Author: ian

After breakfast, Tiki departed for the home of her parents, as her mother has been struggling to cope with a broken ankle. Upon her departure, I walked our dog to the corner store to purchase a copy of ‘The Daily Telegraph’. Saturday’s edition costs a dollar.

I watched the remainder of the A.B.C.’s countdown of the current Top Fifty musical videos. No Doubt’s ‘Don’t Speak’, featuring its vocalist, Gwen Stefani, sits at number one. Our national broadcaster follows this with another musical programme, ‘Recovery’, hosted by Dylan Lewis. Dylan not only possesses pierced ears, he has an earring through his left eyebrow. The show also includes a someone, or something, known as the ‘Enforcer’. Donned in a black outfit, Enforcer’s job is to not only exercise control over the programme’s guests, but Dylan, himself!

‘Recovery’ must have proven to be popular last year, as it has quite obviously returned for this one. It screens in opposition to Channel 10’s ‘Video Hits’.

There are four races this afternoon that possess prize money of one hundred thousand dollars or greater. Ian Craig is to broadcast the action via the radio station, 2KY, from Sydney, while his counterpart in Melbourne will be Bryan Martin. The racing surface in Sydney has been affected by rain, however, Melbourne’s meeting is forecast to be run on a surface described as being ‘good’.

Channel 9 is to also cover both meetings, with Ken Callander scheduled to update the odds of the runners prior to each event. The station will have John Russell describing each race from Flemington Racecourse, in Melbourne, and Johnny Tapp is scheduled to do likewise, from the Warwick Farm Racecourse, in Sydney.

‘Ten Eyewitness News’ screens on Channel 10 from five o’clock. It is read by Tracey Spicer, with Leith Mulligan delivering the segment on sport. ‘Bright Ideas – The Home Improvements Show’ follows at half past the hour. Its presenters are Renee Brack, Jane Blatchford and Mark Tonelli.

Gina Boon reads the ‘National Nine News’ from six o’clock. Its report on sport is read by the tall Peter Overton and includes a cursory review of the racing in Sydney, supplied by Johnny Tapp. It is followed, at half past the hour by the return of the perennial, ‘Hey, Hey It’s Saturday’, for another year. This entertaining offering is presented by Daryl Somers and Jo-Beth Taylor. Its guests include the Canadian singer, songwriter, Bryan Adams, who performs his hit, ‘Eighteen Till I Die’; a sumo wrestler, who sits next to Red Symons during the segment, ‘Red Faces’; the British group, Boyzone , as well as a new group, according to Daryl, that includes the son of the former ‘Monkee’, Mike Nesmith, as well as the son of Donovan (Leitch). The group, called Nancy Boy, closes the show by performing ‘Deep Sleep Motel’.

I followed this by switching to the A.B.C.’s Channel 2 in order to watch the latest episode in the British series, ‘Heartbeat’. Set in rural Yorkshire in the 1960s, it boasts an impressive musical soundtrack. This offering bares the copyright of last year. The series began in 1992 and, quite obviously, remains popular.

Peter O’Malley leads the field in the Australian Masters, which is being played at the Huntingdale Golf Club, in Melboune. After today’s third round he leads by one stroke from a fellow Australian, Lucas Parsons, with an aggregate score of fifteen under par. The American, Tiger Woods, lies six strokes astern of O’Malley.

Yesterday, the Australian icon, Arnott’s, which is known predominantly for its production of biscuits, bowed to the pressure from an extortionist(s) and removed all of its products from the shelves in both New South Wales and Queensland. This action was in response to several prominent people, amongst whom were politicians, being sent packets of the biscuit, Monte Carlo, whose contents had been laced with a lethal pesticide. Consequently, investors devalued the company’s shares by thirty-five million dollars, which was tantamount to twenty-five cents per share.

The National Australia Bank, yesterday, matched the unexpected move by the larger Commonwealth Bank, when it reduced its standard variable loan on a home from 8.25% to 7.55%. This means that such loans have not been at this level since the late 1960s.

Superstar, Michael Jackson, 38, wants to settle in either Britain or Australia, according to his biographer of twenty-five years, J. Randy Taraborelli. Jackson became a father yesterday when his wife, Debbie Rowe, 37, gave birth at the Cedars Sinai Medical Center, in Los Angeles. Their son weighed three kilogrammes, After the birth, Jackson commented that he did not want the baby to grow up as he had, which he likened to living in a “fish bowl”.

Last Monday, Oasis’s Liam Gallagher cancelled his proposed marriage to girlfriend, Patsy Kensit, due to the intense scrutiny from the media. Within days, his brother, Noel, called off his wedding to Meg Matthews, that had been scheduled for Valentine’s Day, having cited this same reason.

