Arm The Insane

Moving House

2007-06-19T09:08:00.000+07:00

I've had just about enough of the bullshit of having to make about several attempts before viewing this literary masterwork, so I'm moving here. I've already started moving a few of the old posts over. You won't be able to see the well written stuff, though.

I couldn't be bothered moving the comments.

It's been a long time since I rock and rolled

2007-06-01T16:35:00.000+07:00

And even longer since I listened to Led Zeppelin.
Up until yesterday I was unable to access any blogspot blogs, including this one. I don't know why that was the case as I could write and post on the site, I just couldn't see the result. Now I can see it, eventually. I usually have to refresh the page half a dozen times to get blogspot pages to display, but display they do, so I might start writing a few bits every now and again.
As for me, there's not a lot to tell, really. I got married in February. Dad came over for a month, which was pretty cool. I've been doing a fair bit of scuba diving when the mood takes me. Apart from that, not much.
It will take me a whi9le to get back into the swing of writing stuff, but don't worry, this won't turn into one of those inner demon exposing blogs all about me, me, me, me. Nor will it be a travelogue style, "Look at me, aren't I adventurous!" things.
They shit me.

Not much has happened

2007-01-21T13:05:00.000+07:00

Well here I am in sunny Vietnam. I've been here for a little over three weeks. Now for a brief summary. Saigon stinks. It's also fucking crowded. No surprise there, I guess. I met the lovely lady at the airport, after having sat next to another Aussie who spends six months a year in the same town that I now find myself living in. We spent a couple of days in Saigon before doing a bit of a tour around the Mekong delta to the Cambodian border. Now I'm in Nha Trang.

Apparently Vietnam is not, in fact, one huge town. I've been reliably informed on various occasions that I was in the countryside between towns. You can tell that you are in a rural area because some of the houses have backyards. The Vietnamese name for these backyards is 'farms'.

Nha Trang does a fairly good impression of a tropical paradise.

Which is all I could be bothered telling you at the moment; I've got to go get a pedicure.

I'm just going out for a short walk

2006-12-15T01:30:00.000+07:00

I think that some polar explorer said that before he disappeared into the icy wasteland.
Which I guess is a little inappropriate as I have no intention of going anywhere near any icy wastelands. I will be buggering off for a while, though. Probably for about a month or so.
If you don't hear from me before then, feel free to purchase me something expensive for ~~consumer exploitation day~~ Christmas.

Groundbreaking New Technology

2006-12-09T08:30:00.000+07:00

Every other bugger in the world is posting YouTube video, so because I am nothing if not a diehard individualist, always willing, nay, eager to go against the flow, to buck the trend and to fight the machine, I'm going to post a YouTube video, too. I have no idea why cornstarch and water behaves this way, but it is pretty nifty.

A pool filled with non-newtonian fluid

In other news, I replaced the drag link on my ute smornin'. I mention this only because of the trouble I had in sourcing a replacement. I emailed literally dozens of establishments in the eastern states. Only six bothered to return my email. Of those six, four wanted to know what a 'centre drag link' was. For those of you who don't know, a 'centre drag link' is what Holden call the item I was taught as an apprentice to call a tie rod. Also known as a track rod or even just a steering linkage. You would think that a spare parts person would be familiar with the terminology.

I also mention this because it is the first bit of maintenance that I have done on this vehicle that was remotely straightforward. Fair dinkum cobber, you'd think this vehicle rolled off a sixties Vauxhall production line, not a noughties Isuzu one. It's only the metric fasteners that give it away.

Hail to the chief

2006-12-06T01:20:00.000+07:00

Unless something very odd happens in the next twelve months, I'm going to vote Labour at the next election. I heard Kevin Rudd on the steam powered wireless yesterday and in the very first Opposition Leader interview of his that has come to my attention he addressed two of the issues that matter the most to me. Not only did he he address them, but his stance on these issues is very palatable to me. On the first we are in complete agreement: Australia is sending jobs overseas by the bucketload because of the current gubment's obsession with having every single budget in surplus. The easiest way to get a surplus is the export of commodities, we give the industries major tax breaks, the taxpayer then constructs the majority of infrastructure (Although the coal industry is doing so well that they are building a lot of their own rail and water lines now.), the commodity is then put on a boat and sent overseas. We don't manufacture anything any more. We send coal and iron ore to Japan, who smelt the ore. Japan is not a cheap country, either tax-wise or labour-wise. How does this make economic sense?

Rudd nimbly side-stepped what will probably be the official Liberal Party rhetoric about tariff barriers (Much like the official Liberal Party rhetoric about interest rates, they will neglect to mention their own record on tariffs, or tell you who fixed the problem.) and gave some imprecise, but encouraging answers full of references to R&D and industry development. It is naive to expect detailed policy from any opposition this far out from an election and ridiculous to expect it from a new opposition leader, but I will be watching this one closely.

The second issue I don't see exactly eye to eye with Kevvy on, but at least he is addressing the issue in a way which is likely to see a positive outcome. I am referring to the relations between state and federal governments. My preferred solution is to get rid of the states. Simple idea, really, but bloody difficult to put into practice. Kevvy didn't offer a quick soundbite solution to the problem (He'll have to work on that if he is to compete with Howard. Johnny's policies are always easily digestible. Might not be any good, but they are easy to sell.) but he is aware of it, has worked in both area and seems to have a pragmatic approach to the problem. Johnny, on the other hand, uses the steamroller approach in areas where he is ideologically motivated or where there are easy points on offer. Everything else he blames the states for.

There is another reason to vote for Kevvy: He wears RMs.

My ex-girlfriend's sister had one of Jamie Durie's g-strings

2006-11-20T01:48:00.000+07:00

In these days of trepidation regarding climate change and global warming, a thought occurred to me the other day which strikes fear into my heart.
First let me qualify this particular thought by saying that the last lifestyle program that I had much time for was Torque in the seventies (Couldn't find a link.). However, having been exposed to a few episodes of shows that involve gardening and in particular, makeovers of people's backyards, I have noticed something disturbing. Nobody has a Hill's Hoist. Or if they do, the correct course of action is to remove it. They don't even replace it with one of those reel in and out doovies.

Nup, it's carbon- emission central for this people. Maybe they think that because they have planted callistemons and bromeliads and stuff, that makes them carbon-neutral. I have, of course, written this post out of concern for the planet and not as an excuse to post a photo of Jody Rigby, whom I admire for her horticultural skill, work ethic and ability to drive a bobcat and not for her droolworthiness.

2006-11-19T04:08:00.000+07:00

The new stealth model from Ducati:
Featuring Australia's next World Champeen (If Chris Vermuelen doesn't beat him to it, which seems likely, given his times in off-season testing.) Note his angle of lean, then look where his back tyre is, he's having a bit of a go. And yes, I realise that the picture has been edited for effect, but not very much.
Also, funny what a difference a colour makes, isn't it?
This photo is of the GP7 in stealth trim, so that camera waves bounce off it and they can do their testing in secret.

This photo is of the GP6 in full dress regalia. Basically the same as far as bodywork goes (Which is to say "Far and away the sexiest of the current crop of racing bikes." Like 'em or loathe 'em, Ducati always brings the pretty. Except the Paso. The Paso is the ugly one who stays at home baking cookies.) The GP6 looks far more angular and New Millennium than the GP7, which is almost John Player Norton-ish by comparison. I'd still ride it, though.

Probably only to about halfway around the first corner, but it would be good fun trying.

As an added extra bonus limited edition feature, here is the dash of the GP6.

Belinda Emmett

2006-11-18T03:57:00.000+07:00

Let me begin by saying that until recently I was blissfully unaware of the existence of Ms. Emmett. I have no particular feelings regarding her personally one way or the other. She conducted herself with great dignity throughout her ordeal and for that she is to be congratulated. Rove is as funny as a toothache and as charismatic as a tax office auditor. Be that as it may, he too has carried himself in an exemplary manner and his marriage to a terminally ill woman is to be much admired. Indeed, I think his conduct could be held up to the entertainment industry in general as an example of how people of strong character behave in times of personal crisis.

They buried Belinda Emmett yesterday. The funeral appears to have been slightly more showbiz in orientation, with glossy pamphlets and things, but hey, they were only disposing of a corpse and I don't care what they do at my funeral, so I have no right to be judgmental about anybody else's. However, to commemorate her passing, radio stations around the country were given copies of a song entitled Less Than Perfect, recorded by Emmett* in 2003 for an unreleased solo album.

Yesterday, whilst raping the planet in my tractor** and listening to the ABC, one of only two radio stations we receive out here (The other one being 2WEB, which was playing John "When I want your opinion, I'll give it to you" Laws.) I had the opportunity to listen to Ms. Emmett's song. There is a reason that album remains unreleased.

That song is truly, unrelentingly awful. It is the most painful gash that has assaulted my eardrums in many a long year. I would rather listen to an album of failed Australian Idol auditions. The scariest thing is the probability of this album being released as a fundraiser for the Belinda Emmett Foundation.

I don't know if the Belinda Emmett Foundation exists, but if it doesn't then it soon will because every dead celebrity - and most live ones - have a foundation, it being a well known fact that the only way to contribute to a cause is to duplicate services, multiply the combined admin costs and write it off on your taxes. Which has absolutely nothing to do with self-aggrandisement, furthering your career or trying to cover your greed and wealth in a coating of nobility.

* Is it disrespectful to refer to a dead person by their surname?

** Raping the planet = leveling ground that I earlier cleared with a bulldozer.

Here I am, brain the size of a planet....

2006-11-15T02:19:00.000+07:00

Is it just me, or is depression becoming more common? Not that I'm depressed, but I seem to be seeing more reports of it in the papers. Now Marcus Trescothick is going home.

Bugger.

Apparently pate is sometimes known as forcemeat

2006-11-14T01:12:00.000+07:00

OK, it's four in the morning, I can't sleep and there is nothing to read in the paper. I got nuthin' to say, but I'm going to say it anyway. When I was going to school, I found that this wasn't a good thing as far as productivity was concerned. If the teacher told the class to write a story without giving us the subject matter then I was cactus. By the end of the period I'd have nothing. Too many ideas swimming around in my head and too little time to choose. Apparently this is why a lot of prey animals swarm; it confuses the hell out of predators, who find themselves spoilt for choice and so keep missing targets.
If, on the hand, my teacher told the class to write a story about..., then by the end of the period I would have knocked out a ground-breaking novel about..., and would be considering offers from rival publishers whilst at the same time deciding whether to go with the screen adaptation by Peter Jackson or the Henry Crawford mini series.
One problem I have is that I don't use the Steven King method, mainly because it requires dedication, diligence and a faith in your abilities. King's method is pretty simple really, he sits down at a specific time each day and writes for a set period of time. I don't have the discipline or the desire to 'further my craft'. Another part of his method - the part that requires faith in your abilities - is that he doesn't start with a story in mind, he starts with a situation and sees what happens.
What would happen if a car was haunted? What would happen if a social outcast had telekinetic powers? What would happen if you discovered a spaceship in your backyard, etc. ?
I would never be game enough to start a story without a finale in mind. Writing is too difficult for me at the best of times, it would frustrate the hell out of me to discover after slaving away in my garrett for an unseemly period of time that the only person who can rescue the damsel was eaten by a dragon in chapter three.
Which is all fairly bothersome as I have had an idea going around in my head since 1992 for the Great Australian Novel™. Something of a mix of Camus's The Outsider, Orwell's 1984, and a little bit of Thomas the Tank Engine, given that it was inspired by the placement of the stations on the Frankston railway line. Trouble is, I can only think it about halfway through in my head and I don't have the talent necessary to realise this somewhat grandiose idea.

Also, there are no tits, bums, graphic violence or car chases. I wouldn't read if somebody else wrote it.

Later gators, I'm going to work.

Tit rot, knacker lackers and fire in the hole

2006-11-11T05:05:00.000+07:00

After reading this post over at Adrian's I have a couple of things to say:
First, I fucking hate theme events; I don't even like fancy dress parties - unless they have a 'topless girlies with perky boobies' theme. I don't like Red Nose Day, Pink Ribbon Day, Shave For a Cure or even the MS readathon. All of them are noble causes - all of which I have been affected by - none of which I donate to. At least, not during the aforementioned themed events. I am aware of these causes and contribute to them accordingly based on the merit of their case, not because people are willing to humiliate themselves in order to glorify their own self-image as public benefactors. Which is not to lump Adrian's young bloke in with those knuckle fuckers who think that getting their hair spray painted makes them into paragons of virtue.
Secondly, this is a better than average cause which, as a card-carrying misogynist, lights my fire. There has been a lot of talk about this cervical cancer vaccine being put on the PBS - and rightly so. I don't care how much it is going to cost, three jabs will save a lot of lives and a lot of money in the future, too. Twenty two female MPs signed a letter demanding that the PBS listing be expedited. How many of these women would have gone to the trouble of drafting and signing a letter if the vaccine were for prostate cancer? Prostate cancer killed 2718 bonzer Aussies in 2001. Source: Cancer in Australia 2001,( AIHW & AACR, 2004) (Via Australian institute of Health and Welfare. This is slightly more than 1000% of the number of women who died of cervical cancer in the same period (ibid*) and 124 more than died of breast cancer (ibid, again.).

How much money gets poured into women's health compared to men' health? Women live longer already^, they are less likely to contract just about any form of cancer than men (Specialised girly bits excepted, although 26 men died of tit rot in 2001.); the only gender neutral cancers in which women are markedly more represented in the statistics are Thyroid cancer and cancers related to alcohol consumption - although the mortality rate for thes second group is actually higher among men than women, females were more likely to be diagnosed.

Some of the discrepancies in levels of what would appear to be gender neutral diseases can be attributed to the cause rather than the site: Four times as many men as women contracted mesothelioma. Blue Sky Mine, anyone? (That would be Wittenoom for the uneducated.)

Five times as many men contracted Karposi's Sarcoma. This is one of the diagnostic indicators for HIV. Not for nothing in the politically incorrect eighties did we call AIDS the Anally Injected Death Syndrome. Although bum cancers don't appear to be biased toward men much more than other cancers.

So what's my Point?

I forget.

^You know why old married men die younger than old married women?

They want to.

* I jist put ibid in cos I no wot it meens.

Oh yeah, I remember one point. Breast cancer and Cervical cancer research is so well-funded compared to Prostate cancer, Testicular cancer, etc., because women are much more vocal about their perceived injustices than men - and because men like boobies. As for the Cervix, let me quote L.J. Hooker - "Location, location, location."

For trees are jolly good fellows...

2006-11-09T18:07:00.000+07:00

Woohoo, check me out; two posts in one day! What a gun. To celebrate the occasion, I've decided to show you some trees; because you are urban types and don't know what trees are. On your left you will see a photo. You may notice than in the centre(ish) of this photo is an organism of irregular structure and colouring. This is a tree. Trees don't give up easily.

Trees are also quite friendly. They have been known to respond well to hugs. If they can't find greenie hippy scum to hug them, they will quite often hug themselves.

Of course the similarities with people don't
end there. Just as people (Women, anyway.*) are pretty much useless once they reach a certain age and should be pulped, the same goes for trees. And just like people (Women, anyway.*), we tend to let trees hang on too long.

And just like people (Women, anyway.* Still.), trees
have really crap skin when they get old.

Of course, not all trees are what they seem. This one is obviously a bloke.
It started life as a fencepost. (If you don't count the fact that the fencepost was cut from a pre-existing tree.) Not content with having led a productive life once, it has decided to do it all over again.

*Blokes remain bonzer in perpetuity.

Like you'd know, anyway

2006-11-09T01:56:00.000+07:00

Just a short note to offer advice to Angelina Jolie, Madonna, Martin Sheen, etc., but particularly the self-caricaturising Irish git Bono -

SHUT THE FUCK UP.

I respect your right to have an opinion on any subject.

I respect your right to air those opinions.

What I don't respect is the way that your opinions are given credibility. How does making a series of increasingly crap pop albums make you into an international authority on world economics?

It doesn't.

Shut up.

Fuck off.

And while you're at it, see if you can make a decent album. October was good, every album since has sucked harder than the one that preceded it.

It's all the fault of Cubbie Station

2006-11-07T01:33:00.000+07:00

There is noise being made once again about the gummint buying Cubbie Station, or at least it's water rights. Fuckwits. Barnaby Joyce has said, quite rightly, that it makes more sense to buy properties which are already on the market, such as Clyde and Ballandool (Find yer own links). That is, it makes more sense if you are after some property.

Neither suggestion makes more sense if you are trying to alleviate this - or future droughts. Although there is an argument to be made about the environmental health of the system. More of that later, if I could be bothered. Do you know how much more water would be available to people downstream if Cubbie Station had closed down last Christmas?

The correct answer is none. Ditto Clyde and Ballandool. Despite the compulsory comparison between Cubbie's storage capacity and Sydney Harbour, they have no more right to pump water than anybody else.

As certified nob-jockey and chairman of Darling River Food and Fibre (Not to mention irrigator), Ian Cole points out, the Condamine-Balonne system is often dry, the Darling isn't, but the water allocation here is six times the water allocation there.

Using the same deceptive methods which have been used against the cotton industry for twenty years, he leaves the reader to assume that this occurs every year.

Bull fucking shit.

No water has been taken out of this system by irrigators in this district in this calendar year. At all. When this system flows, it really flows. When the system is in flood we will sometimes get 100% allocation. It has happened once in the last six years. Ian Cole is being misleading to the point of being dishonest and as an irrigator he should know better. The people around the Sunraysia will be looking at him and thinking "If it's good enough for him..."

I gotta go to work.

Fuggit.

Just a very short post with an inordinately long, uninformative title

2006-11-03T01:57:00.000+07:00

The ringleader of the Catholicism cult is buggering off to Turkey. Dunno why; ringleaders do this sort of stuff all the time. There are a few little oddities about this particular jaunt, however. The boss of Turkey has decided that he is too busy to Pope it up and has more pressing business in Estonia, which, like, sure. Estonia? Come on Mr. Erdogan, are you the premier of Turkey or the Markko Martin fanclub?
Another oddity about the ~~all expenses paid propaganda junket~~ trip is the actions of Ibrahim Ak, who fired a gun in the air to protest at the Pope's visit. Not a well-balanced individual, our Mr. Ak. Not only is Mr. Ak quoted as saying in several of the news stories regarding the incident that he wanted to strangle the Pope, which is an understandable sentiment, but not a particularly easy task to carry out using a gun; he is also quoted as saying "I am happy to be a Muslim."

Not sure how this relates to the Lord of the Altar Boy Molesters. We have a boilermaker here from the Shaky Isles; I'm fairly chuffed about being Australian so I might egg his house.

Finally, of the sixty six news articles in papers around the world which Google News decided were related to this story, only the Jerusalem Post mentioned the word 'Muslim' in the headline.

More on global warming

2006-11-02T02:03:00.000+07:00

I don't know if it exists or not. I know that we are in the middle of an extreme drought that doesn't look like breaking any time soon. The Bureau of Meteorology are predicting another El Nino for this summer, which means no rain. The doomsayers are now blaming this on climate change. This seems to be a bold statement. If the climate is changing that fast, then by about July the planet will be uninhabitable.

We have records of the local river flows going back to 1922. Nearly all of the highest flowing years have been in the last four decades.

Just sayin'.

Lazy

2006-10-28T02:08:00.000+07:00

You know how sometimes you get all nostalgic for the old days (Are there any other days to get nostalgic about?) so you go read the newspapers from places that you used to live in? I used to live in the Northern Territory.

So what's the weather gunna do?

2006-10-23T00:58:00.000+07:00

There's been a lot of talk about drought and climate change and whatever. I think that in the bush we're just going to have to get used to it. We've only been in this country for a couple of hundred years (He says, completely ignoring the aboriginal history of the place.) and I think that only now are we starting to get a grip on how the place works. It would seem to me that what we consider to be drought may in fact be the standard weather pattern, if not in the past, then certainly into the foreseeable future.

Although the Canadian alleged climatologist I heard on the steam powered wireless the other day who said that, "Australia is not experiencing a drought; you are just using too much water." seems to have been out in the sun a bit too long. How does using ground water cause below-average rainfall?

I'm not entirely convinced by the doomsayers of climate change, either. Mainly because I don't understand the science. They seem to receive pretty much uncritical acceptance from the purveyors of pop-science, but you only have to look through past issues of Popular Mechanics or New Scientist to see what sort of track record the futurologists have (Remember the millennium bug?). I do not entirely discount the climate-changers, I merely wish to say that I do not take as gospel that which I don't understand. I am not one of those people who say that the accepted forecast in the seventies was climate cooling, therefore we should ignore them now as they obviously don't know what they are talking about.

Opinions change as new information is found and greater understanding is reached. New ways of observing the relationship between disparate pieces of information are utilised and new ways of gathering and interpreting data are created. Complete knowledge and understanding does not spring forth fully formed from an initial observation. If this were the case then we would already know all there is to know about pretty much everything.

Some Famous Guy once said that,"With God, there are four options: If I choose to believe and there is no God, nothing happens. If I choose not to believe and there is no God, nothing happens. If I choose to believe and there is a God, I go to heaven. If I choose not to believe and there is a God, I go to hell. I choose to believe."

Apart from the fact that if there is a God, He ain't gunna be fooled by the lip-service given to him by some tool 'deciding' to believe and you gunna burn, baby, burn, I think that there is something in that quote for all of us. It seems to me that there is more upside to believing than downside.

If we treat climate change as a furphy and it is a furphy, life goes on unchanged. If we treat climate change as an actuality and it is a furphy, there will be some fairly major economic upheavals and quite a bit of inconvenience for quite a lot of people. If we treat climate change as a furphy and it is an actuality, a lot of people will die, a lot of people will suffer and almost everybody's life will be adversely affected. If we treat climate change as an actuality and it is an actuality, there will be some fairly major economic upheavals and quite a bit of inconvenience for quite a lot of people.

