1. A peaceful demonstration through the centre of Sydney went off without incident. I saw a Channel 7 newsreporter ask one demonstrator if she could 'understand' why the government might fear violence from an APEC demonstration. She answered no, and went on to give a reasoned defence of her argument -- which did not touch on why demonstrators might 'understandably' expect violence from their governments.

2. George W. Bush referring to the meeting as the OPEC.

3. APEC headlines sharing first page with articles about how Australian Dame Joan Sutherland launched the career of Pavarotti internationally by flying him to Australia to perform. In case you missed it, Pavarotti, Australia, extremely closely and importantly linked.

4. Horse flu undermining the potential efforts of our mounted police, ending up in at least one officer driving a police bus -- directly into someone's BMW.

5. The Chaser team managing to drive through police security for several blocks with one of them dressed as Osama Bin Laden. Upon their arrest, police refer to the security measures as 'successful'.

6. Asked to come up with the 'quintessential' spirit of Australia (which, in itself, sounds like the kind of impossible task they assign as initiation into a cult), someone came up with Drizabone jackets, with lapels that 'reflected the colours of the environment'. It's impossible to complete such a task without delving into sentimentality, of course, and I won't even comment on the fact that steel-grey was missing from the palette of environmental colours (the blue of the sky and water, the green of the land, blah, blah, blah). I just wonder why it's us smaller countries that end up trying to do such strange, simplified tasks. If they had the meeting in America, would the attendees all dress up like cowboys & proclaim their allegiance to the wildness of a long-absent frontier? Would they dress in stereotypes of other cultures to pay homage to multi-culturalism? Or would they leave such hokey ideas aside as inevitably serving no one & signifying nothing?

7. As thousands of Sydney-siders avoided the city, it was unaccustomedly easier to get a seat on the bus.