Is Pollyanna a girl?

Pollyanna
Anti Pokie Crusader

Ha, I doubt most Americans will get that ... they'll probably think I'm a morals campaigner!

Migaluch said:
Pollyanna
Lead Member

Noooo, way too much responsibility! While I'm posting a lot now I need wiggle room in case I find a new toy. I'm far too faddish and fickle to fully commit to anything, which may explain why I have so much time to post here ...
 
I just did a quick Googlin' and I came up with something about Poker and ATM's. Aussies confuse me, I'm still trying to wrap my head around Vegemite...
 
Can't quite see you in the "no sex before marriage" brigade Pol.

Oh goodness me! I am sooo offended!! How dare you!!!

Oh ok ... I can't keep a straight face any more ...


Red, may I suggest you don't wrap your head around Vegemite. It sounds very messy ...

Guys, a totally offtopic question. You know beat that starts The Doors's song, Touch Me? I get confused with Latin rhythms. What do you call that beat?

Apologies for such an irrelevant question in the midst of this serious talk :)
 
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I just did a quick Googlin' and I came up with something about Poker and ATM's. Aussies confuse me, I'm still trying to wrap my head around Vegemite...

Pokies = Poker machines = slot machines.

The dreaded things have taken over many live venues. Live rooms in pubs close overnight and are refurbed into "pokies" venues. The profits from them are huge....great for business but no good for the live music scene. A band playing to several hundred can't compete with the millions these bloody things rake in.

Sad driving past so many venues that were pumping in their day, but are now just gambling houses.......as the Cat would say, "where do the children play?"!!

They've drawn the ire of many a muso here in Oz.....Pol being one of them.

If you spread vegemite lightly, it's far more pleasant than if applied like peanut butter.
 
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You have brigades for that sort of thing? Do they hold an annual street parade? With drums? Hell, drums used to promote abstention, that can't be right. What's the point of banging if you're not banging?

Reminds me of a certain parade in Pol's neck of the woods.......definitely no abstention.....but a hell of a lot of banging!

I truely am glad I live south of the border!! :)
 
Nice summary of the pokies situation, PFOG.

Happy with the Mardi Gras here in Sydney - we're pretty cool like that. Not happy with the live music scene here (R.I.P.) and the traffic ... very uncool :(

I visited Melbourne in the 90s and was stoked with the number of live venues there. I hear that Melbourne's starting to go the way of Sydney now with the ^%^&%$! pokies. Is that true? Damn shame if it is ...

Andy, all countries have a no-sex-brigade - their job is to douse the fires of passion %-}
 
I visited Melbourne in the 90s and was stoked with the number of live venues there. I hear that Melbourne's starting to go the way of Sydney now with the ^%^&%$! pokies. Is that true? Damn shame if it is ...

Not like the 90's Pol. They're well entrenched here....one on every bloody corner. I drive around thinking, used to play there....and used to play there....and there, not one live room left in any of them. There's still a scene, but not what it was IMHO.
 
Not like the 90's Pol. They're well entrenched here....one on every bloody corner. I drive around thinking, used to play there....and used to play there....and there, not one live room left in any of them. There's still a scene, but not what it was IMHO.

What a bummer. Actually, it was even later than the 90s (sorry) ... probably 2002. I couldn't believe it ... a local suburban pub with a group and the whole place had a party vibe. I felt like I'd walked into a time capsule to the late 70s/early 80s in Sydney.

Many of the venues I played at and went to have disappeared altogether - the blocks where they were now occupied by malls and office blocks. Nearly all of the venues that remain no longer hire bands but have a big room full of shiny machines ...

Pretty amazing really ... that a big city can lose most of its character in just a few decades.
 
Pretty amazing really ... that a big city can lose most of its character in just a few decades.

You should check out My neck of the wood, damn city's so spread out across this dusty desert crevice no one wants to travel 30 minutes to go see a show. There used to be a scene here some 20 years ago, we produced the Gin Blossoms and Jimmy Eat World. Now i'm relegated to playing in creepy dives... ok enough of me.

Do you think I could buy Vegemite on the internet? I have a love for local delicacies.
 
To go even further off topic (well, what is "on" topic in this thread really), my local rural market town has a really good gigging scene. Just like the walk back in time you described Polly. To put it in perspective, the town population is under 50,000. We have at least 5 centre pubs that have proper bands on every week. Two of those have dedicated live music rooms. We also have a live music only club. Holds around 800 with 50ft stage & good house PA & lights. Our favourite pub is The Barrels. I put up a couple of clips from that venue a few weeks ago. Has a regular gig room plus holds frequent outdoor gigs in their courtyard with a dedicated stage. Outdoor gigs attract 700-800 audience for a good band. On top of that, there's also many live music pubs in the surrounding area. My band has 5 times more gig offers than we choose to accept. Given we're in a rural area, pretty much in the middle of nowhere, I think we're very lucky.
 
Big contrast between our locales, isn't it? One's full of poker machines, another full of dust and another full of music.

Red, a poster on this page tells how to buy Vegemite. My sister went our with an American guy when she was young and he said it looked and tasted like axle grease (not sure how he knew what axle grease tasted like).

I like it and regularly eat it spread on toast - first margarine, then the Vegemite. Actually, these days I buy Mighty Mite, which is very similar, a bit cheaper and it's made in Oz (ironically, Vegemite is owned by the US). Agree with PFOG that the uninitiated would do best to spread it very thinly at first to avoid going into apoplexy ...

