Tetherd Cow Ahead

I grew up in Goulburn, a small country town of about 20,000 people, a couple of hundred kilometres southwest of Sydney.

I had a wonderful childhood, and it is full of the memories of which a childhood should be made: dad taking me for rides on his bike; thick white fog that didn’t lift till noon; going to the Saturday matinee at the cinema (or ‘The Pictures’ as we called them then) and having change from a shilling to buy lollies; the smell of burning autumn leaves; an unexpected present of a box of 12 Derwent coloured pencils (which I left on the school bus one day and never saw again); Easter egg hunts in the house in Albert St; early morning thunderstorms that meant a ride to school in the car; scorching summers buzzing with cicadas; listening to Life With Dexter* with dad by the light of the valves from the old valve radio; the smell of chlorine and suntan lotion at the swimming pool; hot Milo on the back steps with mum.

Some of these memories (but surprisingly few, all things considered) are recorded in photos taken on an old Box Brownie camera which I still have.

Now, snow is a rare sight in most places in Australia, and outside the main mountain ski fields of Perisher Valley in New South Wales and Mount Hotham in Victoria, snowfalls are consigned to a few brief days a year in places that get cold enough.

During my childhood Goulburn was cold enough twice.

Luckily for readers of The Cow, the creation of the Snow Bear is one of my memories that has been preserved on film for posterity. This shot was taken around 1963. That’s my brother Steve on the left.

*Overseas visitors: here’s an mp3 of an episode of Life With Dexter. You can have no better impression of what it was like to be in Australia in the early 1960s.

Hammacher Schlemmer is offering for sale a life-size walking and talking remote controlled ‘Robbie the Robot’.

Now there’s the Yuletide gift for the Man Who Has Everything. If any of you have a spare $US49,999.95 I’m sure I can wrangle a big enough Christmas stocking.

I’m sure you all know that Robbie first came to fame in the wonderful Forbidden Planet and has stayed in the zeitgeist ever since. The Hammacher Schlemmer replica offers, among other things the following features:

The robot is pre-programmed to deliver his famous lines from the original movie, and the remote control allows you to adjust the robot’s volume, track selection, and start and stop functions. Robby can also be prompted to move his computer relay assembly, rotate his servo-controlled head, spin his planetary gyro stabilizers, and rotate his scanners while his various lights flash. The integral audio system produces CD-quality sound projected from a directional speaker system in the head and synchronized with the neon tube lights…

He’d be a nice complement to my toaster, dontcha think?

Thanks to the Red Ferret Journal, where I read about this first.

t-shirt humor.com

A couple of days ago my toaster went on the blink in a bizarre red beans and rice incident.* It is one of the frustrating things of this modern age that when domestic appliances break down it is often more expensive to have them repaired than to replace them. With toasters this is evidently always the case as I have learned from past experience. So instead of even bothering to get a repair quote this time, I just gritted my teeth and headed off to David Jones to find a new one. My previous toaster was a Russell Hobbs two slice and I was completely happy with it. It did not for a moment occur to me that what I really needed was The Metropolis.

Film aficionados are aware that the amazing design in Fritz Lang’s cinematic masterpiece Metropolis extends to all details of the production including the character props such as watches, clocks, jewellery and haberdashery, but it is rarely noted that even the kitchen appliances in the film are carefully crafted to complement Lang’s futuristic vision. It is said that Lang himself, unhappy with the original maquettes for the toasters and blenders in the film, took an active part in their realisation.

Rough sketches of the toaster shown in the scene above still survive, penned by the unmistakeable hand of a director with a thousand things on his mind, but driven to perfect even the tiniest detail.

Now, after lengthy negotiations to secure access to these sketches, Italian company DeLonghi has been able to to create an almost perfect replica of one of Lang’s favourite props.

I believe that DeLonghi also intend to release a blender modelled on the one that features in the famous sequence with the evil scientist Rottwang and the electrical activation of his robotic Maria. The company is being very secretive about it, so details are hard to come by, but you can rest assured that when the news breaks you will hear about it first here on The Cow.

*Don’t ask.

Another curio from Mysterious Corner. This is a little birdy button that tweets when you press it.

Download (Click to play…)

I wish I could tell you a story about it, but again, I can’t remember where it came from.

In the corner of my loungeroom is a small shelf which for possibly understandable reasons has come to be dubbed ‘Mysterious Corner’. It is laden with all manner of arcane trinkets, and I thought I might share a few of them with readers of The Cow. Today I have for your delectation Jesus Saves:

It’s a money box, if you didn’t pick that up. I can’t remember where it came from… (Cissy Strutt?). It has remained empty since I’ve had it. I’m not sure if there is anything allegorical in that.