As you may or may not know, I am a farmworker. One thing that I have learned from being a farmworker is that you always make your plans expecting the worst. You never allow yourself to be caught by a series of setbacks; you make your plans with these setbacks in mind. If you do this correctly it allows you to take advantage of opportunities as they arise. In much the same way that this has allowed us to expand and look at maybe putting on an extra man at a time when For Sale signs are going up and people are being laid off, I think that by embracing climate change as a fact (Whether or no.) and behaving accordingly, at the very least Australia will be relatively better off than if we ignore it.

Most of the suggestions put forward by the more rational section of the Church of Greenhouse would seem to be pretty good housekeeping whatever the situation is.

Initial instance

2006-10-18T11:54:00.000+07:00

Most people have landmarks in their life which they remember with great clarity and which they use to calculate the exact chronology of other lesser events. Four eggs ample a mother may say something like, "Let's see, you were born on the Tuesday after Laurie Fowler ironed out Big Nick (Hallowed be thy name) in the first quarter of the Grand Final, so you'll be thirty four next birthday."
There aren't many people who don't know where they were when they watched a man named Armstrong walk upon the moon. I know that I was driving home from Brisbane when I heard on the radio that Princess Di was on the radio, too. And the glovebox and the dashboard and the bonnet. I think everyone knows what they were doing at the time. Unless they are too young. If you are too young to remember this event, can I just say to you with all sincerity: Fuck off, emo kid. Go harm yourself and leave the adults in peace.
There are other, more personal landmarks in people's lives - first day at school, first kiss, first car, etc. I can vividly remember the first time that I had sex. I doubt if the girl involved has quite as distinct a memory. In fact, I'd be surprised if she even noticed it happened. Faster than a speeding bullet and all that. Going even further back, I can remember my first wank. Wasn't as much fun, but it took longer. And I didn't have to share it with anyone.
For those interested in such things, here is a brief list of personal firsts:
Album: Livin' In The Seventies, Skyhooks
Motorcycle: Jawa 250
First motorcycle I actually paid for: Yamaha DT250
Car: HR Holden station wagon
I could go on an on, but it is starting to look a bit like one of those meme things and they suck. There is one more first: the first time that I met someone without whom life would feel incomplete. It wasn't all that long ago, really.

Old man emu

2006-10-12T01:46:00.000+07:00

John Williamson sucks. Really sucks. I mean, time is distorted when he passes by he sucks so hard. While Old Man Emu suspension components don't suck at all. They are incredibly overpriced but they are quality items.
Anyway.
For reasons best known to persons who know reasons for things, emus seem to be a fairly good guide to the state of play regarding weather around these parts. Specifically, emu numbers give a very good indication of the amount of feed available. Contrary to what would appear to me to be basic logic, emu numbers increase more rapidly as feed availability decreases. Doesn't make any sense to me, either.
It has taken years of research by NASA, the CSIRO, NASCAR and Steve Irwin (and his heirs and inheritors) to deduce why this is. Unfortunately, they aren't telling anybody. Arseholes. I took these photos while ploughing the new place we bought. Ever since I started in this paddock there have been big mobs of emus roaming around. For the first couple of days I didn't pay much attention to them as they were all a couple of miles away at the other end of the paddock. As I got closer to them I started to watch them a bit closer.
For a little while.
Emus are boring.
There are/ were three mobs, each with about eighty birdies in them, but yesterday they had a meeting of the ways, making one big mob with two- or three-hundred bush chooks gathered together to talk about that big noisy red bugger ruining their nice paddock. Some progressive birdies took the floor and told the old reactionaries about the joys of ploughed land and all the nice fresh dirt it contained. Either the progressives were persuasive or the reactionaries were scared, but all the emus wandered across from the unploughed country to the tilled land in a slow mass exodus. The photos don't do justice to the actual numbers there because they were all strung out in one long stream and ran every time I stopped the tractor anywhere near them, so I took these shots through the window as I was going along. Trust me, there were shitloads more than this - would I lie to you.

Channeling Tim Blair

2006-10-09T02:09:00.000+07:00

I am lazy. Really, really lazy. To prove it, here is a link-and-comment type post:
It is never easy to present a balanced view on topics such as these, so I'm not going to. When are Muslims going to realise that discrimination is still discrimination whether you are being discriminated against or doing the discriminating yourself? I don't care whether your ~~stupid goatherders superstition~~ revered religion prevents you from carrying dogs or alcohol; the solution seems to be pretty bloody obvious. Go get a job which doesn't contravene your beliefs.
Which one of the alleged men in the photo which accompanies this story doesn't deserve a kick in the nuts?* I'm lazy (I may have mentioned that already) so guess how much research I did*. Why God's Kitchen?
I'm glade the Pope is giving us advice on reconciliation™ because the Catholic Church has such a long and proud tradition in this area - ask any meso-american.
In other news, I watched a fair bit of Bathurst yesty and was quite pleased with the way that things worked out. It was the first time in about five years for me and I was impressed. I channel surfed quite a bit before the race started because, although Peter Brock was a legend in his field I hate it when people wear their heart on their sleeve and try to glorify themselves by the amount of grief they can exhibit. The race started out well when Mark (Public School Patrician Poonce) Skaife got punted and just kept getting better. At least, the coverage did. The race pretty well sucked until the last bit when they decided to actually race instead of have a procession behind the safety car. My pick won, too.
Yay me.
*Correct answer= 0

I need a sub-editor so that I can have wittier post titles

2006-10-05T01:49:00.000+07:00

Da Boss bought another block of land the other day. 16,000 acres, making for a grand total of 71,000 acres (I didn't even knead a calculator to work that out. Clearly I am not a recent school leaver.) The block is about twenty kilometres down the road. No water comes with it, although there is a little river running through it. At least; there is a little river running through it when the little river is running. It still has some pretty useful waterholes in it, which is more than the rivers on this place has. Da Boss is trying to arrange a sharefarming deal on a 7,000 acre paddock between the new place and the old place which has been pulled but not raked. This would allow us to operate it as basically one big farm instead of one medium and one small farm.
I went for a bit of an explore the other day and found a sheep bridge over the river which is bigger than that coathanger thing Sinny people are so inordinately proud of. There is only one paddock of cultivation which is 2200 acres. I've been running the offsets over it for a couple of days, by my calculations there are fourteen more days of ploughing ahead of me. In the same paddock.
Sometimes farming isn't as exciting as being a stunt man or an international powerboat racer.
In other news: did you know that it costs just over fifty times as much to call Vietnam as it does to call the US or UK? Neither did I. Wanna buy a kidney?

Pub talk

2006-09-28T02:24:00.000+07:00

You know how when you go to the pub and have a beer with the boys you talk about footy and tits? Well I had tea last night and had a beer with a few of the boys and we had a bit of a yarn about footy and tits and this and that. One of the discussions covered the area of post-war rebuilding and how various countries go about it. The general consensus was that the Sepps were the most generous with their time and money, going to a fair bit of trouble to clean up the mess left behind. The Poms and the Bonzer Aussies didn't get such a good wrap, although I neglected to mention the sterling work done by the Poms after the Malayan Emergency.
tangential to this discussion was a bit of a yarn about the relative ethical standards which the various nations adhere to when they are in a winner takes all death match, with no rules and no referee. We had a bit of a mental block, however: what was the name of the British Air-Marshall who came up with the idea of fire-bombing Dresden? I think that it started with 'H'. Also a supplementary question for extra credits: who did he lose in the Blitz?
Place the papers on the desk at the front and leave quietly when you have completed the exam.

Motorcycles I am unlikely to purchase

2006-09-27T02:17:00.000+07:00

I like motorcycles. A lot. Postie bikes, superbikes, Italian exotica, UJMs, Hardly Drivables - I like 'em all and can see situations in which I would like to own one. Some motorcycles I just bring myself to desire, however. Such as this:
Looks OK at first glance, doesn't it? Fun little thing to ride, front wheel up, etc. The trouble is that it's 'powered' by this:

Which is kind of unfortunate, in that a lot of the joy of riding a motorcycle is aural. Even plain Jane UJMs such as my motorcycle sound like sex when you get enthusiastic on the twisty side of the handlebars and the induction roar starts to emanate from the airbox. The Lovely Lady has even commented on the sound that reaches her in the Little Red Car when she followed me into the Twisties. As compared to this thing, which would sound like a tram.
This thing looks the goods, too, huh? Once again appearances are being deceptive. Although it looks like something Loris Capirossi uses to duck down to the shop to buy a carton of milk, it is in fact powered by this:

That's right folks, no MotoGP inspired pneumatic valved 17,000 rpm, 250bhp per litre screamer, it's a diesel. D. I. E. S. E. L. As well as aural, one of the bonus, no-extra-cost joys of motorcycling is tactile. From the angry buzz of an Aprilia RS250 at three billion rpm on a windy road to the uneven lope of a H-D poking down a freeway to the once-a-powerpole thump of an old pommy single, motorcycle engines each have a unique feel to them. I think that this may be just a little too unique for moi. At least now H-Ds may loose the epithet 'two-wheeled tractor'.
This is just wrong, so I'm going to work.

Stupid fucking Firefox decided to update itself midway through writing this post

2006-09-23T13:25:00.000+07:00

Therefore, if you find you find the writing a little lacklustre (or should that be lacklustre-er?) I suggest that you get in touch with the Mozilla Corporation and vent your spleen at them. Spleen-venting should be a regular event in any case. I find it therapeutic.
Anyway.
What I was writing about was the things that have been happening in my life to cause my sporadic trickle of posts to dwindle down to a few reluctant drops which just won't let go no matter how hard you shake.
Long term loiterers will be aware that on my recent holiday I met a Lovely Lady. Said Lovely Lady has come to figure quite significantly in my life. Indeed, if I am not careful, the 'L' word may come into play and we can't have that, can we? I mean, I'm a rough, tough outback bloke™ and we just don't use language like that.
The Lovely Lady works for a scuba diving school in Nha Trang in Vietnam. Apparently she doesn't find this at all onerous. Can't say that I blame her, either. Looks passable in the picture, anyway.
After I came home from my holidays the Lovely Lady stayed in Melbourne for a few weeks sorting out some personal stuff and then flew up here to spend a few more weeks with me. Yes, flew up. I didn't know Lightning Ridge had an airport either. Took her from eight in the morning until after nine at night, on three progressively smaller 'planes. The last one looked like a VW with wings. Never say die. Whilst she was here we had the occasional chat with each other and the Lovely Lady decided that she would see out her contract in Vietnam and return to live here with me. Remember what I said about the 'L' word? Well even worse than that, the 'M' word might have been given a run. I'm nervous just alluding to it.
Anyway, I took another week off and we went to the Sunshine coast for a few days, via the Bunya mountains. Bonzer trip, worth a post of its own, pertickerlerly the day we spent at the Australia Zoo. At this stage I will just say that there was an admirable lack of mawkishness at the death of Steve Irwin and that everybody should go there at least once in there lives - it really is brilliant. I dropped the Lovely Lady at the airport and even managed to get a little misty as I watched her boarding her flight.
I drove straight home, arriving here at about ten-thirty, to start work at six a.m. the next day (Wednesday). I had something of an epiphany on Friday as I was performing my allotted tasks.
The Lovely Lady works in paradise and has a job there for as long as she wants. Pays bugger-all, but with very little debt to cover, who cares. She was going to give up paradise to live here. I thought that this was perhaps not the most sensible idea that anybody ever had, certainly it isn't an option that I would relish, so I have decided to pull my sign down here and try my hand in Vietnam. Apparently they are crying out for people to teach English over there. However, I have also heard that as well as a TEFL/ TESOL accreditation, you also need a uni degree. I have put out a few feelers today and am awaiting a reply. The Lovely Lady is putting out feelers in Nha Trang. Apparently she can tip me into giving the locals swimming lessons, but this would be at best a sideline. She is also keen for us to do some volunteer work teaching English to homeless kids, which sounds like a satisfying way to pass the time.
Then again, it may all come to nothing.
I hope not.

I'm not dead

2006-09-21T02:44:00.000+07:00

Surprised?
Disappointed?
Indifferent?

Resurrection Shuffle

2006-08-30T02:35:00.000+07:00

There are elections on the go, bombs in Turkey and ermm..., other stuff going on around the world. To all of which, like, yawwnnn. Doesn't any of the members of the heathen media have a shred of piousness about them? Doesn't anybody care about the Second Coming of JC? Are you all minions of the anti-Crump?
Fuck yez all.
May JC fail to show up at a track near you.

Choo-choo

2006-08-27T07:21:00.000+07:00

I've been waiting for Ranger Tom to get himself settled into his new digs before posting on this topic.
Seeing as how Tom is something of a railway tragic, I thought that I would give this little excursion a post of its own. Whilst on tour with the lovely lady, we did the touristy bit in Lithgow and went for a ride on the Zig-zag Railway.
You can tell from the first photo why it is called the zig-zag railway. Traveling west to east trains would descend these three levels on the way to Sidderney. The main railway line is on the bottom and is the one used today after the development of tunnels through the mountains.

Speaking of tunnels, there is a tunnel on the descent to this bridge which takes ninety seconds to traverse. Ninety point one seconds after entering the tunnel, the lovely lady and I were busted sucking face. (A romantic expression if I've ever heard one.) In that little valley thingy below this viaduct is a barbecue area where upon request, the railway dudes will stop the train to drop you off and pick you up later in the day.

As we went mid-week, the steam trains were parked up, instead we rode up and down in this railcar of Queensland origin. The only time I can remember seeing one of these was the old Gulflander that used to run though the gulf country (Funnily enough.) Not as romantic-y as a steam train, but it'll do. Incidentally, to get to the zig-zag from Lithgow, you have to travel up the very best (read: windiest) section of Bell's Line of Road. Coming out of Lithgow we were following a queue of about a dozen cars. I slowed right down to let them get about four hundred metres ahead. Three or four kilometres after the start of Bell's I pulled over to wait for all the cars to catch up. The lovely lady was first. It was uphill and the little red car just didn't have the grunt to take advantage of all the gaps.
Paying attention to the sign on the right is probably a good idea. This is where the zig turns into a zag. Way back when, the zig-to-zag conversion was done in another spot. There was a mishap which resulted in a spectacular "Only in the movies"- style railway engine hanging over the abyss style photograph (which I can't find online).

Funnily enough, contrary to popular opinion, not everybody who works on the railways sweats it out every day. This is the balcony on a signalman's box. The entire edifice has been relocated and painstakingly restored, with every worn or damaged piece repaired or replaced. Except for the window ledge, which acquired its present shape by dint of one hundred years of signalmen resting their fat arses on it waiting for something to do.

This is an engine used in underground mining. These days it is used to pull a firefighting tanker. The cab isn't original, being from a different engine.

I showed that photo only to provide a reference to this photo, which shows the injector pump on the engine of the engine. Odd looking thing, isn't it? I've never seen an injector pump with this style of tandem construction. Nor have I seen one with these individual bleeder levers on every injector line. Must be a bugger of a system to bleed to need those. I arst the guide dude, but he didn't know anything about it except to say that they haven't had to lay a spanner on the engine since it has been in their possession.

On occasion they do a Harry Potter style weekend. This is the engine they use for the trip. J.K. Rowling, who is totally a philanthropic lover of children who writes solely for the joy she can bring to the masses probably hasn't ok'd these events as the nameplate reads 'Wizards Express' rather than 'Hogwart's Express'. Of course, my tenuous grip on the details of the Harry Potter series may also be more tenuous than I realised.

As well as Harry Potter, they also ~~rip off~~ pay tribute to Thomas the Tank Engine. Guess who this is.

Of course you are

2006-08-23T02:29:00.000+07:00

Marion Jones has loudly proclaimed her innocence after testing positive for EPO at the US championships. Big surprise there, huh? When was the last time that somebody got busted and said "It's a fair cop Guv, society is to blame."?

I don't think that there are many international athletic events these days whose outcomes aren't influenced by performance enhancimg drugs. Probably swimming is cleaner than other sports - for two reasons, it is more technique driven than other sports and therefore less likely to be won by pure athleticism. Secondly, I used to do a little bit of swimming coaching so therefore it must be clean because I would have absolutely nothing to do with drugs. Right, Marion? (How is Tim going these days?)

It's got to the stage where they should just let people take whatever the fuck they want and just get on with it. Those people who don't want tiny testicles, sterility or to end up like Flo-Jo can have their own separate 'clean' competitions, just like bodybuilders do.

Then again, using bodybuilders as an example is hardly persuasive, is it? What a bunch of strange cunts.

P.S. Marion is still a hotty, even if she is a drug cheat with a really big butt. At least you can still crack walnuts on her glutes.

Snapshots

2006-08-18T02:37:00.000+07:00

In an effort to avoid writing another one of those "What I did on my holidays" posts, I'm going to write one of those "What I did on my holidays" posts - pared down to a few snapshots presented in no particular order.
The first one is of the car that the lovely lady I met drives. It's a tiny little thing with an engine that is smaller than the one in my motorcycle. Goes pretty bloody well, though, and sticks to the road like a single mother to an employed boyfriend. It's got an electric fold-down roof too, which means that you can stuff a fair bit into the boot with the roof up. It's a bit like driving a skateboard in that there is nowhere but the pedals to put your feet, your legs are cocked out around the steering wheel, it is about three-quarters of a turn lock-to-lock and I have to duck to see out the windscreen. It's also the most fun to drive of any car that I've ever been in. Nothing goes around corners better than this. Many a time we would be holding up traffic by traveling at the speed limit, then we'd get to a windy bit. After a few minutes this little red car would be the only vehicle in my mirrors.
Sunrise from our balcony in Tathra. The lovely lady was beginning to forget that there is a sunrise as well as a sunset, so she made a special effort to be awake for this one (I wake up early anyway.), it was well worth the effort. Considering that we were traveling with absolutely no plan - or at least absolutely no plan that looked like being even remotely adhered to, we were incredibly fortunate in choosing the places where we stayed and the places that we ate. Tathra was probably the dodgiest room, but with a view like this coming through the picture window to greet you in the morning, who cares? Actually, we were incredibly fortunate in most areas of the holiday thing, right down to the bar staff - if you're ever in Miles, make sure you go to the rissole and ask for Mary, the most charming barmaid in world (except for JenJen). Also, stop in Bodalla on the way through and have a glass of champagne with June, the publican(ess). Rat may be interested to know that it took three days to reach Tathra after we saw him. Peter Theoming is the figurehead for a movement called 'slow touring'. I think that the lovely lady and I could teach him a thing or two. The day after we left Rat we travelled 45k in six hours with three stops on the way.
Finally, this is the lovely little town of Walhalla. Walhalla used to have one of my favourite pubs in it, but it burned down. Now it has a new, 'period style' pub in it's place. Actually there are now two pubs. The large building opposite the rotunda is the Star Hotel, which wasn't there the last time I came through here. I'm not a fan of fake antiquity. I nearly bought a house here in the eighties - four thousand dollars fully furnished. These days they've got bitumen road access and electricity and houses are going for fifty to one hundred times that much. I never was much of a businessman.
As an aside, my mother's ashes are scattered to the left of this photo.

Title

2006-08-15T15:39:00.000+07:00

Sometimes a plan comes together and sometimes it doesn't. I had the rough outline of my little holiday all worked out; first up to Gladstone, then down the east coast to visit Dad, then back home. I didn't have a set schedule, but I had all the (windy) roads picked out. I had some of the detail arranged, too, right down to paying for accommodation in Brisbane. Then the first night out, halfway to Gladstone, going a different way to the one that I had planned, I met a girl.
And that's all there is to it. We spent almost every minute of the next four weeks together. Apologies to those in Sinny whom I was going to catch up with; although we spent a few days in town we were too busy doing romantic-y things like..., umm, holding hands and..., stuff.
That's pretty much all there is to it, although I will flesh it out somewhat in days to come, I'm still to knackered to do it now.

Later, 'gators.

2006-07-14T02:50:00.000+07:00

OK, so I can add a gun-crazed, testerone driven member of the US League of Overlords to the list of nagging bitches who just won't let me relax. Like, sigh... What to write about..., I could write about how the second coming of JC is coming along very nicely, thank you very much - five rounds, three wins and two seconds and a thirty four point lead over all around Nice Guy Greg Hancock but seeing as that information is readily available elsewhere on this page, I won't.
I know, whacky Australian animals. In a country which has a giant hopping mouse and a big chook on it's coat of arms, I suppose that it was only natural to find a fossil site full of carnivorous kangaroos, tree-climbing crocodiles and three metre tall, 400kg 'demon ducks of doom.
No, no good either, Tim Blair might have a swag of fanboys, but I don't like link-and-critique blogging. I could write about the trials and tribulations of installing mp3 players into Holden Rodeo utes. You know how these days that all you need to do to replace the head unit on a stereo is to slide the appropriate implements down each side of the head unit, depressing the spring loading retainers so that the head unit slides out? Not on my ~~annoying piece of shit~~ ute. Nup, it's still screwed in. You can pop the bezel off to access the mounting screws; doesn't do you much good, but. The head unit is larger than the hole in the dash, so that you have to remove the instrument surround panel. To remove the instrument surround panel, first you have to detach the lower dash panel. Around twenty self tapping screws. Into plastic. I'm not going to have a squeaky dash now, no way. Self-tappers into plastic is totally not a cheap, bodgy way of assembling a vee hickle. So, I got the head unit out. You know how stereos these days have standardised wiring so that you can swap them straight over? Nuh uh. Not only are the plugs different, there are an unequal amount of wires on them, with no logical correlation between the two. You know how you can buy cheap aftermarket manuals for your car so that you can have a look at a wiring diagram? Nope. Nobody prints them for my particular ute. I can get earlier models, later models or the same model year, but not my engine. Holden wanted 280 drops of my blood for a genuine item. Marque Books wanted $220 for the same one. I got a genuine manual on CD over ebay for $11.90 delivered. There are 411 pages in the manual related to the electrical system. By comparing wiring diagrams I was able to figure out that the vehicle wiring harness had three redundant wires. Way to keep costs down, dickheads. Got the head unit and extra speakers installed and couldn't set the clock on the bloody thing. As a last resort I read the destructions. You don't set the clock - it sets itself by Radio Data Signal apparently, whatever that may be. I say apparently because the bastard hasn't set itself yet. Of course, this is a very marginal area for any kind of radio reception, so maybe it will magically come good the next time I go to an urban area. Good excuse for a day off anyway, "Won't be in tomorrow, Lord and Master, I'm setting the clock in my ute."

