Suburban tales: St Nick under siege

We also have a sorry duty to report that yet more inflatable plastic toy Santas have fallen in the line of duty.  First, a group of Perth vandals hacked a hapless 8m St Nick down in the prime of the festive season.

Now, the Knox Leader reports some grinch has done the same in Melbourne’s outer east. A family has been struck by some scumbag who thought it would be fun to hack up its Christmas displays.  In this orgy of festive violence, another santa got stabbed. Both kids and Santa are apparently deflated - Santa a little more so than the kids.  By all accounts, dad is prepping for DIY surgery to get the red fella back on display for the big day.

Can these two pieces of yuletide thuggery, separated by several hundred kilometres of Australia’s more rugged outback,  be related? Almost certainly not. Will I shamelessly use the word ‘spate’ to describe them anyway? Eh, why not.

So, in the second of this spate of heinous Christmas crimes, Santa wasn’t the only victim. Nope, an inordinate number of reindeer also got spirited away - five from one house and another couple from another family across the way. The moral of this story? Well between Vic, SA, New South, and Queensland, there are a lot of Christmas lights, reindeer and elves - and all of them should be nailed to the spot.

Vandals have also struck in Noosa, which has been strewn with graffiti.  This particular form, though, eschews the normal brand of shazza4dazza4eva-esque literature that normally graces bus stops and train stations. The Noosa Journal reports this graffiti is in French.

Apart from a certain amount of Gallic-chic (who doesn’t like seeing graffiti with accents grave?), you’d think it would also cut down on the potential list of suspects. Round up the local arts students and foreign exchange kids, and you’d pretty much have quorum – barring, of course, the thousands of potentially French-speaking tourists swarming through the area at any given moment.

Law enforcement in Adelaide, meanwhile, had no problems spotting a possible imposter in their midst.

The Weekly Times Messenger writes that the SA plod charged a gent after finding him allegedly driving a car with blue and red flashing lights, and wearing a T-shirt with the word “Police” written on it.

Apparently the T-shirt wasn’t standard issue.

To council news now, and we normally try to avoid bring up council goings on, as such news can be slightly snooze-inducing to a fair chunk of the population.  When you hear though that your local burgesses have hoiked up parking fine revenue by 27000 per cent. The Macarthur Chronicle reports such a move happened in the vaguely comical-sounding council area of Wollongdilly.

Sounds impressive, until you read the main factor behind the increase was that the council - shock, horror - employed someone to actually check parking meters.

Meanwhile in Melbourne, one newspaper has done homage to an exiting mayor who had a savant-like ability to ham-up photo ops.  Yes, can you see where Rudd and pals get their training in dressing up in silly consumes or generally making burkes of themselves for the cameras.

And thus we finish our journey around the suburbs for at least a week or so, as hard-working suburban reporters across the country take a few days off.  Personally, I’ll be taking a leaf out of Melbourne lad Jake Richardson’s book by building an honest-to-god working medieval trebuchet to fling miscellaneous shit out of.