Fred and Jane, Sam and Fanny

	Sally has been successful in her choice of college and is very happy.
	Freddie has heard about Sally's success and is very worried as he knows she has no college fund.
	Freddy writes a note to Sally about college fees
	Sally places a chat call with her uncle to see what help she can get in paying her college fees.
	Sam is not sympathetic as he's just paid out a lot of money to Freddie.
	Sally and Fanny are now friends.
	Fanny is worried that Sally will ask her for a loan
	Sally makes a comment about having no money.
	Sally joins the group The Three Monkeys and pretends she can neither hear or see.
	Sally plays loud music for Fanny.
	Sally and Jane are now friends.
	Sally and Jane discuss economics and sex.
	Sally asks Freddy for a date.
	Freddy writes to Sally that he is busy for the next few years.
	Sally has joined The Greta Garbo society
	Freddy regrets having given all his money to Mr. S. U. B. Prime
	Sally became a fan of Jon Stewart.
	Sam regrets giving so much money to Freddy
	Fanny leaves a note for John asking if he has any dough.
	Jane and John are now friends.
	John invites Fanny to the Spelling Championships.
	John invites Jane to the Spelling Championships.
	Jane misspells 'Doe'.
	Sam is avoiding his nephews and nieces.
	Sam is invited to the EU economic summit.
	Jane is taking music lessons.
	Jane and Bambi are now friends.
	Sally thinks Fanny has stolen her money
	Fanny thinks Freddy has stolen her money
	Freddy thinks Sam has stolen his money
	Fanny gets a note saying her college course has been discontinued.
	Fanny is selling her text books on EBay.
	Jane is thinking of buying "Spelling 101" on Ebay.
	Sally has gone to hotel.com to find out the cost of hotels in Nigeria
	John is emigrating to Azerbaijan.
	Jane wished she could spell Azerbaijan.
	Sam is singing the Star Spangle banner and wishing he was The Fat Lady.
	Jane wonders how to spell "Congress".
	Fanny wonders where Congress is located
	John hopes Congress is not in Azerbaijan.
	Jane has decided to go back to the Boston Tea Party

To be continued ...

Too Kool for School

As Seinfeld would have put it, last century, "What's with 'cool?'"

And by 'cool' I don't mean that universal answer people under 35 give - no matter what you say, they inevitably answer, 'Cool'.

"It looks like rain."
"Cool"
"Pass the salt please."
"Cool"
"The curry is rather hot."
"Cool"

No, I mean the cool as in minimal. At least I think that's right. I had thought that minimal went out with pink pashmina scarves and Bill Clinton jokes. But apparently not. The new cool is the new minimal, sort of minimal in comfort rather than style. Or that's the impression I got after we left Subtle Tea.

I was with my brunch friend Alice. Alice is super cool but doesn't know it. I suspect the not knowing it is part of what it means to be cool. If something's cool, Alice will know. Now me, I might think it is just uncomfortable, impractical or ugly. But I wouldn't know. I am not 'cool'.

But back to the Subtle Tea. We were both tired and prickly, having endured a New York work week. Alice said hers was worse than mine as she works on Wall Street. We'd hoped to unwind but we had unwisely chosen for our 3:00pm brunch a British-Indian restaurant that was decidedly uncool. Even I could recognise its uncoolness.

Chez le Chef

We hadn't enjoyed our uncool curry, and so Alice thought we should try to recover what was left of the day and she suggested tea. Cool. We left Curry Hill and walked west down 30th. We passed a place called "Chez le Chef". It speaks for our New York work-week-exhaustion that we both stood gawking at the storefront, wondering what type of cuisine it served. Alice thought it might be German. Uncool ...

We walked a bit further until we reached Subtle Tea, and went in. I found it most odd. There was nowhere to move and on the central bar where everyone was seated, there were strange devices that looked like those dryers they have in nail salons. I looked around expecting smiling Korean ladies holding bottles of nail polish, but there were none. So it really was a tea room. The nail dryers must've been something else. Probably outlets for plugging in Apples. The place would obviously not tolerate a PC.

Alice had told me earlier, that the place was comfortable. "Look", she whispered (cool), "there's sofas".

