It’s an amusing time of year in the media, where the competent and/or established writers are away on holiday and the airwaves and papers and blogs are instead filled with the wittering of the B team (don’t worry, Dave will return in the new year). The sort of ridiculous drivel that you’d never see during the rest of the year*.

Let’s savour the silliness, Pure Poisoners, sharing the more absurd productions that slip past the holiday subeditors.

To get us started, here’s one from News, and one from Fairfax.

News has this link-baiting report on left-wing vs right-wing brains. Which they get wrong in the very headline:

A thick brain means you’re right wing

…Self-proclaimed right-wingers had a more pronounced amygdala – a primitive part of the brain associated with emotion – while their political opponents from the opposite end of the spectrum had thicker anterior cingulates – the section in the middle of the brain.

In other words, each end of the spectrum had a more developed part of the brain, not a “thicker” brain overall. But great trolling headline for the AAP piece.

And Fairfax publishes this silly exercise in stereotyping, inventing an arbitrary “junior intellectual” class of alcoholic Q&A watchers filled with envy for their better-off “bogan” countrymen. See, anyone who fights racism or homophobia or other forms of discrimination is really just motivated by jealousy of and snobbish contempt for people who don’t recognise their moral superiority. The only reason anyone objects to locking up refugee children in detention is because they hate “bogans” who enjoy “Border Patrol”. Of course!

What other particularly Silly Season efforts have you seen?

*Yeah, we know.