rubix

15dec2018
just to prove i'm still somewhere, i thought i put up a solution for the cube. probably stories about the thing popping into my worldly earthy space, would also be a story of the eighties and the people twirling the thing in the most strangest places. if you could remember that time.


Rubix have a go with my paint time and my interpretation of

 according to wikapedia this is the original colour setup.  since the start of the cube,  colour setup can be different depending on manufactured product.





centre cube - is stationary.  edge cube -  two colours , moved to edge.  corner cube -  3 colours , moved to corner.



16dec2018
i  always thought the cube had been around a lot longer than it actually is. i genuinely thought it was around in the 60's. for some reason it reminded me of them chinese finger torture things, you got in them crappy christmas stockings in the 60's. finger torture, did i hear you say. they were just small matted/platted roll, not many knew what it was. put your finger in either end, easy in , never out. you know what i mean. the time of the cube was slow at first, then it took off. personally, i liked brain teaser things, ie jigsaw puzzles , puzzle rings , mastermind game and that stuff. popular before computers .at that time i was busy doing other stuff , like work and going out. i might/probably got one of them early on, but never got past one side, and there it stood for not done. i went from brain teaser wiz to dumb fuck. too much , too many other things. as time went on, and the popularity grew, and people just took the stickers off and on, saying i done it. not many  people could do it. then came the book/s of how to do it. for me, back then, if you can't do it out right , then why bother, cheating. for those who weren't around then, it was fadtastic, marriages were breaking up, cause husbands spending all their time on the cube and not responsibility.

19dec2018
sometime between 1981 and 1983, i noticed someone had been trying to solve the cube and it was left around the house, like goldilocks. i just thought half your luck. then after a few days, i saw the cube with the middle bit done. i thought i never got that far, must of moved the stickers.

13april2019
around 1983 we got some new blokes on the railway gang, not really, i seen many come and go during my time there. one chap by the name of john, done that job for a while, maybe a few months. only a short guy, i can still picture him sitting in the truck canopy, his little legs swinging back and forth and twirling his cube. he was a bit of a wiz with it. he asked if someone could twirl it to a hard solution, and he'd figure it out. i said i know a really hard positioned squares , he gave me his cube, i moved two stickers while he wasn't looking. and said here you are, work this out. he twirled for a bit, and said hang on , then got the shits. you don't do that. i said , you said, you wanted a hard solution. i still laugh at that. he was the first cube nut i meet, that's how far it got. he apparently was a piano player, and ended up teaching the piano, i'd see his ad in the paper a few years later.

20april2019
that reminds of this other person , also a musician, even pictured in them ironworkers photos. he was probably the first person i ever knew who apparently worked the cube out by himself , most probably around 1980, early on in the fad. he was the dux of his school, them type of people seem troubled to me, somehow. he died sometime ago now. as for the cube, i wasn't much interested in the thing. a time after twirly john left. even longer, after a bit of trouble with the shifty job, i was back on the day shift gang doing the hard yakka. we had this old, well old to me then, truck driver.

26april2019
today, i done the old google on twirly john, he's still tuitaring the piano, it says 30 years at it.  i wonder when was the last time he twirled the rubix. if you think this rubix blog don't fit in with the other blogs, the truck driver may change all that. the trucks were contracted, and the drivers worked for that company, they didn't do no railroad job, just drove us to the job then back to the yard. over them years we had about two handfuls of drivers, we're talking the dayshift gangs.

30april2019
you know everybody has a story, and this particular truck driver did have some. seeing i was stuck in the dayshift gang, with no really way out. after a time, we got a talking. if i had only known things i've found out latter, very many of. one not really related, was early on doing the platelaying job, at lunch time, we were working close to my grandmothers house. i nearly said to john henry lets go over my grand mothers house, i never did. stuff like that. anyway , the truckdriver had heaps of stories of the early fifties of singing contests and fisticuffs fights. i told him the story of twirly john, he said he figured out the cube on his own.

