In the spirit of Overheard in Melbourne, this one heard the other day at Victoria Gardens shopping centre while on an Ikea run:
“If you don’t behave, I’ll take you to the police station!”
Puh-lease, talk about an empty threat. Unless the mum thought the kid was guilty of terrorism charges or something. As I’ve said before, lying to your kids doesn’t work.
Maybe things haven’t changed all that much in the last 119 years.
And in place of lowing cattle, I can hear the fiendish rattle
Of the tramways and the buses making hurry down the street,
And the language uninviting of the gutter children fighting,
Comes fitfully and faintly through the ceaseless tramp of feet.
Why is it that some oldsters seem determined to jaywalk?
In fact it could be my imagination, but it sometimes seems the less agile they are, the more likely they are to jaywalk. The other evening in Glenhuntly I saw a lady who was struggling to merely push a shopping trolley, and she decided to try and get it across Glenhuntly Road (a mere 100 metres from the traffic lights), and then down a sidestreet… not on the footpath mind you, but along the roadway.
On Centre Road and on Jasper Road I regularly see the oldsters crossing a few metres from the traffic lights. Sure, they don’t usually have shopping trolleys, but they often seem to be less fleet of foot than most.
Maybe it’s just what they’ve done for the past X decades, and they haven’t quite registered that the once quiet road is now chocka with cars.
Certainly I can understand the frustration of waiting for traffic lights. Some of them have been designed by traffic engineers who were determined to waste as much pedestrian time as possible. And I can understand why sometimes you want to be taking the most direct route across a road, especially if it’s a quiet one and you don’t walk very fast.
But in busy traffic, and if you’re not as nimble as you once were, why do it? Unless you have a death wish, use the freaking crossing, that’s what it’s there for!
As for this guy who drives his motorised wheelchair down the Nepean Highway — well it’s not actually the first time. I saw someone doing the same a couple of years ago, and called Triple-0. I wonder if it was the same guy.
Now I’ve seen everything. On the 8:05pm to Werribee last night…
PS. Sunday 7:45pm. Post title modified. Yes, he was a real hairdresser.
(With apologies to Bargearse.)
Jeremy is rather unimpressed with the postal service. On Monday last week he mailed a letter to himself from my mum’s place, and it took until today to arrive. Some other mail had been turning up — sporadically, but something every few days. I wonder if some of the posties on post-Christmas holidays?
For a while there we thought it had vanished completely, and would eventually be like that recent case where a postcard turned up 93 years after it had been sent.
But as it is, it took nine days to cover such a short distance: 2.3km as the crow flies; 3.3km walking; a little further by road. So although it probably went via any number of mailing centres, it had an average speed of 0.015 km/h.
Spotted in Victory Park, Patterson Road, Bentleigh yesterday. (It’s where we go when the car is getting its tyres looked at.)
I’ve seen a few obscure pieces of playground equipment in my time, but what is this? I can’t figure it out. It’s too high to reach, even for an adult.
I wondered if it might be a light, but there’s no sign of any globes inside it anywhere.
So what, apart perhaps from a waste of my council rates, is it?
Spotted in Australia On Collins
Now call me old-fashioned if you like, but shouldn’t the location of life-saving fire-fighting equipment be indicated in a slightly less subtle way?