I could write about that, but I won't, because it's only one step up from cat-blogging. Instead I will tell you that I'm going for a ride on my mo'sickle. I'm leaving over the weekend, or maybe Monday and I'll be gone about a month.

Cya.

Shine on you crazy diamond

2006-07-12T15:49:00.000+07:00

So Syd Barrett died. So fucking what? One album and a few singles does not a stellar career make. For fuck's sake all you middle aged ex- dope fiends, get over it- he wasn't that impressive. In particular all you pseudo music nerds who think that because you know Syd turned up unannounced and uninvited at the session where they were laying down the vocals for 'Shine on you crazy diamond' you are therefore some kind of Guru - fuck right off.

More scanner-y goodness

2006-06-26T15:45:00.000+07:00

In 2002 I had to make a visit to Victoria for family reasons. While I was there I took a few photos. The first one is of Thorpdale, the town I grew up in. The building in the centre is the old family homestead. Or as it was known locally, the servo. Note the lack of petrol bowsers out the front. You can't buy fuel in Thorpy anymore.

When I lived there, the main agricultural pursuits were spuds and dairy cattle. The arse has fallen out of the local spud industry these days and I'm fairly sure that a bloke I went to school with was the last dairyfarmer in the district. Beef is the go, apparently, and onions. Sheep are getting to be more popular, too, it would seem.

This is Turton's Creek Road, on the Great Divide. Note the roadside facilities. All three of these photos were taken after six years of below average rainfall.

To put this in perspective, this photo of a property near Mungindi (co-incidentally, the property the Young Bloke was on before he came here) is taken on the same roll of film. This is after one year of below average rainfall.

New Toy

2006-06-24T06:16:00.000+07:00

I bought a new scanner/ copier/ printer/ fax/ toaster oven thingy. It arrived last night and I plugged it in this morning. These are the only photos I could find:
I made this when I was working in Murgon. The sexy legs you see standing on the pipe in the background belong to my fellow slave. He is a boilermaker, but refused to make this monstrosity as it was beneath his dignity. I agree with him, it's a dumb looking thing. Although it looks like one of those potato roasters that were once popular at local sporting events, that isn't what it is.

We were duplicating a pumpsite, this part is to hold the flapper valve that acts to prevent water running backwards through the pump when it is not in operation.

This is the flapper valve.

I even welded it on the inside. Thorough, aren't I?

Huh?

2006-06-23T02:49:00.000+07:00

Probably a fairly common thing, but I don't seem to get too many of them. I received this email the other day, addressed to my blog email box and about thirty five thousand others who begin with 'ro'. I've read through it twice and as near as I can tell, it says that vegetarians are pedophiles but meat eaters are doing the work of the devil.

((((((((1)))))))Contradictions in terms:The tribunal says that some pedophile is sane and have no mental illness.The tribunal must not say that a rape is a phisiological conduct(non mental illness or disability) and that pedophilia is not a insanebehavior. 90% of the people who killed a parent is declared mentallyhealthful, this means: non pathological conduct, phisiological conduct(genetic or non genetic), good doctor, not vector of functional oranatomical suffering. Also crimes against the patrimony are notphysiological conducts.
((((((((2)))))))A conduct can be pathological (biological group self-destructive activity)or non pathological (phisiological), no external or middle case is expectedMedicine is an exact science, jurisprudence is an exact science. Enemies andfriends: of the mental hygiene only, war between doctors isn't expectedvalue. "Fighting with islam against the devil" : this information isharmless and profitable in every case. Are communists clinically insanepeople or they got the reason ?
((((((((3)))))))Siegmund Freud lies not knowing to be lying: he is a conceptual pedophilewho says children has sexual attraction for parent (edipus) and that mind ispartitioned in 3 parts (ego superego es). False premiss brings wrong result:like Freud says, cognitive error generates pathological conduct.
((((((((4)))))))"All fine at home? Do your parents act with you like with friends? Is yourparent clinically perfect? Do your parent, consciously or inconsciously,donates to you any activity of clinical and penal importance ?": the medicaldoctor must somministrate this or analogous enhanced suggestion to thehabitants for preventing or for healing, before programming any othersomministration.Slapping child is a crime and a mania, like by the general rule, evidentlyif child doesn't born genetically stupid, unable to understand words,handicapped, diseased, socially dangerous (also menacing, insulting, anykind of offensive or embarrassing activity).Earth's habitants kill gays but children don't born gays, habitants corruptand kill children doing a "sacrifice to the devil": this non geneticepidemic is familiarly but not geneticaly transmitted.
((((((((5))))))))1:28 God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number;fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds ofthe air and over every living creature that moves on the ground."Christians priests contradict god (they are not fruitful): they areheretics and unconcscious servants of devil (so devil doesn't want them inhell, this could induce the mistake). With baptism christians forgivethemselfs from god's sentence.
((((((((6))))))))1:29 Then God said, "I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of thewhole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will beyours for food.1:30 And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds ofthe air and all the creatures that move on the ground-everything that hasthe breath of life in it-I give every green plant for food." And it was so.Chirstians don't eat only green plant: they trust in god to contradict god.Eating cadavers is a pathological conduct, like by the general law.If vegetarian food gives longer and better life than non-vegetarian food,eating non-vegetarian food is a pathological conduct. Eating cadaversinduces a phisiological genetic reflex: vomiting. A cow has 96,5% dnaperfectly matching with human dna. Eating a human cadaver is a behavioraldisturb.This is a final version or close, you should not receive emails anymore.Pls forward. For unsubscribing, partnership or donations:

Religious cramks, or vego radicals? I dunno.

Sugar cops a caning

2006-06-20T04:49:00.000+07:00

Apart from beginning training to become a tabloid sub-editor, I've been watching the latest trauma to befall the sugar cane industry quite closely. First up, I have to ask whether it is a co-incidence that in an era of religious-conservative government, the problem is smut ?
I have to confess that I have mixed feelings on the subject. My knee-jerk reaction is "Poor buggers, they haven't had a decent year since the early nineties, then when they do get one, half the industry gets blown away by a cyclone. The half that is still standing is now facing destruction." Then I think that, before the Innisfail cyclone, my opinion of the cane industry was "Shut up. Just shut the fuck up, you mob of whinging arseholes." Yes, the international sugar market is one of the most corrupt in the world. Yes, the international sugar industry (In particular the U.S. industry.) is one of the most heavily subsidized in the world. Yes, the international sugar industry (Again, the U.S. industry in particular.) is the most effective at lobbying to prevent a 'leveling of the playing field'. You know what?
I don't care.
This has been a hobbyhorse of the cane industry since they first noticed that the 'Good Old Days' were becoming just that - the 'old days'. I knew a bloke who came from a cane farming family in the eighties. They had a separate tractor for every implement. But this is irrelevant and only inserted into this post because it aids your argument to influence people emotionally as well as rationally.
Apart from all the evil shenanigans which beset the industry from abroad (And which the bonzer Aussie Battler™ cane farmers would totally not take advantage of if they were given the opportunity.), the biggest threat facing the cane industry long-term is the Brazilian industry, specifically the large-scale, broadacre style of cane farming they do over there, this has been happening since the eighties and is increasing in scale every year.
This isn't going to stop anytime soon, look at the determined expression on the face of this Brazilian cane cutter: she means business. A bit different from 'Roo' in Summer of the 17th Doll.And look at that lush..., ermm, climate and fertile..., aah, soil. They've got some good things going for them over there, no wonder Aussie cane farmers find it ~~hard~~ difficult.
Picture magazine-style snerking aside, all of these problems have been around for years, none of them are going away and a couple of years of good prices aren't going to save the Australian cane industry. In my humble (but erudite) opinion, anybody who is planning to stay in the cane industry is a dickhead. Cane farms are based in high rainfall areas with fertile soils. Grow something else, you bunch of tools. Stop carrying on like cane is the be-all and end-all of Australian agriculture. Even CSR gets a major percentage of its income from elsewhere. It's never gunna be the Good Old Days again. The only hope for cane in this country is ethanol and unless somebody does something massive in that industry soon, it will be too late.
Self-inflicted wounds don't get too much sympathy from me, nor do I think that we should continue to subsidize an industry based in such fertile areas year after year.

Bogan is the new Black

2006-06-18T13:30:00.000+07:00

I can only remember meeting two aboriginal people when I was a kid, the first was a member of the Stolen Generation™, apparently I screamed when I first saw her; I don't remember, I was only about two years old at the time. We became fairly good friends for a few years, but I haven't seen her since I was about eleven. The second aboriginal person I met was Lionel Rose. I was six or seven, he was world champion and he would sometimes play cricket with us in the street. I met him a few times later in life when he was on the grog and after, when he had picked himself up again. Which is just a bit of fame-whoring and not relevant to this post.
I can remember only two non-Anglo-Saxon families in our neighbourhood. There was a German family who lived up the street who kept pretty much to themselves and we had the stereotypical Greek corner store owners. My brother went to school with a kid who had the surname Poppadopalopoulos, but he may have been bullshitting, too; he also claimed to know an Ernest Deadly. As surnames were read out first during roll-call, this would of course become Deadly Ernest.
Whatever. At the time Greeks were wogs, Italians were Dagoes and Aborigines were boongs. The only Asian people I had ever seen were running Chinese restaurants. Dad worked with people from a wider range of ethnicities, particularly people of Baltic heritage. We also have Austrian relatives. Aboriginal rights had recently become something of a popular cause due to the efforts of people like Charles Perkins, so I think that the majority of Australians had something of a paternalistic soft spot for Aboriginal people. I think that for a lot of people this remains true, particularly for a lot of the non-aboriginal people who are the most vocal on the subject.
The point that I am trying to make is that in my youth, suburban Australia was white and anybody who wasn't white was odd. Therefore, anybody who wasn't white was also fair game for some sledging. This had the effect of keeping the darkies/ chinks/ wogs/ etc in their place and also bolstered the ego of the sledger by reinforcing their perceived genetic/ cultural superiority over the sledgee and by cementing the sledger's place as a member of the dominant group.
Having said that, I don't remember anything particularly malicious about any of the sledging. Most of the people who made Dago jokes would have Italian friends, ditto wogs. Asian people were a bit more insular and my experience of Aboriginal people at the time is too limited to offer an opinion. I have no doubt that it was insulting and hurtful to the recipient, but it wasn't life-threatening. Much like being called a 'planet-raping neanderthal' based on no other information than that you are an irrigator. These days everything has changed, Australia has people from pretty much every country on earth living in it, we've passed through the phase of acknowledging the existence of homosexuality by sledging poofters and gap-lappers to accepting them as another valid group. We are now no longer allowed to sledge anybody because we are conditioned everyday to be sensitive to the needs and feelings of others and to value their emotional wellbeing above our own. We are constantly urged to celebrate the national culture of whatever ethnic group is celebrating this week, we celebrate the Gay (and Lesbian and Bisexual and Transgender and Intergender and other hairsplitting label) Mardi Gras and we slap ourselves around every NAIDOC week.
On the surface, this would appear to be a Good Thing. However, in practice it is bullshit. People need to be superior to somebody. This is universal. It doesn't just apply to Anglo-Saxons, despite what the Luvvies would tell you. Suppressing this has led to two major devopments; the rise of a more vigorous, malicious form of racism among working class Anglo-Saxons (along with the rise of ethnicity based gangs among non-Anglos) and the spectacle of the Anglo-Saxon majority feeding upon itself. This takes two separate forms: first, Anglo-Saxon people are made to feel guilty for being part of a successful group, which in itself takes many forms - the 'sorry' campaign being the most prominent example. The main form of self-consumption though, is the rise of the 'Bogan'.
Originally an affectionate, if derogatory epithet, it used to refer to a specific subset of the Australian Anglo underclass. Wikipedia has a very fair and accurate article explaining this. The Uncyclopedia definition is suspiciously similar. These days, howver, most of the affection has gone, to be replaced by a vitriol towards a particular group (of which I am probably a marginal member) which has not been seen in Australia since Lambing Flat. Witness the Urban Dictionary definitions. This is a position which is adopted by both the Right and the Left, although it is adopted much more enthusiastically on the Left, who blame 'Bogans' either directly or indirectly for John Howard, the resurgence of aggressive religious conservatism, Australia's participation in the invasion of Iraq, global warming, Japanese whaling - indeed, evertything they may disagree with. According to the Luvvies, everybody who isn't actively involved in a campaign either for or against something is an apathetic VB swilling wife-beater who has their opinions formed for them by John Laws, Ray Martin and the Daily Telegraph.

I could go on (and on and on and on) about the way that the definition of the word 'bogan' has been broadened to include pretty much any white person the speaker feels superior to (which is most of them, most of the time; particularly if the speaker too, is white) or how vicious and inaccurate the use of the word has become, but I won't. I'll tell you why it has happened, instead.

In fact, I already have told you, partly at least. People need to feel superior. But feeling superior isn't enough. Other people have to know that they are superior, too.

You are not allowed to claim superiority on racial, sexual, intellectual or gender based terms any more, therefore another target has become necessary. That target is the 'bogan'. Of the same racial background (usually) as the person using the word, 'bogan' cannot be considered racist. Both men and women can be considered to be 'bogan' therefore it isn't sexist. Homosexual 'bogans' are rare and I am not aware of any transgendered persons of boga, but this may be an oversight on my part and does not necessarily indicate that the term 'bogan' denotes homophobia on the part of the user, although 'bogans' themselves are traditionally thought to be homophobic. They are also considered to be racist, sexist, shoppinglist and every other -ist word you can think of. All of these negative traits have increased in recent years as 'bogans' become more than the nation's scapegoat, they become what the nation fears itself to be.

Much like Prohibition produced an epidemic of binge drinking lawbreakers in the You Ess in the 1920s, suppressing people's natural desire to differentiate themselves from others in a way which seems positive to themselves has caused them to express this desire negatively, vicariously and in a much more extreme manner. To put it another way, the use of the word 'bogan' is to mainstream Australia very similar, but not synonymous with what the term 'beard' is to homosexuals.

Whereas a 'bogan' is likely to be racist in general terms and less so in interpersonal terms, the person using the label 'bogan' is more likely to be theoretically multi-cultural, but may feel some discomfort if, say, they met a group of Lebanese youths after dark, or found themselves in the middle of a group of aboriginal metho drinkers in a Moree park.. Unnaturally, they will feel guilty about this and they project their 'evil' thoughts, much amplified, onto that lesser being, the 'bogan'. A 'bogan' too would feel uncomfortable in those situations, but has no guilt about it. A Moree resident may think to themselves that they should have known better than to let themselves get caught in 'a mob of park boongs' but he doesn't let that colour his feelings towards other aboriginal people, whom will have as workmates, sporting team-mates, neighbours and friends. What he sees as a group of societies losers, the luvvies see as victims of white persecution (because every negative in an Aboriginal's life is the result of White persecution, White Apathy or White something else. Their paternalistic attitude will not allow them to acknowledge the possibility that Aboriginal people are just as capable of making bad decisions as white people are.), he feels guilty about this persecution and this magnifies the guilt he felt because of being uncomfortable in their presence.

Rationally, if he felt this unnecessary guilt, you would think that he would actively do something about alleviating the situation. But he doesn't. He's too busy planning his next career move, or paying off his inner-urban terrace or packing for his next trek in Nepal. This too makes him guilty. All this guilt has to go somewhere.

It's lucky that most 'bogans' have broad shoulders.

I'll leave you with a quote from a book I bought in a trendy St. Kilda bookshop in 1999. I can't find it online, so if there are any typo's or mis-spellings, they belong to me, not the author,

Don't you just hate 'em? Every gap-toothed, inbred, uncivilised, violent and hopelessly DUMB one of 'em? Jesus, how can you not hate 'em? There's no class of people with less honor. Less dignity. No-one more ignorant. More gullible. They're a primitive breed with pre-historic manners, unfit for anything beyond petty crime and random bloodletting. Their stunted, subhuman minds are mesmerised by cheap alcohol, Lotto fever and the asinine superstitions of poor-folk's religion. They stop beating their wives just long enough to let 'er squeeze out another deformed rugrat. They scatter their hand-me-down genes in a degenerative spiral of dysfunction. They breed anencephalic, mouth-breathing children. Vulgarians. All of them. Bottom feeders. They really bring down their race.
Luckily for you, I didn't specify which race that is. If I'd been talking about black trash, I might be lynched. If I was talking about white trash, I'd merely be another torchbearer in an ongoing national lynching. The differemce between vile racism and precision satire all depends on the nigger's color.

Which is the first two paragraphs from a book by Jim Goad called The Redneck Manifesto and is of course copyrighted by him. Hopefully he won't get all shitty at me for pinching a bit without asking. Everybody should read it.

And the winner is...

2006-06-12T14:08:00.000+07:00

I just got back from a semi-lightning ride to Sydney. Apologies to all friends, relatives and nodding acquaintances in the Greater Sydney area, but it was a spur of the moment thing and I didn't have time to see anybody anyway; all I had time for was picking up twenty kilos of heroin from the airport. Don't worry about that though, it was cleverly concealed inside the cavities of a few chinese child sex slaves/ illegal immigrants, and the lefty softcock customs guys never think to look there.
I rode down on Saturday. It's about eight hundred and fifty kilometres from here to ~~Eternity~~ Sydney and it rained for about eight hundred of them. I froze my nuts off. Lucky I don't use 'em much any more. I did what I had to do and started back on Sunday morning (-ish. It was about noon.) I got as far as Glenbrook afore it started to rainin' agin. Remember my nuts? Same thing. I managed to do a good deed on my way through the Blue Mountains. Some girl in a little generic hatchback (Seat?) was driving along with her back door not shut properly and I went out of my way to remedy the situation before catasphrophe befell her. Actually all I did was pull up next to her at a set of lights and tell her about it, but I'm thinking of taking up politics and I need some good news.
My amazing powers of perception let me down shortly thereafter when I missed the Mudgee turn-off. I realised it nearly as soon as it happened but I figured there's only about thirty kilometres difference so I came home via Bathurst/ Orange etc.
I'm not entirely certain that this was a good decision as my nuts re-attached themselves just so that they could fall off again, even harder. I wimped out at Orange and pulled up. This, too, may not have been wise as it was 5.5 degrees below zero when I left Orange this morning. Nuts, etc.
Still, I survived.
You may find this difficult to believe, but this filthy piece of shit I saw in the carpark of the motel in Orange is the very same bike that was shined to within an inch of its life last week. Apart from the ride out to the highway, about two killer meters, it hasn't been off the bitumen.

It's time we saw some pussy...

2006-06-08T17:03:00.001+07:00

I've been cleaning up a lot of stuff on my 'pooter, no special reason, I'm just good like that. In the course of my cleaning up, I came across a stash of cat photos. I don't remember where I found most of them, nor do I remember why I kept them. In a spirit of camaraderie and to show that I am transparent in all my dealings and because everybody does catblogging, apparently, I'm going to share them with you.
I like this little tacker. I hope he likes me.

Of course, because cats are pussies they collapse like a house of cards when you put the acid on them.

Then again, who needs ticker when being cute and furry is enough to get you into situations like this.

I must confess to being a dog man, though. Dogs can be cute, too, as this photo will attest.

And you'll never see a dog doing this for a living. Actually, this is the only photo who's history is known to me. It's from TSSH.

You are being redirected

2006-06-01T03:25:00.000+07:00

I don't know anybody called Fred. Not for a while now. However Fred writes rather well. He certainly nailed this.

Via 2blowhards.

What's in a name?

2006-05-31T15:28:00.000+07:00

You may have noticed in my previous post the occurrence of the street name 'Ruthven'. Persons of Toowoomban descent pronounce this phonetically - r, 'u' as in cup, 'th' as in throw, 'ven' as in "Ven vill you learn Hogan?". I'm led to believe by an unimpeachable stranger in a pub somewhere that 'Ruthven' is in fact a Scottish word and should be pronounced 'riven'. Which goes to show two things:

That Scottish people are still resisting the English invasion, and
Most people are a bit touchy about place names.

