It snot good

I am a ball of green snot, cloaked in flesh.

That kind of precludes any pedal time this week, since my lung capacity is about 50% of normal. I am seriously considering attaching a straw to a squeezy bottle full of water, sticking the straw up each nostril and thence attempting to clean out the cavities betwixt my ear'oles.

I've always found the best cure for immovable mucous is a quick dip in an ocean full of pounding waves. Nothing like getting dumped whilst body surfing to ram a few litres of ice cold salt water up the snoz. That generally does the trick. You know it's working when fish start surfacing around you to eat the balls of snot that are drifting around in pools of goo that make the Exxon Valdez look like the aftermath of sneezing whilst topping up the engine oil.

The problem is that it takes 2-3 days for the testes to descend after a swim at this time of year.

Flying Monkeys

An interesting Monkey photograph, this time featuring Monkey, flying between beds in the cheapest hotel in the Southern Highlands. Our room was so cheap, it featured 30 year old decor and 30 year old beds. Our family of five put up with it for two nights because, well, it was cheap, and we intended to spend very little time actually occupying this room.


It was so small that the beds were not very far apart. Monkey spent the better part of an hour leaping from bed to bed to bed, and I spent some of that time trying to photograph him in mid-air. My digital camera is great for photographing many things, but not flying Monkeys. I fiddled with the manual setting mode, but could not get it to agree to take a photo at say 1/100th of a second or faster.

There is about 1 day in 365 that I pine for my old SLR camera, but even then, that's only for about 5 minutes on that one day of the year. The rest of the year, I put myself in the hands of very cunning Nipponese engineers.

If we were at home, Monkey would of course have been yelled at very loudly for jumping on the bed - since he has already broken one doing just that. It's amazing how attitudes change once you check into a hotel.

I have to say that bed jumping is marvelous exercise for young kids. Once he bombed out for his afternoon nap, we couldn't get him up. We almost had to resort to feeding him chocolate in his sleep in order to rouse him. We are such good parents......

Where the walls have shag pile carpet

We ventured into the Southern Highlands for the weekend to attend the wedding of a cousin on J's side. J's family are originally from Croatia, and they all have surnames lacking in vowels like Crvckckwvkc (pronounced 'vishafish') and cool first names like Drago. Half of them are also bonkers. The other half are even more bonkers. The fun part is working out whether the person you are talking to is half mad or three quarters mad.

They are great people - hard working, outgoing, self reliant, family oriented, church going and all that sort of stuff. To them, the idea of accepting a pension after a life of hard work is sponging off the government. They are also pretty insular, and some don't take kindly to an anglo interloper like me - but they sure know how to put on a wedding. If I didn't have the kids to look after, I would have been unconscious under the table before the main course arrived.

We stayed in the world's cheapest hotel, which laughably called itself a "country club". When I hear the words "country club", it brings up visions of manicured golf courses, black servants in tuxedos, G&T's in comfortable chairs in the pavilion and people riding around on horses going "hi-yup!"

I never pictured pink walls, brown carpet from the 1970's on both the floor and the walls, and beds that offered less support than Obama offered the Iranian protesters. I swear I slept on a hammock two nights in a row.


Ooo baby, that wood panelling really does it for me. And the one plastic chair for the room.


The shower cubicle was minuscule. The Southern Highlands get a lot colder than where we are down on the Sydney plain, so having a shower first thing in the morning could be murder. There was no heater in the bathroom, and the walls were ice cold. Bending down to pick up a shampoo bottle from the floor meant contact first with the back wall, then every other freezing tiled surface as one bounced around, yelping as tender skin stuck to ceramics here, there and everywhere. My sleep was interrupted by the occasional marauding pack of bikers roaring past, or drunken yahoos rampaging through the car park.

The last lot turned out to be our cousins, starting a vodka frenzy.

The food at the wedding turned out to be pretty shocking. It was held in a civic centre, and J described it as "Council food", which was exactly right. I had gristly, lumpy, overcooked lamb on a bed of the most horribly dried and abused roasted potatoes, surrounded by carrots doused with too much sugar. After 8 years of boarding school food, a year of university college food and seven years of Army food, I can eat just about anything, anywhere at any time. This was a meal that I ate less than half of. It was that bad.

Then again, you don't go to weddings for the food. Or the coffee. I was able to stand my spoon in this cup of coffee. Drinking it was like indulging in a thinly watered down mud face pack.


When the desserts came out, J pointed at them and went, "Oh look, genuine Croatian pastries". I sampled the pastry tray, and came back with a lamington. Since when has a lamington been a "genuine Croatian pastry"?

The kids were given a bowl of ice cream, and the kitchen managed to bugger that up as well. It had been frozen, thawed, frozen, thawed, frozen and thawed until the initially cheap-as-dirt icecream was a mass of sand-like crystals. Monkey loves icecream. He will drag chairs into the kitchen and pile them on top of each other to reach the freezer in order to get to the icecream, and I have seen him using every implement in the kitchen to pry the lid off the container. He can eat icecream at every meal. This morning, he wanted boiled eggs with icecream for breakfast.

But he wouldn't eat this stuff. He pushed it this way and that and then shoved it away. Even I couldn't eat it.


He then did the most insane thing ever. He zoomed off to a table nearby, and started sticking his finger into the dessert of another guest. When I caught up with him, there was a woman sitting there going, "You'll have to stop him doing that, Steve will go nuts if he comes back and finds his food tampered with".

Steve turned out to be this guy, and his brother is only slightly smaller, and was sitting next to him. They're both lovely blokes, great to have a yarn with. Although I am sure he weighs more than 120kg - more like 140kg.

J's sister has two boys in their early teens, and they are in awe of the ultimate wrestlers. They spent half the night trying to work up the courage to go and talk to them. J's sister is about 5 1/2 feet tall, and J, her sister and the two enormous cousins were all very close when they were young. J's sister finally managed to convince the boys to come and meet their heroes, and the eldest asked if he could show them some moves. Instead, he said, "Nah, I'll show your mum some moves so she can keep you two in line." At that, the two of them turned white. The idea of their mum body slamming them out of bed in the morning in order to get them to school was too much to take. I was hoping one of them would pick one of the boys up by the ankle and, dangling him upside down from one enormous paw, question him as to whether he was treating his mother with respect. They're those sort of blokes.

The wedding by the way was fantastic. The groom cried (I am used to them fainting), the bride and groom got up and sang at the reception (and they can both hold a tune), the mother of the groom did a tune as well and even the priest got up and belted out "Crazy little thing called love". The speeches were a treat and actually worth listening to, the kids behaved themselves (to a degree) and the people at our table were nice and talkative.

