(There's something weird about 'wierd'; 'I before E, except after C' doesn't always work)
Remember that scene in "They're a Weird Mob", in which Nino for his first job as a builder's labourer wears his Sunday best? It's not in the book, but in the movie Pat's last words to his departing boss are, "Why didn't you bring me Prince Philip?"
I was reminded of this scene when I walked into my favourite op-shop, Vinnies in Moruya, and met Paul, the book whisperer, who tends to the second-hand book section. "Why don't you wear a tie?" I wanted to ask.
As he told me, he's a retired high-school teacher in maths and history, and never lost his habit of being dressed like a high-school teacher. I, too, seemed to have been born with a collar and tie on, and for most of my working life I have worn both, and, if the climate allowed it, also a proper suit. It left me with a wardrobe full of business suits and dinner suits and even a tuxedo, and I have often wondered if I should wear them out while I'm driving my ride-on mower up and down "Riverbend". It'd finally give the neighbours something they could really talk about!
A German reader, getting well ahead of me, tried to image what I would look like sitting on my ride-on, dressed up to the nines, and so created this image — with the help of "KI", he told me. The same people who gave us Goethe and Schiller, Nietzsche and Kant (sorry, I didn't mean to swear!) and such beautiful words as "Schadenfreude", "Lebensschmerz", "Sehnsucht", "Blitzkrieg", "Wiener Schnitzel", and "Heimweh", replaced scores of them with English ones (and then, even more strangely, gave them German der, die, das articles, German plural endings, and even conjugated them - if they're verbs - and declined them - if they're a nouns or adjectives - as if they were German words. And yet, they insist on using the initialism "KI" (künstliche Intelligenz) instead of the proper English one, which is "AI". (And if you think that this was a rather convoluted explanation, that's still the German in me trying to get out.)
(Yes, I could've read it online, but I bought it for its beautiful slipcover)
The things Paul and I talked about were books and movies. Of course, as an ex-teacher, he had seen the movie "Wake in Fright", based on the novel by Kenneth Cook, after which we briefly touched on "Lord Jim" by Joseph Conrad, "The Shiralee", and "Doctor Zhivago" with Omar Sharif — whom Paul resembled, or so Padma insisted. I left with a beautifully produced slipcover copy of Okakura Kakuzo's "The Book of Tea", which is all about tea and Taoism and Zen, and Hermann Koch's "The Dinner", after which we had our usual lunch at the Moruya Bowling Club.
