The Mayor of Keyfood #1062

Wells R is the King of Keyfood Supermarket #1062

From my Google phone app, FourSquare February 24th 2010
Eleven hundred bucks for Sushi already. That's a lot of dead fish.
Nick Fifer in "Scenes from a Mall"
"I am not like the Leader of the Opposition. I did not slither out of the Cabinet room like a mangy maggot...
Paul Keating Australian Labor Party Prime Minister 1991 to 1996.

A person called Wells R has taken my position as Mayor of the Keyfood Supermarket on 2nd Avenue. I am shocked. Being Mayor of the Keyfood Supermarket was my first public office position since I was secretary of the Australian Labor Party's Federal Electorate Assembly of Corangamite a hundred years ago.

I didn't much like being the secretary of the Australian Labor Party's Electorate Assembly of Corangamite, because you had to join a FACTION. American readers will be bemused at this because the American political system doesn't know about PARTY LOYALTY. So a quick education ... Australian readers please skip the next paragraph.

Australia has a two party system like America. The Labor Party is like the American Democratic Party, in philosophy that is. It is what Americans call "liberal". The second party is the Australian Liberal Party which is like the American Republican Party.

In Australia we say "small ell liberal" meaning NOT the Liberal party but liberal as in enjoying freedom, which is what George W was on about although he was not a small ell liberal. The right wing faction of the Australian Labor party is called the Centre Unity. The members of the Centre Unity are economically liberal (small ell) but socially conservative. They are called Centre because they are centre of left. American readers should have no trouble with this, as it is is similar in concept to Americans calling the middle part of the east of the United States, "the South" because it is south of New York. The physical south of the US is sometimes called the Mid West for reasons I cannot fathom.

Keyfood cashier ticker Feb 24 2010.

Confused. Don't be. It will shortly become clear.

The Australian System is not counter-intuitive like the American one. If you join a party in OZ you are LOYAL or you will be EXPELLED.

In the Labor Party (and I realize that I've gone over the one paragraph, but it was necessary, and I like to show my Australian readers that I haven't forgotten the land of my birth), in the Labor Party, although joining a faction was mandatory, I didn't join one as I spent a long time making up my mind, and by the time I had made up my mind as to which faction to join, I'd left.

The reason I didn't want to join a faction, was that once you did, the people in the other factions HATED you. They'd sneer at you when you walked past and say nasty things about you in their faction meetings. I hate meetings as well, which was another reason not to join a faction. But the main one was that I don't like having ENEMIES. The factions in the Australian Labor Party hated each other more than they hated the Liberal Party.

After leaving the Labor Party I had nearly two decades out of public office until I became, for about one week, the Mayor of the Keyfood Supermarket #1062. To explain: there's a cell phone app called FourSquare and when you go out, the local places, stores, museums and so on, show up in the app. If you go into one of those places, you can click in and a counter somewhere in cyberspace gets incremented.

The person with the highest score for any particular place becomes "mayor" of that place. And so there I was until Wells R got in on the act and beat me by one point.

Tonight I went to the supermarket after work. I thought - great idea for a story. I can show my non New York readers what a New York supermarket is like, how much things cost and be educational for a change. However dear readers, all you will get this time are the digital images I prepared for you, as explaining the Australian political system took up too much space.

But before I go, I continue to get emails from people asking about the Brunch Crowd

I cannot answer emails individually as there are too many. So here is the Brunch Crowd update.

Green Bags at Keyfood

I strongly suspect that the the Brunch Crowd held a secret cancelled brunch last weekend and did NOT invite me. The reason I think this is that I bumped into two of the Brunch Crowd members this week separately and on on two separate occasions, and BOTH acted extremely suspiciously. BOTH mentioned food and restaurants. One even murmured something about a possible brunch sometime in the future and then pretended she was just coughing and hadn't said anything.

The other did (for some inexplicable reason) a mime of someone calling on the telephone. This person held up a pretend telephone receiver to its ear (I am careful NOT to divulge the gender) and said "ring ring please pick up". I just said no I wasn't playing, but it wasn't detered and it asked me out to dinner, conspicuously leaving out the other members of the Brunch Crowd. Suss to say the least ...

I will continue to keep you updated, and my next story WILL REALLy be about New York supermarkets.

K C Juliff
EX  Mayor of Keyfood #1062 (February 1 - 7 2010)
EX Secretary Corrangamite Federal Electorate Assembly