It’s all over  being “named and shamed” in the latest Dropping Off The Edge report on postcodes and suburbs of highest levels of disadvantage around the nation.

Comparing this year’s report with 2007, it seems not a lot has changed in eight years  - a lot of the same allegedly disadvantaged folk felt just as miffed back then.

The common complaint coming from many regions and states today is that while it’s good to show where work is needed to bring better education, health and economic growth, naming the so-called worst areas might just make them worse. Just ask a real estate agent.

DTM has an alternative: Instead of Dropping Off The Edge, how about Scaling the Heights naming our wealthiest and healthiest postcodes and demanding they share things around a bit more?

Battered and bruised

We hear of a fish’n’chip shop selling Mick Fanning specials: battered flake.

Feeling negative 

A DTM chum bought a new oven last week.

The day it was installed, she was getting frustrated at not being able to work out how to make it go, and was becoming a bit, err, loud.

Her seven-year-old daughter kept repeating: “It won’t go. It won’t go. It’ll never go.”

In frustration, Mum snapped: “Can’t you be just a bit more optimistic?”

“What’s optiopit-mystic?”

“A bit more positive.”

“Okay. I’m positive it will never go.”

Not a total write-off

Some people need a good hard reality slap.

Bendigo cycling hero Zak Dempster was again in the Tour de France this year and just making the start line in a team makes you a cycling god in our book.

But after a bad injury and some gruelling days in the saddle, Zak had to withdraw and put this very silly message up on his Twitter account: “Thanks for all your tweets. I couldn't deal with the pain of the injury and ride fast enough, I feel pretty ashamed but that's all I had…”

We’ll chalk it up to exhaustion, but a later Tweet indicated normality, or what passes for it in world cycling, had resumed: “If I had a euro for every awkward naked moment I've had with the old lady whose balcony faces my bedroom courtyard... I'd have four euros.”

So the tour wasn’t a total waste then, Zak?

Rough going

But Zak, Bendigo riders are tough. We’ve been reading about the Bendigo-Melbourne bike races of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.

The race had had a break for a few years after World War I, but in October 1927 it was all go again… and remember the road would have been rugged to say the least by today’s standards.

Joe Parmley of Richmond raced in front of crowds all the way, including thousands at the Melbourne finish in the near record time of four hours 14 minutes – for 147 kilometres.An average of about 35km/h.

Oh, did we mention that the 163 riders also faced furious headwinds, record heavy rain, hailstones and “a heavy fall of snow”.