… And not a drop to drink

“I think it’s time we started taking notice of a grave threat to the environment. The consumption of bottled water in this country has grown in the past 25 years from less than a million bottles a year to more than a billion per annum.”

It is estimated that about one-fifth of these bottles are thrown away with the top screwed tightly down and an average of one ounce of water remaining inside.

Given that these plastic bottles are airtight, nonbiodegradable containers, this means that the water contained inside is withdrawn from the planet’s hydrosystem for the next 10 million years.

If present trends continue, it is estimated that within the next 400,000 years, not only will all the planet’s carbon be tied up in the plastic of these discarded water bottles, but also the entirety of the world’s oceans will be locked up inside these bottles.

The result is that humans of that future era will spend their lives swimming through an ocean of plastic water bottles, continually opening bottles to scavenge water, one ounce at a time.

Leave the Scots alone

Please, if you live in York, stop shooting Scotsmen with your bows and arrows. Just because the ancient by-law which allows you to legally send an arrow up a kilt within the city walls has never been repealed, that’s no reason to keep up your archery classes. The war has been over for centuries, don’t you think it’s about time you stopped?

A peace offer to the Scots

John Cummins

I see that Johm Cummins, Union Man has gone south, gone to the Great Rest Home for Organisers in the Sky.

He’ll be missed. We always supported Cummo around here, he supported pensioners as well as his Union members. I used to see him a lot at the Irish celebrations, we may be all Australians after living here 150 years or so, but we are still Irish inside.

A bright core of green beneath our sun-dried exterior.

Tocfaidh ar la!

Virgin Mary in my kitchen

I noticed this morning that I have two old kitchen towels hanging on the door of my oven which often resemble the Virgin Mary. (The towels, not the oven) If I crouch down and look sideways with one eye shut and slowly scrunch my neck, I can even see a Bleeding Heart of Jesus. Or maybe that’s the beetroot stain.

In any case, my Council Home Help girl is coming today and I must ask her to take a photo with her dirigible camera. Then I will post them for everyone to share.

I have to sit down with a small drop of sherry and think about the possible commercial aspects of manifestation. 

Chocolate BVM

For those who asked about the chocolate BVM, it’s all true. Here’s an account of the Virgin Mary manifesting in a chocolate drop

Kitchen worker Cruz Jacinto was the first to spot the lump of melted chocolate when she began her shift by cleaning up drippings that had accumulated under a large vat of dark chocolate.

Chocolate drippings usually harden in thin, flat strips on wax paper, but Jacinto said she froze when she noticed the unusual shape of this cast-off — It looked just like the Virgin Mary on the prayer card she always carries in her right pocket.

How fortutious! If anyone else had spotted the droppings first they wouldn’t have witnessed the miracle.

Blessed Virgin Mary Sightings again

I haven’t given a thought to the B.V.M for more than 50 years, but obviously a lot of people never grew out of their invisible- friend phase and Mary has been popping up all over the place. In recent years the B.V.M has been spotted on a ham sandwich, markings on the wall of a tunnel, a hospital window, chocolate discards and sniffling on a plaster statue in a suburban back yard.

And now she’s turned up on the belly of a turtle.

Shirley McVane (who is 81 years old and by rights should have progressed past the mental age of 3) owns the afflicted turtle and is claiming a miracle has happened. I only hope she’s charging a few dollars for people to come and gawk at the turtle. Heaven knows, it’s hard enough to get by on the pension.

Mysterious Things

The Yowies are making pests of themselves again. Yowie expert Paul Compton says that Yowies are lurking in the Clarence Valley National Park

I’ll have to ask my Council Home help girl where the Clarence Valley actually is — so that I can avoid it.

I met a Yowie once, years back. It was in one of those look-alike Blue Mountains townships along the Great Western Highway where the road snakes its way through a massive World Heritage-listed wilderness area of some 1.03 million hectares (2.5 million acres), consisting mostly of forested landscape. (I was there searching for a sighting of the Big Black Cat and a tea-room with a reasonable lavatory.)

If you ever want an encounter with UFOs, a Big Cat or an up-close-and-friendly with a Yowie, you can’t go past the Blue Mountains. You can find a lot of monsters among the obligatory haunted houses and the local winebars.

Here’s some more info on Yowie, Sasquatch of the South

Mysterious Places

I had a lovely comment from that well-known commentator Anonymous who told me that there is a place left in the world where you get good fish and chips. I had to sit down and have a little glass of sweet sherry to celebrate.

And this place is the mysterious Anstruther on the East Neuk of Fife. Anstruther, the Royal Burgh of Kilrenny, Anstruther Easter and Anstruther Wester. That’s in Scotland (to save you the trouble of looking it up.)

Apparently, the little town attracts many visitors during the summer months. So there’s something else that I learnt today, they have Summer in Scotland. See the nice photo of Summer in Scotland to prove it?

This internet invention is opening my eyes to the mysterious parts of the world, like Tuvalu, Long Dong, and the East Neuk of Fife.

Sherry and vegemite

I interrupt this blog to thank the kind young lady at Labyrinth of Learnings, who bought me a nice soothing glass of sherry this morning.

She tells me that scoffing down a meal of fish and chips, the fat-saturated variety, is still a popular pastime where she lives. Of course, the poor dear lives in the bush, and you know what Bush people are like. They haven’t the slightest idea what to eat besides boiled lamb and damper.

Heavens, I don’t think they even have vegemite, it’s found only in those scattered outposts on the bullock run. To show my appreciation, I’m sending the kind thing some vegemite recipes in case she suffers from boils, ulcers or bladder troubles. (I believe bladder problems are rife in the Outback - it’s so far to go to reach a toilet)

Whatever happened to fish and chips

Remember Fish and Chips on Fridays? That’s how we knew what day of the week it was, by the greasy bits of flake wrapped up in old newspaper. (We never minded the print dye running into the batter, it gave the potato cake an extra zing.)

You just can’t get fatty food like that anymore, all these young people want nothing but low fat, no salt, no sugar, biodynamic batter and organic cold pressed oil for totally taste-free flake.

Constance Brown, 98, has been frying fish and chips for 80 years in her little corner fish and chip shop. She’s been eating them too. “That’s all I eat. I don’t eat any vegetables at all.”, she says. “So I’m living proof you can eat nothing but fish and chips and still be healthy.”

You can’t tell me that Connie has been tucking away this new-fangled low fat fish since the war.