Confusion and Caramel

I'm personally in a really good mood today - driving to work, sitting by the side of the road, I saw a cheeky midget. I love cheeky midgets - I see enough grumpy midgets, to see a cheeky midget really put a spring in my step. My beautiful girl with the blue eye shadow was at work, being her ever helpful self at the shop counter, and my favourite video on Youtube, the moving tribute to Alan Didak set to Delta Goodrem, got a well deserved shout out in the Herald Sun. And, just to put the cherry on the cake, I saw some bogans arrested in the shop where blue eye shadow girl works which I always enjoy. I love bogan theatre, to the point that I was going to pull up a chair and get some popcorn (the cinema kind, not the horrible blue kind you get at parties). "Idintferkindonuffink", that's always a great bogan thief phase, and they kick from the bottom of their legs, from the shoe down. I always love to see what the bogans have stolen, and today, it was a putter. I don't know how you steal a putter, or why you steal a putter. Maybe at Royal Penguin the bogan found out that while his long game was standing up to pressure, he was missing crucial putts and thought "Imaferkinstealone" from a low budget shop (not that you are low budget blue eye shadow girl). There was a chase, he made it almost to Boost Juices stand where the girls loathe you (and I mean really loathe you - outside of the sheer hatred of the bar staff at The Quarry, it's probably the least friendly girl group in the whole of Tassie - to the point you think, I wonder if this actress/model has spit in my Guava drink) before slipping over and almost breaking his neck while his girlfriend squealed something about "Leavemalonhesonlyakerd" or something...outstanding work...people who go on about the rise of the bogan and the decline of society, they just don't understand good solid cacks...

Despite this frivolity, it's been a pretty awful day for Tassie - it seems like we've lost Cadburys factory in Claremont, well, they are sacking 200 people, but they say the job cuts are simply part of a bid to turn the plant into, let me get this right, a centre of excellence for producing moulded chocolate blocks, which sounds like they've opened the Ponds Institute or the Max Factor Laboratories in the middle of downtown "C". I don't know what a centre of excellence for producing moulded chocolate blocks does, well, apart from produce bloody rippingly excellent moulded chocolate blocks, but it apparently requires 200 less people to operate it. This is terrible news because obviously because of the job cuts, but I hate Cadburys anyway, since they got rid of the DMCs, the much lamented and missed dinner plate sized M&Ms style chocs - and it robs us of the best tourist attraction in Tasmania, the Cadburys chocolate factory tour. I've often thought of the Cadburys chocolate tour as being like knowing you are going to play a great game of catch and kiss (where this nonsense to call it kisschasy, like the lame band, has come from I don't know) after triple maths - sweet delight after utter tedium (or if you prefer, Shane O'Bree taking ten minutes to get the ball to Medhurst). The tour part of the tour is massively lame - look kids, it's a bewildered and low paid Malaysian woman in a hairnet glazing a Walnut Whip, don't all take a photo at once - and tedious and involves a lot of boring men pointing to machinery parts and conveyor belts. However, after, what, 3 hours, you get your reward - the big barrel of cheap chocolate. Yes, at the end of the tour, you are depositeed blinking into a shop with a sawdust floor where there's buckets of cheap chocolate and licorice. It's fat kid paradise, and I remember when we went, almost being barged into a big stand of boxes of caramel by a porcine young girl in a "Sexy Biach" (sic) T-shirt that seemed hand made, and then thinking how brilliant it was when, on the bus back to town, she choked on a Chupa Chup and had to be revived with a massive slap on the back from a man in a Tassie Underwater hockey T-shirt. I think she thought it was love, he thought it was duty, and there was a mass of confusion on both of their faces as they munched seperately and thoughtfully on their respective free goodies. There's no way there's going to such a hormonal mass of confusion and caramel (I should have caused the blog that..) in a centre of excellence for producing moulded chocolate blocks, and that is quite frankly sad...

