'there is a black heart in the belt'

'Vyössä on musta sydän' = 'there is a black heart in the belt'. Of all the umpteen duolingo phrases I have had to endure over and over again, this one rubs me most the wrong way. I don't know why but possibly because I don't understand it. Duolingo, or at least the stage of the 'course'/torture I am at, goes on and on about fashion-related items eg there is a large diamond in that piece of jewellery (except it calls it 'jewelry'), and where is the changing room, and what kind of tie is now in fashion? I don't entirely begrudge the duolingerers all of this, because I can see how some of the phrases help to understand different kinds of sentence construction (eg the way that the large diamond phrase is constructed in Finnish is something along the lines of: in the piece of jewellery there is a large diamond, whereas of course in English our tendency would be to express it the other way around. Although it does get very far up my proverbial nose that duolingo insists that you translate 'korussa' as in the piece of jewelry, not just in the jewelry, I've been caught out with that a few times now and it sucks. 

I also can't stand the translation of 'limonadi' as 'soda pop', rather than what it obviously is, a transliteration of 'lemonade'. 

But actually all of this would be fine if it wasn't all so gruellingly repetitive but then again who am I railing against? Obviously learning a language is all about repetition and I will concede that occasionally I can find myself in a zone where I can effect a translation, a sentence construction, even very rarely a grammatical form, without thinking about it at all - it just seems natural. Now, I'm not kidding myself, I know that there's a lot more to learning a language than this, but it's a way in, isn't it, and doing it daily is valuable - as long as you are actually learning the right stuff (sometimes I am a bit alarmed when there is a discrepancy between duolingo's version of a word or phrase and google translate's - but I suppose it's possible they're both right - and that it doesn't suit their respective business models to allow for nuance. 

hire car

Adelaide News 20 July 1954 p. 17

The fact is, businesspeople operate companies and employ dogsbodies paid nothing so when they implement shitty practices customers are arseholes when they get crabby at the poor fools operating at the coalface. 

I also have to admit it's my fault that I can't remember 'pin numbers', so could not put a $200 deposit down for a car I was hiring. But up to that point I (we all in the queue) had been kept waiting close on half an hour as the car hire place was understaffed (five portals for customer service, two people working there) and they were already obviously planning on giving me a monster truck as as substitution for the tiny thing I had booked because I don't like driving large cars (and they cost more to run). 

Anyway I can't say they didn't warn me at the end of a very long email I hadn't bothered to read that I was going to have to pay that deposit. When I try the whole process again next week (at another supplier obvs) I will be better prepared, not just to pay extra money, but also to be thoroughly irritated by a very irritating process. 

That's actually the more annoying part, that I was so annoyed, all the way. I was really, really annoyed and I need to work on being less of a cliched entitled annoyed prick. It's kind of hard to get over. But the innocent suffer. 

*Update then six hours later they sent me an invoice?! I had actually cancelled at the hire office. I called them and they were like oh no you also have to cancel on the website. Cunts. 

tiellä ei minnekään

I have previously kvetched about duolingo and particularly its competitive ('gamified') aspect but right now as the one who is riding high in I think Pearl League or whatever they call it, I can see the plus. What bothers me more is the repetition in duolingo, and I don't know if it's the same with other languages or just the very niche ones like Finnish. If I ever needed to say oh no the koalas are in trouble, well, I have it down. Similarly if I wanted to ask 'Mr Blue Sky? Why are those trees singing?' which I kid you not is a phrase that crops up very often, ditto 'the camel is trying to bite the tourist' and other preposterosities, well, I'm covered but the repetitiveness (and the fact that these phrases are in there at all) is really getting me down. I am sure the psychology is, in part, that you get something you're very familiar with so you can advance, practice and be reminded that you do know some things. Also, I can complain about the repetition and the lack of variety but it's not like I get it all right all the time. But still. Some new material would be pretty nice to see. 

 

windows and orphans: two centuries of typos

Ipswich Journal 7 August 1736 p. 3

Dunlop and Claypoole's American Daily Advertiser 13 May 1784 p.3

Lancaster Gazette 22 February 1845 p. 3

Devon and Exeter Gazette 22 May 1845 p. 3

True Democrat 14 October 1852 p. 1

Lawrence Daily Journal 16 July 1876 p. 2

Lancaster Excelsior 27 May 1910 p. 1

Evening Mail 4 February 1920 p. 3

Corsicana Daily Sun 4 January 1935 p. 16

Lewiston Daily Sun 15 June 1948 p. 7

The Standard-Star 6 March 1967 p. 4

Evening Standard 28 August 1980 p. 7

... and so on. A search on this phrase turns up 2, 825 mentions, though a lot of them are (1) actually about windows on orphanages - or similar (2) the two words in separate articles on the same page (3) syndicated stories, oddly enough, since you'd think each newspaper would have to have them typeset individually at least until 40 or so years ago. 

