TheBanyanTree: Past the one month mark

[peter macinnis]

Today being Earth Day, V. I. Lenin's birthday and mine, I have had a 
visit (at a social distance) from my twin granddaughters and videocalls 
with the New Zealand grandkids.  We are now all allowed out under 
controlled conditions as things begin to get more hopeful here in Oz and NZ.

BTW, don't feel bad about missing my birthday if you did: (a), it 
probably isn't my birthday where you are yet; and (b), I typically lie 
about the actual date, so you would probably see it as the 25th.

Each morning, Chris and I walk in the sanctuary where I work (we workers 
aren't allowed in there right now) where visitors are allowed, so long 
as they avoid each other, and today was no different. I and my 
colleagues have been prowling and plotting, and sharing schemes and 
plans, ready to get into action as soon as the whistle blows.

Despite having world-class idiots of Boris and Donald stature as our 
state and federal leaders, the medical people have kept the loose lips 
buttoned, zipped, stapled and glued, which is why we are now able to be 
getting hopeful.

Fully 10% of Australia's Covid-19 cases stem from the authorities 
letting a single plague ship's passengers off without checking. Without 
that ship, we'd be far better off, and I have staked my reputation as a 
fraud-finder that the cause was a bribe that will, if and only if my 
advice is followed, be uncovered.

Still, we are playing safe. I had to jump through hoops to get to see an 
audiologist yesterday, to be told that my left ear retains ornamental 
qualities, and just one functional quality: it keeps my glasses from 
falling off.

I can no longer listen to opera or orchestral music at preferred levels, 
but I'm holding it all together, even though I am now officially deaf. 
(That said, I an using a massage tool that has greatly improved things: 
the problem is fluid build-up in the middle ear, and this is shaking the 
fluid about and out.)

This past month has seen two e-books go into circulation with Amazon 
Kindle, and a dead-tree book has gone onto the shelves in good 
bookshops: 'Survivor Kids' is about how to cope in the wilderness.

That was supposed to be the point where I hung up my pen, but I found 
two relics on the back-burner to play with.  I watched the re-make of 
'Whisky Galore' last night, and I had used the islands of Big Todday 
(Todday Mhor) and Little Todday (Todday Beag) for my fictional Ugly 
Islands, written as the background to a statewide science examination.

A miserable intellectual twigmy with the creative talents of a dead 
sheep tried to claim copyright in the whole work when a friend sought 
leave to use it, so I put it on the web, declared it open and challenged 
the dead sheep to sue me.

Anyhow, I later started writing stories a bit like 'Tales of the South 
Pacific' located in the Ugly Islands before setting it aside.  Now, 
having seen the movie, I am playing with it again, Sam, though the new 
movie only has Todday, and failed to set up the second-best joke of the 
whole movie, when a village idiot, holding up the lawmen, suddenly 
declares that "whisky" is the password for no good reason.

After that, there was a book on beach-combing that might be fun to 
research, if not to write...

Meanwhile, I got on the 'Whisky Galore' thing because in the 1949 
original, there was a children's nonsense song 'Brochan Lom' used as 
mouth music in the movie, and I was thinking of teaching that to my 
granddaughters (they have Scots inheritance on both sides), but if you 
listen to it <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0f0zm9DfVw0> or 
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjim2wN9pqo>, it makes a fine marching 
song, and as Chris and I sought the remaining flannel flowers of autumn, 
these words came to me:

Flannel flower, flannel flower, gentle never tough,
Flannel flower, flannel flower, soft and never rough,
Flannel flower, flannel flower, you will be enough,
Home to beetles, butterflies and other lovely stuff.

I'm working on a few other verses...

Now about Lenin's birthday: in 1970, I was a "quiz star", which entailed 
strangers accosting me in the street and saying "You're Peter from 
Pick-a-box, you must be very intelligent". I always thanked them but 
wanted to say "Look, I may be intelligent, but that's beside the point: 
I have a ratbag mind, and that's how I do it..."

Anyhow, in one show, there was a warm-up "Who am I" question, and when 
Bob Dyer read out the first clue "I was born on 22 April 1870..." I hit 
the buzzer. He was counting on filling two minutes with this, which was 
lucky, because as he said "Peter, I don't believe it!" the name went out 
of my mind, but I can talk under wet cement, so I stalled. I explained 
that I was also 22 April, and had read something about the centenary in 
'New Scientist', so I knew that the leader of the Russian revolution was 
born that day, he was pattern-bald, had a small beard, and that was when 
the name came back. "Some call him Ulyanov," I said "but we mainly call 
him Lenin or V.I. Lenin."

peter
whose sig file celebrates his new auditory status

-- 
Peter Macinnis,
Stand-up chameleon,