General Chat

but not vicey versey!

A UTE is any car or light truck with the rear end cut off and replaced with a flat steel or aluminium tray, or a molded rear compartment open on top of course!
They come in many shapes and sizes - all the Yank "pickup trucks" would qualify as utes.


xxxxxx mick

I post the pix, nobody looks at 'em.

Aussies, help me!

An Aussie "ute" isn't the same as a NA'an pickup truck! It's a sissified version of one. ;)

thats what we call over in civilisation.a "Pick up Truck" I always thought a "Ute" was an American Indian.**M**.

Janey, you have missed the quintessential utility beloved by all Britishers who know their utilities. And most of them do not even know it as a utility.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Rover_Series

Yes it is the Land Rover. Most commonly seen with a green canvas cover over it's utility feature.

There are probably many more sites with better illustrations of the marque. I am just too lazy to bother searching.

Mick

we lived in Macleod for 10 months in 1975/76

Blimey, what's going on in the colonies????

edit - dang, no, it wasn't an actual ute, it was just similarly ugly.

http://local.aaca.org/junior/starcars/duke.htm

There's a picture of the hideous thing there. ;)

It was called the General Lee in the show, and actually it was a 1969 Dodge Charter.


The real thing:

http://www.ford-forums.com/ford-falcon/14480-so-whats-ute.html

Yes you did tell me, Mick. I was duly impressed. And I probably told you that Flying Doctors was produced by one of our own Cdn corps, which owned Nine West. ;)

So you been working for us, you been. For the Aspers of all people, ew.

What was that awful US television series where they drove one of them? It (the car thing) had its own name even, I think. There was a woman who wore very short shorts, and some guy called "the general" or some such ... Never watched it myself, you see!

edit - believe it or not, I just googled

"the general" television series "hot pants"

and I found it. Third in the results list. The Dukes of Hazard.

We invented the UTE of course.

Did I ever tell you that I was in Flying Doctors?
(The episode about the outback Bachelors & Spinsters ball-
which was actually filmed at the Heidleberg Town Hall of all places))

xxxx mick

and every self respecting aussie (and northerner over here) knows that they have to be dirty, never washed or polished!

Here we are, finally remembered the name of the one I know -- it was a Ford Falcon. We had 'em here in NA as well, which is where I first found them the ugliest thing I'd ever seen on four wheels.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/hugo90/1088550318/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/velden/4148283861/

http://reference.findtarget.com/search/Ford%20Falcon%20%28Australia%29/
http://www.goauto.com.au/mellor/mellor.nsf/story2/F03B934415CD0AEFCA256D1F001C3CA7

I know what "ute" it is, Bob, but nuh uh. I know my antique Aussie vehicles. ;) I've seen Flying Doctors at least twice through!

http://www.google.ca/images?hl=en&source=imghp&q=ute+australia&btnG=Search+Images&gbv=2

The new ones are more universal-looking, but the original ones are those chopped-up snub-nosed looking car things.

Some classics:

http://www.moparts.org/moparts/picture/ute/ute.html

Janey, I rather think that UTE is a contraction of the more widely known Utility, or multi purpose vehicle,(MPV) as in a similar vein are rv's suv's,and so on.......Bob

Oh, you just missed where I made that dreadful sweeping generalization about morons driving pickups and pickups being driven by morons. ;)

1227491

So you agree??

What's the earthquake situation like in Oz, anyhow? Or does having sharks and crocs and bushfires exempt you from that particular part of nature's horror show?

A "ute" is one of those particularly horribly ugly things that's really a car with part of it cut out, right? A girly pickup truck, in other words ...

I did not connect Janey's post with the magnificent Aussie ute.

I thought the article was alluding to Americanized rust buckets which no self respecting Oz male would be caught dead in.

And I still believe there was historical truth in the wayward humour of the origins of the US.

I knew it. Just wanted the humourless twink in question to fess up!

Of course ... it wasn't the vehicle I was making fun of ...

;)

It was me- I am still very upset about you making fun of my UTE!


xxxxx mick

And AuntyS, I'm sure you're not hearing much about the 10,000 (official estimate, i.e. under-count) people -- the Canadian Labour Congress, Oxfam, you name any of the dozens of legitimate "civil society" organizations -- who marched to call for more money for maternal health initiatives (and for the vile right-wing Canadian government to abandon its ideological right-wing refusal to fund abortion services and thus help to save the lives of the tens of thousands of women who die of botched abortions every year worldwide), and for action on climate change, etc. etc., while the goons were smashing windows.

To give our own media credit, and particularly the privately-owned and often too Conservative CTV, they made that point constantly: that thousands of people demonstrated peacefully for important causes with none of the fire-setting and window-smashing having anything to do with them, and merely detracting from their message.

I was actually one of the organizers of the very first ever (anywhere) counter-summit to a G7 summit. The demonstration part, which I was in charge of, got a notice in the New York Times as having gone off without violence. ;)