Some people can write a new post everyday without really trying. Nothing much may have happened in their day, or in the world; still they churn out post after post of eminently readable material. I'm fucked if I know how they do that. I've got shitloads going on in my life, I'm finding the world a fascinating place, but I got nuthin'. Oh well.
There's been a fair swag of sheep running around a couple of our paddocks for the last couple of weeks. I was over Da Bosses house last night for a barbecue and I asked him who they belonged to, as I thought that they were here on agistment. Apparently they're ours, all two and a half thousand of them - cattle prices are too high to keep the feedlot full so they bought a mob of joined ewes with the intention of selling the fat lambs and ewes seperately in about March. It would have been a shame to see all the feed in the paddocks go to waste; it will nearly all die off over summer whether it gets grazed or not. I can see a few late nights with the shootin' iron coming up, the pigs will hammer the lambs, to say nothing of the foxes and cats. Could be worse, they could be planning to shear them.
In other news, the Department of Primary Industries is doing an audit on the feedlot tomorrow so I spent all day cleaning stuff that doesn't need to be cleaned and hiding anything that looks vaguely untidy. Tagged under FarmingSheepCattle
So the AFL Grand Final is today; the Blood-stained Angels versus the West Coast Coolers. I don't have a great emotional investment in the game, but I hope the Swannies win, for one very good reason - I've only ever met one Coolers supporter and the world would have been a better place if he had been shot into a sock.
Funny place, W.A. Very friendly place generally, the only city I'd ever live in again, but xenophobic. I lived there in the eighties and the only way I could get past the initial interview phase when I was job searching was to lie and tell them I grew up in Perth (Hi to all my old classmates at Mt. Lawley High, whoever you are). When it comes to sport, Sandgropers are nearly as parochial as Queenslanders. In 1986 or 1987, when I was living there, there was a State of Origin Game between W.A. and Victoria. For weeks beforehand the front and back pages of the West Australian and the Daily News were devoted to stories explaining how W.A. was going to spank the Vics. There was never any doubt that it was going to happen, just a bit of conjecture about how the outcome was going to be reached. I was at Subiaco Oval when the Vics showed the Sandgropers how to play the game.
You had to go three pages in from the back of the West Australian the next day to read about it - Idon't think the Daily News covered it at all.
We started putting the new hayshed up this week. It's been kinda fun doing something different. As I don't mind working at heights, I've been one of the bunnies in the excavator bucket seven metres in the air swinging off a podgy bar or spanner. I can't say that I'm terribly impressed with the design of the shed, but then again, I'm no engineer. For the stats minded, the shed is twenty eight metres long and twelve metres wide and seven metres high at the peak, with five metres clearance at the side. In other news, I retract my earlier statements regarding cattle breeds. We put a herd through the yards yesterday morning to draft off a new pen for the feedlot. They were lunatics, but not in the usual way. It's like they were part of a sleeper cell of cattle planted by PETA, programmed to go from meek and mild to completely nutso at the most inopportune moment. The Angus were the loopiest, but the Santas were the scariest. One of them leaped at me from the other side of a six foot gate and nearly made it over. Scared the shit out of me and took us a while to get him off the gate without us - or him - getting damaged. I'm getting pretty light on my feet, though, only one of them actually made contact with me.
A previously docile Santa Gertrudis walked into the forcing yard, decided he didn't want to be in there and bolted back out, straight at me. Cattle will often throw their head at you as they run past, dunno why, but they'll do it from three or four feet away. This bloke did it just as he reached me and gave me my first horn wound. Luck he'd been dehorned when he was a pup, because the horns grow back with a flat end. Still hurt like a bitch, now I've got a little graze/bruise right where my rock-hard abs meet my rock-hard..., other muscles on the side.
What does it mean that so many of the most enjoyable movies of recent years have been documentaries about the movie life? Perhaps this is just the way of all postmodernism: These days, the thing that is the thing-about-the-thing trumps the thing that is the-thing-in-itself. But perhaps there's more to it than that. I'll venture a small-t theory: It's a symptom of the current state of the movieworld. The movies themselves have become less important not just as elements in the general media mix but even in that smaller complex of things we call "the movies." Where once the movies were the central event of "the movies," they often now function merely as pretexts for an avalanche of other media events: articles, ads, campaigns, careers, profiles, DVD extras. As the business, the deal-making, the careers, the packaging, and the technology have moved to center stage, the movies themselves have receded into the shadows. Quite a change! When "Nashville," for one example, opened in 1975, The New York Times ran at least eight pieces about the movie itself, and editorial writers and critics weighed in with interpretations of the film for months after. These days, who cares what some moviemaker has done in an artistic sense, let alone what he has to say? Let's cut to the chase instead: How has the film done at the box office? Who's hot and who's not?