I'm just thrilled to think of all the ribbing compositors must have endured over centuries from this benign error. Probably a few of them were somewhat mortified, most of them probably shrugged. It's obviously less horrific than a mistake like, I don't know, writing No in a box in a referendum when you should have written Yes. There's many millions of Australians today who should be far more regretful. (I wasn't going to go there, I couldn't help it).  

stop or my dog will shoot (the simpsons s18 e20)

'The opening speech will be given by New York's most famous mayor'

He's just addressing dogs, so he's saying 'who's a good boy?' etc 

According to wikipedia Giuliani recorded his guest appearance but then had to be replaced by an actor because he was a presidential candidate... but now, his voice has been reinstituted in the currently available version of this episode. If that's true, it really doesn't sound like him (you'd think they'd find someone who sounded more like him) although I suppose this is 16 years ago. It doesn't look much like him either but ditto. 

As mentioned, I am watching a lot of this because it's not exactly Finnish practice, more precisely a useful reminder that it's a lifetime's work learning all this Finnish, for crying out loud. 

struggle

I have never seen this ridiculous barbecue on Moonee Ponds Creek near Docklands being used, but it does spark the imagination, doesn't it, about how it might be used and by whom. 

This morning Perry and I went for a walk to Docklands then we thought 'hmm, it's less than an hour from here to Westgate Park and then we could get the ferry to Spotswood and train home,' but what we weren't taking into account (or didn't know) was the fact that the ferry only runs in the mornings and the afternoons on weekdays - on weekends, it's doing a constant back-and-forth. Weekdays, it's out of commission entirely between around 10 and 3. So we had to basically walk back from Westgate Park which was a bit of a hike, I have to tell you. But we lived and are probably better people for the experience. 

toppa 3

I can't copy this properly because the Sands and McDougall 1944-5 online is 'unstable' but this is part of an ad for Amalgamated Dairies at 155 Capel which must be shortly before the time that Toppa ice cream was being made there. I don't know if Amalgamated became Toppa or Toppa bought the premises and converted it into an ice cream factory. The last mention of Amalgamated in the Age is August 1950. 

Here's another ad from approx the same time:

Melbourne Age 19 March 1943 p. 2

The above is from the Brisbane Telegraph 2 July 1953, p. 23. It doesn't tell us much but it doesn't negate anything we already know. Then there's this, from the Hobart Mercury 3 April 1954 p. 38:

Below is an ad from 1954, wherein the premises now houses a sinister-sounding org called 'Business Investments' and is selling off Amalgamated Dairies-adjacent (or perhaps some other similar company recently bought-adjacent) properties:

Melbourne Age 5 June 1954 p. 21

 Similar situation from May the same year:

Melbourne Age 27 May 1954 p. 20

Another ad, from 8 April 1954 p. 11 says that Business Investments is 'a subsidiary of Toppa Holdings'. Business Investments Pty Ltd - find me a more generic name - has fewer than twenty ads in the Age in the 1950s, and seems to have existed only to sell milk bars, which were surely owned by Amalgamated Dairies at an earlier stage and which needed jettisoning as the business switched, which seems to suggest (I'm talking myself round here) that yes, Amalgamated Dairies either converted to Toppa, or was bought by Toppa and its component parts sold off. I'd need to know more about the history of dairy distribution in Melbourne in the immediate postwar period I guess. But we are way before the period of dairy consolidation in the city - that didn't take place until, I think, the 80s. Those times when you'd go to another suburb and they'd have completely different packaging on their milk cartons! We were provincial AF back then...

Here's a banal news item from the Argus of 19 November 1955 (p. 18):

So this morning Perry and I went to have a look at 155 Capel St. We got very confused about where it was as it no longer seems to exist as an address, let alone as a building. These are 141 and 151, and a bit of associated laneway buildings etc. 

By the way this (above) appears to be a cool hidden cafe which I will have to check out properly sometime. 

I was confused about this but I think I've figured it. This is the site in 1945. It's pretty hard to see anything in this picture aside from that the big white shape represents one consolidated site. 