29may2019
not long after he was seating in his truck twirling on the cube, this is after the big fad, around 1986. he showed me he could do it, i said, i never got round to figuring it out. next, he brought in a 4 in a row one , he figure that one out too, i don't know where their heads are at. i asked if he could write down a solution. i never thought much about it. but that i showed interest in it. not long after, he brought in some paper with the solution all drawn and instructed. at the time you could get a cube for 10 cent, they were  throwing them away. i picked one up from somewhere, and sat down one night and read the paper and done the thing. his instructions were sort of easier to follow than the book that was released. i actually made a little book out of a tobacco pouch paper, the paper in the middle of a drum  tobacco packet, with the solution in pages in it. i gave it to brain wave at tech in 1995. i've also got in on a floppy disk, an old apple floppy disk. as soon as i figure out how to transfer it to here i will, 

18july2019
rather than figure out how to transfer from the old floppy disk. i found some old dot matrix print pages of that continuous stuff, stashed away with other brickaty brak pass age. went and scanned it.

with was a mini cube, are these rare now

note ditto, wtf




 

ginger beer

16june2018
 today was one of them days when you are looking for some past thing, a piece of paper with something written on it. i didn't find the thing i was looking for. i did find a few other things stashed away, bits of crap . one of the things was a recipe for ginger beer. i don't think i'll ever use it, so i thought i'd put it here , maybe someone will find it useful.

29june2018
firstly, me and ginger beer go back to my youth, just like for others my age and older. just like poor man's oranges, ginger beer was the staple beverage of old. too me, it's a bit like sea monkeys, a concoction that turns into a so called plant that is feed. i remember making it back in the sixties, but it turned out crappy. there's a lot of work in bottling, just like real beer. being young at the time there was no waiting, ended up opening to early and i think it tasted rubbish. others had problems with exploding bottles. the whole thing is trail and error and art. 

2july2018
to make plant:-
- 8 sultanas
- juice of two large lemons
- 1 teaspoon lemon pulp
- 4 teaspoons sugar
- 2 teaspoons ground ginger
- 2 cups cold water

to feed:-
ground ginger
sugar

method:-
combine all plant ingrediants in a screw top jar.
leave for 2 to 5 days or until beginning to ferment.
then each day for 7 days, 'feed' with two teaspoons ground ginger
and four teaspoons of sugar.
this is the ginger beer 'plant' from which ginger beer is made.

to make ginger beer:-
- 4 cups of sugar
- 4 cups boiling water
- juice from 4 lemons
- 7 litres of cold water

method:-
place sugar in a large bowl, add boiling water and lemon juice
and stir until sugar has dissolved.
strain ginger beer plant through fine muslin in to water + lemon
mixture;
squeeze muslin dry.
add cold water and pour into clean, dry airtight bottles.
seal with patent seal caps.
keep, five days in a cool cupboard before opening.

to keep plant alive
divide in half the mixture left in muslin after straining
and discard one half or start a second plant or give it to
 a friend.
put the other half in a screw top jar with 2 cups of cold water
and feed each day for a week with 4 teaspoons of sugar and
2 teaspoons of ground ginger.

ayres rock

8 april2018
lots of people have an ayres rock, Uluru, story, i don't have one of those.mine is somewhat different, in actual fact, i've never seen it or been there, but there is some symbolic connection. my intention here is to tell a story the best way i can remember it. plus add other interesting bits of time.

9 april 2018
this came about through mucking about searches on twitter. knowing my friends aren't on twitter, either they're old, dead or just not interested. i done a wollongong search to see what's happening. i do mucking about searches every so often, probably due to boredom. a couple of interesting things there, not much. i did a wollongong punks search, knowing probably dead as anything. but there might be someone doing something. i found a tweet and i thought, i remember that.

the tweet lead me to this page    ← ⬅️   (you click) 

26oct2021

how the above link was deleted was totally predictable . it doesn't matter. it just shows how the world writes off the little guy. in fact it proves a point .

10 april 2018
as i read the story, which is a crikey.com post about punks, junkies, bikies and a poster, the hand over of  uluru to the traditional  owners. browsing through it i was interested in this punks bit and if i knew anyone. as it turned out, the punks bit was about sav the cheery punk, and that's me. before i go on, i was reminded how over the years i've told some people that story, and they just thought whatever they thought. i got the sense that, i was full of shit. this type of thing happens to me a lot. i don't want to go on, trying to convince some dickhead i'm not talking shit. like ed koch once said, fuck em. it's a story i tend not to talk about.  

12april2018
if you'd read an earlier blog thing, i'd moved from a flat to the house with artists. this would of been early 1985, which means i would have been 26. looking back now, it was ok at first, i was working, they worked, mainly a couple commuted from sydney and on weekends had places in sydney.  on occasions people would come down do a bit of screen printing or whatever. me, personally just done what i did, at that time, my job was spare shifty. basically i was a platelayer, which is railway maintenance a daytime job. they also had a gang of 4 on call 24/7 for derailments and things. so, when they brought in the 38 hour week, they were short a bloke. the spare shifty filled the gap. i worked 5 day shift work, monday to friday there for sometime. work was something you tend not to think about. what i'm trying to say, is there was days i seen the artists and others i didn't. there was a girl from the tiwi islands, who was at the house mostly. as time went on, so did people. one of the artists got a offer to work back up the northern territory, and it got quiet there some weekends.