Four eggs ample; in North Rockhampton there is a thoroughfare which has been bestowed with the rather nifty name of Berserker Street. When I first saw it I wanted to shift there. How cool would it be to live in Berserker Street? How much fear would the name of the local football team instill into opposition hearts? But 'cept for the fact that the dolts in Berserker Street don't pronounce it in the way that nature intended, oh, no, no, no, no, no, they've decided to play God and changed the pronunciation to 'burrssicka' street. Fools. Our God is a vengeful God and will doom them to a life of Rockhampton if they don't repent.
Not all street names are mispronounced. Just down the road from Rocky is the lovely harbour city of Gladstone. At least it would be lovely if the original founders of Gladstone had looked around at the prettiest little harbour on the Queensland coast and not built meatworks, coal handling facilities, power stations, bauxite refineries and aluminium* smelters right on the shoreline. Dickheads, at least they could have put them up past The Narrows. Anyhoo, the main drag of Gladstone is Goondoon Street. A cross street of Goondoon Street is Yarroon Street.
Incidentally, Yarroon Street houses two of the three roughest pubs in Gladdie (one of which I used to work in), the police station and the courthouse.
According to me, both Goondoon and Yarroon are words from 'the patter'; the local dialect of Glasgow. Allow me to demonstrate their usage in a brief dialogue:
1st Glaswegian - Here you Jimmy, what the divil d'ye think ye doin', puttin ye feelers doon ma keks?
2nd Glaswegian - Dinnae borrer yesel' Jock, ah'm on'y Goondoon on ye, but ah've got tae hoist yoor boabie first. It's what I learnt in Barlinnie.
1st Glaswegian. Well ye can have that on Yarroon Jimmy, ah'm nae bufty. When ah wish a sooky, ah'll nip a hingoot. Put ma boy back in ma troos or ah'm gaunnae put ma napper intae ye heid, ye jobby jabber.
Speaking of Goondoon, I wish I was gay. Not only would I be thinner, better looking, wittier and wealthier, but I could change my name to RSI, become a criminal and move to Sydney. Bobbin Head, to be precise. Can you imagine the hilarity that would ensue when I was arrested by an inexperienced constable of uncertain sexuality after he took me to the station and the desk sergeant said "'allo, 'allo, allo, what have we here?"
The constable would then reply proudly "I've got RSI from Bobbin Head." And everybody would chortle.
Then there are names which are just unfortunate. East of Melbourne there is a place which used to be a town, but which is becoming a suburb of Melbourne. It is called Pakenham. A little further east on a rise is a smaller place which is an off shoot of Pakenham. Guess what it is called, you have a choice of:

a) East Pakenham
b) Pakenham Heights
c) Little Pakenham
d) Something completely unrelated to the word 'Pakenham'
e) none of the above

Of course, the correct answer is e) none of the above; because all of the above answers were sensible, slightly boring and not prone to schoolboy snirking.
As opposed to the actual place name which is...,
Pakenham Upper.
I have nothing more to say.
* Can't wait for the seppo spell checker to try and remove the extraneous 'i'.

As useful as a jam sandwich to a drowning rabbit*

2006-05-30T02:11:00.000+07:00

I happened to be passing through Toowoomba the other day and saw this pair of Harvey Dangerfields parked in Margaret Street. They represent two of the three corners of the Harley owners triangle. The first is the generic, lot's o' shiny bits, ridden only in heavily populated areas at times of high pedestrian traffic, the accountant recommended it shop floor model Harley, with a couple of catalogue accessories to 'individualise' it.

The second one represents the type of Harley for which I have the most respect. I'm not up on Harley models, but to me it looks like about a 1975 FLH. What I particularly like about this bike is that it looks ridden. It has obviously done a lot of miles and, although not immediately obvious to any casual passers-by, it is also fairly heavily modified, with all modifications designed with riding in mind.

It has a different carburettor, belt primary drive, magneto ignition, plus a few other home brew thingys, like a steering head lock and the one in the second photo, a remote mounted oil filter. This guy likes to ride. I was going to write about how blokes with bikes like this are usually big, dirty and hairy, but I saw him riding down Ruthven Street a little while later and he looked like he should be on the white bike - young, clean cut, wearing new Harley branded clothes. Maybe he just bought it from a big, dirty, hairy guy.

Incidentally, this is the third point of the triangle. Could it be any more of a generic New Millenium Chopper? Billet alloy wheels, stretched and raised frame, 3" seat height, 300mm wide rear end, even the straight out, downward curving pipes. I've never seen one of these on the road, but I've seen a few parked outside cafes in Bronte and Manly. Ridden(?) mainly by middle level, middle aged business types who can afford the $50,000+ price tag, they are usually up for resale within a few months when they realise that they only impress other middle level, middle aged business types and they are even worse to ride than that other toy they bought years earlier - the trophy wife.
In its favour this one is built by Redneck Engineering, with a name like that they must be okay.
*I have no idea who said that, or why, but it was on the news while I was thinking of a post title and it made me giggle.

Late Breaking News:

2006-05-23T01:49:00.000+07:00

I'm not dead. What I've been up to is none of your business, so shut the fuck up.
I'll probably tell you about it one day, anyway.
(That should shut those nagging bitches up. They probably don't put out anyway.)
(Or do the dishes)
(Or cook.))

I want more stuff; where's my stuff?

2006-05-10T16:17:00.000+07:00

Peter Costello can lick the sweat from my balls. He's a cunt. Of course, only he could run the economy responsibly, Labor have never had any economic credibility (Hands up if you remember who floated the dollar. Keep it up if you know who was the first treasurer to bring down a surplus budget. Keep it up if you remember who deregulated the finance sector. Keep keeping it up if you remember the reaction of the [Liberal Party candidate breeding ground] financial sector. Keep keeping it up if you know on whose coat-tails Costello rode for seven or eight years.), no, only Costello could have artificially created a couple of surpluses by selling off income generating assets. Only Costello could have ridden the Chinese boom, allowing us to have an even more commodities driven and dependent economy.
After the armchair ride that he's been given for eleven years, what does the cunt do? Give everybody in Australia a big fat handout.
Except me.
Cunt.
All you overpaid IT/ public service/ other cunts get from about $30 to over $100 a week. All you poverty stricken brain dead morons on under $40k a year (whom I am already subsidizing, through..., ummm..., subsidies and stuff) get about $40 a week. What do I get?
$9.96.
I don't get any Family Tax Benefit, or that other one. You know the one. The one that I'm not eligible for. Nup. Nothin'. Not even a blue beer ticket. You can all get fucked. Up the arse. With a post hole digger.
Of course Costello is basking in the glory and nobody has woken up to the fact that the big tax break he is giving you is no more than playing catch up. When is some far sighted genius of a treasurer who, by definition, agrees with me, going to index the tax brackets to inflation? As the system stands the tax system gets greedier year by year until whoever the treasure happens to be at the time gets a chance at glory by putting the tax level back where it used to be.
I'll tell you what else he should have done, because you learn these things before they let you drive tractors, he should have made income splitting the default taxation position for single income families. He should have introduced twelve months paid maternity leave. He should have done something to alleviate the coming, inevitable, bust that follows a commodities boom. He should have doubled the budget of the CSIRO. He should have invested more into ethanol/ bio-diesel research. In fact, anything that will make us less dependent on oil would be good.
Our own reserves are running out and they aren't making any more, so we should be doing more about alternatives now, before we need them. Putting your fingers in your ears, closing your eyes and going "Lalalalalalala." really loudly won't make the problem go away.
But most of all, he should have given me more stuff.

There's something about JC and Sunday that goes together

2006-05-07T12:21:00.000+07:00

The Second Coming begins.

A funny thing happened on the way to the internet...,

2006-05-06T08:28:00.000+07:00

There are very few approved routines available to stand-up comedians. They are:

Men and women are different.
Airline food is shit.
Kids these days.
Black people are different from white people (There are two pre-requisites for this routine; the performer must be black, and all differences tend to favour black people.)
Your customs in this foreign country are quaint.
Everybody who goes to prison will acquire a 3oolb girlfriend called Bubba.
Every blue eyed blonde teenage girl in a chatroom is in fact a 300lb ex-girlfriend called Bubba.

Actually it's just the last one that I want to talk about. I have only ever been in a chatroom once and I was pretending to be a teenaged girl. Let me explain. Way back in the dim dark past, before I ever bought myself a computer I was visiting with some friends who had a teenaged daughter, D. D was in a chatroom talking to some alleged teenaged boy from Tuscon. As I am by nature a curious soul, who likes nothing more than learning - and I'm a bit of a stickybeak, I was watching this take place. D would explain what she was doing and what the exotic abbreviations meant and all was well with the world. D's mother nagged her into performing some menial task which was going to take about twenty minutes, so D talked me into continuing chatting with the alleged denizen of Tuscon.
All went well for a couple of minutes talking about music (D had a folder of CDs that I used as crib notes), then it all went pear-shaped. Tuscon boy wanted to know what sort of clothes D wore. I heard a ping on my radar, but I just typed in a list of clothing items. One of the items was 'skirts'. Tuscon boy asked 'How short are the skirts?'
Before I could think of a reply he added 'Short enough to see your cunt?' I panicked and ran for (D's) Mum. She panicked, too. D turned up, read what was on the screen, laughed and did the chatroom equivalent of calling for a bouncer in a nightclub. Dunno how that worked. Dunno what happened to Tuscon boy, either.
Which is a roundabout way of saying that I have been thinking about internet personas lately. What they are, who adopts them, how they create their particular persona and why. Apart from the name, I don't have one. When I first bought my computer and beat Telstra into submission so that I could get on the net, just about the first thing that I did was get onto Google, type in 'blogs' and see what turned up. The very first blog I ever looked at was After Grog Blog. I still read it. In fact there are three other blogs I looked at that day that I still read, A Yobbo's View, Man of Lettuce and The Spin Starts Here. Anyway, I was looking at these blogs, thinking to myself "This looks alright, I might leave a comment here."
From memory it was on TSSH to tell Caz that I would marry her if I was allowed to wear..., something. Can't remember. I looked at all the other comments and they all had pseudonyms on them. At least I assumed that they were pseudonyms. You don't see many people walking around with names like Wobblebottom Jizzbomb. I assumed that it was customary to use a pseudonym so I chose Dirk Thruster, which is the name of a character I played in a movie made about twenty years ago by a hornbag Arts student whom I was trying (and failing) to bone. The name is as far as the character development went. I lack the imagination to create another personality and I'm too lazy to stay in character for any length of time, anyway. Every opinion that I have ever stated is Dirk's; which is to say mine. The language used to express those opinions is pretty much the same as I use in conversation, with most examples of the words 'fuck' and 'cunt' excised from it. I swear a lot.
Probably the major difference between the way that I behave on the net and the way that I behave everywhere else is that I am more argumentative face to face. When I first started net surfing I would stick my oar in wherever I could find a gap. I soon realised a few things, though; there are a lot more well-informed people on the net that there are in pubs, so I would get shot down in flames quite frequently - which taught me the benefits of research; a lot of otherwise rational people lost their sense of reason in debates, particularly when those debates involve politics or religion; a lot of people (this is related to, but not synonymous with the previous point.) cannot conceive of the idea that another person may arrive at a different conclusion than themselves when presented with the same evidence; almost every person involved in arguing on the net has a position from which they will not budge, so any attempt to do so is not only futile, but leads to animosity from the other person involved; everybody on the net is a tough guy (Except the girls, they're all hard bitches).
So these days I am a bit more careful about raising my voice and only do so when I am confident of my ground. If a person with whom I am having a debate refuses to acknowledge my line of reasoning or becomes abusive, then I just stop. How tough do you have to be to call somebody names from thousands of kilometres away? Somebody whom you have never met?
There are people around for whom violent abuse hurled at random strangers appears to be their only outlet. I feel sorry for these people. I often wonder what is so wrong with their lives that the only way that they can feel 'empowered' or whatever the buzzword du jour is, is to send insults to somebody over a - real in some instances, but usually just perceived - slight on the recipient's part.
Sometimes I think that it is for these people that the internet was, in fact, created. How many of them would be littering the shoreline at The Gap or giving train drivers the shits as they went under the front if it wasn't for the outlet provided to these inadequately equipped individuals?
Of course, there is a very strong argument in favour of removing these people from the gene pool. The trouble with that theory is deciding when to stop. Let 'em breed, I say. They'll die out eventually anyway and in the meantime they are at least diverting. A very small minority of them are even amusing.

I guess that proves it, then.

2006-05-04T02:30:00.000+07:00

Socialism is evil. This is a self-evident fact. Take socialised medicine, for example.

The Romance of The Bush (part one)

2006-05-03T15:21:00.000+07:00

When I was a little tacker I was an obnoxious little prick. That isn't germane to this post so I'll gloss over it for the moment. As well as being obnoxious I was fascinated by The Bush. I always thought of it that way - as a proper noun with a preposition*. Until I was nine years old I had very little first hand experience of The Bush. A week long holiday every year in a little town in northern Victoria called Wandiligong and that was about it. It was an old gold mining town and my brother and I would go exploring The Bush every day and pretend that we were gold miners/ bushrangers/ other exotic bush types. I remember being faintly disappointed that people didn't actually call each other 'cobber'.
The last time that we went to Wandiligong we extended the holiday by camping on the banks of the Tambo River in eastern Victoria for the week prior to Wandiligong. Camping in the same area was a bloke with his family. The bloke was either a) Peter Brock's mechanic, or b) John Harvey. (Older bogans will know who John Harvey is.) Either way, my brother and I were suitably impressed.
It was during our time on the Tambo that my dear old Daddy formed the idea of moving out of the 'burbs and going bush because "People still wave to you out here." Coincidentally, the local fuel outlet/ convenience store/ mini market thingy in Ensay was for sale. Dad looked into it, but a few weeks later he decided against it. However, it did put the idea into his head that he should buy a business rather than look for another job. So every weekend for the next couple of months we would be traipsing around rural Victoria looking at different small businesses.
My personal favourite was the Snake Gully store. Not only was it a big old bluestone building (with really bad stumps - when I stood next to the end of the counter, the top was at shoulder height. In the middle it was level with the top of my head.), not only did it have stables (stables mean horses), but it was Snake Gully!!
How fucking (The) Bush can you get?
My brother and I were walking around saying things like "Crikey bloke, come 'n' 'ave a squiz at this!" (Translation: I say, this is an interesting object I find within my field of vision.)
Actually, whilst I was saying things like that, my brother was saying things like "Piss off, you annoying little turd." Didn't matter, we didn't buy it. I was upset. We ended buying a servo in a little (less than [Bloody blogger keeps reading the 'less than' sign as the opening of an HTML tag and fucking up the post]100 people) town in Gippsland.

I thought that it was The Bush for about six months, then I realised that it was a little town two hours out of Melbourne. The Bush had drovers, shearers and swaggies, we had dairy farmers, SEC employees and spud pickers.At the time there were dairy farms between Dandenong and Noble Park. I don't think that I appreciated the freedom that living in this town gave me. I would ride my bike for miles to visit friends, go for tractor rides, go crayfishing, shoot rabbits, go fishing in another spot on the creek away from where y9ou went crayfishing 'cause every bloody nose that you don't get fish where the crayfish live. If you hadn't caught at least one copperhead by the time that you left primary school then you were obviously a poofter and therefore unfit for human society.

Everybody else knew what they were going to do when ther grew up. Take over Dad's farm, buy a trauck, become an astronaut, whatever. They knew. There was never any doubt. I had so many ideas going through my head that effectively I had no idea. I still don't. For a few months I wanted to be a tin scratcher in the Gulf country. I wanted to be a crocodile shooter a la Tom Cole. I wanted to be an opal miner (Done that one. It's fun if you don't mind going broke.) The only sensible idea that I had was that I wanted to be an aircraft mechanic. I even wrote a letter to the Government Aircraft Factory in Port Melbourne asking about apprenticeships. By the time that they wrote back I'd forgotten all about it.
Eventually I did an apprenticeship as a motor mechanic with Dad, only because he asked me if I wanted to. I only agreed because I didn't want to hurt his feelings. Looking back, it was a dumb decision, but whaddyagunnado?
This was s'posed to be a brief preamble without reference to mateship about a whole 'nother post, not my fucking life story. I'm tired; the rest will have to wait.
*I mean 'The'. I think that's a preposition. I'm fairly thick.

*Update: Diligent readers may notice that a large portion of this post has been subtly altered. This is because Blogger ate it. I suspect it is another attempt by Osama's boys, but have no proof to support this. Neither can I remember the original post so I made up stuff that fit into gap.

Yay4me

2006-04-30T06:46:00.000+07:00

All hail me, for I am the IT king. No bastard would tell me what was wrong with my 'pooter (did you note the use of past tense? I tried to be subtle.) , so I fixed it myself.
Impressed?
I am.
I tried system scans with three different bits of software, I ran registry cleaning software, I even downloaded a manual which is supposed to explain how the registry works and what all the file names and extensions mean and manually ~~fucked with it~~ modified it. I downloaded another couple of browsers, nothing worked. So I bit the bullet and did something I thought would bring about the end of civilisation as I know it.
I worked out how to do a clean install of Windows and blow me down if it didn't work. I didn't panic when it told me to insert a CD into the drive when I dion't have a CD of the name requested. I didn't even scream when I had to reconfigure the satellite software. I held my nerve and succeeded against all odds. I've put a proposal to Jerry Bruckheimer, but he directed me to the Hallmark Channel. It should be on a cable TV near you by Christmas.

I'm going to go and touch myself inappropriately now.

Evil bikies

2006-04-28T01:27:00.000+07:00

If you have been trawling my archives or - heaven forefend - reading this drivel for long enough, you will know that my dear old daddy and I would go to Bathurst each Easter for the bike races. Persons who have never been to Bathurst may be labouring under the assumption that it was a weekend of violence and debauchery. It was. Except for the violence. In ten or so trips to the mountain, the only interpersonal violence (as opposed to violence committed upon a motorcycle*) was directly outside the police compound and was committed by the police. I have since heard from a retired policemen that there was quite some competition for the Bathurst job each year. I suppose everybody has to vent.
Be that as it may, I never felt threatened or intimidated by any person or situation when I was there. Dad obviously felt the same because he gave me free reign even as a twelve year old to go pretty much anywhere I wanted by myself. I worked out that the best way to get around was to buy a T-shirt emblazoned on the back with a motorcycle logo; didn't matter what brand you chose, somebody would be riding that brand and would stop to offer you a lift. In those days when you were actually watching the races you would usually find yourself in a conversation with whoever happened to be nearby. Later in the evening, if you happened to run into those people at a pub, you would have a beer with them. If you were walking around the campground and they spotted you, they would call you over for a beer. Generally speaking (and I generally am), it was the most consistently friendly and socially accepting atmosphere that I have ever experienced.
Cut to the present Day:
I was on the telling bone with Dad on Anzac Day talking about The Old Days **. Dad went Phillip Island for the MotoGP this year. Dad will turn 80 next year and is a fairly gregarious chappie. Apart from monosyllabic grunts and the guy on the gate, nobody spoke to him all day. Although he is quite thick skinned and one of the toughest blokes I know, this upset Dad. He's been involved in motorcycles and motorcycling for over sixty years. Which illustrates something that has been gnawing at me for some time.
The nature of motorcyclists and motorcycling has changed, I believe for the worse (All changes are for the worse). Originally, when Dad started riding, motorcycling was an economic decision; you rode because you couldn't afford a car. Only a small percentage of riders rode for pleasure and of those, most raced. This meant that there was some sort of camaraderie between riders, sort of a mutual support group. Then, when I started riding in the seventies motorcycling was populated almost entirely by pleasure riders. Cars were cheaper, people were richer. If you rode, it was because you wanted to. At the time motorcycling was not quite respectable. A lot of people had misconceptions about motorcycling and motorcyclists, considering it/ them to be somewhat dangerous. These opinions were fuelled - as such misconceptions usually are - by sensationalist stories in the populist media. Some fuckwits even had their opinions reinforced at the movies.
However, this also led to a sort of camaraderie among riders. It meant that you would never drink alone in a strange pub or run short of someone to talk to at a race meeting.
These days there is still a camaraderie among riders, but it has changed subtly. Some older riders - and I include myself here - have retained the old attitude of welcoming anybody with the correct number of wheels. A lot of riders, young and old, now reserve their 'brotherhood' for riders of the same ilk i.e., sports riders, tourers, Harleys etc. Worse, a lot of them have a strong clique mentality whereby you have to become accepted into their lofty social strata before they will recognise their existence.
Fuck 'em.
*I saw two blokes having an argument once. One bloke had a Ducati and the other had a Suzuki. Suzuki Man claimed that Ducatis were pretty boys with no staying power. Ducati Man said that Ducatis were just as tough as the working class Suzukis. To resolve the argument they got the bikes wheel-to-wheel, started them up and held the throttles wide open. For a very long time. Eventually the Duke heard the alarm go off, thought that it was time for work and put a leg out of bed. Dunno how Ducati Man got home.
**Shut up. Just shut up.

Bugger

2006-04-27T02:02:00.000+07:00

Osama's boys have hit my 'pooter again. Internet Explorer don't wanna work no more. Which is fine by me, except that I like to use a freeware browser called Crazy Browser, which is basically IE with tabs. It's a ball-tearer. Fire up the 'pooter (gotta give it a bit of choke now that it's getting cold in the mornings), open Crazy Browser, open the favourites thingy, left click on about twenty sites, go make a cup of coffee, come back and all twenty sites are opened in their own little tab. Except now they aren't. Firefox is still working, but it is too clunky for me. I want IE back. I've run Norton 2006 and Ewido but nothing shows up. I've tried restoring to earlier dates but nothing has been changed since January. When I get home I'm going to see if I can remember how to do a clean install of Windows and see if that does anything. Failing that, I'm going to throw a major league tantrum complete with extreme swearing and thrown objects.

War! (Huh!) What is it good for?

2006-04-25T03:40:00.000+07:00

Absolutely nuthin'
War! (Huh!) what is it good for?
Absolutely nuthin' - say it again y'all

Which is a pretty stupid way to start an ANZAC Day post, but I figured 'Lest We Forget' would have been booked out. I don't know why Gallipoli assumed such significance in the national psyche, nor do I really understand why most nations identify themselves to some extent to particular military campaigns; the US national anthem is about the defiance of Fort McHenry after eighteen hours of shelling from the poms in 1814 (And a very stirring poem it is, too. I wonder how many Sepps could recite the final three stanzas from memory?). If you think Roseanne Barr didn't do credit to the anthem, then go here. Wear earplugs. The original title of La Marseillaise is Marching Song of the Rhine Army and comes from revolutionary days. The poms still invoke the spirit of the blitz. The Germans have been quiet on the subject in recent years.
Apart from Texans and the Alamo, Aussies and Merino molesters are the only people I can think of who identify so strongly with a defeat. It isn't like we were short of victories to crow over - Beersheba, for instance. I guess it's because Gallipoli was our first major engagement; the Boer war was a relatively small scale affair for a purely financial cause. I don't see how Gallipoli marks a coming of age for the nation, either. To my mind that didn't come until Curtin cut the apron strings. I find it difficult to understand why people think that sacrificing a generation of young men to a foreign cause is a sign of maturity.
It does illustrate a point, though. Australian people and Australian governments of both parties have always been willing to involve themselves in the problems of others, our shamefully late entry in East Timor notwithstanding. Sometimes, as in the Great War, we've involved ourselves to our own detriment for little or no potential benefit to ourselves - we were still paying the poms back on the loans we took out to save their arses well into the thirties.
There is one other thing that I take from the Gallipoli story and also from the story of other campaigns; every person involved was just an ordinary person and almost all of them acquitted themselves well, which gives me hope that if I am ever in a desperate situation then I too would acquit myself well.

