GOF’s Scrap Bucket

1. Australian Hearing Organisation research reveals that
    when older people are fitted with a hearing aid they have
    a 12% better love life.

    Old Gof has a couple of questions;
   
     1.  What is "love life"?   Can someone jog my memory please.
     2. What sort of apparatus was used to measure the 12 percent?

2. "Survival of the fittest must be replaced by survival of the
     wisest"    (Jonas Salk...polio vaccine dude)

3.  Roger Bacon, 13th century English scientist proposed;

     "the breath of young virgins could replenish the vital essence
      of old men, and I recommend spending time in their company".

      Nice try Roger.  But just exactly how did this idea go down with
      Mrs Bacon?

      I can feel a unique scamming business
      opportunity coming on. 
      Would you like to be my new joint venture partner?
 
      We can sell bottled virgin breath.

      You can find the virgins.

      I'll get my hands on all the bottles.

     Yep, you read it right,
     The bottle job will suit me just fine thank you.
     

4. GOF's Human Stupidity Award for the month.

    A Queensland banana grower is planning to package
    individual bananas in specially shaped plastic punnets
    for export. 
    This will replace the standard 13kg biodegradable carton.

    Like the world does not have enough pieces of plastic littering
    the oceans and landfill sites already.
 

When the time eventually comes for me to leave this little farm which has been my home for a quarter of a century I will feel great sadness.

I have an affinity with, and attachment to this small part of Australia which has provided my livelihood, and been a safe haven for family life.
There is also a sense of history knowing that we are the first human family ever to have used it as a permanent place of abode.
Previously only the Noongyanbudda Ngadjon Aborigines sporadically wandered over this land during hunting and collecting expeditions.

I could quite easily be tempted to romanticise and suggest that for me this Earth was, as it is for many native peoples, my Mother, but I would be fooling myself because I am descended from generations of conquerors, travellers, invaders and transients who knew not how to send down deep roots.

It is therefore beyond my ability to completely understand the attachment to sky, land, flora and fauna which anchors the true indigenous societies on earth.

Some Australian Aboriginal tribes have a connection to place going back perhaps one thousand generations. Traditions and events archived through art, and kept alive by oral history.
I can only begin to imagine the pain of disconnection from Mother Earth that they feel in light of the last 220 years of our history.  
Firstly removed from their land at the point of a gun, then more recently suffering from Government policy which forcibly removed aboriginal children from their parents.

The Hmong people from the mountain areas of Laos, with their own ancient culture, were loyal supporters of our allies during the Vietnam conflict.  In appreciation, and for their own safety, many were assisted to migrate to the USA after the end of the war.

Many eventually settled in Minnesota, and they must have been severely traumatised by such an extreme cultural, climatic and topographical relocation.
The story is now told that many of the Hmong men died in their sleep soon after the relocation.  Others were awoken when they were on the doorstep of death, and revealed that they were in the middle of a dream where they were flying back over the oceans to the land of their birth.
Each man was having an apparently similar dream.

The men who had died had done so from broken hearts and spirits, and from the pain of severance from "place".

Some traditional patrilineal communities in New Guinea have a parable which the elders tell for the benefit of girls who are leaving it, by tradition, to marry into distant villages.

Boys are symbolically represented by the fruit stalk of the breadfruit tree.  When ripe, it falls directly back to the earth below.

Girls, are the leaves, which, upon maturity, fall from the branch to be gently dispersed on the breeze.

Humanity forfeits some of its accumulated wisdom, knowledge and appreciation of "place" every time any ancient culture or language is lost in our relentless pursuit of "progress". 

The experience of life has left me with the belief that the occasional impeccably timed smack on a kid's arse after reasonable attempts at negotiation have failed, can be a useful and effective deterrent against its subsequent delinquency.

Last year when I expressed this view I was taken to task by some of my Vox neighbors.  This year I have felt obliged to examine whether or not I was perpetuating antiquated barbaric behaviour, and to check whether any other cracks might have developed in my 20th century fortress of child raising certainty.

