Monthly Archives: August 2013

Oh, Christine !

14 Wednesday Aug 2013

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In a break from the constant politicking, here’s a celebration of the fine art of hyperbolic advertising copy.  FM as long time patrons of the Pig’s Arms know, is a fashionista and she receives this seasonal “newsletter” from Christine’s in Melbourne.

It’s always over the top, but this one is so far over the top it has to be an all time classic.

Read on ! (with our thanks to Christine)

ChristineChristine 1

A ‘suppository of All Wisdom’

13 Tuesday Aug 2013

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art-abbott2-620x349The ‘Suppository of all Wisdom’.
August 13, 2013

A cheeky little number and ‘suppository of Wisdom’..
A few weeks ago someone questioned the silly terms given by wine tasters to alcoholic beverages. Far from it to complain about our national past-time of tippling but to call a wine having ‘ambition’ or being ‘arrogant’ is getting a bit wild. I have often watched those buffs at wine-tasting. Those with small noses need not apply. Most wine tasters have enormous noses not unlike the proboscis monkey with those flexible noses. Do they also drink through their noses?

Apart from giving a simple wine the most ridiculous attributes on par with an enraptured tourist guide describing Sydney’s opera House to Japanese tourists or Lang Lang’s suave description of Beethoven’s Ninth symphony to musical conservatorium students we have this latest discussion from our possible future Prime minister, Mr Tony Abbott.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/australiaandthepacific/australia/10236990/Australian-election-debate-Tony-Abbott-makes-suppository-gaffe.html

He is a Rhodes Scholar, apparently meant to say repository – a storage place- rather than a medication inserted in the rectum. Get a bit closer to your screen now and listen carefully.

His political opponents have now available one of the richest veins of jokes, cartoons, and endless requests for Mr Abbott to bend over and get free ‘suppositories of wisdom’.
This is George Bush’s territory in Australia all over again.

Stewart Lee – America

13 Tuesday Aug 2013

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stewart lee

Note: Video is a bit dodgy at the start sometimes, but bear with it – it started working for me and the dialogue is gold.  There’s a running commentary on what he’s doing while hes doing it, what the audience reaction was – and what it could have been – the different segments of the audience…  and merciless pisstakes on Americans, anti-muslim nutters, the stupidity of modern life, Top Gear, Margaret Thatcher …….

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uj2LcKdRU0o

Over at iView, you can see the whole two hours of this show with no video hassles – it’s unbelievably clever and twists and turns, returning to expand earlier jokes.

Can I speak to the Owner please?

13 Tuesday Aug 2013

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imagesCAL6FHWI
August 11, 2013

Speak-a- da-english pleaz.

Do people still speak English in Australia or is it my aging? Of late, I am drawn to the language of silence as the preferred language. There are silent movies why not silent speech? It’s just that I don’t seem to mix with people that still speak normal English. The English speakers have all died, or, like me, are old and prefer silence.

Most people, especially the young now, use a kind of rapid language with bits of English thrown in for good measure. On the television or radio, it is the same. There is the Adam-Hills show which has been lauded as the best ever. In between lots of laughter there is that kind of unintelligible rapid machine-gun type talking between hopeful Biebers or other Big Brother like fame seekers. They must be in such a hurry to attain fame and riches. How else to explain their strange fast talk?

By the time I try to decipher the first few words the program has changed into a mad dance routine and I am again faced with the manic laughter of a rapturous audience and Adam’s rampant crinkly face all contorted into a somewhat too spontaneous response, making a mockery of anyone still trying to make sense of the first joke. I don’t get it anymore. It all moves too fast. The fun has gone out of comedy. Give me back Charley Chaplin or even Ronnie Barker with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. They spoke English.

At least with those cold- calls on the land line you get to talk to someone from India or the Philippines where English is still being spoken properly. It’s a pleasure to be reassured by a polite; ‘can I speak to the owner, please?’ I always feel honored to answer and take great pleasure in finally meeting like-wise people linguistically still normal and intelligible.

It is a great pity that I can’t really extend the conversation. Regrettably, I am not in the market in wanting to get richer, neither need a cheaper phone rate, nor a lucky chance to own a resort on some pacific island with waving palms and coconut clad wearing maidens playing the ukulele. It is a cruel conundrum to find an equal in language but with totally opposite desirable aims or outcomes.

I usually am too much of a coward to end the pleading conversation by, just as politely refusing their kind offers. Instead I switch on the electric juicer , hoping the noise will be seen by the callers as something close to a technical hitch. Those cold-callers have families waiting, little mouths to feed and probably live in some shanty without drainage, let alone have electric juicers. It is a cruel world. But, at least they still speak English, heavily accented, but preferable to the gun fire tattle rattle of our locals and TV comperes.

