My god daughter is having her 8th birthday this weekend, and so I am loading her up with chapter books so she can become more proficient at reading.

I doubt that the Muddle Headed Wombat I ordered will arrive in time, and I realised when I re-read Paddington Bear a few years ago that the sentence structure requires an adult to concentrate, so I will leave Paddington til next year.

So I bought a few anthologies of Enid Blyton books (as you do – or at least, as someone as non-PC as me will do).

I also have bought a nice hard back copy of Pinocchio, which really is a dark comedy for children, although I have my doubts that most people are familiar with the novel.

People will not be surprised that whilst I have read the novel, I am not all that familiar with the Disney animated feature. I happily admit that I don’t think that I have seen any of the classic Disney animated features, except for Fantasia.

I will say that the novel is far darker than the movie.

Let’s take the main supporting character in the movie, Jiminy Cricket, an anthropomorphised insect who dresses like some sort of Victorian era London spiv complete with top hat.

He has a much smaller role in the book, and lacks a name, and only occupies the space of chapter 4, which is 3 pages long. There is no possibility for the cricket to spend more page time in the novel because Pinoccio throws a hammer at him and flattens him.

See… much darker than the movie. But skimming my paperback copy of the novel right now, the energy and dark humour leaps off the page at me in a way which the eight or nine year old version of me might not have appreciated.

But to truly appreciate the sometimes dark humour in Italian literature, you need to have some sort of lived experience as an Italian, particularly as an Italian peasant. The struggle for survival is one which Italians find blackly, or bleakly, funny, as is the host of resentments and causes for envy amongst neighbours. As an ethnic Italian born in Australia from peasant ancestors, I am close enough to that mindset to ‘get’ it.

Aside Pinocchio, another example is Italo Calvino’s hero Marcovaldo, an uprooted peasant struggling to support his family in post war Rome. There is a scene where he finds a free feed (mushrooms if I recall), and he then ends up sick all night from it. It might not be funny to Marcovaldo, but to Calvino and his readers, it is indeed – the bleak humour that comes from understanding the struggle for survival.

Moravia perhaps is a little too sophisticated and bourgeois for peasant humour, but he too sometimes can be very funny in a way which an Italian perhaps would exclusively understand. HIs book of short stories, Il Paradiso, which consists of ten stories of a sexual nature narrated in the first person by female protagonists, is well worth appreciating. It is one of the few books of Italian literature which I have read in the original language, given my spoken Italian is better than my reading ability.

Readers of this blog who scroll far enough into the deep recesses four years ago when I set it up will know that I have no fondness for Facebook and that this blog was originally set up as an alternative way for me to share my travel adventures from my 2019 trip to Italy.

That I did not need to set up a blog in 2016 on my previous trip to Italy was due to the existence of Google+, the social media experiment which Google discontinued in early 2019, and of which I had been a member for over 5 years.

On Tuesday I very reluctantly set up a Facebook account. I did so primarily because there are certain distant relatives in Calabria whom I wish to meet on my imminent trip, and that they are more easily contactable via Facebook than other means.

Soon after setting it up on my smartphone, I tried to log on via my desktop and was informed that my account had been temporarily suspended due to suspected breaches of conditions – mostly I presume because I had immediately sent an abundance of friend requests to various friends, former colleagues, and relatives whom Facebook suggested to me.

That has not stopped me logging out and logging back in via my smartphone, but it does prevent me accessing Facebook on this desktop or on my tablet.

So this is a great start to my relationship with Facebook, and confirms a whole lot of the reservations I had about joining it in the first place.

I will see how it continues, but I am sorely tempted, after my trip to Italy is over, to cancel the Facebook account.

So take that Zuckerberg!

I first visited the Embassy Taxi Cafe in Spencer Street in May 1989, either before or after the Metallica concert at Festival Hall.

They made, and still make, some of the best fish and chip shop burgers in Melbourne. I was reminded of this last Friday when I popped in for the first time in ages.

