A Wednesday compilation

* The amazing adventures of Kevin Rudd: Last week, Labor figures were saying "no, no, no, the Japanese don't think we have snubbed them." This week, the PM being questioned at length about this in Japan (by Japanese journalists) makes that argument just a little hard to sustain. And is it really a good idea to come across as a smart arse by saying "well, you didn't visit us either."?

Andrew Bolt has covered well the silliness of giving money to Toyota to do what they were going to anyway. I expect the next question time in Parliament will go on about this at length, and rightly so.

* Crab scam: Also in Japan, the fraud is of a fairly esoteric nature. Read about the great Japanese crab scammers here.

* A new way of saying "when Hell freezes over": "when Tim Blair becomes a hypermiler": Wired has an article about "hypermilers" (being people who have become obsessed with driving in such a way as to get maximum fuel economy from their cars.) Some of the methods are just nuts:

Fulton routinely gets 55 mpg from his 1997 Toyota Paseo, a car the EPA rates at 29 mpg. He started hypermiling about 18 months ago when he landed a new job 37 miles from home and got tired of burning so much gas. He mastered "pulse and glide" -- turning off the engine and coasting while driving. "This technique alone dramatically increased my mileage from 38 mpg to 47 mpg on my first tank," he says. "I was blown away."

Well, let's just sit back and wait for the first manslaughter conviction for a hypermiler who couldn't use his power steering to help avoid a deadly collision.

* Indiana Jones and the Green Left Weekly: Just what you were waiting for: a socialist left critique of Indiana Jones! The reviewer complains:

The indigenous people who help Indy in his exploits are sympathetically portrayed, but those who resist are seen as ignorant and superstitious. And some really nasty racism rears its ugly head.

An audience survey of the most popular scenes in Raiders revealed that most people’s favourite scene was when Indy guns down a sword-wielding Egyptian man with a pistol in a crowded square. What if the situation was reversed and a sword-wielding white man was gunned by an Arab? Would it still be the public’s favourite scene? I don’t think so.

That's what I like about the po-faced Left: the way they attempt to crush the simple enjoyment out of life. (It is also analysis like this that made the first Austin Powers movie very funny. You know - the part where suddenly the movie veers into looking at the effect on the bad guys' families after they're killed.)