Elizabeth Farrelly, Crack Columnist

HAVING chewed over a smorgasbord of seemingly random thoughts about Sydney’s mayor, big projects, women’s oppression and Irish drunkenness, Elizabeth Farrelly has extruded her weekly log on the Silly’s opinion page. Nominally about the many achievements of Clover Moore, its chief topic is, as always, the special and precious gift to the world that is Elizabeth Farrelly. Why the Silly believes the musings of an onanist, and an architecturally fixated onanist at that, belong on the opinion page is a question unlikely to be put until adult editorial supervision is restored to the newspaper. In the meantime, Big Notin’ Betty will continue to turn out lines like this:

My father, his father and proud eons of bog-Irish fathers before them believed fiercely in the great divide between women's work and the other sort. I don't recall the phrase ''men's work'' figuring too heavily.

Women's work, though, was clear. It covered everything routine, repetitive and mind-numbing, everything that didn't actually get you anywhere - feeding, weeding, sewing, hoeing, scrubbing, tubbing, bubbing.

Men got to do adventurous, limit-testing stuff. Stalking wild boar, caulking ships, walking on the moon. (For a positivist intellectual, my father was noticeably primal in his choice of metaphor. But I digress.)

Caulking ships, the great male adventure! Nothing could be further from the truth, as stuffing oakum into narrow gaps for hours on end would seem a chore for which Farrelly is perfectly suited. Simple, interminable and making use of fluffy rubbish that would otherwise be thrown away, caulking is the boatyard equivalent of  her weekly column. View the short video below and observe how a talent for the boring and repetitious makes her a natural..

Loping about the lunar surface and stuffing cotton fibre into cracks, at the Silly they cannot tell the difference.