Yesterday Heather and I went out to my favorite coffee place for my birthday treat. When we got there, there was about four fire companies getting coffee too. That’s around 20 people because that also included some older dudes that I think might have been battalion or division commanders. There were fire rigs parked all over the street. There was nothing wrong, they were just standing in the parking lot drinking fancy coffees and having a nice social time. Back when I was working, we’d call this “team building.” I’ve heard that our local fire department is trying to retain firefighters and recently a new bunch of them graduated from the fire academy. My guess is that the whole division decided that they just wanted better coffee than they had in the firehouse and being a slow morning they all converged on my favorite coffee spot. They were still on duty as most had their radios out. I wonder what they radioed into dispatch before rolling over – “Coffee levels low, will be at coffee house refilling.” I was both gratified and annoyed that they were there. I was happy to see that our local firefighters agree that this was the best coffee place in town, but annoyed that they were in line before and I had to wait longer than normal for my coffee. I also thought, “If I was going to have a heart attack, now would be the time and place to do it – plenty of paramedics here.” As you might know, there isn’t much about firefighting that I don’t know:
I just read a fireman had twin sons. He named one JoseA and the other JoseB.
What do firefighters call their helmets? Very important to your health.
What should you do if you see a firefighter smoking? Turn the hose on them!
Interesting historical fact – what happens in the Bible just after Moses sees the burning bush? Yes, the first fire station is built.
Why are there so many calendars with sexy pictures of firefighters? It’s really difficult to find sexy accountants, lawyers or plumbers …
Quick quiz: Q: What is the fire department’s favorite song? A: We Didn’t Start the Fire
Why don’t most firefighters smoke? They’re really good at their jobs.
What’s the difference between an electrician and a firefighter? Who you should call when a fire starts.
Is it true that firefighters have to train to jump higher than a fire hydrant? No, anyone can – fire hydrants can’t jump.
What is the fire department’s radio code for a church being on fire? “Holy smokes …”
How many does it take to change a light bulb? Four, one to carry a ladder, one to cut a hole in the roof, one to change the bulb and one to radio headquarters that the bulb will be changed in 10 minutes …
I was going to write a joke about fires, but I couldn’t get it started.
I heard the firefighters talking about a new award the department is going to hand out for the “Most Extinguished.”
This is a series of posts about the music I play while writing. This time looking at The Band Played Waltzing Matilda by Eric Bogle about the Australian experience during the WWI Gallipoli campaign where ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) forces suffered heavy losses. Don’t confuse this with the folk song Waltzing Matilda. Bogle uses Waltzing Matilda for images and metaphors but I’ll get into that later. The style of The Band Played Waltzing Matilda is a folk song accompanied by guitar. Stylistically it’s a not exactly a ballad, more of a prose poem or short story. I find the song moving as it gives a realistic feeling of what those soldiers went through and about what can happen to a solider. Written in 1971 by Eric Bogle, Scottish-born Australian folk singer-songwriter, the song does carry some of the anti-war emotion that was the early 70’s.
This song ends up on my play because, the melody creates a reflective mood, tells a story, and gets me thinking. To fully understand this song you need to know more than what the singer tells us in the song. You need to know at least two things, history of the Gallipoli campaign and the Australian folk song Waltzing Matilda. Bogle’s song makes direct references to both.
I should say that this song speaks directly to the ANZAC experience. Similarly the song Waltzing Matilda is uniquely Australian and most outsiders don’t fully understand it, other than it’s the unofficial National Anthem of Australia.
Waltzing Matilda was written in 1895 by the Australian bush poet Andrew Barton “Banjo” Paterson. First thing to point out about the song is that it’s a ballad of a “swagman” or itinerant worker who traveled around Australia and his “Matilda” is his swag bag holding his worldly possessions. As a child hearing this song, I assumed Matilda was his girlfriend or wife. No, to go “Waltzing Matilda” was to rollup your stuff, ‘Matilda’ and go wandering around looking for work or adventure. Here’s a good version of Waltzing Matilda:
Here’s translations of Australian words in the song:
billabong – an oxbow lake or watering hole
jumbuck – a sheep
billy – a can to boil water in
tucker bag – food bag
troopers – mounted police
squatter – farmers who raised livestock on land they didn’t have a right to (often these squatters acquired legal rights or ownership ship of the land later).
