Welcome to the Tuesday cranker of the celebrity – stand in for Jako – week.
As you can see, the Trade ‘n Laid, servicing the investment professional industry here in St Georges Terrce, Perth, is still slugging out an earner above the Zoomba Lounge. Jako has his shed across the road and Redbacka has his muffin stall to keep earning while the market makes up its mind.
I don’t know much about markets, XJOers so you’ll have to suffer a story.
About my father and a bull.
It was the early 70’s. We had a stud cattle farm near Rocky Gully in Western Australia. Mum and dad decided to try their hands at the relatively new practice of Artificial Insemination. After successfully inseminating a few hundred, they sent me off to learn the practice as well.
I soon got the knack of inserting my arm into a cow's rectum, holding the uterus through the bowel wall with my left hand while manipulating the semen gun in through the number one passage, up the cervix and into the uterus and squeezing the trigger. All relatively straight forward you might say.
Now comes the interesting part. Dad decided to move on to the actual collection of semen. This was normally practiced in special collection facilities and required transporting your bull off-farm for an extended period.
This was no good as we were poor, having just spent $35K on a grand champion bull. It was much cheaper to do it in our own yards.
He had a special foot and a half long rubber-sheath with a steel jacket around it and a water-jacket around that in which my mother would pour body temperature water into. This, we thought would make it identical in feeling to a cow’s vagina.
My job was to bring the cow (on heat) into the yards. The ground was eighteen inches of gumboot sucking, sticky, poopy mud. I step by sucking stepped my way to the centre of the yard with the cow, while dad got our stud-of-studs, the one ton, A-grade Murray Grey bull, Mr Barcoo.
Dad said, ‘Get out boy, and Judith (my mum), pass me the sheath’.
Mr Barcoo was sniffing and snorting, steaming and bellowing, ready to go and was on the cows back before dad had retrieved the sheath from mum. Uh-oh, I threw a stick at the cow’s flank and she started forward just in time.
Dad grabbed the steel thermos as the very unsteady cow, stumbled around the pen with Mr Barcoo grunting along on two legs behind her, eyes bloodshot from the exertion as he tried to get his aim right. Dad slurped along under the bull as he tried to keep pace with a frantic ton and a half of copluating beef.
Around the yard the three of them went. Mr Barcoo, eyes rolled back and bloodshot, the cow trying to get out from underneath this grunting hulk, and dad, red faced and swearing as he stumbled along, backwards, squatting, losing one gumboot, then two into the putrid, gluey, shitty, blowy infested mud. It was beyond me how he escaped a horrible, trampling death.
After the third round, he grabbed the bulls stabbing, jerking, slippery appendage, and managed to shove it into the stainless steel apparatus.
Done and done in, poor dad staggered back to my mother, his two white eyes blinking through dripping, brown muck. He was more exhausted than I have ever seen him. I went to dig up his gum-boots, his socks were long gone. He passed the cannister to mum and said, ‘Did we get any’? and she said
‘You’ve got it upside down Kev’.
Good luck trading today Trendies and thanks to the regulars for your generosity.
(20min delay)