The older kids confined their foodfight to just their three tables and no drunken fights broke out. I only saw one person chundering, and that was a five year old that had taken onboard too much cake and lemonade. The teenagers didn't get drunk or sneak out the back for a fag or a pash. No one crashed their car on the way home. None of the adults sleazed onto someone else's partner and disappeared for a quick shag. Nothing was smashed, no fires were set, the Police stayed away. No one took all their clothes off on the dance floor, and no one passed out on the toilet or under a table.

Considering at least a few of those things, if not all of them, have occurred at some of the weddings I have attended, in short, it was all quite amazing.

The canary in the housing market

From our anecdotal observations in just this area, the top end of the housing market has gone very soft. We've been thinking of moving, mainly because this place is falling down around our ears, and J has been keeping a close eye on local rental properties for some time.

The magic point in the market in this area seems to be around $650 per week for a 3 bedroom home. If you ask more than that, chances are no one will nibble, let alone bite. J has been watching asking prices drop from $750 and $700 a week by $50 to $80. And that's just in one week. Those properties at the top end - costing a grand or more - are advertised week after week after week.

However, if the price is $650 or lower, the place disappears from the market faster than a cow trying to cross a pirahna infested river.

I wonder if people are downsizing from the top end of the market - abandoning the $1200 apartment with the water views and settling for a $650 house that is a few blocks back from the harbour? Is that a sign that the froth has definitely left the economy?

Everything you ever wanted to know about homelessness

Thanks to two articles in the Silly today (two for the price of none!), I now know a lot more about how homelessness is defined in Australia.

As they used to say on Twin Peaks, "The owls are not what they seem".

The articles in the Silly pointed me at this report from the 2006 census. I doubt you want to wade through 95 pages of tables and text, so let me try and summarise some pertinent ideas for you.

For starters, you need to understand how "homelessness" is defined.

Primary homelessness describes the situation of all people without conventional accommodation, such as people living on the streets, sleeping in parks, squatting in derelict buildings, living in improvised dwellings (such as sheds, garages or cabins), and using cars or railway carriages for temporary shelter.

OK, I can understand that. I've seen a number of them in my time. Most of them were drunk, getting drunk, or sleeping off being drunk.

Secondary homelessness describes the situation of people who move frequently from one form of temporary shelter to another. On census night, all people staying in emergency or transitional accommodation provided under the Supported Accommodation Assistance Program (SAAP) are considered part of this category. Secondary homelessness also includes people residing temporarily with other households because they have no accommodation of their own, and people staying in boarding houses on a short-term basis, operationally defined as 12 weeks or less.

Hmm, been there, done that. What I did not expect to find is that someone who has been in a boarding house for months is classified as homeless. The way I have always envisaged the homeless is those that do not have a fixed roof over their heads - ie, rough sleepers. This is getting interesting.

Tertiary homelessness describes the situation of people who live in boarding houses on a medium to long-term basis, operationally defined as 13 weeks or longer. Residents of private boarding houses are homeless because their accommodation does not have the characteristics identified in the minimum community standard (Chamberlain and MacKenzie 1992): they do not have a separate bedroom and living room; they do not have kitchen and bathroom facilities of their own; their accommodation is not self-contained; and they do not have security of tenure provided by a lease.

I bolded that bit about the "minimum community standard", because that tickled my fancy. Essentially, if you wanted to, you could continually increase the number of homeless by fiddling with that standard. In a decade from now, the way McMansions are being built, the minimum standard may be that if you don't have a separate media room for your 50 inch plasma TV, then you are defined as homeless. Similarly, you could halve the homeless rate overnight by simply saying that living somewhere with a shared bathroom is no longer defined as tertiary homelessness.

I notice that not having a separate bedroom and living room counts as tertiary homelessness. When I was in my 20's, I knew quite a few singles that lived in bedsits in Kings Cross. Some were international flight attendants, who did not spend much time at home, others were professionals and so on. Does owning your own bedsit in the Cross (as they all did) suddenly make you homeless?

Now comes some stats:

• Boarding houses - 7626 persons, 28% of total
• SAAP accommodation - 5110 persons, 19%
• Friends and relatives - 10,923 persons, 40%
• Sleeping rough - 3715 persons, 13%

Total of 27,374 in NSW, or 104,676 across Australia.

If you ask me, if you have a place to stay for the night, then you are not homeless. If you have shelter from the elements, so that you can stay dry if it rains, and you have access to lighting and heat and water, then you are not homeless. Dossing in a public park with no tent and no fire obviously equates to a fairly miserable situation - but not one that I am unacquainted with, having spent months sleeping like that out bush during my time in the Reserves.

There was many a warm night when I could not be bothered raising my hootchie, and I slept in my clothes wrapped in a large garbage bag - I didn't take a sleeping bag at times to avoid the extra weight and bulk in my pack.

You tend to stink after a while - clothes impregnated with days and nights of stale sweat take on an odour not quickly forgotten - but I also know from experience that after a day, you no longer smell yourself. You might stink to high heaven, but your nose simply ignores the experience.

My prejudies aside, it's worth remembering that of the 100,000 or so classified as "homeless", only 13% are sleeping rough, and even then they are probably moving in and out of hostels and shelters on a regular basis. Or, alternatively, you could say that the homeless statistics are inflated by a factor of 8 by those that have a vested interest in fluffing up the numbers - the "homeless-charity complex", to coin a phrase.

The survey divides each city up into regions and finds that:

It is usual to find a higher rate of homelessness in the inner suburbs of capital cities. This is the case in Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, Hobart and Brisbane. People often gravitate to the inner city, where services for homeless people have traditionally been located.

I bolded that last bit. I have to ask, why do is the highest density for services for the homeless located in areas that are the most expensive to do anything? Surely, if you have a set budget for homeless services, you want it to stretch as far as possible, so you setup shop where land is cheap - like anywhere but the CBD. Are the homeless gravitating to the CBD in order to tap into existing services, or are the services gravitating to the CBD to serve the homeless? It's a bit chicken and egg, isn't it?

Or are those services, such as charities, simply in or around the CBD because that is where they setup shop back in 1920, when the city was much smaller and there were slums in The Rocks and Redfern etc, and they've stayed there every since our of inertia?

Or, the CBD usually has the highest concentration of pubs, and some pretty manky pubs at that, who will serve anyone at any time. And if you get thrown out of one for weeing on the bar, it's a short stagger down the road to the next pub. Plus if you need a feed, there are plenty of fast food joints selling fat and salt topped off with plastic cheese - the perfect thing after chundering half digested port all over your shoes.

