IN a week when Australia is still unofficially on summer holiday, the past week's news headlines have been unusually pungent.
And they've come in pairs.
The big death of the week was the conservative Catholic Cardinal George Pell at the age of 81.
But the same day, the revolutionary English rock guitarist Jeff Beck also passed beyond the vale, aged 78.
That makes them contemporaries.
And for all of Pell's robed magnificence, I'd wager Beck - whose 1968 album Truth, with Rod Stewart and Ron Wood beat Led Zeppelin to the heavy metal punch by a good six months - had the greater influence.
Then on Thursday we were confronted with the sight of a contrite Premier Dominic Perrottet, begging public forgiveness for wearing a Nazi uniform to his own fancy-dress 21st birthday.
Fearing imminent disclosure, he went on the front foot to manage the fallout as best he could.
That included going cap in hand to the Jewish community to beg forgiveness, because any reference to Nazi Germany that is not one of outright condemnation is automatically taken to be a slight on Israel.
I don't see any evidence of that here, and I don't see how what he wore to a party 20 years ago is materially relevant to his running of the state.
The same can't be said, however, for Perrottet's "pair" in the indiscretion stakes, recently elected Republican Senator George Santos, under pressure to resign after the New York Times caught him fictionalising his CV.
For reasons as yet unclear, he claimed his maternal grandparents were Ukrainian Jews who fled the Holocaust to South America.
He said he attended an elite prep school, had a college degree and had worked for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs.
Little or any of it appears to be true, and Santos looks to be cold meat before his political career could get going.
And rightly so. Anyone with that sort of cavalier attitude to truth clearly has no place in public life.
Still in the old US of A, the Democrats who were baying for Donald Trump's blood over the caches of classified documents that the FBI pulled out of his Key Largo resort after raiding it last year are well and truly on the back foot after news broke of another stash of classified documents accumulated by President Joe when he was Deputy President to Barack Obama.
I sense contrasting attitudes in the way the two cases have been reported, with multiple media outlets running "explainer" pieces outlining as many differences as they can between the two, with the aim of maximising Trump's culpability and minimising Biden's.
The first tranche of Biden documents were reportedly found when staff at the University of Pennsylvania's Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement were moving out of their Washington DC premises.
A second batch has also emerged, this time from an as-yet undisclosed location.
Who doesn't take work home, nowadays?
The problem I see is that the more that governments stamp things "classified" - or "cabinet in confidence" for even routine things here - the less the public gets to know about the things being done in its name.
At the same time, the pressures on an obviously ageing - and apparently error-prone - President Biden are steadily mounting.
There's no doubt Trump is a grade A goose who was way out of his depth as the putative leader of the free world.
But the "Russiagate" investigation fizzled out from lack of evidence that Trump had done anything wrong, and yet when it came to the "Hunter Biden laptop" story that broke in the lead-up to the 2020 election, we have since learned that the US intelligence community worked with tech companies including Facebook to suppress the circulation of an issue that had the potential to rock the Democrat campaign to the core.
The irony of the Democrats dissing Trump for doing business in Russia when Joe Biden's son was using his father's name to do the same thing in Ukraine seems obvious enough from where I sit.
This week's final "pair" are two of Australia's richest people, Andrew "Twiggy" Forrest and Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes, who have fallen out after a mega-renewables project they are both backing - the Sun Cable "Powerlink" between the Northern Territory and Singapore - went into administration.
Both businessman have put their money where their mouths are as far as renewables are concerned.
Cannon-Brookes by wresting control of Bayswater/Liddell owner AGL, and Forrest by backing various hydrogen projects.
A recent Washington Post piece on Forrest points to the "unmatched" subsidies now available to hydrogen entrepreneurs.
As far-reaching as Sun Cable might be, it seems to me to raise an obvious question of national interest, if not outright sovereignty.
With the inherently intermittent nature of solar power meaning we need a much larger latent grid capacity to make renewables work, surely the power we generate here should stay in Australia.
We are indeed an energy-exporting country, but the present gas industry imbroglio - where we are short of affordable product despite being one of the world's top gas producers - is surely a relevant warning.
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