In the days of my youth, when the sun was always shining and the magic lantern show cost a farthing, I was a somewhat competitive individual. I played football at a high standard, cricket to a lesser standard (although I was a pretty handy leggy - took 2 - o off three overs once. Everybody knew that spinners were a thing of the past, though) , at school I was usually in the top two or three in swimming and middle distance running. I even played basketball for a while, which is surely the WWE of ball-sports. However, for once this post isn't all about me, except that it is. These are the top ten sporting moments which I have witnessed, as opposed to participating in. I'm not even going to tell you about the football game in the thunderstorm in the under 15's where I kicked our team's entire score. We won. A lot of these moments came in sports which, in themselves don't really captivate me, but the emotion of the moment caught my attention. What can I say, sometimes I get caught up in the moment. You will note that Cathy Freeman doesn't appear on the list. I have nothing against Cathy, but I never really bought into the whole "Darling of a Nation" thing. I was pleased when she won in Sydney, mainly because of the media scrutiny she would have been subject to if she lost, but..., meh. She also lost a bit of goodwill of mine when she only started speaking out about the plight of aboriginal people a week after she got hit with a bill for back taxes. So, without further ado and in reverse order, here's my top ten:
10:
The day after Australia Day, 2001 Jennifer Capriati won the Australian Open; her first Grand Slam, ten years after she started out. Capriati was something of a child prodigy in the mould of Tracey Austin and Martina Hingis, arriving on the scene as a 14 year old and kicking some major league arse. It all got a bit much for her and she fell of the rails for two and a half years, before making the Big Comeback. I'm not greatly bothered either way by any of that, or the fact that she successfully defended her title in 2002. I just like the way she celebrated after her win. I don't remember too many times when I have seen such pure, unadulterated* joy in my life. She looked like a ten year old girl who just got a pony for her birthday. Maurice Green could take a lesson from this - but probably won't.
*Honourable mention in the celebration stakes goes to Brooke Hanson after qualifying for the 2004 Olympic team. 9: I was late for work the day that Australia beat New Zealand in the 2002 Commonwealth Games Netball final. Generally speaking, I'm not a huge fan of netball, contrary to what a lot of girls might think in the area where I grew up. Everybody plays sport in country towns. Boys play football, girls play netball. For reasons best known to the organisers, netball games started a little bit later in the day than football games, so when I'd finished my game(s) as a junior, I'd leave the other blokes at the footy and go over to watch the netball. A lot of the girls were impressed that I'd chosen to support them and I did nothing to disabuse them of the idea. Lots of athletic women running around in short dresses had nothing to do with it, alright? It actually did have nothing to do with watching the 2002 game. It was just a very exciting, hard fought contest against a traditional enemy. And we won. What more do you want?
8: Gary Hall jnr. is a knobjockey. He can swim like a trout but he's still a knob jockey. Because the media thrive on conflict, they had tried (and still are trying) to portray Australia and the US as major enemies in the pool. As if. There are no enemies in swimming - it's basically eight people/teams competing against a clock all at the same time. To think otherwise is fatal, as I'll explain a bit further down the page. Anyway, Gary Hall jnr. played up to the hype, saying in an airport interview that the Americans were going to "Smash the Aussies like guitars." (Which reminds me - Leo Fender hated Jimi Hendrix with a passion because of the way he treated his Strats). Cut to the first day of competition in the pool and the final of the 4x100 men's freestyle final, an event exclusively the preserve of Sepps since, well, ever.. The Aussies dominated the Yanks, blitzing them by a massive 0.19 seconds. Everybody said yay. The best was yet to come - when the boys had assembled on the pool deck, they all turned towards Hall and gave an impromptu air-guitar recital. Ha Ha Hall.
