Scavenging with a certain grace
This is not what you know. Wahroonga’s Jim Pollitt recalls a Foundation Day scavenger hunt (C8) held at the University of NSW in the 60s: “One of the highly rated items was won handsomely by the commerce faculty when she was a shop mannequin. One of the commerce students was Michael Grace from the eponymous store. A visit to the Broadway store was a pantechnicon and the rest, as they say, is history.”
“A letter lost in France” reporter “This reminded us of Northern Paris, where we walked a long way from the train station to look for a French friend’s house,” writes Peel’s Donald Hawes. “Lost, we greeted the only person on the scooter and asked: in francefor the required street. ‘Are you Donald and Ana?’ we were asked in English. “Turns out he was her friend’s boyfriend.”
“The explosion of the old fart thread (C8) was unexpected and completely necessary; outside was always better than inside,” says Suzanne Saunders of Wadeville. “Caught unawares, I’ll blurt it out anyway: Besides Old Fart Beer, there’s also Old Fart Lube, made locally by The Lost Sock Ranch. ‘An old fart and a lost sock walked into a bar’ is an opening for the C8ers to drop the punchline.”
“A few years ago I saw a yacht called Passing Wind at Nambucca Heads,” adds Daniel Flesch from Bellingen. “Decent pun and probably named by an old fart.”
“Despite all the talk about grumpy old farts lately, I prefer to be called a grumpy guy,” says Tamworth’s Mike Parton. “Sounds a lot more dignified.”
Michael Dunlop from Surfers Paradise (Qld) wonders: “Does monoculture mean a light diet of meat and three vegetables and sometimes fish and chips?”
“I see from the letters page that Coral Button in this column always referred to movies as ‘pictures’ in her youth,” says Don Bain of Port Macquarie. “At the southern tip of Africa, it was ‘bioscope’ or ‘biography,’ although we don’t know exactly why.”
Kent Mayo, from Uralla, who is still on the big screen, thanks the FIFA Academy: “Yes, there are more players doing death throes (C8) in the World Cup than in a Sylvester Stallone movie.” And Col Burns of Lugarno, who came up with a better name for this practice than “credit stealer,” suggests “narcissistic football.”
Column8@smh.com.au
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