There are also lots of people in the CBD, so if you spend your days cadging money from pedestrians, you go where the density of pedestrians is highest. I doubt that there are a lot of homeless people in the CBD because of high rents or lack of accommodation - the homeless are there because it is a happy hunting ground. Booze, food and easy marks abound.

The report also includes new information on marginal caravan park dwellers and Indigenous homelessness.

We have a family member who is currently living out of the back of a van up in Queensland. Another member regularly takes to the road and lives out of their van. I would not class either as broke, or even poor. They have the potential to earn good money; they simply choose not to, preferring life on the road. A life without attachments and chattels, where they can "live in the moment". I will now have to tell them that the are homeless vagrants.

They also include living in shipping containers as homeless. My godfather, who was a state MP for decades, lived in a shipping container for months whilst his house was built. I am so going to enjoy telling him that he has been a homeless bum. I don't remember him complaining about it too much at the time.

Hell, my mum grew up in a hessian shack in the bush with a dirt floor. If I rang her tonight to tell her that she grew up officially homeless, she'd laugh her head off. They had a farm and food, they had clothes, they had a Model T ford and pots and pans and furniture and a bible and they went to church every Sunday. Although shoes were an issue - she didn't get her first pair until she started school at age 12, having been home schooled until that point. And sure, if it got a bit hot, her mother improved the ventilation in the kitchen by chopping a window in the hessian wall with a pair of scissors.

From that life of hardship, which was pretty typical of settlers in the wheatbelt back then, and was shared by my father in separate circumstances, they went on to great and important things. Growing up rough did nothing to hold them back. And whilst the housing was rough as guts at times, and they lacked refrigeration and electricity and telephones and so on, dad says that he never saw his father without a tie and hat. Ever. How many people in similar circumstances today would turn up every day for work in a suit? How many would even turn up for work?

It is common for homeless people to move from one form of temporary shelter to another. It is also common for homeless people to move both within and between states.

It costs money to move interstate, unless you hitch all the time. Is homelessness a result of poverty, or something else?

The minimum community standard is a small rental flat––with a bedroom, living room, kitchen, bathroom and an element of security of tenure––because that is the minimum that most people achieve in the private rental market. However, the minimum is significantly below the culturally desired option of an owner-occupied house.

....there are a number of institutional settings where people do not have the minimal level of accommodation identified by the community standard, but in cultural terms they are not considered part of the homeless population. They include, inter alia, people living in seminaries, elderly people in nursing homes, students in university halls of residence and prisoners.

Drat. I was going to say that this standard equates to the sort of accommodation I had at uni, and some of my student mates lived that way for 4 or 5 years, depending on the type of degree they were doing. I don't remember it ever doing any of them any harm - except perhaps to their livers. I don't understand why a uni student, who may be working part time and studying and so on, can live a "normal" existance in a university college, whilst a non-student in the same standard of accommodation is somehow seen as being terribly disadvantaged.

In some communities, local SAAP workers send homeless people to the local caravan park if there is no alternative accommodation available. Caravan parks may also house some people on a longer-term basis who are unable to re-enter the private rental market.

Shearers, fencing contractors, miners all live in caravans. My sister bought a Coaster bus from a shearer's cook, and the cook lived in it for years as she travelled from farm to station to farm. What's so bad about living in a caravan? A mate of mine, who has been a millionaire and lost it all a few times, and is now running his own multi-million dollar business again, spent a few years living in a caravan whilst he poured every cent he had into a business venture.

Living in a caravan should not preclude anyone from holding down a job, saving money and living a normal, albeit different, life. His caravan had a shower, hot water, a nice bed, a place to eat and a kitchen where simple but good meals could be prepared. What more do you need in order to live life?

Local informants talked about ‘makeshift cabins and metal sheds’ and people buying blocks of land, but being ‘unable to build a house because they could not find work’. There were few households with someone in full-time work and a household income of $1000 or more. The number of blockies was low.

Ah. Some people have scraped up enough money to buy a few acres of land, but are struggling to find the money to build a house on that land. Gee, how did it come to pass that someone sitting on say a $100,000 block of land, which they own outright, is considered homeless? Sure, they might be living in a tin shed on that block, but what is wrong with that? I helped build a house on a farm once, and the family moved in once the roof was on. No walls were put up until it started getting cold, and even then, the windows were made of clear plastic fertiliser bags. The floor was paving blocks loosely deposited on top of compacted sand. It was a great house for a family of four, who were also putting everything they had into getting a business up and running. If you ask me, your house does not dictate your circumstances.

The Australian Government’s White Paper on homelessness has proposed two ambitious goals: ‘to halve homelessness by 2020’ and to provide ‘supported accommodation to all rough sleepers who need it’, along with interim targets for 2013.

It's never going to happen. I will predict now what will happen. Some people who are currently renting privately, but who are on low incomes, will see a huge amount of new public housing being built. They will engineer their circumstances in order to take advantage of that new housing. They will reduce the amount of rent they pay by going on the public tit. Demand will outstrip supply, and the number of homeless will continue to grow.

I'll be interested to see what happens when all that new accommodation is built for rough sleepers - whether they will take it up. By 2013, can this mob guarantee that I will never have to step over a drunken bum and a huge puddle of piss to step into my office? I doubt it.

Since the White Paper, the government has announced a further $6.6 billion to be spent on the construction of 20 000 homes for public housing, the largest expansion of public housing for many years.

Will this induce more people to seek public housing, as it is cheaper than private housing? Why pay rent if the government will give you something for next to nothing?

It is known that some groups are particularly vulnerable to homelessness, such as young people who have been through the care and protection system

Let me get this straight - government fucks these kids up via the "care and protection" system, and then we think that the solution is for the government to get even more involved in their lives via the provision of housing?

Second, it is important to recognise that most people do not sleep rough on a permanent basis. .... only two per cent... was consistently without shelter, but 49 per cent of the sample had slept rough occasionally.

If that is the case, why do people make such a big deal out of it? Is sleeping under the stars from time to time the end of the world?

Most commonly, families become homeless because of a housing crisis or domestic violence. Adults in families experiencing a housing crisis are typically unemployed or outside of the labour force. These families are usually poor and often have accumulated debts. In most cases, the family is facing eviction because of rent arrears.

Looking after this group invites moral hazard. What is to stop an unscrupulous mob from renting a house privately, then refusing to pay rent over an extended period, using every wheeze to delay eviction, and then sponging off the state once they are evicted and suddenly "in crisis", running to Today Tonight with a sob story worth of tabloid television air time.