I will leave you with a 1934 quote from Kemal Ataturk*, a Divisional Commander at Gallipoli and whose name literally means 'father of the Turks':

Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives... You are now lying
in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no
difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side now here in this country of ours... you, the mothers, who sent their sons from faraway countries wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land. They have become our sons as well.

*Incidentally, Ataturk was also a member of the CUP, or Young Turks, which is the group which carried out the Armenian Genocide. This is the progenitor of Hitler's 'Final Solution'. Indeed, when questioned on the wisdom of the Final Solution and whether the public would stand for it, Hitler is said to have asked "Who remembers the Armenians?"

The Armenian genocide is commemorated on April 24.

Added bit: It took me so long to write this that I forgot the most important thing. To all those who have served and all those who are still serving; Thank you.

Come the revolution, brother

2006-04-23T04:37:00.000+07:00

So old Lizzie turned 400 or something at some stage in my short-term memory. There's been the expected outpouring of vitriol from the usual suspects and probably the usual parade of sycophancy from the other usual suspects. I say probably because I didn't really notice her birthday sneaking up on me so didn't look for any coverage of it in the housewife porn mags*. I have nothing personal against Our Monarch, I just don't like the idea of having a monarchy.
Lizzie is only playing the cards that she's been dealt. As far as nominative (and ceremonial) Heads of State go, she doesn't do a bad job of it, either. Nor do I dislike Chuckles. He's a bit whacko, but at least he has opinions which are his own, which is refreshing. Also, anybody who likes the Goon Show can't be all bad. Needle nardle noo and all that. Admittedly the Windsors are no competition for the Grimaldis when it comes to hornbag-ness or even wackiness, but they provide amusement.
Which doesn't mean that they should have anything to do with The Great Southern Land. Adhesion to the poms has been a mistake financially and lately, diplomatically. It was always a one way street militarily - Boer War, anyone? World War One? (At least the yanks had the brains to sit out the first few years. Smarter than our mob.) World War Two was our go, but it wasn't until we got rid of Pig-Iron Bob and Curtin sided with Roosevelt over Churchill that our national security was, in fact, secure. The poms were ready to sacrifice us. Malaya was us, nothing against the poms there. Ditto Vietnam, given the locale and the (ultimately wrong) Domino Theory. Pity the Sepps didn't look a bit closer at how the Poms handled Malaya, the outcome may have been different. Wars are not won by statistics.
It is now easier for a Cypriot or Estonian or Lithuanian to enter, stay or work in Britain than it is for a bonzer Aussie to do so, fair dinkum. And yet conservatives- and I use the term here to describe one resistant to change - still cling to the monarchy as if it were indeed a Good Thing for the nation, instead of just a security blanket for people who fear the new. Of course, some of those people will point to the Summit or whatever it was called that we had in Johnnie's first term and say that Australians don't want a republic, carefully omtting the point that the whole thing - from membership to agenda - was carefully orchestrated by one of Australia's most ardent monarchists especially to produce an unpalatable outcome. I saw Tony Blair on Parkinson last night because I have no life and Blair said that Bill Clinton was the best 'politician's politician' that he ever met. I feel that this is a slight on Howard, that man is a genius.

I am by no means as slavishly devoted to the concept of democracy as most people would have you believe that they are. The trouble with democracy is that the same people who vote for the Logies also vote in general elections. The same people who made McDonalds the most popular restaurant in the world select the government in a popularity poll. For this reason, I think that a minimalist approach to a republic might be the most logical and likely to get up. Just stop the Governor-General from being a Vice-Regal representative. You wouldn't have to change the way that the Gee Gee is selected, or anything else for that matter. Call it the Presidency if it's important to you, but it doesn't really matter. Change the flag, if you want, but that doesn't matter either. I don't give a two nobs of goat shit what the flag looks like. I've heard all the arguments pro- and con- and I don't care if the blue ensign has never been officially elevated above the red ensign, I don't care if you want to get rid of the tea towel in the corner and I don't care if you fought for and died for the flag. Incidentally, anybody who fights for a flag is an idiot. Go to the disposals and get another one; it's a piece of dyed cloth, it's not important. The purpose of a flag is to provide a recognisable symbol of the nation. The current one serves the purpose; so would a new one. It's the nation that is symbolised that is important, not the design that is chosen to represent it. Too many people confuse the wrapping paper with the present.

Democracy is ok, works well to varying degrees in most cases and usually corrects its own mistakes given enough time, but I find myself being something of a fan of benevolent despotism. Democracies, by definition, are nations run by committees. This means that it takes ages for any decisions to be reached, they are usually poor compromises and errors are always somebody elses fault. The only trouble (but probably an insurmountable one) with benevolent despotism is ensuring its benevolence. I'm still working on that one.

While the minimalist approach to a republic is logical and pain free it isn't my preferred choice. I favour a much more extreme makeover of the whole system. If I had my druthers I would scrap the State system and revamp the way that Local and Federal government operates. Of course you would have to retain ceremonial State borders. I couldn't live without State of Origin, that's just silly.

I would break the whole country up demographically so that there was a Local Government Area for every hundred thousand voters. Each Local Government Area would elect a council of ten members. These ten people would then select a Federal Representative from amongst themselves. This representative would then go off to Canberra and have nothing more to do with the running of the council, which would look after the traditional council stuff. All the reps from all the councils would then form a government along traditional party lines, the Prime Minister, who would be selected by the reps, would be the President. No more playing the blame game in health, education or anything else. Plenty of power with nowhere to hide. Everybody's vote carries the same weight and the bloated bureacracy would be less bloated.

I am a fucking genius.

* I am a fairly difficult person to offend. I don't have a thin skin and I am tolerant of divergent opinions. Some things disgust me, though. Probably what exemplifies it best was the cover of (I think) Women's Weekly that had a full page photo of Princess Di on the Pec Deck. Not that there was anything particularly lewd or lacivious in the photo itself; more that it was seen fit for publication at all, let alone on the front cover of a national magazine. I didn't give a rat's arse one way or the other about Di, I certainly never bought into the whole 'People's Princess' bullshit - she was a Sloane Ranger who managed to elevate herself into the position of Uber Ranger by boonting an ugly inbred. She wouldn't have given 'the people' the steam off of her piss on a cold day.
Which doesn't mean that she wasn't due her share of privacy. People who enter into the public arena (as opposed to being born into it) must expect to have their every public move examined and critiqued. They shouldn't need armed guards at the upper story windows to prevent photographers from feeding housewive's addictions to salacious material. I don't dislike papparazzi - they've seen a market and they're exploiting it - I hate the prurience and hypocrisy of the scum who buy their product.

The land of leeks and wizards

2006-04-19T15:29:00.000+07:00

Never say Dai, and all that.

As you are no doubt aware; because he's world famous in my house, my dear old daddy used to race speedway bikes for a living in the UK. Way back in the dim, dark, old timey, pre stuff days, it was a fair trip back home in the off season, so he didn't make it. He would stay with a family in Wales on their dairy farm. He had many stories about this place and still corresponds with them (Hi Wlliams family.)(That narrows it down, huh?)

It gets cold in Wales. The house was old, like fourteenth century old. Add old and cold and you get walls four feet thick. The fireplace had seats inside it. There was a hole in the back wall of the fireplace which had metal doors in it. There were rings in the front wall of the fireplace. The idea was to stick the trunk of a tree through the hole in the wall, get the fire going and drive spikes into the tree trunk. As the trunk burned away you would put a chain around the spikes and through the loops and winch the trunk in a bit further.

We've all lived in places where you have to drain the radiator overnight to prevent cracks in the engine block, or where you fill saucepans with water before you go to bed so that you have water (ice) for coffee in the morning.

In Wales they had a tractor, which they would sometimes find a use for over winter. If they were going to use it that morning, they would put a kerosene burner under the crankcase and go for breakfast. By the time that they had finished breakfast the oil would be warm enough to flow that well that you could hand crank the motor. Still no hope on the key, though.

Crows are smart. Anybody who has ever seen one calculate the width, velocity and trajectory of your vehicle before taking the precise number of steps away from the roadkill carcass necessary to avoid your tyres by less than two centimetres could tell you that. In Wales, they're smarter. They had a murder of crows (which is the best collective noun, ever.) which were hassling their..., umm..., calves, I guess. Or something else, can't remember. Anyhoo, they had an oats paddock next to the house and the crows would all hang out in a row of trees on the other side of the paddock. You could go out into that paddock banging rubbish bin lids, drums, waving your arms around, nothing. You could get brooms, mops, hoes (not hos), whatever and point them at the crows like a gun and you wouldn't ruffle a feather. Walk out of the house with a shotgun and the crows would be gone before you could take a shot.

Smartarses.

Night of the Living Rednecks

2006-04-17T10:58:00.000+07:00

As you could probably work out from the photos in the previous post, we've finished picking. Because we are in Australia and therefore adhere to Australian culture and customs, we celebrated the end of the harvest with a deeply spiritual activity consisting of heavy consumption of intoxicating liquids and ingesting pieces of charred, dead animals. So Thursday wasn't the most productive twenty four hours in the history of cotton farming.
So, Easter.
So, Roma.
The Young Bloke and I stayed at a motel and got drunk a lot. I am nothing if not cultured. Being Good Friday, no beeratoriums were operating when we got there, but a pub disco/ nightclub thingy did open at midnight. Did you know that women in nightclubs just aren't as pretty when you are sober? For those keeping score, it was a nil all draw, although the Young Bloke had better stats with two phone numbers to my one. I think I'm past my peak.
Next day was a bit hectic. Brekky down the street, clothes shopping (no, we're not a couple)( actually a young chicky babe in one of the clothes shops arranged to meet me that night. Pissed the Young Bloke off. I missed the meet. I really am past my peak.) and goat racing.
For reasons I don't know, Roma has an Easter In The Country festival every year. At Easter. For reasons I have even less of an idea about, this includes goat races up the main street. I don't take good pictures with a hangover, but even if I was straight out of the health spa (I'm so going to go to one of those things one day. Pampering suits me.) I don't think that I could make it exciting. Moderately amususing for a little while, but...meh.
So after the goat races, we went back to the motel, dumped the stuff we'd bought and went to something Easter-y that will resonate with Christians everywhere - went to the Mud Bash. These things are institutions throughout rural New South Wales and Queensland. They seem to be more popular in cotton growing areas. Dunno why. Essentially what it involves is two vehicles, which bear a vague resemblance to motor cars, racing on separate tracks through a bunch of mudholes. Spending money, or using competent tradesmen is tolerated but not encouraged. They had a bar there. Guess where the photo was taken from? As you can tell from the hats in the foreground, the majority of the audience were My People. Some kids came around selling raffle tickets. Dunno who it was in aid of, not too sure what the prize was, either, but the Young Bloke and I bought a few tickets and off they went. Five minutes later they were back, with a Mum. Apparently you're not allowed to let them keep the change.
After the mud bash, we kept our necks red at the speedway. Sad to say that the speedway didn't have bikes and pretty much sucked. So it was back to town and a couple of very noisy pubs. Nil all draw again, without even a phone number. I need a life coach. Next morning I went and had a very pleasant breakfast, while the Young Bloke cultured his hangover. After he had recovered sufficiently, we headed for the drags. Ironbark raceway is only an eigth mile track, so they don't have the really fast boys, but they had a few altereds and suchlike, with a shitload of hotty street cars.This was the car that interested me the most. Not exciting to watch race, it was a pretty cool little jigger to have a closer look at. It's called a Junior Dragster. Like the name implies, it's a kiddie car, for ten to sixteen year olds. The engine is a replica of a 5.5hp Briggs and Stratton lawnmower engine. It's made by a mob called McGee who used to be based in Sinny, but are now in the States. Last I heard of them was about twenty years ago when they were making 511 cubic inch Top Fuel engines. This thing is still a 3"x3" sidevalver, but with an alloy rod, roller bearings, turbocharger and nitrous oxide injection and makes about 28hp. I love the pointlessness of it.They had a few bikes there, too. Mostly road bikes, but a couple of proper drag Harleys, on old 750 Honda drag bike, and this. It's handbuilt from the ground up. It's the loudest thing I've heard in a long time. They didn't have the best day on the track. They only had one good run, which was on the back wheel for the full length of the track. At the end of proceedings, there was a bit of a presentation thingy where people were given trophies for stuff. After the presentation was over the real crowd pleaser was conducted, the burnout competition. More of an Urban thing that a bush one, the kiddies put on a pretty good show.
Well, I liked it.
This girl won it. That's right misogynists, the blokes were out-testeroned by a breast bearer.

After the burnout comp, it was back to town, junkfood for tea, and a few beers at the Irish pub. At least, I had a few beers. The Young Bloke couldn't back up and didn't have a beer all day. Bloody kids, what's the world coming to?

Next morning we hit the road, stopping only for groceries.

I'm knackered.

Dave Scott wishes he had one of these

2006-04-14T03:00:00.000+07:00

Happy Easter, Passover, Spring Equinox Fertility Rites, whatever. If you don't put the addendum to 'easter' you just ain't in the loop, man.
Anyhoo, I've got four days off, so suffer in your jocks, urban types. I'm going to Roma for the weekend to abuse my liver and take advantage of tourists.
In the meantime, you might be interested to know what the headline is all about.
Dave Scott was the first bloke to drive a moonbuggy on the moon. This is what dinkum Aussie cottongrowers call a moonbuggy:
Impressed? I was, the first time I ever saw one. Most of the other times that I've seen one, as well. Particularly this one.

Not because the moonbuggy itself is much different from other moonbuggies that I've seen. Rather, it's because the bloke operating it is one of the best machine operators I've seen in quite a few footy seasons.

Like watching a craftsman or skilled tradesman at work, a skilled machinery operator is a joy to behold. There is an economy of movement and a flow to their work that is as rhythmic as any dancer; in some instances, such as a shearer or cabinetmaker, it is beautiful.

This bloke is that good. No wasted movements, no corrections and no rush. He loaded eighty-one modules, weighing an average of about sixteen tonnes, in seven hours. About two of those hours were spent waiting for the trucks to return from the gin. Equally importantly, he left minimal cotton on the ground. I bow before his awesomenessity.

On the road again

2006-04-12T01:44:00.000+07:00

About six years ago I was working for a contract cotton picker. I was doing then pretty much the same as I am doing now - following the pickers (and mulcher) around with a sidebuster. I don't even like being on cotton farms at picking time; when asked once what job I wanted to do at pick I said "Sow wheat." So I got to sow 8000 acres of wheat while everybody else was getting stressed.

Anyhoo, back to six years ago; I was driving the tractor back to the contractors place between Boggabilla and Goondiwindi, a distance of about 250 kilometres. As the tractor and rig was overwidth I had an escort vehicle front and rear (should have had a police escort but, heh.). For the first 110k's or so we managed to stay on backroads out of the traffic, but the last 130k's was straight up the Newell Highway. It is usually a fairly uneventful experience roading a tractor and implement; occasionally a truckie will talk to you on the two-way for a while, asking how the implement works or telling you about his time on tractors, and now and then some goose will get a bit stroppy for slowing him down.

As I said, I had an escort vehicle front and rear. We were all talking to each other all the time, so if traffic was building up behind, the rear escort would let me know and I would pull off of the road. If a truck was coming up behind us the front escort could tell him when it was safe to pass, regardless of the linemarkings. Generally speaking, this system worked well, except for a couple of Grey Nomads who were in a Hilux ute pulling a caravan which needed a Landcruiser to tow it safely. I was heading up a single lane rise - double lines - and we called a truck through. So far, so good. Old Mate in the Hilux saw the truck go and thought "What's good for the goose..." and went, too.

Big mistake. The truck took off up the hill like it was supposed to and the Hilux wheezed up beside me like an asthmatic old dog. The rear escort vehicle erred in not letting me know that he was coming and I didn't notice him until he was nearly level with me. At pretty much the same time I noticed a road train coming over the hill towards us. He had nowhere to go but over the Hilux and the Hilux had nowhere to go but under the road train. I hit the turning brakes and went bush to give the Hilux somewhere to run. I bounced through the table drain at nearly 40k's in a vehicle with no suspension and two or three ton of sidebuster hanging off the back of it. I split my head open on the cab roof it bounced that much. I was lucky not to break a diff housing.

In what was pretty much the single best piece of driving that I have ever seen, the roadtrain driver did the same thing on the opposite side of the road. How he kept the wheels underneath it is beyond me. Some people are just born to their job. The Hilux driver just carried on, oblivious to it all. I don't think that he even noticed anything.

Naturally enough, there was a fair bit of chatter on the two-way after that. Most of it was about the dickhead in the Hilux and what a **** **** **** ******* ****** he was. After a couple of minutes the dickhead came on and joked about it like nothing had happened. Much attempted re-education ensued, to no avail. He was old and had seen it all before.

We got back tp Boggabilla and washed the tractor down, did some maintenance and packed it in, ready to hook in the following morning. We were staying at the caravan park. On my way back from the shower, I noticed a familiar Hilux. My first thought was "Crush, kill, destroy!" but he was old, so I had to show a bit of respect. I went over and tried some more re-education. Still didn't sink in. He was a monument to his upbringing and you can't put brains in a monument.

My favourite motorcycles, los partos cinque

2006-04-08T02:31:00.000+07:00

los partos uno
los partos deus
los partos tre
los partos quattro
OK, I'm on a roll and nothin's gunna stop me now. Whe I was a young bloke, I lived in motorcycling heaven, but 'cept for the weather. Smooth windy roads all over the shop. Lovely. The first road bike that I spent any serious amount of time on was one of these:
Ain't she pretty? It's a 1975 Honda CB400F and it's still just about the perfect bike to just have fun on. Haven't ridden one in over twenty five years, so I would imagine that they would be a bit short of neddies by today's standards, but if anybody knows where there is one for sale, my email is on the sidebar. I want one to play with again. In their day they were light, flickable, well braked and just generally sporty without being overly macho about it.

They had the sexiest header pipes ever put on a Japanese motorcycle, too. Didn't sound too sporty until you stuck a bit of rod through the baffles in the muffler, but damn; they looked good. The engine looked good from the other side, too:

I love being able to see the engine on a bike. Fairings are a good thing when you are actually sitting on the bike, but nothing beats naked to look at.

Dunlop used them to advertise theit TT100 tyre, which I guess from looking at the bikes in the top of the picture below;

was their road-going version of the old triangulars.

I'm late for work, later 'gators.

It's bloody obvious, really

2006-04-07T02:43:00.000+07:00

It's because we are all so good-looking.

My favourite motorcycles, part the fourth

2006-04-06T18:20:00.000+07:00

part the first
part the second
part the third

It occurs to me that it is quite some time since I added anything to this series. When I was a little tacker and we had the servo, we became sort of sub-dealers for Kawasakis. We sold the entire range of G4TR/A ag bikes. High-tech beasties they were, too; high and low range, rotary valves. Cutting edge stuff. We got cool stuff, too, like Kawasaki overalls and, umm..., pamphlets.

So it should come as no surprise to you that number four on my non-graded list of favourite motorcycles is the
Kawasaki Z1, or as the one in this picture is called, the Kawasaki Z1B. In fact any of the early air-cooled Claggy saggy four bangers will do me. When arr woor yoong, my dear old daddy and I used to wait out the front every morning to listen to Somebody flog the crap out of his Z650 on his way to work. We lived on one side of a small valley and Somebody lived on the other side. He was either late for work every single morning of his life, or he was normal, but that Kaw copped a pizzling. It had a set of four into ones on it and sounded like (to quote dear old daddy) somebody tearing a sheet of cardboard inside a water tank. Aurgasmic.

Like a Hollywood actor, they got heavier and slower as they got older even though they looked leaner and meaner. I had one in the eighties. It started life as a Z1000. Before it departed it was up to nearly 1200cc and had a hodge-podge of bitties inside it. I don't remember the details and I'm not going to try and fake it, but it had bits on/ in it at various stages from Moriwaki, Yoshimura, Keihin, Tranzac, Ceriani, Two Brothers (I think, although I can't for the life of me think what it might have been) and ..., others. Went like shit off a shovel. Handled like shit off a ..., well, just shit.

I still wasn't even close to being as fast as this bloke, but. Graeme Crosby could ride the wheels off of these things. They were the weapon of choice for production and superbike racers. Jim Budd, in particular, used to impress me. Fucked if I remember why. Gregg Hansford never looked comfortable on them to me.

These bikes, along with the old sohc 750 Hondas, revolutionised motorcycle styling in a way that has never been fully recognised. Before these bikes came out (and with a very few notable exceptions, one of which is already on this list) motorcycles all looked cobbled together, like the engineering department wasn't talking to the styling department and vice versa. These were the first bikes that had a cohesive design; that looked finished. The engine wasn't something sent up from the workshop to fill a hole in the design, the engine was the centrepiece of the design from the outset; and rightfully so, it was beautiful.

In fact, it's so beautiful that you can buy a life sized pewter sculpture from the people from whom I stole the photo. I have no idea if it's any good; buy one and tell me.

Telly heads could tell me if Claggy Saggies were the bike of choice on CHiPS; I think so, but I lost my remember. All those persons who realise that real race bikes don't turn right would know that Bruce Penhall had a role on CHiPS.

Actually, while I'm tired and rambling, does anybody remember Barney Miller? The character Fish, played by Abe Vigoda (don't even try and tell me that I've got a poor memory) had a spin-off series called Fish. Would have paired well with CHiPS. Just sayin'.

