Hot Sydney Chicks

Three Sydney women who were around in the twentieth century. I will get around to writing a bit about them, but can anyone name them? For some reason I think this post might get many hits from Google Search.

Amusements

I was going to write a rant about VCAT, but instead I am feeling happy and I bring you the best of what grabbed my short attention span on the net this week, aka, viral videos.

Veteran Channel Nine newsreader did not bat an eyelid as a seagull made a star performance. He was seeing the image in a monitor behind the camera.



You don't have to watch this drunk guy for very long to get the idea. I have never been quite as bad as this dude.



Terrabyte in Perth put this vid up on his website. It is good. Would I waste your time with some overlong and boring?



Virginia Trioli is a well respected broadcaster, but it maybe she is not a morning person and has a problem with suffering fools gladly in the early hours.

More St Kilda

It must have a cool early weekday morning to get this photo of the Vineyard in St Kilda without a patron. I haven't been there but I have seen it many times and at night, especially Friday and Saturday, it is packed. I think the expression is that it 'goes off'. Guards valiantly fight to keep patrons within its boundaries voices and music reach a crescendo and taxis are queued outside to cart patrons away.

It had some botheration with the council for a bit, over public land encroachment I think, but the problems were sorted out with some modifications to the premises.

Not too many venues in St Kilda have such an open outdoor space.

The Hammer

Well here is the hammer story.

In the sixties, long before I was born, my uncle was in a terrible car accident. While one of those in the car did not survive, my uncle did, possibly due to the generous rear parcel shelf in the VW Beetle, but he was brain damaged. He lived with us for a time. He worked for the State Electricity Commission who took responsibility for his rehabilitation.

He worked in a machine shop for a time to improve his fine motor skills as part of his rehab and made the hammer. I keep it only for sentimental reasons and I have a proper wooden handled claw hammer to use. The steel one is heavy, hence the holes drilled in it to make it lighter, it is unbalanced, badly angled and the claw does not work.

It is perhaps useful for tapping someone on the scone with or breaking a brick, but hopeless for driving in a nail.

I am just thinking, no wonder Mother does not want to cook anymore. She cooked for my father, two of his brothers, four children and often her parents too, plus other visitors or house guests.

Sharia Law

Well, we all have our preconceived ideas about what muslim Sharia law means. Some mild from of it is proposed for Australia.

We have laws, rules, regulations and bylaws enforced or mediated by courts, tribunals, panels and mediation centres and if none of these are to your taste, you can take civil action.

I wonder what possible area these Sharia laws or whatever could deal with that is not already covered by Australian laws?

Rightly or wrongly, we already have a bending of the laws for Aborignes.

Surely muslims are not proposing something that could go against Australian laws?

So where is this going to end? Will christians start telling me I can't work Sunday? Maybe jews will tell me I can't work Saturday? Maybe buddhists will stop me using fly spray?

Ok, Sharia laws or their mediation would only apply to muslims. But there is no reason why other religions could not claim similar rights. Oh dear, wait and see what the baptists have planned.

Hopefully the proponent of this Sharia nonsense is someone from way out on left field.

If I had a hammer

I'd hammer in the morning. I 'd hammer in the evening, all over this land. In tribute to Mary of Peter, Paul and Mary, who recently died.

This pictured hammer has some family history, which I will recount, but why does it have holes in the handle?

Cooking Disasters

A new book about cooking disasters has been published. Even the review of the book was amusing.

This is not an accurate quote from the book. I just noted the essence of it and will make it into my own form.

A wife cooks a first meal for her new husband, meat and vegetables......including a serving of boiled avocado.

My last cooking adventure was about eight years ago when I made a casserole with prunes. It was so deliciously rich, one mouthful was enough. My previous disaster was Teriyaki Beef, also very rich and quite inedible. No one can reduce like I can.

R is an excellent cook. While he uses recipes as a general guide, he never follows them. He is instinctive about cooking.

He blames drugs, and he may well be right as it was the late eighties. He has had a couple of disasters, always when there were visitors.

One was when he should have followed the recipe and actually cooked the chicken in the oven as well as tying it into parcels and browning it. I can't remember this one. Possibly drugs really were involved.

The other occasion I remember vividly, reinforced by it being recorded on a video camera and I have since transferred it to a dvd, but without watching it. It was terrible.

It was our last meal in Prosper Parade, Glen Iris. The video was called The Last Supper. A non Australian born friend was always known to say, it could do with a bit more salt love, whenever he ate a meal R had cooked. The friend then poured half the salt cellar onto the meal.

We have never used salt in cooking and still don't, but as a concession to this friend, R made a lasagna with salt......lots of salt........ I could not eat it. No one, even the salt lover could eat it. At the time another friend had been taken ill with a kind of breakdown. Five stoned gay men and a missing friend who had taken a breakdown and an inedible meal.........well the video is cruel but also hysterically funny. I can remember waking up the next morning with a sore throat and a aching jaw from laughing so much.

Ok, 'fess up. What has been your cooking disaster?

Sal, Sal, Sal

Sal Mineo.

Ok, I have heard of him, but a group of which I am a member posted some photos of him in a play called Fortune and Men's Eyes. Wow, bit raunchy and ever so homoerotic.

He acted opposite James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. I have seen it and it too had a strong homoerotic element. I don't remember Sal very well. No doubt I was very focused on James.

Google images found a number of online photos of him. Sal was hot. I will add him to Highriser Celebs. You can see the gaol play photos there.

