A Vaucluse reader's morning routine took an unexpected turn this week after she opened her plastic-wrapped newspaper on Monday 12 October and discovered that someone had carefully cut out a front-page photograph of Ben Roberts-Smith. The excision was precise, removing only his image and leaving the rest of the page entirely intact, raising the question of just how many copies may have received the same treatment from an unknown hand somewhere along the delivery chain.
Sue Lyall of Vaucluse described the cut as "carefully done so that no other part of the page was cut or missing," and wondered aloud whether other readers had unwittingly received similarly edited editions. It is not clear at what point in the distribution process the alteration was made, though the meticulous nature of the trim suggests a deliberate act rather than accidental damage.
Wordplay takes centre stage
Beyond the mystery of the censored photograph, readers this week turned their attention to the joys and peculiarities of the English language, producing a small avalanche of neologisms and rhetorical puzzles.
Nick Bencsik of Hunters Hill posed the question of whether one could exist in a state of simply being "whelmed" if neither over nor underwhelmed. Phil Edwards of Denistone East took the thread further, noting that years of reading had left him neither bewildered nor flustered, and asking whether that qualified him as "combobulated."
Col Burns of Lugarno rounded out the wordplay with a discovery about the word "gruntled," explaining that the prefix "dis" was historically assumed to be a negative marker when in fact it was not. Burns concluded that a pig suffering from laryngitis would, at least, have genuine reason to feel "literally disgruntled."
On a lighter academic note, Jack Dikian of Mosman offered a timely word of encouragement to HSC students, expressing hope that their Atari gaming scores would not somehow be mistaken for their ATAR results.
A bogong moth observation and Parisian crepes
Mickey Pragnell of Kiama brought a rural curiosity to the conversation after noticing something unusual while driving past local cattle herds over the weekend. Bogong moths appeared almost magnetically drawn to dark-coloured cattle resting in the paddock, while lighter-coloured animals, which were moving around more freely, attracted none at all. Pragnell's explanation arrived in the form of a pun: "a strolling roan gathers no moths."
Meanwhile, Agostino Chiarella of Summer Hill was transported back twenty years to a Parisian footpath near Notre-Dame Cathedral, recalling a restaurant that had set up an outdoor stall at night selling crepes Suzette, flambeed with Grand Marnier and served on paper plates. Close by, someone was roasting chestnuts on a metal garbage can lid balanced on a shopping trolley. Chiarella described both as "the finer things in life."
Small world connections across decades
Edward Loong of Milsons Point spotted two familiar names in a recent column and used the opportunity to reach across time. He recalled knowing a Barry Wooldridge at school in Parramatta in the late 1950s and wondered whether the name that appeared in print was the same person. He also noted a connection to Coral Button, whose husband had practised as a solicitor in Parramatta in the 1970s at the same time Loong himself was doing so, though the two had never actually met. "Small world?" he asked, a sentiment that neatly captured the week's recurring theme of unexpected connections, whether through a censored photograph, a shared craving for crepes, or a pig with a sore throat.
