At the risk of stating the obvious, the danger of asking members of the public for their opinion is that they might just give it to you. This was illustrated perfectly in a recent edition of the Shepparton News, a regional Victorian tabloid.

A reporter and photographer ventured out into Greater Shepparton asking the following question for the newspaper’s “On The Street” section:

If you could learn another language, what would it be and why?

From the responses published, one can only assume (in order of likelihood) that:

1. The opinions editor has a wicked sense of humour
2. Of all the responses received, only six were (barely) fit to publish
3. There were only six respondents, and space and deadline constraints meant all of their answers had to be given a run.

A few stood out. The first was that of 38-year-old Stanhope resident Denise Bowyer who, despite possibly having told a porky-pie about her age, offered the following:

Japenese (sic) so I can understand most of them.

Either Stanhope has an enormous Japanese community whose Engrish is barely intelligible, or Denise believes all Asian-looking people (you know, the ones with the funny eyes) are Nips. I’ll let you decide which is more likely to be the case.

Clint Morris, a 14-year-old Mooroopna resident, puts an even finer point on Denise’s sentiment with his response:

Asian, because there are so many of them here.

Clint’s done away with the folly of trying to pin down these shifty immigrants to individual nationalities — and why not? Since they all look the same, it makes perfect sense that they’d all speak the same imaginary language.

Bill Huylands, 67, of Moama provided what, on the face of it, seems a reasonable enough response:

Spanish, because you can use it anywhere.

Except in Stanhope, of course, where the throngs of incorrigible little foreigners refuse to understand a word of anything but Japenese (sic). And would probably karate-chop you for your insolence anyway, amigo.

The most thoughtful response came from 12-year-old Steven Sutton of Invergordon:

Auslan, so I can understand deaf people.

A terrific answer. Which goes to show that youth need not be a barrier to commonsense and open-mindedness.

1) Sunrise
They love Channel Seven’s Sunrise at my gym. It’s on all the televisions and I can’t escape the brain cell-killing, journalism-defiling, populist mundanery when I’m there before work in the mornings. Last week I saw two things that had me groaning out loud:

* A news item voiceover went something like this: “A new survey reveals that Victorians are becoming more tolerant of Asians. It shows that we are more accepting of them in our communities.” The overlay pictures? A smiling white man purchasing groceries from a smiling Asian woman in a corner store.

* The sports “reporter” told us about his experience at the V8 Supercar launch the previous night, spending about 30 seconds on the cars and drivers and two minutes on the V8 Supercar XXXX dancing girls (complete with overlay footage of XXXX dancing girls consisting almost entirely of gratuitous closeups of the girls’ wiggling arses.) After the “reporter” threw back to Cocky Kochy we saw Mel holding her head in her hands. Kochy — being the SNAG we all know him as — asked the “reporter” to talk some more about the XXXX girls. So he did. For another minute. With the footage playing on a loop.

2) Cops with cultural awareness
Whilst walking my bike home the other day I witnessed Victoria’s finest displaying their celebrated cultural sensitivity. A cop on a motorcycle pulled over next to an Asian man in a car at the lights. The cop asked the man to turn left and pull over. The light turned green and the man drove straight through the lights and pulled over. The cop pulled up behind the man, got off his motorbike angrily and stormed up the driver’s window.

COP: (screaming) Why did you drive straight through the lights! I told you to turn left!
MAN: (confused) Uuuh…
COP: (still screaming) When a police officer tells you to do something you have to do it!
MAN: (confused) Uuuh…
COP: (getting hoarse) So if I told you to turn left why did you go straight ahead?
MAN: (panicking) Uuuh…
COP: (normal speaking volume) Um, do you speak English?
MAN: Uuuh…

3) ABC branding
ABC TV has introduced new logos to differentiate between its current and future television channels. As with everything else on ABC this idea has been imported from the UK’s BBC.

Now, watermarking (the faint or not-so-faint white translucent station logo in the corner of the screen) is not a new phenomenon but the ABC have started slapping the new logos on their stream at about 20% transparency and about 150% the size they should be. Fucking distracting, to say the least.

4) Cloverfield
Went to see Cloverfield last night. It was okay — not crap, not brilliant, just okay. The motion sickness thing that I’ve heard all about is totally true because I’ve never seen so many film walkouts in a non-film festival film. I reckon easily a dozen people left, including the girl sitting next to me (not McBec, who was sitting the other side of me.) This poor woman felt so crap that she emptied her giant popcorn on the ground and held the empty container under her face for a while before getting up to leave.

I’ve got to admit that I felt a bit woozy at times and even had to close my eyes once or twice when the handycam wobble got a little bit too much for me. However, McBec, who is the ultimate carsick chick, didn’t feel a thing!

5) Orthographic fascism
When we got home from Cloverfield we watched the end of Ghostbusters on Channel Ten (great film) and the first twenty minutes of Bad Boys just to laugh at Will Smith’s ’90s haircut and Martin Lawrence’s ’90s clothes. In this time I noticed two errors:

* A sign at the entrance to a helipad read: “Authorization Personnel Only”
* A title on a computer screen read: “Guards desk”

I’m so anal I disgust even myself.