Climate Prat of 2014 – We have a winnah!

Posted by Pointman on December 19, 2014 · 29 Comments 

Another year, an udder climate prat has to be crowned, if you’ll forgive the bovine reference because quite frankly, there’s been so many to choose from out of the herd this time around, but very few standout climaticus maximus candidati. In the whole history of the Pratties, we’ve never had so many people nominated and it must have been agonising to cull down the nominations to the final five run off candidates.

My personal favourite, my little chickadee, my darlin’ and my pretty little doxy prat Leonardo, was blinder pratted in at the last moment by the committee. I’d no direct hand in that. Perhaps a few ex-committee conversations, but that’s only fair.

I’m aware there have been some questions raised in certain quarters on what might seem to be a disproportionate representation by a certain country in the final straight, but believe me, the committee have been scrupulously fair in the administration of the competition this year. That’s not to say they’ve let themselves down in previous years but let’s not get into potentially litigious waters and anyway as end of year approaches, I think we should let bygones be bygones, who while they may do a smidgen of planetary collateral damage, do happen to build absolutely spiffing interstellar motorways.

I do pride myself that this blog is very inclusive, very internationalist and even seeks to build bridges with you mainlanders over the straits and us real people who aren’t clinically insane, but you’re making thing very difficult for me of late, you really are. Just try and be normal for a while, fake it if you have to, and I’ll hold back the islanders with their machetes and a dialogue can begin. There might be a few words I use which are a bit avant-garde for the OED but they’re all findable in this particular variation of a universe.

In traditional fashion, I’ll announce the results in reverse order, building up to the coronation of the one and only Climate Prat of 2014. Cue the orchestral Mantovani elevator muzac, emotion overflowing into tears, those interminable thank you diatribes, a hug from last year’s winner Dana as he passes the baton on and places the tiara on the winner’s carefully coiffured noggin with a hug and girly kiss, and an almost inaudibly muttered “bitch” under his breath. This year we’re having none of those massively, cringingly, head between your knees barfing acceptance speeches. I couldn’t take another one of those. Dear Lord no, never again. No more speeches.

Personally, I think it was very cruel that my Dana never even made it to a second final. I think there are people out there with the knives out for him but I’m not going to get bitter and twisted over it. However, I know who you are and where you live and I’ve a long memory, as those nice people from Greenpeace say when they’re not out and about vandalising world heritage archaeological sites.

Well, that’s enough of the prologue stuff, let’s get down and boogie.

Bringing up rear, as they say, we’ve Manny the Moobs. It’s his third time out of the traps in this competition and I’d have to say it’s showing. A tired old mare of a horse trailing a long way behind a younger and much more vibrant field of filles, he got through the nominations stage yet again but only attracted a measly 16 votes in the finals. Why didn’t somebody like Willy the Wiki make the cut? He’d have attracted some decent venom. I know it’s hard but let’s face it, when it comes to Manny, everyone knows Elvis left the building a few years ago. The smart money says he’s doomed to end up as a skid mark or at least a stain in someone’s underpants and no prizes for guessing whose linen that’ll be.

We had some deep humanitarian discussions in the committee about him and have decided to exclude him from next year’s competition, barring an almost miraculous return to form by an ageing Cinderella of warmist fairy tales. He’s going to have to do a lot better next year or no nominations for him will be accepted. Your heart goes out to a three time loser but sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind. You never know, he might like that sort of thing. I always felt so sorry for those poor little horsies in that opening scene. Their backs must have been raw – you wouldn’t get away with doing that sorta thing nowadays. Anyway, getting back on topic, Manny may come from that certain district of Sydney nobody wants to talk about, but I’m afraid he’s out of the running next year.

Beating Manny out of last place by two or so votes, we have Christine Milne, also known as prune face by her less than fond constituents in God’s great island of Tasmania. One day, those islanders are going to mine the Bass Straits to the mainland and shoot any refugees from the rest of Oz paddling in their direction. After some of the blowins they’ve had, I couldn’t find it in my heart to blame them really.

There are some dark and terrible rumours of packs of wild Tasmanian Devils being brutalised and trained way up in the remote mountains of the island’s hinterland to attack and rip to pieces green politicians. If you visit the darknet, there are some horrific videos of the poor creatures being goaded into a killing frenzy by cattle prods held in the hands of people dressed up as fading wannabe hippies and wearing the face masks of green politicians like prune face.

I totally disassociate myself from such actions; those people are not genuine skeptics. They’re just blowins; bleeding mainlanders pretending to be honest to goodness Taswegians. Mainlanders just wouldn’t know about how you have to starve them for a week at least before wafting in the smell of pork wrapped in lasagne verdi with a cheeky little aroma of café latte, à la mode the infamous Mezethes tavern in the centre of Hobart’s Salamanca market, where Letters of Transit to Lisbon can be obtained if you know the right people.