Some families become homeless as a result of family breakdown involving domestic violence. .... One form of early intervention is family counselling to help couples work through their relationship issues, and another form of intervention is to remove the perpetrator of violence from the family home.

If you ask me, if a bloke thumps a woman, it's lockup time for the bloke. I'm talking a few months in prison at least. I see no reason for a woman with kids to be out on the street after taking a bashing from a bloke - he should be behind bars, and that's it.

If the woman takes it that far though, the court should make an order that she is never to hook up with him again - possibly on pain of her being locked up. I am sick to death of these mental females that get their face punched in, then shack up with the bastard again and go through it time after time after time. One chance, that's it.

A significant proportion of the people with a long-term housing problem have substance abuse issues and/or mental health issues, which complicates their exit from homelessness

That presumably means that they have totally fried their brains on cheap plonk or drugs, and are essentially incapable of living a "normal" existence. I have a solution for them, and we used to call them looney bins. If someone is so far gone that they are pooing in their pants, then putting them in a nicely furnished apartment is not much of a solution. The sad fact is that they probably need to be put into a mental institution of some sort for the rest of their life. Those brain cells are not coming back.

Phew, I am exhausted after doing all that. time to open a bottle of metho and have a drink.

Multiculturalism at its finest

Funny how no one mentions multiculturalism when people from different ethnic groups start to kill each other in large numbers.

Few talk of brutality by their own side except to rationalise what went on. "We Han Chinese are organising to protect ourselves," says Chen. Uighurs only talk to me cautiously, out of fear of police reprisals and also of Uighur informants.

A quietly spoken woman in Shaanxi Lane confirms she saw out her window her fellow Uighurs slaughtering Chinese people. "But this does not mean they are animals," she says. "Do you know June 26?" - referring to the murder of at least two Uighur workers by Chinese mobs in Guangdong province.

Asked whether she saw Uighurs killed, she switches to English and answers in code. "Those women are Muslims," she says, nodding towards two women dressed in black with white headscarves. "Muslim women wear white scarves when they are in mourning."

A Chinese construction worker said he watched Uighurs slaughtering Chinese - "slicing their throats like lambs" - in Shaanxi Lane and then armed police killing Uighurs. Uighurs have claimed that "hundreds" of their own were massacred on Sunday night, but the facts are thin on the ground.

Can't we all just get along? Sing kum-ba-ya and all that?

Follow the logic

From Life at the Bottom, talking about poverty, health and life expectancy:

By no means can the poor not afford health or a nourishing diet; nor do they live in overcrowded houses lacking proper sanitation... or work 14 backbreaking hours in the foul air of mines or mills. Epidemiologists estimate that higher cigarette consumption among the poor accounts for half the difference in life expectancy between the richest and poorest classes in England - and to smoke that much takes money.

Notoriously, too the infant mortality rate is twice as high the lowest social class as in the highest. But the infant mortality rate of illegitimate births is twice that of legitimate ones, and the illegitimacy rate rises steeply as you descend the social scale. So the decline of marriage almost to the vanishing point in the lowest social class might well be responsible for most of its excess infant mortality. It is a way of life, not poverty per se, that kills.

He's talking about the UK, but he could of course be talking about the wretchedness and squalor of any number of Aboriginal communities, which seem to disgorge nothing but appalling health indicators, mindless violence, nihilistic behaviour and early death.

We know that Aboriginal life expectancy is poor, and that "something must be done". I wonder if smoking could also account for up to half the gap between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal life expectancy, and if so, what the government expects to do about it. Smoking seems to be amazingly prevalent in Aboriginal society - my brief encounters from time to time have found that almost everyone smokes from about the age of 10. Roll your own, unfiltered smokes seem to be the tar delivery mechanism of choice.

Smoking is of course a voluntary activity. I know that it is addictive to a degree, but I don't believe that it is as addictive as the nicotine-replacement industry likes to make out (being an ex-smoker myself). They have a vested interest in telling the smoker that it is not their fault that they smoke, that it is hard to quit, and that they need to spend lots of money on nicotine replacement patches in order to relinquish the filthy habit.

Again, the smoker is told that their "addiction" is not their fault. It is the fault of tobacco companies, luring them with irresistible advertising. It is the fault of their parents, who had the gall to smoke in the car with us when we were young. It's peer group pressure. It's always something else, and never the desire of the smoker to smoke because they enjoy the activity.

Anyway, who is going to be game to try and get between a blackfella and his smokes? Smoking in white society has been demonised to the point where smokers are seen as vaguely evil, worthy of punishment and morally decrepit. To be a smoker is a loser, and smoking in the wrong place at the wrong time can bring criminal charges. Smokers are the lowest of the low. They are bums, useless carbuncles on the backside of humanity, leeches who consume more than their fair share of health resources, weaklings who are unable to control their base cravings, knaves and fools for continuing to undertake an activity certain to hasten their demise, morally reprehensible for puffing away in the presence of children - an act almost likened to child abuse - financially stupid for being so idiotic as to fork out ever increasing amounts of cash for the cured leaf of an abominable plant.

Now, can we turn around and say that to blackfellas? Can a white man say that they are:

• morally decrepit
• a loser
• a criminal
• a bum, leech, carbuncle
• weak, useless and unable to exert any self control
• knaves, fools and financially irresponsible
• child abusers
  

You can say these things to a whitefella, but woe betide anyone who dares to even think about saying any one of these things to a blackfella. The racist tar brush will be applied in the blink of an eye.

Such pussyfooting around might explain why so many Aboriginals continue to smoke, and why there has yet to be an effective campaign to get them to cut back. So we continue to tip-toe around the truth, and in the meantime, lots more Aboriginals die young. The soft headed do-gooders of course insist that Aboriginal health can be fixed with more money, more nurses, more clinics, more doctors and so on, but the greatest gain will probably come from weaning them off the legal weed. And the extra money in their pockets could then be spent on useful things, like house maintenance, better food and so on - things that will produce further health improvements.

Good luck with that.

No rides for you

As if the lousy weather of late is bad enough, I had to go and contract a cold this week. It's been raining on and off for days - frequently enough to make any ride a wet one, if it went on for more than an hour. I've had a lot of couch time over the last few days, alternatively reading Theodore Dalrymple and sleeping.

Since I started reading Life at the Bottom, I've been having rather nasty little nightmares. I blame the lack of oxygen reaching my brain due to a bunged up windpipe, rather than the contents of that book. Still, it doesn't make for a good night's sleep.

