https://abclisten.page.link/ZesFMBKBQVABa6ys7

While some Pig’s Arms patrons are not big fans of cats, others are very fond of their feline companions but because of circumstances like unreasonable landlords or partners who eschew the job of emptying the litter box they are denied this simple pleasure.

After a long absence, our pub’s holding company Pig-Tel comes to the rescue !!!! with the release of our new range of eau-de-companion scents.

This festering season we bring you Chat Dion Odour. The essence of cat furniture polish. We’ll have your place returned to its gory days before Mrs Tasha went to that great pussy park in the sky.

For a more robust atmosphere you can go On Lion.

And as a bonus Pig-Tel will include Mrs Claws upholstery scratcher revitalising brush.

So all you former cat hoarders, call <the number for dial-a-prayer> and pony up just 3 payments of $39.99 plus postage and handling $114.26 and Pig-Tel will return your household to its former gory.

The first 10 mugs callers will receive at no extra charge our credit card fee waiver.

Act now !

The Enmore Institute was formed in 2007 just prior to Kevin.  Our purpose is to provide a more accurate barometer of the state of the local economy – because as PM Albanese says “All Politics is local” – or perhaps ARE local depending on whether one regards “politics” as a collective noun or not.

Since 2007, we have refined, sharpened, distilled, and generally improved our econometrics and we have finally settled on one blindingly clear and comprehensible statistic –

The Enmore Institute Plebeian Confidence Index – the EIPCI or PCI for short.

The index is created using sophisticated sampling equipment –

• Two Clickable Counters – one black and one white – the reason for the colour choice will become apparent later.
• A pencil for just in case and
• A pair of well-worn RM Williams ding boots.

Our methodology:

• Starting at the Warren View Hotel, we walk up Enmore Road towards Newtown.
• We count only street frontage shops, pubs, hairdressers, cafes, restaurants, recycled clothing shops, art supplies, bookstores (yes, Virginia, they do still exist in our hamlet), the occasional minimarket, chemists, bakeries, and a seemingly endless parade of shops that we can generously say sell “floral arrangements, homewares and objets d’art”.  We do count the one church and the needle exchange / methadone clinic but we do not count houses of ill repute.  We are, after all a serious research institute and we are too tired to climb the stairs.
• We count enterprises that are clearly operational and others which are in the main as dead as a doorknob, under endless renovation or too tough to call – they could be dead businesses, or merely just given to operating with a patina of filth unusual in our economy.
• Some businesses have the kind of bland nameless ambiguity of illegal gambling operations and one business nominally advertising itself as a purveyor of fine meats, has opaque curtains and a large individual hovering by the door – presumably waiting for the next delivery of contraband meat in what is otherwise a bastion of veganimity.
• We walk all the way up King St, stopping when we reach Sydney Uni’s Moore College, then we cross the road and return back down King Street on the south side till we reach the last shopfronts at Lord St opposite the St Peters chimney stacks.
• We acknowledge that in constructing the PCI there is a margin of error implicit in the methodology, namely that some erstwhile establishments are difficult to classify because they choose to be that way.

Now to the PCI.  Being an index, it has no particular meaning attached to any actual numbers of live or dead businesses.  Its total value is in the extent of change from one collection period to another.  We aim to collect the data on at least a monthly basis or more frequently if the weather is pleasant.  Some of our researchers favour using his majesty’s bus services if there is a period of protracted foul weather.  Only time will tell, but to date no researcher has been fast enough to click their way through to a stable dataset -, possibly due to the sad state of the tarmac.

Results:

There is an astonishing number of shopfronts (pub fronts etc) in the Enmore Institute’s collection area – a total of 679 – some of which house more than one enterprise (like photography and pet suppliers !). In this our first formal collection period, 593 shop front businesses (87%) had a pulse.  Eighty-six  (13%) displayed no sign of life.  How many of the latter group were alive, but comatose is anyone’s guess, but we are confident that the number is likely to be insignificant.  The lights were not on and / or the windows were so dirty we could not tell.

Conclusions.

When we began the survey, we felt that the state of our high streets reflected an economy in trouble – but the predominance of operating businesses appears to give the lie to that.  However, an alternative assessment could indicate that the nearly 600 going concerns reflect the staunch tenacity of Inner West citizens and our skilful ability to live on a diet of brown rice and kerosene.

