Talk of the North: John Andersen dishes up some tales to make you squirm

Yeowch. Townsville Bulletin columnist John Andersen has some tales to share that are truly not for the feint of heart. Ever heard the one about the man with the toaster?

ANDO TALK OF THE NORTH KEYART

Red alert. Red alert. If you are squeamish about aberrant human behaviour do not read the story below. It contains references to grotty predicaments people with too much time on their hands find themselves in.

THE things you hear on police and ambo scanners.

A retired Townsville police officer I know contacted me regarding some bizarre information passed on to him by a mate and former Detective Sergeant who is also retired but listens to the ambos on his radio scanner. First, someone rang 000 to report that they had a microphone stuck in that place where the sun don’t shine. Scouts Honour. It’s true. But, there’s more.

It had been there for two days. Two whole days. How would you live with a microphone in your fundament for two whole days? The amplified sounds to begin with…Ride of the Valkyries a’la Apocalypse Now would pale in comparison. No, don’t get me started. We’re all adults here.

Presumably the bloke had exhausted all efforts to pass the microphone, so to speak, and in the end pressed the panic button and rang 000. How much desperation would that have taken? I know ambos are confronted with plenty of grim scenes, but now and again they must have to excuse themselves and go outside and have a chortle.

Uniden Scanner. Police Scanner for Car generic

The weird stuff just kept happening. A couple of days later the Detective-Sergeant contacted my mate again to report that someone had phoned 000 about a problem with a toaster. You might say, so what. Toasters are always having problems. They jam. They burn the toast. They take for ever to turn bread into toast. Sorry to say, but this one was way worse which is why the complainant phoned the emergency response desk. In this case the business part of the toaster had closed around the bloke’s family jewels. The jewels were stuck. There he was a lumping around a great bloody toaster which had a vice-like grip on his Uncle Freds. We do not know if it was a simple two slice toaster or a super-duper Breville four slice monster. Whatever, it was attached to ol’ mate’s nuts. Presumably it was unplugged.

Imagine walking from the kitchen to the bathroom gently holding the toaster so that there wasn’t any downward drag on the cods. No. No. No. On second thoughts don’t imagine that at all. Imagining it will only give you post-toaster flashbacks.

Wireless Microphone. Not pleasant to imagine.

We never did find out the backstory about how the bloke’s cojones ended up in a toaster, but it has been confirmed it was not plugged in at the time of entrapment (phew). And really, do we want to know the how’s and why’s? Of course we do, but alas, just like other great mysteries such as the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 and why the Haughton to Townsville pipeline still isn’t finished, we will never have an answer to how the goolies ended up being ensnared in the jaws of a taster.

I’ll take a brief side track now that we’ve mentioned the Haughton pipeline. The Druzbah oil pipeline between Russia and Germany goes for 4000km. It was built over four years in the 1960s when they were still using picks and shovels. The Colonial Pipeline in America transports petroleum products 8850km from America’s Gulf Coast to New York Harbour. It was built in two years from 1962 to 1964. I repeat, two years. Again, this was back in the day when they were using picks, shovels and crowbars and a couple of Ferguson tractors. The Haughton pipeline started seven years ago in 2018. If it is ever finished it will cover a massive 64km. Holy thunder. Sixty-four kilometres. What a triumph. Seven years. Will wonders never cease? If the Colonial boys were on the job they would have built a 27,000km pipeline by now. That’s almost two times around Australia by road.

Getting back to toaster bloke. No doubt he had a corker of a yarn cooked up for the people at Triple 0 and then for the ambos and firies when they arrived at his house. Just imagine standing there trying to look invisible in front of a bunch of first responders with a toaster dangling from your nether regions. And then the moment of horror when one of them steps forward with the Jaws of Life? These are what the Ukrainian army uses to cut open the hatches of captured Russian tanks.

FIRE SAFETY: Firies have urged residents to turn off appliances at the wall when they are not in use after a toaster nearly started a house fire. Photo Carolyn Archer / NewsMail

You can just hear the firie speaking while he points to the pneumatic steel cutter he’s holding in his hand: “Just hold still there fella. Don’t make any sudden movements or there’s no tellin’ what this baby’ll do.”