When I woke up on Tuesday morning, I was quickly gripped by the worst coughing and hacking spasms that I have ever experienced in my entire life. I had a lump of snot stuck in the back of my throat, and it was refusing to budge. It seemed to be quite elastic, but firmly tethered at the far end - like the inside of a golf ball attached to a rubber band. I'd cough the thing up to the back of my tongue, but it would then refuse to detach and go any further, and that would make me retch and almost vomit. It was terrible. I gargled with cold water and warm water and even hot coffee, but nothing would tempt it to depart from its lair.

The best description that I can give of its consistency is that of half congealed blood. You know what blood is like when you get a really big clot of it, and it is no longer wet and liquid on the inside, but it has become a large, malleable ball of goo. That's what the snot was like.

I had to give up on my attempts to hack it out when one cough produced a lightning bolt of pain that went across both shoulders and straight up the back of my neck and into my head. I've never felt anything like it - it was like an electric current that zapped across and up with the utmost speed. I was sure a force 10 headache would have followed that, but all that came on was the usual cold and flu stuff - lethargy, difficulty in breathing and very, very loud snoring. Which is odd, as my vocal cords were so thickly coated in goo, I could hardly talk at times.

Ah well, back to the couch. And I've been too stupid to tape the Tour de France each night, so I don't even have that on disk to while away the time.

Act!onaid stupidity - international edition

I had a small rant at Act!onaid a few weeks ago. The top execs are very well paid, and if it was not for government grants, 93% of their income from donations would be soaked up by expenses.

Now we have an article from the UK Telegraph that lifts the lid on their ideology.

The more I see of some charities, the more I conclude that those running them and working for them are a bunch of power-tripping greedheads who have found a niche where they can wallow in guilt funded luxury and boss the little people of the world around. Apart from the Salvos and Vinnies, I am hard pressed to find any major charity that has not been taken over by management consultants who are more interested in a car space and a fat salary than trying to enable the less fortunate to lift themselves out of poverty and squalor.

Comments on all sorts of stuff

I'm glad I don't pay for newspapers anymore. I look at the online editions and rarely find more than 2 or 3 articles worth reading. How is it that I can pick up a 49 page copy of the Spectator and find something of interest in 80% of the articles, yet less than 1% of the SMH makes sense on any given day? I pay for the Spectator, and am happy to do so. I'm not sure if it is the mix of articles, or the viewpoints, or the superior writing and editing that attract me - all that I know is that if the SMH folded tomorrow, I would not mourn it for an instant.

Except as a source of stupidity.

The Law Reform Commission is stuffed full of ancient critters, and its mausoleum like corridors need to be invigorated with fresh blood, somewhat like giving a vampire a goblet of virgin's blood as an early evening pick-me-up. Instead of new people, how about just abolishing the commission? Do we really need a flood of new and reformed laws?

I like the way they do things in Alaska, where the legislature sits for 3 months and then packs up and goes home. I'd be happy for Parliament to only sit one year in two, and to allow the courts, police, business community and so on to digest the latest pile of waffle to emerge from the bowels of the bear pit.

I'm sure those working at the commission see their work as being vital to the well being of the state, but if they closed their doors for a decade, would the world really come to an end?

Personal screen savers and wallpapers have been banned from Sydney City Council computers - wow, that's big news. BFD*. Whilst I detest odious little control freaks like our Muppet Mayor, it has to be remembered that they are council computers, not personal computers. You want your own screensaver, pay for your own computer. It does suck though when IT decides to do something without telling its customers in advance. What is it about geeks and their inability to communicate with the outside world? We have all these technical gizmos - i-phones, Blackberries, Twatter, Faceplant and so on; all designed to improve personal interaction, and geeks still churn out change after change without informing a soul of their intentions.

Given that our schools are intent on churning out a generation of functional illiterates, how much worse is this going to be in future? I'm sure I'll go into the office next year to find a sticky note on my screen saying "ur keybrd sux. lol. Nu kybrod uner dsk. Cll Fizpig if prolbm."

Welcome to the new age of corporate communications.

I'm wondering what services our council are going to take the axe to this year, given that their request for a rate increase got kiboshed. I read in the local rag that our local Labor MP, Angela D'Moron, opposed the increase for some unknown reason. She's been running around the suburbs, white-anting the Labor Mayor and doing her best to stab him in the back - there is a long history of bad blood there. The local Labor councillors and party members, who mainly hate her guts (she was parachuted in by head office), are up in arms. Nothing like a bit of interminable warfare within the ranks to enliven one's day.

I don't see what her angle is. What's she going to say? "I made sure your council got no more money this year, so your roads, paths, verges, drainage pipes, parks, seawalls, libraries and so on are going to be even shittier at the end of this year than they are now - and that's all my own work. Old people will go unfed, dog shit will go uncollected, and childcare services will be cut back. Aren't I just fucking marvelous?"

Her moronic government is blowing $160 million of our cash on an unnecessary bridge just down the road from here, and that represents 3 years of total council expenditure. I had a flick through our council financial statements the other day, and we have a backlog of something like $49 million in maintenance.

You want to know why I own a 4WD? It's because our local roads are appalling goat tracks, liberally coated in the smashed spoilers of low riding sports cars that were unable to navigate the pot holes without leaving something behind. She saves a few peanuts at this end, but advocates flushing over a hundred million down the toilet at the other end. The thing is, we don't want the money spent on her stupid bridge, but we do want it spent on fixing up wonky foot paths and leaking drains and roads that would not look out of place in Helmand province, Afghanistan.

I guess she knows that since she's going to lose her seat at the next election, the only available job will be in local government, and maybe she is eyeing off the mayoral chains and cloak. It's pretty rare for an MP to step back into local government, but it has been done before.

If I was council, I'd dig up the street outside her office and then cite a "shortfall of cash" as their reason for being unable to fill in the six foot deep moat (preferably complete with punji stakes smeared with faeces at the bottom, and unfed piranha fish).

*Big Fricken Deal.

Confusing cause and effect?

Have a read of this article in the Silly - it's about locking up crims. Young crims.

Putting young offenders in custody is not only expensive but ineffective. More than half of those released reoffend. The younger they're incarcerated, the more likely their recidivism.

This implies that being locked up causes crims to commit more crime. I have an alternative idea - maybe magistrates are locking up those that they feel will commit more crime.

Consider two kids arrested on a Saturday night. One is in school, from a stable family, and has been picked up for being drunk and urinating on a car. He has no previous form, and his parents are horrified at the fact he has been arrested. Both parents work.

