Zorba the Greek

 

 

There used to be a video clip on YouTube which shows Basil, the buttoned-up young intellectual, meeting Zorba on a rained-out day inside a taverna on the Piraeus waterfront. Unfortunately, it's gone, as is the full-length movie.

It is my favourite scene of the whole movie, as I myself had spent many such rained-out days in perhaps the very same taverna when I lived and worked in Piraeus, but times and I have changed. I am now also caught in "the full catastrophe", which makes the above clip more appropriate.

"Zorba the Greek" is a wonderful tale of a young man's coming of age, and has been a classic of world literature since it was first translated into English in 1952 and made into an unforgettable movie with Anthony Quinn. Zorba, an irrepressible, earthy hedonist, sweeps his young disciple along as he wines, dines, dances and loves his way through a life which is dedicated to fulfilling his copious appetites.

 

 

The sun is out and warming up the day. At the risk of making me feel even more melancholic, I have grabbed a big bottle of retsina, Nikos Kazantzaki's marvellous book, and my mp3-player to drink, read and listen myself through another glorious morning of "Riverbend" idleness.

 

 

Continue reading here

 

Continue reading here

 

Η δόξα που ήταν η Ελλάδα !

 

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Another welcome Government initiative

 

 

In an all-out effort to alleviate the ever-increasing cost-of-living crisis, the Australian government has now begun to instal CENTRELINK counters at several Bali hotels for the lodgement of claims for JobSeeker payments by long-suffering Australians who can no longer afford the return airfare to Australia.

Unemployed Australians can now complete their applications without leaving the pool, with waterproof folders provided for their supporting documents. One man said he had been looking for work all morning.

 

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TAIM BILONG "Melbourne"

 

 

Some weeks ago, I bought this tiny "Mini Portable LCD Digital FM Radio Speaker USB SD TF Card Mp3 Speaker Player" (to give it its full name), only to find that it wouldn't play at all, not even after I had it plugged into the charger for a whole night.

I was about to give up and send the ebay seller a stiff note, when she-who-must-be-obeyed opened the battery cover and discovered that the battery was still inside its protective sleeve and thus not connected.

I know I will hear about this for the next twenty-five years (after having survived the first twenty-five years without too much visable damage), but in the meantime I make good use of it inside far-away "Melbourne".

This afternoon I treated myself to the full twenty-four episodes of "TAIM BILONG MASTA" while lazily declining on the bed and gazing up at old photographs of Camp 6 on Bougainville Island in Papua New Guinea.

 

Top: "Millionaires Row" in Camp 6 facing Loloho Beach
Bottom: A peaceful Sunday morning on Loloho Beach

 

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Episode 1 Never a Colony Episode 2 The Good Time Before Episode 3 God's Shadow on Earth Episode 4 The Loneliness and the Glory Episode 5 On Patrol Episode 6 Sailo Episode 7 The Boat Came Every Six Weeks Episode 8 Masta Me Like Work Episode 9 The Violent Land Episode 10 Moneymakers and Misfits Episode 11 Wife and Missus Episode 12 Growing Up Episode 13 Into The Highlands Episode 14 The Promised Land Episode 15 First Contact Episode 16 Gold Episode 17 The Good News Episode 18 The Mission Rush Episode 19 You Had To Be Firm Episode 20 Across the Barriers Episode 21 Courts and Calaboose Episode 22 War Episode 23 A Reason For Being There Episode 24 Going Finish

 

The book is freely accessible from the ANU Open Research Library - click here

 

I had found "TAIM BILONG MASTA", then recorded on twenty-four cassettes, in 1983 in the ABC Shop in Adelaide's Rundle Mall during one of my frequent business trips from Saudi Arabia back to Australia. For years, I listened to them again and again as, in the absence of any proper television or radio reception in the world's largest sandbox, they had become my daily nightcap to drown out the howling desert winds.

 

 

Over the years, the cassettes had become, like myself, warped and worn, and I was delighted to rediscover them on a single USB stick, to once again drown out the outside noise, this time not howling desert winds but screening parrots and the raucous laughter of kookaburras.

Feel free to copy my mp3 files onto your own USB stick to play on your own Mini Portable LCD Digital FM Radio Speaker USB SD TF Card Mp3 Speaker Player. At just $16.15, postage paid, it's a bargain - just don't forget to remove the protective sleeve from its rechargeable battery!

 

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EXACTLY

 

 

Published in the United States and some other countries under the title "The Perfectionists", Simon Winchester's book "EXACTLY" is exactly the same - and what a totally fascinating read it is!

 

 

Since I am not mechanically-minded, I may not have read this book if it had been written by someone else, but I've read so many other books by Simon Winchester that I couldn't resist. I prefer non-fiction books, and Simon Winchester wrote some thirty non-fiction bestesellers: "Pacific", "Atlantic", "Krakatoa", "The Man Who Loved China", "The Map That Changed the World", "A Crack in the Edge of the World", "Land", "Knowing What We Know", "Outposts", "The River at the Centre of the World", "The Alice Behind Wonderland", "The Professor and the Madman", "The Breath of the Gods", "The Rise and Fall of Travel", and there are more.

 

 

Although I am still not mechanically-minded, I was not disappointed by the book, as I took away an explanation of the words "precision" and "accuracy". As Simon Winchester writes on page 12: "In the following account, the words precision and accuracy will be employed almost but not quite interchangeably, as by common consent they mean just about the same thing, but not exactly the same thing — not precisely."

And he continues: "If you describe something with great accuracy, you describe it as closely as you possibly can to what it is, to its true value. If you describe something with great precision, you do so in the greatest possible detail, even though that detail may not necessarily be the true value of the thing being described.

You can describe the constant ratio between the diameter and the circumference of a circle, pi, with a very great degree of precision, as, say, 3.14159265358979323846. Or pi can happily be expressed with accuracy to just seven decimal places as 3.1415927."

So, in engineering at least, there is a clear difference between the two. Precision describes how variable an outcome is, or how close repeated measurements or actions are to each other. Accuracy is how close you are to the true or intended value. If you’re hitting near your intended target then you’re accurate.

 

 

After you have read Simon Winchester's book, you will be able to explain to your friends with great precision the meaning of the word "accuracy".

 

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Another riches to rags story

 

Read the advertisement here

 

SELLING BELOW PURCHASE PRICE! My vendor purchased this dream property in 2023 for $1,688,000 but life has changed for him, he wants it moved - so his loss could be your gain."

Not only has the vendor's life changed but also his bank balance which is now almost $300,000 lower than it was in 2023, after taking into account the stamp duty on purchasing, the agent's commission on selling, and the legal fees both times, because the property sold for a mere $1,475,000 four days ago. And there will be many more riches to rags stories after Labor put the boot into the real estate market and the rising interest rates also begin to bite. The only ones who "cleaned up" were Pam and Jack who bought the place in 1998 for $240,000 and resold it fourteen years later for $1,200,000. Those were the days!

 

 

Only time will tell if $1,475,000 was a bargain. Not that it worries me. I've resigned myself to the idea that I will end my days at "Riverbend" which you can see in the photo below in the bottom left-hand corner.

 

Click on photo for a close-up of "Riverbend"

 

"Dolce Domum". Life could be a lot worse than living at "Riverbend" while dreaming of being someplace else!

 

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