Subtle Seating

I looked. There was about an inch of sofa to perch on, the rest of the 12 inch seat being taken up by fluffy cushions. No wonder no one was sitting on them. We sidled around past the non-Korean young people plugged into the dryer things. And perched. "Where do we put our cups of tea?" I prickled at Alice. She looked glum, and vaguely waved in the direction of a white plastic chair with a concave seat, six inches away. "I'm not balancing a cup of tea on that!" I snapped. "Let's go", she answered.

And we did. Once outside Alice explained the place to me. She sounded patient, sort of as if she felt sorry for me, or as if I were hard of hearing. "That place is too cool", she told me. "It's for young people, cool people. It's minimalist."

"I don't call dryer things crammed on narrow bars and nowhere to sit on empty sofas minimalist and anyway minimalist is so last century", I snapped back, failing abysmally in a pathetic attempt to be cool.

"Well it IS for young people", said Alice. "Well NEITHER of us is young. We are hardly co-eds", I retorted. Her face fell. "No we aren't". I felt mean.

Still the day ended well. We found a big airy Californian-looking place, aptly called Californian Pizza Kitchen. "Californian", I muttered. "I don't feel like soya beans and decaf". And to myself, "Lighten up, enough is enough!" And then, to Alice, "Yes OK, it looks OK."

We went in and sat down in real chairs. The staff were friendly and cheerfully served us "just coffee". We sat there for about an hour; the waitress topped up our coffees at regular intervals. Unwinding. Relaxing. When the check came it was $4.80. We left $10.

Now that's what I call really cool. A big airy place full of polite and friendly waiters. A cholesterol-filled menu with heaps of trans fats. Room to walk between tables. Lots of little lights and big carbon footprints.

So NOT Californian. And oh, so very cool.

Patterns of Connection

Poster photo of Black Saturday shown in New York

New York, Valentine's Day 2009. The "Australian" restaurant on 38th.

I was standing in the crowd of mainly Australians, at the Bushfire Benefit. I stared at the photo on the wall. Even without my Canon Elph's lack of focus, it looked ghostly.

Australian accents all around. Glasses of beer and wine held a-high. But I wasn't part of the ebb and flow. I was transfixed by those ghostly figures photographed outside their devastated home in the Australian bush February 2009.

From "Patterns of Connection" - Leah King Smith 1991

What is it about our Australian bush? And the "dreamtime" so aptly called?

Several years ago I stood at an exhibition of Australian photography and gazed at Leah Kings Smith's reproduction of a photo (left) of a young Australian aboriginal in the 19th century, Healesville. Probably not far (in space) from the place where the photo at the Australia" restaurant was taken. Healesville was one of the places affected by the 2009 bushfires.

I don't know an Australian who is not attune to the Australian bush. Even those of us who have lived most of our lives in cties, have an affinity to those scrubby green-brown landscapes of eucalypts. Even those of us who came to Australia as adults, and who were not brought up on a diet of Mae Gibbs bush babies and banksia men, grow to love "the bush".

I remember when I first came to the US about 14 years ago. A friend drove me from Oklahoma to Illinois. Impressive country-side. Fertile, cultivated, orderly. But the trees! Symmetrical and foreign oaks and elms. All monotone green. Where was their character? Seen one, seen 'em all. Where were our straggly gums, teeming with character with subtlety of color of every hue of grey-green. Where were the motley and dappled crooked trunks? Where were the gumnut fairies and banksia men? Where was the dreamtime which I may not understand but know that is there?

How we Aussies miss our bush. How hard it is for us to watch it and its inhabitants burn.

Aussies' coats on 38th Street, Manhattan

And so, on a chilly New York night, and no doubt in many other cities throught the world, we gathered.

Remembering. Missing. Giving.

A truth universally acknowledged

There was a time when people spoke in complete sentences, a time when conversation was an art. Now, even when attempting to reproduce the style of the lost art of conversation, even the best script writers have problems.

Watch this scene from Lost in Austen , a back-to-the-past-in-the-future parody of "Pride and Prejudice". Close, but not close enough.