One is a teenager, but has rarely attended school for years. He is from an unstable home environment, with his mum shacking up with a new loser every 6 months. He's been picked up for break and enter for the 5th time. He has plenty of form, and has been committing crimes most weekends since he was 14. He already has a nasty drug and alcohol habit, even though he is too young to enter a pub. His mother does not give a fuck that he has been arrested, and screams at the cops for arresting her "innocent" little thug. She has never worked, and has been on welfare since dropping out of school at 15.

The loser in the second instance has never been locked up before, even though he is responsible for more crime than you can poke a stick at. The judge finally loses his patience, and locks the little bastard up. He gets out a month later - and goes back to committing crime. Is that a surprise? Did a spell of incarceration cause him to commit more crime, or is it the fact that he is a criminal through and through cause him to commit more crime? All a bit of gaol time has done is to prevent him from robbing people for a short period.

As for really young kids being incarcerated and being more likely to commit crime when they get out, maybe they are being locked up at a really young age because they are thorough-going little shits! Maybe the judge has realised that even though they are 13, they are already a hardened crim with no remorse, no morals, and no desire to go straight and live a "normal" life.

Nearly one in two juveniles in custody report some form of serious past abuse, including violence and neglect. Do we really think detaining a young person with that sort of background is an appropriate response to their problem?

Maybe these kids know all the right buttons to push, realising that if they can spin a good sob story, the beak might go soft on them. Even if the judge takes a hard line, some soft-headed goose in the media, or a charity, might start bleating about how badly they've been treated, how it is not their fault, etc etc etc.

It costs the NSW Government about $150,000 to lock up a young person for 12 months.

Why does it cost so much? Instead of saying, "It costs too much to lock them up", why don't we look at how we can lock them up really cheaply.

I have every sypathy for someone that has come from a poor background, and who genuinely wants to change their situation and to improve themselves and leave their crappy life of crime behind them. They deserve our encouragement and support. However, that is a change that they have to want to make themselves - it has to come from within. For those that show no genuine desire to change, I say we just lock them up as cheaply as possible and keep them locked up until they see the light, or get too old to climb in old lady's windows.

I don't conflate "youth" with "innocence", and I don't see why locking up habitual criminals who just happen to be young is thought of as a bad idea. I hear people say, "But they are missing the best part of their lives, it's cruel and unfair".

No, it is cruel and unfair on the rest of us to allow young predators out to prey on the law abiding and the weak. And is someone who is smoking dope all day and stealing cars at 15 really experiencing the "best part of their life"?

I say good luck to Mission Australia, and I hope they can turn some lives around. But they should not be so soft as to turn the other cheek every time. Those little turds that essentially spit in the eye of those that are trying to help them should be thrown straight into pokey, and left there for a long, long time.

Let me throw a slew of numbers at you

I enjoy reading the Dr Housing Bubble blog listed on my sidebar over on the right. I love the way the author slices and dices statistics to show just why he thinks housing markets in the US like California are doomed to be stuffed for years. Read a few articles to see what I mean.

I thought I'd have a crack at analysing housing in Five Wog.

How much to buy a $750,000 home in this suburb? That will get you a small, rundown 3 bedroom place in a rough part of this neighbourhood.

The banks these days are going 80/20 - 80% loan to 20% deposit, which means a deposit of $150,000. Gone are the days of the 100%+ mortgage. I hope.

That leaves us with a $600,000 mortgage over 25 years.

One of those online repayment calculators gives us a figure of $3771 repayment per month.

I've heard around the traps that banks want to cap repayments at 31% of pre-tax income, so how much do you need to earn to afford a mortgage of $3771 per month?

You need $12,164 per month, or $3041 per week.

Accoridng to the ABS 2006 Census, there are 3,073 households in Five Dock.

Of those, 302 earned over $3,000 per week. This was before the financial crisis, remember. At present, it is only those lucky 302 who could afford to bid on a $750,000 property, assuming the minimum $150,000 deposit. And assuming that they met all the usual documentation provisions.

A further 322 earned between $2,500 and $2,999. In the days of easy money, banks would have let these people have enough money to bid for a $750,000 house, even though someone on $2600 a week would be tipping 36% of their pre-tax income into their mortgage - even more if their deposit sucked.

A further 237 earned $2,000 to $2,499. Imagine earning $2200 per week and having to fund a $3771 mortgage, especially with kids. You'd be facing repayments of 43% of pre-tax income.

Some people in this last group of course were given mortgages of that size, and larger. I'm reliably told that there are quite a lot of people in this area who have not made a repayment in 6 to 9 months on their $800,000 mortgage. The banks are looking the other way, trying not to spark a panic by foreclosing on them and flooding the market with properties that just have to be sold. I'd assume that everyone in this group, if they have a mortgage like this, is fucked. They are financial zombies, waiting for the banks to turn off the life support.

Those in group 2 are probably not in great shape either. The bonuses that they depended on are gone, as is any hope of a good pay rise in the near future. Once Rudd gets over his panic and decides to pay back debt, it is this group that will cop it in the neck in terms of tax increases, which will further squeeze their available cash. Then there is unemployment - from what I have seen, companies have ruthlessly culled managers and executives in this pay band. The cafes are filled with morose looking middle aged men who have recieved a nice payout, but have not worked for 6 months, and have little hope of finding work in the next 6. Financial armageddon is just around the corner for them.

Those in group 3 should be sitting pretty - those earning over $3,000 per week; except that they are not sitting on an affordable $600,000 mortgage. If you are earning that much, why put up with living in a pokey dog box in the scungy end of Five Wog? These people are sitting on million dollare mortgages, which means a repayment of $6,285 per month. Ouch. You need an income of $5,000 per week to keep your repayments down to a manageable 31% of pre-tax income with a mortgage like that.

Now for the fun part.

2 years ago, you'd go to an auction for a $750,000 house and there would be bidders there from groups 1, 2 and 3. You had a pool of 861 households in this suburb who could afford to bid - 28% of all households in this area. You are talking a wall of money.

Now you'd be lucky to get 302 eligible households - 9.8% of households. What happens at auctions when 2/3 of the previous bidders are left out of the market?

Of course I am being silly by only limiting my search to households in this suburb, but I had to simplify things, or I'd be here all night.

The other fun thing is that I'd assume that most of these households are 1.5 or 2 income households. The mean taxable income for this area is $57,900.

What happens when the 0.5 of a job disappears, or one of those 2 jobs vanishes?

Me, I'm waiting for the banks to give up and start foreclosing in earnest. That's when things will get interesting.

F*&k me drunk

Three flats in one week. Clearly, something is askew in the heavens. I will have to read the entrails of a chicken by moonlight to divine what is amiss in the cosmos.

