Chris Wilkinson of Turramurra loathed the black birds “that sneakily used to steal our chooks’ eggs. The remaining chooks no longer lay,so we’re no longer visited. I deal with the crow/raven nomenclature conundrum by calling them CORVIDS.”
More on the iToilets of Japan (C8),this time from Rosemary Seam of Kempsey:“The control panel,entirely in Japanese,on a smart toilet at Osaka airport,had me bemused and too intimidated to press any buttons. I waited until reaching my hotel room.”
“I’ll never forget the time my wife accosted me as I stepped out of our friend’s newly renovated bathroom,” writes Jack Dikian of Mosman. “‘I hope you didn’t do your business in their bidet,’ she said. I replied,‘I’m not an idiot.’ On the way home I asked her to explain bidet.”
Michael Sparks of Braddon (ACT) says “The recent discussion ofschadenfreude andfreudenshade made me remember the German term for joy in other people’s happiness:freudenfreude. It’s what I feel when I see contributions from friends in Column 8 or hear of other success that has come their way. I’ve always been one to look on the bright side and I prefer this to the other two.”
“Facebook recently ran an article about using CountryLink trains to access medical care,” notes Tony Sullivan of Adamstown Heights. “The photo has a couple walking down a platform flanked by two European TGV fast trains. Did the creator just randomly pick out a train photo?”
“Governor Arthur Phillip didn’t have koala on his menu (C8) because the first sighting by the colonists was not until the late 1790s,” explains Colin Taylor-Evans of Lane Cove. “And wombats were not known to the foreigners until the early 1800s. Lucky Sir Joseph Banks was into flora,not fauna.”
Rabbie Burns’ lesser-known line ‘mighty Führer of the sausage people’ (C8) reminded David Gordon of Cranebrook of a past occasion of Cold War humour:“The Yanks had developed a compiler that could translate from English into Russian and vice versa. At its unveiling,the US president submitted ‘out of sight,out of mind’,which was successfully translated into Russian;the reverse,however,yielded ‘blind lunatic’.”
Column8@smh.com.au
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