After a couple of minutes it became evident to me that the bloke at the machine was having some difficulties and I started to look around for the person that’s employed to lurk usefully around the ATMs for just such an emergency. That useful person wasn’t there, but it was then I realised that the…
.. Thom nowadays and they tend not to mix in my ever-decreasing circles. I first read about it in an audio magazine article written by the late, great Richard C Heyser of JPL one of the pioneers of in-depth loudspeaker laboratory analysis, and developer of Time Delay Spectrometry, who was using Catastrophe Theory to describe…
Manners certainly didn’t apply in these fraternal disputes. I suppose there had to be some release from perpetually polite behaviour – we were lads after all – but our constant bickering eventually led to our having to be separated and given our own bedrooms. Of course I got the better bedroom and Richard was consigned…
..with an annoyingly cheerful ‘Good morning’. Some time is spent contemplating what I would do with all the money I am totally convinced that I am going to win in the next lottery draw, a conviction which has gone totally unrewarded. Annoyingly I know that I have a better chance of being struck by a…
..A Fate Worse Than Death, or simply provocative and silly like Mama, Did Jesus Wear Makeup?, but there’s no discernible trend as far as I know – apart from avoiding the bleeding obvious, of course. Perhaps perversely, (or of course perversely), while I’m quite comfortable playing certain songs for years at a time, I’m not…
..delighted by him doubling his bets to cover his losses, as they profited by the eight billion dollars that he had lost. This increased the bonuses, the eventual sale of Porsches, floating gin palaces, excessive dinner, divorce settlements etc. of the very few people who tended to sit in front of trading screens for far…
Dick’s Toolbox cont. ..real winner. I wandered into this musical genre through Stephen May, who learnt guitar from Gary Young. Stephen thought that as Mike is musically brilliant, some talent might have devolved to me – a supposition that would have pleased neither a geneticist nor a behavioural scientist. Mr May, apart from being a…
Mike’s Pith & Wind cont. .. however, as it was the subject of constant headlines and discussed in hushed tones by disquieted mums over cups of tea and soggy white cucumber sandwiches from Beaths to Ballantynes. Strangely however, I don’t once remember lesbianism being mentioned, either in conversation or in the media, confined as it…
..(as represented on the For Pete’s Sake compilation CD that was produced to help raise funds for the second of Pete’s major Parkinson’s operations), Dragon, Thorpie, Russell Morris, John Farnham, Slim Dusty, Air Supply, Matt Finish, Australian Crawl, Mi-Sex, Pseudo Echo and Glenn Shorrock. No mention of any of my bands you’ll notice. Jamaican Farewell…
.. but realised that he is a New Zealander so the sunburnt country will have to make do with Clive Palmer. Tentatively I might say that we have better gun laws but the similarities between the two countries are far greater than any differences. While we don’t have a George Bush in the closet we…
Mike’s Pith & Wind cont. .. I’ve come to quite like my stinky asparagus pees actually, which probably tells me that I’ve been living on my own for too long. I’ve been skimming through my ‘WHY in West Germany’ journal (1983) to see if I can find any references to my German asparagus story. Boy!…
Dick’s Toolbox cont. .. been blind-sided by A V Jennings. I realise that we are rather recently evolved creatures of imperfect knowledge, but I think that we should be able to do better in our beliefs than be extended versions of the followers of Joanna Southcott. This worthy lady passed away in 1814 after announcing…
.. companions for a number of years, but it wasn’t till I got to the UK in the early ‘70s that I realised we were being short-changed in Australia – the range of chocolate bars was prodigious and Bounty bars and Amazin’ Raisin bars quickly became part of my daily diet round about the time…
.. into a rubbish skip or were used as weed suppressants somewhere on our little acre where I still occasionally turn up multi-coloured fragments. The silly thing was that whilst a number of paintings deserved their fate by being, in anybody’s opinion, a waste of paint and canvas, there were a number of paintings that…
Anyway, this particular setback to my innocence happened on a rainy day at the family farm (Mendip Hills) in North Canterbury, two or three hours north of the now blighted city of Christchurch. Mendip Hills was the jewel in the crown of the Rutherford family, our forebears on our mother’s side. Our grandfather, Norman Rutherford,…
.. significant investment in both money and occupied space. If I was adding up – which in my darker moments I am – some might consider it a considerable investment. Which, in my darker moments, I do. I don’t know what some of these devices do – though there are a number that bear a…
.. because of my familiarity with the PC format. I shouldn’t have bothered. The Windows 8 platform in my Notebook bears little resemblance to my XP or Windows 7 equipped PCs and the hardware is relatively heavy and it’s onerous to lug around. I hate throwing still-functioning things away so I continue to lug it…
.. and the damn thing doesn’t understand the phrase ‘Just shut up, will you!’ People will drive of the road screaming that they can’t take any more of The Eagle’s Greatest Hits’. You can take and initiate phone calls and have your text messages read out to you. My Subaru which has a dashboard that…
..bloke talking about an amazing band he’d seen in London. When he said they were called The Rolling Stones I was actually quite disappointed. I didn’t get the blues connotation and thought the name sounded like they were just another folk band – and you had to live through the folk boom of the early…
..the French. Who else would give this sensationalist and disturbing book two major awards – it would never have made it onto the short list of the anglospheric Man Booker – and have it leap into best seller status? Now while I am an unabashed Francophile, but I must confess that they do take intellectualism…