We're getting so used to seeing masked terrorists and other malefactors gracing our news that I wouldn't mind betting that's what you thought it was. No, it's just Mike studying his much-used underpants from the inside, as he is wont to do every decade or so. Read the whole unexpurgated story in this month's Pith & Wind below.

Mike's Pith & Wind - Underpants
I dropped into Target on Sunday to purchase some new underpants. It’s not something undertaken lightly by your average bloke, if indeed he’s left to his own devices in this area, because the average bloke’s average pair of underpants can last upwards of a decade, and things can change in ten years.
The modern system of measurements is a hurdle to begin with. I know it’s meant to be more convenient when you’re adding and dividing, but the metric system of measurement bears no relation to everyday reality compared to the good old mathematically illogical imperial system. The imperial system being based on some ancient royal personage’s idea of measurement, i.e. a foot was the length of his royal foot, means that you’ve something tangible to visualise. I still have no idea how high thirty metres is, but I know roughly how high a hundred feet looks, and a hundred and eighty two centimetres just doesn’t stack up to somebody six feet tall, an assertion backed up by the satisfying number of your modern sports’ commentators still preferring to describe footballers in feet and inches.
So, there I was in the Target men’s underpants department, trying to work out whether I should linger another decade in the L size (95 -100) and risk long-term constriction of my vital organs, or graduate to XL (110 – 117) and suffer the private indignity of droopy drawers.
After a lot of mental anguish and muttering.. read more

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Dick's Toolbox - The Three Monkeys
There can be few more appalling sights than the sycophantic self-congratulation of John Howard and President Bush in Washington in the middle of the month of May. Mind you it was difficult to see everybody’s mate John, not just because of his diminished stature, but also because he was so far up the President’s arse that he must have been able to see Tony Blair’s feet.
I am not the first to comment that what was conspicuously missing was any realistic or moral appraisal that the Coalition of the Willing might gotten things just a little wrong. It’s an achievement to overthrow a despised dictator and find, several years later, that majority of the liberated think that they would have been better off had it not happened. It requires gross moral laxness after the death of perhaps 140,000 civilians, insurgents and allied personnel, and the expenditure of upwards of $US435 billion, not to be concerned that ninety-nine per cent of read more