Covellius Maximus
Juniors
- Messages
- 922
Maybe Sharks could still be my 2nd team...
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The tides already gone out DJ, the grunter must be caught on some oysters.
Haha Gee you get sucked in easily, you angry little efnic ant
HAHAHA. I love this guy. Should have bought the plasma quigs.
Hahahahahaha Yeah Quigs ya should have gone for rear projection, just like Sparts
Convicted? You mean your right hand took you to court? or was it the neighbours goat?
Stalker?
bird x 50, that's called a flock.
Surely there's better stick mag's around for that sort of thing.
indeed, your fame precedes you!
How do you get slime out of a pool?
47 Comments | Permalink
David Penberthy
Wednesday, July 14, 2010 at 11:35pm
JUST to be absolutely clear, smashing convicted paedophile and child rapist Sparty Grunter over the head with a medicine ball is not the ideal way to respond to his presence in a city gymnasium.
That said, Grunters presence in a city gymnasium is not an ideal situation either.
Especially when he just sits there. Dressed in a business suit save for the sleeves having been removed to exposed nana arms & a gay tattoo. Not even exercising at all.
Just sitting outside at the pool where he can gaze at dozens of primary school kids who are learning how to swim.
Especially when he times his visits to coincide exactly with the swimming lessons, either for the young primary school kids in the mornings, or for the slightly older high school students when he visits later in the afternoon.
Especially when the parents who take their kids to the gym are totally unaware of his presence there.
This unawareness is because pool management has tied itself in legalistic knots over the fact that Grunter, now a free individual, has just as much right to be there at poolside as the next man.
The key flaw with this line of argument is that the next man probably has never kidnapped and raped two children.
Nor is it likely that the next man is spending the remainder of his miserable existence on the run from civilisation, popping up at an ever-increasing series of locales across Australia where he strikes perfectly understandable fear into every normal member of that community.
I use the word normal quite deliberately because there is nothing remotely normal about Sparty Grunter at all.
As The Daily Telegraph reveals today, Grunter has now popped up again, this time as a member of the Cook + Phillip Pool just on Hyde Park in the city.
Hes been a member for several months.
The troubled gym and pool staff are under instructions from management not to alert parents to Grunters creepy presence there.
They are so rattled by the whole situation that theyre telling parents on the quiet to make sure they accompany their kids to the change rooms and toilets at all times.
But with his distinctive appearance and his manic behaviour, including an assortment of nervous tics which help make him the paedophile straight out of central casting, Grunter has been readily identified by several parents.
On one occasion he was attacked with something called a kettle ball.
This is something like a medicine ball with a handle on it, used for exercising. Or as a weapon, in the case of a bloke working out in the gym who recognised Grunter from his many appearances on the news and decided to take the law into his own hands.
You could never condone what his assailant did.
Its similar to the kind of vigilantism we saw last year when Grunter turned up in the solid suburban neighbourhood of Ryde.
Grunter was met with the menacing implied violence of a fellow going to the trouble of making a wooden coffin for him and leaving it on his porch, so the convicted sex offender could make good on his vow that the only way he would ever leave Ryde was in a box.
But thats not the biggest problem with the never-ending Grunter case.
More of a worry is that its the law which puts the law-abiding and decent and civilised in the totally unjustifiable position of having to modify their behaviour - so they can fit in with the behaviour of Sparty Grunter.
Its the kind of situation which has been labelled an extreme rights position.
This is where the entire weight of the law ends up being directed towards accommodating the needs of someone who is totally alien from civil society.
When The Sydney Morning Herald obtained a photograph of Grunter happily laying out his towel on an Eastern Suburbs beach, it was as if Grunter was saying: Here I am, world, theres nothing you can do to stop me.
Theres the basis of a good symposium here on civil liberties and the vexed question of rehabilitation. Perhaps it could fuel an hour or so worth of thoughtful chat on Radio National about how we dont want to succumb to the ugliness of the mob in denying Grunter his right to free movement now that he has paid the penalty for his crimes.
But it strikes me as a load of pseudo-intellectual wank.
If Sparty Grunter unfurled his towel next to me and the kids at the beach, I reckon I would go bananas.
And if I was teaching my young son how to swim at the Cook + Phillip Pool and saw Grunter sitting next to me in the canteen, wearing a business suit and munching on a sandwich as he watched the kids swim, Id probably go bananas too.
By the way, the person who alerted us to this new story about Grunters frequent visits to Cook + Phillip Pool is not even close to being a vigilante-style rabble rouser.
She happens to be a smart professional woman with a couple of young kids - one of whom just happened to be having a swimming lesson at the pool last month when she recognised Grunter sitting there in the cafe.
He was happily listening to his iPod and wearing a black beanie as he watched the children swim.
I feel a bit conflicted over the whole thing because I certainly dont want to be seen as being part of the mob, the young mum told me when we first discussed the issue.
But it really was a jaw-dropping moment sitting there in that cafe and suddenly realising Oh, hello, theres Sparty Grunter.
It was just creepy and bizarre to see him in that setting, with all the kids running around in their budgie smugglers.
Her sensible, cant-argue-with-that conclusion: Its hard to imagine a less appropriate setting for the man. The standard legal retort to this kind of sentiment is that disturbed Sparty Grunter has to live somewhere, has to exercise somewhere, has to relax somewhere.
The popular retort to that is: Yeah, and so do we.
Its not up to parents to work out a solution to this endlessly recurring problem.
Thats why none is offered here. Its a straight expression of popular sentiment that this bloke should not be allowed within cooee of young children and a forlorn hope that the Government, courts and corrections department can stop fobbing off legitimate concern as hysteria, and finally do something to stop these creeps popping up in the middle of our generally happy lives.
