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Last updated on August 8th, 2017 at 12:32 pm
The Age’s Traceeee Hutchison considers weather and other phenomena:
It was hot. Too hot. The mercury wedged itself in the 30s and 40s, and refused to budge …
It’s called “summer”, woman. You might have noticed it happening by every year or so.
We forgot what it was like to be cool – despite the crazed occurrence of a white Christmas just weeks ago …
Short memories, as Midnight Oil once, er, “sang”. (Incidentally, a reader claims Traceeee was once shacked up with Oils’ drummer Rob Hirst. Quite the brainiac combo that would have been.)
To quote the late Australian singer-songwriter from the Triffids, David McComb, it was too hot to move and it was too hot to think.
For Hutchison, thinking is too difficult even in mid-winter.
I guess there was a message lying somewhere in another tasty enviro-fact that surfaced this week: that Melbourne used to reach peak power demand in the winter and now it happens in the summer. Hello? Anyone there?
Hello? More people these days own air-conditioners. Traceeee next attempts to link Serb-Croat tennis violence to Australian patriotism:
The new-look Australia, with its friendly all-embracing ways, went on international display in a triumph for that particularly ugly brand of flag-waving patriotism we’ve seen so much of in this country in recent years.
OK. Take a look at the flags on display during the violence Hutchison speaks of.
We shook our heads and wondered where these young people had learned to hate with such passion. We couldn’t find a reason that seemed adequate enough to explain it so we blamed their parents, after all, it couldn’t possibly have been anything they’d learned here.
If Serbs and Croats did learn to hate each other here – word on the street is that this hatred began some time previously – it rather represents a failure of multiculturalism, does it not? Traceeee may have explored her point further (Australian flags cause Serbs and Croats to loathe each other – I have proof!) but she quickly moves on to the matter of a Melbourne power outage:
Freezers coughed up their booty and fridges demanded they be cleared of all perishables. Crashed computers reminded us we’d forgotten how to use pen and paper and the absence of traffic lights somehow made us forget how to drive.
You know how it is when you happen upon a busted traffic light. Is it clutch-brake-stop? Brake-accelerate-open driver’s door? Neutral-coast-close eyes-die? So difficult to remember.
When we finally did get home we couldn’t sleep because we’d forgotten to draw the blinds to keep the house cool during the day like people used to do in the old days.
The gal can’t recall annual weather events or driver basics, or carry out elementary summer household routines. Before you read on, I beg of you – move back from the screen:
This week some people chose to take personal responsibility for the problems that have begun to challenge the way we live and some people chose the mealy-mouthed path of me-focused complaint.
Which one were you?