Life in General

Twanging the Wires

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I’ve been promising myself to do this for ages and finally bit the bullet – I started guitar lessons this year. Actually “started” isn’t precisely the right word as my first guitar lesson was last century when I was 15 years old and it was conducted at my high school. The first turned out to be the only one with this teacher because, I can’t remember how but the professional musician father of a friend of my brother’s, offered to teach me around about the same time. I had one lesson with him before he left his family and buggered off with a woman other than his wife so that was the end of that. To complete this family’s story, my brother’s now ex-friend is wanted in connection with the murder of his wife and three kids. There’s a $1,000,000 reward for information leading to the solving of that case. I could make a joke about the Jackson family and the Osmond family and the Manson family but won’t. So I decided to teach myself, as you do.

I’ve had a guitar since I was 15 (I now have seven) and I pulled it out occasionally over the years and ever so gradually gained a modicum of proficiency although, to be fair, my guitar playing is to Eric Clapton what my mother’s driving is to Lewis Hamilton.

But I needed some incentive to focus more time and effort if I was to improve and my Brazilian employers from some years back managed to do that, bless them. The Brazilian people I worked with in the world’s second largest resources company were mostly (there are always exceptions, right) the nicest people imaginable – friendly, pleasant and smart. How the corporate culture got so poisonous I am yet to fathom. I left this company in 2009 after three tumultuous years during which I spent more time with lawyers than customers and I was the marketing general manager. Litigation with a smile. And with persistent and acrimonious litigation comes stress. And what’s a great way to relieve stress? There are many obvious ways including the Jeffrey Toobin method (look it up – he hilariously still works for CNN) or the way I chose – playing the guitar.

I’ve mentioned this previously but the finish to my Brazilian corporate experience was bitter/sweet – rather frustrating but a blessing in disguise. The poisonous culture got me. Admittedly, I provoked it and it was a bit bigger than me but they claimed I jumped the shark. Unlike The Fonz there would be no more repeats for me.

Taking a step back, when I play (the guitar) I can’t concentrate on anything else thereby alleviating stress – that’s how this works. I guess anything that requires the use of two hands and a brain fits that bill. But I’m a shit carpenter so making furniture was out so I took up lessons again. One term later with a teacher who wanted to eliminate all of the bad habits I had picked up over decades of playing with myself (errr), I realised this wasn’t working but I had found the work ethic again and dedicated myself to improvement.

I’ve read a lot of music biographies and auto (laugh out loud) biographies and most of them are forgettable even those describing the most fabulous and depraved careers – I guess you had to be there. It was the Guns ‘N Roses boys who did it for me. The best book I read in this genre was Duff McKagan’s (he’s the Gunners’ bass player) although that is irrelevant to this story. More relevant is his band-mate Slash who told me (via his book) that he practiced 12 hours a day. That point stuck in my mind and inspired me to do nothing remotely like this. Which is why I will never be as good as Slash. That and a decided gap in our respective natural abilities.

Slash and Duff doing their thing

What I did discover is that you can only carry yourself so far. A combination of indolence and red wine was conspiring to carry me even shorter distances. I had plateaued and needed a mountaineer. So I found a teacher and the first things he said to me were “show me what you can do” and “what else do you want to be able to do”. That was all I needed to hear. So in another year or two of intense practice I’ll be able to finger pick Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and there won’t be a bar chord that I haven’t heard of. The child bride is getting heartily sick of hearing mangled versions of Streets of London and Landslide as I try to train my right thumb and three of the four fingers to at least appear to be cooperating.

It works for me to the extent that I’ve even written a few songs. Just in time for the revival of vinyl records which is just as well because how else do you get a song into the Top 40?

Covid – Despite What You’re Told, Doesn’t Travel Well

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It’s a truism that if you want something organized efficiently, don’t get a bureaucracy to do it.

I was recently asked to travel from the city I live in in Australia to another city in Australia, in another state, have a meeting then fly back the same day. Pretty straight forward you would have to agree and not an unusual occurrence. In my full-time working days I did it regularly. But do you think I could decipher the reams of instructions and descriptions polluting numerous government websites in order to understand what freedoms I would have to forego to do this. Because this whole episode, world-wide has been an exercise in restrictions of “freedoms”

I use the inverted commas round the word freedom because freedoms, by definition, are free and not to be tampered with by busy body politicians and their cadaverous health bureaucrats. Unfortunately, that’s not what the word means anymore. Once inalienable freedoms are glibly given and taken and rationed. They are rewards for good behaviour given to inmates who have behaved themselves.