This is the same site on google maps now. So I guess what was Amalgamated Dairies/Toppa in the 1950s is now St Joseph's Flexible Learning Centre, which I didn't photograph when I was there because it's a school with kids in it. 

I suppose that's about the end of the mystery for now. In the sense of, that's as far as my research can go. The mystery may continue. In fact it does. But it's kind of a concocted mystery, and at present I feel like I'm having a discussion with myself about something no-one else cares about. What I do know is that if you put posts like this up online, at some point someone comes along who knows more. If that's you, please comment. If you want to discuss with me but you don't want to actually be published, you should still comment but with contact details and I won't publish the comment but I will get back to you. 

toppa 2

 

So being on strike and therefore not working I slipped into the PROV this afternoon and looked at everything they had relating to Toppa. There was virtually nothing and what there was, was not enlightening I am sorry to say. The main things, apart from that slender accounts report from the 40s above (the most interesting aspect of which was that their factory at this time was in Capel St, North Melbourne, and I use the term 'interesting' not advisedly but actually falsely), was some hard-to-follow court documents where various people had sued (loosely speaking) Toppa for injuries they'd incurred while working for the company. 

Aside from a few things like this (there was also a case of a portable scaffold that fell down), there's another court case where Peters Ice Cream claims that the Toppa people didn't give back a freezer cabinet. There must be more to this than meets the eye. But I don't really get it. 

So I wish I could tell you more about Toppa but at the moment that's all I have, and it's nothing. 

toppa the world

You might remember in 2006 I reminisced about how fond my feelings were towards the Toppa Ice Cream company. Perhaps my affection is linked to the fact that, as of 1966, the company was owned by British Tobacco - might also explain why I still get a slight yearn when I smell cigarette smoke (I've never smoked). What I don't really understand is why, when that company was doing such great guns in 1966 when (according to the Bulletin, anyway, which I suppose might have had some rationale to promote something that wasn't as hot as it seemed, though surely the Bulletin wanted cred) 'several... firms would welcome the Toppa fold under their wings', it basically disappeared in the early 70s.*  One of the things Toppa did in the mid-60s was move its factory from Brunswick to Preston...

Melbourne Age 12 May 1971 

and then wait five years to sell the old one, or something. That space is now, I gather, occupied by these townhouses, although there might have been something else in-between:

This is where they were at in 1970, looking for a mature man. Perhaps immaturity was a problem they faced? Hard to tell. Branching into diary products might have been a mistake as well. 

Toppa disappears from the pages of the Age in the mid-70s, and I gather at some point in there they were bought by Paul's, who always pissed me off because I assumed they were named in response to Peters, which didn't seem fair. But there was a two-hour moment in early 1972 when Toppa really got into the groove:

The Age 16 December 1971

How rad would that be? Yeah, I reckon they used words like 'rad' then. 

Anyway, if I can think of any other avenues to find out what happened to Toppa I will go down those avenues, though possibly what happened to them is they were bought by another company which shut them down, that's the end. 

* 'Expansion in the food industry' The Bulletin 8 January 1966 pp. 48-49

lost an old friend

The thing I had been dreading for months has finally come to pass, yesterday, when I had one of my front lower molars (OK I don't know the names of teeth, only that they each have a name or at least a number) removed in a one-hour exercise that didn't really hurt but which was stressful because I guess I had been prepped to imagine there was a possibility of things going wrong. Indeed I am not entirely sure yet that things haven't gone wrong because the tooth in question was somewhat infected and there might not be enough bone, or good enough bone, to put the implant in. I don't know. I am still to be honest not entirely sure I need an implant but I guess I have to bear in mind that if I don't have it my face might get weird(er) looking and while I wouldn't have to endure that, others would. 

Anyway at this point, I miss the tooth. I'd had it, I guess, 46 years or so and we had a good working relationship all that time. I had noticed it develop a fracture earlier this year (actually, I thought something was stuck in it but no, it was a crack) and it was unsalvageable, apparently. I guess it wasn't a thing with feelings, just a tooth in my mouth. Its absence is sorely felt though, and I'm not trying to be funny. 

Yesterday was a bit of a write-off then* but today I have spent quite a bit of time at the PROV scanning reports on Fishermans Bend so you can imagine I'm fairly chipper. This afternoovening I am going to write a thousand - you heard me, a thousand - words on a chapter intended to serve as a model for a joint-authored book. It's going to be about 8000 words ultimately (the chapter is), and it will be quite interesting but not panic-inducing or OTT. 

Image from Australian Woman's Weekly 2 July 1980 p. 109

*thank you to Laura for taking the day off to care for me.