by John Clarke
Real Estate
Gidday. Now the Fred Dagg Careers Advisory Bureau has already done enough to secure its place in the social history of this once great nation but I think this report is probably among its more lasting achievements. In essence it outlines how to go about the business of being a real estate agent (and as things stand at the moment, if you’re not a real estate agent, then you’re being a fool to yourself and a burden to others).
Like so many other jobs in this wonderful society of ours, the basic function of the real estate agent is to increase the price of something without actually producing anything and as a result it has a lot to do with communication, terminology and calling a spade a delightfully bucolic colonial winner facing north and offering a unique opportunity to the handyman.
If you’re going to enter the real estate field you’ll need to acquire a certain physical appearance which I won’t bore you with here but, if you’ve got gold teeth and laugh lines around your pockets, then you’re through to the semis without dropping a set.
But the main thing to master, of course, is the vernacular, and basically this works as follows. There are three types of house: ‘glorious commanding majestic split-level ultra-modern dream homes’ that are built on cliff-faces, ‘private bush-clad inglenooks’ that are built down holes, and ‘very affordable solid family houses in much sought-after streets’ that are old gun-emplacements with awnings. A ‘cottage’ is a caravan with the wheels taken off. A ‘panoramic’, ‘breathtaking’, ‘spectacular’ or ‘magnificent’ view is an indication that the house has windows and, if the view is ‘unique’, there’s probably only one window. I have here the perfect advertisement for a house, so we’ll go through it and I’ll point out some of the more interesting features; so here we go, mind the step.
‘Owner transferred reluctantly instructs us to sell’ means the house is for sale. ‘Genuine reason for selling’ means the house is for sale. ‘Rarely can we offer’ means the house is for sale. ‘Superbly presented delightful charmer’ doesn’t mean anything really but it’s probably still for sale. ‘Most attractive immaculate home of character in prime dress-circle position’ means that the thing that’s for sale is a house. ‘Unusual design with interesting and intriguing solidly built stairs’ means the stairs are in the wrong place. ‘Huge spacious generous lounge commands this well-serviced executive residence’ means the rest of the house is a rabbit warren with rooms like cupboards. ‘Magnificent well-proportioned large convenient block with exquisite garden’ means there’s no view but one of the trees had a flower on it the day we were up there. ‘Privacy, taste, charm, space, freedom, quiet, away from it all location in much sought-after cul-de-sac situation’ means it’s not only built down a hole, it’s built at the very far end of the hole. ‘A must for you artists, sculptors and potters’ means that only an idiot would consider actually living in it. ‘2/3 bedrooms with possible in-law accommodation’ means it’s got two bedrooms and a tool shed. ‘Great buy’, ‘ring early for this one’, ‘inspection a must’, ‘priced to sell’, ‘new listing’, ‘see this one now’, ‘all offers considered’, ‘good value’, ‘be quick’, ‘inspection by appointment’, ‘view today’, ‘this one can’t last’, ‘sole agents’, ‘today’s best buy’ means the house is still for sale and if ever you see ‘investment opportunity’ in the newspaper, turn away very quickly and have a crack at the crossword.
Sewing
Gidday. As anyone who’s ever drawn a few stitches together will tell you, sewing is a major usurper of time and, in terms of energy, an afternoon of pleating buttonhole darts is about equivalent to running a marathon with a cast-iron stove strapped to each leg.
Let’s just take a simple sewing exercise and see how the process operates. Let’s say you want to do something fairly basic and everyday, like converting an old pair of jeans into a batik wall-hanging that doubles as a zip-up lampshade with pockets.
First of all, you’ll need a sewing machine, so you locate that and park it somewhere good and central. Then you have a go at fixing whatever it was that broke last time and caused you to put it away when you were trying to make a shirt out of the curtains.
Once you’ve got the little light going, you can lay your material out, and start cutting it out into shapes that you think might be roughly suitable. Within a matter of moments you’ll have most of the room draped in a solid ocean of fabric, you’ll have lost the scissors somewhere back at base camp three, and you’ll have to set out on a separate expedition to find the sewing machine. Everyone else in the house will have suddenly remembered they’ve got important things to do on the other side of the moon, and when you lift the material up you’ll notice that you’ve cut enough carpet out of the floor to make a series of matching winter overcoats for most of the people you’ve met since you left primary school. Now you can get some of the hunks you’ve cut out and start trying to sew them together. You’ve got to be very careful at this stage, particularly with your foot. Unless you know how to work the accelerator properly, the machine will go into overdrive and sew a big line of blanket stitch through everything that’s not bolted to the floor.
This doesn’t last long, though, because in no time at all you’ll break the needle and fill the insides of the sewing machine with about a hundred thousand kilometres of intricately knotted cotton.
At about this stage you should give the whole thing away and leave in disgust, pulling the sewing machine over and dragging the whole room with you, since by now you’ll have sewn the jeans to the couch and the tail of your shirt and the only advantage is that it’ll expose the floor again and reveal a zillion small pieces of cotton that you can spend the rest of the day cleaning up.
If you weren’t present at the sacking of Carthage I recommend you have a crack at sewing. It’ll give you an idea of what the place must have looked like afterwards.
