KEY POINTS:
It seems to start earlier every year: the countdown of shopping days until Christmas, the round of Christmas parties, the whole silly season.
The advent of summer, on the other hand, is still a matter of rumour and conjecture. There have been reported sightings in various parts of
the country but by the time the locals have put out the deckchairs and slipped into shorts and jandals, another cold front has swept in.
It's fitting that Don Brash should provide the first star turn of the silly season. Despite his obvious intelligence, he blundered myopically across the political landscape like Mr Magoo, the difference being that Magoo invariably emerged unscathed from the mayhem he precipitated.
Brash never learned how to play the game. His last act was to jump before he was pushed, thereby depriving the hunting pack of a kill. Denied his scalp, they elected to savage his political carcass rather than give him a decent burial.
The idea of the anti-politician, the amateur whose idealism hasn't been leached away by years of betrayal and shabby compromises and gnawing ambition, is a chimera. The media routinely heaps contempt on political animals for being true to their debased natures, but when an apolitical animal comes along, he or she is mocked for naivete and lack of political instincts, notably the killer instinct.
Brash could be described as an anti-anti-politician, someone who had most of the amateur's shortcomings and few of the professional's attributes. One can't help feeling that those seeking to portray this political duffer as Richard Nixon with a comb-over are drawing a long bow.
In show business, of course, it's always the silly season. To paraphrase Queensland's boast of endless summer, in Hollywood it's tacky one day and crass the next.
Where else but in Hollywood could a starlet - Lindsay Lohan - publish her letter of condolence to the grieving family of an industry great - Robert Altman, director of M*A*S*H and Nashville - apparently oblivious to the egregious grammatical errors ("I was lucky enough to of been"), the pompous sentiments ("Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of yourselves"), and the inappropriate, misspelt and therefore hilariously ironic sign-off: "Be adequite".
But even in year-round silly season, some days are better than others. Take the collapse of the Pamela Anderson-Kid Rock marriage. Show business is full of women with obviously fake breasts but no one has parlayed a career out of cosmetic enhancement as brazenly as Anderson.
Show business is also full of men with obviously fake names (John Wayne, Rock Hudson, Elton John) but none as risible as Kid Rock.
On the face of it, this was a perfect match. Yet the marriage lasted only four months, which works out at a month of married life per marriage ceremony.
You see, Master Rock and Ms Implants were so in love that a single ceremony simply couldn't do justice to their towering passion. Thus they were married on a yacht off St Tropez - it was a white wedding; the bride looked radiant in her bikini - and again in Detroit (Rock's home town), Nashville and Malibu. What about Las Vegas? I hear you ask. Don't worry, they played Vegas too - that's where Rock popped the question.
The death by radiation poisoning in London of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko may signal the start of the sinister season. Or perhaps that should be resumption: for veterans of the Cold War, there's a distinct echo of the 1978 assassination, also in London, of dissident Bulgarian writer Georgi Markov who was injected with ricin by a device concealed in an umbrella.
Three years later Pope John Paul II barely survived an assassination attempt in St Peter's Square. The gunman was a Turkish neo-fascist, Mehmet Ali Agca. An Italian Parliamentary Commission concluded that he'd been recruited by the Bulgarian secret service at the behest of their Soviet counterparts, the KGB, whose political masters in the Kremlin were alarmed by the Pope's links to and inspiration of Solidarity, the rebel trade union movement in his native Poland.
That was how the Soviet bloc dealt with defectors and those who stoked home fires from abroad. Litvinenko was an outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin, the former KGB man and relic of the Soviet system who seems increasingly inclined to run Russia the way the Communist gerontocracy ran the Soviet Union - with an iron fist and a harsh disdain for human rights and the rule of law.
And call it silly, surreal or sad, in the week when Auckland chose a ludicrously expensive enlargement of Eden Park in preference to a new national stadium on the waterfront, Paris unveiled the striking design of a $1.6 billion skyscraper, the centrepiece of the redevelopment of La Defense business district.
Let's face it, those French can't help themselves; they're suckers for the bold project, the dramatic gesture. Look what they've done to Paris - just one "sight" after another. No wonder the place is cluttered with people standing around gawking at things and getting in the way.
It makes you proud to be a New Zealander, doesn't it? No one could ever accuse us of having ideas above our station.
