You may have noticed in my previous post the occurrence of the street name 'Ruthven'. Persons of Toowoomban descent pronounce this phonetically - r, 'u' as in cup, 'th' as in throw, 'ven' as in "Ven vill you learn Hogan?". I'm led to believe by an unimpeachable stranger in a pub somewhere that 'Ruthven' is in fact a Scottish word and should be pronounced 'riven'. Which goes to show two things:
That Scottish people are still resisting the English invasion, and
Most people are a bit touchy about place names.
Four eggs ample; in North Rockhampton there is a thoroughfare which has been bestowed with the rather nifty name of Berserker Street. When I first saw it I wanted to shift there. How cool would it be to live in Berserker Street? How much fear would the name of the local football team instill into opposition hearts? But 'cept for the fact that the dolts in Berserker Street don't pronounce it in the way that nature intended, oh, no, no, no, no, no, they've decided to play God and changed the pronunciation to 'burrssicka' street. Fools. Our God is a vengeful God and will doom them to a life of Rockhampton if they don't repent. Not all street names are mispronounced. Just down the road from Rocky is the lovely harbour city of Gladstone. At least it would be lovely if the original founders of Gladstone had looked around at the prettiest little harbour on the Queensland coast and not built meatworks, coal handling facilities, power stations, bauxite refineries and aluminium* smelters right on the shoreline. Dickheads, at least they could have put them up past The Narrows. Anyhoo, the main drag of Gladstone is Goondoon Street. A cross street of Goondoon Street is Yarroon Street. Incidentally, Yarroon Street houses two of the three roughest pubs in Gladdie (one of which I used to work in), the police station and the courthouse. According to me, both Goondoon and Yarroon are words from 'the patter'; the local dialect of Glasgow. Allow me to demonstrate their usage in a brief dialogue: 1st Glaswegian - Here you Jimmy, what the divil d'ye think ye doin', puttin ye feelers doon ma keks? 2nd Glaswegian - Dinnae borrer yesel' Jock, ah'm on'y Goondoon on ye, but ah've got tae hoist yoor boabie first. It's what I learnt in Barlinnie. 1st Glaswegian. Well ye can have that on Yarroon Jimmy, ah'm nae bufty. When ah wish a sooky, ah'll nip a hingoot. Put ma boy back in ma troos or ah'm gaunnae put ma napper intae ye heid, ye jobby jabber. Speaking of Goondoon, I wish I was gay. Not only would I be thinner, better looking, wittier and wealthier, but I could change my name to RSI, become a criminal and move to Sydney. Bobbin Head, to be precise. Can you imagine the hilarity that would ensue when I was arrested by an inexperienced constable of uncertain sexuality after he took me to the station and the desk sergeant said "'allo, 'allo, allo, what have we here?" The constable would then reply proudly "I've got RSI from Bobbin Head." And everybody would chortle. Then there are names which are just unfortunate. East of Melbourne there is a place which used to be a town, but which is becoming a suburb of Melbourne. It is called Pakenham. A little further east on a rise is a smaller place which is an off shoot of Pakenham. Guess what it is called, you have a choice of:
a) East Pakenham
b) Pakenham Heights
c) Little Pakenham
d) Something completely unrelated to the word 'Pakenham'
e) none of the above
Of course, the correct answer is e) none of the above; because all of the above answers were sensible, slightly boring and not prone to schoolboy snirking. As opposed to the actual place name which is..., Pakenham Upper. I have nothing more to say. * Can't wait for the seppo spell checker to try and remove the extraneous 'i'.
I happened to be passing through Toowoomba the other day and saw this pair of Harvey Dangerfields parked in Margaret Street. They represent two of the three corners of the Harley owners triangle. The first is the generic, lot's o' shiny bits, ridden only in heavily populated areas at times of high pedestrian traffic, the accountant recommended it shop floor model Harley, with a couple of catalogue accessories to 'individualise' it.
The second one represents the type of Harley for which I have the most respect. I'm not up on Harley models, but to me it looks like about a 1975 FLH. What I particularly like about this bike is that it looks ridden. It has obviously done a lot of miles and, although not immediately obvious to any casual passers-by, it is also fairly heavily modified, with all modifications designed with riding in mind.