Dreams
Gidday. Just getting back to the Socratic Paradox for a moment and the link sinclaired between it and the Fred Dagg Theory of the Human Memory, it’s been called to my attention that if our knowledge is to some extent a function of remembering previous experience, one of the areas where the spanner might come into some sort of contact with the works is dreams.
If in order to have knowledge we must be able to recognise it, and therefore in some sense in order to acquire knowledge we must already have acquired it, and if we can have knowledge and then forget it and then remember that we’ve forgotten it, then it has to be decided whether or not the knowledge of lack of knowledge constitutes knowledge. And if knowledge of lack of knowledge or more correctly knowledge that there is lack of knowledge can be said to be part of life’s rich tapestry, then the knowledge acquired by remembering what occurred in dreams must be admitted as evidence under sub-section four.
Now the nature of dreams must be discussed if we’re to get anywhere at all with this line of thought. Some people say that dreams take place in the subconscious, but given that the knowledge of them doesn’t exist until they’re recalled and that the recalling of them must happen in a state of consciousness because if it happens later in the dream it’s inadmissible on the grounds that we don’t know what the state is, unless we’re dreaming now, in which case we know a fair bit about dreams and nothing very much about anything else.
Sleep of course is the other important element in the relationship of knowledge to the memory and dreams. I read the other day that dear old Malcolm sleeps only very rarely and can get by on five hours a night, and about ten or twelve hours a day, which might explain why he knows so much, or maybe he’s remembering things he knew in dreams, or perhaps he’s only dreaming that he knows anything. I don’t know. The country’s a shambles. There’s got to be some explanation.
Going to the Races
Gidday. If you’re going to maximise race-going you’ll need to get dressed up well beyond the nines and you’ll need a couple of things to carry; binoculars are very good as they help to act as a ballast later in the day when the wolve
s are howling. You park your car about 800 kilometres away in a car park (which is Latin for ‘expensive paddock’) and by the time you get to the main buildings you should have built up a good thirst. Proceed directly to the bar. Do not pass go. Do not collect anything like $200.
Once you’ve had a few, you can move out to the gambling department and start whistling your fiscal toehold up the spout. The first race is easy. Anyone can pick the winner of the first race. The trouble with the first race is that no one’s ever got there in time to bet on it. The first race finishes as you come out of the bar and the horse you were going to place your shirt on is on the board at a zillion to one and has just won the first race by ten lengths. Unfortunately in the second race you’ve got four gold-plated certainties all given to you by people who know the trainer’s brother. So you stack your pfennigs on each of them for a win, and return to the bar and tell the barman you had the first race in your pocket if only you’d arrived early enough to bet on it. If his eyes glaze and he’s obviously having trouble staying awake, don’t worry, he probably had a late night or something.
If you go outside and peer through your binoculars now you’ll see that there’s a very big bloke standing right in front of you and if you listen carefully you’ll overhear him telling someone that Mr Sandman will win the fifth race by a very long way indeed. So you shoot down and place a wager to that effect. Race Two has finished by now and the four nags you bet on had a great tussle in the run to the judge and eventually dead-heated for seventeenth. Race Three and Race Four seem to have gone, too. They always run Race Three and Race Four around the back somewhere and no one ever sees them, so you’ve got time for a couple of quick shots of juniper-extract before collecting on Race Five.
At this stage you’ll run across a group of people you haven’t seen for years because they’ve been in this bar together since shortly after the war. After a short time with your old friends you’ll realise that the result of Race Five is not as important as the high harmony line in ‘shenandoah’ and your day at the races begins to take on a new character.
People who care about placings, dividends and quinellas will suddenly seem a bit on the silly side and, providing you’ve cancelled everything on your books for about four days into the following week, you’ll find that the only drawback of the whole thing is that the sport of kings is the father of the prince of hangovers.
Teaching
Gidday. I think it’s time I had a word or two to say about the teaching profession. Now look! Some of you people at the back aren’t paying attention, and if you think…who did that? Come on, who did that? I can wait, I’ve got all day. I can just wait here until that person owns up. We can all just sit here and wait. What’s so funny? What’s that…no…perhaps you’d…you, you, no, next to you…you, no next to you…you …yes, you, yes, perhaps you’d like to get up and tell us all the substance of your very amusing little remark. I think we’d all like to hear the joke, wouldn’t we? We’d all like to have a laugh. Yes I think we could all do with a laugh. Nothing? Oh, I see, it’s not funny anymore. Well, isn’t that interesting, the way jokes sometimes become a little less hilarious when we’re asked to share them with our little friends.
Well, if I might be permitted to continue, I’d like to tell you about how to go about becoming a schoolteacher. Now, the first thing…stand up…stand up, you…no, behind you…no…behind you…yes, you, yes…stand up.