7: Another swimming one. I like swimming, you'll get used to it. In 1984 the 6'7½West German Michael 'The Albatross' Gross was the holder of the world record for the 200m butterfly and close to unbackable for the Gold medal at the LA games. Jon Siebens's best time was nearly four seconds slower than the record. Siebens cut that back to two seconds in the heats, but nobody took him seriously. Gross qualified fastest, naturally. Gross was leading after the first 100m and looked to be cruising, Sieben and most of the others were just maintaing contact. Gross fell apart in the last half lap and Sieben swam over the top of him to claim Gold and the World record. I can even forgive him for being coached by Lawrie 'somebody put him out of my misery' Lawrence.
6:
Anthony Gobert isn't the best looking bloke I've ever seen. Nor is he the most well-balanced individual to ever grace the stage of world motor sport. But gee, he's good to watch. In 1996 at Brand's Hatch Gobert pulled off the single best overtaking manouvre I've ever seen in my life. The format for World Superbike Championship is different than that of the GP classes. It is held over two races, with the points tally from the two counting towards the championship. In the first round at Brand's Hatch the ageless Pier-Francesco 'Frankie' Chili had skipped out to a bit of a lead on his Ducati. Gobert hunted him down on his Kawasaki but didn't look like he had enough to get past. Brand's Hatch's main straight goes up over a bit of a hill with a long right hand corner about 150m over the brow. On one lap Chili crested the hill about 50m in front of Gobert who locked the brakes at the crest of the hill, threw his bike sideways and flew past Chili about fifty metres before the corner, with the bike laying on it's side and pointing at the side of the track. When the bike was pointing at the apex of the corner he released the brakes, opened the taps and shot out of the corner fifty metres in front of Chili. Sheer brilliance. Chili won the race, but Gobert won my admiration. Later that year Gobert did the same thing lap after lap at the Honda Hairpin at Philip Island and wone both legs. Still not as good as Brand's, but.
5: In 1979 two old rivals met in the Grand Final for about the seven thousandth time. As is usual with these games, it was a pretty intense affair, with Collingwood coming back at Carlton in the final quarter. Carlton Godcoach Alex Jesaulenko had shifted nuggety back pocket Wayne Harmes into the centre and late in the final term Harmes had a snap at goal from near centre-half forward. The ball sprayed wildly towards the boundary line, but Harmes chased it down and, diving headlong, managed to tap it back in to Kenny Sheldon (who is probably more famous for landing on his shoulders after collecting a haymaker from Mad Dog Muir in a whole 'nother game) who goalled to extend Carlton's lead to 10 points. Collingwood goalled, Carlton scored a behind, the siren went ant the correct team won by five points. The fact that replays show that the ball that Harmes chased down was clearly over the line and the goal should have been disallowed (which would have given the Maggies the crown) only makes it sweeter, I know people in the Black &White army who are still bitter about it. My niece was born in that year. I took a photo of her in a Carlton beanie. It turned out to be a pretty cute photo as far as baby photos go, so my sister-in-law had it enlarged and framed, then hung it on the lounge room wall. When her father - a lifelong supporter of the 'woods - saw it he had a hissy fit and never spoke to me again. Hahahahahahaha is all I've got to say on that subject.
4: I have absolutely no interest in athletics generally, although Tatiana Gregorieva caught my attention. It had nothing to do with her being a statuesque blonde, either. Shut up.
Jai Taurima won silver in the Long Jump at the 'lympics. Here's a couple of quotes to illustrate why I liked this;
``I'm the stereotypical knockabout Aussie,'' he once wrote. ``I eat pizzas at least twice a week, and when I get bored with them I head down to McDonald's. I am addicted to chocolate and jellybeans and I'm never in bed before midnight. I love smoking and will go through a pack a day. The smoking actually helps my career; it keeps my weight down. I'd me massive if I didn't smoke."
[...]
Jai Taurima knew it was time to stop celebrating his silver medal in the Olympic long jump when his drink slipped out of his hands at dawn. . ..
He is a walking advert for the unorthodox view that you can smoke, drink and stuff yourself with fast food and still make it big at the Olympics. . .
He was still making his presence felt at Sydney's Olympic Park on Friday, long after his contest had ended.
"Ladies and gentlemen, this is a smoke-free zone," said an announcement over the public address system at the complex's railway station.
"Anyone caught smoking will be asked to leave or join the Australian long jump team."
Another quote of his that I like but couldn't find a link to was a response to a question about what foods he likes to eat when he's celebrating - "Anything that doesn't hurt too much on the way back up." He's keen on a Bourbon, too.