It is a place where the thing which appears to have changed in the past thirty plus years is the price of the food. It’s a time capsule to a much earlier time.

I’m too young to know if there were other taxi cafes around Melbourne back in the day, although I have heard rumours that there were. But it’s the only one now – open 24/7 and regularly frequented by taxi drivers of all companies (Embassy was taken over years ago).

In terms of the best old school burgers in Melbourne, I would list four:

. The good old Embassy Taxi Cafe

. Andrew’s burgers in Albert Park

. Danny’s Diner in North Fitzroy

. The Ascot Vale Fish and Chippery

The first three on my list have been operating for over 60 years each.

Do unto Spain what Elizabeth the First did to the Armada!

Over a decade and a half ago, a friend told me that he had just ordered a new dinner suit as he had joined a yacht club and they regularly held formal dinners he needed to attend.

There was no talk of him actually going out in a yacht of course – it was all about the formal feeds onshore.

As I discovered a couple of years later, my friend had told me a rather egregious fib – he had not actually joined a yacht club, but rather, a masonic lodge which met on the premises of that yacht club, and he had been sponsored into the Freemasons by a trustafarian who happened to run a yachting supply store.

I believe that the lodge was rather pretentiously named ‘Hearts of Oak’ or something equally silly, and that any yachting enthusiasm by either most of its members or my (now long former) friend was at best fleeting and superficial.

This was a bit like my friend’s sudden enthusiasm, a couple of years before that, for the newly launched A-League, Australia’s new national soccer competition. He had fallen in with bad company, the sort of people who wanted to attend Melbourne Victory games regularly, and he desperately wanted to fit in, just like he did when he joined the Freemasons.

My friend’s passing enthusiasms for niche sports represent something which is more than a mere weak attention span (he has been bundled out of the masons and I doubt he can afford to attend A-League games anymore), it is symbolic of Australia’s own infatuations with certain sports.

As the Matildas progressed through the Women’s Soccer World Cup tournament in recent weeks, there was talk of calling for a public holiday if they won. This was in recognition of the national significance of such a victory, similar to the jubilation which erupted when the yacht Australia 2 defeated an American defender to claim the America’s Cup in 1983. At that time, whilst no public holiday was declared, then Prime Minister Bob Hawke gave his moral endorsement to people to unofficially take the day off and celebrate.

I was only 14 at that time, but I was a bit skeptical even then about the significance of winning the America’s Cup. Yachting is a very elitist sport for the rich, and it consumes much money to undertake successfully. Alan Bond, who was the principal sponsor for the Australian challenger, was a ruthless nouveau riche businessman who sought to use yachting as a way to propel his social standing upward to match his self made wealth.

It did not escape me at the time that he had, weeks before the yachting contest in Long Island Sound, closed down the Waltons department store chain in Victoria and put hundreds of people out of work.

Only a few short years later, this former painter and burglar was found to be extremely crooked as well as ruthless in his business dealings. However Perth is probably the one place in Australia where social standing is less nuanced and more meritocratic, and I doubt that his fall from grace was as harsh as it would have been on the eastern seaboard.

So what happened after we won the America’s Cup? Fremantle was to host the defence in 1987, and was all transformed for this event, possibly in a way which ruined its previous charm (I am not sure as I first visited in 1991). Then we lost the race and with it, any collective interest in yacht racing as a source of national pride.

And so it will be with soccer. Our national women’s team did much better than the men’s team has ever done, and did so hosting on home ground. There has been great interest shown both by the live TV audiences and in the packed stadia.

But it is over. There is no fairy tale history making win, and no public holiday – official or otherwise – to celebrate.

We will now sleep off our hangovers and forget it, just like my former friend with his faux yacht club masonic lodge and his deluded enthusiasm for Melbourne Victory.

In nature, the lionesses of a pride hunt for prey and provide food for the lions.

