The Great HSC heist of 1985, 6.

 

The hysterical woman

After the event, John Cook was promoted to a newly-created assistant director job, and I took his role, though I was hotly pursued by a back-stabbing creep who hoped to white-ant me. As a Principal Education Officer, I found myself involved in politics, defending the iterative scaling methods used for the Higher School Certificate.

These methods were contentious to idiots lacking insight, like the aforementioned creep, but a colleague and I in TAFE, after a two-hour modelling exercise, four years earlier, realised that we had come in through a back door, and reinvented iterative scaling.

By that point, I was writing and delivering short essays about technology and science on the ABC, so I had honed my style, and as the minister knew from my reports in the save-the-HSC operation, I was what he needed and wanted. It really annoyed me that in his final report to Parliament, he credited all my funny lines to me: had he taken the credit, the lines would have been quoted in the only decent local rag.

The job came with my own Apple IIe. I was willing, trained and capable of defending the only appropriate policy, and that meant me doing a lot of drafts on the trusty computer, stuck on a table behind my desk. I have never learned to touch-type, but I always said that as I could type faster than I thought, why bother. The work was exacting but rewarding, but the Minister, Rodney Cavalier, wanted rude replies to rude letters.

Only once did a draft of mine get rejected, and that was for “unwarranted ferocity”. I blew that rejection note up to A3, framed it, and only then advised the Minister of the correspondent’s other form, and he conceded that my ferocity was indeed warranted. I kept churning out the responses, even though I was getting a pain in one elbow. I dismissed it as tennis elbow.

In those days, we still had typists, but as the only professional who was management and a teacher, and the only one who understood the methods needed for the typists chosen to become keyboard operators working with Apple computers, I was well placed to advise them: things like not hitting RETURN at the end of each line, because that messed up when the sender wanted extra words added. It had started when one of the typists, formerly my father’s secretary, and who recalled me as a three-year-old, started tapping me for advice.

I complied, and rapidly became the go-to for all the typists. This was definitely crossing A&C/professional borders, but I didn’t care, though as I learned later, Ted was after my scalp to revenge himself against the clan Macinnis. I knew that he complained about my “interference”, but I ignored that as jealousy. I was in good odour, he was in bad odour and beginning to stink. My superiors, all professional division, encouraged and approved.

Then, soon after and quite by chance, Ted fomented my slam dunking of him that, brought on his retirement. I had labelled my right-arm pain as tennis elbow, and in a senior management meeting, one of the A&C people mentioned that a lot of cases of pain were arising. As it happened, I knew all about repetitive strain injuries, but I had never considered that I might be affected.

Ted, being the sort of sexist and racist mongrel I have always hated, commented sourly that it seemed to be only hysterical women who had this complaint. Now a moment’s thought will reveal the situation: lots of women, thrown into new work, and only I knew that one solitary male (me) had the same problem.

At that moment, I realised what was causing my ‘tennis elbow’. It came from typing in a totally impossible position, but it was his sexist remark that annoyed me enough to bring the light (remember I had kicked off equal pay, two decades earlier).* 

This wasn’t tennis elbow: it was RSI, repetitive strain injury. I should have known this, because one of my programmers had introduced me to a friend of his who had a table with a square for the monitor and a keyboard on the underside: the only way this chap could work was by lying flat on his back. I knew that keyboarding brought risks, but even then, I had not made the link to my own case.

Ted had been unduly horrid to me and my pirates, but I thought it was just that that he was a dill. Still, he was a suitable case for treatment, and now I had my opportunity to slam him, and with my customary politeness, I interrupted his nastiness.

“Well, Ted, in that case, I must also be an hysterical woman”, I announced, pausing just long enough for that to gain everybody’s attention, “because I have exactly the same complaint.” I then gave a succinct and detailed account of how it was caused, and what we needed to do. There are no secrets when a clown is comprehensively slam-dunked

Within an hour all of the women had found an opportunity to thank me, and before the day was out, I think all the A&C staff had thanked me, save for two toadies. That was when I realised that Ted was detested and feared by all, and I had belled the cat, crippling him.