3:
As I said earlier, swimming is an individual sport, competing against a clock. When you start treating it as a race against somebody else, you are likely to lose. Kieren Perkins showed this in 1996, when he won the 1500m in Atlanta. He'd been ill and in poor form for quite some time (I think they found out later that he had an iron deficiency which was remedied by eating more meat). He'd only just qualified for the team and when he scraped into the final in lane eight not many people gave him a chance. The usual method in a 1500m race is to go out fairly hard for about 200 metres, then settle down into a rhythm for about a kilometre before winding up in a 'sprint' to the finish. Perkins went out even harder than usual, surprising the field, who all broke the basic rules and paced themselves against him. 200m came and went and Perkins kept up the pace, the field breaking one by one as they tried to keep up. Finally it was just him. He finished about fifteen seconds outside his record and was about ten seconds clear of second place. It was the single gutsiest effort I have ever seen in any sport, also one of the smartest. Four or five of the finalists were capable of beating Perkins's medal-winning time, but none of them could beat him.
2: On the afternoon of September 26, 1970 at about 3:30, the modern style of fooftball was born.Rumblings had already been felt because of the efforts of Polly Farmer (In my opinion, the greatest ruckman ever to play the game) and a couple of others, but never before had an entire team moved the ball around so quickly. Carlton were forty four points down at half-time when Blues coach Ron Barrassi made the changes to the Carlton game plan that he lived off for the rest of his career. Essentially, all he did was to tell his players to keep the ball moving. Before this, Aussie Rules could be a bit of a stop-start affair. It was rare for anybody to 'play on' after a mark or free kick, but Barrassi instructed his kiddies to "handball, handball, handball." Essentially, they ran the Maggies of their feet. Teddy Hopkins also guaranteed himself free beer for life in the environs of 3053 when he came off the bench after half-time and kicked two goals in two minutes, with four in total. This was also the match in which Alex Jesaulenko took the official 'Mark of the Century' over Graeme 'Jerker' Jenkin, which is probably the single most widely distributed photo in Australian sport. I must confess that I didn't actually see this happen until they played the replay later that evening, VFL Grand Finals not being screened live until 1977 (another Grand Final losing year for the black & whites. Ha ha.) I listened to it on the steam powered wireless at a friends place instead. His family were all mad Blues supporters who couldn't get tickets to the game and we cried nearly all day, first because we were sad, then because we weren't. It was a good time to be a little Carlton supporter. I was even allowed to stay up and watch Mary Hardy and Mike Williamson on Penthouse.
Equal first:
I couldn't separate these two, so I put 'em both at the top, or bottom if you want to be peadntic. The bloke on the left is Rune Holta. The photo is taken at the Olympic Stadium in Sydney on October 26, 2002. My mum died on October 2, 2002. She'd been crook for years and had spent the last two years of her life either in hospital or a nursing home. My Daddy used to race speedwaybikes for a living, so when in January of 2002 I found out that the Speedway Grand Prix was coming to Sydney I drove down and organised tickets, accommodation and an air fare for Dad. Unfortunately, I got Stadium Australia and Aussie Stadium confused and booked the accommodation in Rushcutter's Bay, which isn't exactly next door to Homebush. Oh well, Homebush is a slum anyway. I could write an entire post about that weekend and the effect it had on my Dad and I and one day I probably will. I'll also write a sentence with fewer repetitions of the word 'and'. Suffice it to say for now that it was the most exciting nights entertainment I've ever had. Rune Holta got knocked off his bike in the most bizarre speedway accident I've ever seen in turn one when the bloke on the outside of him (don't remember who it was) got too far sideways and backed off, which had the effect of standing him up. He opened the throttle again, but instead of sliding, his bike stood up on its rear wheel. It then pivoted on its back tyre and caught Holta neatly in the face with the front axle. Greg Hancock won the night but it didn't matter who won; those guys are seriously fast. The dude on the right has the same initials as Jesus Christ and just like The Son, he comes from a famous family. Jason Crump's Dad Phil was a fairly handy speedway rider who got podium finishes in the World Final when it was run as knockout event. His grandfather, Neil Street, was also a handy rider who rode professionally for about twenty years, who also built the modified four valve JAWA engines that Phil used. Both of them are very friendly, approachable chappies, too. All of this paled into insignificance when, in 2004, Our Jason™ brought the Speedway world title home to the land of speedway's birth, fifty two years after Jack Young was the last Australian World Champion. Tony Rickardsson has set things back on the status quo, claiming his seventh world title, but at least Our Jason™ managed to win a couple of rounds and secure second place for the fourth time in five years. I don't have a neat way of wrapping all this up, so I'm just going to sto
I sat down at the 'pooter at about ten o'clock this morning with the intention of knocking out a quick template. It's now six-thirty and I just finished it. If by 'finished' you mean 'not really'. I cheated, too. I started making a template from scratch, but about halfway through it started playing silly buggers on me; the sidebars would grow, then shrink, then move around the page. I started off with a Blogger template, but I changed just about everything. It now has an extra, bonus sidebar, the page itself is wider, the background is different, etc., etc. You've got eyes, have a look. I set the layout up the same way I did with the scratch built jobby and after a bit of tweaking to get the sizes right, it worked like a beauty. I worked out how to do drop-down menus, but they were pretty ugly, so I got them in from outside as well.
