And Then There Was None

*

‘You say Mr. Quamby you left your pension money in the bank, which bank?’
‘That one there,’ says Charlie pointing directly at the empty box clearly marked “Cooking Salt”.
‘Besides you Mr. Quamby, who else has knowledge that the wooden container marked cooking salt is actually where you prefer to hide your pension money?’
‘Well for starters, Fred knows,’ says Charlie.
‘Anyone perchance,’ says Roberto, ‘with two legs and maybe answering to the description of being, a human being, Mr Quamby?’
‘Struth, I reckon, just about everyone I know, being a pensioner I have most of my stuff delivered, need to have the cash handy to pay them you see.
I am here most days anyway, except every second Thursday when I collect the pension and of course the very next day, if it is not raining, I play bowls and my two best mates Bountiful and Debonair bring me home from the club.’

A flash of lightning, a shuffling of molecules, and life for Franz Kafka Molekel will never be the same. His sudden metamorphosis from a bright young lad into an energetic and clever jack russell terrier brings a neverending series of amazing challenges and adventures into Franz’s life.

Ian Derrick

Oh how could this be, shattered of course, cringing in pain, but also triumphant, dignified, piercing in the way he controlled himself. Gersch; who couldn't drive his vehicle without breathing into a breathaliser which would automatically stop the car if he was over the limit, was always happy to tell stories. He had already heard the stories of love and obsession. Old ladies made themselves available to him, but he wasn't interested any more. Why they laughed so much he would never know. There was a certain discrete passion about the way he presented himself. And Gersch told the most hysterical of all the stories, in the round table on cats. It began with a bloke, bearded, from the mountains, Keith, they called him, who had adopted their little watering hole and was often present, a gracious contrarian who always wanted to argue, coming up with illogical theories just to prove he was a thinker.

Keith told the story of the cat that would always be up a tree on the path from the train station whenever he came home. Didn't matter whether it was two in the morning or two at night. Up the tree. Waiting. How did he know when I was coming home? Keith asked. And the blokes all nodded at the great, whimsical mysteries, as the blokes drank their schooners and thought about ordering another $10 jug, the Glengarry speciality. The cat up the tree story had followed anothoer about the cat next door who was so fat it had to be virtually wheeled around; amidst uproarous laughter about how it had grown even fatter in the absence of Margaret, who had gone to Scotland, leaving Frazer in charge. Frazer had been drinking campari and vodka mixed together all afternoon; and was just in the mood for story telling. Oh he could tell a few.

But this was just a silly yarn about the cat who would only drink from the bath tap or the shower; and it reminded him of the cat which had been trained to sit on the toilet. Then it was his turn, in the great camaraderie of blokedom, and he told the story of the cat his ex had dumped on him one day. The cat was called Mosquito and was an American snow cat, or some such thing, supposedly worth money, rather attractive if you ignored it's personality. But he just hated the damn thing; hated it from the moment it was dumped on him. The kids liked it, but he didn't, and whenever the young ones weren't watching he would do his best to drive it away, chasing it around the house with a broom, giving it all the encouragement he could to seek a better place. The day it shat on his bed was the day it signed its death warrant.

He had been thinking for days of cornering it, for by this stage they truly hated each other, taking it up to the university and releasing it. Someone would find it. Someone would love it. And then it pooed on his bed and that was it. He cornered it; must have taken a good hour to catch the damn thing; put it in a box and had taken it to the euphemisticallhy named Cat Protection Society. The concerned, earnest, animal loving luvvies behind the counter were so concerned; as he dumped the box with the whining screaching cat inside. I just can't cope with it anymore. I can't look after it. My ex dumped it on me and I just don't want it. So rather than blaming him, they rang her; and she, bless her, told them in no uncertain terms that the cat known as Mosquito could get stuffed, they could get stuffed and who were they to moralise to her? So she attracted the moral censure, not him; and ducked through the traffic back across the road, relieved.

And then Gersch began his story. He had been lonely when a little kitten showed up on his door; they had looked at each other, both lonely, and suddenly it was as if they belonged to each other. The cat needed him and he needed the cat. The neighbours also all loved the cat, and Gersch became something of a local hero for adopting the stray. Until it began to shit in the house. It shat in the bedrooms, it shat in the kitchen, it shat in the loungeroom. If he dwent away for a couple of days there would be cat poo from one end of the house to the other. Slowly the poo began to grind into the carpet, there was so damn much of it. He had never met an animal which could produce so much excrement. He, too, began to hate the cat which he had once thought so cute. It had to go.

One day, one poo too many, he too cornered his cat, put it in a box despite its wailing protests, drove it down to Woolloomoolloo near Harry's Cafe de Wheels, a Sydney landmark, grabbed the protesting cat out of the box and literally threw it out the car window. He drove off before he could even determine if it had landed on the ground alright. He had had enough. He told the neighbours the cat had disappeared, and there was much local distress at the disappearance of the much loved piece of fluff. People, of course, care more about animals than they do each other; particularly in a city where the people are more like pack dogs. Concerned young women kept knocking on the door; asking if there had been any sign of Fluff. Finally there was a spurt of excitement, he had been spotted down at Woolloomoolloo. I'll go searching for him; Gersch assured him, the lie beginning to amplify.

