Sport and Religion in Australia

This is another copy of a blog that I sent to the 'Manchester Evening News', so it appears on the 'Net' somewhere else, but Odin (I already told you that I'm descended from the Vikings) knows where. So I am including it here as well, just in case you can't find it either, that's the sort of thoughtful, caring guy I am!

I have some statistics before me, these are ‘dinki di’ statistics compiled by the ‘Christian Research Association’ and printed in ‘The Melbourne Age’ a very august publication in much the same vein as ‘The Manchester Evening News’, not the usual crap that I make up off the top of my head. (To be honest with you, I just added that in case the inestimable editor of the MEN, stumbled on this in an idle moment).

Anyway, these stats reveal that of Melbourne’s population of 3.6 million, 1 million are Catholics and another million are made up of various Protestant groups ((are Anglicans, (400,000) Prods?)) and Moslems, Jews, Buddhists, Zoroastrians and other assorted odds and sods. That leaves over 1.5 mill or 42% who don’t claim to be anything.

That’s an awful lot of Godless bastards, in America 98.67% (alright! I admit it, I just made that up) claim to be church-goers. Over there if you claim to be an atheist, you’re only one small rung above being a paedophiliacal necromaniac with a shoe fetish.

So, what do these Aussies believe in? Well, you can go for twenty years working next to a person and never find out that they’re an Archdeacon in a Druidical sect, that practices animal/virgin sacrifices at every full moon. People just don’t talk about religion, apart from the door-knockers, Seventh Day Adventurists, PsuedoOlogists and clean-cut lads in suits from Salt Lake City.

However, you can’t go longer than twenty minutes without finding out which Aussie Rules Team they barrack for (We’re talking Melbourne here) different rules apply in NSW and Queensland, where they follow Rugby League Teams, but the principle is just the same.

In the AFL (Aussie Football League) there are 16 teams, one each from QLD and NSW, two from SA and WA and the rest from VIC. To function properly at all levels of society you HAVE to be a fan of one of these.

You can follow and participate in Crown Green Darts, Ice Soccer, Synchronised Swimming, Table Badminton, or Nude Beach Tiddly-Winks. Whatever takes your fancy , but you MUST follow an AFL club or you are a social leper.

So, what is this AFL you ask? Well, it’s a very quick, athletic game played between two teams of eighteen, very fit young men who attack a ball and try and kick it between four (not two) posts at either end of a large oval field. If they succeed, then a man dressed as an attendant in a lunatic asylum, waves white flags dementedly around and another similarly attired gentleman waves back at him from the other end of the ground.

This semaphoric routine indicates whether the ball went through the inner bigger poles, which scores 6 points in which case two white flags are flapped around maniacally.

The other alternatives are minor scores which go between a big pole and a small pole, this scores one point and only one flag is used. If the ball misses all the poles then no flags are waved and the crowd shouts obscenities at the player who missed. If he’s one of yours, these can be in an anguished tone, if he’s one of theirs then it should be in a jeering manner.

You also need to shout out obscenities at the umpires as they are always useless, blind white maggots of questionable parentage with exceptionally low IQ’s. As a newcomer to the game, it is highly recommended that you study a game on the TV before you attend an actual game. This is not particularly difficult to achieve as they are broadcast in their entirety (upwards of two hours) on Friday evenings and all day long and most of the night on Saturdays and Sundays.

This means that you can shout obscenities at your spouse (women are even more vociferous than men) all weekend and get away with it. Women love the game and why not? where else can they watch 36 young men in skimpy shorts, beating the crap out of each other? I know that I for one would be glued to the screen if there were games of beach volleyball, with 36 bikini clad beauties beating each other up and no net to intervene, but I’m a sicko!

Unlike most games, where the teams start off in their own half of the field and run like buggery into their opponents half, in AFL they all go anywhere they like, right from the start and then run around higgledy piggledy, trying to confuse everybody, including themselves.

If it’s like any other game, the one that comes closest is Gaelic Football, but they have an excuse, because they’re all Irish and it's expected of them. I won’t go into Aussie Rules any further at this stage, unless popular demand requires me to, as it would require a book, of which there are many available in all good book-stores and selected news-agencies.

Aussie worship of sport doesn’t end there of course, they love beating anybody, but especially The Poms. This is rooted in history, and there is no tradition stronger than that of Test Cricket. The Poms are just as bad of course, when they beat the Skips in England, the Queen knighted the bloody lot of them, including the ‘Sight Screen Movers’.

Not really giving much of a flying frolic who won, although I do enjoy watching test cricket. If the Poms were winning, I used to go into work and say “The Poms are going alright then”. If the Aussies were getting the upper hand, I’d wander in and say “Us Aussies are thrashing the arse off those Pommie Bastards, eh!”. This tactic caused great consternation among the Aussies and it pays to beat a hasty retreat if you’re about to get lynched.