I'm pretty bloody pleased with myself, actually. In fact, I'm so impressed with me that I just might touch myself inappropriately if I'm not careful.
I now have a great deal more respect for web designers and such-like. It's a lot more complicated than I thought it would be. I mean, have a look at this page, we're not talking cutting edge ummm..., stuff here. At least I'll be able to think straight when I look at this page now, which should help me start posting with some degree of reliability (and reply to comments). I haven't eaten all day, there's dishes in the sink from last night, I've got a headache and I haven't even had a beer yet. It was fun though, can you get people to pay you to do this?
I get the B3TA newsletter every week. Sometimes I think that's a good thing and sometimes I delete it without reading it because of the "We're terribly witty because we send up the mainstream" style of writing they employ. Last week I read it and I'm glad I did. Backhoes are God's gift to the middle aged man-child. I love backhoes. L-U-V love'em. This series of photos from a link in the newsletter goes a long way towards explaining why. If I met the bloke driving the backhoe I'd buy him a beverage of his choice. Two of them, maybe. That's a pretty darned impressive piece of backhoe-ery. I can put one up into the back of a tipper, but this guy is way outta my league.
Allow me to pass on a couple of mildly amusing anecdotes regarding backhoes. Actually, they're not all that amusing, but they do serve to make me look like a wild-eyed rebel flying in the face of conformity. Or..., not.
WARNING: Gratuitous self-aggrandisement follows!
I first learned to drive a backhoe on a Case 590 SuperL . It's still my all-time bestest backhoe. The farm I was on at the time used PTB (pipe through bank) irrigation instead of syphons. This meant that the head ditches were a little higher, between a metre and about 1.3 metres, it also meant that the banks of the head-ditches were wider, wide enough to drive along. As well as that, the headlands were wider; because you couldn't swing the implement out over the channel bank as you were turning around, plus the rotobucks (temporary earth mounds put up to control the direction the water flows) were 24 metres apart instead of two.
These last two factors, plus the nature of flow from PTB's meant that it was often necessary to get down into the headland area with the backhoe and do some running repairs during irrigation. Plenty of mud for everybody. Once the repairs had been carried out and it was time to leave the fun started. There were 28 fields on that farm; it was possible to reverse up onto the head-ditch in two of them. The preferred method on the rest was to reverse up as far as you could - not far, usually. Then unfold the hoe, reach out and stick the bucket into the opposite side of the bank you wanted to climb, push the boom down to lift the rear of the 'hoe off the ground, then fold it up again, which had the effect (if you got it right) of pulling the machine up the bank.
Sometimes the hydraulics just didn't have enough grunt in them, so then you would lift the front bucket up, fold it under like you were emptying it, stick it into the ground, then fold it back upright. This, coupled with the aforementioned method usually got you out of trouble. If it didn't, then the fun really started. The official Carlos Fandango Approved method then was to employ both techniques at once - with the machine at full revs and reverse gear engaged.
Think about it for a minute - you're supposed to face forward when driving or operating the loader bucket, but rearwards when operating the hoe. It's usually some ungodly hour in the morning at the end of a week or two of nightshift, you're blasé because this is all you've been doing for the last week, you're trying to pull yourself up a muddy four or five foot high bank and stop on the six foot wide bit on the top because there's a channel full of water on the other side, you're operating a loader bucket and a backhoe at the same time - and the wheels are spinning just as fast as you can make them go.