In the Discworld novel, The Last Continent, Terry Pratchett describes how Rincewind the wizard invented Vegemite while lost and drunk in the outback of a country that seems an awful lot like Australia ...
He placed the potato reverentially on the ground and tipped out the rest of the bag. There was an onion and some carrots. A tin of ... tea. by the smell of it, and a little box of salt.

A flash of inspiration struck him with all the force and brilliance that ideas have when they're travelling through beer.

Soup! Nutritious and simple! You just boiled everything up! And, yes, he could use one of the empty beer tins, and make a fire, and chop up the vegetables, and the damp patch over there suggested there was water . . .

He walked unsteadily over to have a look. There was a circular depression in the ground that looked as though it might have been some sort of pond once, and there was the usual cluster of slightly healthier than usual trees which you got in such places, but there was no sign of any water and he was too tired to dig.

Then another insight struck him at the speed of beer. Beer! It was only water, really, with stuff in it. Wasn't it? And most of what was in it was yeast, which was practically a medicine and definitely a food. In fact, when you thought about it beer was only a kind of runny bread, in fact, it'd be better to use some of the beer in the soup! Beer soup! A few brain cells registered their doubt, but the rest of them grabbed them by the collar and said hoarsely, people cooked chicken in wine, didn't they?

It took him some time to hack one end off a tin, but eventually he had it standing in the fire with the chopped-up vegetables floating in the froth. A few more doubts assailed him at this point, but they were elbowed aside, especially when the smell that floated up made his mouth water and he'd opened another tin of beer as a pre-prandial appetizer.

After a while he poked the vegetables with a stick. They were still pretty hard, even though a lot of the beer seemed to have boiled away. Was there something else he hadn't done?

Salt! Yes, that was it! Salt, marvellous stuff. He'd read where you went totally up the pole if you didn't have any salt for a couple of weeks. That was probably why he was feeling so odd at the moment. He fumbled for the salt box and dropped a pinch in the tin.

It was a medicinal herb, salt. Good for wounds, wasn't it? And back in the really old days, hadn't soldiers been paid in salt? Wasn't that where the word salary came from? Must've been good, then. You went on a forced march all week, building your road as you went, then you fought the maddened blue-painted tribesmen of the Vexatii, and you force-marched all the way back home, and on Friday the centurion would turn up with a big sack and say, 'Well done, lads! Here's some salt!'

It was amazing how well his mind was working.

He peered at the salt box again, shrugged, and tipped it all in. When you thought about it like that, salt must really be an amazing food. And he hadn't had any for weeks, so that was probably why his eyesight was acting up and he couldn't feel his legs.

He topped up the beer, too.

He lay back with his head on a rock. Keep out of trouble and don't get involved, that was the important thing. Look at those stars up there, with nothing to do all the time but sit there and shine. No one ever told them what to do, the lucky bastards ...

He woke up shivering. Something horrible had crawled into his mouth, and it was no great relief to find out that it was his tongue. It was chilly, and the horizon suggested dawn.

There was also a pathetic sucking noise.

Some sheep had invaded his camp during the night. One of them was trying to get its mouth around an empty beer tin. It stopped when it saw that he had woken up, and backed away a bit, but not too far, while fixing him with the penetrating gaze of a domesticated animal reminding its domesticator that they had a deal.

His head ached.

There had to be some water somewhere. He lurched to his feet and blinked at the horizon. There were . . . windmills and things, weren't there? He remembered the stricken windmills from yesterday. Well, there was bound to be some water around, no matter what anyone said.

Ye gods, he was thirsty.

His gummed-up gaze fell upon last night's magnificent experiment in cookery. Yeasty vegetable soup, what a wonderful idea. Exactly the sort of idea that sounds really good around one o'clock in the morning when you've had too much to drink.

Now he remembered, with a shudder, some of the great wheezes he'd had on similar occasions. Spaghetti and custard, that'd been a good one. Deep-fried peas, that'd been another triumph. And then there'd been the time when it had seemed a really good idea to eat some flour and yeast and then drink some warm water, because he'd run out of bread and after all that was what the stomach saw, wasn't it? The thing about late-night cookery was that it made sense at the time. It always had some logic behind it. It just wasn't the kind of logic you'd use around midday.

Still, he'd have to eat something and the dark brown goo that half filled the tin was the only available food in this vicinity that didn't have at least six legs. He didn't even think about eating mutton. You couldn't, when it was looking at you so pathetically.

He poked the goo with the stick. It gripped the wood like glue.

'Gerroff!'

A blob eventually came loose. Rincewind tasted it, gingerly. It was just possible that if you mixed yeasty beer and vegetables together you'd get—

No, what you got was salty-tasting beery brown gunk.

Odd, though ... It was kind of horrible, but nevertheless Rincewind found himself having another taste.

Oh, gods. Now he was really thirsty.

He picked up the tin and staggered off towards some trees. That's where you found water ... you looked at where the trees were and, tired or not, you dug down.

It took him half an hour to squash an empty beer tin and use it to dig a hole waist deep. His toes felt damp.

Another half an hour took him to shoulder depth and a pair of wet ankles.

Say what you like – that brown muck was good stuff. You didn't really believe what your mouth said you'd just tasted, so you had some more. Probably full of nourishing vitamins and minerals. Most things you couldn't believe the taste of generally were ...
 
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