I could go on about other sports, but I won’t mainly because I’m getting bored. Suffice it to say that if you are a sportsman or woman and you’re prepared to be naturalised (sounds painful) then Godzone is the place for you (not from a religious point of view of course). Look at ‘Aussie’ Joe Bugner for one, on second thoughts don’t It’s not a pretty sight.

Cheers for now,

SkyBlueSkull

http://keith-skellern.blogspot.com

More about my best friend. Sparky the Collie.

When I left this topic a few weeks ago, me and my offspring were at a farmlet West of Melbourne, checking out some Border Collie pups. A consensus was reached and I forked out A$200 for the one my daughter chose. A cute little critter that looked a bit like a Panda (facially that is, not at all like one otherwise).

A$200 seemed like a bit of a bargain at the time as they were charging $210 at the dog pound. However, their’s were de-sexed, vaccinated and micro-chipped and mine wasn’t and still isn’t, apart from the vaccinations. It still has it’s nuts and it hasn’t run off yet, in fact it seems to like it around Chateau Skull, so who needs a micro-chip, apart from the local council.

I won’t go into the reasons, because I’m trying to keep this blog short and it’s a long story, but it ended up with the name ‘Sparky’. If anybody out there really wants to know why, you can email me or blog me.

Sparky was and still is a ‘Chick Magnet’ when I take him for walks, which is 3-4 times a day, males smile at him and heaps of females stop me and want to pat him. They usually ask me “Can i stroke it?” and being a sicko pervert, I answer “Yes and if you’re good, you can stroke the dog as well.”

That aside, the pooch is not at all a ‘house dog’ after disgracing himself by pissing on the carpets (twice) in his first five minutes in the Chateau. He now lives with me, in my garage/study/kennel/aviary/workshop and is not allowed inside the house. I’m allowed in, for feeding and sleeping purposes.

This is a fairly good arrangement for all concerned, Sparky had exceedingly sharp claws and being a friendly, jumpy sort of a dog succeeded in tearing flesh from the arms and legs of any passing humans, including myself. Having personally got through a box of band-aids a week, I took him to the vet for a pedicure.

He also tends to cause a lot of destruction in our mutual abode, tearing down anything that can be torn down, eating books and terrorising my two remaining birds, although he can't reach them YET. He has become toilet trained to a degree, but if I discipline him (by beating him around the head with a bit of four by two) he comes in, defiantly looks me in the eye and pisses up my desk and runs off before I can catch him.

These habits have not endeared him to the rest of the family and although his claws are now considerably more blunt, he still insists on jumping up gleefully to greet people. After nearly three months of being well-fed, he has just about trebled in size, which is a tad worrisome.

More to follow eventually.

Cheers,

SkyBlueSkull

http://keith-skellern.blogspot.com

How I became a dog's best friend!

I’ve been trying now for the last four years to persuade the family to buy a dog. I’ve even offered to walk the next door neighbour’s chihuahua, that’s how desperate I was. They (the neighbours) agreed, but it never came to pass, as they pretended to be out when I went calling. I knew they were in, because I could hear the pooch (Improbably named ‘Chopper’) being suffocated under a cushion to prevent it barking.

My son has always been in favour of acquiring a pooch and has even claimed that the reason he didn’t have a trouble-free adolescence, was because of a lack of canine companionship. I doubt this is true, because there aren’t too many pub’s that allow dog’s inside in Australia.

This is not true in England, where I had a brief sojourn in November 2008. Over there, they don’t appear to mind the presence of Man’s best Friend (M.b.F) in the local boozer. With the provisos that a) they don’t bite the other patrons and b) don’t crap or piss on the floor, both conditions being very reasonable in my opinion.

I also noticed that there was a preponderance of big dogs over there and in towns and villages, if not large cities, (I didn’t visit any), it’s de rigeur to pick up your dog's shit and deposit it in the bins provided, which is also very civilised. Over here in Aus, we seem to pick smallish pooches such as Jack Russells and Pomeranians, possibly because it’s a lot hotter in the Antipodes.

To get back to my predicament, I had to persuade my Spouse and Daughter to agree to buying a M.b.F. as they are both ‘Cat People’ and we already have one of those horrible, ‘bird killing’ predators, this was not an easy task. I eventually resorted to emotional blackmail and told the Souse that if I had a dog, I would take it for 3 or 4 walks a day and could end up living for an extra ten years. She eventually broke down and agreed to my proposition.

Just before Xmas the progeny and I went to a couple of dog-pounds, looking for a suitable canine for a Christmas present for yours truly. We went about three or four times over the next three weeks, but all we could find were Labradors (too big for me, although the lad fell in love with one with a ‘designer scar’ on it’s snout), Jack Russels (too small for me and him, but the lass thought they were ‘pretty’) and Staffordshire Bull Terriers (too ugly for me, although the kids thought me and them were a perfect match).