I was planning on riding yesterday, but that was kiboshed by J being sick. Before I could go today, I had to change the back tube, which was still flat from my ride home on Friday.

Changing a tube at home is easy on a sunny day. Find a picnic chair, gather ye tools and implements and settle if for a quick spot of tube off/tube on. My weapons of choice are a powerful stand-up pump, three tyre levers (one broken), a pair of latex gloves (to avoid the dreaded black finger) and a nifty tool for getting the last bit of tyre bead back over the rim when all is done. Oh, and a spare tube - either new or patched.


My latest disaster - the core of the valve blew out as I removed the pump several miles from home. It came out with such velocity, it would have done significant damage to any eyeballs in the vicinity. Never had this happen before.


My nifty, $25 bit of yellow plastic that is great for aged finger and thumbs. I use kevlar reinforced tyres, and they stretch in the same way that flak jackets stretch - hardly at all. The blokes that work in bike shops who change flats all day long have thumbs the width of my wrist - they flick tyres back on with seemingly little effort, whilst I strain enough to develop a hernia. I found this bit of plastic advertised in a magazine, and bought it over the internet.


One end hooks inside the bead of the tyre, and the other side rests on the rim. You simply lever the bead up and over the rim. Simple. Getting it off afterwards is not always that simple, as the hook bit gets trapped under the bead and is reluctant to depart.

After changing this tube, I forgot to put my road pump back on the bike. So of course I got a flat after going over some broken glass 15km from home. I swapped the tubes over, and then waited for another cyclist to go by. Most cyclists will stop and ask how you are if they see you with your bike upside down on the side of the road - it's like flying a flag upside down.

I had to wait about 15 minutes for someone to come past. I thought the path I was taking was well patronised - I always see other cyclists on it - but perhaps they were all in bed after staying up all night to watch the first leg of the Tour de France (I taped it). A very nice bloke of 62 pulled over and helped me out - he was riding into town where he was going to spend the afternoon assembling bikes in a bike shop. We rode together for 10 minutes or so and had a nice chat - he used to race when he was younger, and seemed to know every prominent cyclist in NSW personally.

It was a pleasure to drift along with him, although I had to leave him in the end as I was freezing. When I left, my bike thermometer read 23 degrees - beautiful weather - so I dressed light. Within 10 minutes, it was reading 17, and I was starting to feel nippy. I had to raise my flat cruising speed to 32-35 km/h to keep the blood flowing to my extremities. Even now, my toes are still chilled. He was tonking along at just over half that speed, and I could feel the icicles developing from the sweat that had previously been running down from my brow.

In a way, it's a good thing the flat cut my ride short - my legs were totally out of puff. The other day, they were zinging along with all turbos screaming. Today, the battery was utterly flat. No signal available. Out of service. It is so much nicer to be sitting inside a nice warm house - except that the bike needs a thorough degrease and clean.

Ah well, time to put the degreasing clobber on. Ciao.

A cracking read

I would not say that Theodore Dalrymyple's book, "Life at the Bottom: The Worldview that Makes the Underclass" is a can't put down book. But it is still a great read, although I can only digest a chapter at a time because the subject is a tough one to deal with. You can only take so many attempted suicides, beaten wives, hopelessness and depravity per day.

From what I've read so far, he makes it clear that the problems of the underclass are all about self control and self worth. Poverty - or lack of money - is clearly not an issue. He rips apart the fantasies and fads of modern psycho-babble and the "intellectuals" in a refreshingly straight forward manner.

I wish I could write like him.

New research?

The SMH announced today that:

Adele Horin
July 4, 2009

THE Howard government's family policies left a legacy of stressed, overworked parents and set gender equity back a decade, a new study shows.

A study by Lyn Craig and Killian Mullan, of the Social Policy Research Centre at the University of NSW, shows the ascendancy of the family model promoted by the former prime minister: a father in full-time work and a mother in part-time work, depicted in his speeches as "the policeman and the part-time sales assistant".

New study? Really? Would this be the same study mentioned back in December 2008 in The Age?

Mums still bear brunt of housework

Adele Horin
December 1, 2008

Dr Craig, with colleague Dr Killian Mullan, will present the findings at an international conference of time-use researchers, starting at the Wesley Conference Centre in Sydney today.

Adele Horin must be really into being green, since she seems to be rather good at recycling old articles.

Crikey, The Age used that December article twice as well - once in the Lifestyle section and once in Essential Baby. That's extra, extra recycling.

About the only difference between the latest article and the previous ones is that Doctors Craig and Mullan are no longer Doctors in the most recent incantation. They are plain old Lyn and Killian. Isn't it patronising and demeaning to strip women of their hard-earned titles like that?

I wonder what Barbara Boxer would make of that discourtesy?

Pizza - carbohydrate of the Gods

A pizza you will not find on the take away menu anytime soon - olive tapenade base topped with thinly sliced tomato and Parmesan cheese. Different, and delicious. The trick is to make a thin and crispy base, apply a thin smear of tapenade and drain the tomato slices for as long as possible to get the water out of them. Otherwise, as happened on the second attempt, they dump a gallon of water onto the pizza once it goes into the oven, and that is not good for crispiness.

Oh, and plop some aoli on top as well.


Tomato sauce - 8 tomatoes slow roasted in the oven for 3 hours after being sprinkled with sugar and salt, plus a huge thing of garlic, a wad of fresh oregano from the garden, a glug of balsamic vinegar and a bigger glug of olive oil. Whizzed up in the blendy thing. Good to eat as it is.


Too damned much tomato paste on this pizza. Normally, I make a perfect amount for 3 pizzas. However, tonight I made two pizzas with an olive tapenade base, and two with tomato. The first one got 1/4 of the tomato paste, because I forgot I was making two with tapenade. Instead of putting the tomato paste in the fridge, I put all of it on this pizza. Should have put half of it in the fridge - too much tomato sauce really is too much.


My soon-to-be-trademarked wrinkly pizza base. This is what happens when you roll the dough out about 50% larger than the pizza stone. Oops.


Caramelised garlic aoli, on pizza. Surprisingly good. You would not want to be riding behind me tomorrow morning.

I got no photos of the 4 cheese pizza. It all went before I could get a photo.

Tony Abbott - legend of liberty

Tony Abbott rightly branded the NSW government a "nanny state" this week for banning parents from smoking in a car with kids, and promptly copped some flak from one of the usual fake charities - Action on smoking and health.

