La Dee-vina Comedia

This is a good time to thank Andy, Nasher and everyone else who makes this site run so smoothly.

I'm not sure if you're suggesting a name change or a gender change.

I'm really disappointed Xavier Lindsay wasn't given the number 40.

Is that the traditional Welsh spelling?

So, what you're saying is that AI and politicians are basically similar. Fair enough.

Might explain why he departed West Coast. List Manager thought it was an instruction rather than a nickname.

I'm a bit dubious about a thread on the topic of betting which was started by someone with "FIX" in their name.

And Kynan

There's an amusing story in The Age CBD column today about "NFL legend" Rob Gronkowski. He's apparently been brought out here by V'Landys to promote the NRL games in Las Vegas. He was in Melbourne over the weekend and went to the races where he was raving about...AFL. Hardly the script Peter V'Landys would have been looking for. It's the second story in the column which can be found here (although could be behind a paywall).

Nothing wrong with the club taking its time as long as the acting CEO is doing a good enough job. And if the acting CEO is an applicant for the position the club is getting an opportunity to see how he performs in the role.

I suspect this is correct. I assume partly because (1) the heartland states of NRL (ie NSW and Qld) have much larger regional populations who can't otherwise get to games and (2) they generally play games in smaller and poorer stadiums which don't encourage spectators to attend.

Plus, they have to find something to say that is AFL-related every day at this time of year. There's not always a genuine news story, so puff pieces and fillers like this dominate the off-season.

Why is T-Mac considered to be the "4th tall" rather than Petty? Based on a combination of training reports and last year's form of both players, I can't see how McDonald is behind Petty. It seems to me that it might be Petty that misses out. Doesn't mean he can't be picked as a forward, of course, although he would also appear to be behind Turner, van Rooyen and possibly even Johnson, given that Johnson might be picked to help Gawn.

The newspaper headline says: "Millionaire Sanjeev Gupta pulls rug out from under David Koch over Port order new guernseys to ditch GFG logo". Err, what? Hope they have a succession plan for their major sponsors.

It's interesting how the tabloid Herald Sun (and its predecessor, the Sun News Pictorial) were always called the "little paper" to contrast it with The Age which was a broadsheet. Even now, after The Age has been tabloid size for quite some time (more than a decade?) the epithet "little paper" still clearly suits based on what it says, rather than its physical size.