When paperboy turns prohibitor

October 14, 2026 — 9:00pmThis is rather curious: “When I opened my plastic-wrapped Herald on Monday Oct 12, and spread it on the kitchen bench, I noticed that the photo of Ben Roberts-Smith had been carefully removed from the front page,” reports Sue Lyall of Vaucluse. “The tear was just around his image and carefully done so that no other part of the page was cut or missing. I wonder how many other papers were tampered with by an unknown censor.”Jack Dikian of Mosman takes the joystick: “HSC students: do your best, keep your nerve, and here’s hoping your recent Atari scores don’t influence your ATAR.” “Driving past some local cattle herds over the weekend, I noticed that the bogongs (C8) seemed attracted almost magnetically to those dark-coloured beasts sitting around on the grass,” writes Mickey Pragnell of Kiama. “The lighter-coloured cattle were more mobile, moving around the pastures, and seemed to have none of the bogongs bothering them. I couldn’t think why, until I remembered that, of course, a strolling roan gathers no moths.”“I had those same crêpes (C8) 20 years ago, but in Paris near the Notre-Dame Cathedral,” recalls Agostino Chiarella of Summer Hill. “A restaurant had set up a stall at night outside its premises on the footpath, and was selling crepes Suzette flambéed with Grand Marnier and served on paper plates. Delicious and cheap. Nearby, a person was roasting chestnuts on a metal garbage can lid atop a shopping trolley. The finer things in life.” “Never mind being ‘shevelled’ or ‘gruntled’ (C8),” advises Nick Bencsik of Hunters Hill. “Is it possible to be just ‘whelmed’ if you’re neither over, nor underwhelmed?”“As a long-time reader, the verbal gymnastics of recent Column 8 postings has not left me ‘bewildered’ or ‘flustered’,” claims Phil Edwards of Denistone East. “Does that make me ‘combobulated’?”The last bit of wordplay, comes from Col Burns of Lugarno: ‘I was quite ‘whelmed’ when I Googled the etymology of ‘gruntled’ and discovered that ‘dis’ was mistakenly assumed to be a negative prefix. However, surely, a pig with laryngitis is entitled to feel literally disgruntled.”Edward Loong of Milsons Point noted “two familiar names” in Wednesday’s column: “I knew a Barry Wooldridge at school in Parramatta in the late ’50s. Same person? I also know, but have never met, Coral Button whose husband and I separately practised as solicitors in Parramatta in the ’70s. Small world?” Column8@smh.com.auNo attachments, please.Include name, suburb and daytime phone.More:Column 8OpinionFor subscribersHSCInsectsParisThe Sydney Morning HeraldBen Roberts-SmithWordPlayFrom our partners