Here in Bowral we have an Elvis impersonator. He arrived on a Saturday morning by small truck laden with large speakers and amplifiers and a DVD player with TV screen on which he can read and hear the words of the songs that he then ‘supposedly’ sings. He is totally into being Elvis Presley with many glittering gold baubles stitched on his vest and flared trousers. His face is old and a brown weathered sixties looking, topped by a shiny wavy pitch-black wig of hair carefully brushed back but enough of it falling over the right side of his fore-head. Through the years he has developed a formidable stomach but still is agile enough to sway, very routinely, backwards and forwards with a speaker in his hand and makes a credible impression as an Elvis. I can tell that the young walk past somewhat bewildered and amused. They wouldn’t know what a legend he represents. The young are all in a hurry to become instantly famous aided by incoherence.

I really think that this is what he has been doing for years, perhaps his entire life. The whole electronic caboodle is driven by a small petrol generator that is only just less noisy than the pre-recorded music and singing. He has a printed note in an open suitcase asking to support him and his love for ‘The King’. I suppose his cause is as good as any or better. He certainly deserved a couple of dollars. It can’t be easy to pack and unpack this half-truck load twice daily doing the rounds around Australia. A true troubadour. What dedication for an idol that is still lingering around yet faded into history like forgotten notes left in a bottom drawer. I try and spend time listening to this Elvis still sung in fairly normal English.

I can understand every word.
.

Unworthy, Unworthy, Unworthy

09 Friday Aug 2013

Posted by in Emmjay, Politics in the Pig's Arms

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ferretabiliaStory by Emmjay

In the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, I was fond of reading the weekly newspaper The Nation Review.  There were many top shelf contributors including luminaries of the times like Germaine Greer, Phillip Adams, John Hepworth, Morris Lurie, Bob Ellis and the redoubtable cartoonists of the day, Michael Leunig and Patrick Cook.  Richard Walsh wrote a paperback coffee table book about the Nation Review and charted its course through to its demise in 1983 (thanks Wikipedia).  Walsh’s book was called “Ferretabilia” – maybe a copy or two left at Leura Books – because Nation Review as Wiki says “styled itself as ‘Lean and Nosey – like a ferret’

mungoI always enjoyed Mungo MacCallum’s pieces and I was reminded of this in today’s book purchase at random – from Berkelouw’s in Newtown – called “Punch and Judy” – referring  (too kindly in my view) to the state of the recent and current political canvas.

punch-judyIn this book, Mungo shows us that he’s lost none of his sharp, perceptive and dry wit since those Nation Review days.  He borrows the definition of “Punch and Judy” from Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (“a deception, an unbelievable story”) and dedicates the book to his old friend Graham Freudenberg (Gough Whitlam’s speech writer), referring to the old days when politics was “important, passionate and fun”.

And it occurred to me that he’s summed up nicely the current political malaise in just a handful of words -it certainly isn’t like the old days – politics nowadays have become trivial, deeply disrespectful, cynical and dire.

Richard Walsh said that the Nation Review folded because the readership had moved on and that many people amongst the paper’s left-leaning readership had become – by 1983 – disenchanted with politics – not least because of an abiding sense of unassuaged outrage at the Dismissal, but also because of the ridiculous caravan of buffoons the Labor party had foisted on the Australian citizenry, the decent bloke but unelectable leadership of Bill Hayden (who was as charismatic as his batting counterpart in cricket – Bill Lawry, otherwise referred to as ‘ a corpse with pads’) and the apparent contentment voters seemed to feel under Malcolm Fraser’s prime minister-ship.  Until Bob Hawke broke the national political slumber party and set the Labor record by winning four elections on the trot.

That may have been true, but I recall the 1980s as a decade of working my bum off, making a quid, buying a house and raising a pair of baby Emmlets.  I let my membership of the Labor party lapse because other, more personal things intervened.  I left – as they say – “for family reasons”.

Meanwhile in another universe, John Hewson, like Tony Abbott more recently, managed to lose the unlosable election – to the much disliked, but enormously talented and consummate politician, Paul Keating (whose Dad, incidentally played bowls with my Dad on the odd occasion).

Tony Abbott, similarly lost the unlosable election to the much disliked Julia Gillard – who proved to be not so much ‘consummate’ as she was ‘consumed’. Although nobody can take away from her triumph – the NDIS – or the poisoned chalice of being Australia’s first female prime minister.

