Cottee's

Long before Aussie kids swigged Coca Cola and Pepsi there was Cottee’s.

The Cottee’s business was started by dairy farmer Spencer Milton Cottee (1864-1944) in 1927. 

According to the Cottee’s website, Spencer Cottee grew passionfruit in addition to his dairying activities, with such success that he often had large quantities left over. Not wanting to waste it, he began creating the drink that remains well known today, Passiona. It too was a success so in the 1920’s Cottee began to make other flavours of drinks as well. Demand forced the opening of a second factory with the business expanding into a second factory as well as diversifying by also going into the manufacture of jams, jellies and peanut butter. During World War 2 Cottee assisted the war effort by sending specially produced jams and juices rich in vitamins to Australian soldiers serving overseas. The orange peels left over became Cottee’s Marmalade. The 50’s and 60’s saw the company continue to grow. 1970 witnessed the company merging with General Food Corp USA to become Cottee’s General Food Limited, which was acquired by Cadbury Schweppes in 1984 which in turn was acquired by Asahi Breweries in 2009. 

Its products remain popular and the 1980's jingle “My dad picks the fruit that goes to Cottee’s to make the cordial that I like best” is part of the psyche of every Aussie kid and adult from those days. (How many readers used to sing the bastardised version: “My dad picks his nose that goes to Snottee’s to make the cordial that I like best”).

Some early pics:

Spencer Cottee at rear, with moustache

So why am I telling you all of this?

Because the Cottee’s speech ad that is currently on the Teev is one of my favourites.

There are two slightly different versions, below is the text and a link to each.

Each ad finishes with the voiceover "There's a lot to celebrate when you're a kid. Lucky Cottee's makes a lot."

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#1

Speaker: Listen, although these days may seem commonplace, with the clarity of hindsight they'll crystallise in our minds as our best! Jessica..

Jessica: Yeah?

Speaker: At your wedding to Nozzah we shall all set sail on the warm winds of nostalgia back to this happy place. The friendships. The adventures. 

All: Yeah!

Speaker: The fun. 

All: Yeah! (One of the boys blows a raspberry on his arm).

Speaker: But, we are not adults yet. 

All: No!

(All clink glasses containing Cottee’s Cordial). 

All: To the best days of our lives.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITsQ6rNvNKk

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Speaker: Listen, although these days may seem commonplace, in years to come they will crystallise in our minds as our best! Jessica . . .

Jessica: Yeah?

Speaker: At your wedding to Nozzah we shall all look back to the friendships, the adventures . . .

All: Yeah!

Speaker: The fun. 

All: Yeah!

Speaker: But, we are not adults yet. 

All: No!

(All clink glasses containing Cottee’s Cordial). 

All: To the best days of our lives.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YzZfe-_wQE

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Monday's Mixed Bag

A potpourri of items to start the week:

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A valentine by Alex to Jodie on Valentine’s Day last week published in the Launceston Examiner in Tasmania:

Wonder if Alex is still sleeping on the couch.

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Btw, according to the Online Dictionary, the word "potpourri" has the following meanings:

1. a collection of mixed flower petals dried and preserved in a pot to scent the air

2. a collection of unrelated or disparate items; miscellany

3. (Music, other) a medley of popular tunes

4. (Cookery) a stew of meat and vegetables

The Online Etymology Dictionary says this about the word:

• The word dates from the 1610's and means "mixed meats served in a stew." The word comes from the Spanish “olla podrida”, meaning “rotten pot”, a reference to the meats in the stew. The French borrowed it and translated it to pot pourri, the word “pourri” meaning "to rot".

• The notion of it being a medley led to it being applied to a mixture of dried flower and spices, first recorded in English in 1749.

• The sense of a "miscellaneous collection" is recorded from 1855.

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Son Thomas thought I was unfair to spiders in last week’s Funny Friday and brought the following to my attention:

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Given the couple of Hitler and Churchill posts last week, it is apt to repost the following:

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Some Winter Olympics Facts and Trivia

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The first winter Olympics were held in 1924 at Chamonix, France.

10,004 people paid to watch the first Winter Olympics in Chamonix.

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No Winter Olympics has ever been held in the Southern Hemisphere.

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The first Winter Olympics saw 16 nations compete in 16 events.