Our premier is a whiny socialist, typical of many politicians around the democratic world (there’s a major contradiction in terms in that last sentence). Listening to these people try to explain what we can and can’t do on a daily basis is something I have given up doing – life’s too short. They live for it, I know. I don’t. Notwithstanding, it makes the libertarian portion of my blood boil.

So back to my dilemma. After spending too many hours trying to understand whether I could take my day-trip without having to put my granddaughter up as collateral or leaving a few pints of my own blood (the non-libertarian part) for the inevitable transfusion I would need after returning from the home of the walking dead in the south of our country, I gave up. That is, I gave up trying to work it out for myself. The solution – ring your local member of parliament and get them to earn some of that salary they didn’t forego when most of the country was locked down and destitute. So I did. It’s been a couple of hours so even the people who wrote the manual don’t seem to be able to make any sense out of it. I found it easier to work-out the instructions regarding construction of an Ikea bookcase. And I haven’t got a degree in architecture.

Update

I have been advised by my local MP’s office that if I want to go to this particular state for a few hours then return, I have to be double vaccinated (I am) and while I am there, get Covid tested and return a negative then on my return, do two weeks in quarantine. This is for my protection because I am incapable of protecting myself. I need a whiny socialist to look after me apparently. And this brings us full-circle back to why you don’t want bureaucrats organising anything.

A Bevvy in the Boulders – Part 2

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Since the CB and I decided to do a reverse tree-change and move from a semi-rural acreage setting to a townhouse closer to the city one thing we have missed is the view or in our case, views. There’s the horizontal (or slightly elevated) view to the hills in the distance and the vertical view to the incomprehensible splendour of the Milky Way. We hadn’t seen the Southern Cross and its Pointers for four years because of the blocking effect of city lights but a few nights ago, there they were.

Stanthorpe only has around 5000 people and we were out of town anyway so if he’d been there, Darryl Kerrigan would have been in his element – how’s the serenity. This piece of trivia would not have registered with those of you who haven’t immersed yourselves in the Aussie cultural equivalent of the Renaissance, a movie called “The Castle”. Watch it. Here’s a taste.

And I mention the Southern Cross because it’s very much part of the Australian psyche (and flag). And it and Orion’s Belt are the only celestial constellations I can identify.

Day 2 was a wine tour – all day. Four wineries and the Queensland College of Wine Tourism for lunch. That was about 38 wines all up. For professional tasters, that’s all in a day’s work. For amateurs like us it’s a serious challenge which was approached with all of the grit and determination we could muster. There were four of us (plus the driver) on our tour, the CB and I and a honeymooning couple who spent their time on the back seat of the mini-bus while the CB and I admired the scenery.

For the pros, wine tasting is all about the five “s’s” (pronounced “esses”), as in swirl, sniff, sip, swoosh (round the mouth) and spit. For us amateurs there’s a variation on this theme that goes swirl, sniff, sip, swallow, serve (the next one). And by the end of the day you might find the real amateurs doing the sip, swirl, swallow, sip, swallow, sprint, spew.

In these wine growing and wine making areas with lots of cellar doors you’d have to assume that, especially on the weekends and in high season there will be at least a few half pissed tourists on the roads. Which could explain the signs near all of the main intersections which tell drivers to stay on the left because this is Australia. Apparently these signs are all over the country but this is the only place I’ve noticed them and also apparently it’s because of the proliferation (in non-covid times) of fruit picking backpackers. In these covid times some fruit rots on the vines because our entitled youth and unencumbered older types are too lazy to pick fruit for $25/hour. There’s a strawberry runner farm in the area which employs about 600 people at peak times but….despair.

The CB and I would have offered to help out but with my dodgy back and her bursitis ravaged shoulder the best we could do was make a financial contribution so we signed up for wine clubs and bought a car full of produce, mostly of the liquid variety. And as previously mentioned, the Ugg Boot Lady got a couple of sales (four if you count each boot). And we bought Christmas stuff (and chocolate) from the Christmas farm because it’s May already and we don’t want to leave it too late.