So it is in soccer (a sport I profusely dislike). The Lionesses of the English Women’s team last night provided a goal to feed each of the three Lions on their shirts as they comprehensively thrashed the Matildas.

Rollo! Mayne! Aquitaine! Those are the names of the three Lions on the England Soccer shirt, which harken back to the medieval heraldry of Olde England.

And so today, when I saw that I could buy an England scarf at Rebel Sport, I happily did so, even though it is 100% acrylic and Made In China.

I am rather contrary that way. But you would have worked that out if you have been reading my blog for a while.

You must understand that I really dislike Soccer, otherwise known as Association Football. For me, the only truly loveable football code is Australian Rules. As a patriotic Australian, I do want to see Australian Rules Football dominate the entire nation, rather than just Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia, Western Australia and the NT. I deeply resent the pretensions of soccer in this country.

The Socceroos, the male national team, have long been just a very derisive joke, and I have enjoyed their inept capers at international tournaments like the World Cup where they always fail to deliver. It is impossible to think that such rabble will ever influence a growth in that sport in Australia.

I have always had a much greater liking for the Matildas, I much confess, although until very recently they seemed every bit as inept as their ridiculously named male counterparts. The Matildas have always been rather underpaid and under appreciated, and have had to work very hard to earn the exposure and attention that they now enjoy. I respect them.

But I’m sorry, I have no room in my heart for soccer in Australia. With the semi final defeat last night, this bandwagon hits a brick wall, and I am relieved.

It was interesting seeing various of the very silly commentators after the game on Channel 7 last night talking about how the Matildas need to focus on the next World Cup in four years’ time and how they need to have training facilities as well funded as those of the Lionesses.

This was risible to me (I enjoy laughing at soccer) for two reasons.

The first is that these so called sporting commentators seem to have forgotten that the Olympics are coming up next year in Paris, and that the Matildas are very likely to play in them. What myopia! The national hunger for gold medal glory is one which obsesses our sporting commentators, the public, and our jingoistic politicians to a degree which is usually out of place in any but a totalitarian nation.

The second issue is that we don’t exactly have the spare money for funding. Chairman Dan has probably just killed off the Commonwealth Games, and with it, much of the internationality of Netball due to lack of money, mere months after he threw Netball Australia a lifeline. Where is the money to come from to fund more for the Matildas? By starving the Karens of Australia Netball? That would be robbing Petra (ie Karen) to pay Paula (ie Matilda).

In the meantime, I will enjoy the build up to the World Cup final in my England scarf and bowler hat, and will listen to my favourite England theme songs (Three Lions and World In Motion) regularly.

I was browsing today and saw this display of supposedly trendy clothing featuring Carlton Draught logos. It is by some clothing company called Nina and Pasadena. They use this branding to justify charging $79.95 for a t-shirt.

This sort of over charging for becoming a walking advertisement for a beer brand makes me wonder whether the world has gone made.

Few people would have ever heard of the Southern Aurora Hotel. It was demolished in early 1993.

It might have been the roughest pub in Greater Melbourne. It was located just next to Dandenong Railway Station.

I visited it one Friday evening in May 1992, when I happened to be working in Dandenong. I had been drinking with a colleague who was to quickly become my closest friend (still is) at the slightly less feral Nu Hotel (which was our regular watering hole), and we decided to have one more for the road.

He saw some bloke he knew and remarked that he hadn’t seen him around for a while.

“I’ve been in gaol,” was the casual reply.

There also was a young lady, either a barmaid or a dancer, wearing only a g-string, wandering around the floor. I don’t remember too many of the details, as it had been a really crappy day, and I really had needed quite a few drinks more than usual to close off the week.

So anyway, the only part of the Southern Aurora which did not get to meet the business end of a bulldozer was the bottle shop, which is still there today when I visited Dandenong in a misguided fit of nostalgia for my misspent youth. As it was in the same style of architecture as rest of the Southern Aurora, you can get a fair idea of what the Southern Aurora might have looked like from the photo I have placed above.

