranges for someone to come and do a house evaluation at eight o’clock in the morning?

Our bank and my so-called husband is who.

Problem was that the morning in question I’d been woken early by the kids and the puppy and had found myself in a restless mood. It was the kind of mood that, in the past, would have inspired me to turn a bruise into the face of Jesus Christ with a magic marker.

I’ll let you in on a secret; there are some aspects of getting old I am quite looking forward to. For instance, the thought of sitting on my porch yelling ‘get off my darned lawn’ at teenagers is quite appealing. The idea of becoming a crotchety old crank warms the cockles of my heart. Then again, there are some dear friends of mine who would argue that the only thing currently missing from this equation is a cane and pair of chest high slacks.

What is it, how do I get it and how do I keep it?

The modern obsession with maintaining our youth and vitality is evidence of the changing trends in health care. In over thirty years of dentistry I have witnessed the emphasis in health services shift from pain and disease management to prevention and elective health services.

Here in Melbourne we like to think of ourselves as a cultured bunch and we have a plethora of cultural institutions, festivals and independent cinema exhibitors constantly coming up with more entertainment than we have time to see. So, in the interest of helping everyone out, I’ve collated a short list of what you really ought to get yourself along to during the cinematic month of March in Melbourne.

In her 1845 book Modern Cookery for Private Families Eliza Acton describes fruit cômpotes as ‘delicate and agreeable preparations’. She recommends the cômpote to readers ‘already acquainted with them and to those whom may have a distaste to the common stewed fruit of English cookery.‘ Today, a carefully prepared compôte remains something we marvel at but are at a loss as to how to prepare. Many of the simple recipes for fruit cômpotes were superseded sometime in the middle of the twentieth century by those who like to complicate everything with such innovations as cooking fruit with lemonade or pear juice or artificial sweeteners. Stewed within an inch of their lives, these offerings doled out without ceremony with a scoop of the ubiquitous commercially made ice cream became the standard finale to many a midweek dinner in middle Australia.

I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to attend the New Zealand in a Glass public and trade tasting in Melbourne recently. These events are fantastic for several reasons: first, you get to taste a wide variety of wines (87 wineries pouring over 430 wines). Second, you get to taste a wide variety of wine styles (e.g., getting many takes on what a Chardonnay or Pinot Noir can taste like by different winemakers). Third, you get to meet and talk to the winemaker, which almost always adds some dimension or insight to the wine tasting experience. You get to hear the wine’s narrative, so to speak, which can propel your understanding of a wine a step or two up the knowledge ladder.

Much to the disgust of my lovely editor, I was right. Unfortunately for the balance of power in Casa Del Tribune, I was right about something that didn’t matter to her, but I’m still doing the “Whose house? Juzzy’s house!” dance at regular intervals, while rubbing the sports pages of various alleged newspapers against my groin.

Turns out I have more influence in the sporting world than I or anyone else had previously thought, because I finished last month’s column with the astoundingly accurate words “Brendon Fevola. That is all” and the Lions took it as an instruction. So hooray for me and ten bucks if you can guess whose name’s going into a similar sentence this month.