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It’s not what you know. Jim Pollitt of Wahroonga recalls a Foundation Day scavenger hunt (C8) in the ’60s at University of NSW that “was won handsomely by the commerce faculty when one of the high-scoring items was a shop mannequin. One of the commerce students was a certain Michael Grace of the eponymous department store. A visit to the Broadway store, a pantechnicon and the rest, as they say, is history.”
“A ‘lost in France letter’ to the Herald reminded us of a late evening in northern Paris, where we had walked a long way from the railway station with luggage, looking for a French friend’s place,” writes Donald Hawes of Peel. “Lost, we hailed the sole human, who was on a foot scooter, and asked, en francais, for the required street. ‘Are you Donald and Ana?’ we were asked, in English. Turned out he was the friend’s boyfriend.”
“The blowout of the old-fart thread (C8) was unexpected and completely necessary – always better out than in,” declares Suzanne Saunders of Wadeville. “Caught unawares, I’ll blurt it out anyway: along with Old Fart Ale is Old Fart Oil, made locally by The Lost Sock Ranch. ‘An old fart and a lost sock walked into a bar’ is an opening for C8-ers to pop off a punchline.”
“A couple of years ago I saw a yacht in Nambucca Heads with the name Passing Wind,” adds Daniel Flesch of Bellingen. “A reasonable pun and quite possibly named by an old fart.”
“With all the recent talk of grumpy old farts, I much prefer to be referred to as a curmudgeon,” requests Mike Parton of Tamworth. “It sounds so much more dignified.”
Michael Dunlop of Surfers Paradise (Qld) wonders: “Does monoculture mean a bland diet of meat and three veg and, on occasions, fish and chips?”
“I see from the Letters page that, in her youth, this column’s own Coral Button always referred to movies as ‘the pictures’,” observes Don Bain of Port Macquarie. “Back at the southern tip of Africa it was ‘the bioscope’ or ‘the bio’, without knowing quite why.”
Still on the silver screen, Kent Mayo of Uralla would like to thank the FIFA Academy: “Yes, the World Cup has more actors feigning death throes (C8) than a Sylvester Stallone movie.” And in finding a better name for the practice than “credit thief”, Col Burns of Lugarno offers “narcissoccer”.
Column8@smh.com.au
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