And that’s just the March/April edition. Online you can test your nerve on the quiz link, trying to sort the utterances of Angelina Jolie versus Mahatma Gandhi, which is no walk in the park, believe me. Take these two:

“I believe in equality for everyone – except reporters and photographers,” said Gandhi.

I think we all want justice and equality,” purred Jolie, “a chance for a life with meaning.”

Get trickier. And get lost in the homepage’s Lists as well. My nugatory heart raced on seeing such headings as:

10 Doughnut Facts

8 Female Serial killers

6 Great Art Fakes

5 TV Shows that Predicted the Future.

You’re getting the Floss feel by now. If you enjoy succulent morsels of no consequence, savour here. As for the cover story – 25 Most Powerful Books of the Past 25 Years – that’s gonna need its own counterargument on this blog soon.

Just to explain, the rugby was part of the Australian Masters, a mock-Olympics for onshore tragics over 40 years old. As a diehard rugby nut, slow to let the code go, I’ve taken to the touch version like a seagull to a soggy chip, playing when the knees allow in a local Melbourne comp most Sundays.

Of course one thing leads to another – my team of fellow patricians opting to submit our squad into the geezer tourney in Geelong last weekend. And damn if we didn’t win the whole caboodle.

Undefeated, I should add. Because as one comrade mentioned, “We may not be playing for sheep stations, but the male ego is roughly the same size.”

Anyhow, the phone call. I’m slumped in the passenger seat, an ersatz medal around my neck, my calf in traction, an Egyptian coil of dressing on the right patella, when the blip-blip starts.

Hello?

Right now, that’s all I got…

So it transpires, Sunday Life magazine is keen to run a feature focusing on a special art exhibition. Not the Archibald, or Picasso’s Blue Period at the Domain, but ordinary garden-variety blokes, all over 40 in fact, each one responding to a singular topic. Pastels. Oils. Abstract. Self-portraits. The range is wide as the theme is narrow.

The topic? The male menopause, or midlife crisis. The sort of thing that prompts a weekend warrior to imagine he’s far younger than his hamstrings suggest, daring to hare about a dusty oval in Geelong….

At least I have the scars – and golden bling – to prove I survived the folly. Look for the art story sometime in April, and my retirement from active sporting duties perhaps a little sooner.

Jeez that phrase went close to making the Gold-Class Googlers for 2007/2008. However, after close consultation with the snickometer, the umpire has plumped for this lot. Howzem?

The Ten Weirdest Key-Words To Lead To This Blog

Canyon Country Dental Insurance

Nonirritant

A random sample of some single keywords that have unlocked this blog over the last calendar year. Yet none cuts the mustard compared to the following bunch of esoterica, each inquiry bringing you browsers this way.

As you can see, the last post was the Bronze Googlers, while today is the odder set of search terms. Congratulations to all of the culprits responsible – I think. Truly, what the hell was going through your heads?! Here they be:

Women milked like cows

Fluoro pingpong ball

Just a taste of the keywords that you crazy surfers have used to chance by Cassowary Crossing over the last year. Yet none qualifies among the 30 strangest.

As you’ll see.

Today’s Bronze Google Medals are devoted to the less-than-common search terms used over the last 12 months. In coming posts I’ll be handing out Silver and Gold for the odder and oddest terms respectively, each bizarro cluster somehow arriving at this humble http. Don’t ask me how.

“Jacqueline, the envelope please”¦”

Taiwan waffle maker

My ten-minute play, The Mercy Kitchen is due to run on December 20 at The Arts Centre in Melbourne, a matinee show featuring the weird, the wild and the occasionally subtle Short & Sweet Wildcard winners. Come support the fest, and let your voice be heard on the end-of-show ballot paper.

And speaking of theatre, the answer to the Romp poem from last week, was HER MAJESTY’S THEATRE, taking the first letter from the first line, second from the second and so on. While I did crack it – pre-reveal – as my mate Beck will attest – I didn’t figure on that pesky ‘apostrophe’ warranting its own special place in the code. How’d you go?

[If none of the last paragraph made sense, scroll back a few posts and look for the cryptic doggerel in bold.]

In a day or two – the literature that soldiers take to war. (We’re not talking bazooka manuals here, but novels.) Any care to guess before I reveal the master-list in a US grunt’s kitbag?

1) Preparing for the Melbourne Writers Festival. I’m part of the Whole Shebang at Federation Square tomorrow. Check here for a few more clues. http://www.mwf.com.au/2008/content/mwf_2008_home.asp?

