Column 8, Thursday, June 11: The devil outside
Pymble’s Bob Makinson notes that a Tasmanian devil has gone missing from the Gold Coast Zoo but thinks “they’re looking for this animal in all the wrong places. Frankly it would be a starting point for Warner Bros. Movie World.”
“Once again, on a serious note, I would like to draw attention to a little-known home and business hazard,” said John Swanton of Coogee. “Upside down empty milk crates become dangerous when they deteriorate with age. The plastic becomes brittle and collapses easily. A colleague broke his arm doing this, and you could cut your legs into strips from the sharp plastic pieces. Good day, everyone.”
“I was playing Lego with my five-year-old grandson yesterday and remembered my old Meccano set,” writes N. Andrew McPherson of Tathra. “The only person in the room of 11 who knew what I was talking about was my dear old mother (93). Any other Col8ers out there who remember Meccano?”
The tertiary joke sequence (C8) seems to have taken a bad turn, with many letters involving the defacement of student digs; It’s something Warriewood’s Dennis Fardy knows all too well: “I was away for the weekend playing rugby at Drummond College UNE in 1979. When I returned home, exhausted, I found my room completely littered with newspapers. An annoying but clever joke.”
Shout out to parents of the cloth diaper era who keep said items out of the landfill. Redfern’s Brad Campbell reminisces: “The nappy pail in the laundry and the waving white squares in the Hills Hoist. We started using them in 1985 and continued until the mid-1990s. Not with the same child, of course. There are a few square squares I use regularly to clean and dry my bike. Better than microfibre and great value for money.” Ruth Saunders, of Dulwich Hill, says: “My son was born at the end of the cloth nappy era so his ones haven’t worn out. As cleaning nappies they’ve lasted us over 30 years. I almost cried when I finally threw away the last nappy.”
“Talking about diaper pails and cloth nappies made me realize that my ‘diaper wand’ (used to poke nappies in sanitizer buckets) is 46 years old and is still being used for other wetting purposes in the laundry,” says Corinne Johnston of Gymea Bay.
Column8@smh.com.au
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