..shaped. Firstly came the issue of who should be invited. The number of elders has not changed; in fact it has sadly decreased by one since last year, but the number of children and grandchildren has grown, if not exponentially, at least arithmetically. We are unique amongst the group in only having the one daughter…
S P E C T R U M S P E C T R U M S P E C T R U M M I K E R U D D B I L L P U T T . C O MM M I K E R U D D B I L…
.. in the course of being interviewed by Michael I discovered quite a lot about the goings-on of Geof before and after our lives briefly intersected in an exchange of letters back in the ‘70s. This Geof-type information curiously resonated with the first writer, Shane Homan’s brief, which is to record the history of venues,…
..a television for a week we had no idea what it meant. My French is adequate enough to cause confusion, invite strangers to go roller skating or to admire the buttocks of my neighbour’s goat, but collapses entirely when the speed goes above the very slow and deliberate pace which one uses when addressing the…
..me over for the holiday weekend until I could arrange for another visit from the plumber to fix it properly. That evening I decided to pop down to the local Red Rooster as I’d absolutely nothing in the fridge. As I arrived home there were lightning flashes as the predicted change swept over Melbourne, so…
1) Hugh does his mad professor bit as he sets up 2) I’ll Be Gonzo – but you knew that 3) Dunno who the she is, but she walks like an Egyptian.. 4) Daryl sees something amusing in the gloom..
Currently we have state and federal government where advertising is seen not only as the most appropriate and almost certainly the only activity to solve a problem. The billboard struck me as the equivalent of Speed Kills advertisements which are seen as a substitute for proper driver training and a way of eliminating the gross…
Well, for one thing he’s usurped a traditional Rudd family name. My great-grandfather on my father’s side was named Minchin Rudd and my father still carries Minchin as his middle name. OK. In fact, I couldn’t give a fig about happenstance like that. It’s his talent I resent. M couldn’t have been absolutely riveted to…
Mike’s Pith & Wind cont. .. David packing. (Or so the story goes – David’s recently been giving my brother and me unsolicited hints that there’s another side to the story). Jump forward forty years and I’m holidaying in NZ and stopping off in Rororua on the way to see mum in Auckland. To my…
.. sound of rain relentlessly thundering down on my roof – and filtering down through the loungeroom ceiling into my now inadequate symphony of pots and pans and thudding damply onto the attractive pooh-brown carpet. I realised that I was far too annoyed to go back to sleep, and concluded that the light was only…
..socio-economic status of the students. Private schools send all their problems to State schools where teachers cope with extraordinary generosity of spirit. Most of the time. But this, perhaps not too tangentially, brings to my attention the absurd amounts that CEOs of large corporations are paid, which is both disproportionate and absurd in relation to…
But not for me, however, given that the few tools I had possessed unique migratory habits, flying with the Terns and Godwits to Siberia and beyond; this would leave Bunning’s unique selling proposition looming very large and very empty. Which leads me to Christmas and the inevitable “Wadja wunt” (which is etymologically related to “Emma…
.. is a Canadian citizen and Matt Canavan is an Italian citizen, claim that they did not know that had dual citizenship. Waters was born in Canada and moved to Australia as an infant. After Scott Ludlum, also another Green Senator discovered that he not actually given up his ability to carry both and Australian…
Daddy Cool rocking at a hard place..
..simple, but in any case I’m generally pleased with the result. It seems that a lot of second-guessing has been replaced with an instinctive but apparently reliable certainty about what is required and how to get it. I don’t know if it’s a style exactly, but it’s a good starting point. No thought yet as…
.. Paris and Spain, to which end Dick purchased the latest in trendy back packs, which he proudly showed me on the night I visited them recently in Warrandyte. (See Dick’s Toolbox). I said it looked very fine, but one should be careful when wielding such an item in polite society, and told him this…
.. a nice fellow but he spent too much time playing football without a helmet.” Not that being on the wrong side of clever means all that much as it is apparent that most people can be convinced to believe anything no matter how ridiculous. You may be with me in thinking that anybody who…
Bearing in mind this is taken out of context, here’s what Michael Marissen had to say on the subject in his discussion with John Kleinig and Robin Leaver – I think you’ll get the gist: I mean there are two kinds of texts that people are uncomfortable with these days, no matter what their background….
..the family when I was a little boy. I think camping’s the present-day manifestation of men’s need to talk to Nature – and perhaps for Nature to talk back. It’s safer in this case to have Nature represent God and I think that most blokes would be comfortable with the communing with Nature metaphor. ‘Going…