FAQs

Isn't 'The Pike' a complete piss-take of Damien Broderick's 'The Spike'?

Yup.

Why do you call Sydney 'Devil Bunny City'?

(1) Thomas Townshend, Earl of Sydney, was known to his friends as 'Devil Bunny'.

(2) Pandaemonium (the capital of Satan in Paradise Lost)has acquired a new connotation over the years, Babylon would be unfair since Little Baghdad is my favourite part of Sydney, and any of the Cities of the Plain would sound homophobic, when that isn't my intention at all.

Is Tony Blair really a genetically modified salamander?

As is well known, the urodeles have the largest genomes of all vertebrates. Until recently, the reasons for this peculiarity were unknown. However, Capek and Voss (Genetics, 164(2):735-746 (2003)) have demonstrated that the unexpressed portions of the salamander genome code for a completely different morphology, a morphology which bears startling similarities to Tony Blair! Under appropriate conditions, the 'normal' promoters which lead to the expression of the regular salamander genes could be turned off, and alternative promoters activated to express the 'Tony Blair' genes. While the true story of Tony Blair's origins remains classified, it is probable that the erratic genius Wolfgang Clam was aware of the potentialities of the salamander genome by the mid-1980s, and generated both Tony Blair and his human cover identity before his descent into madness and evil.