READERS WRITE

 

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Steve M sent me an email commenting on the Australia Day posts:

Great Bytes today, Otto. Loved the cricket stuff and especially loved the bush poem.

Agree with your sentiments.

Many thanks.

Steve m

Thank you, Steve.

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Likewise friend and colleague Tony G expressed appreciation for the Australia Day Thought for the Day:

Love the thought for the Day.

Thanks Tony.

The Thought was the victory song of the Australian cricket team, sung by the players after every victory:

Under the Southern Cross I stand,

A sprig of wattle in my hand,

A native of my native land,

Australia, you fucking beauty!

We should consider that our national anthem in place of one that has the words “Our home is girt by sea.”

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Steve also sent me a response to the photographs of urban hells around the world:

Amazing Bytes yesterday, Otto. What dreadful people creatures human beings are.

Thanks Steve.

As someone once said to me: “It’s the price you pay if you want a ten dollar angle grinder.” He was referring to the pollution arising from overseas countries where manufacture is cheap and without controls.

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David B commented on Big Things:

Love that you have captured the Kelpies atmosphere and all.

Hope that you are keeping strong.

David

Thanks Dave, I am.

The kelpies Dave was referring to are a pair of monumental steel horse-heads 30 metres high between the Scottish towns of Falkirk and Grangemouth. (A kelpie, or water kelpie is a mythical shape-shifting spirit inhabiting lochs in Scottish folklore. It is usually described as a grey or white horse-like creature, able to adopt human form.)

Some more pics to show size, scale, manner of construction and how they are variously illuminated:

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Ron T emailed a comment about the photographs of my father:

Your Dad was one handsome fellow. Folks of that generation were heroes in every respect.

Thanks Ron.

Some facts about my dad that I learned from relatives, he never spoke of these matters:

• His mother would hide him and his brother under floor boards covered by a carpet when the Nazis came looking for males to send to slave labour camps.
• Twice he was caught and sent, both times he jumped from a moving tarin Germany and made his way back home.
• On one such escape he was hidden by a German family.

After the war and migration to Australia, he often declared that that was the past, we should move on and not hold onto hate and hostility.

My mother retained her hostility for a long time. As I said in my eulogy of her (which I will post one day), this was a woman who still had the scars of German shrapnel on her leg, who saw the V2 rockets and the Hindenburg fly overhead. In her last days, in moments of hallucination, she was dreaming she was back in occupied Holland as a young girl, hearing the sound of goose-stepping Wehrmacht soldiers marching on cobblestones and fearing for her life. She overcame the negative feelings eventually when Dad started training German Shepherd dogs, bringing them both into contact with numerous German people, some of whom became friends.

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Thanks to those who welcomed me back when I had blog and internet issues, both at the same time ! !

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Charlie Z in the US sent me an email before those issues arose:

Otto - many thanks for the poetry and funny Fridays! Many have been passed on to friends who appreciate your humour!

Thanks Chezza. Interesting that you used the Australian/English spelling on ‘humour’. A result of living in Australia?

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David B emailed a comment on Maya Angelou’s poem My Younger Days, the final verse of which is:

Though my hair has turned to grey

and my skin no longer fits,

On the inside, I’m the same old me,

It’s the outside’s changed a bit.

David commented:

Hi Otto

This resonates with me and reminds me of a comment made by a contemporary. A comment with which I very much agree.

"When I look in the bathroom mirror I wonder who that old man staring back at me is."

Regards

David

Thanks David.

I responded to him:

I know the feeling – mentally and psychologically I don’t feel the age I see in the mirror.

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David G (is every second person in the world named David?) set me a comment on Christmas day:

Otto

Merry Christmas. Thanks so much for receiving your Bytes each day. It always extends my breakfast to a second coffee and makes a great start to the day.

Really appreciate the Christmas card, your sticking to tradition (ie mailing Christmas cards, Otto) is fabulous.

Trust 2025 brings good health to you and your family and look forward to catching up sometime.

David and Lorraine

Thanks Dave.

By the way:

Tim B liked the following, which I used on a Christmas card one year (best image I have been able to find):

‘Santa and the Drover’

by commercial artist and illustrator Jack Waugh (1910-1996).

Jack Waugh’s 1964 painting of Santa pausing on his travels to share a cup of billy tea with an outback drover, whilst the drover’s horse and Santa’s reindeer tentatively become acquainted, was painted for Arnott’s Biscuits and was featured on the lid of their Christmas biscuit tins. So popular that it was repeated year after year, it also appeared on the rear page of The Australian Women’s Weekly for a number of years each Christmas. Waugh, born in Lakemba and raised in Glebe, used himself as the model for the drover. Note the kelpie (Australian cattle dog, not the Scottish horse) next to the drover.