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Bob Makinson of Pymble notes that a Tasmanian devil is missing from Gold Coast Zoo but thinks “they’re looking for this animal in all the wrong places. It would obviously have made a beeline for Warner Bros Movie World.”
“On a serious note just for once, I would like to draw attention to a little known household and workplace hazard,” reveals John Swanton of Coogee. “Standing on upturned empty milk crates becomes dangerous when they deteriorate with age. The plastic becomes brittle and collapses easily. A colleague broke his arm doing just this, and you can also cut your legs to ribbons on the sharp plastic shards. Have a good day folks.”
“Yesterday I was playing Lego with my five-year-old grandson when I reminisced about my old Meccano set,” writes N. Andrew McPherson of Tathra. “The only other person in the room of 11 people to know what I was talking about was my dear old mum (93). Any other Col8ers remember Meccano?”
The tertiary pranking thread (C8) looks to have taken a sinister turn, with many a missive involving the tampering of student digs, something Dennis Fardy of Warriewood knows all about: “At Drummond College UNE in 1979, I was away for the weekend playing rugby. On coming home, exhausted, I found my room completely stuffed with newspapers. An annoying but clever prank.”
Shout-out to those parents of the cloth nappy era who kept said items away from landfill. Brad Campbell of Redfern has memories of “the nappy bucket in the laundry and white squares flapping on the Hills Hoist. We began using them in 1985 and continued until the mid-1990s. Not with the same child, of course. I still have a couple of remnant squares that are regularly used to clean and dry my bike. Better than microfibre and exceptional value for money.” Ruth Saunders of Dulwich Hill says, “my son was born at the end of the cloth nappy era and so his were not worn out. They lasted us as cleaning cloths for over 30 years. I almost cried as I finally threw the last one out.”
Corinne Johnston of Gymea Bay says the “mention of nappy buckets and cloth nappies made me realise my ‘nappy stick’ (used to prod the nappies in their buckets of sanitiser) is coming up to 46 years of age and still in use for other soaking purposes in the laundry”.
Column8@smh.com.au
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