Is it a fascination with the lost art that leads many of us to become hooked on Jane Austen's novels? And what has happened to the art of conversation to make talking in complete, let alone complex sentences such a chore?

I have a theory. In the nineteenth century the leisured classes had little to do other than perfect their skills in such areas as conversing, embrodery and music (women), and hunting (men). People didn't have to learn new words almost daily.

See full image HERE

Take "twitter" for example. Pre March 2006 the word meant. And now? "Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users' updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length." (Wikipedia. Blog, blogger, internet, ram, memory stick, not to mention those archaic bits and bytes.

And of course it isn't just in the world of information technology that new words and terms are introduced daily. What about in music (track, album, rap, rif, reggae, rock, R&B ...) and the visual arts (WYSIWYG, video, tivo, tape, CD, Ipod ...) and literature (blog, word processor, Kindle, Word, ghostwriter). The environment (green, carbon footprint, cradle to cradle

And as well as learning new words and concepts, people nowadays need to learn new skills in an ever-changing technological environment. Surely the human mind can only absorb and retain so much.

We don't "converse" and more. We "social network". We show our interest in someone by sending them (if we are a FaceBook users) a digital hatching egg or a growing flower which is really just a sequence of zeros and ones.

Imagine a FaceBook Pride and Prejudice. Someone has!
Charles Bingley is renting a house in Hertfordshire!
Mrs. Bennet became a fan of Charles Bingley.
Kitty Bennet can't stop coughing!!!
Charles Bingley is now friends with Mr. Bennet and Sir William Lucas.
11 of your friends are attending Assembly at Meryton.
From AustenBook

Homework

Write a FaceBook script of Darcy's first proposal to Elizabeth.

Remembering Barry

Back in the olden days when Woody Allen was funny and Michael Leunig was whimsical rather than twee, I used to read a suburban newspaper called "The Melbourne Times". Of course that was when I lived in Australia, but for a while there when I used to go home regularly, I'd flick through my once-local rag.

Ad from the "Melbourne Times"
circa 1995

Here's something I tore out of it on one such visit. So Australian. Would an American bar encourage men to patronise it by giving free drinks to their buddies?

One of my favourite Melbourne Times' columnists was Barry Dickens, a working class lad, or so he seemed to fancy himself, though he was no lad, even back then. His columns would ramble on. What were they about? I cannot remember. Seinfeld pre-Seinfeld was our Barry; writing about nothing.

He was invariably accused by mainstream critics of spouting verbal diarrhea, but his writings, for me at least turned out to be an acquired taste that once aquired was addictive. I do remember one of his articles, about his failure to get a government grant for his writings. And I recall that Barry's "mates" featured frequently in his stories. Or should I say, his "yarns", as Barry had, has, the the gift of the gab - that Australian bush talent for telling a good story, or yarn.

Barry was born in the working class suburb of Reservoir; he could even pronounce it correctly. Real Reservoirians say "Reserve-were" with the final syllable rhyming with "her". I suspect that Real Reservoirians don't eat quiche either.

In the 1980s, Barry used to hang out on Friday nights at Stewart's Hotel, Carlton - a place which once aspired to be the Melbourne equivalent of Sydney's Royal George of twenty years before, but which has long since changed into an Irish pub with an interior that looks like it was commissioned by the Grollo Brothers. No longer do the likes of Jack Hibberd drink there and Carlton identities such as Dinny O'Hearn have long since departed.

I'd forgotten all about Barry, until I read a review of his in the Melbourne Age yesterday. Great moments in shock therapy (January 3, 2009) is a review of Baz Luhrmann's latest film, "Australia".

"Though all criticisms of this movie have been acidic, I have never laughed so much in all my life. As soon as it came on I was in hysterics. It was more preposterous than death. Cheaper than life and funny into the bargain. I punched the armrest at one stage with gratitude when Gulpilil came into it."

And I think that Barry was indeed shocked. Shocked into uncharacteristic succinctness.

"Australia is our stupidity made vaudeville and our history slapstick."

I'm reminded of the Marx Brothers, "Duck Soup", or rather, the scene in Woody Allen's "Hannah and her Sisters" where feeling depressed about the meaning of death, Woody goes into a cinema and is revived by the madcap Marx Brothers on celluloid, playing the "Duck Soup" orchestra scene.

