"I'm no racist," bleated Coun Eddie Wake after he was unceremoniously booted out of the Tory party this week.
An offensive, ageist, knucklehead maybe, but a racist, no.
The Washington South councillor apparently complained that "you can't make a joke about anything" after he was pulled up over a tasteless rape comment made at meeting of police and council
lors.
Jeez, what sort of world is it when you can't joke about rape when representing your constituents?
He has vowed to continue as an independent councillor, though after upsetting women, branding pensioners "coffin-dodgers" and labelling police "Woodentops", where he expects to get votes from is anyone's guess.
Is there anyone he hasn't already offended?
Did you hear the one about knuckleheaded councillor?
On hearing the evidence against Coun Wake, Tory party leaders said they would "withdraw the whip" immediately. Surely they'd have been better employed applying it with great force to his backside.
It didn't take long getting from those first tentative baby steps to mowing down fields of blood-lusting mercenaries. About eight years by my reckoning.
Yet there we were on Christmas morn watching our nine-year-old scythe through hordes of rampaging terrorists with an arsenal of fearsome weaponry on the video game Call of Duty.
Not quite the warm family Christmas scene I'd envisaged, but I guess you've got to move with the times.
I dare say there were Victorian dads shaking their heads at the sight of their offspring glued to kaleidoscopes on Christmas morning.
"In my day we were up cleaning chimneys, not sitting goggle-eyed in front of these new-fangled tubes of colourful light-refracting glass beads. You'll go blind, you know."
Of course, only time will tell whether or not I've failed as a parent. When I'm called by the police in ten years time to plead with my boy to hand over the guns and come down from the bell tower, I may hold my hands up and say "Okay, I was wrong."
We did drag him away from the computer-generated battlefield briefly to indulge us in a game of Family Fortunes.
First question out: What would you most associate with India?
Me: "The Taj Mahal."
My wife: "Curry."
Our Bradley: "Is it terrorists?"
Can't they make these ultra-violent video games more educational?
Okay we admit it. Aliens are circling. They plan to harvest our eyeballs to feed their starving planet. Happy now?
The Echo newsdesk was inundated with phone calls in the days after New Year with breathless readers reporting lights in the sky.
I sat there listening to our reporters fending off the calls.
Could the lights be from a plane, it was suggested.
"No, too low," came the reply.
A helicopter? "Too quiet."
Chinese lanterns? "Erm, no. The lights changed direction, erm, very quickly."
Hmm, could they have changed direction with the wind by any chance?
They weren't having it. Even when we revealed people were sending up Chinese lanterns over the city throughout the festive period there was a disturbingly large number of readers who refused to accept the obvious.
Why are people so desperate to believe little green men are tearing up Wearside airspace in flying saucers?
Tony Blair could have saved himself a lot of bother by ditching his controversial "weapons of mass destruction" lie in the Iraq dossier and replacing it with the synopsis for Mars Attacks!
Had Tony suggested Saddam was a V-like alien from the planet Zoob with an squadron of flying saucers hovering above earth, he may well have avoided the Iraq Inquiry.
I can hear the public reaction now: "Saddam! An alien? Why didn't you say so earlier. Let's nuke the lot of 'em."