We could translate the story of the swagman to this: He was camped by a watering hole boiling water when a sheep came down and the swagman grabs it for his dinner. Then troopers with the farmer came to arrest the swagman for stealing the sheep. The swagman jumps in the billabong and dies. His ghost then haunts the billabong.
It should also be noted that in Australia it often gets used on official occasions and by military units.
Next thing to know about is the Gallipoli campaign during World War I. A quick history refresher here: WWI was fought between the Allied powers of France, Great Britain, Japan and Russia and the Central powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire. Italy joined the Allies in 1915 and the USA joined in 1917. Great Britain meant the British Empire including Australia. While most think of the trench warfare in France, there were battles in many other parts of the world, including Asia, the Pacific and even in Africa.
The Ottoman Empire is largely modern day Turkey plus other parts of the Middle-east and Greece. Gallipoli is a peninsula on one side of the Dardanelles Strait which is the main waterway that leads to the then Constantinople, modern day Istanbul, and the Back Sea where Russia had warm water sea ports:
In 1915 the Allies thought that they could weaken the Ottoman Empire by an attack in the Dardanelles and get warships into the Sea of Marmara to shell Constantinople and open a supply route to Russian ports. The Ottomans were also a threat to the Suez Canal. First Sea Lord, Winston Churchill, ordered a Naval attack in the Dardanelles in early 1915. This failed and the Ottomans were able to stop Allied ships with a combination of mines and coastal artillery.
The decision was then made to invade Gallipoli. The idea was to secure the area by land which would allow the fleet to sail to Constantinople. The amphibious Army landing included both French and British Empire troops. In total 65,000 troops were ANZAC.
The campaign failed and the Ottomans held their ground. From the landings on 25 April, 1915 until the withdrawal in 9 January 1916 ANZAC forces suffered about 12,000 dead and 23,000 wounded — a causality rate near 50 percent. The horror of that battle is hard to describe.
ANZAC Day is now remembered on the 25th of April to remember Gallipoli and in the decades since that battle has been expanded to commemorate all Australians and New Zealanders who served and died.
Which brings us back to the song by Eric Bogle. Listen to it here:
The story is simple, a young swagman who had a simple and free life roaming around Australia, is recruited into the army and goes to Gallipoli where his is traumatized in battle and eventually losses his legs in an artillery shell explosion. Arriving home the soldier is ignored by society and while watching an ANZAC day parade from his front porch, questions the war, ending the song envisioning the ghosts soldiers marching by a billabong like the swagman in Waltzing Matilda.
Bogle’s skill as a poet is another reason why I like this song. This line also sticks with me, “For I’ll go no more waltzing Matilda.” Here our soldier realizes his loss and we get a glimpse into the melancholy state of his mind. Every thing he had before the war is now gone and he doesn’t understand why. Bogle has been quoted as saying that he wrote this song as an oblique commentary on the Vietnam war and at first was criticized but later veteran groups started viewing the song as anti-war but not anti-soldier and embraced it. If you look deeply into the campaign you’ll discover that the failure of the battle and the high casualties is really due to the arrogance and incompetence of various political and military leaders.
So there you go a long winded reason why this song is on my playlist.
It’s that time of year here in our house. Heather’s birthday was yesterday and mine in next Thursday. With our birthdays just a week apart, we tend to celebrate both at the same time. Yesterday was lunch followed by a movie – and yes I’m old enough to get the senior discount. This weekend will be dinner out at a fancy restaurant and likely a lot of overspending on stuff we don’t need with the excuse, “If you want it, I’ll buy it for your birthday.” So here’s everything else I know about birthdays:
Turns out birthdays are actually good for your health — the more birthdays you have the longer you live.
