And the winner is ...
Wit, outrage, disgust, pedantry, ABC weather and, of course, pointing out incorrect punctuation and grammar. These are the bread and butter of The Sydney Morning Herald's revered Column 8.
Six days a week contributors compete to appear in print and online with their pithy observations on life for what, for many, is essential reading at the start of the day. Not infrequently submissions arrive from foreign countries.
Now we can reveal the names of those who have appeared most frequently in the column, once affectionately known as Granny. The winner, by only a small margin, is retired school teacher George Manojlovic with 68 entries. He was closely followed by Paul Hunt of Engadine (66); Jim Dewar of North Gosford (65) and Allan Gibson of Cherrybrook (59).
Mr Manojlovic from Wollongong said he was "extremely humbled" by the award.
Of his contributions, he added: "It's like being part of a family, you recognise the names of the other contributors. I say to my wife, Kathy, I'm in again and she just laughs. She likes the fact that I have an interest there. My advice is to be funny and to be topical but most of all, be witty."
The only reference we could find in our archives to a George Manojlovic was a 32-year-old labourer charged with murder for a beer bottle attack on another man in Bankstown in 1973.
Mr Manojlovic said: "I remember that story. People used to say to me: 'Why aren't you in jail', but I can assure you it wasn't me."
The prize he receives (not the bottle of 2008 Grange he mentioned) is a caricature of himself depicted with the Column 8 doctorate drawn by the Herald illustrator John Shakespeare.
Brian Yatman of the Herald's Library who crunched the numbers, said: "We initially searched the Column 8 database for instances of each candidate's name. To narrow things down, we excluded follow-up mentions [eg "I write in response to Joe Bloggs' letter etc"] by only counting instances where the candidate's suburb was mentioned as we had noticed that the suburb is [generally] only mentioned in the initial dispatch."
Others who made it into the league table will be mentioned in Column 8 during the week.