Back at the cabin, after a long day supporting the local vintners, it was time to relax in front of the fire and not go to the bar because it had closed at 5.00pm. Incidentally, we did attempt to grab a cleansing ale at about 4.55pm but the lady behind the bar assured me that they closed at 4.45pm. I pointed in the direction of the reception area and reminded her that there was a sign there that said it closed at 5.00pm but she assured me it said 4.45pm. It didn’t and when I went to take a picture of it the next morning for this blog, it had disappeared like so many conservative Twitter accounts.

We had plenty of wine and beer but there was a principle involved here. After dismally failing to invoke the principle it was back to the cabin and the fire. It was then that the CB and I discovered we would make useless arsonists. It only took about four goes and a box of fire starters to get a decent fire going. I should know better because fires burn oxygen and as the oxygen content in the room drops, sleep creeps up. And that was that.

A Bevvy in the Boulders – Part 1

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Well the xhild (her new pronoun – no, actually it’s a typo – the “x” is next to the “c”) bride and I have finally escaped, albeit for just a few days. Our travel plans were decimated last year for obvious reasons and this year hasn’t been any better. So we loaded up the car and hit the road. Of course any excursion that involves more than one night away from home rivals D-Day for logistical complexity because you never know when you might need…… (fill in name of appropriate item or inappropriate as the case may be, a truffle trowel, for example). We did however manage to leave enough space in the car for a few cases of wine and that space was duly filled because wine tasting was the primary motivation for visiting that particular part of the world.

We stayed at a rather rustic establishment that came with cabins and its own micro-brewery just outside Stanthorpe, a pretty little town (if rather rocky – it’s in an area called the Granite Belt) in south east Queensland once famous for apples and snow. It is just about the only place in sub-tropical Queensland where it does snow occasionally.

Incidentally the little town just outside Stanthorpe called Applethorpe has a school which they have self-titled “the coolest school in Queensland”. Applethorpe has the cold and the apples covered whereas (and here’s the geologist in me making a rare appearance), Stanthorpe is named after Stannum, the Latin word for tin which was mined in the area (in the late 1800’s) before they started growing apples. And those of you who remember any chemistry will know that the chemical symbol for tin is Sn.

Now onto more frivolous musings. Oh yes, I almost forgot. Stanthorpe is now known for apples, snow and wine.

Incidentally, back on the travel thing, just to show how out of touch the CB and I are, we went to a bottle shop in Stanthorpe on the first afternoon and as we browsed we separately asked the attendant if they had any local wines and he pointed us to the section which had a large sign over it which read “Local Wines”. Now as any regular traveler will know, it’s advisable to have your metaphorical antennae up when you’re out of your homely comfort zone. You need to be able to notice stuff. However this was Stanthorpe not Mogadishu but we have been out of practice so both claim immunity from accusations of stupidity. And why were we buying wine from a bottle shop when there were dozens of cellar doors within staggering distance? It was the first afternoon prior to visiting any local wineries so we needed supplies to get us through the next few hours.

But here’s the real reason we needed to stock-up. The place where we were staying had a very nice bar which shuts at 5.00pm. Let me say that again. The bar opens at 10.00am and shuts at 5.00pm. Not 5.00am but 5.00pm. The first day, we got there with enough time to order one drink. The bar lady asked me if I wanted a 10oz beer, a 15oz or a pint. Nice lady, stupid question. If she’d offered me a bucket after a day of driving and considerable stress, I’d have taken that.

Stress, you say. Yes, something happened between arriving in Stanthorpe and getting to our accommodation, apart from the mercy stop at the bottle shop. This was something I had never done or even contemplated in my many years of existence. I bought a pair of Ugg boots. These have long been considered, along with flanno’s and mullets as integral parts of bogan culture. And I wouldn’t or hadn’t ever contemplated such a flagrant act of cultural appropriation, apart from eating Indian (and Thai, Chinese, Japanese etc) food, driving German cars, drinking ….well any nationality actually….beer (apart from non-alcoholic Iranian beer which I tried once in Iran, funnily enough, and tastes like what I would assume camel’s piss tastes like) and on and on the list goes. Having said that, the inner bogan does emerge occasionally. My wife and daughter once scolded me for wearing jeans and thongs (the ones that go on your feet not in your arse). Who knew?