I searched, I searched everywhere, he told the earnest women of the neighbourhood, I just couldn't find him. Instead, of coursse, he had just gone to the pub and had a few more than usual in celebration of the cat's disapperance. But he kept up the pretence of deep concern at his front door; each time the neighbours, some of whom he would be happy to bed, if not wed, came knocking. Eventually a woman showed up with Fluff tucked in her arms; enormously excited at her great achievement in having found the cat living on the streets down at Woolloomoolloo. Like a boomerang the damn thing had come back. He shut the door and looked in disbelief at the poo machine in front of him, bundled it into his car, drove it up to his sister's place in the country, the cat shrfieking all the way in fear after what had happened last time it got into a car. But unlike the rest of us, the cat lived happily ever after at his sister's house in the country. And all else failed, they failed, but the laughter grew more maniacal as they tensed; waiting, for a future which could bring only fear and disgust.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/05/10/2565667.htm?section=world

The Pope has condemned what he called ideological manipulation of religion as he addressed the crowd at Jordan's largest mosque.

This is the Pope's second day in Jordan as part of his tour of the Middle East.

Speaking inside the gleaming new Amman mosque built by the Jordanian royal family, Pope Benedict made a heartfelt plea to followers of Christ and Prophet Mohammed to bury past misunderstandings and work together constructively for the benefit of the small Arab kingdom.

The Pope was shown a precocious relic - a letter written on animal skin by the Prophet himself to a Christian emperor of Byzantine nearly 1,400 years ago.

The letter asked the emperor to convert to Islam and the emperor declined.

The Pope has been treading an increasingly careful path in order not to say or do anything in public that is likely to offend either his Muslim hosts or the Jewish authorities who will be his host in Jerusalem next week.

But even so there has been some carping.

Earlier in the day the Pope talked of inseparable bonds between the Catholic Church and the Jewish people, to which some clerics in Jordan reacted angrily.

Others remarked the Pope failed to remove his shoes when he visited the mosque in accordance with Muslim custom.

Yesterday, Jordan's Queen Rania welcomed Pope Benedict upon his arrival at the royal palace in Amman

The King and Queen gave the German pontiff a red carpet welcome at Queen Alia Airport as he began his eight-day pilgrimage, which will on Monday take him to Israel and the Palestinian territories.

http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,25453397-5012689,00.html

ELENA Dokic always had an excuse for the bruises and welts, but everyone in tennis knew she was being abused. So why was nothing done to protect her?

Growing up, Dokic would tell people she had taken a tumble on the tennis court. Or that her younger brother, Savo, was learning karate and had practised his holds on her.

But as her career began to take off and she was still in her teens, hotel walls weren't thick enough to hide the terrible truth.

The tennis world has long known what was revealed to the rest of the world during the week, that Damir Dokic physically abused his daughter.

"I know people who were in the next-door hotel room after she'd lost matches and he used to beat the s--- out of her,'' tennis legend John Newcombe said.

"When she was a junior, he was belting her in a car park down in Victoria and a court case came up about that. But she wouldn't testify, so it was dropped. Why would you testify? You've got to go home and he's going to belt you again.''

Even though Dokic hasn't spoken to her father in five years, he still torments her life.
In 2006, when she returned to Australia by herself, he threatened to kidnap her.

This past week he threatened to have a bazooka delivered to his doorstep and fire at Australia's ambassador in Belgrade. He was arrested with two bombs found in his Serbian home.
Now he claims he was joking.

Jelena Dokic has never said directly that her father abused her. It was implied.It was Damir who admitted the abuse during the week.

"When I was young I was beaten by my parents,'' Damir told Serbian newspaper Vecernje Novosti, "and I am now thankful to them for that because that helped me to become the right person.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/10/pakistan-mingora-taliban-swat-fortress

The skiing season at Malam Jabba, Pakistan's only ski resort, is over. Yesterday the pistes echoed with the sound of explosions as fighter jets screamed overhead, part of the Pakistan military's intensifying campaign to dislodge the Taliban from the Swat valley.

An hour's drive away in Mingora, the war-racked valley's main town, the Taliban and army are readying for an urban battle unprecedented in the short history of Pakistan's battle against the Taliban.

Pakistan's prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, yesterday said the army was fighting for "the survival of the country", speaking after an emergency cabinet meeting.

The country's leaders, encouraged by the United States, launched the full-scale offensive in Swat last week in order to halt the spread of Taliban control which had reached districts within 60 miles of the capital, Islamabad. The battle has now been taken to the heart of the north-west region of the country which the Taliban has seized as its power base, and in particular to the beleaguered, frightened town of Mingora.

This once bustling riverside community, nestled between orchards and rolling mountains, has become a hub of the dispossessed and the desperate. Since fighting erupted last Tuesday, following the collapse of a fragile peace deal, tens of thousands of frantic residents have fled, scrambling on to buses, cars and even rickshaws. They left behind a ghost city controlled by the Taliban, under siege from army mortar fire and helicopter-gunship assaults, and tensed in the expectation of an army ground offensive that could lead to urban warfare reminiscent of Russian bids to clear Grozny, Chechnya, in 1999 and 2000.

At Mingora hospital yesterday embattled medics struggled to tend to dozens of residents injured by army shelling and stray gunfire. Riaz Khan, a 36-year-old teacher, his wife and two daughters occupied four of the beds, suffering shrapnel wounds to the arms and legs. His two other daughters were killed by an army mortar last week, he told an Associated Press reporter.