The crushing feeling of failure when you can't be hypnotised

It's when I'm on his doorstep that I realise responding to an amateur hypnotist's dating profile calling for "open minded" guys might not be the safest idea I've ever acted upon. 

Croc spotting

The spotlight catches sparse fog and insects hovering above calm water as it illuminates tangles of vegetation on the banks of the pitch-black Russell River.

As the light constantly sweeps back and forth, the only thing breaking the silence of a still Winter night in far north Queensland is the buzzing of the boat motor slowly pushing us downstream.

What we're looking for, Queensland's principal wildlife officer Matt Brien tells me, is the one "chink in the armour" of an animal whose reputation is largely centred on camouflage and stealth.

Paris

Under an eerily-dark Tour Eiffel, tourists pose for photographs as police sirens echo through the arrondissements.

Millions before them have taken exactly the same images, but when these people look back on their souvenirs, something will be missing.

Asking For It

Adrienne Truscott delicately places a rape whistle on the stool next to her gin and tonic, "in case anybody needs it".

Her vagina is in full view below a tight denim jacket.

"I'm new to comedy," she admits on several occasions to the Brisbane Festival crowd during her provocative one-woman show, Asking For It.

But her frank admission of inexperience betrays the skill required to pull off an act like this. She knows exactly what she's doing.

Morcombe

It looks like an autopsy table, but where there would normally lie an entire human body, there are just 17 fragments of bone.

'Where do these hillbillies come from?'

He sat in the back row of the public gallery in the Magistrates Court, combing his whispy black mullet, visibly nervous as he awaited his moment in the spotlight.

I'd been sent to the court to monitor the developments after a string of bikie arrests, but out of a room literally full of social misfits, it was this mullet guy that held my attention.

A skeptic's guide to a ghost tour

About half an hour into a ghost tour through one of Australia's most prominent historic sites, I'm adjusting my gloves as my sister sneers "are you a little bit scared?"

Her predatory sarcasm seems to be designed to scare me if I'm not already, but it fails.

"No, I'm just cold" I reply.