Stay tuned for the next thrilling PCI – more accurate and heartfelt than anything the RBA produces – and based on something quite close to reality.

• The Enmore Institute encourages other local research groups to have a wander up their own high streets and take the economic temperature of their own bailiwick.
• We wish to express our sincere gratitude to the patrons of the Pig’s Arms, Rosies’ Tattoo Emporium and House of Pain and the Cook’s River Sea Scouts for your generous financial support.

Story by Therese Trouserzoff

The Enmore Institute firmly believes that a strong government demands an equally strong opposition and in light of the current situation, we are taking steps to avoid the imminent extinction of the Australian Liberal Party.

Previous attempts to save the National Party have clearly proven to be fruitless and with the  few remnants wandering around in a vegetative zombie-like state, with limited resources we have decided to focus on what may yet be saved from disastrous leadership, the Enmore Institute has taken the strategic view to avoid attempting the impossible.

Our scientists are collaborating with the Thylacine Project – attempting to re-engineer an extinct species from mitochondrial DNA recovered from the bones of a museum specimen.

Accordingly, our team is exhuming the remains of the late Sir Robert Menzies – father of the Liberal Party. 

Some exploratory work was done in response to urgings to consider using genetic material from the not quite extinct sub species Howardius johnsonii.  However ,funding bodies were hesitant, expressing doubts about the genetic purity of the line following prolonged exposure to Thatcherite radiation.

Further preliminary investigations into using chord blood were scrapped when it was observed that even young Liberals in previously protected habitats (like Goldstein) were judged to be infertile by their gonads  constituents.

Moreover, strong support from a small pod of moderate Liberals included their belief that Sir Robert was turning over in his grave given the extraordinary loss of Liberal habitat, particularly in Western Australia.

The Enmore Institute was approached by the Greens, who insisted that resurrecting even a pure strain of Liberal ideology was akin to bringing back smallpox.  They were amenable to the notion that if Liberal DNA-laden embryos could prove to be viable, freezing them would be an important means of re-creating herd immunity, should the need arise in the future.  The Greens insisted on being guaranteed a say in any considerations to thaw.

One remaining risk bothering our team is that we will find that the coffin, like the ideology, is empty.

From the Pig’s Arms cub reporter Boo-Boo Bear

Today’s headline in the Lent Chronicle carries a leaked email exposing the proposed funding of the contentious AWKWARD Unclear Submarine lay-by deal struck between the US, UK and Australian governments.

The Australian government was using a defrocked priest from St Generic Brand’s semenary as the go-between finance wizard, to stitch together a complex web of off-shore continental shelf companies established by the Melbourne-based comedy financiers, the Encyclical Brothers.

Apparently, the financial arrangements engineered by the defrocked priest (thought to be one Father O’Way) were so simple that they defied analysis by actual waries in Treasury.  Simpler, in fact than the old school Labor approach (aka the Khemlani Affair) where a meeting with a Middle Eastern arms dealer offering unlimited cash on the basis of a handshake sufficed to be adequate for securing supply.  Mind you, “handshake” was not intended to convey pressing the flesh and swapping first borns to make sure both parties honoured the deal.  Moreover, it was in the vein of a Parkinson’s symptom.

The Email goes on to sketch out the bones of the financial arrangement along these lines:

1. Father O’Way would buy the submarines using his Amex card – racking up about 15 gazillion QAINTARSE frequent-flyer points and a year’s subscription to a Murdochian rag of his choice.
2. O’Way would then claim that there was nowhere he wanted to fly and besides, flight is bad for climate change.  Instead, he would then offer to take the troubled airline off some leprechaun’s hands and put the entire show in a Commune Wealth Bank Offset account reducing the monthly AWKUST interest bill to about half of Gina Rhinestone’s play lunch money.
3. When the time came around for Father O’Way to pay off his Amex account, he is planning to complain that the Subs were not in the colour he ordered and under Amex’s ‘customer is always right’ policy, Amex would cancel the order and in the unlikely event that an actual sub had poked its snout into Australian waters, the sub would be ordered to miss a turn, turn around and sail back to wherever, do not pass the Chinese continental shelf, do not collect $100 billion.
4. Because the sub would then be second-hand, or soiled floor stock, the Other AWKWARD partners would be forced to re-sell it at a substantial discount – to be purchased (most likely) by an unidentified man of the cloth, using his Amex card.

