Percy’s take on the Somerton Man Mystery.
Percy’s no mug.
He’s a regular in the front bar of the Slipway Hotel and reckons he’s got all the answers to the bloke found dead in South Aussie back in ‘48.
“I’ll take any questions,” he says, “as long as you keep this full,” gesturing to the schooner sat on the bar in front of him, “and I only drink Reschs, ok?”
“Who was he then?” This from old Tommy.
”Who was who?”
”The bloke on the beach.”
“Which bloke? There were two of ‘em.”
“How do you figure that out?”
”Different clobber on the second bloke next morning.”
”So who was the first bloke, the one they reckoned was pissed?”
”Wasn’t pissed at all, silly fucker was blotted out on barbiturates, known for it in fact.”
”Where did he end up then, if he wasn’t the second bloke?”
”In the morgue, fell arse over tit coming out of the pie shop and cracked his skull.”
“Dead?”
”Like a doornail.”
”Never read about that in the papers.” This from Arthur, known nuisance.
“How many reffos make the papers when the coppers scoop them up dead these days,” replied Percy, “the bloody town is full of them, not to mention that mob of deadbeats in the dugouts just up the beach.”
“So they both ended up in the morgue next morning,” says Percy, “stuck in the ice room with who knows how many more. Who’d want to work in that place, they reckon there’s buckets of guts left over after the local quacks have been and gone, blood all over the trolleys and everything. You can smell the place a hundred yards away.”
To be continued …
The Somerton Man .. 
While you’ve been boring us with poor Les Norton impressions seems you missed Prof. Abbott’s impending fall from “GRACE” That is his be exposed for baseless claims re identification of Carl Webb as the Somerton Man.
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The old South Bondi Boardriders had a reunion about 40 years ago and I bumped into Barrett as he was coming up the stairs in the Bondi Diggers and I told him I’d never read any of his books and never would. Bloke was a mug lair all his life and a complete kook in the water.
And what’s this stuff about DA?.. out with it.
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Peteb..DA’s “incestral” back tracking from Eliza Webb’s half sister Mary Jane Stephens to a current descendant Antero Bonifacio has him linked to the wrong family. All thanks to GC’s PeteDavo who set up the Webb Geni site so that our ‘A’ team might obtain their flawed information and enable BS/TS to stay ahead of the game. There’s more to go on if you’re OK with DNA; Dave Morgan’s easy to swallow breakdown gives Anterio only .001 chance in hell of being just an innocent bystander.
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So why is DA still posting supporting information to his case on his Facebook page
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Guess you could ask that of the man himself..politely though. js
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Price a man’s gotta pay for a schooner these days Percy would want to be right. Thought I was the only mug that still drank Resch’s.
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Talk about hiding your light under a bushel, is Webb a contender or not ?
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Not going by anthing Abbott has done with flawed DNA. Lots of poor blighters went missing in the post WW2 scramble for work. He could have jagged Carl Webb from the hundreds of shiftless itinerants that ended up in Adelaide though.
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Percy was on the money then.
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For someone who has such a high academic profile how can DA be so wrong all the time ?
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DA’s “high academic profile” could be one reason, or else he has a similar problem to his pommie mate CGC. Truth be unknown!
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Or, simply because of a ‘high academic profile’, I’m never wrong is the only thing that matters.
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Because people think the “high academic profile” means something.
His expertise is in Electrical Engineering (or similar). His background has no more influence on how right or wrong he is about this stuff than any of our backgrounds. It’s one of the things that grinds my gears so much about him – that he seems to use his title to put weight on his opinions and views – but being a Professor in one field doesn’t make you an expert in all things. Just like claiming to be an ex-defective doesn’t make you an expert in all things.
Perhaps the one thing that bothers me most about DA is that in terms of SM his research doesn’t really come across as scientific in approach (but maybe this shows my disconnect with scientists). What I mean by that, is I like to think that scientific research consciously tries to remove biases, and is open to disproving what it sets out to prove, provided it results in an explainable conclusion. Abbot’s method seems a bit more haphazard – latching onto unproven ideas and following them with limited effort to prove the original assumptions. For example, from memory he was a supporter of the HC Reynolds ID. He even convinced a colleague to chime in an “prove” that SM was Reynolds – something that a more scientific approach would have shut down sooner, because the holes in the story would have ripped down the idea, rather than have been patched to make a stronger-seeming narrative.
To me, a scientist looks for any answer, but too often DA seems to look for a specific pre-supposed answer.
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