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I don’t understand this universe any more


Heather Kay

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Well, call me old-fashioned, but my car gets 20,000 furlongs to the hogshead.*

 

Regards,

 

Jason

 

*With apologies to Abe Simpson.

Edited by Learstang
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4 hours ago, Learstang said:

Parts of Texas used to be that way (some still are, no doubt). A joke from a long time ago was that in Waco, especially on a Sunday night, they rolled up the streets [like a carpet] at 8 P.M.

It’s the Southern Baptist influence.

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Just now, Space Ranger said:

It’s the Southern Baptist influence.

 

That's the truth! We used to say they could easily do a post-Apocalypse movie in Waco - just do it on a Sunday morning (everyone would be in (Baptist) church), and there would be nobody on the streets.

 

Regards,

 

Jason

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Many years ago we were driving north through France heading for the coast to catch the ferry next day and looking for somewhere to stop for the night within a couple of hours from our destination. It was mid September and I had resisted SWMBO’s suggestion that we book ahead saying that we’d just find a Routier on the way, and we did pass many which were all closed along with everything else. We eventually diverted from our intended route to a large town ( can’t remember where ) and it was like entering a different world. You still get the impression that everything closes at 8.00 pm here in rural areas, especially in the winter.

 

John

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30 minutes ago, Biggles87 said:

You still get the impression that everything closes at 8.00 pm here in rural areas, especially in the winter.

Try getting a meal in a restaurant after 2pm, even in a tourist area at the height of summer.

Perhaps some of our antipodean members can bear me out with this. In 1968, we did a large exercise up on the N.Queensland coast, and then when it was finished, we had  a week's R&R in Brisbane. One of the things we were told at the time was that on Sundays, the pubs and bars would be full of people from NSW, because the pubs weren't allowed to open on a Sunday in that state.

 

John.

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It wasn't that long ago all pubs weren't allowed to serve drinks unless someone bought a bar meal over here and shops like supermarkets weren't allowed to open because they were to big,you couldn't even buy petrol on sundays because it was classed as a spirit...

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On 13/01/2022 at 20:18, Jochen Barett said:

They don't make em like this anymore!

 

In the olden days you had clear and frosted bulbs and power consumption was closely related to light output, end of story. A little later they invented halogen bulbs, sodium lamps, fluorescent tubes and now LEDs.

So the "imperial" way would have resulted in some new form of "untechnical" chaos, like 12 gauge LED lamps (as bright as 12 regular bulbs or as long as a dozen bulbs) or maybe "3/16th new Watts per foot candle to 1 old Watt" bulbs.

 

I acknowledge habit is stronger than gravity though. A lot of things in engineering become too easy when using the metric system.

 

Touche, mon frere!

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18 hours ago, Bullbasket said:

Perhaps some of our antipodean members can bear me out with this. In 1968, we did a large exercise up on the N.Queensland coast, and then when it was finished, we had  a week's R&R in Brisbane. One of the things we were told at the time was that on Sundays, the pubs and bars would be full of people from NSW, because the pubs weren't allowed to open on a Sunday in that state.

 

John.

Not quite. In those days, NSW pubs could open for a limited period (from memory, 1000 - 1500) on a Sunday to serve "bona fide travellers" - that is, those who had travelled more than five miles from the place where they had spent the previous evening. Effectively, this meant that if you wanted to go to a pub on a Sunday you had to get in the car and drive to one that was more than five miles from where you lived. It was nonsense, of course, even in those days, but related back to when the usual mode of private transport was either the horse and buggy or a bicycle. Your people were probably denizens of south of the border who had come north to take advantage of Queensland's "bona fide traveller" provisions -- if anything, Queensland's laws were even more archaic than ours!

 

I turned twenty-one in 1967, and was then legally permitted to enter licenced premises (which I had actually been doing since I was eighteen). As it happened my twenty-first fell on a Saturday, when there was a family celebration, and on the Sunday I went out and played golf with a bunch of my mates in Wollongong, after which we repaired to the Jamberoo Hotel (more than five miles from Wollongong!) where we all signed in as "bona fide travellers" and consumed a good deal more than was good for us (well, I did, anyway ...). We couldn't have gone back to a pub in the 'Gong because none of us would have been "bona fide travellers"! Not long after that the NSW Government changed hands (we swapped one bunch of crooks for another - sound familiar?) and one of the new Attorney-General's actions was to set up a shiny new Law Reform Commission. One of its first duties was to review all the extant NSW Statutes and recommend removal or amendment of any archaic legislation like that. The "bona fide traveller" provisions were among the first to go, and thereafter pubs were permitted to trade on Sundays, much to the horror of the church lobby. Surprising as it may seem, and despite their dire predictions, this did not bring about the destruction of NSW civilisation as we had come to know it. (That was caused by an entirely different set of circumstances - but I digress ...)

