It led the news cycle briefly on Friday afternoon: credible witnesses telling Fairfax Media that Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce had such a heated exchange with a 60-year-old female constituent that Joyce loudly told her to "piss off" no less than three times and a female bar worker even stepped in between them.
Twitter quickly filled with condemnation, or at least my feed did, and in the comments beneath the Fairfax piece, readers were equally full of outrage. 
The flareup occurred "after a heated exchange over mining in a pub", prompting reader Steve Williams to protest that when they are reducing to mining in a pub, nothing is sacred any more ... but I digress!
My point is this. Even though I take the point of most of the Twitterati and commenters that - whatever the rights and wrongs of who was hassling who - it was conduct unbecoming of a Deputy Prime Minister, my reckoning is that rather than hurt Joyce's overall popularity in Australia, it will help it.
In this country we, mercifully, don't have a Donald Trump figure, but when it comes to leaving the script behind, Joyce can resemble him, and it is precisely because of that authenticness - of sounding like us, and talking like us - that he has risen to the rank of Deputy PM.
His schtick is that he tells it like it is. Wider Australia loves it.
Whether or not it will play well with the rather more genteel electors of New England, however, is another matter ...
In my sights
My thanks for all the correspondence from all you Fairfax readers, regarding my item on the hideousness of the upper house member Robert Borsak's boasting of having shot elephants at six paces, and eating them.
I received 98 per cent support, and the only correspondence that disagreed was predictably written in crayon. The best response of the lot, however, came from a comment written below the piece, from a reader.
"I think shooters should hunt each other in special reserves," "Boukefalos" wrote. "This would add a lot more excitement and greater skills to the thrill of hunting. Those who survive could feel very smug in the knowledge they've done their bit for animal conservation and the ones that are killed would die similarly happy. This would also give them an appreciation of what the animals must feel when they are hunted, as hunters say they like to bond with their prey."
Brilliant. Serious question for all you big bully-boy hunters who call it sport to shoot defenceless animals - who, like the execrable Borsak, think you can prove your "manliness" in this manner? How many of you would venture into the bush, into the jungle, to slaughter animals, if you knew there was even one chance in a hundred that one rabbit was in there with a small calibre revolver to fire back at you?
Crickets. You cowards.
You heard me.
Not a winner
You know those films that look so absolutely fabulous in the trailers that you go to see them, only to find that the producers really have plucked the best 90 seconds out of the two hours, and there really isn't much left over after that?
Well, Money Monster, with George Clooney and Julia Roberts, which I saw with Mrs TFF last weekend, was like that.
The premise was fascinating, the set-up pretty strong, but, somehow ... it just didn't quite work. Jodie Foster is a fabulous actor, but as a director, I'm not sure that brilliance is matched. (Mind you, my view might be coloured by the fact that when I interviewed Foster in 2007 at the Park Hyatt, I had the distinct impression I must have had dog poo on my shoe throughout, so spectacularly did her nose wrinkle. But, no, it was just me!)
Joke of the week
In late 1996, just after Bill Clinton had beaten Bob Dole in the presidential election but before the inauguration, Bill and Hillary are in the presidential motorcade just leaving Little Rock, Arkansas, heading back to the airport, where Airforce One is awaiting to take them back to Washington.
As they pass by a tiny, dingy garage on the edge of town, just as dusk falls, Hillary points it out and says, "You see that garage, Bill? I used to go out with the man that owns that garage."
Wryly amused, the President chortles and says, "That is amazing, Hillary! Just think, if you had married him, you'd be the wife of a garage proprietor."
"No, Bill," Hillary says firmly. "If I'd married him, he'd be president."
Twitter: Peter_Fitz