Gobsmacked

Speaking of balloons -

A deflating juxtaposition of images (adjoining pages) in the Gosford City SUN last week.

(Photo credits: Left, Phillip Hearne, Right, Benoit Doppagne)

A year in the Clouds

The Backpage this week has a post using the balloon as a metaphor to talk about strategies with limited sustainability for boosting art development, and to discuss "drift" and "spectacle"

A more concrete balloon story, is from the Gosford Times, 20th August, 1897.

"A pigeon has been shot by the captain of a sealing vessel in the Arctic Ocean, bearing the message, signed by Herr Andree, the aeronaut, who recently started his balloon for the North Pole. Herr Andree’s message, the date of which was illegible, stated that he had passed 82 degrees north at a good speed, and was still going northward."

A LAST GLIMPSE OF THE BALLOON AS IT SAILED AWAY FOR A YEAR IN THE CLOUDS

Must be Something in the Water

The nexus between frogs and Coca Cola Amatil is not new, (check the Frog’s Head in in Diet Coke story) It highlights a fundamental conflict between the profit imperatives of a global corporation and local realities; social and ecological. This was most clearly seen in the well-publicised catastrophe in India.


For Gosford residents, the issue is given greater sharpness with the generous arrangements offered to Coca Cola Amatil to take water from the Mangrove Mountain aquifer at this time of water shortage and global warming.
With growing obesity, dental decay in children, etc., perhaps we need to take an inside look at the consequences of consuming beverages of this kind.
Today the Howard government refused the advice from health organizations to restrict TV junk food advertising screened in children’s viewing time. Why do they think these companies advertise if not to increase sales of junk food?
Of course at this time when water trading is being touted as a solution to government over-allocation of water licenses and over-consumption by Gosford and Wyong Councils, the fundamental question of how water became “privatised” is overlooked.

Return of the Frogs

Sharyn Walker, no doubt inspired by her participation in …the Space Between…, and her voice-over work on the resulting DVD, has sent us the following:

Dear frogs of Gosford:

O no, no. I am not the frog
that goes kurakapony-koo
Nor the one that goes brip-pup,brib-pup,brip-bub.
And I am not the pesky night-time frog
Out side my bedroom window that declares:
drip, drip, drip,
drip, drip, drip,
drip, drip, drip,
drip, drip, drip,
drip, drip, drip...
and forces unwanted attention on the
bathroom faucet -
then stops.
Neither am I the one that makes myself
unavailable, by dangerously hopping
from tree into whiskered jaw
Nor the detestable alien-cousin, marching
Pacific-ly south, laughing
“It’s only my way, you know” and
“O bliss! O poop-poop! O my! O my!”
Never associated with the one who walks along
with Miss M.
Scandelous!
u-hum-u-hum-u-hum
O no! I am the wither-wasted frog, lying
on the Somer table, by the spring.
Sipping the last of my coke addiction before I
Croak.

Image from the Common Well Archive - Gosford Times.