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4 minutes ago, Admiral Puff said:

Not quite. In those days, NSW pubs could open for a limited period (from memory, 1000 - 1500) on a Sunday to serve "bona fide travellers" - that is, those who had travelled more than five miles from the place where they had spent the previous evening. It was nonsense, of course, even in those days, but related back to when the usual mode of private transport was either the horse and buggy or a bicycle. Your people were probably residents from south of the border who had come north to take advantage of Queensland's "bona fide traveller" provisions -- if anything, Queensland's laws were even more archaic than ours!

 

I turned twenty-one in 1967, and was then legally permitted to enter licenced premises (which I had actually been doing since I was eighteen). As it happened my twenty-first fell on a Saturday, when there was a family celebration, and on the Sunday I went out and played golf with a bunch of my mates in Wollongong, after which we repaired to the Jamberoo Hotel (more than five miles from Wollongong!) where we all signed in as "bona fide travellers" and consumed a good deal more than was healthy (well, I did, anyway ...). We couldn't have gone back to a pub in the 'Gong because none of use would have been "bona fide travellers"! Not long after that the NSW Government changed hands (we swapped one bunch of crooks for another - sound familiar?) and one of the new Attorney-General's actions was to set up a shiny new Law Reform Commission. One of its first duties was to review all the extant NSW Statutes and recommend removal or amendment of any archaic legislation like that. The "bona fide traveller" provisions were among the first to go, and thereafter pubs were permitted to trade on Sundays, much to the horror of the church lobby. Surprising as it may seem, and despite their dire predictions, this did not bring about the destruction of NSW civilisation as we had come to know it.

Among the other NSW licensing oddities was the early opening pubs. In the inner city there were pubs that opened at 6am and closed at 6pm which catered for shift workers from places like the Balmain docks or the newspaper offices along Broadway. I used to work for the PMG/Telecom in the seventies doing area maintenance and would often get jobs at at 7:30am in one of them. Quite bizarre to enter a packed pub at that time. 

Another was getting a drink after 10pm closing time, many places had a late license but part of it was that a meal had to be served. Nightclubs would get around it by putting a basket of hot chips on the tables which no one ever ate, in case the licensing police came in.

I am to young to remember or have experienced the other 50's legendary pub experience the 6 o'clock swill , where all pubs closed at 6pm and workers knocked off at 5pm and had an hour to have a few beers.

 

The past is certainly a distant country.

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I'd forgotten the early openers! In the late '70s and early '80s I worked down at Circular Quay, and there were more than a few of them there. They catered originally for ships' crews and wharfies in the days when mercantile vessels could secure alongside both sides of the Quay - the Fortune of War, the Observer, the Orient, the Ship Inn, the Newcastle, and several others including the First And Last, which was right across the road from the office. One of my co-workers used to live on the Central Coast. He'd get a very early train every morning so that he could be at the F&L by opening time to have "breakfast"; he'd make a short visit at morning tea break, a longer visit at lunchtime, another short visit for afternoon tea and then "a few beers" after work just to get him home. Needless to say he wasn't much use for anything after about 1100 ...

 

In those days the pubs down that end of the city were mostly blood houses; these days they're all super-trendy and upmarket! A different country, indeed ...

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7 hours ago, Admiral Puff said:

Not quite. In those days, NSW pubs could open for a limited period (from memory, 1000 - 1500) on a Sunday to serve "bona fide travellers"

Thanks for putting me right. I knew that it was something like that. I'm like you, 21 in '67, so memory isn't what it used to be.

 

John.

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5 hours ago, Admiral Puff said:

I'd forgotten the early openers! In the late '70s and early '80s I worked down at Circular Quay, and there were more than a few of them there. They catered originally for ships' crews and wharfies in the days when mercantile vessels could secure alongside both sides of the Quay - the Fortune of War, the Observer, the Orient, the Ship Inn, the Newcastle, and several others including the First And Last, which was right across the road from the office.

Now that's a blast from the past! They were still catering for ships crews well into the 90's. The Orient was the local when I was on the Oriana in 83, after that it was box boats into Botany Bay (Balmain had recently closed) - we used to get the mission bus into Circular Quay for a night out on the Rocks. Happy times!

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22 hours ago, Jo NZ said:

We used to pull down pompous scientists by asking them what the speed of light is in Furlongs per Fortnight....

 

Lame scientists if they couldn't convert that.