Oh my goodness gracious me

2006-04-05T17:31:00.000+07:00

The telly is on. On the telly is McLeod's Daughters. I heard sombody making the same "C'mawnn." call an ex-boss of mine used to make when calling up his self-mustering Belmont Reds, still my aller time fav'rit cows*. On McLeods Daughters they were mustering. They had four people on horses to work about thirty head of the chubbiest little Hereford and Angus cows, about half with calves at foot. In the lushest Eastern Victorian improved pasture I've seen since the last time that I was in Eastern Victoria.

I love reality TV.

* The cows were only a part-time thing on a thousand acre hobby farm. Every time he went up there he'd call the cattle in and give them some lucerne. After a while they got all Pavlovian about it and would trot up every time you called them. The first time I went up there I tried it. For about thirty seconds there was nothing. Then a faint, but heavy rumbling. Then there was dust rising , the ground started to shake, my fillings came loose and charging up the laneway was about 1500 pounds of the biggest bull I had ever seen, snorting and slobbering and tossing its head. Did I mention the unholy gleam in its eye? It had an unholy gleam in its eye. I was trapped in the open with a biscuit of lucerne in my hand and nowhere to run - not that running was feasible on the bouncing ground. When the bull was about fifteen feet away, he locked them up and skidded to a halt at precisely distance required to eat the lucerne out of my hand - and wagged his tail while he was doing it.

The cows came a few minutes later.

Return of the prodigal

2006-04-05T02:09:00.000+07:00

Those of you who have been here for a while may remember the amazing disappearing underling. Well, he's back. Sort of. Before he started working here, he was employed by our picking contractor. Now he's employed by our picking contractor again. After he left here, he got a job at a larger cotton property the other side of town, where he lasted three days. It's anyone's guess exactly what happened after that.

Apparently he's been in jail a couple of times and was in a fairly unsavoury state when said picking contractor rescued him from the gutter and dried him out.

I would have left him there.

The Red Heart

2006-04-02T04:23:00.000+07:00

I lived in Alice Springs for about five years. I liked it. If it wasn't for the fact that it is too far to anywhere else - and I could travel for five or six hours north or south redlining in top gear without scraping the pegs; I'd still live there. It was a very friendly place and you could get pretty much anything done for a carton of VB.

Four eggs ample, the downline from the powerline to my workshop burnt out for some reason. The official cost for replacement was roughly $3000, with a wait of about three weeks, or two days if it was an emergency. A mate of mine was an electrical contractor and he was down the road with a(n?) NTEC crew putting a downline in to a new factory. One carton of beer and two hours later the NTEC crew and mate had supplied, fitted and tested the new downline.

I worked in various industries while I was there; used cars, tourism, foodservice among them. I also ran a small mechanical workshop in a black market sort of way. I specialised in keeping old bombs going. Mainly for backpackers, but I also like to think of myself as something of a pioneer in teaching aboriginal people that motor-cars do not have to be a short-term, disposable item.

Up until the mid to late eighties the majority of vehicles owned by aboriginal people in the Centre were driven 'til they dropped, having only minimal (but sometimes ingenious) repairs or maintenance. When they stopped forever, they were left where they died, all desired personal effects removed and the family wandered into town for another one.

"Here's a market." I thought, and gradually built up quite a large clientele of repeat aboriginal customers. As is natural, a lot of them deserted me for larger, more impressive operations, but I didn't care; I was making a reasonable living, dealing with customers whom I liked. I gave it away when the lease ran out and no other reasonably priced, suitable premises could be found. Also, going 'straight' would have meant too much paperwork.

At this time, I inherited a red cattle dog who was fairly well nutso. He was two years old and had never been off a chain. He stayed on the chain during the day after he came to live with me as I had to leave the gates open, but I let him off at night. As soon as I let him off he would run around the perimeter fence at about 90% of the speed of light. He looked like that bloke on his old Indian doing the wall of death. I'd go inside to watch a bit of telly and let him run around. After about ten minutes he would come barreling through the door and slide to a halt in front of me and put his head in my lap for a bit of a scritch.

Five minutes of scritching and he would take himself outside for guard duty. Best guard dog I ever had. Never barked at passing cars or pedestrians, always barked whenever anybody touched the fence or whenever a group loitered too long.

He was a bugger of a dog to take for a walk, though, I used a choker chain on him and still his front legs didn't touch the ground for the first fifteen minutes.

Every now and then I would grab a mate or two and take the dog camping. We'd go out into the desert somewhere and let the dog out. We'd go home when the dog came back. Sometimes it was overnight, sometimes it was three or four days. Whenever he came back to camp he'd be covered in burrs and dirt and blood, quite often his own blood, and he'd be as happy as a pig in shit.

I was heading back into town after one of those trips when I spotted an old Toyota Landcruiser ute about a hundred metres off the side of the road. It was missing a back wheel and had tarps hanging down from the tray to make a humpy under the back. There was a small fire behind it with an old black man sitting near it. I walked over to him "Ai, Tchilpi."

"Ai." he replied.

"You good?"

"Ai."

"Flat tyre."

"Ai."

"No spare?"

"Him flat, too."

"Somebody come?"

"Ai."

"Got tucker? Water?"

"Ai."

So we left him there and continued towards town. About four kilometres down the road we caught up with a six or seven year old girl wheeling along a Toyota tyre. We piled her in the back and kept going. Two kilometres later we caught up with her nine year old brother and another wheel. Three kilometres later was mum and wheel. We dropped them off at Hermansburg and kept going.

Dunno how they got back.

Nevermind.

2006-03-28T16:52:00.000+07:00

Kurt Cobain was a fuckwit, just thought that I'd get that off of my chest.

Pete Wells died yesterday. I always thought that he was under-rated in the pantheon of Rock Gods*, possibly because he first rode to fame as guitarist (as opposed to bass player) in the self-caricaturising Rose Tattoo. You could hear the bass player in his guitar work, especially the slide stuff. Very simple and straitforward, every note was there for a purpose. I first saw him play in 1983 and have always tried to keep up with him, although it's kinda hard bein' in the boonies.

I'm gunna go play Blues Hangover now, but before I go, one brief memory. That time in 1983 that I saw Rose Tattoo was the first time that I'd ever seen anybody knock themself out by banging their head on the stage.

* Sepps and other iggerant furriners aren't supposed to know who Pete Wells was. Shame on you bonzer Aussies who had to Google. Less yer a kid.

Avalons are not Toyotas

2006-03-25T03:42:00.000+07:00

Rat, ol' buddy, this is a Toyota:
The Young Bloke needed some help with his ute yesterday, so I pulled some stuff off of it:
We knocked off early yesterday. Dunno why, but I wasn't going to argue. With time on our hands I offered to see why The Young Bloke's Toyota was wearing out the inside of his front tyre. Bloody axle won't pull out for some reason. Note the OH&S approved trolley jack on uneven ground. Think I'll put stands under it this morning. Went to St. George for the parts (Wheel bearings, steering hub bearings, brake pads and uni joints - hey, it's not my money.) and got drunk on the way home. Life is so difficult.

Another day older and deeper in debt

2006-03-22T01:41:00.000+07:00

Inspired by this post over at Ranger Tom's, I will tell you about a little trip I took in a truck back when I was wet behind the ears (a phrase that I don't understand).

An older friend of mine in the Latrobe Valley had a Scania semi-trailer and was doing a trip to Sydney. I went along for the ride. The trip up and back was uneventful, except for the guy who blew his horn at us as we were driving off from a set of traffic lights. We pulled up in the middle of the intersection and, taking an eighteen inch shifter, the driver began wandering to the back of the trailer, checking his tyres as he went. When he got to the rear of the trailer he put the shifter over his shoulder and went to the car behind us.

"It sounds like there's something wrong with your horn button, want me to fix it for you?"

Coming back into Traralgon we were running low on fuel. There is a railway line which runs parallel with the highway. We had to cross under a viaduct to get to a fuel depot. The intersection was on a slight curve on the highway and was always busy. Coming up to the intersection the intersection, the engine cut out. Twenty two tons of steel on the back, no power steering and only one application of the brakes (Trucks have air brakes. The air releases the brakes. With the engine stopped, the compressor wasn't compressing so the brakes wouldn't release once applied.)

The turning light was green, so we were OK to go through. We couldn't go straight ahead because there were vehicles turning from the opposite direction. Hitting the brakes was not an option because of the inherent risk of lockups and lost control. We shot under the viaduct, me working one side of the steering wheel, the driver working the other. We ran a bit wide on the exit and collected a roadsign on the centre divider. We managed to roll up to the fuel depot, hitting the brakes at just the right time to pull up right next to the pumps. Fuelled up, went to bleed the injectors - after dealing with an (understandably) irate motorist, nothing. Couldn't bleed the fuel system. Turns out that we hadn't run out of fuel at all, the injector pump drive had sheared.

They're a funny lot in Yorkshire

2006-03-16T01:42:00.000+07:00

Recycled Iraq Joke.

I'm just rambling 'cause I can't sleep

2006-03-16T00:14:00.000+07:00

How about those Commonwealth Games, eh? Did you see that event where the athlete overcame a setback to win? Neither did I. Much like the Winter Olympics, the Commonwealth Games hold absolutely no interest for me, although they have two advantages that Torino didn't have - three, if you count the distinct lack of knuckle-fucking alleged journalists prefacing every report with bon fucking giorno. Firstly, there are bound to be numerous occasions where it is deemed necessary to have the Minister For The Games on the telly. Big Jussy was my favourite unco-ordinated footballing buffooon (along with Percy Jones) and it's good to see the big fella has kicked on after the game. Secondly, there are bound to be a lot of events where the female competitors wear skimpy outfits. Chances are that some of these competitors will reward a lech like me. And that's a good thing. In a demonstration that I haven't learned to count yet, there is another possible advantage, the netball. It's about the only decent international competition the sport has and it is usually pretty exciting.

I've noticed a couple of things recently. A lot of bloggers and commenters* have ripped into ComGames, using the same line of attack, even the same wording. This tells me two things: that the ComGames are boring, and that mankind still hasn't evolved very far from the days when people had to roam in packs and clans in order to survive. Anthropologists have a word for this kind of mentality. I don't know what that word is, but they've got one for everything else, so it stands to reason that they'd have one for that as well. Anybody who is moderately well-known only has to utter "I don't like strawberry jam." and s/he will be snowed under by sycophantic commenters all remarking how they feel the same way and that jam is evil and should be banned.

The convoluted logic used by some of them to justify their backflips when the hero blogger posts a comment three pages into the thread saying "On the other hand, apricot jam is da bomb." is really astounding.

Wanna know what I did on Saturday morning? I'm gunna tell you anyway. I spent three hours groping sheep tits and checking out their teeth. I think that I may have mentioned this in the past, but if 'animals' were an Olympic event, sheep wouldn't get on the podium.

Now I'm off to play on the tractor.

*The word 'blogosphere' is for ingrates who think that repeating someone elses phraseology will result in them absorbing some of the creator's cool.

i just live my life, always speak the truth, i don't hide a thing and figure thats the way to be about it. a person in my position doesnt have to lie

2006-03-12T18:06:00.000+07:00

You have to get to page11 of this thread before you reach that quote. It's one of the reasons that I like motorcycles and motorcyclists.

For the last time

2006-03-11T01:30:00.000+07:00

Some of you may already know what I think about memes. Some of you, quite clearly, do not. Be that as it may, because she asked so nicely and because I could never resist an intelligent woman who likes boxing and pours drinks for a living, I have decided to descend from my lofty perch and give JenJen's meme a whirl.
25 Questions:
1. Grab the book nearest to you, turn to page 18 and find line 4

OK, did it. Wanna know what it says?

2. Stretch your left arm out as far as you can, what do you find?

That it hurts when you put your left arm through a wall.

3. What is the last thing you watched on TV?

Dunno, the news I think. Also, shouldn't that question read ' What was the last thing you watched on TV?'? Mixing tenses, tut.

4. Without looking, guess what the time is.

5. Now look at the clock, what is the actual time?

5.36a.m.

6. Witht the exception of the computer, what can you hear?

The airconditioner, some crappy JJJ 'satire' called Space Ghost.

7. When did you last step outside? What were you doing?

Do I get to skip a question? Doubling up makes it 26. Anyway, it was about half an hour ago to check on a battery I've got on the charger for the GPS base station.

8. Before you started this survey, what did you look at?

TSSH

9. What are you wearing?

Firstly, let me say that I am surprised that it didn't occur to me until question #9 to copy and paste these questions rather than type them in manually. Anyway, I'm wearing whatever you want me to baby, and I'm hot. Or work clothes. Pick one.

10. Did you dream last night?

Probably.

11. When did you last laugh?

I never laugh. I have no sense of joie de vivre, however you spell that.

12. What is on the walls of the room you are in?

Paint, dust, prints, photos.

13. Seen anything weird lately?

Yes.

14. What do you think of this quiz?

Read the opening sentence of this post. Click the link.

15. What is the last film you saw?

Quite Ugly One Morning.

16. If you turned into a multi-millionaire overnight, what would you buy?

Two hours of Halle Berry's time. No talking allowed.

17. Tell me something about you that I don’t know.

I was investigated over the Russell Street bombing.

18. If you could change one thing about the world, regardless of guilt and politics, what would you do?

Ban memes.

19. Do you like to dance?

I dance like an epileptic duck. It's fun sometimes.

20. George Bush

Kate Michael

21. Imagine your first child is a girl, what do you call her?

Home. Every night by 6p.m.

22. Imagine your first child is a boy, what would you call him?

Bob. Or Tom. Or Bill. Anything normal and spelt correctly.

23. Would you ever consider living abroad?

Absolutely.

24. What would you want God to say to you when you reach the pearly gates?

I told you I existed.

25. 4 people who must also do this theme in their journal.

Firstly, it's a meme, not a theme. The inclusion of the word 'journal' is a worry, too. I'm not inflicting it on anybody.

I knew three camels who were smarter than Randy

2006-03-04T06:23:00.000+07:00

Inspired by these posts of og's, I thought that I would regale you with a couple of stories about electric fences. They don't involve urination, although I have done it and it isn't pleasant.

I knew a bloke in New South Wales who, for reasons best known to himself, decided that he wanted a few pet camels. For reasons best known to the teutons, this was considered newsworthy and an item was broadcast on German telly about it. Must have been a slow news day. The paddock he kept the camels in had a couple of plum trees in it. As you would no doubt be aware, camels like plums. A lot. The amateur cameleer put a hot wire around the trees, fed from a twelve volt battery. Electic fences emit a small audible click from the energiser when the fence 'pulses'. Most people put a little solar powered trickle charger on the battery. I don't know why the cameleer didn't. Every now and then the cameleer would forget to charge the battery. After a while, the camels worked this out and would walk up to the fence with their heads cocked sideways, listening for the click. No click = no more plums.

I also knew a bloke north of Dalby who had a female dog. When she came on heat he put her in with the chooks to prevent teen pregnancies. Another bloke on the same property had a male dog. His yard wasn't fenced but he had on of those 'virtual fences'. This is a set of little radio beacons that are placed on the perimeter of the area in which you wish to confine the animal. The dog wears a collar with a battery powered receiver in it. As the dog approaches the perimeter it starts to get a tingle from the collar which increases in intensity as the dog gets closer to his limit. This worked well until the bitch came into season. The male dog, like males everywhere, would follow his dick off a cliff and began sniffing around the chook run, despite the collar. Much perplexment ensued from all concerned. The virtual fence and collar were checked - both were working just fine, thanks for asking. Then the owner of the dog saw him escape. He (the dog) backed right up under the eaves of the house and, ears down, eyes closed and tail between his legs like he was about to be beaten, bolted blindly through the yard, yelping in pain as he crossed the threshold. After that it was ears up, eyes bright, tail erect and a gentle stroll over to his woman.

Negativity

2006-03-01T23:56:00.000+07:00

As anybody who has wasted a few minutes reading this page in the past would know, I am without a doubt the world's most positive individual*. However, even someone as relentlessly affirmative such as myself feels the need to get in touch with reality now and again, so I'm going to vent on a few subjects. Bear with me if I've already covered these topics; take it as proof that not much distresses me.

Firstly, it has come to my attention that some people actually like Hip Hop, as opposed to just looking at the girls in the videos. Some of these fans are otherwise quite normal and some could even be considered to be intelligent. The more extreme devotees call Hip Hop "Music." I don't see the relationship myself. I've been told that there are some Hip Hop makers who don't write poetry which would get a 'please repeat' in Primary School and that there may, in fact, be others who are not misogynist wankers. Some of them have been known to go three full minutes without self-aggrandisement. They don't last long usually. The majority of the latter group are Australians and they are usually too busy telling me what a racist/ fascist/ non-uni student wanker I am to tell me how good they are - that's just assumed.

Speaking of talking about yourself, how sick am I of country singers telling me what a country boy/ girl they are? I don't care. Just do some more songs about your dog running off with your wife. And play the fiddle. There isn't enough fiddle these days. And Garth Brooks, if you're reading this, fuck off and die. Go and blow your tour bus up at a Big and Rich Concert or something. And take Lee Kernaghan (a.k.a. Garth Brooks-lite) with you.

Also, sheep. Sheep are a pain in the arse. Don't buy wool. Don't eat lamb/ hoggett/ mutton. Sheep are like having a stupid, retarded needy girlfriend who doesn't put out. Cattle can be left quite happily for months and won't complain. Sheep need shearing, crutching, lamb marking, dipping, drenching etc, etc. In wet areas, they even need pedicures. They won't look for water, you have to take them to it. Ditto feed. You have to read them a story and tuck them in or they won't sleep at night. Bastards. Eat more beef, you mob.

I feel better now.

* Unless of course you are talking about things like HIV or Herpes Simplex B, in which case I am not positive at all. Even a little bit. I hope.

New Post

2006-02-24T01:38:00.000+07:00

Many moons ago a farming couple of Irish extraction living just west of Sydney had a son named John. He had the traditional depression-era barefoot to school type upbringing, showed a few clues and, after serving in the army in World War Two, he became a chemist. Something of a restless soul, he plied his trade around the place for a bit before heading to Samoa to run a hospital dispensary for a while. This was pre-Fairstar o'course. On return to Australia he chucked in chemisting and became a builder's labourer (a job that you don't see advertised much anymore). At this stage he also started writing. He wrote about being a builder's labourer, about being a chemist in Samoa, about life in the doghouse when your missus gives you the heave-ho, about a stray cat that he found, about opal mining, professional fishing, all sorts of things.
Not likely to appear on any list of great world literature, his books were nevertheless very enjoyable, humorous and usually capable of engaging the reader. His first two books were written under the psuedonym of Nino Culotta, and were presented as the experiences of an Italian immigrant in the fifties.
In the second book, calles 'Cop This Lot', Culotta goes back to Italy to visit his family and takes a couple of Australian friends with him. One of his friends is talking to Signor Guareschi, who is a friend of Culotta senior and also a communist. They are talking about Culotta senior, who is the village patriarch. When asked how he can be friends with such a man, Guareschi replies "Is bad system. Is many a good man, but is bad system."
I tend to feel the same way. I am not any more likely to be friends with anybody because they share the same interests or beliefs that I do. In fact such people tend to shit me off because they are likely to pretend to agree with me even when they don't, just to maintain the appearance of unity.
Which is a particularly long-winded way of saying that I like Tony Abbott. OK, so he's an idealogically driven conservative, which is scary, at least as scary as an idealogically driven liberal. I prefer to be a pragmatic 'whatever works in this situation' type of person. OK, so he's a Catholic, who expresses no doubts about the primitive superstitions and bizarre rituals. But he's got class.

Work

2006-02-15T01:57:00.000+07:00

OK, so I'm a little busy, so this will be fairly short. Shit, I've wasted time typing that already. Oops, did it again. Anyway, some of you may remember that talked Da Boss into taking a gamble and planting a couple of paddocks into moisture on the off chance that we may get enough water to irrigate them. Well, two (count 'em, two!) days before we either had to plough them in or pay the licence fee for using the genetic material, we got news from Sunwater that we would be able to pump 800megs out of the river, starting in a week. In an average year, this would be just enough to water the extra paddocks. In an ordinary year. Unfortunately this season has been hotter than (Insert unobtainable object of desire here), which means that we'll probably be one water short. Still a profitable gamble, though. And who get's the credit for it? Da Boss, of course. Oh well.

In other work related stuff, we must have set something of a local record the other day when three neighbours and I pulled down and cleared away 1.3k's of fenceline and erected a brandspanker in its place - before lunch. Pretty good, huh? Impressed? I was.

Remember the widdle baa lambs? They've gone, but the ewes remain, being supplementary fed.

It's been so dry around here that Da Boss has been shopping around for a lease block in adjoining districts so that he can de-stock this place altogether and use the lease block for feedlot backgrounding.

Speaking of the feedlot, guess what I have to do this morning? Give up? Ok. I have to go up and draft off a couple of steers who have swollen dicks, give them each a few injections and..., here comes the good part..., rub some ointment on the swollen parts.

And you thought that city folks have all the fun.

Apparently, the Sepps played a game of footy today

2006-02-06T18:13:00.000+07:00

Miami, Jan. 21, 1979 -- Hollywood Henderson says Terry Bradshaw would have trouble spelling Terry Bradshaw if he was spotted the C and the T.
Is that or is that not the single best opening line to a sports article. Ever. Cheers to Scott Chaffin for the link.

Who united all those nations? It'll take me hours to get them untangled

2006-02-04T00:24:00.000+07:00

As an act of public benefaction and to dispel any unwarranted prejudice against persons of different ethnic origin to yourself, I have decided to publish the results of my decades-long research into a comparison of the various nationalities of the world and how persons from each nationality rate as employees. This study, although incomplete, as are all studies into this subject, is detailed and flawless in its findings. I know that it will be of benefit to you.