Mungo MacCallum’s book is about the 2010 election, but so much of his picture remains as fresh as the day he painted it.  The political landscape seems to have changed so little, notwithstanding the last election result being the first minority government since World War II.

Both parties struggle to be more popular under their respective leaders, abandoning the fundamental principles that should be their raison d’etre.  How can voters of conservative or progressive persuasions deal with the unashamed bastardry of the asylum seeker issue, the poll-driven gutlessness or straight out incompetence of the mining super tax, the on and off and on carbon tax (which surely has to be one of the daftest responses to the seemingly deniable climate change disaster) ?

Is it any wonder under the current major parties and their dropkick leaders that we are facing an impossible choice – a brown turd government or a black turd government ?  Is it any wonder that the outcome is more likely to be determined by redneck idiots believing a massively lethal and self-interested, even evil media ?  Is it any wonder than the youth vote – that could have the power to turn this election into something that might arouse some passion and idealistic fervour – could not give a tinker’s cuss ?

I have to admit that I felt – and still feel that John Howard was a disgrace to his high office – and that a man who, riding on the coat tails of such an unworthy dill as George W Bush, took Australia into not one, but two completely unjustifiable bloody and disastrous conflicts.  And I was proud that Australians told Howard and his cronies how lowly we regarded them, when they tossed him out of his own electorate and the Libnats out of government.

We didn’t throw him out for this reason.  We threw him out mainly because of his shitty, demonstrably unfair and un-Australian industrial relations policies – rightly hammered in a wonderfully effective campaign run by the unions – before the same unions’ leaders went on to show an undisguised propensity to spend their member’s union dues in brothels.

Instead of the Rodent, we went on blind trust with a dork who magically appeared out of the Queensland wilderness and turned into some kind of administrative mandarin-speaking autocratic brown nose.

But perhaps the most telling observation offered by Mungo MacCallum was the poisonous internal shitfighting of both the major parties.  The NSW Labor corruption managed to eclipse the incompetence of the far right Labor in NSW and Queensland that, thanks to the media, well and truly (and perhaps rightly so) overshadowed the recriminations within the Liberals – Abbott turning on the NSW Liberal far right religious power-broker David Clark who Abbott saw as stacking the NSW party with dud candidates and thereby ensuring the loss of the unlosable election.  If this is not a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black, I’ll be damned.

And let’s not forget the Abbot – Turnbull leadership debacle, which, had the one vote majority gone to Turnbull instead of Abbott, could have seen the biggest landslide in Australian political history instead of this tensely poised struggle between two idealistically barren drop kicks.

This time the choice for voters is different. Through both the main parties’ barren policies and their cynical power-hungry amoral machinations, they have set in stone the abject poverty of the two-party system.  They have shown us that both the Labor and the Liberal parties  have become corrupt and despicable beyond belief.

This time Australia really needs to throw out not only the Government – but also the Opposition.  And unless we let the two main parties go, a double double dissolution is impossible to achieve.

I have said in a previous article (OK, I admit that it was clichéd) that Australians will get the government we deserve, regardless of the outcome.  If our elections continue to be won by manipulating the media, by convincing rednecks and bogan half-wits with no moral compass to vote (even against their own personal interests) for policies (like boat arrivals) that are unimportant in the bigger scheme of things, and ignore issues that DO matter – like climate change, education, employment and the environment, the world will see another prime example of the ugly side of western democracy – government of the unworthy, for the unworthy, by the unworthy.

Of Pork Cutlets & An Adventure with Vitrectomy and Intravitreal Injection

06 Tuesday Aug 2013

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BlackBeanPorkCutlets1788157Djpg
August 1, 2013

It all was done with a military type of precision and planning beforehand. Plans for travel were searched up on the internet with many options of travel by combining trains and buses duly printed out. The motel was booked and reference numbers of different stages of hospital procedures studied and taken notice of.

We were told that after the operation, driving would be out of the question so the return trip by public transport would be done in reverse. The first hitch arrived soon after arrival at about 5pm. It was getting dark and the normally lit up signs of Motel were nowhere to be see. The Motel was advertised being situated at Macquarie Park so that’s where the train took us. No motel and we were told it was at Macquarie University rail station instead of Macquarie Park.

We walked about 3 kms back to where we had passed this station before. We were lucky not to be seen as asylum seekers with our bags and struggling demeanors. No street signs and no street numbers. Worse, no people. Finally a lone jogger. I asked him for directions and he gave a reply but kept on jogging in circles around us. Most curious, perhaps he did not want to lose his momentum or meters per minute as he did have some device strapped to his wrist. He kept jogging around me and I turned with him in order to hear what he was saying. He did not really know where he was either. The traffic around us was like a speedway. No taxis, just a shrieking madness on wheels. Kafka nightmare springs to mind.