Well, Einstein, I take it that that magazine contains the answers to many of the problems we shall be confronting today. Who’s that on the cover? I see, and who is Mr Travolta when he’s at home? Oh, is he just? Well, I suggest that you put Mr Travolta away because you’re not going to get anywhere in life by knowing a lot of nonsense about Mr Travolta. Are you listening to me? Are you listening to me at all? What did I say? What was the last thing I said? No, before that, smarty-pants! No, don’t look out the window, don’t look out the window when I’m talking to you. Look at me. Look at me. Look at me when I’m…I don’t know why I bother. Who doesn’t either? Come on, who just didn’t either? Look, if people are going to ‘didn’t either’, I think I’ve got a reasonable right to know who they are. All right! I’ve had enough of this. I want you to write an essay on what you did in the holidays.
Our Past Lives
Gidday. Now the last thing I want to be is an alarmist, but the other day I read the following: ‘A Sydney hypnotherapist claims many of his patients recall past lives while under hypnosis. Is this positive proof of reincarnation?’ The short answer to this, as St Thomas Aquinas was saying just this morning as we tethered the horses, is ‘no’. I actually don’t know who the Sydney hypnotherapist’s patients are of course, or how many of them have actually recalled past lives, in fact I’m so silly I don’t even know what a past life is, but the fact that you’ve got to go under hypnosis to recall one will give you some idea of the dire circumstances which prevail in this country.
For some time I held the Chair of Previous Existence at the University of Dubbo and I must say we had a good deal of trouble determining exactly what a past life is. There were those who said that the mind exists only in the present and that therefore the act of recalling a past life makes that life part of the present, or that if something occurs to the mind as being alien to the present, it needn’t necessarily represent the past. It could represent the future.
It was even suggested that the past and the future were the same thing, and that as on the surface of things it would appear in the normal course of events to be impossible to recall the future, and we all freely admitted to great difficulty in recalling the present, perhaps our whole lives are being lived in the past, which would make recalling our past lives not a very tall order at all.
Of course ultimately this proved unsatisfactory because three entire departments of a tertiary institution would have had to stop putting in for a visual aids grant, and as a result I developed the Fred Dagg Theory of the Human Memory, and the rest, as they say in the motor vehicle industry, is bunk.
Membership of the Parliament
Gidday. Today I’d like to avail you of information garnered by the Fred Dagg Careers Advisory Bureau concerning the whys and wherefores of being a Member of Parliament.
How you go about becoming elected is up to you. It’s pretty much anything goes in this area and there are very few whys and no wherefores, and I understand there aren’t as many whithers as there were either. It’s what you do once you’re in there that’s important, and it’d be just as well to sit the bureau’s aptitude test right at the outset just to see if you’re suited to it. So pencils out, please.
If someone asks you a question in the House, do you:
(a) accuse the other side of distorting the issue beyond all recognition and attempting to make cheap political capital out of something that should have been solved in the committee stages of the second reading of the recommendations of reports pursuant to amendments 129 and 130 of the bill as laid down in Standing Orders and held by the Speaker in 1893 to be the right and proper duty of the member intituled the questioner;
(b) answer the question; or
(c) do anything in the world except (b)?
The correct response here is either (a) or (c). In fact that question’s just been amended and (b) isn’t there anymore.
If a member from the opposite benches rises to speak to the motion, do you:
(a) go to sleep;
(b) shout ‘rubbish’, ‘resign’, ‘sit down’ and ‘get out’;
(c) stand up with nineteen points of order and then insinuate that the Honourable Member has been photographed at the Club Whoopee with his arm around a young woman of the opposite number; or
(d) do (a) and (b) and (c)?
Fairly straightforward that one; (d) is the one we’re after there.
If somebody got up one day and made a brilliantly intelligent and thoroughly worthwhile speech, would you:
(a) understand it;
(b) understand it;
(c
) understand it; or
(d) none of the above?
And here we’re obviously looking for another (d).
So think about it, and if you’ve ever wanted to run away and join the circus, this could be the life for you.
The Two-airline Policy
Gidday. Now I’d like to have a word or two with you about the two-airline policy, which is in effect a long-standing arrangement to ensure that if the consumer misses one plane, he can be secure in the knowledge that if he’d got there five minutes earlier, he’d have missed the other one.
The policy is under a bit of a cloud at the moment because the two airlines involved have decided to compete with one another for business. It’s a fairly pagan form of competition, but I think you’d have to say that in some sense it isn’t not competition. Or at least it isn’t entirely not competition in every respect.
The airlines are supposed to create the illusion of competition without actually permitting the competitive element to stand in the way of the fact that if one of them wins, it’s a mountainous victory for all that’s decent, and if the other one wins, they have to go back and start again.
What’s happened recently is that everyone’s gone out and bought the newest planes on the market, with great fats on the back and a big stripe up the bonnet, and each is accusing the other of having made a major miscalculation which is going to cost the people of Australia a fortune.
That is to say, a bigger fortune than paying for two half-empty planes to leave everywhere on the hour and near the hour, just about every hour, and follow each other to everywhere else, and use different car parks when they get there just to make it look as if free enterprise hasn’t been delayed due to maintenance.
Personally, I hope that if there’s been a mistake on the order forms, it hasn’t happened in the white corner, because if it has, the boys in the blue corner will be brought back to the starting gates and forced to make a mistake of similar magnitude, just to give everyone an equal opportunity to take advantage of open competition.