Cooking doyen’s admission of dithering should disqualify her from being dubbed a dame

Guess which one is a wee bit embarrassed.

Alf has gone into a steep decline this morning, on learning he has missed out yet again on a gong in the New Year’s Honours.

He wonders what more he can do to be dubbed a knight, bearing in mind his long service to his community and his admiration for the monarchy.

He also questions why awards are being dished out to people who are reluctant to express their undiluted delight but – to the contrary – proteset that they are underserving or some such. If they are reluctant to pick up these honours, then indeed they are undeserving.

Beware and keep on the safe side of the fence – these pools are not meant for bathing

Falling into this will not be good for your health.

The buggers at Fairfax have given the Rotorua District Council an unjustified rasp in a report on a kid who has found out the hard way what happens when gravity kicks in. If you fall – in this case, alas, into a hot pool – you can hurt yourself.  Seriously.

The eight-year-old boy fell into a hot pool in Kuirau Park on Sunday and was severely burnt on his entire body.

He is in Auckland’s Middlemore Hospital in a “stable but serious” condition. Alf hopes he has a speedy recovery.

But the first sentence of the report at Stuff implies it was the council’s fault and something should be done to stop it happening again.

More than that, it implies the council can’t be bothered doing anything unless someone formally complains about the boy’s mishap.

McCully should think about a ban on Aussies, during the Rugby World Cup, if he wants good behaviour

The descendants of this mob should be kept out during the Rugby World Cup.

Dunno if Alf dreamt it, but he thought he heard a Radio NZ National news item about Murray McCully and the Rugby World Cup. But he couldn’t find a record of it on the web when he looked.

McCully – of course – is Minister for the Rugby World Cup, the job which Alf believes he should have been given.

If Alf heard the item correctly, McCully is urging New Zealanders to be on their best behaviour to impress the hordes of overseas visitors who will come here for the rugby, the beer and what-have-you.

Here’s hoping they get the message in Kaikoura, because it seems the folks down there – or some of them – have been behaving very badly in recent times.

Some of the women, you will be dismayed to learn, are far from lady-like and are apt to bring their choppers to bear on their victims, more like sharks than the whales for which the town is world-renowned.

Caught napping – and meanwhile a central banker has been making a mint to help “”Grasping Grace”

Would our Labour Party be more successful if Phil Goff followed this example?

Alf stumbled upon news of Robert Mugabe becoming prone to snoozing more often than in the past.

Bearing in mind the bugger’s ripe old age, this should come as no surprise. Indeed, Alf is apt to drop off during tedious sessions in The House and sometimes during select committee hearings.

The problem seems to be that Mugagbe drops off at times when maybe he should be paying attention to what is happening because he is The Boss in his country.

He might be snoozing while his missus is making a mint trafficking diamonds, for example, although Alf emphasises the word ‘might’ . He further emphasises that the evidence for such a thing happening on this occasion comes from an American Ambassador, and American Ambassadors have been found to be more than a tad fanciful in what they report back to Washington from Wellington, so we should not expect them to do any better when they are reporting home from Harare.

Oh – and this is a nice touch – Zimbabwe’s central bank governor seems to be involved by printing the money needed to buy the diamonds.

Can you imagine Alan Bollard doing that for Mrs Key???

No, not really.

Spreading poisonous portents about prices and empty shops should be punished with a prison term

Being told what it will cost in a few months took the edge off Alf's appetite.

Full of Christmas cheer and that joy-to-the-world feeling, Alf was dismayed to find the NZ Herald giving news space to some grumble guts from the Institute of Economic Research who plainly is intent on destroying the mood of merriment built during the festive season.

The bugger is telling us that food prices are soaring, which is not what Alf wants to hear as he clambers into the Christmas dinner left-overs.

Alf especially does not want to hear it when he is still celebrating his MPs’ pay rise.

By March, the economist predicts, food prices will be 8 to 10 per cent higher than they were last March.

This merchant of misery and peddler of pessimism is the institute’s principal economist, who no doubt lost any aptitude for feeling merry as a consequence of being named Shamubeel Eaqub.

Anyone who wandered into the Eketahuna Club and introduced himself as Shamubeel Eaqub would be suspected of being foreign, maybe Islamic, and perhaps with bombs strapped to his under-garments or stuck up his nether regions.

