“I would think that the reason Gerald Erickson’s ‘crows’ (C8) were burying stones is so that he may no longer be able to stone them,” suggests Geoff Croxson of Jannali who adds: “Even I groaned at that one.”
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 of schadenfreude and freudenshade 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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