Schmaltz on wry

Next cab off the rank was the restaurateur in Brisbane who designed the Liberal fund-raiser menu offering Julia Gillard-themed quail with the hilarious remarks about breasts, thighs and red box.

Gillard, whose sole point of identification with Holger Osieck may be that she knows an open goal when she sees one, was quick to issue a prime ministerial ”I told you so”, which immediately unleashed a horde of gumshoe detectives seeking to establish that the PM’s office had either invented the whole thing or planted the story after her sexism speech in order to corroborate her point.

By the end of the week, there were some who felt that the offence to the men who attended the dinner and were the subjects of the Prime Minister’s outrage was somehow greater than the original offence to the Prime Minister herself.

Which is right about the point at which, I think, Australian politics might have officially disappeared up its own fundament.

Imagine if we had a black prime minister, and the menu concerned had made some hilarious joking reference to, I don’t know, Coon cheese or something. Would anyone be hunkering down over the chain of events and working out whether the whole thing had been massaged for political advantage?

- A little more respect, a little less Latin, right?

Tumblr also faces other challenges, notably content rights and pornography. Karp is sanguine. “Porn used to 
be about 10 per cent of all our traffic, now it’s around three to five per cent,” he says. “I’m not into moderating this stuff. Tumblr’s an excellent platform for porn, which I personally don’t have any moral opposition to.

-

Tumblr’s David Karp interviewed on GQ

Wonder how Tumblr’s attitude to porn will change now with Yahoo involved.