To be continued,

Cheers,

SkyBlueSkull.

http://keith-skellern.blogspot.com

Toxic Debt and Jay Walking

I expect that by now you have all heard of ‘Toxic Debt’ the scourge of the economy in the late ‘Naughties’, i.e 2000 to 2009, all brought about by naughty, cheeky and greedy ‘Financial Planners’ who were too busy lining their own pockets to worry too much about the ‘Real World’. As usual, their pockets got too heavy and they were caught with their pants around their ankles.

As a trained Economist, I know a bit about these things, which paradoxically insinuates that I know a lot about these things, in my case it should be taken literally, because I actually know sod all about them.

This is also true about 99.9% of the rest of the so called financial experts, who are as stupid as the rest of us. There is of course an exception to the rule and in this case it’s a certain gentleman named Warren Buffet (W.B.), he also happens to be the world’s richest dude (W.R.D.), for obvious reasons.

Not being W.B. back in April I predicted that interest rates were going to skyrocket and locked my Mortgage in a fixed interest rate of 8.0% for three years, dumb move! Interest rates are now at their lowest rate since 1666 and the Great Fire of London.

Here in Aus. they are falling down as low as 2% and in the US of A they have gone so low they are in minus figures. What this means is that if you deposit money in a bank, they will charge you brass for holding it for you. By the same token, if you borrow money they will pay you for borrowing it and the more you borrow, the more they will give you. Neat eh?

Now, even Investment Bankers aren’t that silly, so now nobody lends anybody anything, thus resulting in the much feared ‘Credit Crunch’. In these troubled times, I figured out that everyone who had a few shekels to spare would want to hide it in a sock and put it under the mattress, just like the Chinese, right?

With a touch of the W.B.’s I thought I would search the backs of the chairs and couches and invest any capital I discovered in shares in sock-making and mattress-making companies. Luckily for me, my son and heir had already beaten me to it and invested it in grog. As I was perusing the business section of the newspaper, I discovered that the main sock/mattress makers in Aus. are moving offshore to Asia because of massive losses. You don’t have to worry W.B. your position as W.R.D. is under no threat from the Skull.

To get back to ‘Toxic Debt’ my own Mortgagor is laughing his socks off (I hope they’re Aussie made) so my debt isn’t toxic to him, only to me. To make matters worse is the debt/equity problem, as a trained economist I know a bit about this (do you have a sense of deja vu about this?).

Six months ago, my humble Chateau was worth A$450,000, if you convert this to US$ or Sterling, which I won’t, this doesn’t sound very much at all. If however, you convert it to Yen or Lire, it sounds like a hell of a lot. I won’t go into Zimbabwe Dollars, I’m a bit embarrassed about being a multi-trillionaire.

To get back to Aus. Dollars, I have a toxic debt of approx $45,000 so six months ago I had equity of A$405,000 in my Chateau. After the credit crunch and general economic turmoil, my Chateau is worth A$100,000 less. That means I’ve lost A$100,000 equityin six months. Cor! bugger me! and bless my cotton socks! (Aus. made of course) I’ve lost $100,000.

I was about to throw myself off the window ledge outside my office, until I realised that I write this crap in my garage. What to do? This catastrophe needed a dramatic response. I thought about throwing myself off the roof of the Chateau, but realised that, even though it’s a single storey brick veneer in Melbourne’s West, my ladder is knackered.

So, I did what any rational person would have done and took a walk. I decided to throw myself off the pavement into the gutter. As I walked along the pavements of Albion, I suddenly realised that due to the proliferation of motorised wheel-chairs (don’t mess with those suckers, if you value your life? No! none were racing as I walked) all the bits between the path and the road have been squished down, to facilitate access for the geriatric Fangios.

Which brings me back to the title of this blog ‘Jay Walking’, if I wanted to throw myself into a gutter, I had to walk to a place where pedestrians are not supposed to walk, I did this and jumped. You’ll be happy to know that I survived the drop and although a cop car was passing at the time, I scurried off before they caught me.

I shall have to look into the origin of the term Jay Walking, as to the best of my knowledge a Jay is an English bird that chats a lot (don’t they all) but doesn’t walk across roads, surely that’s chickens!

Cheers,

SkyBlueSkull

http://keith-skellern.blogspot.com

Cockroaches, Good Guys or Baddies?

I’ve written about these little buggers before, see ‘Local Warming’. Back then I was informed that there were three distinct types, Australian, American and Asian. However, a recent article in ‘The Newspaper of the Year’, a rather dubious claim at best, but who am I to argue with the august Melbourne Herald Sun?

This article was over half a page long, if you include the photograph, which could have been anything, from a common bed bug to a blue-ringed octupus. If you don’t believe me check it out on the net, page 7, Friday March 7, 2009. Written by Karen Collier (consumer reporter), under the headline Cockroach Invasion. You’d have to be a fool to argue with someone with those qualifications for cockroach research.

To save you the trouble of looking it up, I’ll give you a quick precis. Big, ugly cockroaches are invading Melbourne (quick, get me a Hollywood script-writer, this has great potential). Hold on though! “Before you panic, that intruder in your kitchen sink, bathroom or barbecue (?) is probably a harmless native“. Thank any Deity you prefer for that, I was just about to pack my bags and catch a slow boat to Wales.

