This last week has been an extremely aggravating exciting time here in Sydney, with the city being comprehensively ground to a standstill by the carnival of clowns that is APEC (aka ACROCK). Today we have George Bush, Hu Jintao and Vladimir Putin slowing down the traffic and stealing the media attention away from more important issues like footballers getting busted for doing drugs.

As APEC has progressed, we’ve been treated to some terrific banter between these great minds of our age (the Leaders, that is, not the footballers. Although, really, there’s not much in it). The press was all over this exchange between George W and John Howard at a barbecue lunch:

George (loads plate up with steak and sausage): I’m a meat man.

John: I think we know that.

Onlookers: Hahahahahaha!

Honestly, I didn’t stop laughing for a full attosecond. And to think they hold Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw up as the finest examples of English language wordsmiths.

Mr Bush said in a speech this morning how much he loved Sydney and that he was hoping to be invited to the ‘OPEC’ summit next year (now was that ever a Freudian slip). It would seem that he thinks APEC is held in Sydney every year. This man is the Leader of the Free World. SpaghettiMonster help us all.

Some of the other fine word manglings I’ve heard this week include annualized, disendorsed and our own Beloved Leader’s stadia (which he evidently thinks is the plural of stadium but it isn’t. It’s a made-up modern word that someone thinks follows the rules of Latin. It doesn’t. A more correct and wholly less pretentious thing to say would be stadiums)

Meanwhile, since International Talk Like a Pirate Day is imminent, and you all know how much I like to get into the swing of things here on The Cow, I propose we start celebrating a little earlier this year and keelhaul the lot of ’em.