Multiple roles for Peter Sellers. Peter Sellers did a rather frighteningly humorous Dr Strangelove. He did an amusing Indian accent too as the doctor saying “goodness gracious me” as Sophia Loren sang boom boody-boom boody-boom boody-boom.

It is a pity he is not around to play a role in the world’s latest real life nuclear horror story. At least he would make us laugh at the saga of the hoax telephone call which this week brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. I am staggered at just how little coverage this story has received in the Australian press. Frighten youself by having a look at the original version in the Pakistan newspaper Dawn.

Cold food for Andrew and Piers. The liberal-leaning Guardian might not be the normal British newspaper of choice for News Limited columnists Andrew Bolt and Piers Akerman, but they both should soon be quoting from it, for on Friday it carried a story that is right up the alley of climate change skeptics. “2008 will be coolest year of the decade” said the headline above a report on a preliminary estimate of global average temperature that is due to be released this week by the Met Office. Both Messrs Bolt and Akerman have drawn attention to temperatures as calculated by the British Met Office being lower than the peak reading of 1998 from then until 2007. The 2008 reading will provide them with further ammunition with which to question the whole notion of global warming.

The Guardian itself was at pains to quote Dr Peter Stott, the manager of understanding and attributing climate change at the Met Office’s Hadley Centre, saying the relatively chilly temperatures compared with recent years are not evidence that global warming is slowing. “Absolutely not,” said Dr Stott. “If we are going to understand climate change we need to look at long-term trends.”

Readers can draw their own conclusion about the long term trend from the graph.

For my own part, I note that 2008 will still turn out to be warmer than any year in the 1980s, but with growing doubts about the capacity of the countries of the world to reach agreement on curbing greenhouse gas emissions, I live in hope that there is something more than a temporary halt in that upward trend line.

The meanest rich wine customer I ever had. I guess it was the early 1980s when John B. Fairfax brought back the boxes of Penfolds wine casks and got a refund. My brother and I, after many years of being a major local advertiser in The Canberra Times, had decided to give the Franklins approach of cutting the ads and putting the savings into lower prices. We took out a full page ad in the Wednesday paper (my memory is hazy as to the exact date) explaining the change in approach and the next day John B. Fairfax pulled up his Mercedes outside Farmer Bros at Manuka and carried in a couple of boxes of Penfolds wine 4.5 litre casks and demanded a refund. If we were not going to advertise with him, the then young managing director of the Canberra Times insisted, he was not going to drink wine bought from us.

Now these wine casks were no longer being made by Penfolds. Production had ceased well over a year before, probably two, and his purchase had been part of a farewell special at a real giveaway kind of price. Like all casks of that time (and I guess it still applies, although it is a long time since I have drunk from an old one) the shelf life of this wine in a box before beginning to oxidise and turn slowly into something like vinegar was six months at most. This returned lot were well and truly at the undrinkable stage and as we gleefully refunded the money to this leading member of the Fairfax media empire, we could but be thankful that we had never been invited to his house for dinner.

Until that day, it had not occurred to me that a millionaire member of a famous family who, after doing his management apprenticeship at the Canberra outpost, was clearly destined for greater things in the newspaper business, would have been so lacking in taste as to actually drink wine from a cask. That he would buy large quantities of casks on special in the first place, apparently ignorant that they would become undrinkable within a few months, just showed me that meanness comes in many forms and good breeding does not overcome it.

I mention this inconsequential little tale because John B. Fairfax is now being spoken of as the likely next chairman of the once again publicly listed Fairfax newspaper empire. Any journalist who thinks that a return of a Fairfax family administration might herald a return to an interest in quality should think again. Rule by the penny pinching and tasteless John B. Fairfax would presage grim times indeed to some once great newspapers.