This is truly amazing and worth the effort

 

This ia a math quiz to reveal your favourite movie. I did it in my head, then on paper, and finally on a calculator just to confirm my numerical capabilities. Each time I got the same answer, and sure enough it is my very favourite movie!

Do not cheat and scroll down to the movies. Do your maths, then compare the results to the list of movies at the bottom.

You will be amazed at how scarily true and accurate this test is.

1. Pick a number from 1 to 9;
2. Multiply that number by 3;
3. Add 3;
4. Multiply that number by 3 again;
5. Your total will be a two digit number;
6. Add the first and second digits together;
7. Look up the number in the Movie List below.

Movie List:

1. Gone With the Wind
2. E.T.
3. Top Gun
4. Star Wars
5. Forrest Gump
6. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
7. Jaws
8. Hang 'em High
9. The Gillard Farewell Speech of 2013
10. The Manchurian Candidate
11. The Pretender
12. Shrek
13. The War Wagon
14. Titanic
15. Raiders of the Lost Ark
16. Home Alone
17. The Sands Of Iwo Jima

Now, isn't that something?

 

My wife and I decided never to go to sleep until we'd resolved an argument. One night we stayed awake for six months.

Boy on a Dolphin

 

Out on a walk on the Greek island of Hydra, a foreign tourist comes upon an old Greek man sitting on a rock, sipping a glass of ouzo, and lazily staring at the sun setting into the sea. The tourist notices there are olive trees growing on the hills behind the old Greek but that they are untended, with olives just dropping here and there onto the ground. He asks the old Greek who owns the trees.

"They're mine", the Greek replies.

"Don't you gather the olives?" the tourist asks.

"I just pick one when I want one", the old man says.

"But don't you realise that if you pruned the trees and picked the olives at their peak, you could sell them? Where I come from everyone is crazy about virgin olive oil, and they pay a good price for it."

"What would I do with the money?" the old Greek asks.

"Why, you could build yourself a big house and hire servants to do everything for you."

"And then what would I do?"

"You could do anything you want!"

"You mean, like sit outside and sip ouzo at sunset?"

This pretty much sums up Greece and how I remember my eighteen months there from late 1983 to early 1985 which included trips to several islands, one of which was legendary Hydra where the Australian writers George Johnston and Charmian Clift, along with their children, lived from 1955 until 1964.

The movie Boy on a Dolphin was filmed on the island in 1956. If you can take your eyes off Sophia Loren's physique long enough while watching this movie, you'll see Hydra as it was in the 1950s. A time before tourism became its chief industry; when fishing and sponge-diving were the mainstay of its economic stability (although it's hard to believe that a woman would have had a sponge-diving job in the Greek male-oriented society back then).

The movie is not easy to come by but I have just been able to buy a copy through - you guessed it! - ebay. Although today the movie comes across as an outdated and very unsophisticated drama, it is a historic record, of sorts, of the old Hydra.

And it reminds me very much of the Greece I knew and loved!

 

Happy Valentine's Day

 

Even our favourite op-shop Vinnies has got into the spirit of things with a bit of a risqué display of what to wear on Valentine's Day.

I've just booked a table for Valentine's Day for me and the wife but it's bound to end in tears as she isn't much of a snooker player.

 

What's the difference between lying to the taxman and lying to your wife? If you get caught, the taxman still wants to screw you.

Quartet

 

Just after we've had the old fogey comedy, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, we now have the Quartet story of a bunch of retired opera singers. I'm now waiting for an old fogey comedy involving a bunch of retired accountants. I mean, accountants aren't really boring people. They just get excited over boring things.

 

"Why don't we try changing positions tonight?" I asked my wife one night. "Good idea!" she said. "You stand at the kitchen sink and I'll sit on the sofa and fart."

Flashback

 

Another day at Ulladulla (or, as our German friends there like to call it, Oolladoolla) for lunch at the bowling club and a few laps in the heated pool.

Pulling into the Bunnings carpark to buy some hardware, I spotted this little beauty: a FIAT 500 Bambino, Italy's answer to the Mini, original right down to its 499cc two-cylinder engine.

As a teenager in Germany, just after I had successfully completed my articles and chucked a promising but ill-paid actuarial career in the insurance industry and joined the large highway construction company Sager & Woerner (SAWOE) as their payroll clerk, I had bought myself a second-hand FIAT 500 Bambino so as to follow every few months the "Autobahn" under construction from Walsrode to Verden-an-der-Aller to Bremen.

My little Bambino not only carried me to and from work, it also brought me (and sometimes up to four friends, one in the passenger seat, three squeezed into the tiny backseat) safely home after a night of carousing.

Until that one fateful day when it had had enough which, happily, coincided with my also having had enough of the 'Vaterland'. So, without a car and a care in the world and still a teenager (a word, incidentally, which we used to pronounce the German way to make us, literally, 'tea gnawers'), I boarded the Italian passenger ship FLAVIA on the last day of June in the year 1965 and sailed for Australia.

Ciao, Bambino!