Strangely enough, sometimes it goes wrong. I saw a bloke (the one who taught me to drive the beast) pull himself up one side of the head-ditch and straight down the other, into about four feet of water. We left the engine running (it had a low-level exhaust and we didn't want water to suck back down into the engine - also it keeps the crankcase pressurised) and went for a tractor and chain. I backed the tractor up tp the opposite side of the head-ditch and hooked the chain up. The other bloke operated the backhoe, trying to drag himself across. It didn't work - the chain just cut through the channel bank without the backhoe moving, but it did look amusing, with nothing of the 'hoe visible except for the boom, cab and airfilter, being operated by an unfit man in his undies who was bracketed by two huge rooster tails of muddy water coming off the (otherwise submerged) rear tyres. We had to get a crane from town to lift it out eventually. No lasting damage, though - changed all the oils, drained the fuel tank, changed all the filters and she was away.
It occurs to me that I have a few readers of inferior non-Australian heritage. These people may have some difficulty comprehending the sheer scale of things here in the Wide Brown Land. I feel that it is incumbent on me to bring some light into their otherwise dull, worthless lives. I have decided to do this by telling you a little bit about a little hobby farm in the Northern Territory; it's called Victoria River Downs, the VRD, or The Big Run. It was originally stocked in the 1880s by two men, Maurice Lyons and Charles Brown Fisher. Not content with being named after a future comic-strip icon, Fisher also managed to be the son of one of the only two men in history* with the name of Hurtle. I bet he got picked on at school. Most of the original stock was brought in by outback legend Nat Buchanan. 20,000 furry methane factories. At least you'd never go short of a feed. (As an aside, most of these blokes lived exclusively on salt beef, black tea and damper made from a 50% mixture of weevils and flour. Would have been hard work laying a cable). By the late 1890's - early 1900's, the Big Run was in it's prime - around 21,000 square kilometres(or 5,250,000 acres) and 30,000 cattle. It was also associated with some famous names - Sid (The Godfather of the Australian Beef Industry) Kidman was part of a consortium which bought the place in 1900. John (Andrew McFarlane was so not a Flying Doctor) Flynn was stranded for a month on a sandbar in the Victoria River. And - for the Poms - the place was sold in 1909 to the Bovril Company. I've never met anybody who actually drinks Bovril. Apart from a Billy Connolly sketch, I've never heard of anybody drinking Bovril. I'd give it a go, but it's probably crap. Since then it's been bought and sold a few times and had it's share of ups and downs, including a malaria outbreak which killed about 10% of the population. These days it is owned by Heytesbury Beef, which is a Holmes a'Court company. It's only a shadow of its former self at 3,000,000 acres and 24,000 cattle, but I don't think they're doing it too tough - Heytesbury beef produced over 9,000 tons of beef in 2002, from a herd of 200,000+ cattle running on 8,300,000 acres. Poor buggers, wonder where their next feed's coming from? *That I know about
I've heard a couple of rumours recently that the next-door neighbours (Cubbie Station) are selling out. The manager of the place has issued a press release denying a sale, but saying that they are looking into a merger with another family - the Brimblecombes, who are up near St. George.
I wish they were selling out, it seems like a bargain to me. One news story has the price being reduced from $470m to $410m.
OK, so the background picture has changed, along with pretty much everything else. The photo is relevant to me, because it is a cotton field. Unfortunately for the relevance factor, it is a cotton field in "the dry cotton area" of West Texas. (Childress County, to be precise.) The photo was an illustration to a story in a June, 1938 newspaper detailing how tractors were putting sharecroppers off their land*, a la Grapes Of Wrath. I really like Grapes of Wrath, but only for the quality of the writing. The depictions of Okies as too stupid to scratch themselves show Steinbeck up for the product of an affluent middle class Coast family that he was. The descriptions of families being 'tractored off' their farms is, apparently, accurate. Oh well, it worked out OK in the long run. I really don't understand the maudlin sentimentality that accompanies any discussion of these events.
Who in their right mind would want to get up before sparrow fart, eat porridge for breakfast, then work your nuts off for twelve or fourteen hours a day, all so you could pay off some of your debt at the local store - maybe? If you were real lucky, maybe your eldest kid could get brand new shoes every couple of years.
Fuck that for a game of soldiers. My Dear Old Daddy did his apprenticeship as an epilectic with one foot nailed to the floor**. At trade school they showed a movie provided by William Adams, who were the Caterpillar distributors. The movie showed two blokes operating three cats. One bloke stood about 100 metres in from each end of the paddock and when a tractor and plough got close enough he'd run in between the plough and tractor, climb over the back of the seat, lift the plough up, turn around and send it back the other way - jumping off when he was satisfied it was going straight. Try getting that past the OH&S people these days...