It goes on to say “Unlike the nasty little German roaches that thrive on filth and food scraps, hide in the dark and carry disease” (remind you of any Germans you know? No, me neither!) “the common shining (black) cockroach munches on organic matter and breaks down leaf litter”.

It then quotes an entomology expert as saying “These ones seem quite stupid and don’t run when they see you” What do they do then? Rear up on their fucking back legs and challenge you to a fight? “They are not as cluey as the pests that use the cover of darkness” (Remind you of any Aussies you know? nor me!)

“if you can, try to return the natives outside, rather than killing them because they help return nutrients to the soil”.

I won’t go into the ‘Smoky Brown’ variety, as I have to keep my blogs short and interesting (which is an oxymoron, if you ask me, so don’t bother). But according to the article they are "yet another introduced pest", along with rats, rabbits and the British?.

Anyway, for what it’s worth, I for one, am not going to try to interrogate any roaches in my bathroom and kitchen to find out if they speak German, Mandarin or ‘Strine’. I shall continue stomping on the bastards or karate chopping the little shits. Although, I might throw their corpses into the vegetable patch, to add nutrients.

Cheers,

SkyBlueSkull

http://keith-skellern.blogspot.com

Old Age, 60 is not the new 40 it's on your way to 20.

I’ve just passed my 60th birthday two weeks ago. I’ve always looked old, even when I was in my early thirties I looked 60. I was always asked by bus drivers and tram conductors if I was a pensioner. I usually replied “Yes” to get a cheaper fare, when I was asked for my concession card, I used to tell them that the dog had eaten it, sometimes it worked.

Anyway, now I’m 60 I look 65 or younger, so when I’m 70 I’ll look an oldish sort of 50 and when I’m 90 I’ll look like a very wrinkled 25 year old. There isn’t a lot you can do about wrinkles, apart from botox and plastic surgery (and they don’t call it plastic for nothing). You also have to be rich to afford it, so the rest of us shit-kickers have very little choice.

You can try ironing the skin on your arms and legs and tying the excess in knots at the end of your fingers and toes, course you’d always have to wear gloves and socks. With your face/head you can always pull your scalp back into a pony-tail (See my blog on Hair) but like I said there, it does tend to give you a very oriental look. Not, I hasten to add, that there is anything wrong with that.

If you have a really, really wrinkled face like Rupert Murdoch, you would have to pull the skin back so far, that you would be able to look through your nostrils and your lips would be stretched round your nose, not a real great look by any standards.

Speaking of Rupert, he’s uber-rich and he hasn’t had plastic surgery as far as I know, (If he has, it hasn’t been worth what he paid for it, but who knows? Maybe it has been a success!). Still on the subject, I’ve seen better looking raisins than Rupe.

I wish I hadn’t thought of that, I really enjoy a couple of slices of toasted raisin bread on a cold winters morning. Now, whenever I see them, I’ll be asking the missus to change the ‘toasted Rupert bread’ for proper toast. I hope I haven’t put you off your breakfast.

Cheers,

SkyBlueSkull

http://keith-skellern.blogspot.com

Local Warming, When you live in a place called Sunshine what can you expect?

LOCAL WARMING

Everybody has heard of Global Warming since Al Gore invented it, but that is ‘The Big Picture’, so it is now time to contemplate ‘The Small Picture’, how it affects me personally right now, not in 2040 when I’ll be dead anyway.

So this is a look at ‘Micro Meteorology’ as opposed to ‘Macro Meteorology’. Just remember that you read the term here first. Maybe I’ll appear on TV with a ‘cherry-picker and a pointy stick and make a big swag of money.

How is this warming phenomenon affecting me, you might ask? That was a rhetorical question meaning you, not me as in Skull. Well to be honest, I couldn’t really give a flying frolic how it’s affecting you, because this is about how it’s affecting Chateau Skull.

First off, the Chateau is now infested with cockroaches for nine months of the year. These horrible little beasties never used to be seen in the Chateau ten years ago, they always stayed north of the border in NSW because it was too cold for them down here in Melbourne.

This may not be strictly correct, we used to have ants, but then we got mice and the ants disappeared and perhaps the mice were eating them along with the baby cockroaches. We then got a cat (not through any pleading on my part I might add, I’m a bird and dog person). The cat has never been allowed inside the house, but it must have caught the mice when they went outside to get a suntan. This keeps them out of laboratories to be tested with all sorts of horrids, because labs prefer white mice, which is a bit racist if you ask me. But nobody ever has.

Anyway, I blame warming on both the profusion of cockroaches and shortage of white mice. Incidentally, I read somewhere that there are three different types of cockroach, Australian, American and Asian. Now this may be a bit of Nationalistic Jingoism, but the Aussie variety are apparently black and as far as cockroaches go are relatively clean. On the other hand the Yankee and Asian ones are brown and filthy. Make of that what you will.

