WE WISH to thank the City of Greater Bendigo for its ability to put the mockers on the weather.
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As Bendigo folk would wistfully recall, we had three-fifths of five-eighths of not-very-much rain on Tuesday morning, but at least it was something.
Later that day the council put out an apologetic media release saying that because the weather was dryer than a pack of Salada crackers, it was having trouble with its unsealed road grading and maintenance program.
Ha! It rained again the next morning. About four-fifths of etc etc.
We urge the council to flood the media with more media releases urgently.
Hot roast
DTM has been trawling car ads over the past few weeks, looking for something in particular, but we discovered something far more entertaining: online spelling and grammar.
There’s a bloke in Melbourne trying to sell a “’58 Corvette Roaster”. Hotted up, we presume.
And another lost soul wants to sell an “Austin A40 ute bahn find".
We wonder what an old English ute was doing sitting on a German train?
Please wash separately
Signs can be more confusing than clarifying sometimes.
One we saw this week was on a child’s jumper.
“Size 3-4y/104. 100% polyester. Wash inside out. Remove child before washing.”
Buying or selling?
Even signs we send out ourselves can be troubling.
A woman DTM knows rather well stays within grabbing range of her mobile phone just before 8am daily.
She regularly enters TV’s Sunrise Cash-Cow thing in which you have to text a code word, your name and contact details before 4.30pm and then, if your number is picked out the next morning, you have to answer within five rings. The lowest prize is $10,000 and it can jackpot.
On Monday the code word was GRASS, so she tapped that into the phone, followed by her name, address and phone number and hit SEND.
Within a minute her daughter texted back: “Was that meant for me and what are you up to? Selling or buying?”
Goldfields aliens
DTM has been poking around in the archives again and we’ve found some stuff which shows possibly a little reported group of Bendigo victims of World War I: the Germans.
The early goldfields were well populated with respected German diggers, miners, storekeepers, councillors and mayors, and even the great and celebrated architect Carl Wilhelm (later William Charles) Vahland.
Imagine their deep shock and humiliation at suddenly being treated as potential enemy aliens.
The Age 100 years ago reports that Bendigo’s Germans were called to a public meeting outside the Town Hall one evening and about 50 turned up only to find it was a shabby set up to identify them and allow them to be insulted and threatened.
They were also pilloried from the pulpits and suffered business boycotts.