That’s where all the gentry hang out, but you do have to get past Stevie or Bethany to get to the player’s lounge in the back. Whisper the name Blackswan or Hillbilly and they’ll let you through the door, but don’t say you got it from me …

Anyway, on such a world stage competition, I feel she was too local a candidate and totally out of her depth. I suppose that’s the story of her life. After all, the divot she made at the bottom of the ugly tree was quite a deep one to climb out of, so she started with a disadvantage straight away. Let’s not be too judgemental or dare I say it, sexist.

Meh, it’s probably okay to be a bit naughty when it comes to her; she really does has the face of a dawg that’s been chasing parked cars all its life.

Next one up is Mr. 97% himself, John Cook. Another Queensland boy – don’t read too much into the name so no catcalls from you residents of that certain district of Sydney. I must confess, I’m totally at a loss to see why he made the finals. He actually hasn’t done much this year; no fetish Nazi uniforms thingy, nothing more statistically dodgy than last year but he does seem to have developed a cheesy Martin Bormann type of grin but perhaps that’s just my imagination. I think his collaboration with my beloved Dana might just be teaching him how to behave in polite company, or at least fake it. However, I do have serious concerns with Dana associating with such riffraff types.

Again, my feeling is he’s another survivor of the nomination’s round who really didn’t deserve to make it into the final. Compared to the previous winners who bestrode the competition like veritable Titans marching across the Earth, he’s a grinning pygmy nobody respects. Unlike Peter “identity thief” Gleick or my beloved Dana, he really is a nobody. Oh Dana, my Dana. Whatever happened to you this year?

Next up is Leonardo. Okay, we’ve received some straf over him and in all conscience, I feel I’ve got to take a bullet for the committee since I may have inadvertently heightened his profile in this prestigious competition and perhaps endangered its reputation. Granted, I hate the little shit and I may have acted inappropriately and appeared to have overly advocated his nomination, but I’m sure all the voters were already lacing up their bovver boots to give the prat a bloody good kicking anyway.

There was a slight difficulty centring about him at the nomination stage, but calling it a vote rigging scandal is somewhat overegging things I feel. It was a simple counting mistake, a mensuration mishap which I promptly corrected. It was the second irregularity concerning him which really put me into hot water with the committee.

It did actually look a bit tricky for me for a while but once I’d convinced the committee he was a son of Italian immigrants to Western Australia who’d left home for California to make his fortune, the heat was off me. I have a certain facility with words which I received in return for an impulsive kiss bestowed while hanging upside down by my heels from the battlements of Blarney castle, which has extracted me out of a number of potentially life-threatening situations.

It’s a creative use of available symbols, building that fabled post-modern narrative that strings apparently unconnected facts into a plausible storyline of causality and if it happens to save your butt, well, that’s a cherry on top or I suppose more appropriately the bottom. Anyway, if anyone asks, he’s actually a Sandgroper, a son of Western Australia to you foreigners. You heard it here first.

Right, get your barf bags ready because I need to share Leo doing a sucking up job to Wan Ki-Moon at the UN. First off, you have to watch this video. Please, resist the gag reflex and stay with it to the bitter end. Next up, you have to watch this one. Have you noticed the difference? No? Okay, let’s try it from a different angle.

Sorry, that was cruel but the only difference is the amount of red bits in whatever you’ve heaved. It’s all in the body language if you watch carefully, because he’s no idea about the lines or I suppose lies he’s delivering, which is why he’s entering that midlife crisis and making a complete fool of himself. A capering clown who feels the need to betray his own profession chasing some sort of respect. Having the useless gift of entertaining people is an honour, but once you start taking yourself seriously, you’re entering the dipshit zone.

The runner up is this guy Obama, who was supposed to be the president of the United States. Frankly, us poor Ockers in the outback are not that gullible, so don’t you ever think we don’t know when our plonkers are being pulled. Yeah, okay, I know, we’re country boys but we’re still clued up and know the difference between a Merino and a Meringue gripped between our knees. One needs shearing, the other needs eating. There are occasions when combinations of the two may apply but things can get a bit strange in the loneliness of the outback when there’s nothing but you, a lonely man who still has needs, and twenty thousand unattached sheep.

The curious thing about him was he wasn’t a son of the lucky country, but supposedly an American, which is suspicious in itself. I cashed in an old favour with this guy Marlowe to take a look into his background. It turned out there was some paperwork indicating he was born in Hawaii but there were some worrying discrepancies when you got down to details. Philip did a great job following a very sketchy paper trail across the world but finally arrived in Wallawoora in the Northern Territory.