Yes humour can restore our very soul at the times when it most needs restoring. " We need to laugh a lot these days just to handle the grief of living", writes Barry.

Let us hope that this New Year, 2009, ends in a more optimistically than it has started. And that the spirit of Grouch, Harpo and Chico, live on.

Let them wear lipstick!

I predict that 2009 will consolidate the baby-boomer-bashing that has been creeping in, virtually unnoticed by us oldies.

We, who never in our hearts believed that we'd grow old. Certainly we never saw ourselves as growing old like our parents had - being perceived by the younger generations as "past it". But fellow boomers, we are - perceived to be, that is.

I suppose I could hack that. But as well as us being past it, everything is apparently ALL OUR FAULT. ASIF!

Reproduced with permission © 2006 ebonWeb

And the worse a problem is, the more our fault it is. There is a positive correlation between the severity of a world problem and the culpability of the boomers.

Global warming, the global economy, the global recession, President George W Bush. It's not our fault about Obama though, not yet ... It's not to our credit either that he's elected. The dividing line between our culpability and the achievement of the younger generations must lie between November 4th 2004 and November 8th 2004.

Look at the Spooner cartoon below. Baby Boomers, the privileged children of the late forties and early fifties. I wish! I was in Australia then. Women received less wages than me for the same jobs. Thousands of refugees from war-torn Europe were settling in Australia, in most cases arriving with nothing.

Nissan Hut, Broome circa 1956

Here are some family friends of the time, newly arrived in Broome, Australia. The corrugated dwelling behind them was their accommodation.

How quickly did the post-war boom happen? Certainly I was not aware of it till the seventies. When I think of the toys that I and my friends had, I think of perhaps one doll and ball, a Scrabble set and cowboy outfit for my brother, maybe a wire pram for the girl. Oh yes there were also Hula Hoops. The fact that these were popular at all is a sure indicator that our toy selection was meagre. Television was not available in Australia until the first boomers were turning ten. I think my family bought a set when I was 15.

Baby Boomer with toy pram circa 1949

Perhaps the boom years started earlier in the United States, though I have not met any American boomers who had an affluent childhood.

In the seventies some of us started making money. Others started making families. A few did both. We tried to provide for our X-generation babies in a way that our parents had wanted to provide for us, but rarely could.

My own children grew up with more than a ball and hula hoop. Four of us lived on a teacher's salary in the late seventies, early eighties. It was sufficient but in no way affluent. Vacations were camping trips or visiting friends. A typical family had one car.

In the eighties as our children became more self-sufficient and women found it easier to get decent jobs - even as in my own case - careers. There'd be the occasional overseas trip to Bali. We were paying off our homes, paying school fees, renovating.

For baby boomers I think that the nineties was "our time". Except for a brief period in the late sixties and very early eighties when we were young and free and poor, this was the time for ourselves. A brief respite before coping with caring for our elderly parents.

And now? Most of our children are launched though some of us still support a straggler. Most of us are still working, our savings crushed with the economic crisis of 2008.

Yes, life is good. We SHOULD see the cup as half full, though I expect Woody is right when he says it's "half full of poison".

Seriously though, I don't get the Spooners of this world who blame the post-war boomers for the worlds economic ills. When I see a professional, a lawyer, banker, dentist ... they all look about twelve! The people holding up societies infrastructure now are mere babies.

I hope the new year brings more joy economically. It certainly won't hurt us to use less petrol. I remember reading somewhere that when people stop buying, when times are hard, lipstick sales go up. This is seen to be because women want a little luxury, and if they can't afford a new dress or a trip overseas, they'll settle for a new lipstick. At the same time, lipstick fashion colours become brighter and darker. It happened in the Great Depression and its happening now.

So, to the new people coming along, I'm very sorry for what we boomers did - fighting against racial segregation, political and religious persecution, the war in Vietnam, women's rights ...

But you still have your lipstick ... Just make sure that it is eco-friendly and that the tube is bio-degradable and that no animals were harmed during its production.

Perhaps you can use it to paint a few slogans on banners .... after all, it's your world now.

Spooner Cartoon