Author: whatarethechancesofthat

Andrew Sutherland has worked every job you can imagine as well as some you can't such as toga-wearing barman and professional Australian Rules footballer.

Christmas Alarm Bells In Doncaster

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The fire alarm at Doncaster Shoppingtown, situated in a suburb of Melbourne, works piercingly well, spearing off the marble tiles floors.

Unfortunately the PA system can’t match it. Its distressed voice (“There is no need to PANIC! Everything is ALRIGHT! Sorry for any INCONVENIENCE!”) battles its own static and the unrelenting screaming siren.

Suddenly, the Christmas cheer is seared off the Doncastrian faces.

The demographics of this suburb comprises big earning men and their big spending wives.

One of the latter I see bending forward to look at diamond embedded brooches when she becomes stilled on her stilettos (she’s a goner if there’s a fire), her face encrusted with fret.

These wealthy-by-marriage women, protected for most of their adult lives from the elements, from cheap synthetic fibres, and the ungodly stench of rubber in Kmart, appear to be confronting fear for the first time.

One has neat bobbed hair and a faux Navy officer jacket with the big gold buttons. I imagine her in the navy and all this screeching belonging to diving Kamikazes and exploding ammunition stores and her groaning ship, shot full of holes, plunging completely vertically into the depths. Would she stand proud saluting or leap shrieking into the oil doused fire ridden sea?

If a major fire had taken hold in the shopping centre it would not have been a pleasant spectacle. The rush to the exits – Tom Ford parfum igniting necks and Estee Lauder foundation melting faces – accompanied by the clicking and clacking of Jimmy Choo heels on the light reflective but spectacularly slippery floor.

And those that make it to the stairwells risk – if they can’t keep the mortal dread under wraps and fail to out bustle their equally impractically attired competitors – undignified and fatal collisions with each of the raggedly finished concrete steps.

Soap

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Common hand soap has no antibacterial properties so it doesn’t kill germs on us; or itself.

I sure hope they wash the pigs whose fat goes into making it.

Talking of bacteria, there have been warnings of  potential outbreaks of new fatal diseases caused by the overuse of antibiotics.

Also the obsessive pre operative hand scubbing by surgeons has led to the formation of lethal scour-resistant micro-organisms. 

Fed up with being scuffed away over the past 60 years and mocked by trauma surgeons in pink gowns some germs have developed the strength and agility of Greg Inglis. They can side step and fend off Chux Super Wipes and all sorts of abrasive scrubs. It is even thought some have no problem holding on against a full frontal assault from a steel brush. 

Hospitals have started ordering angle grinders from Bunnings.

Recognizing The Signs

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An international  convention on sign language held in Austin, Texas was turned into a shambles when the representatives realized they had no idea what the other representatives were ‘talking’ about.

Frustration at not being understood soon turned into angry confrontation. Official hand signs were abandoned for offensive common hand signals. The Iraqi representative , remonstrating with his American counterpart , mimicked blowing himself up. The American responded by pretending to be a cruise missile and was seen to mouth the words: “God bless America”.

Proceedings then quickly descended into widespread mimicking of throat slitting and disembowelment by sword.

All representatives were  admitted to the Austin Memorial Hospital with severe exhaustion. It sure is tiring telling someone you want to kill them in sign language!

Naturally evolved sign languages embraced by the deaf community (in contrast to coded languages that are created by the hearing society to represent the spoken language) often use facial expressions and even have their own ‘words’ which are expressed by movement of the mouth.

Unfortunately those words can be similar to the words of another sign language but with completely different meanings. For example, and this was apparently the conversation that caused the outbreak of communicated violence, the New Zealander ‘told’ the Irish representative : “Rtyu ftui dfroo r meeni nuit!” (“Hope you’re having a wonderful time!”). In Irish Sign Language those words translate as “Your mother is a whore!”

Furthermore the exaggerated facial expressions of American Sign Language ( involving a lot of teeth and smiling, like those overacting extras you see in bars and cafes on US  sitcoms) began to annoy the other representatives.

As did the fact that the Americans didn’t  have signs for the other countries because before the convention they had no idea other countries existed.

The Australian was getting on everyone’s nerves by standing up close and mouthing “Crikey!” into their ears instead of to their face.

The debacle has renewed calls for a universal sign language.

In actual fact the United Nations (trying to save money: all those headphones cost a fortune) briefly trialled a universal tactile sign language. Examples included:-

Arm around shoulder:  “We are all brothers and sisters”

Hand shake: “Fruitful dialogue has taken place”

Touching each other when you’re all in agreement is a noble idea however when there was disagreement the tactile language developed ugly forms:-

Spitting in the left eye: “You Stalinist stooge!”

Right jab to the nose: “You humanist fence sitting dog!”

Tactile sign language had an even more violent form in the New York City Sign Language (NYCSL) during the 1970’s:-

Knee to the face: “Take that you honky”

Kick to the throat: “Do you understand that you black b*st*rd?”

Elbow to the ear: “Is it all clear now you Asiatic turd?”

Of course the first official discriminatory and brutal tactile language was in Nazi Germany. Extreme examples of  the NSL used by deaf Nazis were as follows:-

(Actually) Shooting a jew with a machine gun: “Kike son of a bitch!”

(Actually) Lynching a homosexual from a tree: “You poofter you!”

Non-jewish and heterosexual deaf Nazis abandoned the language when they discovered that the Nazi hearing community planned on shooting and lynching them also.

The GJSL (German Jewish Sign Language) had as part of its vocabulary the shooting of Nazis (“Die you Aryan Supremacist mother f#ck#r!”) but being a pacifist language they used blanks.