The bargain pig

Every Christmas for the last few years, my extended family has decided not to exchange presents. Instead, we've each made a donation to charity. Mine has been to Care, in one of those dealies where you buy a pig or well or such.

My personalised Care catalogue came the other day and so did a similar but unsolicited one from Oxfam. I have just found myself looking through both of them, thinking, 'Ooh, their pigs are cheaper!'... which isn't really the spirit of the thing, is it?

Congratulations, mayor of Mount Isa!

I'm not sure why the people who organise the Australian media's Golden Ernies for most sexist public comment of the year do so in November when there's still a good six weeks of the year left, but they do. Our old friend, the chair-sniffing politician, won the political Ernie, for both the chair-sniffing and snapping the bra strap of a female staffer.

The big winner was the mayor of Mount Isa (a mining city with a huge difference between the numbers of men and women living there), who invited ugly women to move to the Mount where they couldn't help but find a man desperate enough to love them. When local women objected to the comment, he added that they were just blaming him for their looks. Classy.