ADVANCE LINTON FAIR

In recent times one would note that the most exciting thing to happen to Linton in the last six months was the kidnapping of Wilma from her office allegedly by Boko Haram with the intention to marry her off. When a town becomes totally fixated on a bloody doll then maybe we should think about the sanity of the population. I was just sitting around the other day playing something from J.S Bach on my Shoe Horn when it came to me that Linton and its environs which includes the residents of Clappy Valley need to do something other than make off with life size dolls for some bizarre purpose.

Could we hold a Linton Charity Auction involving all the local community organisations together and for them to divide the spoils amongst themselves according to their input of saleable donations? Is this a good time financially to be drawing on the restricted incomes of our small population?

The Progress Association holds a Firewood Raffle once or twice a year but is that enough? I’m not sure that potential Tourists would stop on the way through to buy wood that may have to be transported back to Kazakstan.

One idea I thought of might be to promote the local Roman Ruins. We have holes in the ground scattered throughout the district that may have been Roman Baths and enough derelict brick structures to explain away as ancient Villa’s. A few old walls, the display of some broken terracotta pots or even some spearheads. We have enough Victorian Iron Lacework to scatter a few pointy bits around and I’m sure several disfigured old Pennies might find their way into the bottom of an abandoned well.

Do we have to have something tangible to draw in the Tourists? What about popular annual events such as an ‘Athiest Conference’ where even Agnostics of Golden Pains, Ballarat and Pyranees could get together to explain scientifically how God doesn’t really exist. Father John could be a Guest Speaker and a Raffle held for a new Stature of the Holy Mother for the Sussex Street Median Strip.

Every year 600 Million Dollars goes overseas in Internet Gambling which sort of ruins the idea of Mandatory Gambling Limits in Australia. Linton could get in on this act. Establish in the Blue Room tables, chairs and lounges and a dozen laptop computers hooked up to Wi-fi and connected exclusively to overseas Gambling Sites. Roulette, Black Jack, and Poker could all be played in a relaxed community atmosphere and we could all lose our money together. This would draw in people from Skipton and Smythesdale to lose their money as well. The $5.00 an hour charge to use the service could then be ploughed back into the Linton Community Groups. It’s a win-win situation for some of us.

A side benefit would be that we could qualify to be a high-rollers site and thus like Crown be exempt from Australian Smoking Laws. Of course we would need to prove we were smoking Imported Tobacco and not locally grown Hemp.

In Malaya they have formed Obedient Wives Clubs maybe we could establish one in Linton. Of course the Leaders would be men as ordained by God. Then maybe I should rethink that idea in the light of the iron laden purse heading for my forehead. Maybe the thought of each man being allowed to have four wives would leave nothing for us fat ugly ones.

Now that the town appears to be awakening from its economic slumber it could eventually lead to us being able to establish one of those popular Fishing and Surfing Shops. With Cape Clear so close it’s a badly needed resource for the area. The new Café 80 could redecorate with a Surfing Theme and Suzie’s specialise in selling Board Shorts knitted exclusively by Country Comforts. 

ABOUT PROVENANCE AND ALL THAT

If you have watched 'The Collectors' on ABC or 'Antiques Roadshow' on a commercial channel? You have? Then you will have heard of this word.

prov·e·nance  (pr v -n ns,-näns) noun
1. Place of origin; derivation.
2.
a. The history of the ownership of an object, especially when documented or authenticated. Used for artworks, antiques, and books.
b. The records or documents authenticating such an object or the history of its ownership.

Here is a surefire way, if you are a Second-Hand Dealer or the operator of a Craft Shop like Country Comfort, or actually make Handcrafted Goods to enhance your sales, increase interest in local producrs or to add value.

People who buy antiques or home-made products have a real interest in where it came from, it's history, how it was made and who made it. You will also know that good Provenance with an object also increases its value many times over. A handkerchief is just that, but a handkerchief that may have been used by Bill Clinton to mop up stains will have additional value because it's a one off, or at least we hope so.

If you want to increase an objects value, even after its sale to someone else then a photo of the maker (yourself?) and a quick biography along with dates times and places would be a great advantage, especially if the photo is of the person actually making the object at the time.

If you are able to I would suggest if you have any knowledge of an object, even if you still have it at home and don't wish to part with it just yet, that you sit down at your computer, Open a write program and record concisely all that you know about your favourite object. Who made it, when it was made or when and where you acquired it. Any historically accurate data that comes to mind.

Having done that you should print it out and store it somewhere safe, preferably with the object. Pasted to the back of a painting is one place or folded up inside that vase or piece of pottery.