He would be given a wide berth.

The same wage rise for all MPs is wrong – but it’s worse when it comes to paying namby-pamby judges

Hanging Judge Jeffreys ... a bloke who earned his keep.

Alf must admit to being somewhat pissed off with The Boss today.

His grievance has been triggered by the way we MPs have our pay decided and pay rises announced. It’s a same-pay-rise-for-all deal, the sort of thing trade unions negotiate to ensure that workers and the drones are paid the same and that the system promotes mediocrity.

All MPs have been given a pay rise.

But a hard-working star like Alf is getting the same pay rise as buggers like Paul Quinn, who was described by the political gurus at Trans-Tasman as a media-loathing misfit, and rude and arrogant. The newsletter reckoned “National should start wondering whether this list MP is a waste of space.”

Worse, Alf is being paid the same as that bald-pated poof, Chris Carter, and a whole heap of other banck-benchers you have never heard of because they don’t actually seem to do too much or say anything worthy of anyone’s attention.

It’s a monstrous case of media discrimination – the cameras follow Carter but again give Alf a miss

Bugger - who let the TV3 cameras in on my Christmas?

So why haven’t the buggers in the Speaker’s Office alerted the news media to Alf’s holiday travel plans?

He would jump at the chance to be pictured climbing into his modest Mazda Atenza – a 2004 job – before driving to Taihape for a modest Christmas dinner with other members of the modest Grumble family.

Indeed, he offered TV3 a few hundred bucks if they would take such pictures and screen them on their news programme, but they somewhat impolitely turned down the offer.

The problem, probably, is that he is happily married to Mrs Grumble and they have three children and several grandchildren (Alf has lost count of how many exactly). This makes him remarkably ordinary, despite his accomplishments on behalf of his electorate.

Hence Alf is throughly pissed off to learn that Chris Carter, the bald-pated poof who happens to be an MP on the other side of the parliamentary divide, is saying the media have ruined his summer holiday after the itinerary for his taxpayer-subsidised trip to Sri Lanka was leaked.

When a packet of Pineapple Lumps is your idea of plunder, locking up looks highly appropriate

Waiariki MP Te Ururoa Flavell has very namby-pamby ideas about law and order.

He is reported today to have criticised a Rotorua judge for jailing a teenager for 12 months for breaching a sentence of home detention.

Never mind that the brat concerned had got off lightly in the first place after being involved in a robbery at a superette where the daft buggers pretended to have a gun.

Having been given a lucky break by being sentenced to home detention, what did she do?

Oh yes. She breached her home detention conditions by cutting off her ankle bracelet and leaving the address where she was supposed to be serving her sentence.

Did the firemen know the bird they were rushing to rescue had fallen from a nest?

Stop the press...this story is better than that ACC stuff.

As Alf understands it, journalists call it the Silly Season – the period over Christmas when the country more or less shuts down and most of us bugger off on holiday.

During this period all sorts of pap can make its way into print, although the publishers do not reduce the cover price of their newspapers to match the lowering of their standards and the reduction in their page numbers.

The Silly Season has hit us a tad early this year (although Mrs Grumble reckons the media  have been lowering their standards for some time).

Stuff regales us today with the story – would you believe? – of a tiny baby bird that caused a full-sized flap in Upper Hutt yesterday when it fell from its nest.

Some of Alf’s mates would take care of the failed fledgling by stomping on it.

Those with a more delicate nature are apt to ring the SPCA for advice on how to handle such situations.

Consumer watchdog gives Sanitarium a nip but Weet-Bix is best served (or drowned) with many nips

A bit dry for Alf's tastes...but several nips of good Scotch will give it a lift.

Alf has always mistrusted muesli munchers and vegetarians and their regard for the well-being of all God’s creatures. If The Almighty had not intended us to eat meat, he would not have given us the wit to build barbies and dig hangi pits.

Anyway, after listening to some Labour’s MPs in the House for a few hours, Alf finds it difficult to draw the boundary line between intelligent animal life and a vegetable state.

His jaundiced view of those who eschew meat is reinforced today by news of strange goings-on at Sanitarium, an outfit which promotes health and well-being.