So a bridge too far, or in this case more like an elephant’s foot too far, had been crossed and I had succumbed to warm feet syndrome. I have never been a fashionista and I’m as likely to follow fashion trends as I am to go bungee jumping. And by buying Ugg boots, I broke the bungee.

More to follow.

Taking a Tumble

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If you lived in our townhouse complex you may have been privy to a quite ridiculous situation a few days ago. Let me set the scene.

The child bride has bursitis in her left shoulder and has recently had a cortisone injection so her left arm may as well be made of wood, such is its uselessness.

And yesterday, after lunch at the excellent Birches restaurant, it started to rain. Being the chivalrous knight that I am, I went down the ramp to the carpark first and towards the bottom, turned to tell Mum and the CB to wait out of the rain while I went to get the car. As I turned, I put my foot halfway onto a small step, twisted my ankle and went down like Monica Lewinsky. Unfortunately there was no Clinton of any persuasion to break my fall, only a concrete path and it was not happy to see my right shoulder, right elbow and right hip so took to them like Mike Tyson to anybody.

Consequently, today I feel like I’ve just played the All Blacks….at my age.

So, there are industrial bins for our household rubbish. The lids are at about nipple level for me and top hat level for the rather diminutive CB. With both of us being appendage challenged, as in being unable to lift our respective right and left arms more than about 10 degrees we each had to take one small bag of rubbish to the big bins. I lifted the lid with my left hand and the CB threw the bags in with her right.

In the mining game we call this double handling. In our townhouse complex it’s called pathetic if you don’t know the circumstances.

Fortunately I don’t watch football with my hip and shoulder although they do together comprise a rather brutal function in the uniquely Australian version of football (or “footy” as it’s colloquially called). You can google “hip and shoulder” to see what I mean.

And I don’t need them to drink beer either as I have a perfectly normal functioning mirror image pair on the left side of my body, not that I need my hip to get a glass to my mouth, but it does get me to the fridge.The next challenge is to see if I can slide a guitar into that 10 degree gap.

Your boundless sympathy is much appreciated.

Do You Remember When…

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Back on 9/11 (this year) I intended writing one of those “do you remember where you were when….” essays but I forgot so I’m writing it now. I finished the (paying) work I do each week yesterday and the (non-paying) garden work half an hour ago and it’s raining so I thought I’d impose a bit of cancel-culture on procrastination to fill in a few minutes until beer time. Incidentally, that’s the only time you’ll see the words “cancel-culture” here other than as a target of disdain and ridicule.

There are very few events in human history that warrant remembering what you were doing when they occur because most of those memorable moments are the reasons you remember as in, I remember what I was doing the day I got married – I was getting married.

No we’re talking about disconnected events fusing together into an unforgettable nuclear marriage of inconvenience. For me, only three immediately spring to mind.

The first was when Kennedy was assassinated on November 22nd 1963. I was a small boy getting on a ship in Southampton in the UK with my family to travel to Australia. A note was left on each table when we fronted for our first meal onboard advising us of what had happened. As master of ceremonies at one of my brothers’ wedding, also on November 22nd I was able to remind him that an event of earth-shattering infamy happened on that day, some 30 odd years before. Also, Kennedy got shot.

The second was the actual day of 9/11. I was in Seoul, Korea and had been out with a work colleague, our agent and some customers for dinner and drinks and on returning to our hotel our Korean agent received a phone call from his wife, advising him that a plane had flown into a building in New York – no other details. After a suitably shocked exchange of comments we retired to the bar. On returning to my room and turning on the TV, the full horror of the events that day were revealed.

Seoul is a garrison town for the US army and the hotel I was staying in is next door to the imposing Seoul World Trade Centre. It’s not uncommon to see military activity in Seoul both in the air and on the ground at the best of times. At the worst of times it was chaos. Organized chaos I’m sure but you can imagine the traffic when all but one entrance to the very large army base are shut. And there were more than the usual number of choppers in the air, many buzzing around the building next door, not to mention the troops on the ground. Seoul is after all, only about 50km from North Korea.

Incidentally, I’ve been to Korea over 60 times (I used to keep count) and have never been to the DMZ. The Child Bride has been to Korea once and when she went to the DMZ she brought me back a hat.