Have you ever tried to describe something and ended up looking more like a Marcel Marceau impersonator. Claiming for Insurance can be a nightmare so if you have any valuable objects then I suggest you extend a Provenance to everything of substance in the house.

If you are computer literate and have a digital camera it is also great for Insurance purposes to have a photo of all your valuables as well. Print out a copy of the provenance, insert the image and file it in a place safe from fire and water damage. Note serial numbers and any other identifying marks (this helps if some miscreant decides they want to relocate your valuables to a Pawn Shop.) I have even thought about committing everything to a USB stick and leaving it with relatives. So might you.

Finally. You might have purchased the object just yesterday. But what happens if it lasts longer than the five years things are made for these days. That empty Pickle Jar you collected rather than recycle will, somewhere, sometime, somehow be worth something to somebody. It has provenance already with the 'Use-by-date'. Good wine and even the rubbish wine come to think of it has a vintage or a bottling date for just that reason. Wine Buffs like me who pay anything up to $6.99 for a good bottle of wine set them aside for later consumption maybe a day or ten years later. The longer you keep wine it will either increase in value or tend to morph into Vinegar.

If you cannot do it yourself then I might suggest that paying me around 10 grand to do it for you might be a bit expensive for you but very advantageous for me.

Do it now or forever regret it after you survey the burnt out wreck that used to be your home.

Buyer be sure BUTCH

ABOUT HUMAN DOGS

“ The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog”

Besides being a test for the keyboard it is also the core of this weeks story just in case one might be wondering what diatribe I am about to launch into.

The racing season is over once the Melbourne Cup has been run and the winner decided. I deliberately failed to participate in this years event following a disasterous error in reading the Form Guide.

Maybe this story should alert everyone not to judge a book by its cover, and never to buy yourself a book of common cliché’s and sage sayings.

I very rarely venture into the world of gambling. Being born a tightwad I am doomed to be that way till the end of days. A short flurry with Poker Machines back in the days when they had handles to pull, ending abruptly the day I received my first eviction notice from the owner of Randwick Stables where my Horse and Trap were stored. The possibility of not being able to get to work gave me a start to say the least, and decisions were made not only to stop pulling handles but to grace the lower socio-economic valleys of Randwick Racecourse.

One habit I did maintain, from being born into a dubious line of genetically inclined Trainers, Jockeys and Bookies, was to have a bob each way on the Melbourne Cup. Up until this year that is.

I have never been a lucky person. The only time I ever won a Lottery ended up by my being sent to War. One year, for example I had a dollar each way on 20 horses in the Melbourne Cup. Picking them from the longest odds in the list of runners. Now there is only 23 or 24 horses in the Cup. I’ll leave it up to you to figure out that none of my 20 horses came 1st, 2nd or even 3rd. It cost me a packet and will be an experience never to forget.

I’m so unlucky in everything that if I were to dip my hand into a bag of marbles I’d come up with a second-hand wad of bubblegum.

I’m not even lucky enough to get other people to play by the rules of the game. I am not averse to a little bending but I am to breaking them. When I do point out the error then its only to find out they were playing by one set of rules made up by themselves whilst I was going by the rules as laid down by the founders of the game and they seemed to think their rules were the better and just as legal. If you didn’t like it you could either walk off the field and leave the game or bullied into believing you’d get a punch in the head if you kept it up.

Even when I played Rugby for Randwick I would participate in a bit of bending of the rules such as lurching sideways in a lineout accidentally knocking our opponents off their feet like ninepins, or forcing the Ref to keep counting how many arms were outside the scrum to calculatre how many might be inside bashing the shit out of some opponents face. That’s sport, and sportsmanship with all its niggly little activities like slanging is really part of the game and almost tolerated by Referees.

But a good luck streak has to come my way one day.

For instance I am a member of an association in my local district that is not playing by the rules. Regardless of what I do I don’t seem to be getting anywhere. The Referee doesn’t seem to care about the multitude of breaches in the way the game is run and I worry that a ‘sporting’ organisation has taken to bending them so far that it almost feels like I’m in a totally different game altogether.

What bothers me is that I seem to be the only one who plays by the rules and cannot get the rest of the team to see where they are breaking them. The other players look at me as though I was some sort of eccentric, quizzical looks upon their face when I cite examples of where they are going wrong, or a bloke tolerated just to make pay the annual fee and up the numbers in the team.

I wasn’t able to get my way while I was on the field, so I’m going to give it a go from the sidelines. My team have just packed up their bags and gone home to prepare for the next game, the opponents go into a huddle to work out what dirty tricks they might get up to next, the Referee just keeps reiterating we must play by the rules without doing anything about it and I seem to be left standing in the middle of the oval on my pat malone as if I had just been shat on by a monstrous smelly bird.