Within a week, we had a consultant, paid from Ted’s precious budget, training us in ergonomics, causes of RSI and how to do exercises to fix the pain. Each morning at 10 am, the women and I would stand in a circle and do our exercises.

Not long after, Ted retired, and the very next day, he was identified to me as the leech, and I learned the whole story of what had happened to Ted, courtesy of my father. “We didn’t want to tell you before,” I was told, “because we weren’t sure how you would have reacted.”

Come to think of it, I’m not totally sure how I would have reacted either. I loathed bullies and still do, mainly because my father was a bully. My pay-back for each bully was surgical, deft, and left no physical mark, but I had learned in a hard school. My methods remain commercial-in-confidence, but I am happy to advise, also in confidence.

* My version of equal opportunity: the best bloke gets the job, even if the best bloke is a blokess.

There is more to this story, though not about equal pay:

The Great HSC heist of 1985, 1. Prologue.

The GreatHSC heist of 1985, 2. A disabled number-cruncher.

The GreatHSC heist of 1985, 3. Applied anarchy and surrealism.

The GreatHSC heist of 1985, 4. The robbery.

The GreatHSC heist of 1985, 5. The repair job.

Why Meta should ask before slurping up text

OK, the story so far: my Monster Maintenance Manual has been snaffled without permission by Meta, to train their AI (in this case. it will be Artificial Inelegance), and I have been publicly wondering how they will fare if they draw on my account of post impressionists:

They trick us by planting their feet in the ground and freezing their position, so they give a very good impression of being just a bunch of old poles.

In short, a dearth of reliable info there, and there is quite a lot more like that. Worse, if they have helped themselves to my new edition, they will run into tales like this one about mud alligators: 

 

The Mud Alligators who liked kitchens

Gordon the noisy chef shouted loudly when he saw a snout in the custard pot. “Mustard, you’re busted, get out of the custard!”

Gordon’s roar made the other kitchen workers jump and drop things. They knew what it meant when Gordon shouted those words. He always shouted a lot, because he thought shouting made the food taste better, and he believed that mud alligators in the pots made the food taste worse. Gordon wasn’t a good chef.

Mustard and Murray, the mud alligators, knew they actually improved the flavour of the food they swam in. Everybody in the kitchen, except the chef, knew this, so the workers did not mention to Gordon that if Mustard had crept into the kitchen, and was in the custard pot, then Murray was probably nearby.

The cleverer kitchen workers had already turned to look in the curry pot as the chef picked up a pointy stick and started jabbing it into the custard. “Hurry, Murray, get out of the curry!” a molar mole worker called, quietly.

Two small snouts appeared in two pots, one curry-coloured and one custard-coloured. The kitchen crowd cheered, and the chef roared again. “Out!” he bellowed, waving the pointy stick and scattering blobs of custard all over the place. “You’ve spoiled my two signature dishes from tonight’s menu!”

“But we make such a nice match,” said Murray. “Me in the curry, and Mustard in the custard.”

The chef waved a large mallet, the sort used to make meat tender. “Well, those pots weren’t made for you. Now be off, before I decide to add mud alligator stew to the menu!” There was a snarl in his voice.

Sadly, slowly, dripping curry and custard, the two mud alligators went out the door, and into a gloomy alley. They walked along the dark and shadowy passage until they bumped into a gutter otter.

“Sorry,” they both muttered.

“Oh, that’s all right,” the gutter otter said with a smile. “You’re very light. Anyhow, I’m Highbrow and I’m not mad—who are you and why are you so sad?”

“We’re Mustard and Murray,” said Mustard. “We were hiding in the custard and the curry, but the chef shouted ‘Hey!’ and sent us both away.”

As you may have noticed, if you have ever met one, gutter otters like rhymes, so Highbrow raised one eyebrow, because Mustard was rhyming as well. Everything about gutter otters is heavy, so he quickly put the eyebrow down again, but the strain made him forget to rhyme. “Mud alligators are named after rivers starting with M, but where’s the Mustard river?”

Mustard pointed over her shoulder. “It’s only Mustard Creek, really, and it gets its name because it’s fed by hot springs. I’ve never been there.”