And yes, I do know that the hills in the photo are extremely unlikely to have been pulled by a Caterpillar, being such fluent curves, but Caterpillar was the tenant-farm-destruction weapon of choice in large areas of the You-ess.
As an aside, I find this picture baffling. Those aren't fresh hills. That ground has been worked up at least once since those hills were pulled, which raises some questions. Does 'dry cotton area' mean an area where they grow dryland (i.e., non-irrigated) cotton, or is an area of low rainfall where they grow irrigated cotton? See, if it's irrigated, why do they pull their hills into curves? It's bloody hard to do surface - furrow irrigation around corners and I would doubt that they had centre pivots. If it's dryland, why pull hills? And why put so much work on the dirt? Hills dry out quicker than flat ground, leading your plants into moisture deficit earlier than they otherwise would; therefore increasing the amount of squares and bolls the plant sheds. It also reduces fibre quality and yield on the remaining bolls. Working the dirt costs you moisture as well.
Life is full of little mysteries.
*Of course, several years of drought (The Oklahoma Dustbowl, anybody) and The Great Depression had nothing to do with it.
**Epilectics with one foot nailed to the floor are also known as fitters and turners.
I've been frigging around with the template here for a couple of hours. When I look at it using the 'preview' facility it looks OK; I've gotten rid of the underlines on hyperlinks as well as making the link colours less garish, changed the colour of the text in the title and subtitle to make it stand out more, resized the main content background photo, gotten rid of the leftover bits of brown from the old colour scheme and put in a border on the side of the main content to differentiate the sidebar a bit more. (The photo of Leigh Adams and Niki Pedersen that formed the background of the profile container had to go; when I tried to use it as the background for the sidebar wrapper I kept getting a black margin between repeats, which I couldn't get rid of.
However, whenever I try to load the page in a browser, not only are the links underlined again, but they're in weird colours, the text colour in the header has changed so that you can hardly see it, let alone read it. Frankly, I am somewhat slightly baffled as to what to do; I'm not sure how to fix it, 'cause I'm not sure that it's even broken.; it may be the result of an argument between my 'pooter and Blogger. Or maybe too many changes over too shart a period of time has caused Blogger to have a mid-life crisis, although every time that I was satisfied that a change worked I saved it and republished the whole lot. Dunno. Feedback as to what it looks like would be appreciated. If I've caused too much damage, I'll just swap over to a new template and see how much abuse that one will take.
We moved from the northern suburbs of Melbourne to a small Gippsland town on April Fool's Day in 1972. "How small was it?" I hear you ask. "Well" I reply, "Our phone number had three digits." My dear old Daddy had purchased the town's only service station and mechanical workshop. It was an old building; or rather, collection of buildings, and filled with stuff. The stuff included a '55 Customline and a '48 Packard (which had the first straight eight engine that I can remember seeing. Dad sold these. Spewin'. However what he didn't sell was one of these: Yes folks, a communist era East European clunky two stroke utilitarian roadster. It sat untouched for a while, then my brother and I decided to see if we could get it going. Turned out that there was nothing much wrong with it. We cleaned up the carby ('cause you always clean up the carby), stuck the oxy up the exhaust pipe to burn out the carbon that was built up in there and fired it up. Except that it wouldn't go anywhere. Inspection revealed that the clutch was emotionally stifled and didn't want to appear 'clingy'. Over the pub to hit up the publican for some old corks, which we cut into slices and glued onto the friction plate. Started her up again and this time it moved! Not very fast, but what do you want from about a dozen very small horses? This is probably a lot neater looking than we managed to get the old girl, but we managed to have more than our fair share of fun terrorizing the area at ungodly speeds (30 - 40 kph). Several years later I found another one under a house. This one had been parked and left for no apparent reason. It started, ran and moved with minimal attention required. I had plenty of time on my hands, so I decided to restore it. I had most of the cosmetics done and was on the home stretch when somebody stole it and a friend's bike that I was working on. Don't be shocked. Gentle Reader, but I think some uncouth language may have escaped my lips. It probably wouldn't have looked like this anyway; mainly because a) it wasn't black and b) this is a Jawa-NZ, not a Jawa-CZ. They were assembled in Un Zud in the late sixties.