 

1 mile = 8 furlongs

1 fortnight = 14 days

1 day = 86,400 seconds

speed of light = 186,282 miles per second

 

Keeping track of numerators and denominators for the units, in the following calculation miles, seconds, and days cancel out leaving furlongs in the numerator and fortnight in the denominator:

 

186,282 miles per second = (186,282 miles/sec x 86,400 sec/day x 8 furlongs/mile x 14 days/fortnight) = 1.8026 x 1012 furlongs per fortnight

 

Cheers,

Bill

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On 1/15/2022 at 5:06 PM, Admiral Puff said:

I'd forgotten the early openers! In the late '70s and early '80s I worked down at Circular Quay, and there were more than a few of them there. They catered originally for ships' crews and wharfies in the days when mercantile vessels could secure alongside both sides of the Quay - the Fortune of War, the Observer, the Orient, the Ship Inn, the Newcastle, and several others including the First And Last, which was right across the road from the office. One of my co-workers used to live on the Central Coast. He'd get a very early train every morning so that he could be at the F&L by opening time to have "breakfast"; he'd make a short visit at morning tea break, a longer visit at lunchtime, another short visit for afternoon tea and then "a few beers" after work just to get him home. Needless to say he wasn't much use for anything after about 1100 ...

 

In those days the pubs down that end of the city were mostly blood houses; these days they're all super-trendy and upmarket! A different country, indeed ...

Geez there's a few names from the dim and distant pass ! I remember we all got chucked out of the Orient on my PMG technician graduation party and getting the last train home where of course I fell asleep to wake up at the end of the line with no trains running .

The ones I worked included The Warren View at Marrickville which served the Sydnham rail workshops and the The Rose, Shamrock and Thistle ( better known as the 3 Weeds at White Bay used by the dockers and Power station workers. 

Different Sydney now days, all the old pubs now trendy bars and restaurants and Sydney Harbour just about finished as a working port.

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I was fairly close to a regular at the Three Weeds, even though I lived about 30 minutes' drive away, because they used to have some really good bands there. Don't know whether that's still the case, because it's at least 15 years since I was last there, and the pub music scene has changed a lot since the "good old days". There was also The Basement at Circular Quay (home of Galapagos Duck) and Phillip's Foote in George Street North (great supporter of Australian jazz - names like John Sangster and Bob Barnard were regulars).

 

And I can relate to your "last train" story, Hoppy. On the Main North it got so bad that when the last trains of the evening reached Hornsby one of the station staff would go through from front to back and rouse those still aboard and sleeping, to ensure they weren't shunted off with the train to the Asquith marshalling yards. This was in response to a number of incidents involving alcoholically-challenged passengers who had awoken in Asquith at some ungodly hour of the morning, climbed off the train and staggered back down a very active railway line (the one from Sydney to Brisbane, no less) trying to get back to Hornsby. I know of at least one incident involving someone who had climbed on a Penrith train in the city and crashed, was still asleep when the train reached Penrith and was carried back into the city and thence to Hornsby via the North Shore line, not coming back to life until the train was well and truly ensconced at Asquith. (Wasn't me, BTW ...)

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On 1/17/2022 at 8:39 AM, Admiral Puff said:

I was fairly close to a regular at the Three Weeds, even though I lived about 30 minutes' drive away, because they used to have some really good bands there. Don't know whether that's still the case, because it's at least 15 years since I was last there, and the pub music scene has changed a lot since the "good old days". There was also The Basement at Circular Quay (home of Galapagos Duck) and Phillip's Foote in George Street North (great supporter of Australian jazz - names like John Sangster and Bob Barnard were regulars).

 

And I can relate to your "last train" story, Hoppy. On the Main North it got so bad that when the last trains of the evening reached Hornsby one of the station staff would go through from front to back and rouse those still aboard and sleeping, to ensure they weren't shunted off with the train to the Asquith marshalling yards. This was in response to a number of incidents involving alcoholically-challenged passengers who had awoken in Asquith at some ungodly hour of the morning, climbed off the train and staggered back down a very active railway line (the one from Sydney to Brisbane, no less) trying to get back to Hornsby. I know of at least one incident involving someone who had climbed on a Penrith train in the city and crashed, was still asleep when the train reached Penrith and was carried back into the city and thence to Hornsby via the North Shore line, not coming back to life until the train was well and truly ensconced at Asquith. (Wasn't me, BTW ...)

I remember the Basement at Circular Quay and like yourself have no idea about the Three Weeds as its many years since I've frequented that part of the world. I think its a upmarket pub/restaurant now like most of the inner city pubs. I live a lot closer to you than the CBD now days. 

Luckily the train line was the old East Hills line when it terminated at East Hills , a bit of a walk from there to Revesby where we lived at the time, but better than now days when it goes through to Campbelltown.

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I used (90's) to work in London in an office that backed onto Smithfield meat market where there were early openers. Odd experience, do an all night meeting, go into the pub at 6am in a suit, surrounded by meat porters with bloody aprons.

 

Paul

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