To get back to ‘Local Warming’, here at the Chateau we have been experiencing a drought for the last ten years. Not a total drought you understand, but a distinct shortage of drizzle let alone persisting down rain. This means that the State Gov’t has passed an edict saying that we are only allowed to water plants (not lawns) twice a week before 8:00am. You are also not allowed to wash your cars and need a permit to fill your swimming pool.

As the Chateau is odd (in more ways than just the number) I get to water on Wednesdays and Sundays. I usually do this around 10:00am and if anybody asks, I tell them my body clock is permanently set to West Australian time. I also don’t drive and if my spouse’s car is dirty, I tell her to take it to the car wash. As for swimming pools, well! to be honest, we don’t have one.

When it comes to ‘lawns’, I have two, one at the front and one at the back. It does of course depend on your precise definition of a lawn. Mine do have some grass, but consist mainly of weeds. If they are mowed regularly they look like lawns, if you squint into the sunlight.

I must admit that I prefer summer when they turn brown and if you kick the weeds, clouds of dust rise up. This is basically because I’m a lazy sod when it comes to sods.

At the moment here at the Chateau we’re supposedly in the middle of winter, but somebody forget to tell Thor or whichever God is in charge of these things. (Might as well blame the Gods, nobody else is going to shoulder the responsibility). We keep getting a splatter of rain during the night and then a sunny day with temperatures in the low teens. This is perfect for weeds and always too damp to mow the buggers.

Cheers

SkyBlueSkull

PS. This is supposed to be the middle of winter and today it’s been sunny all day and the temperature has reached 18C. Luckily, I’ve taught the Good Lady Wife (GLW) how to mow and she decided to mow the front ‘lawn’.

http://keith-skellern.blogspot.com

Hair! How I waved (goodbye to) mine!

If you look very carefully at my one and only photo,( don't ask me why, I can't explain why no other photos are available when I 'browse') you will notice green stuff growing out the top of my head and my lug-holes. I did say that you have to look carefully! Anyway, I'm sure that has very little to do with this posting, so read on.

HAIR

My muse made a re-appearance early this morning and she started me thinking about hair. Not the seventies musical which I never saw, but in which I believe, is where they started flashing the pubic variety on stage for the first time. Also not about the male fruit of my loins who is the unfortunate son and heir to the Skellern Throne(s), we have two, if you’re really interested in that sort of thing, let’s say you’re a distant relative of Thomas Crapper, for instance.

But, I’m digressing for a change! What my muse was thinking about, were the cilia like things that grow from follicles on the skin of many critters, including mammals and in this case I’m talking about human critters.

A lot of human critters are born with hair, usually on their heads, but in my case apparently I was born covered from head to toe in cilia. This caused a certain amount of speculation among the doctors and midwives who were present, that they had just observed the birth of ‘The Missing Link’.

Perhaps fortunately, I suffered from this abundantly hirsute appearance for a mere matter of moments, or at the very most days, before returning to a normal, cherub-like appearance. This relieved and pleased my parents enormously, when they eventually removed the swaddling clothes.

In my youth I had a very healthy head of hair accompanied by a surfeit of dandruff, as readers of my well-acclaimed autobiography will no doubt remember. Thinking about this now, the dandruff and my subsequent follicular problems may well have the same root cause (if you’ll pardon the pun). That is carbolic soap, in those far off days, the family budget did not stretch to Lux soap, let alone Two-in One daily Shampoo and Conditioner for soft manageable hair.

In fact, we considered ourselves lucky, that Dad didn’t bring back buckets of industrial strength cleaner with added grit to get rid of those unwanted oil and grease stains. Half the kids in the neighbourhood suffered from impetigo and other unwanted skin diseases, as a result of getting their epidermises scrubbed away. It isn’t surprising that the more elderly, chattering class of Poms have a phobia about bathing, (You can include me in there).

Anyway, to get back to the original topic, which seems to have been lost somewhere along the way. It’s amazing that the older you get, the easier it is to get sidetracked by inconsequentialities. (There’s a bloody good example for you, I typed in that word, and the Comp Spell check tells me it should be with y’s so I change it and the Comp Grammar tells me to change it back). I must admit that if a dog year equals 7 human years, a computer year must equal at least 10 human years, which makes this mongrel machine 150 years old at least. So who am I to complain?

Back to hair, thank Elliot! (See ‘Fosterarianism’). In my early middle age (late 20’s) my head hair started to turn grey, so much so, that a ‘well meaning’ friend bought me a bottle of ‘Grecian 2000’. No apologies to the makers of this crap, because, although my hair did initially darken. When I went outside on a normal hot, sunny, Australian summer’s day, my hair started to smell uncannily like burning rubber and took on a distinctive greenish tinge. I took this as a bad omen and threw the rest of the bottle where it belonged.