What kind of candles on a birthday cake burn longer? None, they all get shorter as the burn.
My cat said she wanted to buy us birthday presents, so we gave her a cat-alogue to order from.
Why put candles on top of a cake? Well, they don’t stay lit if you put them on the bottom.
Reminder, if you get balloons for the birthday party, don’t play pop-music …
What’s the best way to never forget your wife’s birthday? Forget it just once …
I once went to a 93 year old’s birthday party where his great granddaughter gave a very moving speech about his life — even the cake was in tiers.
I told my doctor I get heartburn every time I eat birthday cake. She told me to take the candles off before I eat.
I’m not so sure about AI. I told my ChatGPT that today was my birthday. It said I needed an upgrade and several worn parts replaced.
A true friend remembers your birthday, not your age.
Two candles are on top of a birthday cake and one says to the other, “Don’t birthdays burn you up?”
Did you know that they have birthdays in heaven? Yup, they serve Angel food cake.
I am another year older, but still far younger than my jokes.
My wife just came home from the store with a cake mix, icing, candles, a lighter and a fire extinguisher.
It’s not Sunday and the pizza cooked yesterday, and here I am with a few minutes before dinner. The shortest day of the year was last month, but the mornings haven’t been getting any brighter. Due to an odd astronomical phenomena, the latest sunrise of the year actually happens in the northern hemisphere around January 8 or so and not on December 21st like you’d expect. Now sunsets have been getting later and here at my latitude sunset is almost 5 pm, with the sunrise being later each day, until a few days ago. Today sunrise was at 7:18 am and tomorrow it will be at 7:17 am.
Personally, I don’t think we should celebrate the longest day of the year or even recognize the shortest day of the year – it’s the sunrise time that really matters.
It has to do with sleep. I’m the type of person who wakes up with the sun. I’ve always been like that — when the sun is up, I’m awake. No sun and I could sleep a long time. Normally that’s not a problem as I just use an alarm clock when I need to get up before the sun. However, now that I’m retired, I hate that alarm. For decades it went off most mornings around six so I could be to the office by eight – I have bad memories about what the alarm clock got me into. These days I have little that I need to be up that early for.
Except on Mondays. On Mondays at 8:00 am is my Bible study group on zoom. In the summer it’s no problem to be at the computer ready to meet at eight as most likely I’d have woken up around six when the sun is up. When the sun doesn’t rise until 7:19, there’s barely time for a quick shower and a cup of tea before I need to log into the meeting. Today I was five minutes late – mortifying …
Now, I should point out that I’ve been meeting with these guys for about eight years now and while we’re a “study” group and have actually read and discussed the whole Bible (seriously, we took three years to read the whole thing), these days there are sports scores to review, health updates (we’re all old retired guys with interesting medical conditions), vacation reports and discussions of the sad state of our world to do before we get to any studying. For the last couple of years we’ve been watching these half hour lectures on comparative religions hoping it would give us some better insights into stuff.
Yeah, mostly it does, but apparently it’s basketball season so it took awhile to get to the next lecture on Hinduism. Which turns out not to be simple and most of what we thought we knew is wrong. Even the word Hinduism isn’t a good label for what they believe or are (and it’s a western word, not used until colonial times and not by the Hindus) and calling it a religion is likely a stretch. Today’s lecture was on wisdom and the only thing I really learned is that I have a lot more questions than answers.
I should also mention that one reason I didn’t write yesterday is that our daughter was over for dinner and we started watching this NetFlix series, You Are What You Eat, which is a study of identical twins and how diet affects our bodies. One twin is put on a vegan diet while the other is on a healthy omnivore diet and then they measure the results. There’s also a bunch of stuff on how food is produced, health aspects of food, etc. Basically what you think you know about food is wrong and while we’re only half way through watching, I’ve decided to just stop eating – food is bad for you. Okay, maybe just change my diet, a bit, something …
So at the moment the only thing I sure of is that sunrise tomorrow is 7:17 am, at least here where I live. What it is where you live, I don’t know, you’ll have to look it up.
