No New Kids On The Oz

Green shoots of recovery? I'll give you bloody green shoots - how can things be getting brighter when the New Kids are having to cancel their plans to tour Australia?

In a staccato blog post on the Web site of the reunited 1980s boy band, Donnie Wahlberg announced the bad news: "However -- we are, in fact, in the middle of a worldwide recession and we just cannot make it work. . . We can only assure you that when the recession's stranglehold on the world's economies eases up a bit -- we will find a way to make this work."

Yes, yes. The ticket sales are poor because of the state of the economy. Although how go-ahead would the Australian economy have to be before the people of that fine nation had so much cash to spare they'd buy tickets to see middle-aged men pretending to be the boy band they once were? I'm guessing that they'd have had to have discovered a river of gold cascading down the hills and so much oil you could draw it from the ground by sticking a drinking straw into the topsoil and sucking.