“You should go and find it,” said Highbrow. “Maybe it’s full of trout.”

“It’s a very hot creek,” said Mustard. “I think they might all be fish stew by now.”

“Or fish soup,” said Murray.

“Yummy!” shouted Mustard. “Let’s go!”. They packed up all the disguises they used to get into kitchens, tucked in their tails, climbed onto their unicycles and headed off into the hot dry centre of Australia.

“I hope there’s water in the creek,” Murray called out.

Mustard laughed as she swerved to avoid a bandicoot. “Maybe it’s full of dry mustard!”

They unicycled under fruitbats, slipped around wombats and almost ran into three numbats on skateboards. They saw potoroos, wallaroos and kangaroos, and then they saw a sign. It said “Mustard Creek, 800 km. Bring yer own water.”

“I think it’s going to be dry mustard,” said Murray, but they needn’t have worried. Further north, something was happening. A cyclone had rushed in, over the coast, where it calmed down and began soaking the land. Pitter-patter, went the rain.

Then the rain went splish-splosh, then flimp-flump, then it went BUCKET! The ground got wet, water soaked in until no more would fit, and a flood started to flow, slowly and quietly, out across flat Australia. It filled the runnels, then it filled the channels, and it annoyed many animals by filling their tunnels.

In the hot dry south, Murray and Mustard unicycled north and west as the water dribbled south. Before they got within smell of it, Mustard Creek was full and gurgling.

More water had flowed over the sunny plains, and just as they got there, Mustard Creek was disappearing, covered by a sheet of water, and pelicans and other water birds were flying in from the coast to build nests. Grandma and Grandpa Mactavish saw the birds fly past their home by a billabong, and got worried. They lived in the dry inland for a very good reason, because they could not swim.

“The tractor’s bust, the truck’s full of rust, but the bike works just,” said Grandpa, looking at their tandem bicycle, leaning against a gum tree. As a boy, he grew up with gutter otter neighbours and he sometimes used rhymes.

“Not too sure about that, the tyres are flat,” said Grandma, who had learned rhyming from him.

“Drat,” said Grandpa. “And the boat’s got a leak, so we’re quite up the creek.”

“We’d better walk to Little Mountain, then,” said Grandma, who had stopped rhyming, because she was always the practical one.

Little Mountain was well-named. City folks who saw it called it Mount Speed-Bump or Mount Molehill, but it was the one place on the plain that was always dry.

They packed tents and swags and billies, and started off for Little Mountain.

By the time the Mactavishes had finished setting-up on top of Little Mountain, they were hungry, and that was when they realised they had forgotten to bring any food. They hurried back to their home by the Mustard billabong and filled a big wheelbarrow with food. Then they started pushing it back to Little Mountain.

It was too late. The flood arrived, turning the ground to mud and bogging the wheelbarrow. As the water level rose, the barrow floated free, and they were able to push it along, but soon the water was too deep for them. They started floating along with the barrow, but the current was pulling it away from Little Mountain.

That was when the monsters came around to help. You see, the Mactavishes had never seen any of them, but the billabong by their home on the banks of Mustard Creek was full of monsters.

These were music-loving monsters who crept out and lurked in the shadows and lolled in the shallows whenever Grandma and Grandpa sat on their verandah, either playing duets on the viola and violin, or listening to evening concerts on the radio.

They always hid, in case they frightened Grandma and Grandpa, but now all the monsters agreed that they just had to help them.

“If they get flooded out,” cried a small moat monster, “they might sell up to a tuba player!” The other moat monsters quivered at the thought. None of them liked tubas.

So she and the other moat monsters swam up to help the Mactavishes, giving them something to stand on in the deep water.

That worked until Grandpa said “This is rather fishy—the ground here feels squishy!” As quick as a flash, the moat monsters knew they had been noticed, and they swam away, leaving Grandma and Grandpa clinging to their barrow, and drifting.