It has a different carburettor, belt primary drive, magneto ignition, plus a few other home brew thingys, like a steering head lock and the one in the second photo, a remote mounted oil filter. This guy likes to ride. I was going to write about how blokes with bikes like this are usually big, dirty and hairy, but I saw him riding down Ruthven Street a little while later and he looked like he should be on the white bike - young, clean cut, wearing new Harley branded clothes. Maybe he just bought it from a big, dirty, hairy guy.
Incidentally, this is the third point of the triangle. Could it be any more of a generic New Millenium Chopper? Billet alloy wheels, stretched and raised frame, 3" seat height, 300mm wide rear end, even the straight out, downward curving pipes. I've never seen one of these on the road, but I've seen a few parked outside cafes in Bronte and Manly. Ridden(?) mainly by middle level, middle aged business types who can afford the $50,000+ price tag, they are usually up for resale within a few months when they realise that they only impress other middle level, middle aged business types and they are even worse to ride than that other toy they bought years earlier - the trophy wife. In its favour this one is built by Redneck Engineering, with a name like that they must be okay. *I have no idea who said that, or why, but it was on the news while I was thinking of a post title and it made me giggle.
I'm not dead. What I've been up to is none of your business, so shut the fuck up. I'll probably tell you about it one day, anyway. (That should shut those nagging bitches up. They probably don't put out anyway.) (Or do the dishes) (Or cook.))
Peter Costello can lick the sweat from my balls. He's a cunt. Of course, only he could run the economy responsibly, Labor have never had any economic credibility (Hands up if you remember who floated the dollar. Keep it up if you know who was the first treasurer to bring down a surplus budget. Keep it up if you remember who deregulated the finance sector. Keep keeping it up if you remember the reaction of the [Liberal Party candidate breeding ground] financial sector. Keep keeping it up if you know on whose coat-tails Costello rode for seven or eight years.), no, only Costello could have artificially created a couple of surpluses by selling off income generating assets. Only Costello could have ridden the Chinese boom, allowing us to have an even more commodities driven and dependent economy. After the armchair ride that he's been given for eleven years, what does the cunt do? Give everybody in Australia a big fat handout. Except me. Cunt. All you overpaid IT/ public service/ other cunts get from about $30 to over $100 a week. All you poverty stricken brain dead morons on under $40k a year (whom I am already subsidizing, through..., ummm..., subsidies and stuff) get about $40 a week. What do I get? $9.96. I don't get any Family Tax Benefit, or that other one. You know the one. The one that I'm not eligible for. Nup. Nothin'. Not even a blue beer ticket. You can all get fucked. Up the arse. With a post hole digger. Of course Costello is basking in the glory and nobody has woken up to the fact that the big tax break he is giving you is no more than playing catch up. When is some far sighted genius of a treasurer who, by definition, agrees with me, going to index the tax brackets to inflation? As the system stands the tax system gets greedier year by year until whoever the treasure happens to be at the time gets a chance at glory by putting the tax level back where it used to be. I'll tell you what else he should have done, because you learn these things before they let you drive tractors, he should have made income splitting the default taxation position for single income families. He should have introduced twelve months paid maternity leave. He should have done something to alleviate the coming, inevitable, bust that follows a commodities boom. He should have doubled the budget of the CSIRO. He should have invested more into ethanol/ bio-diesel research. In fact, anything that will make us less dependent on oil would be good. Our own reserves are running out and they aren't making any more, so we should be doing more about alternatives now, before we need them. Putting your fingers in your ears, closing your eyes and going "Lalalalalalala." really loudly won't make the problem go away. But most of all, he should have given me more stuff.
A funny thing happened on the way to the internet...,
There are very few approved routines available to stand-up comedians. They are:
Men and women are different.
Airline food is shit.
Kids these days.
Black people are different from white people (There are two pre-requisites for this routine; the performer must be black, and all differences tend to favour black people.)
Your customs in this foreign country are quaint.
Everybody who goes to prison will acquire a 3oolb girlfriend called Bubba.
Every blue eyed blonde teenage girl in a chatroom is in fact a 300lb ex-girlfriend called Bubba.