We plodded on with H getting despondent and very tired. Finally a girl just walking. We asked and she promptly whipped out a gadget into which she tapped the Motel’s name. Within seconds it showed the road we were on and how much further the motel was. Another 1.2 Kms she said. She was an angel.

We arrived hungry and totally dehydrated at our motel. We were too far gone for any fights or marital punch ups. Fortunately we were near a giant shopping-mall that seemed to cater mainly for students of the nearby university. A Thai beef salad and water replenished us and our anger soon abated. We were too buggered for any talk and I had a rotten night, feeling I should have enquired better. I failed in reconnoitering our destination better. I also kept on seeing visions of needles entering my eyes and remembered fainting once at the doctor many years ago. White coats and surgical things do that to me. I am more heroic with words. I usually do a detour around anyone wearing stethoscope or even just glasses.

Next day, at 7.30 am I entered the hospital next to the motel. I coughed up the lollie, not an insignificant amount for the best treatment! I was duly tagged around my wrist and ankle. Ankle? Was the ankle bracelet in case of an inspection of identity at the morgue? Now-a-days technology does most of the work and my tags came out of a printer with the operation and ward number, the specialist, my address, next of kin, all printed on a very strong water proof adhesive tag.

I remembered many years ago at a public hospital being given just a single handwritten tag out of a row of tags which a nurse put around my wrist. I never checked but it turned out to have the name of a woman patient. I came very close to getting wheeled into a hysterectomy ward. It must have been the beard that gave the mistake away and luckily had a colonoscopy instead. Not that a colonoscopy is a pick-nick on the banks of the Blue Danube.

After the usual struggle with the gown open at the back, but underpants were allowed, I was wheeled in the theatre. The operation was over in about 30 minutes. I was give local anesthetic and remained fully aware. It was totally painless and even saw the amazing sight of needles entering my eyeball. Just because you close your eyelid doesn’t mean your eye stops looking! It was just like in the movies. (Not the Sound of Music)

Helvi visited me and appeared, as always, like an angel with her lovely reassuring Mona Lisa smile. Calm and collected she studied me and I regaled with gusto the lovely lunch I had enjoyed after the long fast from the mid-night before. Pork cutlets with garlic infused potatoes, lovely carrots with Apple Strudel with cream as a finale. A coffee as well. Real coffee, I stated. She doubted it.

Amazing, but most of the staff seemed Asian with a punctuality that was awe inspiring. Every two hours a trolley would be wheeled in and temperature, blood pressure and my pulse taken. Brown arms were winding the blood pressure tube around my arm. Almond eyes coming down on me with a concern for my welfare as if I was on death-bed or a shot down war pilot. At times I would be asked for my name and date of birth. Was this to check my state of mind, gone gaga or perchance not the full ticket anymore?

I stayed overnight. During that night the two hour medical inspections continued mercilessly. I was fine and without discomfort and even thought that at one stage the bacon and egg breakfast was coming. Sadly, it was only 2am.

Above the bed I had a small interactive touch TV with internet key board attached to it on a tray. It was suspended from the ceiling by a complex arrangement of swiveling steel pipes and brackets. The bed also had a remote that would do all sorts of strange things to the mattress. When I was a bit bored I just amused myself with the movable bed and the TV and imagined a honeymoon.

Next day at 6.30 am I was wheeled to the eye clinic and the specialist surgeon looked at my eyes and told me the operation was perfect and very successful. Make sure you stop the car when you get driven back because the gas injected behind your eye needs time to adjust to the higher altitude of the Southern Highlands Mountains. When I told him we were travelling by public transport he told me he wasn’t keen on that idea. If something happens, you won’t be able to ask the train driver to stop the train, will you, he said?

Fortunately, after Helvi phoned around, a good friend, (an American of course) offered to pick us up from the motel and drive us back to our home. We had not seen this old friend for some time. He had only just returned from California to spend time with his very old mom.

It turned out that my eye adjusted without any problems with higher altitude. I am still not seeing much. It is as if I am underwater with everything shimmering. That is normal and it will take a few weeks for the gas to be replaced by natural eye fluids. My eye will be as good as new. Marvelous what can be done with modern medical innovation…Thank you dear doctor Van Ho.

So, that’s that then. What next in aging?

Tags: Apple strudel, Blue Danube, Helvi Oosterman, Kafka, Macquary Park Hospital, Vitrectomy