From Anthony Ackroyd

This year marks the 30th anniversary of my becoming a professional comedian. To answer your unspoken question, no, it's not too late to send congratulations, flowers or a lucrative fast food endorsement offer.
Performing comedy, particularly stand-up comedy, is hard. It requires an unusual level of perseverance to develop whatever talent you have in the face of immediate visceral feedback coming in the unequivocal form of laughter or its absence. Honing jokes, structuring material, mining subject matter and perfecting delivery is the work of a lifetime.
Does the prank call qualify as comedy? My answer is, barely. In terms of comedic accomplishment, I would place prank-calling just above mocking someone with a lisp.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/what-the-world-needs-now-are-these-20121220-2bp9l.html#ixzz2FdFGZLXR
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From the real news...

Poor old Saint Nicholas.
Not only does he face the dilemma every year of trying to please the world's children on December 25, but now he's at the centre of a break-up.
There are fears this could affect preparations for Monday night's mass present drop-off, after months of painstaking planning.
For the past five years, the North American Aerospace Defence Command has worked with Google Maps to track Santa Claus' movements as he travels across the world.
But this year is different. Google has ended its arrangement with the command and set up its own Santa tracker.
Google promises on Christmas Eve to showcase a preview of Santa's dashboard, sent from one of Father Christmas' developer elves.
The command - which has tracked Santa as he moved across the globe since 1955 - has now joined Microsoft's search engine, Bing, to provide its service.
There is also a NORAD Tracks Santa app, a YouTube Channel and pages on Facebook [with one million "likes"] and Twitter [with 95,000 followers]

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/is-santa-tracker-fracas-blitzen-the-deliveries-20121220-2bo1o.html#ixzz2FdDt3ICK

But the way many men have expressed their dissatisfaction with her says more about them than it does it about her.

Whether it was Alan Jones' ill-judged remarks about her recently deceased father; the pornographic caricatures drawn of her by a sniggering and drooling Larry Pickering; or comedians and their largely male audiences at corporate functions tittering into their desserts over lame, sexist jokes, the Prime Minister has been ground zero for a barrage of unresolved masculinity issues.

Actually, it is attempts at humour that often carbon date someone's emotional age with clinical accuracy.

You think Juliar is clever? Really? That 'Ditch the Witch' is a hilarious rhyme rather than revelatory of your stunted emotional development? That photoshopping Peter Slipper to look like a rat on the front page of your major daily newspaper (three times!) is behaviour becoming of a responsible adult?

I mean, we all have our moments of silliness, and a bit of levity in the public sphere is a good thing, but I'm talking about the reflexive fallback on primary-school humour by grown men who in the same breath demand that we take them seriously.

There have also been the endless incidents of 'mansplaining' - where blokes use their public position to explain to women what they (women) should really think about a given issue - and The Australian newspaper has provided a haven for such condescending, punkish behaviour.

As well, there have been some graphic examples of women in public forums being disrespected and belittled by the men with whom they share a panel.

Catherine Deveny was judged rude and overbearing for her responses to Archbishop Peter Jensen on Q&A, despite the fact that she was actually given far less time to speak than he was.

Federal Minister Kate Ellis was treated like dirt on the same program by Lindsay Tanner, Christopher Pyne and Piers Akerman, who alternated between interrupting her and ignoring her.

Of all the witless stand-up comedy scriptwriters for praising Tony Abbott, one can't go pass the likes of Paull Kelly at The Un-Australian... It smacks of comical adulation that one would have hoped Paul Kelly —I believe to be an intelligent man — was BETTER THAN THAT... But no, like a little poodle to Uncle Rupe, Kelly writes this crap:

Abbott romanticises his days at Oxford - the friends, study, beer and boxing. He thrives on self-mocking stories about colliding with the British class system and offending the academic sensibilities. Listening to him one thinks immediately of Bob Hawke at Oxford, causing trouble and breaking beer-drinking records.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/columnists/tony-abbott-throws-a-right-hook-and-leads-with-his-chin-on-values/story-e6frg74x-1226542052564

This is only the beginning of not so faint praise for Abbott who is in fact a little shit... But then, I may be biased here... Actually I don't need to be biased, all I need is to look at Tony's record... which shows he is a little shit...