One of the many, many stories not picked up by the media in the steamy north is the apparent attempt to pluck (repeat pluck) the Townsville Magpie, seen here larking about in the city's Anzac Memorial Park.
It is the pet creation of veteran journalist Malcolm Weatherup which each week delivers a lively broadside on The Magpie website - often having a go at the Murdoch Townsville Bulletin, where Malcolm once worked , and various others who regard themselves masters of the universe under the city's cruel , so- called rain shadow .
This dehydrated canopy nevertheless flooded a large part of the city not so long ago when somebody forgot to tell the little Dutch boy to remove his digit from the hole in the dam wall early in an unusual deluge .
It is the pet creation of veteran journalist Malcolm Weatherup which each week delivers a lively broadside on The Magpie website - often having a go at the Murdoch Townsville Bulletin, where Malcolm once worked , and various others who regard themselves masters of the universe under the city's cruel , so- called rain shadow .
This dehydrated canopy nevertheless flooded a large part of the city not so long ago when somebody forgot to tell the little Dutch boy to remove his digit from the hole in the dam wall early in an unusual deluge .
For weeks , people who regularly and eagerly tune into The Magpie , believed to be of the flute playing , black-backed kind , have had difficulty logging on or else received strange warnings that the site is radioactive , even contains a virus , can induce cradle cap , will make you fall off your perch , etc. This being a great time for conspiracy theories , there is a wild theory that somebody has hired a computer assassin to silence The Magpie .
Who , it must be asked , would be so desperate to strangle the bird by paying someone to hack into its nest and silence one of God's creatures , whose song has been described in What Bird Is That as one of the most joyous rendered by Australian birds?
Who , it must be asked , would be so desperate to strangle the bird by paying someone to hack into its nest and silence one of God's creatures , whose song has been described in What Bird Is That as one of the most joyous rendered by Australian birds?
This morning , this blog received a call from an irate regular Magpie fan, with a great news sense , asking what the hell is going on as he had just tried to log onto the bird and could not. We repeat : There are a thousand and one unreported stories in the naked , in a flap city, and environs - this just one from the taxidermist's work bench , knee deep in feathers .
