The Mount Kembla Chronicle

Of talking trees and swearing turkeys

This post may be found here.

Shintaro and the pinnacle of technology

This post may be found here.

Never work with children or Scottish Folds

The comedian W C Fields is famously reported to have advised up-and-coming performers to never work with children or animals.

I shall now break this rule by presenting the following item, stumbled upon accidentally on YouTube.

(This will take several minutes to download on a slower internet link. Some institutional servers automatically block YouTube.)

Yomigaeru-ga-ii, Iron Chefs! (I summon the Iron Chefs!): Munchkins

Tonight's Featured Ingredient o n Iron Chef (Ryōri no tetsujin - 料理の鉄人, "Ironmen of Cooking") on SBS Television are...

Munchkins!

Yes, we shoved Iron Chef aside to watch a re-run of the original Judy Garland classic movie The Wizard of Oz.

Poor Judy Garland. She looked so young & innocent. Oh well.

I have previously bored my readers with tales of the butler from The Sound of Music (an amateur theatrical role I played in the 1980s). Weell, I can regale you further with playing a Munchkin in the same theatre company's production of The Wizard of Oz.

Now I was young and stupid in those days, and I did not know much about Munchkins. So it was a mystery to me why people burst out laughing when I said i was playing a Munchkin.

The reader who does not know me would not know that I am 185cm tall and weigh about 100kg. So I am not a typical Munchkin.

Bu tas with all amateur productions, men were in short supply. Hence my starring role as a Mutant Munchkin (as I subsequently described myself when I researched the role and began to understand peoples' unbridled mirth at the mere mention of me playing a Munchkin).

On the plus side, I was very fit in those days - running about 5km per day (alas! the older I get, the better I was). I could leap over sets and do cartwheels in dance sequences.

This prompted a cast member to comment to a work colleague "He's rather fit for an old bloke." I was all of 31 years old at the time, whereas the average age of the chorus was about 20 - and most of them were unfit smokers.

The picture at the top of this post is from Seeing-Stars.

Doppelgangers: Borat Sagdiyev vs Mahir Cagri

This journal has already pointed out the similarities between Borat Sagdiyev on the one hand, and Norman Gunston and Sir Les Patterson on the other.

We now have another similarity popping up - with Mahir Cagri.

Mr Cagri, a Turkish "jurnalist , music and sport teacher", gained fame in the late 1990s when he published his website enjoining the reader who "want to come TURKEY I can invitate .....She can stay my home"

Whilst the invitation was to a general readership, the casual reader is left with a distinct impression that being a lady would be a pronounced advantage.

Having now compared Mr Cagri's site to that of Mr Sagdiyev (and Mr Sagdiyev's MySpace page), one is left with a very distinct feeling of deja vu.

The newspaper article drawing the comparison follows.

Mind the curtains - daylight saving is here!

Daylight saving is on us again. (And note, it is "saving" - singular; why people now say "dayligh tsavings" is beyond me.)

Ah, the weather is warming up! I'll take the risk with faded curtains and cows going off their milking.

However, I do understand that people in rural areas and with small children do have problem. Perhaps we should take up the suggestion of a talkback radio caller I heard on the trip to work last week, who suggested we have daylight saving only on weekends.

The picture at the top of this post is from Penny Postcards.

Blog Of The Month: George W Bush

As a further introduction to my travels about the WWW, I am pleased to launch a regular feature - Blog Of The Month!

This will appear in the Bitty Browser window in the bottom left hand corner of this page.

The inaugural Blog of the Month features the work of George W Bush. (reader advisory: occasional coarse language.)

Yomigaeru-ga-ii, Iron Chefs! (I summon the Iron Chefs!): Potato

Tonight's Featured Ingredient on Iron Chef (Ryōri no tetsujin - 料理の鉄人, "Ironmen of Cooking") on SBS Television is...

Potato

I hope Dan Quayle was watching - after the former Vice President of the USA achieved infamy bytelling a schoolboy that "potato" has an e on the end.

And this from the political party that brought us the "No Child Left Behind" literacy education law.

The picture at the top of this post refer to Paul Mickle's 1992: gaffe with an "e" at the end published in The Capital Century .

Word up!

Reader advisory: this post was targeted at readers in the Los Angeles area of the USA (or "U S and A" according to Borat Sagdiyev) for an event that has come & gone. I am leaving it here to maintain an entry on Technorati. It also had a good image of Bugs Bunny.

Doppelgangers: Borat Sagdiyev vs Norman Gunston & Sir Les Petterson

Has anyone noticed that Borat Sagdiyev (Борат Сагдиев), Kazakhstani journalist, former gypsy catcher and host of the film Cultural learnings of America for make benefit most glorious nation of Kazakhstan bears some striking similarities to

- Norman Gunston, former Wollongong journalist , TV variety-show host and 1976 Gold Logie winner

- Sir Les Patterson, former Australian cultural attache to the Court of St James's

By this I do not mean physical appearance. Rather, I refer to the set-up of

- a hopelessly incompetent reporter on an unsuspecting public (or more specifically, on an unsuspecting victim) - as is the case with Mr Gunston

- a man who is rather overly fond of discussing aspects of his personal life in public, as well as an inability to get his suit cleaned - as is the case with Sir Les.

The reactions that this style of reporting is also bearing some sililarity, with the reactions of the Government of Kazakhstan in many ways similar to the reaction of the then Lord Mayor of Wollongong, Alderman Frank Arkell .

The Government of Kazakhstan is running about distancing themselves mightily from Mr Sagdiyev, whilst Alderman Arkell took great public exception to the depiction of Wollongong in The Aunty Jack Show.

The following quotations from The Norman Gunston Show are all burned in my memory - as an impressionable school boy and then a young undergraduate student, I was a huge fan.

The picture of the cover of Norman Gunston's KISS tribute sound record is from the blog of Demetrius Romeo, Stand And Deliver!
The picture of Sir Les Patterson is from Theatermania.com .