It’s not only houses, workplaces and public spaces which have turned black and white with Magpie Fever this week.
Food across the region is also doing its best impression of the Collingwood jumper.
Tatura Bakery and Lunches produced loaves of bread with black and white ‘stripes’ — certainly a delicacy if you’re a Pies fan.
The rest of the country might be ‘Lion’ if they said they enjoyed the look of them, though.
A different kind of grand final fever
Grand finals can sometimes be like the Wild West — with everything on the line, and no tomorrow for immediate consequences of actions to bear fruit, funny things can happen.
But this submission was certainly one Oddie had never heard of before.
Astute local football brain Don Kilgour happened upon an excerpt this week from a 1931 edition of the Shepparton News.
It stated that in a Katandra District Association decider at Katamatite, Yabba had managed to get on top of minor premier Numurkah and drag themselves within touching distance of a premiership upset.
The article then alleges that the match ball was — sensationally — knifed and deflated.
A replacement was quickly procured, but Numurkah refused to play with it and walked off the ground.
This led to the comical — Oddie imagines — scenes of Yabba playing out the last two minutes out on the field on its own, scoring another three goals.
Fallacy in ‘feels like’ temp
Oddie has always been a bit sceptical of the ‘feels like’ temperature peddled by meteorological boffins.
But a healthy suspension of disbelief aside, Oddie has found a gap in the calculation.
The first hot day of spring was a nice and comfortable 25℃, with a feels like temp of around the same mark.
But Oddie ‘felt like’ it was about 38℃ out and about — clearly no indication of whether the weather is significantly different to recent trends is taken into consideration when calculating the figure.