Suburban tales: pythons, horses heads and strippers

Apart from the obvious message that a python is for life, not just Christmas, you have to ask exactly how they dumped it - or for that matter, how it let itself be dumped.

In Melbourne’s south meanwhile, Jenny Mahoney and her daughter, Adelle, woke up before dawn to take their prized horse, McBeal, to a track event.

As they ran their eyes over their mare’s pen, they found an extra horse milling around, acting suitably, well, horsey. Closer inspection revealed the equine visitor to be a life-sized fake horse made out of fibreglass.

Who dumped this model mare on their property they do not know, though Jenny told the Frankston Leader that to pull off the prank, the perpetrators would have had to have schlepped the Trojan Horse through 300 metres of bushland in the dead of night.

One suspects an inordinate amount of claret may have been used to fuel the escapade.

It’s unknown whether a drop or two was involved in an altercation in Sydney’s Rouse Hill, in which a man allegedly tried to kiss and hug a police dog named Bodie.

The police contingent was in a local pub on duty when the 25-year-old allegedly made an advance on the dog in blue. Its human colleagues subdued the gent with capsicum spray and charged him with assaulting a police officer.

The police explained the charge by saying that when their canine companions are on duty, they are treated as officers of the law and accorded the same protection as the more bipedal members of the force.

While Sydney’s finest are cleaning up the streets, one Melbourne strip club is trying to make over its industry’s image.

As we reported previously on this very site, the people of Northcote in Melbourne’s inner north have in the past been equated with community activism, knitting, herbal products and carbon neutral beer.

Into this mix has marched Geoff Hollow, along with a collection of luminescent dancing poles and a troop of women whose first names invariably all end in ‘ie’.

Geoff - manager of the Xplicit Gentleman’s Club - doesn’t just want to entertain the menfolk of the area though - he wants to break down the stereotype of erotic entertainment as “dirty little strip clubs around the corner”. From our experience, it’s a hell of a stereotype to break down.

Geoff’s proposed answer: sponsor community festivals and throw open his strip club’s doors to community events.

Yes, the Northcote Leader reports the plan is not only to offer money to run local events outside the walls of the nightclub, but also to encourage the community to come in, cover up the Xplicit signs and enjoy strip-free exhibitions and performances.

As yet we haven’t heard what will be done with the luminescent poles when such community events are held, or if they’d support the weight of a reasonably priced expressionist piece painted by a local arts student.

Lastly this week, we’ll dip a toe in the water of the racism debate. It’s an area of public discourse that has been pulling a mass of comment for The Punch in recent days.

In Perth there has been fraught debate over that most insidious of racial taunts: the Irish joke.

Local DJ Brendan Belovnf stuck by his guns recently and left the station he broadcast for, after just one too many jokes was made at the Emerald Islers’ expense.

Brendan reckons there’s no place in multicultural Oz for the old Englishman/Irishman/Scotsman stalwart, or anything like it.

The president of the Irish Club of WA doesn’t see much horror in the taunts against his countrymen. As one commenter pointed out though, what if the joke had been: A Yank, an Aussie and an Iraqi?

See more splendid tales of Twitter-based suburbia @suburbantales