My bit for peace
I (Stephen, not Anne) left work yesterday at about 6.30pm. The sky was eerily misty, apparently because of a sandstorm elsewhere(!) There was a protest march going through the city. They were protesting about some skirmish or other which was going on a long way away. The traffic was at a standstill. I later saw on TV that the state premier, Bob Carr, was trapped in his car when protesters surrounded it and attacked it with paint. If they had our tabloid press out here, I imagine we’d see a headline like: Yobs Mob Bob Carr’s Car. This was a silly effort as he’s the state premier, whereas the war is a federal matter. Fools.
Anyway, I went all out for their cause on the way home by eating my sixth limited edition sixties-themed Magnum ice cream. This one was called Peace Man-go. A weak pun compared to some of the others in the range, but appropriate for the day I thought. It was shaped like a heart (or, rather, shaped like the idealised "heart-shape” – no heart is shaped like that) and had mango ice cream with mango-flavoured chocolate on the outside. Yummy. This protesting lark can be fun.
Reading the papers and BBC News web site this morning, I see my efforts may have been in vain. Bush and Blair truly are deaf to the voice of people. At least I tried.
Don’t lose, choose booze
You’ll have noticed that yesterday it was Thursday again. That means it was quiz night in our local bar. Regular readers will know that Anne and I have been each of the previous three weeks and won a $40 bottle shop voucher each time. We don’t drink a lot (often, but little), so our small studio flat is getting a bit full of Toohey’s New beer and bottles of wine!
Well, we won again yesterday. It was surprising because we weren’t doing very well up until the last round, and I failed to recognise the theme tune to Little House On The Prairie (is that how you spell prairie??) in the last round. I was able (eventually) to name five Sean Connery films from the nineties, which I was happy with.
Win we did though, and we now have to find somewhere to store more “grog”. I think we’re going to buy more expensive wine this week.
In bonus rounds. we also won a Jim Beam baseball cap and T-shirt (we now have two such T-shirts – we can coordinate). We need to bear in mind that once we leave Sydney (May? June?) we’ll need to carry all this with us in our rucksacks.
Pub quizzes are very popular here apparently, and some people at my work thought we were very clever for winning. However, I’ve found out that a lot of these quizzes offer big cash jackpots, and ours doesn’t, so it looks like all the big quizzers go to those. There are only ever four or five teams at our quiz.
Rather than go for the big buck, Anne and I are happy to be a big fish in a small pond. Two big fishes, I suppose. Two big fishes with lots of alcohol.