It’s inconclusive but let’s just say things up there have always been a little bit different, even for Australia – and that’s saying something. It’s very sparsely populated, and I do mean very. There are more camels than sheep, which when you choose not to do the stepladder option, does cut down the procreation opportunities, never mind the odd bit of plaisir d’amour. To be honest, they’re all a bit Ozark Mountain hillbilly up there, even though the whole place is as flat as a witch’s left nipple.

You see one of them, you’ve seen all of them. You know the look; bronzed rippling muscles, long shorts down to the knees like one of Monty’s desert rats, going Commando style, hobnail boots, battered old hat with corks dangling off it on strings, swigging pint after pint of warm beer, a three day beard growth – and that’s just the wimmen. It’s not hard to imagine a little game of hide the didgeridoo being played between a blackfella and an obliging Sheila who wanted to be pampered for a change. You take what you can get, we all need a little loving.

As I said, it’s not conclusive but when you consider all his policies; Obamacare, saving the world from Gerbil Worming, preventing Detroit imploding, containing Vlad “no more territorial ambitions” the Expander, Michelle “no more Paris shopping trips in Airforce One” Obama, Benghazi, the plunging living standard of blue collar America irrespective of the colour of their ass and of course not forgetting flushing the American blood sacrifice in Iraq and Afghanistan down the toilet, not one of them hasn’t failed to round on him like a boomerang.

It’s an American tragedy which does make me angry and I find it’s too difficult to be funny about so much of that, so I won’t persist and choose to move on. Let’s just do it and hope for better times and some real leadership the year after next.

At last, we get to this year’s winner. This time last year, he’d already won the competition though nobody actually realised it. The ship of fools as it came to be called, sailed into Antarctic waters as a PR stunt to highlight a supposed biblical ice melt but bumped into the reality of an ice coverage which was mullering all records. It all went downhill from there but there was this horrific prolonged slowmo time-stretching quality about the whole fiasco that gripped a captive but at the same time aghast world of watchers. They’re just making it up, this can’t be happening, it really can’t. The horror, the horror …

It was truly fascinating but at the same time a touch voyeuristic to watch it slowly unfold over Christmas as we gnawed on a turkey leg. It was better than the usual seasonal rubbish on the TV and of course that most sublime of pleasures, a guilty one. One misjudgement led to another and the whole expedition gradually spiralled more and more out of control. Every day, it oscillated between potential tragedy and high comedy but it always seemed to amplify. Them managing to sink one of the two boats as they lowered it off the side of the ship to explore for penguins was an omen they really should have paid attention to.

I loved where the Captain told them to get back soon or the ship would be iced in and of course them ignoring him because they absolutely knew the Antarctic was melting, even though it’s a continent rather than an ice cube – yet another beautiful theory mugged by the usual brutal gang of facts. A little bit late by only a day or so, the good professor re-boarded the ship which by this stage was nicely iced in.

Cue the international distress calls as the ice started to do some radical slimming of the boat. Icebreakers from the various countries trying to stake out their own piece of Antarctica, tried valiantly to get to them but all were stymied by all that bloody ice that shouldn’t have been there. By the way, global warming is now predicted by some of the computer models to bring on a mini ice age in certain areas of the world like Minnesota and the poles. It’s become contra-intuitive like relativity theory; sky is green, grass is blue, okay?

We had to suffer a bit of blogging by Turney and a few propagandists trapped aboard with him. After a few days, they were all suffering from latte deprivation and so were forced down into the indignity of drinking Lapsang Souchong tea – they’d rather die than drink Earl Grey. Jesus wept, the pure inhumanity of it. I’d have to admit I was a bit conflicted at this point. On the one hand, I was cheering on the pack ice but on the other I knew the fool had brought his family along with him. I wonder if they’d paid the thousands of dollars the other guests on his expedition had? Even in the Mafia, the rule is you never involve family.

The pièce de résistance was the Guardian, in its usual over the top complete arrogance about the common sense of any sane readers, began to paint them as martyrs to the cause while the rest of the world was having a good snigger. Prof Turney became forever known as Prof. Turkey and the legend was born.

What’s truly impressive is that one gigunda brilliant fuckoff catastastroke like the Ship of Fools has reverberated down twelve solid months to get him crowned as this year’s Climate Prat. Genius, pure bloody genius I tell you. You would have got good odds on that. There’s even a rumour of a Ship of Fools sequel but I think we’re well back into plonker pulling territory again. Nobody in their right mind would finance that, but you never know with mainlanders.

Anyway, there you have it, the people have spoken, the Turkey is the climate prat of the year which seems more than appropriate at this moment. Enjoy it while it lasts Turney, I know my Dana, the once and future king will return to reclaim his rightful crown.

©Pointman

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There can only be one.

The Pratties 2014 – The race is on!

Climate Prat of 2013 – we have a winnah!

Climate Prat of 2012 – we have a winnah!

Description of a climate prat.

Click for a list of other articles.

Filed under Article · Tagged with Climate Prat Award, Humour