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Winter Olympics have 7 categories of sports, namely biathlon, bobsleigh, curling, ice hockey, luge, skating and skiing.

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The last time Summer and Winter Olympics were held in the same year was in 1992. The Summer Olympics were held in Barcelona, Spain and the Winter Games were in Albertville, France.

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USA has hosted the most number of Winter Olympics with 4. It is followed by France with 3.

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Norway has won the most medals at Winter Olympics with a total of 303. The Norwegians also have a record 107 Winter Olympics gold medals.

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There have been four deaths at Winter Olympics. Two lugers and two skiers, both died during practice sessions.

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Artificial snow was first used during Winter Olympics at Lake Placid, USA in 1980.

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Norwegian cross country skier, Bjorn Daehli has won the most medals at Winter Olympics. In the three Winter Olympics he has competed, Daehli has won 12 medals including 8 gold medals.

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Cross country skier Raisa Smetanina (USSR) is the winningest woman medalist, taking 10 medals (four gold; five silver; one bronze).

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American athlete, Eddie Eagan is the only person in Olympic history to have one gold medals at both Summer and Winter Olympics.  He won a summer gold in 1920 in boxing and a winter gold in 1932 in the 4 man bobsled.

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The opening ceremony of the 1960 Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley, USA was organized by Walt Disney.

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Great Britain won the Gold at the Curling event at the 1924 Winter Games, although it wasn’t recognized until 2006, 82 years later.  This was because the Glasgow Herald filed a claim on behalf of the families of the team that the sport had been an official category and not a demonstration sport.

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Sochi Facts and Trivia . . . 

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Most expensive ever

Sochi is an all-time bank-buster, costing a staggering $51 billion – enough to pave the town’s streets in caviar, and more than four times its original budget of $12 billion.

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Winter warmer

Sochi isn’t halfway up a mountain; it’s actually a subtropical resort town where temperatures rarely drop below 12 C. Events that need snow – like, nearly all of them – will be staged an hour’s drive away in the Krasnaya Polyana mountains. Sochi is the warmest city to ever host Winter Olympics. It is also the longest city in Europe, spanning over 90 miles along the shores of the Black Sea.

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BMW bobsleds

The luxury car maker knows a bit about speed, so it shouldn’t be too surprising that they’ve constructed the USA team’s carbon-fibre wrapped bobsled. No word on whether it could do donuts in the Olympic village car park.

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Going for gold

When you win gold in Sochi, you’ve really won silver. That’s because 2014 winners’ medals contain 516 grams of silver and just six grams of gold. But the $122,000 Russia’s pledged to each winner might soften the blow.

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Richest athlete

Rad US snowboarder Shaun White has an estimated worth of $20 million, mainly earned from various pre-Sochi endorsements – including Red Bull.

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Out of this world

Olympians winning gold medals on February 15 will be rewarded with gold medals made of Chelyabinsk meteor fragments. Why? The date is exactly a year after the space rock crashed into a lake in the Ural Mountains in central Russia.

70kg chunk of the Chelyabinsk meteorite pulled from Lake Chebarkul in Russia’s Ural Mountains 

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Torch travels

The Sochi Olympic torch has covered more kilometres than a Qantas pilot. All up, 14,000 people carried the flame, using many modes of transportation, over 65,000 kilometres for 123 days across 2900 cities and villages. The torch also went into space on board the International Space Station..

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Strong words

The Olympic motto is “Citius, Altius, Fortius”, which means “Faster, Higher, Stronger” for those who didn’t get their Masters in Latin.

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Stadium of light

The roof of the Fisht Stadium, built especially for these games, is covered in more than 30,000 LEDs, which flash different colours at night. At Sochi, it’ll be home to the hockey matches, before being used as a venue for football’s 2018 World Cup.

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Women ski-jumpers

Twelve new events debut at Sochi, including, after much lobbying, the women’s ski jump. Until recently, females were discouraged from taking part in the sport because it was (falsely) believed the hard landings would damage their uterus,

Germany’s varina Vogt wins the Olympic gold in the first Women’s Ski Jump event

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Maria Sharapova

Sochi has been home to the tennis star, Maria Sharapova. She moved to the Russian town when she was 2 and played tennis in a local park.

