While you were sleeping. A government obsessed by discussions of an irrelevant past and two identical creepy twins at the top of politics. No, it’s not news from the future, but from Poland, where PM Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s Law and Justice party has been turfed out. Kaczynski is a pudgy former TV child star who runs the country in concert with his identical brother, President Lech. It’s as if John Michael Howson was PM and the fat kid from Hey Dad was in Yarralumla. Jaroslaw was turfed because of his deeply unpopular law barring from public life any of the 30% or so of the population who had dealings with the secret police during the Communist era. Also too many references to Donald Horne in his speeches. Experts now believe Lech will shriek grotesquely and crumble to dust before their eyes.

For God’s sake put it in. That Turkey, a Hernani tease or what? Despite launching a range of airstrikes into northern Iraqi territory, it is still holding off on a full-scale raid, trying to pressure the US to pressure the Kurdish region government to do something about the PKK. The PKK is the tail that wags the Kurdish government dog that wags the US, desperate to keep intact the one stable part of Iraq. Effectively, the stoush – which the PKK want badly, to escalate the conflict – would be the last act of the Versailles Treaty. At that carve-up, the Kurds missed out because LLoyd George thought they smelt bad. They take the long view on nationhood, which is why they reckon on another few decades of skirmishing for greater Kurdistan, if necessary.

Come on I’ll have ya. Kid Rock’s waffle house brawl has nothing on the new season of London’s favourite sport – Martin Amis baiting – which is well into its third week. After heavy calibre marxist Terry Eagleton called him a racist turd – paraphrasing – for musing out loud about how it might be a good idea to harass the UK’s Muslim population as a collective until bomb plots stopped. Amis remarked that these thoughts were not a statement of policy, but “adumbrations” (non-core presumably). That brief moment of tactful rationality was soon dispelled when he appeared on stage at London’s ICA, smoked a cigarette (“stop me, I dare you”), said he was “more evolved” than Muslims and volunteered himself as a victim of suicide bombing. (In his dreams – he’ll have to write better again, before anyone wastes the peroxide). Much of the fuss is around Amis’s essay The Age of Horrorism whose title is, as someone remarked, “unintentionally hilarious. Got any more like that?” “Yes”, Amis replied. “How about ‘F-ck Off’?”