Making sure tourists get the message

When covering Council our journalist Conor used to do the odd bit of chiacking with former mayor Kim Ford and so gave him a bit of hell last week about the wheel clamp hung ominously on his fence outside his drycleaning business in Richmond, with a sign indicating if you use their parking spots, it will be deployed. 

Our receptionist was gobsmacked a couple of weeks ago, seeing two women riding horses through the underground carpark at Riverview shopping centre at Windsor. She’d seen them earlier out on the street and the horses were skittish in the traffic and they were leading another horse. All I could suggest was maybe they were training them to tolerate all places they were asked to go?

Buying petrol outside Windsor Downs on Tuesday morning I was delighted to see the cheery woman behind the counter flogging the fruit bowl! With a giant wall of every chocolate bar under the sun beneath the counter, it was the bowl of apples and bananas at $1 each that she was promoting. I said smugly “No thanks, I brought my own!” “Good girl!” she said with a smile. I asked if she sells much and she nodded and said “Quite a lot in the mornings.” Unlike some token fruit bowls I’ve seen elsewhere that have green bananas and oldapples, these were bananas at their best, and lovely fresh pink ladies. So like the Wiggles say, give yourselves a pat on the back, everyone who’s bought some.

A recent press release said your kitchen sponge is one of the most bacteria-dense items on the planet. “At 45 billion microbes per square centimetre, kitchen sponges act like cozy little bacteria nests, with plenty of moist nooks and crannies in which bacteria can thrive. And by cleaning your food-caked dishes with a sponge, you are providing food to them.” Now anti-bacterial products have been found to be bad for you, I guess we should use a sponge for only a couple of days before machine washing it.