Kevin Rudd's world tour might be over, but his fingerprints were everywhere this week. Clearly emboldened by his receipt of a campy faux salute from Kevin Rudd a fortnight ago in Bucharest, the American President himself this week experimented with the Rudd tactic of high-level informality - on the Pope. 

"Thank you, your holiness. Awesome speech!" George Bush congratulated Il Papa, after the latter's Washington oration on the importance of moral values to democracy.Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister, seems also to have learnt something from his brief exposure to the Ruddbot; he is due to confer on Monday with the pop singer Shakira, from whom he will harvest ideas on how to provide every Third World child with a primary school education by 2015. 

And how do we reconcile, within this matrix of facts, the additional disclosure yesterday that the Russian President, Vladimir "Pecs" Putin, has left his wife for an acrobat half his age who, if photographs can be believed, is capable of placing her left ankle effortlessly behind her neck? 

Talking About A Kevolution