White Man Commits Crime In Australia
09/27/2006
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You're probably familiar with this joke:

The first mate was found to be drunk one day and that day it happened to be the captain's turn to write in the ship's log so he wrote :

The first mate was drunk today.

He begged and pleaded to the captain to remove that entry but the captain argued that once an entry was made in the company's log it couldn't be deleted. The first mate decided to get even.

The next time it when it was the first mate's turn to write in the log, he wrote: The captain was sober today.

Well, crime in Australia is committed by a variety of people, but especially Lebanese, and Australian newspapers don't like to report this, and regularly redact the descriptions of wanted criminals that appear in the newspapers. Aussie Blogger Tim Blair calls this the "men of no appearance" phenomenon.

Now, he reports, the indescribable criminals are suddenly describable:

The Sydney Morning Heralds notorious men of no appearance now acquire obvious racial characteristics:Police are searching for a man described as being of white/European appearance, aged 25 to 30, with a large build and wearing a dark tracksuit and blue baseball cap.

What the First Mate was implying when he logged that the Captain was sober, was that every other time, the Captain was drunk. Does this mean the Sydney Morning Herald's previous crime reports have all been men of Middle Eastern Experience?

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