“This octogenarian was trundling along the bike path on his old workhorse bicycle when two teenagers approached, riding their bikes,” writes Geoff Turnbull of Ashfield. “I stopped and they stopped. ‘Geoff,’ I said. ‘Jasper’, ‘Liam,’ they replied. ‘You should be wearing helmets, boys.’ ‘Yeah, we probably should.’ ‘Do both your brakes work, mate?’ asked Jasper. ‘Only the rear one,’ I said. Jasper proceeded to make an adjustment to my front brake and voila! Both brakes work. ‘You’re a champion,’ I said, as they rode off. With teenagers like this, the future of our nation is in good hands.”
“In my first job at McDonald’s Waitara in the early nineties we were sometimes treated to the ‘golden tonsils’ of one John Laws (C8) when working on drive-thru,” recalls Melinda Barwell of Forestville. “He’d always order a large fries with extra salt. We concluded it was due to his predilection for Valvoline.” You know what she means.
Plenty of famous Fangs (C8) out there. Just ask Adrian Bell of Davistown: “While no doubt unrelated to ‘Fang’ Fraser, Fang was a common nom de plume. At Sydney Boys High in the mid-1950s, the word Fang was drawn in chalk in every possible spot, much to the apoplectic annoyance of the headmaster, Ken Andrews. Although never officially confirmed, the ‘culprit’ was generally accepted to be the illustrious Peter Crittle, a prefect at the school and proud member of the Wallabies, playing 15 Tests and practising as a respected barrister. Peter died last year at age 86.”
According to Bill Thompson of Crows Nest, “Comedian Phyllis Diller always referred to her husband as Fang. One of her quotes is, ‘I’ve been asked to say a couple of words about my husband, Fang. How about short and cheap?’”
“Has anyone suggested a name change for the Coalition yet?” asks George Zivkovic of Northmead. “The Hekawi tribe from the 1960s sitcom F Troop, was a fictional Native American tribe whose name is a pun on the phrase, ‘Where the heck are we?’ They were given this name after an incident where the tribe fell off a cliff and got lost.”
Louise Edmonds of Redhead notes that “Ian Carmody (C8) asks about ‘lived experience’. I have pondered this phenomenon for some time now, and I think it’s related to the ‘existential threats’ that are seemingly so prevalent these days. That’s my ‘experience’.”
Column8@smh.com.au
No attachments, please.
Include name, suburb and daytime phone.
Read the full article here