Actually it's just the last one that I want to talk about. I have only ever been in a chatroom once and I was pretending to be a teenaged girl. Let me explain. Way back in the dim dark past, before I ever bought myself a computer I was visiting with some friends who had a teenaged daughter, D. D was in a chatroom talking to some alleged teenaged boy from Tuscon. As I am by nature a curious soul, who likes nothing more than learning - and I'm a bit of a stickybeak, I was watching this take place. D would explain what she was doing and what the exotic abbreviations meant and all was well with the world. D's mother nagged her into performing some menial task which was going to take about twenty minutes, so D talked me into continuing chatting with the alleged denizen of Tuscon. All went well for a couple of minutes talking about music (D had a folder of CDs that I used as crib notes), then it all went pear-shaped. Tuscon boy wanted to know what sort of clothes D wore. I heard a ping on my radar, but I just typed in a list of clothing items. One of the items was 'skirts'. Tuscon boy asked 'How short are the skirts?' Before I could think of a reply he added 'Short enough to see your cunt?' I panicked and ran for (D's) Mum. She panicked, too. D turned up, read what was on the screen, laughed and did the chatroom equivalent of calling for a bouncer in a nightclub. Dunno how that worked. Dunno what happened to Tuscon boy, either. Which is a roundabout way of saying that I have been thinking about internet personas lately. What they are, who adopts them, how they create their particular persona and why. Apart from the name, I don't have one. When I first bought my computer and beat Telstra into submission so that I could get on the net, just about the first thing that I did was get onto Google, type in 'blogs' and see what turned up. The very first blog I ever looked at was After Grog Blog. I still read it. In fact there are three other blogs I looked at that day that I still read, A Yobbo's View, Man of Lettuce and The Spin Starts Here. Anyway, I was looking at these blogs, thinking to myself "This looks alright, I might leave a comment here." From memory it was on TSSH to tell Caz that I would marry her if I was allowed to wear..., something. Can't remember. I looked at all the other comments and they all had pseudonyms on them. At least I assumed that they were pseudonyms. You don't see many people walking around with names like Wobblebottom Jizzbomb. I assumed that it was customary to use a pseudonym so I chose Dirk Thruster, which is the name of a character I played in a movie made about twenty years ago by a hornbag Arts student whom I was trying (and failing) to bone. The name is as far as the character development went. I lack the imagination to create another personality and I'm too lazy to stay in character for any length of time, anyway. Every opinion that I have ever stated is Dirk's; which is to say mine. The language used to express those opinions is pretty much the same as I use in conversation, with most examples of the words 'fuck' and 'cunt' excised from it. I swear a lot. Probably the major difference between the way that I behave on the net and the way that I behave everywhere else is that I am more argumentative face to face. When I first started net surfing I would stick my oar in wherever I could find a gap. I soon realised a few things, though; there are a lot more well-informed people on the net that there are in pubs, so I would get shot down in flames quite frequently - which taught me the benefits of research; a lot of otherwise rational people lost their sense of reason in debates, particularly when those debates involve politics or religion; a lot of people (this is related to, but not synonymous with the previous point.) cannot conceive of the idea that another person may arrive at a different conclusion than themselves when presented with the same evidence; almost every person involved in arguing on the net has a position from which they will not budge, so any attempt to do so is not only futile, but leads to animosity from the other person involved; everybody on the net is a tough guy (Except the girls, they're all hard bitches). So these days I am a bit more careful about raising my voice and only do so when I am confident of my ground. If a person with whom I am having a debate refuses to acknowledge my line of reasoning or becomes abusive, then I just stop. How tough do you have to be to call somebody names from thousands of kilometres away? Somebody whom you have never met? There are people around for whom violent abuse hurled at random strangers appears to be their only outlet. I feel sorry for these people. I often wonder what is so wrong with their lives that the only way that they can feel 'empowered' or whatever the buzzword du jour is, is to send insults to somebody over a - real in some instances, but usually just perceived - slight on the recipient's part. Sometimes I think that it is for these people that the internet was, in fact, created. How many of them would be littering the shoreline at The Gap or giving train drivers the shits as they went under the front if it wasn't for the outlet provided to these inadequately equipped individuals? Of course, there is a very strong argument in favour of removing these people from the gene pool. The trouble with that theory is deciding when to stop. Let 'em breed, I say. They'll die out eventually anyway and in the meantime they are at least diverting. A very small minority of them are even amusing.
