Be alert, NZ needs lerts.

I almost laughed outloud, but the laugh was beaten to it by a groan upon reading that Ashtanga is to be a demonstration Olympic Sport in Beijing.

I particularly like the proposed 'logo' for the event, and the fact that it is being included 'along with BMX biking'. Does anyone even do that anymore?

I loved the sneaky jibe 'The organisers feel that with the inherent implicit competition present in Ashtanga Yoga, it was not too much of a stretch (groan) to include it as a sport.'

By the time I got to 'The event will be structured similarly to the decathlon. There will be 6 different rounds held for men and women, each representing a series in Ashtanga. Competitors who make it past the first round of the Primary Series will then compete in the Second Series round and so forth.' I was about ready to give it up and find something else to do in life which most immediately included writing to the poster of the article and lambasting the jaunty, relief tinged timbre of the report - 'At last it will be acceptable to openly ask "what posture are you at?"'.

Fortunately I noticed in the byline that it was post on April 1st.

With April 1st a Sunday there was no local media to provide similar entertainment so we kind of missed out. Last year there was a great one in the paper about how the region was going to get an international airport shortly at a tiny community called Bridge Pa. The plans involved practically bulldozing the few dozen pastel shaded clapboard houses which surround the Mormon church out there and then uprooting a few hundred hectares of prime vineyard in order to construct the runway.

The other newspaper joke that springs to mind is from about 1998 when I was working in the City of London. The Financial Times ran an advert from BMW alerting the public to 'fake BMWs' on the market. You could practically feel the shudder run through the cohorts on the dealing room floor. Luckily there was an easy way to spot the fakes; the distinctive blue and white check logo at the front of the bonnet was a mirror image of the authentic ones. Traders breathed a sigh of relief and returned to their screens and the vitally important work of the day, which normally included a fair bit of eating, reading The Sun and leering at anything female within a 200m radius of their phones.