After that, I let nature take it’s course, my pate got larger and larger (or at least that’s how it appeared in the mirror). My hair turned greyer and greyer, not a lovely sort of snowy white, like, say Santa Claus. Or take Bobawk, well you can’t really, because Blancmange Applejet has already done that. But metaphorically speaking, Bobawk has a beautiful head of wavy white hair, the fact that he has a face as wrinkled as a GPS photo of the South Dakota Badlands, is neither here nor there.

My hair, what’s left of it, is a sort of nondescript salt and pepper, with a lot more pepper than salt. You’ve got blondes and brunettes and the poor sods with mousy hair that’s me with grey streaks. You also have redheads of course, which is also me, ‘no hair just a red head’. To quote another hairy, old chestnut, ‘I used to have wavy hair until it waved goodbye’. Shit! I wish I hadn’t written that.

These days in late middle age (late 50’s) I’ve decided to take extreme measures. I decided to grow my eyebrows to extreme lengths and brushing them back over my forehead, this has an effect like the reverse of a widow’s peak, think about it!

I gave that idea away, because it looked fairly stupid and after I had one of my infrequent showers, using two in one shampoo/conditioner, my eyebrows hung down softly over my eyes, making me look like a rather pathetic, doleful Old English Sheepdog. Not a look I particularly wished to cultivate.

Since then, I have shaved off the insides of the eyebrows and waxed the outer bits into a sort of Salvador Daliesque moustache like creation. This gives me a slightly puzzled and much more satanic effect. Far preferable to a miserable, bloody hound and with careful use of a shower-cap, also sustainable.

I have also cultivated my nasal hairs so that they split either side of my mouth and tied them under my chin; this gives the effect of a goatee beard, but makes chewing rather difficult. I have also neglected to mention the hairs sprouting out of the ears; these used to be subtly dealt with at the hairdresser’s using teensy, dinky little electric razors. When you stop going to have a haircut, as happens, these little beauties sprout rather luxuriantly and are also self-waxing, no hair gell or brylcreem for these suckers. Ask Kevin Rudd if you don’t believe me.

But the piece de resistance is the ponytail, what we balding baby boomers do, is to pull the hair at the sides of the tonsure as tightly as possible, (without pulling it out of course), into a single plait at the base of the neck. This has the immediate effect of tightening up the skin on your face, getting rid of those unsightly wrinkles. There is the unfortunate side effect of making your eyes like slits and if taken too far, can make you temporarily blind.

Over a period of years, (not hours or days here, you need a modicum of patience in all these hirsute preparations) you will end up with a pigtail (Queue) a Chinaman would have been proud of in the Tang Dynasty. Stretching from the base of your neck down to your gluteus maximal cleavage (Bum crack to the hoi polloi). Once you reach this exalted state you can then proceed to the next stage.

The next stage, being to curl the pigtail round and round on top of your head, giving anybody stupid enough not to see through your subterfuge, (which accounts for approximately 97% of the world’s population), the impression that you have a full head of hair. Once you achieve this state, you have two choices, either to staple the pigtail to your head, which can be a tad on the painful side, or alternatively use the modern day equivalent of Brylcreem (Gel) and plaster said queue to your pate.

If you choose the latter, beware, if you venture out into a force nine gale, your pigtail will be whipping and cracking like a bullwhip. This can have an adverse effect on other pedestrians and cause them to panic. With your demonic eyebrows, tied nasal hairs, ear hairs sticking out horizontally and pigtail cracking. This could cause little old ladies, waiting patiently to cross the road, to throw caution to the wind, hoist their walking frames aloft and skip nimbly between speeding cars and trucks, the boggle minds!

Cheers for now,

SkyBlueSkull.

http://keith-skellern.blogspot.com

I rambled lonely as a fart, in a host of golden dandelions

I should possibly have posted this as my first post to explain why I chose 'Skull's Ramblings', but who cares? People can dip in and out of this site in whatever way takes their fancy. Not that anybody has dipped anyway, how does anyone attract a dipper? A bit of controversy is needed here! I'm working on it!!


RAMBLING IN GENERAL


I was lying in bed this morning and my thoughts started rambling about rambling in general. Of course there are two types of rambling, mental and physical. I like them both but living where I do, physical rambling is a bit difficult, it is possible to ramble in a town or city, but most people are striding forth resolutely in an attempt to get from a) to b) in as short a time as possible, without breaking into a trot and find ramblers or strollers a distinct pain in the rectum.


I am also led to believe that in cities such as Paris and New York, if you don’t keep your eyes on the footpath you’re likely to end up ankle deep in dog shit. So physical rambling should ideally be confined to rural areas.


You can wander along, preferably with a copse of oak trees on one side and a host of golden daffodils on the other, with a gurgling stream running alongside your chosen path. If these are not available locally, a solitary gum tree and a host of yellowish dandelions or saffron coloured rape will suffice.


The ideal companion for a ramble is of course a dog, (if you’re accompanied by a beautiful, nubile young female, or a handsome, young Adonis, depending on your sexual proclivities. Let’s face it, you’re not out for a ramble, much more likely a grope in the rape).