The billabong’s only Moby duck started pushing, but she almost capsized the floating barrow and that made the Mactavishes panic. Next, the local Schrödinger’s Cheshire elephant tried to help, but every time she appeared, Grandma and Grandpa screamed, and that made her disappear. A team of Invisigoths came up in a canoe and tried to help, but the Mactavishes got worried because they couldn’t see their helpers. The motets (which look like hats) tried to help, but Grandpa had a hat-hating attack, and started to panic.

Murray and Mustard had unicycled in through the flood, with just their snouts and eyes out of the water, and they had seen all of this. “They’re nervous,” said Mustard.

“Yes,” said Murray. “I think they’re scared of monsters, the silly things.”

“Maybe we could help, if we used our disguises,” said Mustard. “Good idea!” said Murray, opening the disguise kit. They put on false moustaches and chef’s hats and swam over. “Hello,” said Murray in a bad French accent. “Hello! Who are you?” Grandma asked.

 “We are Gascon and Gourmand, ze famous unicycling chefs of Normandy. May we ‘elp you?” Grandma and Grandpa spotted the phoney accents, but the Mactavishes were both keen cooks. Not knowing Gordon, they thought anybody in a chef’s hat should be trusted, and so they accepted Murray and Mustard’s help to get back to high ground.

When they all came ashore on Little Mountain, Grandma saw that their two new friends were a funny build for chefs, but they did have unicycles, and when she unpacked the barrow, they praised Grandpa’s choices of curry powder and custard powder.

Even when Murray and Mustard sniffed the curry powder and sneezed their moustaches off, the Mactavishes still trusted them. When the other monsters came out of the water and apologised for scaring them, the Mactavishes began to relax.

The couple cooked a meal for all their guests, gave them a concert, and felt quite sad when a helicopter came to rescue them, forcing all the monsters to hide in the water.

Two months later when the flood had gone, the Mactavishes returned and went down to the billabong with their violin and viola. They played the Mozart first spring duo for violin and viola in G Major, (K. 423), and all the monsters came out of the water, smiling.

Now, as soon as Grandma Mactavish hears the swish and clang of unicycles on the cattle grid, she starts making a large pan of curry, while Grandpa makes the custard. Then later, they always give a concert, always ending up with their own version of Dueling Banjos, arranged for violin and viola, and Murray and Mustard live as happily as two mud alligators in curry and custard. The other monsters have settled back into the billabong and started the world’s first and only lagerphone band that provides backing for violin and viola duets.

 

Not to be mistaken for granite

This is lifted from the book I am currently about to sign off on. I hope it will be published under the title What On Earth?

* 

In 2017, I went to Sri Lanka to look (among other things) at the site of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami. Stopping at Polonnaruwa, I saw several massive statues of the Buddha, all carved from a local rock, often called a “banded granite”. While I was trained as a botanist, I once studied a bit of geology, and worked with geologists, so I smelt a rat. To my aging botanist’s eye, the rock was gneiss, one of the metamorphic rocks. That meant that it was no sort of granite.

Reclining Buddha carved from local rock, Polonnaruwa, Sri Lanka, with a close-up. 
Yes, it was gneiss.

Some 60 km away by winding road, there is a large rock called Sigiriya, a name derived from the Sanskrit Sīnhāgiri, meaning Lion Rock, rather like Sinhapura, the Sanskrit for Lion City, which is now Singapore. About 1500 years ago, a time when blue body paint was the height of fashion among my ancestors, an advanced Hindu culture established a fortress on top of Sigiriya. As tourists do, we climbed to the top, and so I saw the rock, close up.

Sigiriya Rock, Sri Lanka, but what sort of rock is it?

Sigiriya is built on three layers of gneiss, but many web sites say the stone is granite, and a few assert that it is a volcanic plug—which would make it basalt! I had looked this up before going there, and found that the many contributors to Wikipedia dodge the issue, simply calling Sigiriya “a massive column of rock nearly 200 metres high”. I knew in advance that I needed a closer look. 

Now clearly, ‘granite’, without any doubt an igneous rock, forged and assembled in the planet’s fiery depths, means different things to different people, especially those with little in the way of geological training. It really isn’t rock(et) science, though. 

