Gradually solving the world's problems

Those of you who saw The Gruen Transfer the other night - and I obviously didn't, which is why I'm writing about it now - will have noticed the ad for Superbet, in which a chap walks into a Tab or somewhere like that and concludes that he doesn't want to sit down next to the smelly older working class men, and decides to go and waste his money online instead. This was targeted, the expert in the loud t-shirt explained, at young men who want to waste their money but don't like smelly old men. A logical premise, then, reasonably argued, with perfectly ethical goals in mind, like all advertisements.

But anyway, it struck me then, and strikes me now, that this provides people who are looking into the problem of online gambling addiction with a perfect method of deterrence. Concerned about young people losing all their money gambling online? Solution: send out an army of smelly old men into their flats, their homes, their university colleges, and their bedrooms to counsel them at length about their problems. If by some miracle enough smelly old men cannot be found, an army of, say, young women who have rubbed themselves all over with footballer's socks and painted their face with grease from the underside of their cars could substitute. But I'm sure you could get plenty of smelly old men to participate - just give them a year's supply of VB, or something like that.

On second thoughts, maybe not: we wouldn't want to encourage the rise of counselling in this society. Already, counsellors have reached endemic levels in many parts of this country, and we cannot do enough to battle this scourge which is striking at the very heart of Australian life.

Forget I said anything, then.