I don’t know what happened but I’m guessing that toaster bloke looked at the firie and then looked at the Jaws of Life, realised what was about to take place and bolted for the Ross River mangroves, the Breville four slice toaster swinging in the wind, still locked onto his Uncle Freds. As far as we might well know, he’s still in there, living on mudcrabs and mullet. One thing’s for sure, he won’t be plugging in the toaster.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

LAST week in our jaunt around North Queensland’s no-horse towns we were in Mingela. This week we’ve punched northwards, crossing the Flinders Highway and then up the Dotswood Road, turning left on the Herveys Range Road and then taking a right turn onto the Laroona-Ewan Road after crossing the Star River. And then it’s on to Hidden Valley and Paluma. It’s nearly all dirt road and much of it is remote. The scenery in places is unexpectedly grand. There are almost treeless, butt-naked mountain ranges on the first section which takes in a lot of army country. Don’t be surprised to see soldiers running about in the bush and vehicles hidden away under camouflage netting. Brumbies can still be spotted galloping along the ridge lines in the army country. The right-hand turn-off for Hidden Valley-Paluma is not well signed. It’s just over the Star River bridge (approx 200 metres). If you miss it, you’ll end up going on and crossing the Burdekin River and coming out in the middle of nowhere on the Gregory Development Road between Greenvale and Charters Towers. Worse things can happen, but not much worse.

Hidden Valley Cabins, in the Paluma Range, is an off-the grid resort offering World Heritage Rainforest tours and edutourism tours.

There’s cabins at Hidden Valley and self-sufficient camping on the Running River at Zig Zag Station. I took a turn here once and on a whim followed a track that led to a small tin hut. A bloke came out and greeted me. The first thing I noticed was that he had painted toenails. Unusual for this neck of the woods, I thought. He explained that he’d gotten drunk in Ingham and his girlfriend had painted them while he was out cold. Fair enough. I’ll accept that.

Then when I went into his hut there was a second surprise. It was a submarine, just under four metres long. It was a proper sub he’d just about finished building. I don’t know what he was going to do with it. Maybe take it up the Brisbane River and launch an attack on Parliament House in George Street. He was a tin miner and like all self-employed miners he hated politicians because of the red tape they put in their way whenever they wanted to work a claim. The tin miner was later found dead in the bush near his car. Whatever happened to the sub remains a mystery.

Paluma is a rainforest village. There’s holiday houses and walking tracks. This is a great place to escape to for a few days. Paluma has its own dark side. Two women have disappeared here, one in 1985 and another in 1988 after going for walks in the rainforest. No traces were ever found.

The Mt Spec access road from the Bruce Highway to Paluma-Hidden Valley is closed due to flood damage in February.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

JOKE of the week. TWO mates, both aircraft technicians out at the Townsville RAAF base enjoy a drink or three. It’s a Saturday night. They’re in the hangar but there’s nothing happening. All the flyboys and flygirls are away at another team meeting on Hayman Island. One bloke says to the other. “Fancy a snort?” His mate says, “I do. But we haven’t got any grog”.

The first bloke says “there’s some F-18 jet fuel over there. They reckon it gives you a decent buzz. Wanna have a go?”

Second bloke says, “yeah, why not. Fill up a couple of mugs.”

So the first blokes fills up two mugs and the each knock it back and slap each other on the back.

“That was pretty good,” the first bloke says. “Want seconds?”

“Filler-up,” says the second bloke as he hands over his mug for a refill.

A couple of hours later they knock off and drive home.

The next morning the first bloke rings the second bloke and asks: “have you broken wind yet?”

“No,” says the second bloke.

The first bloke says with some urgency: whatever you do, don’t. I did 10 minutes ago and now I’m in $%&^#@ New Zealand.”

Originally published as Talk of the North: John Andersen dishes up some tales to make you squirm