Needless to say, that whilst there are many demolished pubs around greater Melbourne whom we might lament (the Menzies Hotel in the city being a prime but not exclusive example), the Southern Aurora is not one of them.

What caused me to pause today and take the above photo was the signage on the bottle shop. The top of the pole features the Melbourne Bitter logo, with Melbourne Bitter, Victoria Bitter, Fosters Lager, and Fosters Light Ice all making up the rest of the beers on offer.

The only thing missing from the traditional CUB offerings is Carlton Draught.

And this signage has probably stood there atop the bottle shop for the past 30 years, like a time capsule of what sort of beer was popular in the early 1990s.

Of course, I did not stop to look inside, but I do suspect that these beers are still the ones which are the most popular sold in Dandenong. It does not really seem to me to be the sort of place where craft beer would easily get a toe hold.

A former friend of mine, as he descended deeper into a fantasy world which was either delusional or border personality disorder, once confided to a mutual friend that his intention was to go into space.

This is the problem we will find with all those people who sit on the couch watching Star Trek or Doctor Who til all hours of the night. They dream of being astronauts without thinking of the sacrifices real astronauts would make.

Space tourism is a real thing now, with Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos overtaking Richard Branson in the pioneering of this field. Within reason, anyone with sufficient wealth can stump up the cash for a ticket to the most expensive amusement park ride in history.

It is a bit like the Concorde’s regular transatlantic flights at Mach 2. You could sit in the comfort of First Class and follow the path first flown by Charles Lindbergh five decades earlier, at a speed first flown by Chuck Yeager three decades earlier.

Space tourism, whilst not so comfortable as Concorde, could make someone imagine that they are going where no man had gone before, not all that many years ago. You can follow brave pilots like Gagarin or Shepherd or Glenn into space.

But following those pioneers does not make one a hero, just a wealthy passenger. I do not think that my former friend realised that, nor that his morbidly obese BMI (somewhere over 50) would probably prevent his riding on anything smaller than a long retired Saturn V moon rocket, nor that he would never have the ready cash, regardless of the fantasy world where he believed so earnestly that he would that he briefly obtained a Jaguar on credit.

It was only last year that I finally listened in its entirely to David Bowie’s classic 1972 album Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars, an early archetype of the concept album, themed around a musically gifted alien from space. Such is the miracle of streaming services that I have most albums ever recorded at my finger tips to play through my blue tooth speaker (as Adam Ant would say: The Devil take your stereo and your record collection).

Quite definitely, it was a mind blowing record, one of those examples where the sum (like Aeschylus’ extant Oresteian trilogy – the sole surviving entire trilogy of Greek Tragedies) is greater than the parts.

Last month, one idle evening whilst sipping wine with a friend, I put a similar but inferior album to the test for the first time – Babylon Zoo’s The Boy with the X-ray Eyes. Babylon Zoo are most famed for being a one hit wonder in the mid 1990s with the song Spaceman from that album, after which they sank without a trace.

It occurred to me that Babylon Zoo had a very Ziggy Stardust feel to their music, and indeed when following up on this online found that I was not the first person to say this. Indeed, the past thirty years have had just about all of the few people who have commented (mostly unfavourably) about Babylon Zoo’s debut album have compared it to Ziggy Stardust.

I suppose, just like my former friend who wanted to follow Gagarin and Captain Kirk into space, Babylon Zoo wanted to burst into song on the soundwaves first ridden by Bowie. But at least Babylon Zoo gave us one fun song.

I just spotted this fresh graffiti in Footscray this morning. It makes a refreshing change from the illiterate and mostly untalented scribbles which have infested Melbourne in recent years.

However, WTF? Whilst as an amateur classist I know that Artemis is a virgin goddess, but no one worships her anymore, thanks to the Emperor Theodosius imposing Christianity on our Pagan ancestors 1600 years ago. If this graffiti author wanted to offend, he’s a millennium and a half late.