Nor was a US Debate actually watched….

I was too busy voting

The retiring Lord Mayor of Wollongong, Gordon Bradbery, an Independent, in full regalia — rarely seen but there it is. That pic is from last year when he was lending his support to the YES case in the Indigenous Voice to Parliament Referendum. Wollongong firmly voted YES.

I liked Gordon. Spoke with him a few times.

Yes, here in The Gong and everywhere else in NSW we have our local government elections, which are held every four years. In our case we vote directly for a new Lord Mayor, the current one having retired, and also for local representatives. Turning up to vote is as always, thank God, mandatory. The actual election is on Saturday, but you can vote early — as I did and many others as it turns out.

While I waited my turn along with what appeared to be many another octogenarian a rather silly old man and a much younger and mentally more agile woman were duking it out in Philadephia. After voting I went to City Diggers, conveniently just next to Globe Lane where the voting was happening. The TV sets at Diggers were tuned to a lifestyle program. No debate was in sight,

Mind you, the cranky old guy does not really debate. He performs, he soars into realms far beyond those of cooler minds, he postures, he spits…. He does the King and Duke better than the pair in Huck Finn.

And that is from Times Radio, part of the Murdoch media empire!

In Sutherland around 1954 all the cats were disappearing!

Yes, that was what was doing the rounds when I was ten or eleven years old! And it followed, you guessed it, the opening of a Chinese restaurant. An old staple that one. As Snopes.com notes.

How old is old? The rumor about Fluffy’s or Fido’s being slipped into Chinese food by unscrupulous restaurateurs has been traced by British researchers to the earliest years of the British Empire in England and to the 1850s in the United States:

[Jacobsen, 1948]

How ripe small towns actually are for rumors was amply demonstrated a few years ago. In a town of thirteen thousand inhabitants, which was gradually blossoming into cityhood, there was a restaurant operated by three Chinese. It was the most successful eating place around, patronized by businessmen and citizens morning, noon, and night. Everyone agreed that the food and service were good. But without the slightest warning business suddenly took a drastic drop. The once-prosperous proprietors became miserably unhappy, for they could not understand what had happened to all their patrons. Then they found out that someone, maybe a competitor, maybe just a person who nursed a real or imagined grudge against Chinese, had initiated a rumor that the police had found three skinned cats, labeled rabbits, in the restaurant’s refrigerator.

And yesterday from the potential leader of the free world came this– and may it haunt us forever:

 Donald Trump repeated the wild, baseless claim that Haitian migrants in an Ohio city are abducting people’s pets and eating them.

“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating – they’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country, and it’s a shame,” Trump said.

The conspiracy theory appears to have bubbled up from racist rhetoric circulating online about the Haitian community in Springfield, which has a population of 58,000….

— From a report in the UK Independent.

Harris cracked up, Who can blame her?

Back to Snopes,com:

And why not, some may say….

Not me, of course, Even if I confessed a couple of times on this blog to chomping down on the occasional kangaroo….

Yesterday while not watching the debate I ate a dear little lamb

It came in the form of a pie. A bit like the kiddies in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. Very tasty it was too,,,,