The Border Fail (and post without a point)

Occasionally, I check out the website for the Border Mail, the news rag in my home town. It's mostly for comedic value to read about small city goings on and to shake my head at the forum it seems to provide for some pretty terrible right-wing conservativeness (V8 car races? Stimulating the local economy! Gay marriage? Burn in Hell! New ALDI store? The most exciting event since the Queen visited! Climate Change? Unscientific tosh!). It's a shame that my grandmother has as her limited sources of "current affairs" the Border Mail, Readers' Digest Magazines and John Laws. No wonder we have so many arguments when I visit!

I think my Dad once said (or said that someone once said) that you only have to fart to get on the front page of the Border Mail. And you clearly only need the IQ of a sea cucumber to get a letter to the editor published. [Except, that is, for the guy who wrote a fake letter complaining that daylight savings was to blame for climate change. Following that, letter, a number of concerned local citizenry/climate change deniers all wrote completely ridiculous letters chorusing their agreement. Brilliant.] The letters pages are often a hoot and I get a kick out of reading them when I'm visiting the folks. There seems to be an inordinate number of people writing in to thank a kind stranger for finding their dog or wallet or keys, or not causing them to die on an emergency trolley in the local hospital, or giving their husband a bottle of water as he sat under a tree on a hot day while he waited for his wife in Lavington Square (this one was for real - Mrs Senior Citizen was no doubt shopping up a storm in Big W for some control briefs and a Copperart urn. Any sensible person knows to pass out under a tree in similar circumstances).

One of the funniest letters to the editor I've read recently was from some poor biddie who wrote in to thank the "kind couple" who minded her handbag by her poker machine at the Commercial Club while she went to attend the Members' Draw. These letters all seem to end with the same astonished conclusion that the writer didn't think that nice people like that existed anymore (probably because the population nowadays are all gay, lefty, global warming gullibles who can't wait to see "this great country going down the toilet").

So, anyway, back to the comedic value present in the BM - recently I noticed this story and the magistrate's comment at the end is classic understatement:

http://www.bordermail.com.au/news/local/news/general/i-was-just-airing-my-penis-not-flashing/1687116.aspx

Combine that with the story about the mother in jail on driving offences whilst pregnant with her 10th sprog, and you start to get a pretty bad impression of the place. I wonder if the handbag minders and dog finders and community quilters despair.

(This really wasn't a post intended to appear intellectually superior to readers of the BM, I just really wanted to point that story out. I would call it a pretext but can you have a pretext that appears at the end of a story? Hmm.)