Arnott’s Managing Director, Chris Roberts, has found it appropriate to take out full-page advertisements in newspapers, stating that the company is the “innocent victim” in this extortionist plan to have a prisoner freed from gaol. It is being claimed that the governments of Queensland and New South Wales allegedly collaborated to imprison an innocent man. The threat was first made on the third of this month and states that contaminated biscuits would be placed on shelves after the seventeenth. Mr Roberts has, therefore, stated, “Our aim is to complete the clearance of shelves by Monday, Feb., 17.”

Arnott’s Limited, a company of one hundred and thirty years, revealed other woes yesterday when it announced that its interim net profit had fallen by seventy-eight per cent since its last report. Its earnings, after tax, amounted to $8.5 million, down from $38.7 million, recorded in the first half of the 1995/’96 financial year. Yesterday, its shares closed at $8.50. The American giant, Campbell Soup Co., owns seventy-five per cent of Arnott’s.

Meanwhile, shares in blue chip companies broke through the barrier of 7,000 points on the New York Stock Exchange. This has reportedly removed those fears, held by some, that the market had been advancing too rapidly. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed higher by 60.8 points and sits on 7,022.44. However, the Federal Reserve, in the United States, has expressed its concerns that equities there are becoming overvalued.

Locally, the All Ordinaries closed the week lower by 13.8 points, having closed on 2,482.6 points. Earlier, it had reached another record of 2,506.5. C.R.A. fell by $0.31 to close on $18.78; B.H.P. by $0.066 to $17.95; News Corp by $0.05 to $6.66; C.B.A. by $0.03 to $13.90; Westpac by $0.18 to $7.65 and A.N.Z. by $0.07 to $8.31.

The Canterbury Guineas was conducted at the Flemington Racecourse this afternoon. The race is reserved for horses of three years and was won by the 10/9 favourite, ‘Mouawad’, trained by the Sydneysider, Clarry Connors and ridden by Grant Cooksley, who hails from New Zealand. It is the colt’s fifth win from its six races and adds $227,500 (and trophies to the value of $2,000) to the earnings of its connections. It comfortably warded off the challenge from the hitherto unbeaten ‘O’Reilly’, (13/4) — a ‘raider’ from New Zealand trained by D.J. O’Sullivan and ridden by Lance O’Sullivan — by two lengths. ‘Tarnpir Lane'(11/1) finished a neck away in third position. It is trained by C. (“Cliff”) I. Brown and was ridden by another ‘Enzedder’, Greg Childs.

The much lauded Kiwi pacer, ‘Iraklis’, is an easing favourite for tomorrow night’s A.G. Hunter Cup. The race, which is rated at the level of Group 1, is scheduled to be run tomorrow night at the circuit, Moonee Valley, in Melbourne. ‘Iraklis’ will start from a handicap of twenty metres, ten metres in front of the lone back marker, ‘Desperate Comment’. The trainer of another runner, ‘Suleiman’, John Green, has been quoted as stating that ‘Iraklis’ will struggle to “run a place”. ‘Iraklis’ started as a 1/4 favourite, in winning the Victoria Cup recently.

Yesterday, Kieth Williams, a developer of resorts, claimed a victory when the Federal Court granted him permission to commence dredging near to the environmentally sensitive Hinchinbrook Island, which is situated near to the Great Barrier Reef. Mr Williams’ company, Cardwell Properties, had fought legal battles over a period of four years against ‘The Friends Of Hinchinbrook Society’, a group whom he had described as conservational ‘”fanatics”. The approval is for the construction of a resort on forty-four hectares of land, at Oyster Point, on the mainland and opposite the island. It will house one thousand five hundred beds and be the site of a marina that will possess berths for two hundred and thirty-four craft. Hinchinbrook Island is one of the country’s best habitats for marine life, that includes dugong and sea turtles and, therefore, Mr Williams expects there to be another challenge mounted against yesterday’s decision.

Antonio Castro Trujillo has been sentenced, by a court in the Canary Islands, to spend forty thousand years in gaol after he was found to be guilty of having raped his three daughters, two thousand, four hundred and ninety-six times. The court heard that he had begun to sexually abuse them in 1979, when the eldest was twelve and the youngest, nine. In addition, he has to pay each of his victims the equivalent of fifty thousand dollars.

Astronauts, Mark Lee and Steve Smith, have completed the first of four scheduled spacewalks, during which they undertake tasks that have been designed to improve the quality of the pictures that are being received on Earth via the Hubble Space Telescope. The pair had left the shuttle, Discovery, as it was above Australia, at a distance of five hundred and eighty kilometres. It is anticipated that the instalment of the latest infra-red camera will allow astronomers to peer deeper into the universe.

One of the world’s most renowned acrobats, Walfer Guerrero, is expected to suffer from paralysis after he fell some eight metres as he was performing in Richmond, Virginia. The twenty-eight year old’s act was reportedly a part of the Ringling Bros. Barnum and Bailey Circus. Walfer was admitted to hospital in a critical condition.

