Skippy: poet, diplomat, explorer

Continuing my occasional series of posts about ordinary ancient television -- I was watching a couple of episodes of Skippy the other day.

Two things stood out for me.

(1) It was the episode where Buddy or Tommy or Sharky-boy or whatever his name is (the older one, can't remember, don't care) was irritated he had to spend several weeks shepherding around a marine biologist looking at some aspect of coastal biota. But then he discovered that the deadly dull professorial biologist was actually a fox (as they used to say on Diff'rent Strokes) -- a nubile platinum blonde cutie with conical breasts (as was the style in those days).

Anyway when sea-cutie steps off her boat and into the scene, the most amazing music plays. It's all wokka wokka bow wow wokka wokka bow wow. Nothing but wah wah guitar and sleazy sliding trombone.

For Christ's sake, she was a marine biologist, not fishing for five dollar bills in her g-string (which reminds me, where the hell did I leave my wallet...?).

(2) So like the boy Sonny or Shitty or whatever (I know its Sonny -- I'm pretending not to care to remain cool and aloof) scares Skippy by holding up a lobster. Skippy backs into the boat's ignition which sends the boat shooting off causing Sonny to fall and hit his head, knocking him out in the boat. The boat continues to careen out of control in a fairly narrow estuary without a driver (the sea-cutie and Chocky are scuba-diving below).

So like they need to stop this boat fast before it hits the rocks. They've only got an hour or so. But how to get onto the boat as it zooms at 20 000 knots over the sea? Well sea cutie flies over in the helicopter, allowing Stimpy to jump out and land just behind the boat, but dammnit, he can't quite get onto the boat! Somebody needs to let the net down. But who? There's only a kangaroo and an unconscious 12-year old!

Luckily this is no ordinary kanga. It's Skippy, who went to Geelong Grammar and then a small liberal arts college on the east coast where he studied fine arts and law.

Sea-cutie leans out of the chopper and bellows out of a megaphone: 'lower the net, Skippy, lower the net.' She says this a couple of times before the roo wises up.

Oh, lower the net. Gotcha! So a pair of dessicated roo paws enter the shot without, er, the rest of the kangaroo (that's right, they're kanga stunt paws) and they untie the piece of string holding the net up. The net is lowered, Belchie climbs aboard, and the boat and boy are saved moments before hitting the rocks.

Yay!

Can you believe they made 91 episodes of this? Every parody of Skippy you've ever seen (defuse the bomb, Skippy, defuse the bomb! Cut the red wire, the red wire!) is actually topped by the original.

Rewrite the Internet applicaton layer, Skippy!

Once more with feeling

Went out to dinner on Saturday night with Hazel Blackberry of A Bex and a Lie Down fame, as well as her gal pals (I’ve always wanted to say that) Sarah Ulmer (not really the cyclist), Jessie Mo, her twin Hydro Flo (I just made that up – people who were at the table may well laugh. You, eh, not so much), Zagreb Zoe (just made that up – it sucks but I got nothin’) and boy-toy TeeLaw.

It was fun, especially when Hydro Flo injected her own brand of fun by introducing us to various word games. Which I still can’t get out of my mind. Christ, I’m a nerd.

Anyway I promised to blog the evening. Consider it blogged.

Yes, there’s a reason why I don’t normally do, you know, stuff that happens.

Eventually Hazel will blog the evening and it will be funny.

Whereas this is all contractual obligations and yadda yadda and just going through the motions.

One Angry Pedestrian

Motorists beware! I have a pointy-tipped umbrella and I'm not afraid to use it.

A little internal bleeding is a small price to pay for scratching in a ridge in your duco that could have stopped the tanks at Stalingrad.

Liberte! Fraternite! Won't Put it Away!

My son the four year old has snuggled up to his latest linguistic trope. Bellowing 'no!' is no longer enough in the negativity, denial and refusal stakes. It's simply too weak-kneed and smacks of appeasement.

'Never' is the mot du jour.

As in:

'Will you please put your shoes on?'

'Never!'

'Can you please play outside with that?'

'Never, never, never!'

He puts me in mind of a pint-sized 18th Century revolutionary. Such righteous panache! Give me liberty or give me another chocolate-sprinkled babycino! Or both!

It's cute.

And it beats him calling me a 'stupid f---.'

Where the fuck did he learn that?