To a poet, any hard rock is granite, while a stone mason calls any rock with visible crystals granite, but geologists divide those big-crystal rocks up into granite, granodiorite, diorite, gabbro and more. The poet’s granite and the mason’s granite may not be granite at all, and a friend (not a geologist) says he once read that most Australian “granites” are really a relation, granitic porphyry.

On top of Sigiriya rock, I recalled having written a story about the Rosetta Stone while wearing my science journalist hat, some fifteen years before my climb. The tale began with an Australian quiz show causing a bit of fuss and bother after somebody found an apparent error that had been made a year earlier.

The Rosetta Stone: what sort of stone is it? 
Could it be mistaken for granite?

A contestant had said the Rosetta Stone was made of obsidian, but the quizmaster, looking at his cards, ruled that it was in fact basalt. The producers later conceded that it was “really granite”, and said that the contestant should have another chance to win the big money. The three named rocks are quite different, so what was going on? The Rosetta Stone was carved in 196 BCE, and it carries three inscriptions, saying the same thing in Greek, in Egyptian demotic script, and in hieroglyphics.

The content of the three texts is fairly boring, a list of taxes repealed by Ptolemy V, but the use of three languages made the stone very exciting when it was found in 1799 by French forces fighting in Egypt in the Napoleonic Wars. When the French lost a major battle, the stone became a prize of war, handed over to the victors, and placed on display in the British Museum in 1802, where it remains. Nobody seems to have asked the Egyptians what they thought (or think, now) about that… 

The Rosetta Stone, the key to decoding hieroglyphics, was described by its original French finders as ‘une pierre de granite noir’ (‘a stone of black granite’), but these were not geologists speaking. When Egyptologists called it “black granite”, they just meant a dark, fine-grained granodiorite from Aswan. 

A geologist’s granite has large and very obvious crystals of quartz, orthoclase and other minerals like mica. Forming at a great depth, it cools very slowly, leaving enough time for large crystals to develop. Granite is typically 40% quartz (silicon dioxide), and that means it is normally pale in appearance.

Basalt, on the other hand, is black to medium grey, and while it may contain a few larger bits of the minerals olivine and plagioclase, it is typically aphanitic, a term geologists use to indicate igneous rocks in which the grain size is small (less than 0.5 mm), so any grains or crystals cannot be seen with the naked eye.

That leaves us no further forward: why was a piece of granodiorite labelled basalt? Granodiorite is similar to granite, because it has quartz and plagioclase (with no orthoclase), but it also contains biotite and hornblende. It is typically darker than granite, but still a long way from basalt.

British scientists always called the Rosetta Stone basalt, and probably nobody gave the geology much thought, because it was the text cut into the stone that mattered, not the rock itself. When the stone was cleaned in 1998, it was found to be covered with black wax, printer’s ink, used to obtain contact-prints of the inscriptions, finger grease and dirt, with white paint in the incised lettering to make it stand out. 

Calling the blackened stone basalt made some sort of sense, maybe.
Andrew Middleton and Dietrich Klemm saw that the cleaned stone was not basalt at all, and they published their findings in 2003. In chemical terms, they said, the stone is more like tonalite (that lost me as well, so don’t worry!).

If you want to be precise, the Rosetta Stone is made of granodiorite that has probably been exposed to some extra heating. It definitely isn’t basalt, but neither should it be taken for granite—nor mistaken for granite, either.

Clearing the Snowy Mountains for winter

To foreigners, Australia is always seen as a warm, almost tropical land, but we also have our snow.  In the south of New South Wales, the aptly-named Snowy Mountains reach 2000 metres, and the highest peaks usually carry small remnants of snow, right through the hot days of summer.  Looking more like lumps of muddy ice, they slowly melt, then partially re-freeze at night, only to melt again the next day, providing a trickle of water to the plants of the windy and exposed areas above the treeline.

Now, as the first chill winds of our winter blow up out of the Antarctic, the alpine vegetation has turned brown, the first snow drifts of the coming winter are starting to grow under sheltered overhangs, and the traditional graziers have moved into the area to round up their free range flocks before the cruel cold of midwinter.  In the past, these graziers ran cattle over the ‘High Country’.  Now we know more about the ecological damage caused by these animals' hooves, and cattle are now replaced by light-footed polyesters.