The daughter of America’s President, Bill Clinton, Chelsea Clinton, has been offered a position at the country’s oldest and most famous university, Harvard. Should the seventeen-year-old accept the offer she would become the first child of the White House to advance from high school to university, during a president’s term, in more than seventy years.

Actress, Elizabeth Taylor, at the age of sixty-five, has told the interviewer, Barbara Walters, on American television’s ABC, that after having been married eight times, she has found her limit. Richard Burton, whom she married and subsequently divorced, twice, along with Mike Todd, who was killed in the crash of an aeroplane during their betrothal, were the two notable loves of her life. The actress has said that she plans to concentrate on being the godmother to the newborn son of her friend, Michael Jackson.

We awoke and noted that the rain of yesterday had ceased, however, the sky remained overcast. After breakfast we began to prune those branches from the yard of a neighbour, that have been overhanging the roof of our house and its guttering.

Nevertheless, we curtailed our efforts when it began to rain, again, at twenty past ten.

At a quarter to eleven, we departed to shop at Miranda Fair. After I had parked the car on the centre’s roof, we purchased another litre of Wattyl’s ‘Red Cedar’, in Myer. Next, we visited Nock & Kirby to buy a small paintbrush, followed by a litre of ‘Castle’ mineral turps from Woolworths.

There seemed to be a plethora of unruly children in the crowded shopping centre. Disco music, blared from a loudspeaker above the centre’s main stage as young women, in tight jeans and equally tight singlets, gyrated to it.

As we hadn’t had either the radio or the television on at breakfast, it came as quite a shock to read on the front page of ‘The Sun’ that a cousin of Queen Elizabeth II, Earl, Lord Louis Mountbatten, had fallen victim to the Irish Republican Army at the age of seventy-nine.

A bomb, that reportedly weighed some twenty-five kilogrammes, was apparently planted aboard the small boat that not only contained Lord Mountbatten, but his grandson of just fourteen years. Situated off the Irish coast, the extremely powerful blast is believed to have been triggered via a device that would respond to a signal from a remote control.

Fifteen British soldiers were also killed, yesterday, in a separate incident, when a huge landmine exploded near to Ulster’s border with Eire.

We ate lunch in front of Channel 9’s ‘The Mike Walsh Show’, with its principal guest ironically being the British actor, Reg Varney. The last half an hour of the programme featured a tribute to Lord Mountbatten. Once this had concluded a representative of ‘Freedom For Ulster’, or some such cause, inflammatorily stated that the Lord’s death was no reason for people to become emotional.

I remember having watched a documentary on Lord Mountbatten’s life, that was screened some years ago, over a period of several weeks, and included his term as Britain’s Viceroy to India. Speaking purely for myself, and not professing to know the background as to what has perpetuated the violence between Britain and Ireland and/or why it was deemed necessary that he should be killed, I formed the opinion that he was an impressive figure.

I spent much of this afternoon painting the ceiling in our bathroom a somewhat lighter shade of ‘Tusk Ivory’, for the paint had been in our garage for the past two years. When I experienced difficulty in reaching the area above the hand basin, as well as the bath, itself, I called out to Tiki to come and hold the ladder for me. She’d been watching an edition of the American series, ‘F.B.I.’ on Channel TEN — it was previously shown on the A.B.C.’s Channel 2– and features the actor, Efrem Zimbalist Jr., who rose to fame about a decade ago in another series, ’77 Sunset Strip’.

I made the mistake of giving Tiki both the roller and the brush to wash in mineral turps, only to then find her completing this process by resorting to the usage of water.

We watched ‘Here’s Lucy’ between five o’clock and half past the hour, prior to then passing the next thirty minutes by viewing an edition of ‘Family Feud’ which is compered by the short, in stature, Tony Barber, whom we find to be an irritation, at best! Channel TEN’s news was viewed between six and seven o’clock and was co-read by Katrina Lee and John Bailey.

Channel 7’s ‘Willesee At Seven’ also focuses upon the assassination of Lord Mountbatten and features excepts from the British series, ‘This Is Your Life’, which contains tributes to him from such stars as Jackie Coogan, Bob Hope and Danny Kaye.

At half past seven we turned to Channel 2 to watch two British comedies, ‘It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum’ and ‘Bless This House’. The latter features the late actor, Sid James, whom, I believe was born in South Africa, but don’t quote me.

Remaining on the A.B.C., we watched the penultimate instalment of the Australian serial, ’20 Good Years’. It is set in 1974, on this occasion and its cast includes Harold Hopkins and Anne Pendlebury.

I retired to bed at a quarter to ten, while Tiki chose to watch an offering from Channel TEN’s American series, ‘Dallas’, whose cast includes Larry ‘I Dream Of Jeannie’ Hagman and Jim ‘Rescue 8’ Davis.

However, I was to unintentionally remain awake until Tiki joined me, at half past ten.