Look! The bitter and twisted, washed-up, hacks who compile this column aren’t stupid: if we are talking about the pine trees shown above being snapped by a camera, of course they were!

We may be permanently pissed but we’re not that pathetic! We’ve all held a box Brownie in our past lives.

Our beef on this occasion is we heard some media reports that those trees near the 17th green at the Augusta Masters had been “snapped” by strong winds.

Now it is true that the excellent report by Channel 9’s new roving golf reporter Tim Arvier did show one skinny tree that had been snapped, maybe about the middle, but the bulk of his report and all other news reports we’ve watched show those three big trees crashing down largely intact.

They all looked well and truly uprooted to our column compilers, and trust us, we know uprooted when we see it.

In the modern age of news reporting when the right words often seems to escape our pretty tyros of both or any other sex, we continue to mourn the passing of that era of journalism when the right word – uprooted in this case – snapped easily into the minds of properly trained practitioners of our once noble craft.

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We are indebted to David Marler, who makes a regular and welcome appearance in The Bug’s twitterverse feed, for pointing out this little blue by Aunty.

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And speaking of blues, this one’s ours because we’ve misplaced the name of the columnist and what mainstream mediocre workplace they work at, but let’s just assume they would have been woeful at primary school maths.

The last time Mediocre Bytes looked – in fact, every time we’ve looked since the Aston by-election just over a week ago – the Liberals now hold TWO federal seats in Melbourne.

It may not be to everyone’s taste but facts still matter.