13april2018 
that's basically set my mind in time. enter chips and co. looking back, there was probably a clash of cultures on all sides. i tended to relate more to the aboriginal man, than i did the artists. there was definitely an alcohol problem going on there. i could never understand the drinking thing. with me if things start to get a hold, i start to think about priority's. although i have drunk, i think i never really liked it. and i've seen first hand the damage it does cause. with the man, there are only several incidents that comes to mind, one of which was prolific, not quite sure if that's the right word here, through the years since. i'll come to that. i remember him camped out on the lounge floor. his clothes were that of a park ranger, they reminded me of matt hammond, the ed devereax character in skippy. i can't really remember much more about the house life, a few bits.  

14april2018
one thing i remember from quite early on was a female artist taking photos of the man. i didn't think he liked it too much. the final item from some photo was a silhouette image of the mans profile. it reminded me of   them luna park silhouette images  of yesteryear. i think he was happy when all that stuff was over.  

16april2018
like i said before, i did my own thing. i knew the man was part of the traditional owners of that country up there. it was interesting. my personal view was probably indifference, although i could see the attachment, both spiritual and generational. the attachment goes back thousands of years. i can't really remember anything about town too much. i do remember, the man drank in the public bar in the old wollongong pub, i kept an eye on him there. the public bar was just serious drinkers, no jukebox, maybe a radio for the races. the tab (betting shop) was up the road a bit. and a cigarette machine. they pulled that pub down  in 1986. i drank in the lounge part, they had a jukebox and sit down space invaders table and a pool table room separate. no card machines or pokies. that was it basically.

18april2018
with doing the shift work and the few weeks that they were there, i can't really say much about the incidents in that article. the thing that always made me think about that time, was the washing machine incident. come the weekend, time to wash the work gear. the one thing i never had was a washing machine. they had this twin tub hoover thing at the house. i was doing the work gear, and the man asked me if i could wash his clothes. i was only too happy to wash the ayres rock dirt from the rangers garb. i don't think those clothes had ever seen water, the colour of the water, magic dirt. the man gave me 10 dollars for washing them, i said don't worry, but he insisted. it had a sort of symbolic gesture of  a new start. those clothes came out spick. i ended up having that machine right up until quite recently something like 32 years. it broke down i'd fix it. many a time, while washing i thought about that man and that time, and other times. probably could write another blog chapter on it. in actual fact that machine of late became unfixable, i'd saved up a bit of money and brought a new one. i took the old machine apart and got rid of it that way. the shell was put out on the curb, it lasted a few days before someone took it. in the few days it was there, i thought about that time when i walked past it. that would have been around the time of that crikey article, nov 2017. not that long ago.

25april2018
many changes and nothings have happened since 1985. looking back at that time, it was an ok time, before turning somewhere. the story with the house, again another story.

30april2018
so, i moved on from the house and the job. i learned that the aboriginal man had been stabbed by a relative with a screwdriver, and died. it saddened me. around  1989 i bought a van and trailer for the bike and started a driving trip. it's about as close as i've been to ayre's rock yet. i got to the turn off road to the rock, it was another 250kms from there to the rock, i passed. eventually i made it back to wollongong, i basically lived in the van for a year or so. i sold the bike and got a flat , then sold the van. it was hard times. jester from primary school lived not far, and his mate simon . he had a telecom job, and had an offer to work up the northern territory for a time. i encouraged him to go for it, and that he wouldn't regret it later. i remember him ringing me up from ayres rock on the radio phone really depressed about the hot weather. i just gave him words of encouragement to stick it out, and it would be an adventure he could look back on. he sent me a letter as well.

  

this photo was in the letter, the backhoe tractor is like a giant chainsaw, and is tiny in comparison to the rock

 this was on the back of the photo

3may2018

there was nothing planned about this blog, it just happened, although it was already written, as for the letter. not many people have sent me letters over the years, and so i tended to keep the ones i got. i haven't read it in years. the cards he refers to are phonecards which i collected back then. haven't seen jester in some years now, i wrote an earlier blog about him.