Kiwis: Drink a lot. Smoke more dope than Bob Marley. Usually happy, competent workers. Indigenous Kiwis can all play guitar. Bar none.
Poms: Drink a lot. Smoke more dope than Bob Marley. If somebody else pays for it. Good workers, although Northerners are to be preferred over Southerners, who are usually slow, if persistent, plodders. Contrary to popular myth, don't whinge much, although when they start...
Paddies: Drink a lot, even when compared to other nations who Drink A Lot. Boisterous. Smoke more dope than Bob Marley. Sometimes they pay for it. Eat a lot of spuds. Seriously. Hard workers, usually highly skilled, can be confrontational.
Jocks: Drink a lot. Not as prone to smoking dope. Contrary to popular mythology, usually generous. Keen on a blue. Sometimes need a poke with a sharp object to get going.
Dais: Drink a lot. That's all.
Frogs: Don't drink so much. There is a generational change in Frogs; they start off fairly easygoing (and lazy) but end up hardworking and arrogant. Must be all that pastry.
Krauts: Medium drinkers. Plodders at work. Resentful of instruction.
Dagos: Plonkos. (Very) Hard workers. Given to work-place politics. Don't turn your back.
Nips: Never observed drinking, therefore; DO NOT TRUST. Given to feigning a lack of English when comprehension would mean hard work. Do not employ.
Chinks: Drinking level variable. Genial, hardworking, suited to repetitive tasks.
Canucks: Pretensions to serious drinking. Whinge a lot, especially about being mistaken for Sepps. Good workers for all that.
Sepps: Ambitious drinkers. Don't seem to need external sources of income. Only employed example in the study came from Texas. His name was Tom. In a display of that dry, ironic humour that we Australians are justifiably famous for, we called him Texas Tom. Nicest bloke I ever met, except me and you (If we've met). Worked like a Trojan and drank like me. Laughed all day. If he wasn't ugly and a bloke, I would've married him.
Serbs/Croats (help me out with a colloquialism here): World class drinkers. Blokes are good, if unimaginative workers who need to be supervised. Women don't need supervision.
Romanians: Drink a lot. Are all female. Are all stunners. Not a moral between the lot of them. When I retire, I'm going to live in Romania. And die happy. They are good workers, too.
Somalis: Non-drinkers and therefore untrustworthy. If you have Somali workers, take a stick with you. You can line them up with it to see if they are moving.
Philipinos: Novice drinkers. Are all female. Almost all stunners. Inconveniently high level of moral vigour. Very happy people. Good workers. Four stars.
Fuzzy-wuzzies: Drink a lot. Happy, except sometimes when they drink a lot. Good, if eraatic, workers.
Polynesians (Pick an island, any island): Drink a lot. Smoke more dope than Bob and Rita Marley. Work like three mere mortals. Editors choice (bro).
South Americans: Only one example lives in captivity; a Brazilian female of about thirty footy seasons. Drinks moderately, copulates to the point of exhaustion - has a rest and does it again. On this basis, recommended for employment even if you don't have any work that needs doing.
Israelis: Minimalist drinkers. Severley lacking in the humour department. Very good workers.
Other middle easterners: Non drinkers, which seems to make them cranky. Good, if moody, workers.
Scandinavians: Drinking level extremely variable. Absurdly good skin - would make excellent wallets if you run out of work. Women prone to wearing not much - recommended.
Russians/ex Soviet republics: Don't exist.
Oi Oi Oi: Drink a lot. Exceptional workers. Women are all beautiful, men all have large penises (penii?) Witty and urbane, an ornament to any workplace, but beware, because of their genetic superiority it will not take them long to supplant your place in the company if they so choose.

Never let it be said that I'm not doing my bit for internationasl relations.

tell us about the turkey, Joe.

2006-02-01T23:30:00.000+07:00

A lot of trendy inner urban types consider people in The Bush™ to be a collective noun of big sooky boys, always whinging about how tough life is and how valiantly they have to struggle to overcome a lack of services and so on and so forth. A lot of people in The Bush™ think that trendy inner urban types are a collective noun of smartarse over-educated under-experienced oxygen thieves who would have been better off being shot into a sock. They're both right. I'll start on the Urban Collective:

I had a problem with my internet connection. A dialogue box came up telling me that the satellite dish had probably shifted because the signal strength had dropped. Then it changed its mind and decided that the signal strength was ok after all, but the transmitter doodah wasn't talking to the network control doodah. I got up on the roof and could find nothing wrong, so I consulted the call centre experts in Mumbai or wherever it is (I've had to call them five times in nearly three years and each time it's been an Indian. The call centre must be over there somewhere. ) He sorted it out for me. It's his job, he's trained to do it. I'm not trained to do it, so I didn't try to tell him how I thought that it should be done. Yet most trendy inner urban types who wouldn't have spent more than a week in total on farms, most of which would be at B'n'Bs, don't hesitate to tell rural people how their particular business should be operated, how their sector of the industry has incorrectly positioned itself and how the industry as a whole should really be scrapped anyway, because the [...] industry just isn't feasible long term in this country. Without having a lick of experience, knowledge, understanding or empathy.

Then they will tell you that rural people are leaches, draining away their precious tax dollars in subsides and handouts, conveniently overlooking the facts that;

a) Australia has the lowest level of farm subsidies (both direct and indirect) in the developed world, and

b) Rural people pay the exact same percentage of tax in return for only a fraction of the services.

Which leads me to rural whingers. I've lived in a lot more isolated places than this, but I will use my present home as an example. It is 145ks to the nearest casualty room. It is the same distance to the nearest secondary school. It is nearly 500ks to an obstetrician. There is no garbage collection. No FTA television unless you invest in a satellite dish. Same for Broadband internet, and then it's slower than ADSL. Urban people pay for water to cover the cost of infrastructure. Rural people pay for water and provide and maintain the infrastructure.

You know what? I don't care. If you don't like it here, move. It isn't difficult. There is no law or moral compulsion that forces you to live where you do, or to make the rest of the community shell out for urban conveniences in a rural setting. Stop putting your hand out every time that circumstances change. Of course, all of this could apply equally to Aboriginal people who choose to live on tribal lands.

But anyway, on to the thing that inspired this little rant. For the last few days, there's been an old 4wd Toyota come chugging through here at about 5.30 in the morning and chugging back at about 7 at night. After some deft detective work (a.k.a. asking the boss) I found out that it's one of the neighbour's kids. They live a couple of properties over and the kid drives through them and leaves his ute in the bush at one of our gates. He gets a lift from there into Dirranbandi. In Dirran he catches a bus to school in St. George. The process is reversed at night. Makes for abot a fifteen hour day just going to school. If I were his Dad and I couldn't afford boarding school and the hostel in St. Geoarge was full, or closed, I'd be getting a job a bit closer to town. I know one thing, if I was the kid I'd be fairly pissed off if I got home from school and Mum wanted me to do the dishes or mow the lawn.

Post Secret

2006-02-01T03:20:00.000+07:00

I read Post Secret most weeks. Quiet a lot of the postcards are fairly obviously contrived, but it remains a rich cultural experience. Sometimes, though, it's more than that; sometimes it get's you where you live.

Invasion Day

2006-01-26T15:28:00.000+07:00

I first heard the term Invasion Day when I was living in Alice Springs in the late eighties and early nineties. I don't know if the place has changed since I was there, but in those days the people of Alice Springs would celebrate pretty much anything by drinking more than is recommended by the health authorities. This would usually be augmented with some half-arsed effort at providing a legitimate excuse for the gathering; such as a street parade, 'novelty' sporting event or a concert of some description. Indeed, most of the alleged concerts were better left undescribed. For some reason, there were also Philipino fast food stalls at every event.

More relevantly, at one Australia Day march/ concert/ novelty sporting event I was confronted by one of those professional aborigines who are so lacking in any other marketable skills that they have to eke out a living as victims of the evil white overlords. He started batting on about Invasion Day. I had never heard the term before, so I asked him what he was talking about.

He became most vociferous about the White Invasion of the sovereign Aboriginal nation and genocide etc., etc. He stopped when I started laughing. Became quite indignant, he did. When he asked me what I was laughing about, I said "Let's get this straight - you want me to feel guilty about being on the winning team? I don't think so."

I don't have any ill will towards Aboriginal people, nor do I doubt that there were a great many injustices perpetrated against them. You know what?

I. Don't. Care. Stop blaming all your woes on me and my particular demographic cohort. The battle has been won. The responsibility for your condition is now yours - and yours alone. How many Vietnamese refugees from the seventies and early eighties suffered loss and trauma greater than you (or I) could possibly imagine and arrived here to find themselves in the same sort of circumstances as you find yourselves in - and then built themselves a new life? Quietly and industriously and without begging for handouts or blaming Da Man.

While I'm setting myself up to be accused of being a white supremacist/ racist by all those who would preach the orthodoxy, let's address a couple more issues: until the 1960s, there was no Aboriginal nation. Or rather, there was a shitload of them. Some of them got on with some of the others, some of them didn't. Even when I was in the Alice, the Warlpiri people didn't like the Arrernte and vice versa. Nobody liked the Pintupi. There exists evidence to suggest that there were councils involving leaders of a great many different tribes and language groups. Some activists have suggested that this 'proves' that there was unity among Aboriginal people. To which I say "Iran and Israel both have seats at the UN."

Nor have I seen any evidence which would convince me that there was a genocide. Vast numbers of Aboriginal people were killed. This happens in invasions. Europeans had better equipment, better communications and were better organised. Therefore they were better at killing Aboriginal people than Aboriginal people were at killing them. In the majority of cases, when hostilities with the ousted occupants ceased, so did any killing. There were never any "Indian Wars" type campaigns waged against Aboriginal people. Not because of any moral superiority, more because of economic inability. We couldn't afford it. Nor - because of the lack of warmaking abilities of the Aboriginal people - did we need to. We could move them into the low rent districts with far less resistance and bloodshed. I make no judgement as to whether this was fair, just or even inevitable. But it happened.

So today, when I saw another professional Aboriginal at an Invasion Day rally on the news burn an Australian flag, I said "If you ever do that shit around me, you had better have something more to defend yourself with than a bottle of metho and a cigarette lighter, you cunt."

Why don't old blokes (or shielas) ever read the sports news?

2006-01-24T00:06:00.000+07:00

I like sports. As long as I don't have to participate, that's too hard. Time was that you couldn't stop me from competing in pretty much any sport - as long as it was a contact sport. These days I get knocked up looking for the remote, but I'm still prepared to put in and do the hard yards to flick over from the proper footy to the league, or vice versa if the boys aren't up to the level of conflict required. I am more than somewhat slightly perturbed, however, by the way that the word 'sport' has been bandied about without regard to it's heritage. 'Prostituted' is a term that could could be applied to the way that 'sport' has been degraded.
I'll illustrate my line of reasoning with a few examples:
Running is a sport.
Walking is not a sport.
Wrestling is a sport. (NOT pro-wrestling)
Gymnastics is not a sport.
Weightlifting is a sport.
Poker is not a sport.
Tennis is a sport.
Motorsport is not a sport - despite the name.
To qualify as a sport, an activity must fulfill three criteria:
It must involve an above average degree of physical prowess - which fucks poker, but allows that skinny Japanese guy who keeps winning hotdog eating competions to stand next to Cathy Freeman and The Don.
Success is measured statistically, i.e., faster, heavier, more goals. Bye bye gymnasts.
Success is dependant primarily on the abilities of the participant. The quality of their equipment should not significantly alter the outcome of the competition. Sorry revheads. Although I have had the argument mounted against me that motorsport, despite the accolades awarded to people like Schumacher and Jeff Gordon (The Federer of NASCAR; how can somebody so talented be so boring?) motorsport is, in fact, a team eandeavour and the quality of the equipment is due the effort of the team. To which I say "Fuck off you first year philosophy student."
Which is not to denigrate any participants in poker tournaments, gymnastic umm..., competitions or motorsport types. Just stop calling yourself sportsmen. Especially if you're a chick. That's just wrong.
Above all, a competition should not be decided by a judge arbitrarily deciding whether or not you are sticking to 'form'. Hence, freestyle swimming is a sport, the form strokes aren't. Imagine what would happen if you tried to take away Marice Green's gold medal because he was holding his arms at the wrong angle.
Of course there is one glaring ommission to this, which is cricket.
15º? What a wank. You take the most blatant cheat in the history of the game down to the lab and prove that he is capable of playing within the rules which were modified to allow him to remain in breach of the original rules ('coz we don't want to discriminate, do we, you white supremacist?) What that has to do with what happened three months earlier, in an actual match is beyond me. It's kind of like getting Mike Tyson to punch out a bunch of interns and then saying he is just misunderstood because the whole time he was beating up nerds he didn't once rape anybody. Fuck, he didn't even bite them. It reduces the fine sport of cricket to a mere pastime. As does all the other technological bullshit. No third umpire, no video replays and especially no hawkeye. There are two umpires out there; support them, I defy anybody to show me an obviously biassed official. You got a bad call? Wear it. They even out.

And now I'm just going to stop.

They say that if you are attacked in New York you should yell "Fire" because that is the only distress call that New Yorkers pay attention to

2006-01-23T01:51:00.000+07:00

Well, it's that time of year again, I guess. Bushfires are happening all over the place. I've been caught in a few fairly fierce fires frighteningly frequently before without having to resort to alliteration to escape them and it's never fun. I'm a bit worried about the Moondarra fire, in particular. It wouldn't be very difficult for a blaze to become practically unstoppable in that country; it's steep, with few access trails and plenty of fuel. I guess it does have whatever they ended up calling that Thompson River Dam (Bluerock?) for those water dumping thingummies. Bugger's probably empty.

Which has nothing to do with the scariest fire I was in-

I was working at the time for a chappie who was (and still is) one of Australia's largest private landholders and one of the two blokes who vie each year for the biggest acreage of wheat. He grew 96,000 acres the year I was working for him. As well as about 5,000,000 acres of cattle country and 20- or 30,000 acres of cotton. He's got a few other odds and ends, too, like a transport company, a soft-drink company and apparently he has a slice of the Star City Casino, too. Although that last one might be a non-urban myth. Tight as a fishes arsehole, he is. Nice bloke, though. One of those old fashioned 'salt of the earth' types. For a fella who makes it into the whatever magazine it is 'top several richest people in God's Country' list every year, he's still just a bloke from Coonabarabran.

I wouldn't piss on his kids if they were on fire, though. Arseholes, every one of them. One of his sons was running the place I was working on. I was driving the fuel truck - an old petrol powered four wheel drive Acco army truck with a couple of 1800 litre tanks on the back. I used to shift 90,000 litres of fuel a week with this old clunker - keeping thirteen headers, about a dozen tractors and a few pumpsites full. As well as this, I was spending fifty to sixty hours a week with a great bloke getting his (the wheat tycoon's) workshop going and all his old pieces of shit operational.

Because it was a petrol powered truck, I used to fuel the headers up at the side of the paddock - wheat stubble burns fairly well.

The Son decided that was taking too long and told me to drive out into the paddock to fuel them up. This worked well for a few days - every time I came out of the paddock I would clear all the stubble from around the exhaust and all was right with the world.

Until it wasn't. I was filling a header one afternoon and saw smoke coming from under the cab of the truck. I ran over, opened the cab door, but the flames were already roof height. I ran back to the header and got old mate driving it to bugger off. He'd only gone about 100 metres when the tanks caught fire. No expolosion, but the filler caps blew off and flames shot about sixty metres in the air (they saw the smoke thirty kilometres away) Before long there was a crowd of people forming a perimeter and keeping the fire contained to the immediate area. Just when we were relaxing the petrol tank on the transfer pump caught fire. One last hurrah.

The next day, The Son blamed me for it. I reminded him that it was his idea to drive into the paddock. He told me that no, he he had in fact, told me to drive into (another) paddock. Which had the same variety of wheat in it.

The judge has called for the print to decide whether I quit or was sacked first.

I still like his dad.

I stole this

2006-01-21T13:23:00.000+07:00

Don't tell anybody, but I pinched this workplace relations related document from the Universal Motorcycle Riders Club*:

I, the Penis, hereby request a raise in salary for the following reasons:
1. I do physical labour.
2. I work at great depths.
3. I plunge head first into everything I do.
4. I do not get weekends or public holidays off.
5. I work in a damp environment.
6. I work in a dark area that has poor ventilation.
7. I work in high temperatures.

8. My work exposes me to diseases.

Dear Penis,

After assessing your request, and considering the arguments you have raised, the management denies your request for the following reasons:

1. You do not work 8 hours straight.

2. You WORK IN SHORT SPURTS AND fall asleep after EACH brief work period.

3. You do not always follow the orders of the management team.

4. You do not stay in your designated area, and are often seen visiting other locations.

5. You do not take initiative - you need to be pressured and stimulated in order to start working.

6. You leave the workplace rather messy at the end of your shift.

7. You dont always observe necessary safety regulations, such as wearing the correct protective clothing.

8. You will retire LONG before you are 65.

9. You are unable to work double shifts.

10. You sometimes leave your designated work area before you have completed the assigned task.

11. And if that were not all, you have constantly been seen entering and exiting the workplace carrying two suspicious-looking bags.

Sincerely,

The Management.

*It's an MSN group.

What do Neil Harvey and my father have in common?

2006-01-21T02:41:00.000+07:00

Not much, really. Firstly, a few pieces of seemingly unrelated family trivia.

My paternal great-grandmother was born in North Melbourne in the early 1870s. The only time in her entire life that she ever left the Melbourne metrpolitan area was when she took a train to Sydney to check out the family of my (prospective at that stage) grandfather. He was born in Redfern in 1894 and was a grocer by trade. I use the word 'trade' advisedly as in those days you had to serve an apprenticeship to become a grocer. He became a grocer because his family weren't all that well off and you didn't have to pay your master for the privilege of working for him like you did in the first year of being apprenticed to other tradies like carpenters and painters.

Not long after he was married my grandfather enlisted in the army and got the shit shot out of him in Europe. When he came back he had shell-shock. If he had been in WW2, Korea or Malaya, he would have had battle-fatigue. From Vietnam onwards they called it post-traumatic stress disorder, which is a much murkier phrase that requires some deciphering, but it has four times as many syllables and therefore imparts much greater authority to anybody using it.

Upon his return he established a small grocery business in the town of Warragul. He went bust during the depression and he moved the family to Donvale. At the time Donvale had eight (8) houses scattered through the apple orchards.

During this period he would, to use my father's phrase, get a bit snaky; which meant that Dad and his sisters would camp at a neighbour's for a night or two. Whilst at Donvale, my father was playing with one of his sisters on the roof of the chookshed, she pushed him and he slid off the roof. One of the roofing nails had worked its way out of the timber about an inch or two. This nail ripped the back of Dad's leg open from his ankle to his arse. Seventy years later the scar is still visible.

His Dad got a bit snaky and pulled the chook shed down.

Which marks the end of the preamble.

As I was driving the tractor the other day I was listening to the ABC and they had an interview with Neil Harvey. He was rabbiting on about playing cricket as a kid in the cobbled laneway behind his house and how the uneven surface caused the ball to leap about erratically off the pitch, which improved his reflexes and eye-hand co-ordination. The interview was cut short to broadcast a one day match between Queensland and the Sarfies. Which disappointed me. Neil's yarn reminded me of two things; firstly a time when some people stole all the paving from a laneway in Parkville and secondly and unexplainably, a trip to Undera speedway I made with Dad.

I was living in Edithvale at the time, about two blocks off the end of Edithvale Road. Dad picked me up and we headed up Edithvale Road, which turns into Springvale Road at some stage after it crosses the whatever it's called Freeway. Eventually, it crosses Mitcham Road in Donvale, which turns into Doncaster Road, which is the direction we were taking. We were approaching this intersection when Dad changed from the left lane (the one to be in to go the way we were headed) to the right lane. "I'll show you where I got that scar on my leg." he said.

At the Mitcham Road intersection (I think) there is another, smaller road going off at an angle to the right down a hill to a creek. It was lined with sixties era brickveneer delights - except for one block, which still had the twenties weatherboard jobbie on it. Next to this house was a pile of rusty tin. Dad started laughing uncontrollably. When he got his breath back he pointed at the pile of tin and said "That's the fucking chook shed."

Political genetics

2006-01-20T03:01:00.000+07:00

After reading Major Anya's lament on the imminent departure of Robert Hill, I thought that I had better do some research into the pervability, or lack thereof in the female side of Federal politics. You will note that I do not refer to anybody in negative terms; I do not wish to score cheap points by making disparaging remarks about the usual stock subjects for ridicule. For those of you with idealogical tendencies, I have arranged the photos according to political allegiance.
Here goes:

←Kate Ellis

Judi Moylan→

←Tanya Plibersek

Sussan Ley→

←Dana Wortley

Fiona Nash→

I think that if you were in the business of breeding show pollies, you'd be more likely to invest in red pups than in blue ones. Particularly Ms. Ellis. I'd cross the floor for her - should I happen to find myself on the other side. If I were an MP they'd have to give me castors on my chair, or a skateboard. However, as with most competitions of this sort, Best Of Breed only gets you into the final round of judging and quite often the Grand Champion will come from one of the exotics; one of those breeds which, while they look good, serve no practical purpose, such as the Deludocrats:

Natasha Stott Despoja is the only polly whose homepage has a gallery. She knows what her best asset is. I am somewhat surprised to note how tanned she is - that isn't orthodox PC at all.

Meet the help

2006-01-19T02:03:00.000+07:00

You may remember that just before christmas I spent a few days lamb-marking. In what seems to be a trend emanating from urban centres and the Jerry Springer show, quite a lot of the ewes are very poor mothers. Indeed, some of them desert their young altogether, which means that they are farmed out to uncaring, exploitative foster parents such as myself. In this photo, for instance, you will see part of my vast army of underage gardeners hard at work keeping my lawn manicured and my trees trimmed. The one on the left appears to be somewhat recalcitrant. He should be working, not looking at the camera. Anybody know how to make mint sauce?
I don't keep all of my charges slaving away under the hot sun. Oh no no no no. I keep some of them slaving away over a hot boiler. Here you see Lulu about to bring out another load of washing. Chubby little thing, isn't she? I may have to cut back on her rations. And water the lawn a little bit more often.

