Stroppy Git Award for Meaningless Twaddle 2026

Standard

First of all… I’m sorry! For a full year I have not delighted my followers with a post. I can imagine the mental anguish this has caused, and I appreciate your forbearance. I’ve had not a single complaint, moan or remonstration, which speaks well for the good nature of Stroppy-lovers the world over.

Now to this year’s Stroppy. We certainly haven’t been short of meaningless twaddle, and I could have compiled the longest shortlist in the history of awarding. But I confess to favouring discretion over valour. If Donald Trump was willing to launch a trade war against Norway over not getting the Nobel Peace Prize, I asked myself, “What might he do to Linden Park?!”

The Nobel Committee probably had some lame excuse ready, like “How in God’s name could we give a peace prize to someone who’s arming the perpetrators of a genocide?” I can’t come up with any excuse not to give the Donald this year’s Stroppy Git Award for Meaningless Twaddle.

Photo credit: Associated Press [This is the FIFA cup, by the way, not the Stroppy.]

Peace Prize

Standard

Do you remember Tom Lehrer? He was a mathematician and satirist in the 1960s and 70s (Vatican Rag, Poisoning Pigeons in the Park…).  When Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, Lehrer remarked that political satire was now obsolete.

I had the same feeling in 2015 when Tony Abbott, then Prime Minister, announced an Australian knighthood for Prince Philip. But the Government of the People’s Republic of China has gone one better by awarding the Confucius Peace Prize (the Chinese alternative to the Nobel-branded one) to Robert Mugabe.

Robert Mugabe. The one in Zimbabwe.  Not a typo.