That gnome made me think of a funny story... it's way off topic, but it's pretty funny, and, well, it kind of has something to do with gnomes...
A little background first. My mother took up pottery as a hobby ages back. She enjoyed, for whatever reason, making buddhas. I'll just point out here that my family is not religious.
Anyway, she made heaps of them, and they're sitting everywhere through the house. A couple of years ago, she was given a big buddha as a present. Now, when I say big, I'm talking about a big, fat, up to your hip, solid concrete mofo. It took my father and I to move it, and it wasn't easy.
It used to sit out the front, next to the doorstep. But just before easter, it disappeared. At first we thought it was kids or something so we had a look around and asked our neighbors etc. We figured if it was kids stuffing around, they couldn't have gone far with it before it got too heavy for them.
Unfortunately, we didn't find it. So we called the police... kind of a strange phone call... "hi, someone stole my big concrete buddha from out the front!"
We figured we would never hear back from them, but they called back the other day. It turns out that in the week or so before easter, there were a whole heap of buddhas stolen from people's gardens in the south-east suburbs of Melbourne!
You'd have to be a whacko. I mean, people actually decided to go on a buddha-stealing spree. Can you imagine...
I think my family has become a victim of religious hate... but we're not religious!
