Good will peddling

Geoff Turnbull, of Ashfield, writes: “This eighty-year-old old workhorse was rolling down the cycle path on his bike when two teenagers approached on their bikes.” “I stopped and so did they. ‘Geoff’ I said. ‘Jasper’, ‘Liam’ they replied. ‘You guys have to wear helmets.’ ‘Yeah, we probably should.’ ‘Are both your brakes working, mate?’ asked Jasper. ‘Only the one in the back,’ I said. Jasper started making adjustments to my front brake and voila! Both brakes work. As they walked away, I said, ‘You are a champion.’ “With such young people, the future of our nation is in safe hands,” he said.

“In my first job at McDonald’s Waitara in the early nineties, when we worked on the drive-thru, we were sometimes treated like John Laws’ (C8) ‘golden tonsils’,” recalls Forestville’s Melinda Barwell. “He always ordered large fries with extra salt. We concluded this was because he preferred Valvoline.” You know what he means.

There are a lot of famous Fangs (C8) out there. Just ask Davistown’s Adrian Bell: “Although no doubt ‘Fang’ was unrelated to Fraser, Fang was a common nickname. At Sydney Boys’ High School in the mid-1950s, the word Fang was chalked in every possible spot, to the paralyzing irritation of headmaster Ken Andrews. Although not officially confirmed, the ‘culprit’ is generally accepted as the famous Peter Crittle, the school’s prefect and a proud member of the school.” Peter, who played 15 Tests for the Wallabies and worked as a respected lawyer, died last year at the age of 86.

According to Bill Thompson of Crows Nest, “Comedian Phyllis Diller always referred to her husband as Fang. One of her lines was: ‘I’ve been asked to say a few words about my husband, Fang. How about short and cheap?'”

“Has anyone suggested a name change for the Coalition yet?” asks Northmead’s George Zivkovic. “The Hekawi tribe in the 1960s sitcom Troop FIt’s called ‘Where are we?’ It was a fictional Native American tribe that was a pun on the phrase. “They got this name after an incident that resulted in the tribes falling off a cliff and disappearing.”

Redhead’s Louise Edmonds notes: “Ian Carmody (C8) asks about ‘lived experience’. I’ve been thinking about this phenomenon for a while now and think it has to do with the ‘existential threats’ that seem so common these days. This is my ‘experience’.”

Column8@smh.com.au

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