Let’s stick to dogs, this is a ‘G’ rated ramble. I read somewhere that a dog uses it’s nose in much the same way as we use our eyes, about 80% of their perception of the outside world is through the old snot box. I guess a dog with hay fever would be up shit creek, as a blind human you can use a white stick or a ‘seeing eye’ dog. What would a sinus deficient dog use? a sniffing nose cat?


The other thing about rambling with dogs is that you should never try to emulate them. If you go around sniffing people’s crotches and whipping out your willy from your Y-fronts and cocking your leg up against trees, you could find yourself in serious strife with the local constabulary.


Enough of physical rambling, this was supposed to be a serious dissertation on mental rambling. As I keep on saying, most of my mental rambling occurs between 1:00am and 4:00am, when normal people are sleeping like babies.


I go to bed at 9:00pm when most people are watching the idiot box and wake up four hours later, and my mind starts racing. I have to tell you that my brain is a phenomenal piece of biological engineering.


There was a popular theory a few years ago, which stated that people only use about 10% of their cranial capacity, because if they used the full 100% it would be frightening. I have to agree with this, because having glimpsed my own brain’s full capacity, it is so frightening that I have decided to keep 95% of it under wraps.


Even so, the remaining 5% is four times as strong as your normal hoi polloi’s brain and when it starts racing it is awesome. This means that I have to keep it in first gear most of the time, this results in me producing what you are perusing right now. A load of old cobblers some unkind people might say.

Well, my muse has departed right now and my brain has gone into neutral, but don’t despair, this is only a temporary aberration, it’s still ticking over like a well oiled Rolls Royce engine, it’s just bereft of thoughts right now.


Listening to the soothing sounds of Carole King’s ‘Tapestry’ Album can do that to you. So I shall return to the lively jigs, reels and bawdy lyrics of my favourite group ‘The Dubliners’. The only trouble with that is that my jigging, reeling and cavorting interferes with my two finger typing and annoys the bejasus out of the neighbours and my feathered companions.

Cheers for now,

SkyBlueSkull.

http://keith-skellern.blogspot.com

The Imperial System of Measurement

A GUIDE TO THE OLD SYSTEM

My daughter asked me to help her with her homework recently, she had to convert a recipe from imperial into metric and for some reason was a tad confused. She wanted to know what an oz woz and what was a lb. (pronounced erlb). Having been born in the UK in the middle of the last century, this presented no problem.

I explained that there were 16 ozs to the erlb. 14 erlb. to the stun and 20 stuns to the cwit and quite a few stuns to the ton and approximately 2,240 erlb, or thereabouts, to the aforementioned ton. She thought this was a trifle confusing and what the hell did it have to do with grams and kilograms and tonnes.

We then went into volumes, with two gills to the quart, four quarts to the pint and eight pints to the gallon. I must confess to a certain amount of confusion on my part, when it came to metric equivalents of cups, tbsps, tsps, and pinches. To cover my ignorance (it never pays to admit to stupidity in front of the fruit of your loins, even if they can smell a lying rat 1,760 yards away), I launched into a dissertation on Imperial lengths.

I’ve never claimed to be a metrologist (or even a meteorologist, as this bloody computer keeps insisting that I’ve never claimed to be, which incidentally is also true). I did do one semester on the subject of metrology in 1967, in my first year at Uni, so I suppose that qualifies me more than most.

However, the imperial system, which must incidentally have been the Roman Empire, as opposed to the British Empire, is predominantly in Latin e.g. lbs. And the UK Pound Sterling (which has a dinky little capital L symbol, denied to me by this accursed computer) are both based on Libra, maybe? There again they had deca-whatsits and centurions and other such stuff, so maybe not!

As I was saying, the Imperial System hides very few secrets from yours truly. I know that an inch is the length of the average man’s top joint on his little finger. A foot is self-explanatory and three self-explanatories make a yard. The yard being a very handy little measure of a normal man's stride or alternatively the distance between the centre of a tailor's chest and the end of his fingers, when measuring out cloth. Which is why, over the centuries, evolution resulted in tailor’s having exceptionally short arms.

To proceed, a Chain was 22 yards long, which not coincidentally is the length of a cricket pitch (and possibly some baseball lengths, but don't quote me on that). Rods, Poles and Perches had nothing at all to do with anglers and were all exactly the same length, which was a bit less than a Chain (5 and ½ yards to be precise) , but a lot more than a Fathom (6ft to be equally as precise). All of these were designed to discourage ship-borne invaders and visiting cricket teams.

For greater distances the Mile was invented, this was equal to 1,760 yards, obviously, no explanation needed there! However, for seamen the Knot or Nautical Mile was invented, which is a bit further than a Tonk or Terrestrial Knot. This was mainly due to the fact that crows are notorious for not flying in straight lines over large bodies of water.


IMPERIAL CURRENCY


This brings us nicely to the British Currency, this was simply based on Pounds, Shillings and Pence (In Latin, Libra, Shillingiums and Dinari i.e. LSD, which has absolutely nothing to do with acid based, mind altering substances, thank you very much!