2) Preparing for the Melbourne Writers Festival Opening Party on the following evening. A liver can never be too prepared.

3) Last-minute subs to a biting piece of journalism for Sunday Life, regarding the growing skulduggery of anonymous note writing. You know the kind. Like: I’m not your mother wash you own dishes a/hole!!! For more embittered snipery of this stripe visit the maharani of note-collecting at http://www.passiveaggressivenotes.com/

4) Updating a comic quiz confessional I wrote a few years back. The piece has been selected for a volume of humour writing, since it is painfully, shamefully, gonzo-droll, but could do with a spritz of new-millennium TV references.

5) Creating a themed crossword which may relate to a particular cultural phenomenon that began some 20 years ago, or may not. That’s all you’re getting, dear solver.

6) Teaching.

7) Researching a 30-minute play which Newtown Theatre in Sydney has commissioned, based on a true Australian crime. It’s icky, sticky, and not a little ooky.

Lodging an underwhelmed review of David Lodge’s Deaf Sentence with Radio National.

9) Ministering to a kid with camp-gastro, and flu. A toxic quinella.

10) Wondering why tae kwon do fighters spend eight of their allotted nine minutes hopping around the mat’s periphery.

Till next week, with more excuses.

Not a crossword in this case, but a rampant sudoku fetish among the twelve honest men and women. Every morning, a sort of test-within-a-test, a jury member would Xerox the number grid to measure how quickly his peers could conquer the puzzle. All the while the fates of the accused swung in the balance.

The co-accused, in fact, noticed a juror taking ‘vertical notes’ during his own testimony. Inquiries revealed the contagious puzzle habit, and the judge had no choice but to bail. Down the judicial track a new, puzzle-free panel needs installing.

But as a chronic crossword solver, chewing anagrams during my uni years, wrangling homophones through countless TV episodes, punning in traffic, seeking double definitions amid exotic locations, I have to defend the sudoku faction. Puzzles help align the senses – mainly grid-wise perhaps – but not at the expense of the solver’s periphery. I swear you absorb more in general for being so alert to the specific.

Yes, Your Honour. I’d rather nurse a puzzle in a three-month trial, the challenge of clues ensuring an openness to wide-ranging stimuli, instead of sitting there all civic and glass-eyed, doodling in a Spirax. But that’s my defence. Don’t know if it would stand up in the District Court.

‘Wheel Of Fortune’ Contestants Hit Hard As Vowel Prices Skyrocket’

LOS ANGELES””Contestants on the television game show Wheel Of Fortune have been hit especially hard at the podiums in recent months due to skyrocketing vowel prices, which reached a record $600 last week. “I remember a time when you could get an ‘e’ for $250,” 46-year-old contestant Samantha Means said after a Wednesday taping….

http://www.theonion.com/content/

And the radio was right. Zephyrs turned to gusts turned to gales. Whole branches blew across the Monash. Yachts beached. The West Gate Bridge, too exposed to the elements, shut all lanes. My gate lost a hinge.

But I’d been puzzling all morning, and the stomach needed lining, so I took to the risky streets for a forage.

Hurricane Katrina, move over. Hey Cyclone Tracy, you’re so yesterday. These winds were atomic. Slates jumped off roofs. Awnings inverted. Drought dust turned the air red. But this man was after a tuna salad.

That’s when the Mad Bomber struck. Sheltered in a deli we all heard the crunch. Not a celery stick but something bigger, more sinister. Like moths to a candle we flapped outside to see the giant plane tree of Station Street lying across traffic. No-one was hurt, but the carnage of foliage was spectacular.

News crews arrived before the tree surgeons. The crowd multiplied, a dozen Motorolas held aloft to snap the snap. Toddlers learnt to swear. Sceptics had to touch the exposed roots. You couldn’t more for boom mikes and rubber-necks, and that’s when the second bomb detonated.

Kaboom. Or bam. Thud? It was no time for onomatopoeia. Just 50 metres south, the twin giant shading the menswear shop snapped in half, its crown hurling through the air and landing at the tailpipe of a stranded bus. The second impact evoked that terrorist ploy, setting off one bomb and delaying the second until the ghouls have assembled.

Or Confucius – if a falling plane tree is heard by a multitude of ears, it falls many times.

But what are the odds? A brace of trees toppling a block apart, all in the space of a macchiato? Pretty low, I guess, especially when the knots are so high. But in all my suburban days – and those distant swashbuckling years – I’ve never seen such choreography.

To quote a kerbside sage, ‘Jeez she’s blowy today.’