source : the age
“As suggested by Peter Miniutti (C8), my father, in his work downtime as a linotype operator, would wind rubber bands into a ball which grew increasingly large and heavy,” says Janice Creenaune of Austinmer. “So, as a secret destination, we took him to the ‘largest ball of twine built by one man’ when he visited us in Minnesota in 1998. It’s been immortalised in song by “Weird Al” Yankovic with the unsurprisingly titled The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota and in the film Drop Dead Gorgeous. My daughter, 16 at the time, reflected somewhat disdainfully, ‘We have seen everything now, we can go home’. The largest rubber band ball in Florida (now owned by Ripley’s) had not even begun to be built until 2004, or we may have travelled there, too.”
As for the ball in question making it to Sculpture by the Sea from Earlwood, Dave Williams of Port Macquarie assures all that “it’s downhill from everywhere to Bondi”.
Susan Newman of Mona Vale has another suggestion: “This won’t help with a circular economy but is guaranteed, for weirdos like me, as an antidote to current news. Take six rubber bands of different colours, wind as tightly as possible around any smallish object, then freeze overnight. Have your phone camera on video to capture the result when you pull the bands off said object. Delightfully fascinating.”
The recent groupthink on band names (C8) seems to keep circling back to the University of Sydney and environs, and so it does with Evan Bailey of Glebe: “Some decades ago, as I regularly attended the Forest Lodge Hotel on the way to or from lectures, the best band I saw there was called Wasted Daze, which pretty much summed it up!”
Further south, Roger Smyth of Narooma remembers a band in Albury that played loud rock music during the ’80s. “You either warmed to them or not. The band’s name? Argus Tuft.”
George Zivkovic of Northmead writes: “NASA spaceflights, particularly those in the Artemis program, use a crew of four, rather than three, or any other number, to ‘balance mission requirements, spacecraft capacity and operational efficiency’, whatever that means in non-astronaut language. Also handy for Bridge, Euchre and Canasta.”
For John Trueman of Braidwood, “it makes sense that the Artemis II mission is timed to coincide with a full moon. It means they’ll be able to see all of it.”
Column8@smh.com.au
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