After doing what we had to do that day we made our way to the airport to catch our flight to Osaka to connect with our Ansett International flight to Brisbane. Ansett was doing it really tough right then and rumours were swirling that they were about to go under. As we flew into Kansai airport, I saw the big bird with the “A” on the tail – relief. After boarding (and getting upgraded to first class – some good things did happen on that trip) I was privy to a conversation between two flight attendants which filled me with, not so much dread considering what had happened the day before, but considerable disquiet. They weren’t sure whether the plane would actually leave Osaka. Fortunately, it did – relief.

Our flight was scheduled to fly from Kansai Airport to Brisbane and then on to Sydney. Bearing in mind that the airline was on its last legs (wings? wheels?), the announcements as we approached Brisbane went like this:

We’ll be landing in Brisbane soon. Please ensure your belongings are stowed….etc

A few minutes later…..

We’ll be landing in Brisbane soon. Would all connecting passengers please deplane and re-board when the announcement is made. We’ll be in Brisbane for approximately one hour.

A few minutes later…..

We’ll be landing in Brisbane soon. Would all connecting passengers deplane and wait for an announcement regarding your onward journey.

A few minutes later…..

This flight will now terminate in Brisbane. The ground staff will advise arrangements for your onward connection to Sydney.

A few minutes later…..

Please be advised that all of the passengers heading to Sydney will have to make your own onward arrangements. We don’t know how we’re getting there either.

The airline had expired while we were travelling between Japan and Australia.

And the third time was only recently so only time will tell whether it sticks with me but I’m betting it will. It was one of those occasions that will only happen once in your life – my father died.

My mother and one of my brothers and I had been to see Dad in the morning and it was not a pretty sight. He was in stage 7 of Alzheimer’s which means an inability to swallow, amongst other things. Mum struggled to even look at the handsome athletic man of her youth now a shriveled shell of a man struggling to breathe. We left after a few minutes and returned to her home about 10 minutes drive away from the nursing home Dad had resided in for the past few years.

We had been there for about twenty minutes when Mum’s phone rang. Now those of you who have frequented nursing homes will know that a lot of the staff are Asian, in this case many were from the Philippines. My Mum still speaks with a distinct Manchester accent but, ironically struggles with other accents. She hates ringing the phone company or the electricity company because she will generally find herself talking to someone in Manila or Bangalore. Anyway she could not understand what the lady who rang was saying. If I hadn’t been there to take the call maybe she still wouldn’t be aware that Dad died just after we left.

I cheated a bit with the third example. It wasn’t a disconnected (from my life) event that imposed  itself on me to the extent that it never leaves but, what can I say other than I won’t forget that day.

I just thought of another. The day Gough Whitlam was sacked as Australia’s Prime Minister on November 11th 1975, I was at university. There was a great rending of garments, wailing and gnashing of teeth amongst the communist student union types. My lot, we did what we normally did – went to the pub.

St Crispin’s Day

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Apologies for the history lesson (and the recent paucity of posts – go back to the start for the reason why) but you may or may not know that today is St Crispin’s Day.

So what, I hear you ask?

Well, some rather famous things happened on this day.

So what I hear you ask again There are 365 days in a normal year and calendars of various descriptions have been around for thousands of years so it’s probable that something of note happened on every day of the years in human history. January 10th, for example was the anniversary of the CB and my nuptials, just shading the birthday of Pat Benatar for significance. But I digress.

St Crispin’s Day has religious significance obviously – the “St” bit gives that away. It commemorates the martyrdom of Crispin and his twin Crispinian in 286. They were beheaded by the Romans for preaching Christianity. Rather a severe consequence for something so seemingly insignificant but such were the times. But I digress (again) as that’s not the focus of today’s lecture.

Today in 1854 was the ill-fated but heroic Charge of the Light Brigade during the Battle of Balaclava in Crimea. But more importantly it was the day the Battle of Agincourt was fought in 1415. And if you’ve read this far, you’ve got to the crux of the story.

If you haven’t already read it, I’m going to share with you one of Shakespeare’s most famous speeches. How did we segue to that you are asking? Well in his play Henry V, King Henry (or Harry as he liked to be called) makes the famous Band of Brothers speech just before the vastly outnumbered British take on the French at Agincourt.

