Accents and Elections

Friday was pretty normal, out drinking to excess then eat greasy junk food before going home to bed :)
It started at Velour bar for Kylie's birthday drinks, which was quite enjoyable despite the lack of people in the bar. Normally that place is very busy on Fridays but this time it was pretty dead, with almost every person there being a friend of Kylie's. Had an interesting discussion with some people about accents and behaviours. Diane whose family is originally from Sicily started talking about how people from different areas of Sicily might have dialects so different that they couldn't really understand each other. Then we go on to how the same sort of process goes on everywhere, and even here in Melbourne, there are the beginnings of it. Where similar things have slightly different names, such as children's games, what we called 'Chasey' growing up in Greensborough they called 'Tiggy' in Coburg, and what we called 'Kiss Chasey' was referred to in Canberra as 'Catch and Kiss'. It's a fairly minor thing, but it happens across the language, and if it keeps happening for a few hundred years you would eventually have a completely separate dialect.

Then of course Saturday as the big election day. We all exercised our suffrage and made our choices for the next few years. Also went over to Sean's new place for a bit of a housewarming and managed to catch up with a few key people in my life, which was pretty good. Also got to play with a couple of dogs which was a lot of fun, despite the inevitable dog slobber problem when you're throwing the ball or stick :)

Saturday night was at The Elgin, sitting up on the couches by the fire and having a few friendly beers with a couple of friends, then the rest of our crew showed up after having been at the races all day and we had a few more beers. At one point the 9 of us were getting annoyed by the only two other people in the entire bistro that had turned up the TV very loud to hear the speeches from the politicians. I tried asking if we could turn it right down of turn it off, but they stated very clearly that they wished to view it, despite the fact that they were disturbing 9 other people, they wished to hear the speeches. Not entirely sure who decides to come down to a pub to watch the election and then sits almost all the way across the room and has the TV turned up very loud, but they did seem to be very unwilling to hear the voice of the common man (me). They did state their political preferences, but I won't 'out' them here, suffice it to say they were pompous and annoying, living in hawthorn, and very happy with the results ;)