The funny thing is this - I have trawled through the ASH website, and done several google searches, and can find no sign of an annual report for ASH. Interesting. I'd like to see exactly where their funding is coming from, where it is going, and what their top management is earning. ASH is supposedly partly funded by the Cancer Council, but a review of their latest annual report does not mention ASH in the Grants section of their financial statements on page 54. Hmm. Unless they are hiding it under the $4.1 million they spend on advocacy.

Working for a charity like the Cancer Council is not bad work. The top 7 managers took home $1.279 million between then, or an average of $182,000 each.

The Mad Monk was also criticised by a mob called "Democracy Watch - Australian for Political Funding Reform" - and if you read their web site, you get this:

Copyright Notice

Copyright © The Greens NSW 2004 - 2008. All rights reserved.

The Democracy4sale research project welcomes the use of data on this website by journalists, academics or anyone with an interest in political party donations.

We request that you credit either the Democracy4sale project or the Greens NSW.

In other words, he was attacked by a front group for the Greens. Why can't they just come out and say, "We are the Greens"?

Friday's ride

I could not blog about my ride yesterday - I was in bed by 7.30pm, passed out - stone cold dead from from exhaustion.

I knew it was going to be windy before I started, but not how windy. In my interlude from riding to work, I have not been riding on windy days. If I look out the window and the tree limbs are swaying too and fro, I go back to the couch. Therefore, I am totally out of shape for riding into the wind.

Getting to work was not too bad. It was chilly - a brisk 10 degrees when I suited up - but not evilly chilly. It's odd that I felt colder on the way home, when the bike thermometer was reading 20, than on the way to work. Then again, the thermometer seemed to wake up a kilometer into my ride and rapidly plunged to 17, then 15 degrees. That was more like it.

Except that I had believed the temperature as given by the thermometer to be correct, and had stuffed my jacket in my backpack, and gone with fingerless gloves rather than the full length gauntlets. My jersey was still damp with sweat from riding in that morning, and I was soon having trouble grasping the brake levers due to numb fingertips! I have been issued a locker at work, which will allow my wet gear to dry properly during the day, but have not been issued with a key.

The only way I know I have a locker is that I walked past them and saw that my name had been put on one of them. I have been told not to approach she-who-issues-the-locker-keys, as that is the best way to have my locker rights revoked. I have to wait until she feels that it is time to pay me a visit and hand over the key.

The problems really started when I hit the ANZAC bridge. The ANZAC bridge is fine to ride over when heading into the city - the bridge is reasonably steep, but from the Balmain side, you have this long, straight downhill run before it starts heading sharply upwards. Sensible riders go hell-for-leather on the downhill part and try and build as much speed and momentum as possible before tackling the rise. That sometimes means scooting between pedestrians at 50km/h on a confined path, which can be a bit hairy, but that generally gives them the idea that they should keep left, rather than filling the path from side to side.

The city side of the bridge is altogether different. Some wise engineer at the RTA came up with the idea of building a zig-zag approach for the bike path, so by the time you have ascended to the deck proper of the bridge, all momentum is gone. The zig zag path is also fairly steep - it's common to get stuck behind mountain bikes going zshh-zshh up the path in low-low gear, which equates to walking pace for most humans.

And when you get to the top of the zig zag, you find yourself facing the steepest part of the bridge. Somehow, that engineer with a wacky sense of humour managed to design a bike path that is most off-putting to beginner riders. Bike paths are supposed to be easy to use in order to encourage fat, unfit bastards to start using them. Building a path on one of the most heavily used routes into the city that has a degree of difficulty that would not be out of place on the Tour de France is not the best way to tempt first time riders to come back for a second attempt!

I don't mind it now of course - I usually come up the zig-zag a few gears up from low, and have the stamina to push up and over the steepest part at a reasonable clip. Thin, young wiry bastards occasionally go zipping past me, making me feel like a lumbering hippo trundling up the ascent, but in the main I find it an every day challenge to see if I can improve my time from the base of the zig-zag to the crest of the bridge.

Yesterday was different. As soon as I emerged from the zig-zag, which is in a wind shadow, I rode straight into a ferocious head wind. I was suddenly in low gear, pushing for all I was worth to get up to the crest. Every rotation of the cranks was an effort, and I didn't have the luxury of getting into a really, really low gear like mountain bikes do. I just had to grit my teeth and bear it, hoping that my spleen would not explode out of my side halfway up the hill. It was push-push-push-gasp, push-push-push all the way to the top. I even had to push on the downward slope, so nasty was the headwind. Normally, I coast down under brakes. This time, I had to pedal to keep moving!

Once I was over the top, the fun didn't stop. Apart from a nasty headwind, I was also being buffeted by strong gusty side winds. They were enough to push me sideways a bit every now and then, and I am not as light as a feather. I was giving everything a wide berth, worried that I'd be going around a pedestrian when I'd get bumped sideways enough by the wind to force a collision.

I got a feel for the strength of the wind when I hit the Bay Run. The Run loops this way and that, so sometimes the wind is in your face, others at your back. I came around a long bend and the wind was now behind me. I pushed up through the gears until suddenly there was no noise - the roaring in my ears was muted, and I was riding in the Cone of Silence. I was barely putting any pressure on the pedals, yet I was tonking along at 40km/h.

About 500 metres later, I was doing zero. I'd had another flat.

I found a park bench, and sat down to change the tube. That went ok, until I removed the pump after inflating the fresh tube. The bit that lives inside the valve stem came shooting out under pressure and disappeared into the grass, leaving me with a very flat tyre and no spare tube.

Thank goodness for mobile phones. J came and picked me up.

I woke up several times during the night and had to scrub bits of sand and grit out of my eyes. It was even worse this morning - I had a crust on my bottom eyelid of crud that had worked its way out overnight. On windy days, you really need to swap the sunglasses out for a set of goggles.

Such is life in the saddle. I am about to head out to buy some more inner tubes.

Green madness in Byron

The fruitloops in Byron Bay have gone off the deep end again, refusing to allow landowners to build seawalls to protect their properties from erosion.

I have a simple solution.

The landowners should give the council two fingers and build the walls anyway. When the council turns up with a bulldozer to demolish it, lie down in front of the dozer. At night, put sugar or sand in the fuel tank. Cut the hydraulic lines. Chain yourself to your sea wall. Get your friends to run around singing "we shall overcome" whilst waving red banners. Make sure young children are involved, and put at risk by heavy earth moving machinery. Call in the media and accuse the police of brutality and excessive force. Scream, rant and throw yourselves to the ground in a theatrical manner. Arrange for every ratbag, rent-a-crowd loonie to join in.

If it's good enough for the greens to pull those kind of stunts in order to block legalised logging activities, why shouldn't they be given a taste of their own medicine?