Messed Up Nursery Rhymes

We have a book of nursery rhymes.

The boys sometimes ask me to read it before bed. This usually works by them pointing to a page and saying, "I wanna read this one!". This routine is actually redundant, because they point to every single page in the book. Some rhymes have illustrations over two pages. I have to read them twice.

A lot of these rhymes are a bit wrong. In order of appearance in the book:

Unconscious Sexism

It's not that surprising that cricketer Chris Gayle would demean Mel McLaughlin - he's done it to other female interviewers before, both in Australia and in the Caribbean. On his Twitter account he basically plays the role of Jamaican Hugh Hefner, but with much less literacy.

I can't relate to doing your job and having your work completely ignored so you can be propositioned, then when clearly uncomfortable at the advance, being called "baby" and having the initial comment repeated. Then to have work colleagues sniggering in the background and your employer initially play it for laughs before going into damage control much later. Then to have the person punished by his employer, who then excuses the behaviour as a cultural misunderstanding "said in jest".

I can't relate to that, because I'm a man.

Toddlers

My twin boys are toddlers, and they do and say funny stuff. Like...

Big Bash League Ladder Prediction

I really didn't care about BBL1 and BBL2, but then BBL3 was on free-to-air television every night for six weeks, and suddenly I found it very interesting. There is probably a lesson there for sport leagues on the margins of mainstream public consiousness – I'm looking at you A-League and Super Rugby.

By BBL4 I'd even decided which of the artificial Sydney-based franchises with ugly uniforms I'd support – go Sixers!

Now I'm so comfortably on the bandwagon I'm going to try and predict the final ladder positions of each team in BBL5, which seems absurd given the unpredictability of Twenty20 cricket and the short length of the regular season. But it can't go worse than my NRL predictions.

Top Five Things I Wrote Before This Blog Existed

I launched this blog in January 2015, instantly capturing the hearts, minds and clicks of dozens of friends with my captivating prose they could readily skim through in seconds, yet claim to have read in full, so they seemed politely interested in my new hobby.

It's now hard to remember a time when I wasn't a successful and influential voice in the blogosphere, shaping modern opinion and events on a myriad of important subjects, but if I cast my mind back eleven or twelve months, that time does in fact exist as a hazy memory.

And it turns out, I still wrote things!

They are on Facebook, and from probably hundreds of status updates, I've managed to identify five that are okay, I guess.

Here they are in reverse chronological order:

All The Hats I've Eaten

The 2016 SMH Good Food Guide was released a few weeks back.

When I tallied it up, I've been to twenty of the current hatted restaurants.

Here's a few words on all of them:

Ranking All The Current Australian Cricketers

Following Australian cricket used to be relatively simple. Your typical summer would have 12 or 13 Test cricketers, and maybe an additional half dozen cricketers for the one dayers, either to replace the Test specialists or as cover to give players a rest. There were a maximum twenty players in the mix at any one time.

It's not so simple now. There are now three cricket formats and I reckon across them Australia now typically uses 30 to 40 cricketers over a summer. There are quite possibly more current cricketers that have represented Australia - or at least made a national squad - than there are mere state players.

You've changed, man!

So here's a helpful guide to literally all of them. Number 81 is my favourite.