The Ghost and Mrs Rapist

You know what I was thinking today? (He said, as a worthless and transparent way of opening a blog post.)

I was thinking about Mrs Muir. Those of you of a certain vintage might remember her as one of the main characters from 'The Ghost and Mrs Muir.' G&MM was one of those TV shows that everyone at the time seemed to watch because it was on at that pre-adulthood, pre- or during dinner peak viewing time of 5:30 - 6:00 or 6:00 - 6:30. Over the years, the ABC had Dr Who, Sweet and Sour, the Goodies and Monkey while Channel 10 had the likes of MASH and the G&MM.

Made from 1968-1970 (and repeated well into the 80's -- did you know the original Flintstones series was 56-60?), the story went:

Lovely young widow Carolyn Muir, her two young children, and the maid discover that the New England seaside house they've moved into is haunted by the former owner -- an old salt named Captain Daniel Gregg. Gregg at first resists this intrusion, but he develops a ghostly love for his uninvited guest.

Anyway, the exact bit which popped into my head today (and does so every couple of years or so), was the episode where Mrs Muir decides she wants to be a writer. So she writes something and leaves it out, allowing the the ghost to 'spice it up' and mail it off under her name. (It's never clear how a non-corporeal ghost is able to interact with physical objects like a typewriter -- that's right, I'm one of those wankers.)

So various people read 'her' story and then are shocked and tittilated [for such an important word, it's damn hard to spell] by it -- in place of her (we imagine) sedate feminine tale is a rollicking pot-boiler. Mrs Muir gets lots of winks and nods and comments to the effect that people had no idea she was capable of such stuff. What this is all about of course is sex, though in emmy-award winning US TV from 1969, it can never be acknowledged. (But I'm sure that if Cpt Gregg could poke the keys of a type-writer he could...)

We only really see one little excerpt of the bodice-ripping prose generated by the captain and I only recall one word, the most scandalous: 'ravished' -- which is both suggestive and old-fashioned. Of course, 'ravish' means the following:

1.to fill with strong emotion, esp. joy.
2.to seize and carry off by force.
3.to carry off (a woman) by force.
4.to rape (a woman).

I'm pretty sure definition 1 wasn't being used and 2-4 all add up to the thing.

So the licentious text in question attributed to a 'lovely young widow' was both coy enough to be used on a 1960's US family sitcom but also able to allude to non-consensual sexual assault... I just thought that was, you know, interesting.

I'm also working on world hunger.

Nothing perks you up like your daily mug of weasel shit joe

A colleague at work -- a co-member of a low-grade coffee and prostitution syndicate -- promised to bring in some Vietnamese coffee next week. It would be good stuff, she said, but not "premium" because the very best Vietnamese coffee is filtered through those parts of a weasel where the sun rarely shines. I chuckled. Good joke, nameless-and-faceless-fellow-office-automaton.

But she wasn't joking, because it's true. According to Professor McWiki, Chair of I-shit-you-not Studies at Couldn't-be-arsed University:

"Vietnam has a similar type of coffee [to coffee made using Asian civet cats], called weasel coffee which also comes from the droppings of weasels after they eat the coffee cherries. In actuality the "weasel" is just the local version of the Asian Palm Civet. Some sources erroneously claim that the beans are regurgitated instead of defecated. A synthetic process intended to simulate the weasel's digestive system is used to meet demand."

"The animals gorge on the ripe berries, and excrete partially-digested beans in their feces, which are then harvested for sale."

It's apparently the most expensive coffee in the world. In the unlikely event its available at your supermarket, look out for its famous logo: a red-faced weasel reading a newspaper...

Teach them well for they are the future of blogging

I drooped my four-year old son off at school today and watched as he started a drawing. He was watching the smart Asian girl across the table as she traced around her hands to make two purple hand shapes on the paper.

My son had a go but declined to actually include the fingers in his effort -- it looked like a mitten or a boxing glove (or more like a mitten or boxing glove than a hand at any rate). So he started putting little circles in the mitten.

'This is an alien and these are his eyes.' He said. Then he drew another vague shape sticking out from the mitten.

'The alien is spitting out a chicken which is wearing a chef's hat.'

[Wipes tear from eye.] I could not be more proud.

An alien spitting out a chicken wearing a chef's hat.

Now why didn't George Lucas think of that?