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Mascots

Mascots for the Sochi Winter Olympics are a polar bear, a hare and a leopard.

Sochi 2014 XXII. Olympic Winter Games / XI. Paralympic Winter Games

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Competing countries

88 countries will take part in Sochi Olympics. Some nations will make their debut, including Zimbabwe and Paraguay.

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Jamaican Bobsled Team

The Jamaican two-man bobsled team will be taking part at Sochi, the first time it has qualified since the 2002 Salt Lake Games, despite trying in 2006 and 2010. From a news item:

. . . 46-year-old Winston Watts, back at the Games after a 12-year absence, and brakeman Marvin Dixon, the Jamaican duo seeking to summon the spirit that inspired "Cool Runnings", the Hollywood movie based on the exploits of their ground-breaking predecessors from the 1988 Calgary Games. The team needed an Internet campaign to help raise the initial funds to finance their trip to Russia which produced about $80,000, with more cash flowing in from sponsors and their federation. The campaign had such success that Watts and Dixon had to plead with their fans to stop sending money, fearing they would be damned as greedy opportunists if they didn't call a halt. True to their roller-coaster build-up to Sochi, the Jamaican duo then arrived without their luggage and equipment, lost in transit between New York's JFK and the host city.

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Great Speeches: Winston Churchill's "Fight on the beaches" speech

The Speech:

Winston Churchill's "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall never surrender" speech to the British House of Commons, 4 June 1940.

Background:

When Germany refused to withdraw from Poland by 3 September 1939, as demanded by Britain, the latter declared war. As a result a number of other countries, including Australia, were automatically at war with Germany and its allies. The US, following an isolationist policy that saw the war as a European problem, remained out of the war although leasing military hardware to Britain. For the first few months there was little battle, leading to a description of it as The Phoney War. Neither side committed to a serious land offensive, notwithstanding that treaties obliged England and France to go to the aid of Poland. 

On 10 May 1940 Germany invaded France and the Low Countries, quickly defeating the French Army with its tactic of blitzkrieg (“lightning war”, a tactic based on speed and surprise and using a military force based around light tank units supported by planes and infantry). As part of the Battle of France, German armoured units pushed through the Ardennes to cut off and surround the Allied units that had advanced into Belgium. British and adjacent French forces were pushed back to the sea by the highly mobile and well organised German operation. With German forces advancing and the sea behind them, it looked like hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers, cut off from their support to the south and isolated at Dunkirk, would be killed, wounded and captured. 

Instead, the British government mounted a rescue operation named Operation Dynamo and sometimes referred to as the Miracle of Dunkirk. As the RAF kept the Luftwaffe at bay, thousands of ships were co-opted and volunteered to cross the English Channel to assist in the evacuation. Military destroyers sailed alongside small fishing boats, navy personnel and ordinary civilians in family craft made the trip over and over again, to evacuate 338,000 French and British troops, much more than had been thought possible. The evacuation took place between 27 May and 4 June 1940. On 4 June, 1940 British PM Winston Churchill addressed the House of Commons, calling the events in France "a colossal military disaster". The following are extracts from that speech, the famous “fight on the beaches” speech.

Link:

Hear part of it by clicking on:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkTw3_PmKtc

Some parts of the speech:

. . . the German eruption swept like a sharp scythe around the right and rear of the Armies of the north. Eight or nine armored divisions, each of about four hundred armored vehicles of different kinds, but carefully assorted to be complementary and divisible into small self-contained units, cut off all communications between us and the main French Armies. . . . Behind this armored and mechanized onslaught came a number of German divisions in lorries, and behind them again there plodded comparatively slowly the dull brute mass of the ordinary German Army and German people, always so ready to be led to the trampling down in other lands of liberties and comforts which they have never known in their own.

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When, a week ago today, I asked the House to fix this afternoon as the occasion for a statement, I feared it would be my hard lot to announce the greatest military disaster in our long history. I thought-and some good judges agreed with me-that perhaps 20,000 or 30,000 men might be re-embarked. But it certainly seemed that the whole of the French First Army and the whole of the British Expeditionary Force north of the Amiens-Abbeville gap would be broken up in the open field or else would have to capitulate for lack of food and ammunition. These were the hard and heavy tidings for which I called upon the House and the nation to prepare themselves a week ago. The whole root and core and brain of the British Army, on which and around which we were to build, and are to build, the great British Armies in the later years of the war, seemed about to perish upon the field or to be led into an ignominious and starving captivity.

