“Is someone having a laugh?” asks Colleen Behl of Kiama. “The socks I’ve been buying lately are marked left and right. Seriously? I have closely examined them and can see no difference. What does it say about me when I still ensure I put the socks on the indicated feet? What does one do when the inevitable happens,and you end up with two left socks and the right ones have disappeared into sock cyberspace?”
“I have it on good authority that it doesn’t matter how many billions we spend on submarines (C8),they will still sink,” reports David Atherfold of Avalon Beach. Must have been a leak somewhere.
The signals are mixed for Donald Hawes of Peel:“Between the hand turn/stop indications (C8) and the current blinker lights,the British came up with the trafficator. This was an illuminated arm,roughly 220 mm long,which swung out horizontally from the central left and right door pillars. A driver needed to be well back to see the left trafficator of the car in front. In later years,if one drove a car with these,the driver suffered abuse from other drivers for not using the (non-existent) blinkers when turning.” Granny notes that marketing types slipped-up when the trafficator initially evolved. Its successor wasn’t actually named the blinker. They called it the flasher.
Glyn Bradford of Hawker (ACT) reckons “Early model cars may not have driven off rapidly (C8),however they did have some advantages. My first car was a Standard 10 ute bought in 1973 for $250. No mod cons but could be hand cranked to start and emerged with barely a dent from minor collisions.”
Peter Lino of Lennox Head,whose first car was a Vanguard,bought in 1968,concurs:“Allegedly it had a tractor-based engine,and the front looked like a face. The pink side swatches didn’t suit my taste,so I painted the whole thing in harbour bridge paint. Very cool I thought,until a ‘friend’ scrawled a rather unsavoury word in surfboard wax on the side that couldn’t be removed. One evening a small sports car ran head on into the parked ‘Face’. It was written off. Not even a dent in the heavy steel bumper of the trusty Face.”
“One obvious answer to Roger Holt’s question (C8) - with no internet we could have been saved the power of Trump!” suggests Kelly Smith of Bangkok.
Column8@smh.com.au
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