Because of the name, most people assume the polyester filament is a polymer, like polythene, but this is a false derivation.  The first European visitor to the area was Count Strzelecki, a Pole, who named our highest peak Mount Kosciusko after a famous Polish patriot.  It was Strzelecki (an excellent geologist, by the way) who named it the ‘polyesta’ after the traditional  furry winter socks worn by Polish peasants.  The complex laws of zoological naming forced the spelling change, as the name Polyesta had already been assigned to a completely hairless lizard by another Polish scientist with a warped sense of humour.

The Australian polyester, Polyester kosciuskensis, is a large and harmless arachnid, related to the flannelweb spider Polyester onkaparingensis, which is found below the treeline.  The flannelweb makes a blanket-like web in two layers, and nestles between the blankets, gaining warmth from the paralysed birds that are its main prey (the birds often live five days after they are caught), but their ‘flannel’ is useless for commercial purposes, as it cannot be combed, worked or spun, as it is extruded in the form of tight spirals.

The polyester, on the other hand, covers its body in long threads of ordinary spider silk, using this cover as water-proofing, insulation, and camouflage.  The wild specimens are smallish -- about the size of a hamburger, but the Australian research organisation, the CSIRO has succeeded in producing a domesticated strain of much larger polyesters, about the size of a dinner plate, and with a much finer coat, which is produced in much greater quantity.

The wild specimens are ruthless hunters of small vertebrates: frogs, lizards, small fish, and even the occasional young snake, but they seem never to attack birds or mammals, and have been shown to be non-venomous to all of the larger mammals of Australia.  The larger cultivated breeds also avoid warm-blooded vertebrates, but they specialise in larger snakes and the introduced rainbow trout.

This presents something of a problem, with ‘sporting fishermen’ complaining about the loss of a valuable resource, the trout, while green groups are concerned about the ecological effects of falling snake populations, and delighted at the attacks on the feral trout.  They are more concerned, however, at the risk the polyesters represent to certain of the alpine frog species, and the authorities have been asked to build a polyester-proof fence along part of the Ramshead Range.

Tradition, however, is on the side of the polyester herders, who drive their flocks up into the High Country in the middle of October, just as the ski season is at an end, as they have done since time immemorial or 1999.  There are twenty such operations, and each herd carries subtle DNA tags which allow the herds to be separated at the end of the season.  So far, there have been few examples of cross-breeding between the herds, so this does not appear likely to be a problem.

Now it is time to round the polyesters up again, and bring them down to safety for the winter.  Fish-oil lures draw most of the polyesters in to the mustering sites, and trained dogs are used to round the stragglers.  The dogs are also used to drive the polyesters into flat trays, which are then loaded and stacked on trucks to carry the polyesters down to sun-warmed sheds in the valleys below the snow-line.

Once there, the polyesters will be fed a rich meal of fish waste and abattoir offal, which causes them to moult, to swell and burst their skins, which can then be gathered and sent to the factories for processing.  For the next seven days, the polyesters are at terrible risk, until their new coat is hard enough for them to cover it in a new layer of web, but in the sheds on the valley floor, very few of the animals are ever lost.

Research continues on transgenic implantation of genes from the closely related flannelweb spider, in the hope of producing a hardy breed which can survive outdoors right through the year.  So far, these experiments have only resulted in spiders which produce commercially useless woven coats, rather like the flannelweb spider's ‘blankets’.

In the past, the authorities have quietly allowed the misconception about the true origins of ‘polyester’ to go unchecked.  Now, as the polyester industry approaches maturity, the herders are less concerned about people's reactions to wearing clothes made of spider web.  They can sell all the polyester they produce, and they argue that nobody minds wearing silk.  You are likely to hear more about the polyester herders of Australia's High Country in the future.

Other related matters: 
The Giant Dung Beetle
The Yandackworroby Cup
The Yandackworroby Pub
The Fancelli sisters' castle
The Fancelli sisters' store
The Fancelli sisters' gym and bar

The Fancelli sisters' gym and health bar

The Fancelli sisters were devastated recently when their landlord put up the rent on their shop.  They have had a successful time over the last twelve months, but now they have been forced to move on.  Regular readers may recall that the sisters originally ran their castle museum, until they were forced out by a malicious council by-laws inspector.