Harry’s would be one of the most inspirational pre-battle speeches (you can keep your “because no one can take away our freedom”, Mel Gibson) in history, if it wasn’t made up by Shakespeare. But fiction of non-fiction, it is said to have inspired Churchill’s famous “Never was so much owed by so many to so few” Battle of Britain speech and many others. So I am reproducing it here for your reading and edumacational pleasure. It starts with the King’s cousin lamenting the lack of numbers:

WESTMORLAND. O that we now had here
But one ten thousand of those men in England
That do no work to-day!

KING. What’s he that wishes so?
My cousin, Westmorland? No, my fair cousin;
If we are mark’d to die, we are enough
To do our country loss; and if to live,
The fewer men, the greater share of honour.
God’s will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.
By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,
Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;
It yearns me not if men my garments wear;
Such outward things dwell not in my desires.
But if it be a sin to covet honour,
I am the most offending soul alive.
No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England.
God’s peace! I would not lose so great an honour
As one man more methinks would share from me
For the best hope I have. O, do not wish one more!
Rather proclaim it, Westmorland, through my host,
That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made,
And crowns for convoy put into his purse;
We would not die in that man’s company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.
This day is call’d the feast of Crispian.
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam’d,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say “To-morrow is Saint Crispian.”
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say “These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.”
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words—
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester—
Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb’red.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be rememberèd—
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

Be inspired!

Not Happy!!

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It’s been a while since I’ve posted because it’s a bit of a struggle at the moment. As you dear reader know, I try to lace my missives with the quirky and ridiculous and funny. While the second of these currently applies to world events in spades (am I still allowed to say that?) it’s the allowance of a piece of Seattle to be hived off into a new country type of ridiculous and not the frocks worn to the Oscars type of ridiculous that I’m talking about here. As a consequence I’m mad as hell as my previous post probably indicates although it has to be said the intransigence of the “authorities” has moved on from a mere virus to a threat to Western Civilization. And aren’t the Russians and the Chinese and the Iranians and the North Koreans loving it.

I’m mad as hell because I cannot imagine a parallel universe where what is happening now around the world and especially in the USA would be tolerated by sane people. A very very small minority of morons is being allowed to dictate terms to the silent majority because left wing politicians (where they have jurisdiction) and a complicit traitorous media are supporting them and promoting them and level-headed law-makers are doing nothing about it. And you want me to kneel because of my white privilege? How about you just fuck off.

Yesterday Victor Davis Hanson said that the wind went out of the #MeToo sails when Joe Biden was accused of sexual assault. When it’s one of your team and that person can’t be jettisoned as collateral damage like Harvey Weinstein was, the hypocrites on the left are as toothless as a sock-puppet. Watching various A through F grade celebrities splutter and bluster when confronted with this inconvenient Biden truth (remind me again of the Kavanaugh fiasco) makes me laugh….with disgust. As a corollary it’s likely that the coalition of thrill-seeking middle-class teenagers, Antifa scum, perpetual student rent-a-crowds, gang members and lazy, good for nothing drug-addled chancers will only be forced to disperse the day after they are given Nancy Pelosi’s address. Then Democrat governors and mayors in cities that have been controlled by the Democrats for many decades will be ordered to re-take control. If Trump hasn’t already done so.

The irony of what is going on across the USA is that the people most affected by the riots in places like Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, St Louis and Washington DC – residents and small business owners, black, brown and white – are the people who regularly and monotonously vote for the clowns who are allowing this to happen. Nobody deserves to be innocently caught up in a self indulgent block-destruction party and see their life’s work go up in flames especially when Hollywood shit-bags are providing funding for the occasionally arrested arsonists, thieves and thugs who have taken your life’s work off you. But if you keep voting for them, my sympathy only stretches so far.

And where do you think all of that money that Hollywood and beneath contempt, virtue signalling corporates are donating is going? Into legal-aid funds? To feed the inhabitants of CHAZ or CHOP or CHUMP or whatever the hell name the “warlord” who runs the joint has dreamt up today? To pay for the removal of garbage? To house the homeless? To buy weapons (and drugs and attendant luxuries) for Antifa? If you chose the last option go to the top of the class (when the school reopens). If you think that’s too harsh tell me who has control of the bank accounts and who their auditor is.