Whether it be the Melbourne Cup, playing Rugby, trading in the Money Market (did you know that Westpac pay 2c on the $ U.S less than the publicly quoted price?), Poker Machines, Lotteries, Powerball or the dreaded Footy Tipping I never seem to be able to get a clear run.

Many people around me wonder why I sometimes spend inordinate amounts of free time worrying about how the community runs itself, how democracy is not being seen to be done when it comes to being a member of an organisation, and wonder why I want to see things being run by the rules of the game when our society and its regulators appear to have no interest in ensuring everyone plays by the rules.

Except when losing money very few people give a damn. So I wonder why I shouldn’t just shut up, pull my head in, and

“ Let sleeping Dogs lay “

ABOLISH THE PARTY SYSTEM?

One place where one learns all the tricks of the trade, how to outgun your opponent, sidestep his strategy and demolish his defence is to work with a left of centre law firm like Slater and Gordon. Of course left of centre is where all potential antagonists gather, so if you want to piss off the establishment left of centre is a potentially a lucrative position to argue from. One very successful graduate of Slater and Gordon was our ex-Prime Minister Julia Gillard, but some would argue that she is not really someone S&G would be pleased to promote.

Julia, having learnt all about manipulation of intangible knowledge, through various cases involving both big business and politics, was in an ideal position to outgun, sidestep and demolish anything or anyone that stood in her way. She is a master at political strategy, constantly threatening her supposedly supportive colleagues into doing what she wants and not what the country needs. In the end the knife she was wielding was turned against her and with all the aplomb of a vanquished leader left politics altogether, but, not without a nice prime-ministerial pension to sustain her. Now of course she will be passing her vitreolic message to the dumbo’s studying law in Adelaide.

I always thought that the Liberals were the masters of ideological pile-driving, where the ideals of the party bulldozed away any ideals for Australia. But apparently Julia duplicated some of these strategies of the Liberals as Tony had begun to realise that the politics of fear, as practised by One Nation, could be just as useful to the Liberal cause. It is also this ‘fear-mongering’ that keeps the National Party compliant. All three major parties Liberal, Labor and National have really moved to the centre so that voters are confused over which policy really belongs to which party, and the three minor parties decided that one would go to the left (Green) one would go to the right (KAP) and one would move away from the Catholic Church (DLP). We don’t consider Palmer (P.U.P) as going in any direction.

Lets face it a party that represents only a proportion of the electorate is doomed to oblivion and the Nationals unfortunately appear to be taking that path. They are moving, like Labor, away from their heartland, and unless they revert back to the founding principals will find themselves caste out like lepers from their country colonies.

On another note this scribe, who has always been an admirer of anything so far to the left that I’m nearly always outside the common room, and probably the only true socialist in Linton. This is not to be confused with Communism as invented by Joseph Stalin. who like religion was high-jacked by the power hungry mongrel intent on enriching only himself, Stalin did do one good thing. He established that the representatives of the people and the employees of the people government would only have to obey one rule. Rule # 1. Always please the boss. I suppose in an Australian context Julia also adopted this all encompassing rule.

The party system is broken. We have gone the way of the United States and allow self-interest to dictate the countries direction. America admits its system is broken, and like Australia, is being run by chance, luck, happenstance and the everlasting incompetence of the bureaucrats. If we know the U.S system is broken and can’t be fixed unless by the hand of God, then why do we slavishly keep following the U.S and not govern in the interest of Australia and our neighbours rather than some sand-locked god-forsaken corrupt and religious divided backwater that no sensible person would even fly over let alone visit.

Lets get rid of political parties. The only parties to legally exist shall be where we can dance and be happy and get off our faces. It won’t be the chaos that some predict, nor shall the nation become ungovernable (politicians don’t govern) the state won’t collapse, although States should.

When a Private Members Bill comes up, as they do now from independents, all the other members of the house either agree or disagree with it, not on party lines but on what they believe their electorate would want and would be advantaged by. Groups of similar minds would band together to adopt, amend or defeat the law or policy. Nobody would be standing over our representatives,

Parliamentary Secretaries, Ministers and Prime Ministers would be elected by the both houses as with one example put forth by Republicans for the selection of a President/Governor General. The best woman or man would be elected to the most appropriate positions and the one most suited to their talents. There would be no free for-alls but mini-elections within parliament itself.

The beauty of this system is that the electors, you and I, would be voting for somebody we potentially know, somebody we believe has our interest at heart and somebody, if they don’t represent us that can be easily removed from office. The thing that keeps a politician on his toes is the next election.