And if that doesn't make you go "Aaaah." then may I present, in the tradition of bumfights, laydeeez annd gemmen, iiit's..., kittenwars !!!!

Multi skilled

2006-01-17T17:38:00.000+07:00

How clever am I?
Tonight, at the same time, I:
Cooked marinated pork steaks (remember these guys?)
Had a MSN conversation with Hooch
Downloaded some software called 'Recover My Files' (Kudos to Hooch's friend Pete who put me onto it)
Failed to recover the accidentally deleted Hotmail type email I tried to recover
Watched Sri Lanka beat the Yarpies
Marveled at the stupendous number of files I managed to recover, including several blogs I don't recall ever reading
Watered my lawn.

The upshot of all this is;
if you are the dude who sent me the email regarding the satirical newsletter - wanna give it another crack?
Huh?
Puhh-lease?

It is the will of Allah, or some shit like that

2006-01-16T03:41:00.000+07:00

In a day of action which totally demonstrated that Islam is an enlightened religion and totally not a collection of primitve superstitions, the other day in Saudi Arabia three hundred and something pilgrims on the Hajj got spread out like Vegemite as they were piffen yonnies* at three pillars which represent the Devil. Or something.

Some of these pilgrims are Doctors, scientists and chemical engineers - and they do this shit. Matter of fact, it s apparently compulsory. Dickheads.

Not that I would be throwing too many stones if I were a Catholic - ritual deicide, anybody? Lie, cheat and steal all week and go to heaven anyway 'cause you said "sorry." to God. But you don't even get to play until some kiddie fiddler in a dress sticks your head in a bucket of water.

I am so going to start a cult.

*That's 'chucking rocks' for those of you not familiar with the northern suburbs of Melbourne

Heath Ledger who?

2006-01-14T09:52:00.000+07:00

There's a movie doing the rounds at the moment called Brokeback Mountain. You couldn't get me into a cinema to watch this turkey at the point of a gun. Not only is it based on a story by Annie Proulx who inflicted 'The Shipping News' on an unsuspecting world, but the screenplay is by Larry 'Lonesome Dove' McMurtry.
Be that as it may, I don't really understand why people are getting all het up about it. Apparently the movie is about a couple of bum-punching cow-punchers. So now it isn't going to be shown in Rockhampton or Townsville. Rocky, just like people who are called Rocky, is a primitive organism with a fifties outlook on life. It is also the beef capital of Australia. However, as far as I know, it does not have all that many ringers or stockmen within its environs. Not that it would make much difference if it did; the boys would be down at Lee Kernaghan's pub riding bulls or at the Criterion chasing skirt and probably wouldn't even notice the movie drift by.

Townsville is even more baffling. I like Townsville. In fact, I wouldn't mind living in Townsville. Dunno 'bout the humidity in summer, be alright if you were near the beach I expect. Anyway, I would have thought that a thriving university/tourist town would have been sophistimicated enough to put up with a couple of gay cowboys. Apparently not.

Personally, I suspect that the scrapping of Townsville and Rocky, along with similar ocurrences in the You Ess, eh, to be nothing more than publicity stunts by the distributors, much like the EMS crews stationed outside movie houses screening 'The Exorcist' in the seventies.

And I'm always right. Even when I'm wrong.

I didn't do it

2006-01-10T16:03:00.000+07:00

I didn't do this.

But I know who did.

The word "Oops." seems appropriate.

I don't normally do quizzes...,

2006-01-08T14:31:00.000+07:00

But this time its personal.

Get Your Drunk Personality at LiquidGeneration.com!
Update: These quizzes are addictive. Apparently I'm also a Canadian-baiting Uber-American.

I should put something here about Paris Hilton's beaver, but I won't

2006-01-08T14:13:00.000+07:00

Nobody is completely evil. Even scrawny super-skank and 'star' of low grade porn Paris Hilton has some redeeming features. Like this, for eggs ample.
The enemy of my enemy...

A bit of a breeze

2006-01-06T05:37:00.000+07:00

First up a disclaimer; I got up at 4:30am yesterday and started work at 5:30am. I finished work at about eight o'clock this morning, which adds up to a fairly scattered redneck, so this little piece of prose - while it will still have an innate elegance and charm - may be somewhat jerky in its narrative flow.
I heard a lady on the steam powered wireless in the tractor (the Case bloke came and put new stereos in the new tractors during the week, still no mp3 players, but) this morning piss and moan about some wind storm she had the other night. She don't know shit. None of yers know shit.
Hurricane Katrina? Pfft. A gentle zephyr on an autmn afternoon compared to some of the stiff breezes I've seen.*
I recall one time in 1998 when I was zipping about the farm on a quad bike, irrigating (I'm quite a zippy chap) when I spotted a bit of a dust storm coming, so I went and hid in a convenient machinery shed. There was a row of tractors lined up outside the machinery shed; two of them got roofing iron through the windscreens, although I didn't find that out until later, visibility was down to about three metres. The other bloke who I was irrigating with got caught out on a head-ditch and had to hide behind a diesel engine on an irrigation pump. His bike got blown into the channel.
Another time, on the same farm, myself and a couple of other chappies were having a bit of a Sunday afternoon dip in the pool near the single men's quarters. We all had our lunchbox eskies with us with a few beers in them and were just floating about, looking at the interesting cloud formations. It just occurred to us to wonder why the two cloud formations were travelling in opposite directions when they bumped into each other. As soon as they touched, it began to hail golf ball sized chunks at us, coupled with an instant dose of 125kph+ winds. The pool was a hundred metres from the nearest solid building, no way were we going to run that far, so it was stay in the pool and use our esky lids as helmets. One of the blokes,who was a ~~sheep fucker~~ ~~merino molester~~ ~~South Sea Pom~~ Kiwi, thought that he would hide behind the shed that the pool pump and chlorine, etc. was kept in. Worked, too; until the shed blew away. The storm only lasted a few minutes, but it took weeks to clear all the mess away. One of the demountable units in the single men's quarters had blown over onto its roof; nobody in it at the time, fortunately. Two houses had extensive roof damage, another lost the entire roof from the top of the walls up. Another house, whilst not itself damaged, was moved about an inch and a half on its stumps. The verandah of the farm office was blown off. We found most of it a week later, about seven k's away on the other side of the storage. Speaking of the storage, the wind had whipped up some pretty good waves in there. The tops of the storage wall are normally thick enough that two standard sized four wheel drives can pass each other comfortably. After the storm you couldn't ride a quad bike around the far side of cell two (capacity:10,000,000,000 litres, or roughly every olympic swimming pool in Australasia***).
If you want proof that God exists - and drinks beer - here it is. All up there was several hundred thousand dollars damage (don't know what it cost, atcherly), two injuries requiring medical attention and no broken stubbies.

*The very first double entendre I ever understood was in an Alvin Purple movie I saw at the pitchers when I was about eleven. It was a very hot day (in the movie, dickhead) and Alvin was in a little store in a little country town. The store was operated by Abigail, a.k.a. the worlds least sexy sex symbol, who was complaining about the duration of the heatwave. As country store propietors are wont to do, she bent over in a very sort miniskirt to get something from the lowest shelf, exposing her ample buttocks through a pair of see-through knickers. As she did this she said "I haven't had a stiff breeze through here in months." Snerk, snerk.
** Toenote to the footnote. One scene in the movie caused great debate amongst the predominantly pubescent mail audience. Some actress whose name escapes me stood up from behind a desk to reveal that she had - wait for it - TRIMMED HER PUBES!!!!!! We couldn't believe that such depravity existed. Mind you, we were quite pleased that it did.
***I made the pool thing up, but it sounds about right.

Just a short note

2006-01-02T06:25:00.000+07:00

to let anybody know that has emailed me in the last month or so that for reasons which I don't understand I can't access one of my email accounts. It was the one in the sidebar, so I've changed that link to a new address, which is connected to one of those MSN messesnger things. I don't know why.
If you've emailed me in December to let me know of a vast fortune that I've inherited, then send it again to the new address, otherwise chill, baby, chill.

Go again

2006-01-02T06:05:00.000+07:00

Well, well, well.
Q. How many wells does it take to make a river?
A. One, if it's big enough.
So life is going along merrily when my computer starts to become unreliable. In fact my computer becomes downright uncooperative. I will go so far as to say that my computer ceases to function at all. I try talking nicely to my computer and it refuses to commence operating once more. I use language against my computer that will cause me to remonstrate most severely with a person who uses such language against me and my computer gives me plenty of chill. I will go so far as to say that if my computer is a doll, it will be such a Judy as is apt to serve me up large quantities of the back of her neck.
Now I am not in a thriving metropolis. I am not close to a thriving metropolis. In fact it is quite some distance to a town that even bustles, and maybe further. Therefore, it takes me some time before I am able to remedy the situation. I visit several stores which are purveying computing devices and they do not cause me to become optimistic about the health of my computer. In fact, they tell me that it will cost a large quantity of potatoes to even tell me what is wrong with my computer, and probably more. This is not the kind of scratch that I like to flutter with. I do the figures and get the Iranian guy at the computer purveyors to construct a fresh machine for me instead. This means that I have lost all the data which is on my computer as of course I never back anything up because these things do not happen to me. Naturally this means that HIV sufferers will have to wait a bit longer for a cure as I am repeating a lot of my research, to say nothing of the common cold, which really is quite common.
Contrary to rumours, I have not gone MIA, in fact I am not in the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area for several years, although if there are new women there, I will be on the next bus to Griffith.
One thing I am doing in the computerless era is re-reading Damon Runyon. Can you tell?

I don't gotta tell you nuthin'

2005-12-05T03:03:00.000+07:00

Yeah well, so I didden post for a while. Wotcha gonna do about it, punk? I had more important stuff to do, a'ight? I hadda waste some Ballas, bust up some drug rings, shoot it out wit da Russian mafia and get maself some bling. And when I wasn't playing San Andreas, I hadda work. Many hours a day - or night, as the case may be.
Rumours of my demise have been greatly exaggerated, as Mark Twain once said. Mark Twain was a smartarse and everybody who quotes a smartarse is a sad sack incapable of independent thought.
Except me. I'm pretty clever, so it was obviously an ironic comment on the poor state of punditry available on the web when I quoted Twain (who you'll remember is a smartarse), not indicative of a paucity of intellect at all.

For those of you who are members of the e-generation and therefore have a phobia concerning large blocks of text owing to the fact that all of you combined would have the attention span of a retarded fish ( the Barcoo Grunter is doing fine, incidentally, thanks for asking. At least you would have asked if you'd remembered that s/he existed, which you didn't because you have the attention span of a retarded fish (the Barcoo Grunter is doing fine, incidentally, thanks for asking. At least you would have asked if you'd remembered that s/he existed, which you didn't because you have the attention span of a retarded fish. ( The Barcoo Grunter is doing Help! Help! I'm trapped inside a pointless joke and I can't find a way out! Anyhoo, because most kiddies today can't read stuff that don't got pitchas in it, here's some illustrative graphic type things. Photographs, we used to call them:
This first little gem is of the flash red tractor with the less flash blue set of offsets hooked on behind; if you look hard enough you will see that I am correct when I say this. The offsets are a type of plough, although I heard the guy who played Rimmer on Red Dwarf describe them as harrows on the telly the other day. Depends how you're using them, I guess. We were on the borderline between the two, but I'm going to err on the side of 'plough' for three very good reasons: First, we were working the ground a little too much to call it harrowing (Actually, harrowing isn't, really. Harrowing, that is. It's quite pleasant, to be honest with you.). Second, we had a prickle chain on the back of the offsets, which was doing the harrowing. Third, ploughing is a much more masculine thing for a Rough, Tough Outback Bloke™ to do.

For those of you who are still here and even a little bit interested, a prickle chain is comprised of the same sort of links as most bracelets, neckchains, etc; except that, instead of being butted into one another, the ends of the individual links overlap, extending past the main part of the link to form barbs - or prickles. It's a fair bit bigger than most bracelets as well, although some of those kiddies in Redfern...
Look at the wear on the clevis of that ram. Nevermind.

At this time of year, nightshift finishes about an hour after sunrise. This is good, because you can see the horizon start to brighten up from about four a.m. It also means that you can do your servicing in daylight, instead of by torchlight with its attendant critters. Of course, you get bigger critters in daylight, such as these emus (enlarge the photo, there's a mob in the background) who came to watch me replace a bearing.
This is a better photo of the mob for two reasons: You can see the emus more clearly and because of my exceptional photographic skill I managed to give this picture the visual quality of a still excerpt from a 1950-ish outback documentary. These fellas all got to about ten or fifteen metres away and were just hangin' around when I had to start the tractor to work the hydraulics. I didn't know emus could fly.

After you have given yourself some nice crumbly dirt to play with using the offsets, you drag a grader board all over it. As the name would imply, a grader board works in much the same way as a normal grader. The main difference is size; the blade on the average grader is roughly four to five metres wide, this one is thirteen metres wide. It's a bugger of a design though, because you can't change the angle of aggression on the blade, meaning that you can't tilt the blade forwards or backwards to change the way that you work the dirt. Good enough for wheat paddocks, though.

Once this was finished, it was back to the cotton to cultivate the only paddock that we have water for, then start cultivating the fallow country.

Remember the sheep? They've all dropped their lambs (clumsy buggers) so we've also spent a few early mornings (4.30a.m. starts) lamb marking.
As you can tell from this picture, which I took this morning from my back yard, they use rings here. These are rubber bands placed around the base of the tail and scrotum which restrict the blood flow, so that eventually the tail and testicles just fall off. Painlessly, apparently, although I can't help feeling that the males especially would have a sort of empty feeling inside.

Anyway, enough of this nonsense; it's my day off and I have lazing about to do.

I am a machine

2005-11-16T04:41:00.000+07:00

A bloody good one, too. I started night shift last night. We've got the offsets hooked up and we're working up a lot of the newer dryland country so that we can put a grader board across it to fill in some melon holes and just generally smooth it out a bit. The last time we sprayed that country it nearly killed the poor old boomspray bouncing up and down; it'll make it easier on the headers, too. Because my boss is such a slave driving arsehole*, he made me work a few hours yesterday morning setting up the machine and giving the Young Bloke a few pointers on the efficient operation of same. That is, if by 'made me' you mean 'didn't argue when I volunteered'.
So I didn't put my head down until about 11a.m., then the power went off at about 2p.m., meaning the electrickery powered air coldifying device ceased operations in support of the IR reform protests. In 35° heat. I woke up. I then proceeded to not go back to sleep when the sparks started flying again at 3p.m. On top of this (no, I'm not whinging, I'm just giving you the relevant information so that you can independantly arrive at the conclusion that I am indeed a machine.) I followed my usual pre-nightshift practise the previous night and sat up drinking beer and talking shit on the telling bone until around midnight.
From the available data you should be able to deduce the precise amount of sleep I was able to sock away prior to night shift last night.
3/5 of 5/8.
For persons not familiar with the imperial system that works out to roughly fuck all in metric.
Did that slow me down?
Do I really need to answer that? I already told you that I was a machine and I'm hardly likely to write a post highlighting how piss-weak I am, now am I?
I soldiered on through the bleak and stormy night and covered heaps of ground. More than heaps. Big mobs of acres. Even stuck to the Thruster Code of Ethics and left the machine in better condition than I found it, adjusting a few things here and there. I do feel a tad weary at the present moment in time, going forwards in a proactive manner.
Never let it be said that sleep is impossible on nightshift. Once you've managed to convince your body that the new routine is going to be a routine, sleep comes just as naturally twelve hours later. Indeedy, I prefer nightshift to dayshift in the summer. I'd much rather be crawling over a broken machine by torchlight in the cool of the night than slogging it out in 40° heat with 2,349,725,845,711,047 flies in the middle of the day.
As an aside, one brief nightshift story:
Several years ago, when I had not been working in the cotton industry all that long, I got work on a corporate farm Like a lot of cotton farms, it started life as a sheep station and still had the old shearers quarters. It was a bloody good setup, but most of the other blokes there were kids and therefore, by definition, pigs. I don't like living in my own mess, let alone anyone else's, so I bought a caravan and set it up next to the quarters so I could use the shower and toilet. Like a lot of farms out this way, it had a gravel pit on it and, like most corporate farms, a lot of time and money was spent on maintaining the network of roads on the farm. I was working nightshift on irrigation when a couple scrapers turned up with a laser bucket to put a couple of new roads in and do some maintenance on the existing ones. I had no idea where they were going to put the new roads. I found out where at least one of them was going when I got up to get ready for work.
When I went to bed, my caravan was on the side of an empty grass paddock. When I woke up, there was a completely finished gravel road through the paddock which passed within twenty-five metres of my van, complete with a driveway for me.
I slept through the whole thing.

*No, he isn't. That's known as ironic satire - or 'bullshit'.

Extrapolation on #19 in the post previous to the previous post

2005-11-14T15:33:00.000+07:00

BOGAN ALERT!!!
Do not read further if excessive interest in internal combustion engines offends.

"What is a Maltese Ferrari" asked Rat. Oh, to be so young and innocent.
A Maltese Ferrari is, of course, a Valiant Charger. These days they'd probably be known as a Lebanese Lamborghini. Extraordinary motor vee hickles. 14.1 second quarter miles,140m.ph. top speeds (from a six cylinder engine - 318, 340 and 360c.i. V8's were available, but the 265 powered E38's and E49's were quicker) amazing (for the day) handling and the most amazing induction roar from the triple Weber 48mm DCOE carburettors; all wrapped up in an Italian designed body in a project overseen by a ridgy didge racing driver, who was possibly known as Leo Geoghan. I'm old, so any of those figures may be wrong - except the e.t. for the quarter; I'd bet my left nut on that. I only use the right one these days, anyway.
Of course, being Australian Chryslers, the Chargers had their share of problems due to poor build quality and cost cutting - the Bathurst homologation E38 had a three speed gearbox, f'rinstance.
My own particular Charger was a bomb yard special; a 1972, '73, '74, '75 model, arriving in my possession for the princely sum of $900 as an emergency transportation measure after some ~~father sucking, anal object inserting, goat molesting piece of shit~~ misunderstood victim of society had relieved me of the effort of maintaing my show-quality Falcon coupe. I spent about two years of my life building that coupe. The Charger was more fun to drive.
Especially after I fucked with it a bit and got around 350 hp out of it. Total cost of the whole thing was about three thousand dollars - excluding replacement clutches. The running gear on the Falcon cost many times that.
I killed it in the end- a bit of brain fade, too fast into a corner on a dirt road, backwards over the bank, give it the berries in an attempt to drive it back up onto the road just like I saw Colin Bond do on 'This Is Your Life', attempt is working when the front guard hits a white post and flips the car over backwards down a thirty foot bank - through a clump of gum trees; one of which still has, to the best of my knowledge, scars on it eighteen feet from the base. I went out through the windscreen and the old girl tucked me in as she rolled over the top of me. The next car down the road was my sister-in-law, who meandered down the bank to see if I was o.k. I was unconscious and doing a pretty good impersonation of a claret fountain with my head. She got a bit upset, but not nearly as disturbed as she was when the the next car along stopped and the driver came down, looked at her, looked at me and started to steal the stereo out my car. Roaring Days, I believe ol' Henry called them.
P.S. I pinched the pitcher from The Chrysler Owners Club. I hope their lawyers aren't very good.

Extrapolation an #10 in the previous post

2005-11-14T01:49:00.000+07:00

Back in the days before I realised that New Years Eve should be retitled Loser's Night Out, a group of mates and I decided to go down to Lakes Entrance for the big night; and to catch up with an old mate whose family had moved down that way in High School years. As we were all young and stupid, we had a great night full of drunken debauchery.
Our schoolfriend managed to disappear whilst scuba diving the day before we got there, but we didn't find that out until later and we were young and callous anyway. We got a broken windscreen on the way home and then it started pouring with rain, but a mate had his scuba gear in the back, so I put on his mask, snorkel thingy and hood and soldiered on. The animated collection of zits at the McDonalds drive-thru didn't blink an eye.
Two or three years later I was living with the Catholic Girl and she wanted to do something - far away from her family - for New Years. Lakes seemed like a good idea at the time. We rocked down there and the first people we ran into was a small outlaw bike club (whose clubhouse was in Champ Street, Coburg, across the road from the entrance to Pentridge prison.). I'd met a couple of members before, neither of whom were there, but when I asked about them, they adopted me like a long lost son. We escaped their clutches an hour or two later (the prospects were giving me the shits) and wandered from pub to pub. I don't know if they still do it, but in those days they used to block the Esplanade off at either end with cop cars and just let people stagger about aimlessly. For some reason somebody decided to write something on the back of my shirt. Somebody else saw it and decided to write something, too. It pretty much snowballed after that and before long I had autographs pretty much everywhere.
One girl asked if she could put her name on me. I said yes, she asked where she could sign, I told her anywhere that she could find room, she got down on her knees and wrote The Lord's Prayer on my penis*. Funnily enough, GF didn't mind that at all. We kept wandering about and wandered too far; right into the clutches of the coppers who were stationed at the end of the Esplanade to prevent people from wandering too far. One of the coppers was a woman, don't remember much about her, except that she looked like she was Italian. She grabbed me like I was a murder suspect, pushed onto the bonnet of the car, threw a leg over me to hold me down and stuck her tongue so far down my throat that I thought I was growing a tail, while checking whether or not I was circumcised and that my undies weren't too tight.
Judging by the way that the other copper was laughing when she climbed off and pushed me away, I'd say it was a bet or a joke. GF got pretty steamed about it, I enjoyed it, though.
*Actually, it was just her first name. In very small letter.