The week in review, from the pages of the Coffs Coast Irritant:

Champagne corks could be heard popping in the McMansion of Ken and Barbie Hines, as they celebrated the news that housing in Coffs had become even more expensive. Watch out Port Macquarie, we're about to snatch the coveted title of Australia's least affordable town from you!

Climate change just keeps on showering us with goodies; first cane toads, now year-round mosquito-borne disease. If I had any money, I'd be betting it on crocodiles in Boambee Creek by 2020. Also, there's an animal called a mangrove jack. I thought it was just an ironically ocker name for a café.

On Sawtell beach, two people got caught in a rip and dragged out to sea. Three people swam out to save them, got caught in the rip and dragged out to sea. Had paramedics not intervened, half the population of Sawtell would be on the way to Lord Howe Island now. We're a brave little village, but not very bright.

A massive funeral stopped traffic along Hogbin Drive as a thousand friends and relatives spoke movingly of a shy, bookish introvert, not keen on sport, with an endearingly reserved but polite manner. You're not buying it are you? Okay, he was really a "normal" knockabout larrikin who tragically took one knock too many on the football field.

A heartless bastard might argue that Coffs has so many obnoxiously charismatic meatheads that one less is no great loss, but one must remember that the sustainability of any population of footballers is very fragile. Like pandas, they mate very infrequently, and are very particular about doing so only under the right conditions. Unless at least twelve of their closest friends are in the motel room, with a carton of warm lager, footballers have absolutely no interest in sex.

The Greens are running a campaign of hope in the Federal seat of Cowper. It's a good thing hope springs eternal; they will be needing an awful lot of it. I also hear Faith can move mountains. She's a big girl.

You would have thought that Southern Cross University would have been exempt from university funding cuts, on the grounds that it's a vocational training college, not a university. Apparently the government has been misled by the name. They're not the first, I suppose.

As anybody who knows me will testify, I've had just about enough of the negative Nellies who are constantly running down our beautiful region. Why all this talk of "notorious" accident blackspots? Why not "famous" accident blackspots, or even "scenic" accident blackspots? Accentuate the positive, people!