In the golden, olden days the serfs, villeins and servants were only given a few Pence (d.) every couple of months, if they were lucky. This caused the Bank of England and the Royal Mint to start issuing ¼d coins (farthings), ½d coins (ha’pennies) and 3d coins (threpenny bits).

Clear so far? There were 2 farthings to the ha’penny, 2 ha’pennies to the penny, three pence to the threpenny bit, (four pence to the groat, which was discontinued in mediaeval times, for some obscure reason), those were the coppers. With the silver coins there were 6d to the tanner, 12d to the shilling or bob, 24d to the florin or two bob bit, and two and six to the half crown. There were also crowns (5 bob) and sovereigns (21 bob), but I never saw any of them and they were probably fictitious and probably went down the gurgler along with groats.

Then of course, there was the folding stuff, as a kid I was never entrusted with this stuff, as it was far too valuable. I did get to handle the occasional ten bob note and Pound note (240d) but only under strict parental supervision. I can recall seeing a 5 Pound Note at a distance and think that I may have once glimpsed a 10 Pound Note, which was the size of a small newspaper, but it could have been a figment of my youthful imagination.

So there you have it, simple really! How can you wonder that people fought the introduction of metrics tooth and nail? They were used to working out whether it was cheaper to buy 3 & ¼ ozs. of butter at two and threpence ha’penny a lb. or 6ozs. of marg. at one and eleven a lb. When they only had two tanners to rub together and a family of eight to feed. “Bugger the butter, give the ungrateful brats dripping on two day old bread, that’ll keep ‘em goin’ for another week”.

Wonderful mathematicians those housewives, with nary a calculator, slide rule, log table or abacus in sight, they produced the men who claimed half of the world for King/Queen and Country. I could go on about area and temperatures and so on, but I think I’ll give it a big miss, partly because I’m bored shitless with metrology and mainly because I know sod all about it, which is where I first started.

Cheers for now,

SkyBlueSkull.

http://keith-skellern.blogspot.com

The Viking Connection

I'm not too sure if it's possible to plagiarise your own work, but a lot of stuff that will appear on here, has already appeared elsewhere on the net. I will be attempting to make it a bit sharper but it's still fairly blunt. It's just I thought it was mildly amusing at the time and I'm suffering from tennis elbow of the brain at the moment.

THE VIKING CONNECTION

My surname is Skellern, which is derived from the Olde English “Skalhorne”. I have a theory about this, which has been enthusiastically embraced by my progeny. Let’s face it who wouldn’t want to be genetically related to the race that produced Eric the Ready and his barbarous gang who brutalised the North of England, discovered Greenland (nice con job that one, not a blade of grass to be seen) and America.

I reckon that Ethelred ‘The Unsteady’ Skalhorne was a Viking who was on a long-ship from Norway, to go raping and pillaging in Newcastle (North of England not NSW Aus.) He wasn’t much good at raping and his pillaging was pathetic. While the rest of his motley crew carried home buckets of coal (highly desirable in the cold northern climes) and comely Anglo-Saxon wenches, he took home a couple of bottles of Newcastle Brown Ale (Piss-pottery runs in the family!).


When he got home to Norway, his mum was less than impressed, dragged him into the nearest sauna and thrashed him soundly with Birch branches and threw him out into the snow (this was roundly applauded by the neighbours who immediately followed suit, nakedly thrashing themselves with branches and throwing themselves into snowdrifts). This practice continues to this day. (A first of many innovations for the Skalhornes, which have never been publicly acknowledged).

Ethelred was suitably bashed and abashed and his Mum sent him back to raping and pillaging. When he arrived in Newcastle he pillaged several more cases of Newky Brown (subsequently a favourite tipple of generations of Skalhornes) and ran off into the interior. He ended up in Derbyshire, which is about as far as you can get from the sea in England, no matter which way you walk.

He was welcomed with open arms by the locals, who soon polished off his Newky Brown and although he couldn’t speak English. It wasn’t a great problem because neither could they.

Anyway, over the next five hundred years or so, the monks/priests etc who had a rudimentary understanding of Latin came to translate Skalhorne as Skellum, Skelm and eventually Skellern. The first two seem to relate to Olde Scottish and Olde Dutch respectively in which they both mean ‘thieving ratbag’, so probably they knew something I don’t.

There is also the ancient French word Scelerat, (a few accents and graves in there, those little critters that they put over vowels and which I don’t know how to do, being a technological Neanderthal), which also means something similar. However, who cares about the Frogs and their accursed language.

To add to this, 'Keith' apparently means 'The man who dwells in the woods' which makes Keith Skellern 'The thief who dwells in the wood', making me a latter day Robin Hood?? When I was working for the Tax Office, it could legitimately be argued, that I was robbing the poor to give to the rich.

Cheers for now,

SkyBlueSkull.

http://keith-skellern.blogspot.com