I just hope for their sake, that all of the skipping and jumping, selfie taking, isn’t it all such a spiffing wheeze with all the like, chanting and like, marching and like, swearing (not too loudly), fresh faced (but masked), outer suburban teeny-boppers who just love, like, sticking it to the man as long as they can borrow daddy’s car, aren’t still hanging around after bed-time when patience runs out and the vigilantes arrive or the legally sanctioned shit really hits the fan because their new chums from CHUMP most definitely won’t have their backs – more likely their back-packs.

Corona Crazy

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The CB and I are into day 12 of our two week lock-down. We started to feel it after only two days. At that point we were starting to get desperate being down to our last internet, three laptops, one desktop, two smart TV’s, Netflix, Foxtel, Stan, free-to-air TV (whatever that is), 2 smart phones, 7 guitars and associated paraphernalia, a cupboard full of food, a fridge full of beer (and some food), a wine rack full of wine, countless toilet rolls, a house full of comfortable furniture and two children at our beck and call. It was touch and go whether we would survive the next 12 days.

But here we are with only two days left. To those who have been going stir crazy, I say harden up. It’s not that bad and if you prepared and have the mental capacity to withstand the range of deprivations dumped on us collectively by an over-zealous political sector (and I include politicians, bureaucrats and police in that over-reaching totalitarian collective), then you’ll be okay.

We aren’t in the least bit stir crazy and were perfectly okay until the two cats were returned from their “holiday” at the cattery which they endured while we were away. As usually happens, as soon as they got home they filed an eviction notice with the authorities as two people (us) had again squatted in their house. They do this every time we travel and it never works because the CB and I have more money than them and can therefore afford better lawyers. You’d think they’d learn.

But things will be back to normal in a couple of days except for the fact that stray people are now being rounded up and removed to five start hotel rooms I believe as well as being fined for exercising that sadly missed right to freedom of assembly. Compensation for this is coming in the form of money – our money being given back to us in advance because the government hasn’t taken it off us (and our kids and their kids and their kids etc) yet.

It must be great being the government. They can pump up the economy by injecting cash into it by buying back government bonds. But here’s the best bit. They just print more money to buy said bonds back. How brilliant is that. Imagine if we could all do that.

Where to Look?

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A few years ago the child bride and I decided to forego country living and move to the city. I have mentioned this before, but to recap, we wanted to be able to pick-up and leave at the drop of a hat if an interesting (and cheap) travel opportunity presented itself. Also I got tired of spending all weekend, every weekend mowing acres of grass, trimming round dozens of trees and along endless edges and maintaining various items including a swimming pool. So we sold our sprawling house on acreage and bought a two story townhouse close to the city and the international airport.

One of the attractions of the place where we now live is that the pool is right outside our gate. So we can use it whenever we like but not have to worry about cleaning it. I did, however have to tell a bunch of (what I assumed to be) male flight attendants yahooing and generally talking very loudly at 6.30am one Sunday morning (a time that barely exists in my world), to pull their heads in. They obviously weren’t bikers or UFC fighters because they politely apologised and buggered off.

There is one disadvantage in being so close to a community pool, especially as we have a two storey house and I spend a lot of time upstairs in the multi-purpose room where I have my guitars and the big(gest) TV. This room also has a large window with a panoramic view of the pool. In winter this is not a problem. In summer it presents some rather unique challenges. Let me set the scene.

We also have a gym in our complex and I was on my way there yesterday, walking past the pool at about 11.30am. I couldn’t help but notice a rather attractive young lady sprawled out on her towel sans top and wearing a barely visible thong (not the Australian foot-wear type thong, the other one) because she had hidden most of it in her person. It is impolite to stare so I didn’t….for very long. On the beach this isn’t a problem. Here, it is and here’s why. If young ladies are on display around the pool below my window, standing at the window for any length of time, whether looking at them or not, is going to get me branded as a perve. Not being able to look out of one of your windows kind of defeats the purpose in having them.

Think how much worse this could be if it was a group of 10 year olds (male or female) in and around the pool and there’s “pedo guy” surveying the scene from the relative security of his upstairs rec-room with hands out of view below the window sill. The inadvertent consequences don’t bear thinking about. So what to do? Spend more time actually in the pool I guess.