Sal was killed for money by a drug addled teenager in 1976, who had no idea who he was.

Some trivia, Sal donated a drum he used in a movie to a then thirteen year old David Cassidy.

As my parents said in the fifties, well not literally my parents but, I would tread him.

As we said in the nineties, I'd do him.

As we said in the seventies, and my favourite, I'd shag him.

I wonder what phrase young people use now?

Here are a few of pics of Sal. While R adores blonds and redheads, and I like them too, nothing grabs me like dark hair and dark eyes. Yeah Jahteh, you worked that out already.

Snarl

A supposed American Pit Bull Terrier locks onto a mans hand. In spite the efforts of four people, two of them policemen, the man's hand cannot be freed. The dog had already killed a cat, bitten a girl, and killed one of the trapped bloke's pet dogs.

It took paramedics with a syringe full of the good stuff to kill the dog and get the man's hand free.

I believe this is what American Pit Bull looks like. They come in many variations. When I was young we called them Pig dogs. Suitable for killing wild pigs, no mean feat.

I have mentioned this before. We took a dog on from the Lost Dog's Home. It was a Staffodshire Terrier. It was strong and powerful. After it demolished its fenced enclosure and nearly killed the dog we already had, we took it back to the home. We were very sad as it was lovely with us.

But it was untrustworthy and could easily do serious damage to a pet or a human. I'd reckon the home then put the dog down. Dogs this powerful and with uneven temperaments are not suitable to being in society.

While it is already illegal to breed them here, further measures need to be taken. Owner's of Pit Bull's always cry that theirs is some other breed. Of course I don't need to say what sort of people own these dogs, just to say they are of a type who would be unlikely to be invited to a garden party at Buck House.

American Pit Bulls and variations, remove from the owner. Rottweilers, also notorious, remove from owners. Forget the cutesy name Rotty. They are bad. Dogs bred for fighting, remove.

Do you think this might be politically unacceptable? Nonsense. I can see the spin doctors now working away on removing this threat to our society, our people, our decency, our country, protecting our children our elderly from this foreign breed.

Dog bites man or creature in anything else but self defence, dog gone.

Project Complete

Forty five litres of Dulux Lexicon x 1/4 (white), eight litres of feature colour Dulux Centra (sandy gold) and four litres of bleach for cleaning woodwork later, the apartment has been painted.

Venetian blinds professionally cleaned.

Things that don't get moved and cleaned under were moved and cleaned under.

Pictures were juggled around and rehung.

Wardrobe doors removed for cleaning.

Light and power switch covers removed and cleaned.

Cables for computer, tvs, audio and assorted electric equipment cleaned.

Two Roman blinds vacuumed.

Light and lamp shades cleaned.

Old painting equipment chucked.

New painting equipment chucked.

About two dozen dead bogan moth remains discovered and disposed of.

Balcony cleaned, especially where exhaust fans remove the greasy fumes from cooking.

Still a few jobs to do, and there always will be, but we are quite proud of ourselves.

Clean, fresh and bright.

From Mother's Wardrobe and a Fire Story

This is a photo of Mother's parents when they married. Lucky I take after my paternal side in the hair department. The bridesmaid is my grandmother's sister and the best man is my grandfather's brother. They later married too.

Of course my great grandfather was there to give my grandmother away. My grandmother's formidable and stern mother is not in the photo.

My grandmother was a slave to her older brothers and sisters. She had a hard life as market gardener's daughter and then a market gardener's wife. When asked by my grandfather if she would like a hot water service installed in the early fifties, she settled for a kitchen sink heater and a chip heater for the bath and continued to heat water in an outside copper for washing clothes.

She was never shown any affection and so nor did she ever show any. She was wonderful to us, her grandchildren, just not demonstrative. She was quite characterless and had no interests aside from her family. Her only excitement in her old age was a game of Beetles or Whist with her church acquaintances.

I don't seel any connection between the woman in the photo to my grandmother. She was old and slow moving by her late fifties when I have my first memories of her. She outlasted my grandfather by a couple of years and died at the age of 74 in 1978. She was treated very badly by the staff at Cabrini Hospital in Malvern in her last days. To be treated with indifference and not noticed was her lot in life. She knew her duty and always did her duty. Tradie Brother and Sister won't have strong memories of her, but ABI Brother and I do. I hope she knew how much we loved her.


My grandmother grew up on a market garden where Monash University now sprawls. Their house was on a rise. Mother recounted to me just yesterday how her mother and siblings on summer nights used to watch the fires burning in the Dandenong Ranges. This sounds like it was a very frequent occurrence.

I fear for the Dandenong Ranges. When it used to burn, there were farms and small villages. The last really bad fire in 1983, Cockatoo, was not even really in the Dandenong Ranges but adjacent to them. Now houses are sprinkled right across the Dandenong Ranges, as perhaps they are across the Blue Mountains in New South Wales. It might not happen this year or even next year or the year after, but it will happen. Insure highly and get out is my advice.

But, my opinion I strongly hasten to add, just because it might be one of these new Code Red Days, unless there is actually a fire burning in an area where it could come to you, a case of the Boy Who Cried Wolf will quickly arrive. Don't tire or wear yourself out needlessly evacuating. There has to firstly be a fire that may affect you.

PS. I am astonished to be now watching on story about fires in the Dandenongs on last weeks Stateline as I just tidy this post up a bit that was mainly written a couple of days ago.