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Nevertheless our thankfulness at the escape of our Army and so many men, whose loved ones have passed through an agonizing week, must not blind us to the fact that what has happened in France and Belgium is a colossal military disaster. The French Army has been weakened, the Belgian Army has been lost, a large part of those fortified lines upon which so much faith had been reposed is gone, many valuable mining districts and factories have passed into the enemy’s possession, the whole of the Channel ports are in his hands, with all the tragic consequences that follow from that, and we must expect another blow to be struck almost immediately at us or at France. We are told that Herr Hitler has a plan for invading the British Isles. This has often been thought of before. When Napoleon lay at Boulogne for a year with his flat-bottomed boats and his Grand Army, he was told by someone. “There are bitter weeds in England.” There are certainly a great many more of them since the British Expeditionary Force returned.

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I have, myself, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once again able to defend our Island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone. At any rate, that is what we are going to try to do. That is the resolve of His Majesty’s Government-every man of them. That is the will of Parliament and the nation. The British Empire and the French Republic, linked together in their cause and in their need, will defend to the death their native soil, aiding each other like good comrades to the utmost of their strength. 

Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.

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Some Dunkirk pics:

Allied soldiers await evacuation on the beaches at Dunkirk

Abandoned vehicles at Dunkirk

Ad hoc pier from abandoned vehicles and timber to assist in the evacuation

A recreation of the "little ships" evacuation at Dunkirk in 2010, the 70th anniversary

The Tamzine, the 4.5m fishing boat that was the smallest to take part in the Dunkirk evacuation, now on display in the Imperial War Museum in London.

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Funny Friday

Byter Jess, who is also a member of our Trivia team, was driving when she saw a large Huntsman spider walk across her windscreen. Spiders creep me out, I’m not afraid to say it, and if that makes me less than a complete man, so be it. Hunstmans come under the category of FBS, Big Spiders, and a FBS is heaps creepier than a FSS.

When Jess arrived at our house she asked Number 1 Son Thomas to check out her car. I don’t blame her.

I sent her a couple of pics of spiders by SMS and received replies, as follows

    My pic sent:

    Jess:  Ewww!!! I’m still scared shitless!

    My further pic sent:

    Jess:  And it did disappear!

So guess what the theme is today. . .

(some swearing)

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I said to my girlfriend, "Please get me a newspaper."

"Don't be silly," she replied, "you can borrow my iPad."

That spider never knew what hit it.

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A father watched his young daughter playing in the garden. He smiled as he reflected on how sweet and pure his little girl was. He thought about her seeing the wonders of nature through such innocent eyes. Suddenly she just stopped and stared at the ground. He went over to her to see what work of God had captured her attention. He noticed she was looking at two spiders mating.

"Daddy, what are those two spiders doing?" she asked. 

"They're mating," her father replied. 

"What do you call the spider on top?" she asked. 

"Daddy Longlegs" the father replied

"So, the other one is a Mommy Longlegs?" the little girl asked. 

As his heart soared with the joy of such a cute and innocent question, He replied "No dear. Both of them are Daddy Longlegs." 

The little girl, looking a little puzzled, thought for a moment, then, raised her foot, stomped them flat and said, "Well, we're not having any of that Brokeback-Mountain shit in our garden."

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Btw, speaking of Daddy Longlegs . . . 

A man poked what he thought was some hair, only to get a huge surprise.

See it at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgoG5BjFE7w

The arachnids are thought to be opiliones — more commonly called harvestmen or, in the U.S., daddy longlegs — which are known to congregate en masse.

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A few years ago I had a mate who had epilepsy.

I wish I had known, I just thought he kept walking into spider webs.

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My wife just told me to grow a pear...

What the fuck does fruit have to do with killing this spider?

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I'll never understand how a woman can pour boiling wax onto her upper thigh and rip the hair out by the root...

...but still be afraid of a harmless little spider.

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Corn Corner:

I saw a huge spider wearing a turban and carrying an AK-47 yesterday and I completely shit myself.

I'm guessing I have Iraqnophobia.

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