Truth? What Truth?

Now I know that I have lost some functions in my old age and it's always a problem staying up for the long term, if you know what I mean ( and you would if you were 62 and not 22) but when your wife said that a piece of (cooked spaghetti) roughly equates to your manfulness then you are certainly in trouble. Not only because I couldn't think of an equally cutting reply in time and therefore lost one of my rare arguments. Actually its the losing of an argument that is rare not the number of arguments. We were having the usually Friday night Spaghetti and Mince, which I cooked to perfection as usual and I don't remember what I said but passions escalated until Nuran came up with the final retort hooking a long piece of spaghetti which drooped lazily over her plate. It's enough to make you ring up the guy on the "up your nose and away you go" advert for reassurance.

Now I can dream like any young buck but lately not with the same result! Still I have had my time in the sun and can sit back and enjoy the memories. All I need is park bench and an old raincoat.

Now being a Pom I can laugh at myself and Poms are used to that because the rest of the world joins in the laughter, why we cant win cricket which we invented why we cant win the football which we invented and about the only thing we can win is darts and now a bloody Dutchman even beats our best player at that! So we Poms go laughing all the way to the pub and then cry in our beer.

This explains why I follow Geelong, I'm not happy unless the team I want to win loses and I can complain about it. What's that about a whingieng Pom just understand when we are whingeing we are actually happy. Understand the culture you morons. Now the FA cup is on TV tomorrow and I guarantee that the most vocal section of the crowd are the ones that are losing!

A good thing happened yesterday and I beat Ron at darts but I wasn't happy as he may not come next time. Bugger this Pommy attitude. In Australia a good loser is just that , good at losing, and when you win you heap scorn on the opponent so he loses again next time. None of this "well played mate" its more "your just a bloody loser mate" oh well I have got four sons but now , maybe, I am just losing it!

dont you worry about that

On TV last night they had the 20 best lines used in a TV interview and of course Bjelke had three in the top ten. Don't you worry about that was the best known and usually used when he was completely in the wrong or ignorant on the subject matter, which was a lot of the time but the one I liked the best was in response to a question of the changing environment in Queensland politics ..."Old Guard , New Guard, MudGuards all the same to me!" and showing how good he was on repartee in response to a question on the power strike in Queensland "What will you do when the Union Gorillas exercise their muscles" "Make monkeys out of them." He was probably the last old school character in Australian Politics. Now you have to be so politically correct but he genuinely couldn't give a tinkers cuss about the media even though he was a redneck on a lot of issues mind you he only stayed in power through a gerrymander that eventually got dismantled.
Locally the Civic and Arts centre , which incorporates the Sir Robert Helpmann Theatre celebrated its, 25th anniversary. This is a memorial really to another great State politician in Don Dunstan who believed that everyone in the country should enjoy the same access to arts and education as those in the city and economics didn't come into it, unlike today where people are second and the cost comes first, during his reign many government offices opened branches here and it was a delight to live in a regional area but inexorably the services are being dragged back to the city and just about the only one we have left is the registrar of Motor Vehicles and the Family and Youth Services department no wonder the Metropolitan area is expanding.
Still we enjoy a relaxed lifestyle here which suits some and the most frantic I get is when pedalling through the Pines after kangaroos and lost dogs. There were that many in the forest today that in exasperation I sooled the dogs onto them so I could get a clear path to ride on. That was a mistake as the dogs disappeared into the trees and it took me an hour to locate one, Buddha, so I cut my losses and brought him home alone.
After a cup of coffee I ventured out to seek Banjo only to meet him at the corner about to cross the main road. Apparently he had got sick of waiting for me to turn up and loped back towards home. I wonder if he had the same frame of mind as me, "bugger, I'm going home without him this time".
Well I have a home brew to bottle so I can't spend too much time on the computer. Busy Busy.

Tuckered Out

How ironic that, whilst we were dining on kangaroo fillet steaks, freshly barbecued, I got a phone call from Don Mathys saying that his daughter Jacqui had just hit a kangaroo on Avondale Rd and there was a fresh carcass for the dogs waiting for me to butcher on the side of road. I couldn't go out straight away as the beer would have been warm by the time I got back but I noted the location and got assurances that Jacqui was alright although the car was somewhat bingled and the roo had got off the worst.
Kangaroo fillet steak had been on a special at Coles supermarket which is why we were dining on them and they were delicious, no wonder the dogs drool at the mouth when offered a meaty kangaroo bone.
So after the barby Nuran and I went out to retrieve the roadkill bounty. Nuran to hold the torch while I carved the meat off of the unfortunate Skippy. Lucky the back legs were not bruised and I wondered how it had received a fatal blow as it looked unharmed, probably a broken neck or a headbutt onto the right wing of the car. No matter I am becoming an expert at removing the back legs and loins of dead 'roos without getting entrails all over the place and we were home in 15 minutes. We called in at "holy" Thompsons with the tail, he likes the kangaroo tail for his dogs, stripping the skin off as if it were a snake and giving them the gristly remains. I don't bother as we have enough bones lying over the back lawn as it is.
Holy is one of those old Tarpeena characters, brought up in the days of bow saws not chain saws and fisticuffs in the pub on a friday evening after work. Now that he is 80 he has slowed down a bit but is still active and tall and strong and trains greyhounds. He looked after my useless greyhound last year when we went to Fiji so I am repaying his kindness in kangaroo tails.
Mind you the freezer is full of dog meat and I mustn't confuse the dog meat with the coles meat and if I do I won't own up to it!