Now an even more savage blow has fallen upon them.  They left their castle in despair and opened up a corner store and coffee shop, while continuing with a few of their more prized sidelines, like their herb-enriched tomato sauce, second-hand goods, seedlings and some most unusual home-made and highly illegal liqueurs.  It was the liqueurs which were their undoing, as the landlord discovered what they were doing, and tried to blackmail them.  Being women of principle, the sisters left, taking almost everything with them: the prawn heads under the floor boards are something we need not go into …

Now they have taken over a bankrupt gymnasium in the middle of our suburb's shopping centre, and set up their business there.  They have evicted the Coke machine, but the taller Miss Fancelli is continuing her tradition of drastic tea-brewing.  Over the past year, the shorter Miss Fancelli has become a true master of the espresso coffee machine, in between offering sculpture and plumbing courses for the elderly at the local technical college.

I am delighted to be able to bring my readers  news of the world's first fluid-computer wall-mounted coffee machine and sculpture, which is now beginning to take shape on the highest wall of the converted squash courts.

The essential principle is binary logic.  As a fluid passes from the stem of a Y junction to the two upper arms, it will usually flow into one arm only, unless it is given a nudge, after which it flows into the other arm until nudges again.  This simple bistable unit forms the basis of the coffee machine, with sensors shunting weak coffee back through the grounds, and others pushing cool coffee back through a heating unit.

That, at least, was the starting point.  With the Fancellis, nothing stays simple for long, and the logic units started to multiply.  They replaced the original pipes with clear glass, added more controls to maintain a supply of hot filtered water, fitted a solar-powered peristaltic pump, and began to plot serious computing power.  By the end of the year, they expect to have something with about the same power and usefulness as the first Altair microcomputer, but a great deal more aesthetic charm.

At the moment, they have to use mains power to drive the pump on cloudy days and after dark, but they have hinted to me that they are working on a couple of pleasing solutions.  Given that their favourite movie is The African Queen, I suspect that it will involve steam in some form.

Other related matters: 
The Giant Dung Beetle
The Yandackworroby Cup
The Yandackworroby Pub
The Fancelli sisters' castle
The Fancelli sisters' store
Bringing in the polyestas

 

The Fancelli sisters' store

The Fancelli sisters were later forced to give up the Rhine Castle tea rooms and museum, their home of many years. I described a while back how they survived mainly by taking in paying visitors, but a new Council ordinance put an end to all that. In fact, by the time I reported on their castle, the move had already been forced upon them. I hesitated to report their problems then, but they have sprung back, and I can report both their calamity and how they got over it.

They sold up and moved out, not without regret. Still, they took much of their "collections" with them, shuttling back and forth in their elderly Studebaker between the castle and their new home and base of operations, a corner shop quite close to where I live.

There was a time when Australians always shopped at "the corner shop", a small store which carried most of the main household needs, situated in walking distance of people's homes. Cars were rare, refrigeration was little more than an ice box, and many foods had to be bought fresh each day. After World War II, about the time the Fancelli sisters' Studebaker crossed the Pacific, Australians started to acquire cars. That was when the writing went up on the wall for the corner shop.

A few of the shops survived, if they were in key locations: near a park, close to factories, or opposite a school, for example. The sisters have found such a little store, across a quiet street from a sheltered park at the end of a Sydney harbour backwater. There is a stream of locals driving past the door each afternoon to buy bread and milk, and on weekend afternoons, picnic groups besiege them all day for ice creams and drinks. Each morning, the sister on duty can sit serenely enthroned in the shop window, listening to music, drinking tea, reading, and serving the occasional customer.

That occasional visitor needs a strong stomach for their music and a cast-iron stomach for their tea. Those who qualify may sit at one of the free tables, but you need either eclectic musical tastes, or a foreknowledge of which sister is "on" that day. One certainty is that the music will be loud, and superbly reproduced, but it can vary greatly, unlike the industrial-strength tea.