Astute readers will no doubt have picked up a theme here – and possibly also spotted a flaw in O’Way’s logic – namely what to do when he owns several QAINTARSE airlines.  But not to write off the good father’s plan prematurely, his own father, “Anchors” O’Way was overheard discussing the potential for the airlines to outsource everything to each other with the exception of baggage handlers who would continue to be subcontracted by the travel insurance industry.

In the next instalment we’ll hear about more steps in Father O’Way’s grand plan – to purchase Alan Mask, spring Ghislaine Maxwill and Julian Massage, in exchange for Mork Latham and two Milky Bars.

Hi Patrons of la salle de porc.

BC – that is, before Covid, FM and I had the pleasure of seeing Trevor Noah live at the Enmore Theatre. Of course we were in an overwhelmingly white people audience. The woman next to be (not FM, the woman on the other side) asked me (in a thick South African accent) “Where are you from ?” Which was a weird kind of opening line. I replied “Enmore – about 500 metres away from here”.

Apologies, this content won’t embed in WordPress. But it’s worth going out to Facebook to listen and watch Trevor Noah going through his paces being a native of everywhere 🙂

https://fb.watch/f7T7Z17oAW/

Playlist by Emmjay

Ruby Tuesday – Melanie Safka  1971-2

Look What They’ve Done to My Song – Melanie Safka with Miley Cyrus (2015)

Ruby Tuesday – Coors and Ron Wood

Don’t Walk Away Renee – The Left Banke – 1966

Walk Away Renee – Billy Bragg – 1988

Don’t Walk Away Renee – The Left Banke – 2010

Because the Night – Patti Smith Band 1978

Because the Night – Patti Smith  2015

Story by Emmjay

Every New Year’s Eve, I ponder the enormously wasteful spectacle of the New Year’s Eve Fireworks display over Sydney Harbour. I think about how we are colluding in the sending of 6 tonnes worth of exploding air pollution over the magnificent Sydney Harbour Bridge and environs.

And I think about the huge cost of the fireworks that might otherwise pay for a bit of accommodation for Sydney’s homeless folk. Yes, yes, I get it – tourists will spend millions of their hard earned cash to crowd the foreshores to watch the same crap year after year after year. Fortunately this year, there’ll be some kind of allocation of paid perv spots, assiduously policed to make sure that the great unwashed and mostly tanked up masses play by the rules of Covid commerce.

But then… somebody has come up with the brilliant multi-functional use of skyrockets to send grandpa and grandma’s ashes into the inky near-blackness of a Sydney night sky – for distribution all over the Bridge and environs – and hopefully on the bonces of the nonces in attendance. Of course they wouldn’t do that, would they ? Sydney councils being what they are, I’m betting that an exceptionally low orbit arc for Nan and Pop might more likely end up over the municipal tip, or just outside the metro area. A shot into the hinterland, if you will.

The above photo is real ! Courtesy of the Marrickville Metro carpark. I put it down to somebody with a friend in the car sign-writing business watching too much Netflix.

For those of us insufficiently well-heeled to spit a bit of our ancestors into space, the final send-off might well be … light the blue touch paper, stand back and see off a rello … a few hundred feet up, up and away. Not with a whimper, but a bang – or a starburst or whatever. And heaven forbid if your Pop’s celestial vehicle is a fizzer.

The world we seem to be living in is bizarre beyond belief. You couldn’t make this shit up !

This year I am determined to not watch Jeremy Fernandez, Zan Rowe and Charlie Pickering pushing barrow-loads of faux mirth up a very steep hill, introducing B and C grade performers blasting it out in front of the Opera House. My resistance tank is empty. I just cannot face this again.

But in the spirit of camaraderie of the patrons and contributors to the Pig’s Arms, I wish you, one and all, a far less crappy 2022, a bucket of Pink Drink or Trotter’s Ale and immunity to whatever you need to be immune.

Stay tuned for our latest Pig-Tel development – Pig-Tel Bullshit Repellent.

Fond regards,

Emmjay.