Bagged it.

Terminated with prejudice with my weapons of choice. A Chinese made water pistol with no serial numbers and an Irish Mattock of undetermined origin.

Taking a leaf from the GW Bush/Rupert Murdoch book of International Relations, I set about ridding my garden of a rogue Cypriot Cypress Pine that was determined to subvert the local natives with hard line Islamo-Funtamentalist dogma.

Now here me out here. Cypress sounds like Cyprus.......and Cyprus is in the Mediterranean... and the Mediterranean laps on the Middle Eastern western shores....... and the middle East has Iraq in it........ and Iraq was responsible for the Twin Towers and the death of baby Jesus.......and anyway they are only after our freedoms.

So I had an Iraqi terrorist disguised as a Cypriot to contend with. The aforementioned Iraqi terrorist had to go with some hard line coalition of the willing can-do action.

It was going to be a slow, hard exercise.....

The softwood branches were no match against some good ol' fashioned Aussie steel.

You never know with these buggers, when you think you've got them broken, they dig in harder. The roots were a different story........the insurgent had an strong underground supply network.....this was going to take a little longer than expected. However, it was possible by cutting off lines of supply by thwacking out the secondary roots utilising the services of an Irish mattock and wetting down the soil with a high pressure hose to gather intelligence on further supply networks.

It wasn't giving in easily...... however using several methods from the Joint Task Force Guantanamio Field Guide, the blighter was soon broken. Not that it admitted to being an Iraqi terrorist but I knew it was.

And for a replacement, I have a Japanese maple, from one of the more friendly countries. I read a theory today that war has never been waged between countries with McDonalds reataraunts in them. Japan has McDonalds.....so Japan is good.

So........God bless the Golden Arches and God Bless Australia...... I'm off to go and get Fox News connected now.