Winter in Australia

The Snowy Hydro Scheme Part 1  Part 2  Part 3   Part 4  Part 5  Part 6

The Snowy & Its People Part 1  Part 2  Part 3   Part 4  Part 5  Part 6

 

If it's true what they say about fighting pain with pain, what about fighting cold with cold? I've just been shivering through a viewing of Ted Egan's beautiful documentary of the Snowy Mountains which made me appreciate that I'm not feeling quite as cold down here.

It also made me realise how many years it's been since I last passed that ticket booth at the entrance of Kosciusko National Park. Maybe it's time I drove up there again once the weather has warmed up again.

Right now though I turn up the fire and watch my favourite actress in my favourite movie: Sigrid Thornton in "The Man From Snowy River".

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Tell me the tales that to me were so dear ...

 

Yesterday, totally out of the blue, an email arrived written in German which you won't be able to read since it was us who lost the war, so I'll translate it for you:

"Hello Peter, maybe you remember me from our time with 'Fahrenden Gesellen'. I was searching the net to see if they still exist, and came upon your blog with some old photos. Regards, Armin"

 

Yours truly on the left

 

Of course, I remembered Armin, and to this day I am a card-carrying and fee-paying member of the 'Fahrenden Gesellen', a German version of the scouts but without the funny handshake and the constant 'dyb-dyb' (do your best) and 'we'll dob dob dob' (do our best). We just did the traditional stiff-armed salute (only kidding! ☺).

 

This was always the last song before we crawled into our tents after a night around the fire

 

When moments later his Skype-call came in, I quickly donned my old scout-shirt which I hadn't worn for fifty-five years, to make sure he would still recognise me. We had a good old chinwag for several hours and the memories just kept coming back from another life when we were still young and full of energy --- and full of ourselves.

 

 

We're the sum total of all the things we've done in our lives, and the years with the 'Fahrenden Gesellen' imbued me with much of what I am today. Indeed, their coat-of-arms still adorns my house today.

"Es lebe der Bund!"

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P.S. Days later, Armin sent me these photos:

Armin the left; yours truly on the right; the lady in the middle was one of those kind people who gave us hitchhikers a lift around England

Armin on the left; Opeter on the right (keeping his diary)

Zeltlager beim Landheim Ohof

Einweihung Landheim Ohof

on the left: Werner Peiser and Armin Stiller

Großfahrt England

Großfahrt England

left to right: Armin, Werner and 'Opeter'

Großfahrt England

Einweihung Landheim Ohof

 

A day without sunshine is like, you know, night

 

 

This morning was so cold, I did the washing-up in the kitchen just to warm up my hands. Then I thought I'd better soak in every last bit of sunshine by drawing back all the blinds and turning the sofa towards the window until Rover said, "Stop!"

And there we were, Rover and I, lying on the sofa and lapping up the sunshine on this sunny Sunday morning. While Rover chewed on some dried liver, I did the same with George Negus's book, "The World from Down Under", a collection of 'mind-watering' articles.

With hundreds of articles on over five hundred pages, it's the sort of book "you read when you're not reading a book", which meant that I could also finish off the 150 pages of "What does China think?" by Mark Leonard, which had been on my back-burner for some time.

Written well before the more recent South China Sea disputes, it makes you think just how deeply we should get drawn into this maritime mess, if we don't want to have the Chinese navy flexing its muscles off our own shores in ten years' time.

If we can stay clear of it, it won't be thanks to our politicians' foresight but rather to the fact that our billion-dollar navy assets have become more of a liability, as they're currently tied up in Sydney with propulsion problems. As for those new-beaut submarines we've ordered from the French, I guess they'll end up as problem-plagued as the Collins class.

Who'd want to invade us anyway? We're practically ungovernable.

 

www.tiny.cc/riverbendmap

 

Would you blow yourself up for this?

Please double-check that there are indeed 72 raisins.
I wouldn't want to run a fallacious argument

 

The belief that the Koran promises 72 virgins in heaven for Muslim martyrs is the result of a monumental mistranslation, according to Islam scholar Irshad Manji, who claims that these individuals are, instead, offered “raisins” after death.

In parenthesis, if you'd grown up in a tent made of camel hair and lived on a diet of camel's milk and camel meat cooked on burning camel shit, eating raisins would seem nothing short of heaven.

“Nowhere in the Koran does it promise 72 virgins, 70 virgins, 48 virgins. What it promises, as far as heaven goes, is something lush,” Manji argued on CNN. “The Arabic word for virgin has been mistranslated. The original word that was used in the Koran was the word for ‘raisin,’ not ‘virgin.’ In other words, martyrs will get raisins in heaven, not virgins.”

This idea about raisins is not new, as a 2002 piece in the Guadian noted that author Christoph Luxenberg‘s book “Die Syro–Aramaische Lesart des Koran” posited that “many obscurities of the Koran disappear if we read certain words as being Syriac and not Arabic” - click here

 

Click on the orange button to listen to the discussion

 

What bad news for jihadists! Blowing themselves up for seventy-two raisins in a Sunkist box which they could've bought for $1.99 at ALDI!

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P.S. Under the influence of my German genes and my former career in accountancy, I was forced to revise my earlier impression of Paradise:

I like the one in the third row, second from the top; which one do you fancy?  ☺

 

Achtung! Feind hört mit!

 

Forget about Germany having legalised gay marriage. At least now a German army will never mince its way into Russia again. The real bombshell this week was when lawmakers passed a bill that cracks down on hate speech, which critics say will have drastic consequences for free speech.

Of course, the law is squarely aimed at the angry debates about the recent influx of more than a million Middle Eastern socalled "refugees", and the ongoing 'Islamisation' of German society.

Why is it that we can critise the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition and have the Bible rigorously picked apart by scholars of every kind, but we cannot do the same with the Koran without committing career suicide, or indeed becoming the target of a suicide bomber?

It's an absurd situation we're in when nothing that anyone does while being a Muslim is any responsibility of Islam, yet anything anyone does while being a Christian or a Jew is the responsibility of all Christians and all Jews.

"Redeverbot" - the ban on speaking out - is nothing new in Germany. It merely took them 72 years to reinstate it. "Achtung! Feind hört mit!"

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P.S. There is, of course, a way around this "Redeverbot": to throw the Thought Police off their scent, let's talk about 'radical moose lambs'. You couldn't possibly hate them, could you?