The Devils, for what it's worth, are our VFL Australian Rules team - they play at the level below AFL standard (where the Pies play) and should, should, be a great signpost on the way to getting an AFL team (don't laugh, I've had my Believe bar). However, they are about to get the arse because we can't afford them, and Scott Wade (a man who's grasp of decision making makes Burt Reynolds decision to make Cop and Half (yes! Finally I get in a reference to Cop and A Half!) seem inspired) has decided to bring back the Statewide League instead. Yes, we're going to stick to West Sydney by bringing back East Launceston (go you mighty Demons!) vs Lauderdale in a statewide mate vs mate struggle. This is obviously such a stupid decision, you'd imagine Scott Wade would dump Ana Ivanovic for Catriona Rowntree because CR has frequent flier points. I might have referenced before though, I can't talk, well, I can, I'm not a selective mute, but I didn't do enough to support the Devils, unless you count my going to 1 game, at Bellerive, when we made the Preliminary Final a few years ago, and that wasn't entirely Devils related - I went, with jet lag, just to see the semi legendary Clarence (they were playing the curtain raiser) water boy slash scoreboard attendant. I can't remember the team, it might have been Longford, but there was one day at Penguin when some team came with two water attentends - one amazing, ridiculously beautiful female who was allegedly anyones for a Violet Crumble (no, wait, that was Bracknell, sorry for questioning her purity) and one twin brother of Mick Martyn. It was hilarious to see Longford players lie in the Penguin mud, pretending to be hurt, asking for water, and then suddenly recovering if it was Igor that came out with the water or the Deep Heat. Clarence though, he was in charge of both water and the scoreboard, and memorably asked us what 3x6 was, because he couldn't keep up. Anyway, the Devils got flogged, and I haven't thought about them much until today, but for some reason, I have a Tassie Devils cap, and I have no idea how I got it - this is much like my Delta Goodrem DVD...when the hell did I buy that...

So having suffered the loss of our chocolate economy and our football team, local pride has been seriously wounded, but better news is at hand, because it's nearly cricket season (next year football in Tasmania is going to be 6 months of waiting for cricket season), and it's almost time for colourful football identities who's teams aren't involved in the finals to come down and talk about...the finals they failed to get to. Russell Robertson, Kevin Sheedy, Richo, they'll all be out and about speaking at local football club lunches to slightly put out coterie groups, and I hope at least one of them makes a big Jason Saddington style faux pas. I'm a massive rap for cricket season, but what I hope happens is some kid steps up and wins the handball competition at one of these functions. If you don't know, it's a bit of a tradition at these appearances that people line up to try and handball an Aussie rules football through a hoop, and if you do it, you can guarantee immortality within your local community, "aren't you that bloke than when Justin Murphy came to town" style. You can get free beers forever. Your team may vanish, your job may go because you don't fit in at a centre of excellence for producing moulded chocolate blocks, but you can always be the bloke who...I'm afraid at Penguin in the 80s, I choked at my big handball moment. I remember the Sherrin, the target outside Cut Price Sams, the line over which I could not step, the mildly interested shoppers, and the celebrity, well, it was actually the double act of Terry the Tipster Morris off local radio ("Give us a tip Tezza" I think was his catchphrase) and the 1985 Queens Quest winner, Jeanette Hamilton from Ulverstone (boo, Miss Penguin was robbed, she didn't even win the Miss Personality award...it's politics I tell ya) resplendent in sash and red hugging top. Maybe some albino cleavage distracted my young eyes (which may be unfair to the lovely Jeanette, but that's how I remember it) but my final handball clipped the inside of the bullseye, and agonisingly, deliberately and awfully fell to the floor, and I felt awful despite TTTM giving me a voucher for the Soapbox and I lost to some smart arsed kid called Glenn who hit a bullseye despite the handicap of eating a Redskin split at the same time. So he became "Aren't you that kid" and I became someone who in an hour had a doctors appointment...

If nothing else, I hope someone restores some local pride here in Tassie by getting their picture in the paper for their incredibly accurate handballing. That's much better than getting in the paper getting your blood pressure taken at the doctors...and after the day that state has had, we need all the local heroes we can get...

Tasmania vs Public Liability Insurance

So I'm turning 30 soon, to which you might say "Oh, what do you want, a round of applause blog boy? You've found the Internet at 30, well done, aren't you just like one of those elderly white guys in a Chris Rock film who finds rap music and jives on down, well, next week you'll buy a walkman?" - actually, it really annoyed me last night, there was some soul singer wannabe on V who said something like "soul music is being embraced by youngsters, but if you ask a 25 year old, they'll say it always around!", and I wanted to beat her to death for her urchin cheek - and I'm having a party and I decided it would be quite fun to have a bouncy castle, you know, because pretending to be young is just so in right now. And to be honest, once I turn 30 I'll probably shrivel up and die and spend my time telling the kids about soul music from the 90s, but the problem with my hilarious plan is that I'm not allowed to have a bouncy castle because the bouncy castle people won't rent a bouncy castle to adult parties with alcohol because of public liability issues. Of course this is something of a shame, as it's always annoyed me that I can't just hurt myself on my own time without everyone thinking I'm going to sue. When I lived in Penguin, as I said before, our #1 piece of play equipment in the park was three bits of PVC piping joined together, each piece getting progressively smaller, that were full of what we prayed was rain water, and the other option was a killing machine of a flying fox. I had my leg ripped open on a slide at Ulverstone slide park (that place needs an entry) and I took all the skin off my neck running into uncovered tennis wire, and was rewarded with my Dad telling me I was making too much noise. Now the park in Penguin apparently has fenced off areas and crash mats - we only got crash mats at my old school if we were good, and if you had to a somersault onto a hardwood floor, well, that's how people got to the Olympics in those days. Of course, we were all sitting around listening to soul music young people, you didn't invent it you know...