I just heard the saddest two sentences I have heard in many moons. A little boy in New Orleans , maybe three or four years old, was asked by a journalist where his mother was. The little boy said "My mommas dead. Somebody pushed her in the water." No wonder people are looking for somebody to blame.
I went for a bit of a drive on the weekend. I passed through the Lockyer Valley on the way home and was struck yet again by how rich the soil is. It doesn't look like any other soil anywhere that I've been. It looks like chocolate. This picture doesn't do it justice, although if you look up 'fertile' in the dictionary, you'll find a picture of Lockyer valley soil in there. If you look up my dictionary, that is. Two bizarre things happened while I was away. Guess what they were. Go on. Guess. You know you want to. Oh, alright, I'll just tell you then. Firstly, not only did some kids who were raising money for..., some kids, I guess, wash my ute; they polished it as well. I thought that a photo was justified, it doesn't see a hose too often. That's the Gatton campus of UQ in the background, the dirt photo is of the DPI research station across the road. OK, bizarre thing number two - I went to Brisbane to see an exotic friend of mine. Apparently the idea was to sit on her balcony in Kangaroo Point and watch Riverfire. Exotic friend has latin blood, so things got a bit willing pretty early in the night. How many of you can say that you have been getting to know somebody in the biblical sense and - just when things are about to reach their conclusion - an F1-11 does a 'dump and burn' low enough to make ornaments fall off the dresser? And burn the hairs off your arse. Not wanting to miss an opportunity I said "How often has a man made that happen for you?"
Some of you may recall a post I wrote some time ago called Something new to play with. In that post I said that I managed to delete the photo of the JCB with the jib extended. Well, through hours of hard work and finding it buy accident filed in the wrong folder, I've managed to undelete it. No, I don't have anything better to write about.
I am a somewhat technically-minded person - despite my clunky efforts on this page. I like knowing how things work and I like to think that I am capable of understanding fairly complex processes and interactions. Which is a different thing to knowing what these processes are called. Coupled with this I have a remarkable level of what I like to call 'mechanical sympathy'. Got a dodgy sounding car you need to get to Toowoomba? I'll get it there. Gotta get a load into Rocklea, but your truck's getting a whine in the diff on over-run and your worried about it chewing a crown-wheel, so you need somebody to treat it nice? I'm your man. So why can't I get a toaster to work properly? On average I go through a toaster per annum. They don't actually cease operating, they just won't play nice. Either they'll burn it black or give you warmed over bread - on the same setting. Sometimes they'll toast one side of the bread more than the other, sometimes they'll toast the bread on one side of the toaster more than the bread on the other side. After the first two or three times, I blamed all this on the fact that I was buying supermarket brand toasters, so I started purchasing name brands at electrical stores: pretty much the same result. OK, so I might get an extra month or two out them before I crack a sad and lob them at a guinea fowl*, but I don't know that the value for money factor is being improved. I have an urge to go to one of those upmarket-style kitchen supply places and pay about fourteen bales of cotton for the ritziest, sturdiest bread-browning device they have- as long as I get a lifetime, gold-plated-twice-my-money-back-signed-in-blood warranty. How hard can it be to stick a couple of heating elements in a box? *There's a few outside right now and if they don't shut up one of them is going to feel the joy of a Sunbeam on its shoulder.
I find it difficult to understand the callous disregard which people have for the victims of Katrina. Nobody except Americans seem to be even talking about it, let alone doing anything about it. Surely all you lefties aren't blaming the residents of New Orleans, Biloxi,* etc. for The Great Satan? And what about all you RWDBs? Shouldn't you be racking up the points with Head Office? Australians still tell war stories about Tracy**; imagine if Tracy spent Christmas in Sydney or Melbourne instead - that's the level of destruction the Sepps are looking at. The link at the top of the page, which will be staying there for a while, is for The Salvo's in America. They'll take Orstrayan credit cards, though, so bust 'em out. *As a fan of Blues- and to a lesser extent, Zydeco- and Cajun- music, I find the location of the destruction particularly upsetting. I'm going to spend quite a deal of time in that area before I die. **I know a bloke who got on the grog and slept through Tracy. Woke up on the couch and the roof of his house was gone. Update: Even the Sri Lankan gubment found a lazy $25,000 to help out. Whaddya got scorpions in your wallet? Up-Update: Check this out.