When I was a little tacker I was an obnoxious little prick. That isn't germane to this post so I'll gloss over it for the moment. As well as being obnoxious I was fascinated by The Bush. I always thought of it that way - as a proper noun with a preposition*. Until I was nine years old I had very little first hand experience of The Bush. A week long holiday every year in a little town in northern Victoria called Wandiligong and that was about it. It was an old gold mining town and my brother and I would go exploring The Bush every day and pretend that we were gold miners/ bushrangers/ other exotic bush types. I remember being faintly disappointed that people didn't actually call each other 'cobber'. The last time that we went to Wandiligong we extended the holiday by camping on the banks of the Tambo River in eastern Victoria for the week prior to Wandiligong. Camping in the same area was a bloke with his family. The bloke was either a) Peter Brock's mechanic, or b) John Harvey. (Older bogans will know who John Harvey is.) Either way, my brother and I were suitably impressed. It was during our time on the Tambo that my dear old Daddy formed the idea of moving out of the 'burbs and going bush because "People still wave to you out here." Coincidentally, the local fuel outlet/ convenience store/ mini market thingy in Ensay was for sale. Dad looked into it, but a few weeks later he decided against it. However, it did put the idea into his head that he should buy a business rather than look for another job. So every weekend for the next couple of months we would be traipsing around rural Victoria looking at different small businesses. My personal favourite was the Snake Gully store. Not only was it a big old bluestone building (with really bad stumps - when I stood next to the end of the counter, the top was at shoulder height. In the middle it was level with the top of my head.), not only did it have stables (stables mean horses), but it was Snake Gully!! How fucking (The) Bush can you get? My brother and I were walking around saying things like "Crikey bloke, come 'n' 'ave a squiz at this!" (Translation: I say, this is an interesting object I find within my field of vision.) Actually, whilst I was saying things like that, my brother was saying things like "Piss off, you annoying little turd." Didn't matter, we didn't buy it. I was upset. We ended buying a servo in a little (less than [Bloody blogger keeps reading the 'less than' sign as the opening of an HTML tag and fucking up the post]100 people) town in Gippsland.
I thought that it was The Bush for about six months, then I realised that it was a little town two hours out of Melbourne. The Bush had drovers, shearers and swaggies, we had dairy farmers, SEC employees and spud pickers.At the time there were dairy farms between Dandenong and Noble Park. I don't think that I appreciated the freedom that living in this town gave me. I would ride my bike for miles to visit friends, go for tractor rides, go crayfishing, shoot rabbits, go fishing in another spot on the creek away from where y9ou went crayfishing 'cause every bloody nose that you don't get fish where the crayfish live. If you hadn't caught at least one copperhead by the time that you left primary school then you were obviously a poofter and therefore unfit for human society.
Everybody else knew what they were going to do when ther grew up. Take over Dad's farm, buy a trauck, become an astronaut, whatever. They knew. There was never any doubt. I had so many ideas going through my head that effectively I had no idea. I still don't. For a few months I wanted to be a tin scratcher in the Gulf country. I wanted to be a crocodile shooter a la Tom Cole. I wanted to be an opal miner (Done that one. It's fun if you don't mind going broke.) The only sensible idea that I had was that I wanted to be an aircraft mechanic. I even wrote a letter to the Government Aircraft Factory in Port Melbourne asking about apprenticeships. By the time that they wrote back I'd forgotten all about it. Eventually I did an apprenticeship as a motor mechanic with Dad, only because he asked me if I wanted to. I only agreed because I didn't want to hurt his feelings. Looking back, it was a dumb decision, but whaddyagunnado? This was s'posed to be a brief preamble without reference to mateship about a whole 'nother post, not my fucking life story. I'm tired; the rest will have to wait. *I mean 'The'. I think that's a preposition. I'm fairly thick.
*Update: Diligent readers may notice that a large portion of this post has been subtly altered. This is because Blogger ate it. I suspect it is another attempt by Osama's boys, but have no proof to support this. Neither can I remember the original post so I made up stuff that fit into gap.
