Sharp-eyed punters will see a subtle difference between my original opening par for today's Blunty (below) and the published version after the link.

The draughty feeling between your legs? That’s a lack of pants down there, my friend. And the soft kiss of a gentle breeze wafting over your pink bits is a natural consequence of the sweet nothings being whispered into your arse by the executives at Seven and Foxtel, and their enablers in the Federal government who just let Cricket Australia drop the nation’s summer sport behind a pay wall.

Seven and Foxtel’s joint billion dollar deal for the broadcast rights to Test and limited overs cricket, is about as clear a breach of the anti-siphoning legislation as you could hope for… if you had a lazy billion dollars lying around and you wanted to spend the next six years gouging millions of punters for all they were worth.

Brisbane has been struggling through a crime wave. Even better it's a foreign crime wave. Even betterer again, the foreigners are Irish and they've mostly been scamming food and drink, and stuffing too many potatoes in the toilet.

I decided this was definitely a topic for The Instrument. Unfortunately the sensivity protocols at Fairfax didnt allow me to go competely to town. I had to change the phrase a 'slobber of skankapotamusses' to a 'slobber of mots', which is more cullturally appropropriate, and actually scans a lot smoother.

For too long now, or since January anyway, bar and cafe owners have lived in constant fear of brassy Irish scrubbers rolling into their establishments at all hours of the afternoon and demanding free drinks and sandwiches to make up for all the drinks and sandwiches they ate yesterday that were full of broken glass to hear them tell of it.

This same slobber of mots have routinely stuffed dozens of tubes of Pringles into the oversized nappy bags on their robbery prams while honest Brisbane shopkeepers have been distracted by the shenanigans of their tiny feckin snot-nosed barrow-wights.

The rest is at Blunty.

I was very sad to hear John Clarke passed away. A great loss to the nation. An even bigger loss to farnarkling. A tribute at Blunty:

Farnarkling lost a champion yesterday, with the passing of Mr John Clarke. The veteran broadcaster was not just the voice of the national sport, but a much-loved ambassador to the powerhouses of the perfect game as far away as Bad Odursburg and Middlefart.

Play at the 'G in Launceston, where Australia and Uzbekistan contended fiercely for a quarter-final slot in the Far Eastern Cup, was interrupted for the traditional 49 seconds of mumbled Celtic mourning chants in the original Old Icelandic.

Just because I mocked the hardy frontier image of hardy frontier Queensland in Blunty:

There's nothing tough about refusing to evacuate in the face of a cyclone.

If you survive the winds and roaring storm surge you were just lucky, not resilient.

Cyclone's path: 'please leave'

North Queensland residents in the direct line of Cyclone Debbie should "take this seriously" as emergency crews prepare for "significant damage". Nine News

If the eye turns away and looks for somewhere else to destroy, same deal.

But if you live on the coast and you simply wait for the blast front and the tsunami because some pissweak little storm isn't going to scare you away, you're living in denial at best.

At worst, you're a selfish idiot who will endanger the lives of everyone who has to come to your aid.

I'm sure Lord Bob has all the feelz about this issue.

First Blunty.

So far 2017 is off to a cracking start. It hasn't killed any meme-worthy celebrities. Donald Trump isn't president. And I'm not even scrambling through a post apocalyptic wasteland fighting for rat meat and potable water. So, yeah. Good times. This is a great year so far.

I was going to do piece on this Centrelink datamatching fiasco, but the more I looked into it, the more I needed to look into it. So I might do that in a week or two.

Today's column was a simple and silly return to the keyboard while I sort out my shit for the year. There is a lot of shit to sort.

It was this, or West Papua. I went with the option all the playground was talking about. Even Murph, although he's mostly talking about what an abomination avocado toast really is.

Too late, Murph. The invasion of your food culture has begun.

There is no such thing as twenty-two dollar avocado toast. But maybe there should be. Ridonculous demographer Humbert Blowave may simply have been meeting his clickbait KPIs when he set the dumpster on fire over the weekend, claiming that kids these days should be driving trucks for their country and negatively gearing their second McMansion instead of galavanting about the boulevards combing truffled avo toast from their hipster beards – but his was the hot take we desperately needed.

At Blunty.