Jun. 17th, 2004 09:14 am
My father's fer-de-lance story
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muckefuck(For those of you who don't know what a fer-de-lance is, it's the most venomous snake of the Americas. [Cue one of my Australian readers saying: {Crocodile Dundee voice} "Huh, huh. Thet's not a vinimis sneyk." {whips taipan out of trousers} "Neuw thet's a vinimis sneyk!"])
My father was a member of the Papal Volunteers (basically, a Catholic Peace Corps--Catholics have to have their own version of everything). Late one night, when he was living in Stann Creek, British Honduras [now Dangriga, Belize], he and two of his friends encountred a fer-de-lance. One of them killed it with a machete. Carl Burns, an Iowa farmboy, wanted to save the skin, but he didn't want to do the skinning in the middle of the night. Since this is the tropics, they knew the flesh would get pretty rank and nasty before morning, so they stowed the corpse in the kerosene-powered refrigerator.
Of course, no one warned the cook. A blood-curdling scream at the crack of dawn alerted them to this oversight. She was ready to quit on the spot, but they managed to convince her to stay by promising never to do something like that again.
My father was a member of the Papal Volunteers (basically, a Catholic Peace Corps--Catholics have to have their own version of everything). Late one night, when he was living in Stann Creek, British Honduras [now Dangriga, Belize], he and two of his friends encountred a fer-de-lance. One of them killed it with a machete. Carl Burns, an Iowa farmboy, wanted to save the skin, but he didn't want to do the skinning in the middle of the night. Since this is the tropics, they knew the flesh would get pretty rank and nasty before morning, so they stowed the corpse in the kerosene-powered refrigerator.
Of course, no one warned the cook. A blood-curdling scream at the crack of dawn alerted them to this oversight. She was ready to quit on the spot, but they managed to convince her to stay by promising never to do something like that again.
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I thought you must have meant Bill Hunter, unless you were referring to an obscure Texas senator.
Bill used to be a local part-time barman until about ten years ago, (We don't pay our actors like oriental potentates).
He is in most Aussie movies, his best being "Muriel's Wedding", (as the Mayor of Porpoise Spit) 'Gallipoli" and Bruce Beresford's remarkable "Newsfront", (remarkable because it looks like it cost millions of dollars but was made for less than the cost of the coffee budget of "Terminator II")
If you enjoy Aussie movies, see them while you can. First Rupert Murdoch intimidated our state government into giving him our beautiful old showgrounds to turn them into studios where crap like "Starbores" and the "Matrix" pretentiousnesses are made. Now our gee-whizz new free trade agreement will see the demise of what's left of our film industry.