This blog at some point took a sharp left turn into dealing with the issues of local pride, mostly after I saw the Think Falkirk campaign, but obviously, there are obstacles that the purveyors of local pride have to deal with. Fuel prices stop a motorbike convoy delivering toys, dis-interested communities fail to stump up volunteers, chosen fat guys who get the job as Santa suddenly have a dodgy past brought up - but nothing quite tops the burden of public liability insurance. Things have calmed down a bit since the hysteria of the early 00s, when every second day seemed to feature, certainly in the Mercury, some small children standing around a slide pulling a sad face because they nasty liability people wouldn't insure it or the annual Fingal Fete being shut down because the horses couldn't get insured. When I lived in Penguin, every single year there was a Xmas parade, in which kids could run alongside the fire truck and jump on the back of it and people would try and shoot them off with a hose or hit them in the head with lollies. Try running that event these days, see how you go. As far as early 80s public liability went, all we had was Wally the Wombat, the mascot of the Tasmanian fire service. Brilliantly (yes Kid Rock, we didn't have no Internet) a large part of the year was spent waiting for the new Wally The Wombat sticker to come out, with it's new safety message brought to us by the mascot with the mostess, Wally The Wombat. The excitement that would grip the North West Coast as we unpeeled the free "84, on fire, we declare war!" sticker from the free calendar the fire department sent us was palpable. And certainly, I learned a lot about safety from those stickers. I've never lit a fire in my life, so I did my bit - well, apart from the one at the fat guys house, the one who throw a Mars Bar at me while I hung off the edge of the fire truck. Anyway, the point is, it wasn't an issue in early 80s Penguin, no one was going to sue, but now, we have people pretending to fall in K-Mart, and it's causing community groups no end of grief. Not as much as the poor quality of Tim Tams at the meeting, but still, a lot of grief.

Now, I suspect it's a massive pain in the arse for, say, the Avoca Community Group to cover every we don't want to get sued eventuality every time they want to organise a market or Celtic dancing festival, and insurance is a huge enemy of local pride, but someone told me something once that I found really interesting...apparently lemmings don't kill themse...no wait, that's not it. Apparently one town in Tasmania (not Avoca, I wouldn't slur them like that) had their organising committee set up to sort out the end of year show - but they got to the end of year show, looked at the books, looked at the lack of volunteers, looked at the amount of effort vs the amount of time left in the year, and mostly how freaking lazy they had been all year in the Tim Tams vs actually booking celebrity guests and rides debate, and worked out that there was no way the end of year show could possibly take place. And then one of the committee members saw an episode of Bad Behaviour Caught on Tape, and saw someone pretending to fall over in an American casino, and decided they could simply blame all the failings on public liability insurance. So that's what they did, sorry kids, no show this year, the nasty insurance company won't cover our show, won't let us have ponies, better pose for the Mercury and look sad. Then the committee took the money they had and went to Queensland. The town was pretty upset that they didn't get their Xmas show, and pretty much ran the insurance company out of town and had a massive campaign against them waged in the church newsletter, at least, until someone from the PR department of the insurance company checked the phone records and found out they'd never been asked to supply insurance. One family doesn't live in that town anymore, that's for sure.

Still, it is a pain in the arse public liability insurance, not just because it stops me having a drunken bounce on the castle at my birthday party. I honestly think that one of the things that binds local towns together is their ability to hold events and bring everyone together, and it's a terrible shame when events like insurance issues stop them from happening. Bad weather, that can't be helped, but someone famous cancelling a speaking engagement at the last minute can really deflate a town and hurt the local pride the community is trying for when they create these events. I can still remember a particularly grim sausage sizzle - now, I love a sausage sizzle, which is completely different to a barbeque of course, which i suspect you all know anway, the differences being completely vast - outside Mitre 10 in Penguin back in the day where everyone just felt really lousy about living in Penguin on that particular day. And it wasn't even that we couldn't get insurance for the BBQ - it rained, the BBQ wouldn't light, the sausages were just horrendous, a big name guest didn't show up, the balloons they released floated away in the air - it was just awful, and everyone was cringing after all the effort the people organising the event had put into fliers and promotion. The final straw was a particularly difficult to raise inflatable which showed the independent spirit of a pre Cater 2 U Destinys Child, and threated to make a run for the railway tracks at any moment. And just when things were at their most dismal, a car full of bogans from Ulverstone drove past and said "Hey! Penguin sucks!" just as our inflatable finally broke free of it's moorings and limply collapsed to the ground, the perfect visual representation of our awful day.

Truly, no insurance based cancellation will ever, ever wound like those words...