The immediate dilemma was where to find another child on which to experiment.  Globet, for reasons unknown, vamoosed many years ago to live at the opposite extremity of this large continent.
And anyway if I attempted to lay a disciplinary hand on her 27 year old backside today the most favourable outcome from the menu of potential repercussions would probably be that her gymnasium toned body would simply pound my patriarchal puniness into pulp.

Society also apparently frowns upon old men randomly selecting children to smack in supermarkets, even though the temptation on occasions is almost overwhelming.
Long term readers will remember that GOF additionally has some "prior history" of questionable behaviour in shopping centres which resulted in him being banned from two of them.

My review options were becoming seriously restricted.

I thought that maybe doing a few experiments on animals might be more acceptable, but Animal Welfare caught me at it and told me it wasn't.
At least no conviction was recorded, and I am learning a lot during my community service at the local animal shelter.

The only remaining opportunity for me was to do my testing on some inanimate object, and just in the nick of time I was presented with a suitable contender.

Our 20 year old television set suddenly had the temerity to display floating rainbow colours instead of any transmitted program.

Whack!!! on the side panel.
Picture restored.   (instantly, but temporarily)
Whack!!!!!    Wallop!!!!!!
Picture back.
I am well on the way to proving my point of view here.

However after two weeks of corrective discipline administered with increasing frequency and intensity, and just as I was about to scout around for a suitable weapon with which to administer a damn good flogging, I decided last Sunday in a moment of frustrated exhaustion to sit down in front of the television and speak quietly to it.

(I have cleaned this up a little for the benefit of your innocent eyes)

"I am dissatisfied with your recent performance.
 Next Thursday I am going to take you to the dump recycle centre,
 then I am going to buy a new digital TV"

We have had a perfect television picture for the last 2 days.

My belief system is now in tatters.

(The attached little comedy sketch is specially for Globet, and for anyone else whose week has also not been entirely filled with sunshine.)

Glob, if one day Old Gof comes to stay for a while, then invites our mutual septuagenarian Vox friend/resident philosopher to visit, the conversation you witness across your dining room table may, on occasions, perhaps go a little bit like this;

One of Pip's rellies

Emjay is a slightly troublesome Vox neighbour of mine.

In a nice way.  She regularly publishes gorgeous photographically illustrated accounts of life in her town which occupy far too much of my time and limited solar power in viewing admiration, and occasionally they also send me scurrying back on nostalgic journeys into my past.
Such was the case when she included the picture of a draught horse in a photo documentary.

When we first moved to GOF's Paradise, I desperately wanted the first farm animal resident to be a draught horse.  Unfortunately it was going to cost several thousand dollars at a time when we were earning considerably less than $100 per week, so the dream did not come true.  

Until the late 1960's, suburban Melbourne still had the "Milko"; 
Vendors with draught horses pulling drays, home delivering milk in glass bottles with silver foil lids which would regularly occasion fingerly harm when us kids attempted to open them incorrectly.

The Agricultural College I attended was built on 6000 acres, at least 20 miles away from any town.  It had, in effect, its own self sufficient little township of Currawa housing all the 100 staff necessary to operate such an esteemed institution, along with their families.

Occasionally our student work roster would have us out of bed before 5 am to prepare Pip the draught horse, reverse her into the 4 wheeled milk cart harness, load bottled milk from the farm dairy, and home deliver it according to the written list of recipients we were given.

It mattered not if, in the dark, we could not identify which house belonged to whom.  Pip knew from all her years of experience on the job, and she would only stop at the houses which needed milk delivered.

Whilst clopping along between houses she would perform an equine rectal extravaganza;
Farts (and sometimes more) of such depth and richness, magnitude and frequency, that they provided top shelf comedic entertainment for teenage boys.

Most of us loved Pip.
Draught horses are the Dalai Lama's of the animal world.
They are gentle in deed and thought.
They are, quite simply, beautiful animals.

Pip died in 1967.
Her death brought a sorrowfull pall of gloom over the whole campus and community.
A sadness that I can still recall after all this time with almost as much clarity as that which followed the assassination of JFK in the same decade.

Pip was one of the greatest ambassadors for animals I ever knew.