Two quick points:

• Compulsive Coffs Coast Advocate correspondant picman2 defies satire, and
• The Advocate's comment moderation policy continues to baffle me.

picman2 posted another of his comments sounding like a particularly deranged version of the Stradhoughton Echo's Man O' the Dales, from Keith Waterhouse's sublime novel Billy Liar. (By the way, isn't it a shame that gone are the days when you could carry a novel in your pocket rather than a wheelbarrow?) The natural reaction to which is to engage in a bit of Pythonesque one-upmanship. Unfortunately picman2 leaves one without much further to go, so my effort fell a bit flat:

@picman2 Aye, an' all this were fields when I were a lad. Sigh.

God Save the Queen? Sheer luxury. In my day we had to sing the whole of Advance Australia Fair, even the verses nobody knows. With "Australia's sons" rejoicing - none of this political correctness gone mad. WITH only a bottle of warm milk with yucky skin on top to stop us dehydrating in the blazing sun before we got a chance to deposit 20c in our Commonwealth Bank savings accounts.

It's tragic that today's kids can't enjoy these simple pleasures for fear of council-appointed cyber-predators stalking and killing them for their sausage rolls and frozen Sunnyboys. All they can do is sit at home texting each other as their pants sink lower and lower with ennui. We are failing a generation, and acres of steaming ashphalt is going to waste.

So far, so hilarious. But the odd thing is I had another sentence-and-a-bit which was expurgated from the comment as published. From memory it went something like:

Childhood has gone the way of thrashing young backsides with the wooden spoon and washing out insolent mouths with soap and water. It's sad but true.

Now if this portion was excised due to being exceptionally leaden satire I can't imagine why any of the preceeding text was published at all. And it can't have been edited for reasons of concision, as the whole comment is less than half the size of the one it was replying to. Did somebody imagine I was implying picman2 or some other individual enjoys, or at lease endorses, quaintly anachronistic violence against children? As in past occurences of rejected "wit", it appears my faculties of reason are insufficiently baroque to detect the logic at work.