The taller Miss Fancelli (as I have mentioned before, nobody seems to know their names, other than "Miss Fancelli") has austere tastes in music, favouring opera and vocal music above all else. She sings along with most of the operas and adds a new dimension to what she calls her "light relief", the CD of "The Three Tenors".

Her voice was probably once a rich contralto, but now her tannin-impregnated larynx usually gives a close approximation to a tenor in need of minor repairs (a rebore, perhaps?). The taller Miss Fancelli draws in the "blue-rinse set", women of past retirement age, and she is now taking names for a Wednesday matinee opera theatre party.

The shorter Miss Fancelli ranges across the full range of 20th century music, with a strong Australian bias. Her collection includes John Cage, Arnold Schonberg, several Australian groups favoured by moshers (if this means nothing, take it to mean "heavy metal"), the aboriginal rock band Yothu Yindi, and the fusion groups Gondwanaland and Sirocco. She also favours several well-known avant garde Australian composers, all of whom she claims as former lovers. Her current following is younger, but equally loyal. I cannot, however, speak of her lovers.

Saturday and Sunday mornings are special. The sisters both work, and offer us their version of a compromise: full-strength Romantic pops. "Nothing heavier than Mendelssohn, nothing lighter than Tchaikovsky" is their motto, and it seems to work well. They are both kept flat out serving hot scones and their potent tea (though the taller sister is now teaching herself to brew equally dangerous coffee!!).

Beyond this, their shop is still a shop, selling staple foodstuffs to the locals, but being the Fancellis, they have already started to acquire a wider range of stock. If a customer asks for something they do not carry, the sisters will buy some in. If they need something themselves, they order a wholesale consignment, then sell the rest at retail rates. The shorter Miss Fancelli delights in attending auction sales, and this has also added many novelties. She tells me she is currently looking for an espresso machine for her sister.

Already they have been forced to add new shelves, right up to the ceiling on all the spare walls to carry such items as a range of wallpaper oddments, bath toys, stationery, Willow-pattern china, and a range of brass and steel screws. The second-hand bookshelf has been relocated three times, ending up as a rummage bin near the door.

Kitschy "scene in a snowstorm" globes are doing very well, especially the tasteful one with two dolphins on a seesaw and "Greetings from the Gold Coast" in luminous gold letters. The snow flakes also glow in the dark, and the globes have been given a special shelf of their own "just in case they're radioactive, dear". The ceiling has sprouted hooks from which some of their lighter and bulkier stock items dangle.

At the back of the shop, the garage that contains their venerable Studebaker, is also home to a load of bagged sand and cement, pool chemicals, scented candles, dog food, home brew beer kits and more, including a huge pile of the sisters' own brand of tomato sauce (for Americans, that is ketchup), sealed into any sort of recycled glass container they can gather in. Each Friday, their car can be seen cruising the streets, ahead of the recycling truck, as the sisters maintain their bottle supplies. Beside the garage is the greenhouse where they grow their "secret herbs" for the sauce.

I am happy to report that they have not only brought their collection of historic vacuum cleaners with them from the Rhine Castle, but they have developed a profitable sideline in selling new ones, and several are on display. On the footpath out front, they have set up a table with seedlings in punnets and tubes. The taller Miss Fancelli offers punnets of herbs and annuals, the shorter Miss Fancelli germinates the seeds of hard-to-grow Australian native plants.

One small problem with their diversification is that no single part of their business is totally viable. During the day, they may sell three sandwiches, which means they break into a loaf of sliced bread, and at the end of the day, they still have most of a loaf left over.

When the last customers of the day come seeking bread, the eccentric sisters will offer them a part-loaf at discount prices. It says a lot for the locals that this has now become accepted, although their attempts to dispose of parts of bottles of milk are still being resisted. But whatever else you say about them, the sisters have managed to turn the clock back to the days when a corner store would and could sell almost anything. For that alone, we love them.

Other related matters: 
The Giant Dung Beetle
The Yandackworroby Cup
The Yandackworroby Pub
The Fancelli sisters' castle
The Fancelli sisters' gym and bar
Bringing in the polyestas