Art and architecture in Canberra

We did a bit of wandering around in Canberra over the weekend, and it rammed home just how different Canberra is to the rest of Australia. It really is the odd ball city - in the nicest possible way.

Take public art for instance. It seems that there must be a law somewhere that says that every office building must have a hideous piece of sculpture out the front. I didn't take note of what the people in this office block do all day, but it might be full of arseholes, because there's a sculpture of a colon out the front.



This wheat silo shaped building, funnily enough, belongs to Trade. Have a look at the silver knobbly bits that punctuate the walls along each floor like thumbtacks - they're sure to get this monstrosity heritage listed.



This pile of junk sits outside Tourism House. If you thought our tax money was wasted on running useless ads overseas, it's nothing in comparison to the money wasted on "contemporary art", which is little more than the contents of your average farm rubbish tip welded together and spray painted.



This is more to my taste - this hangs in the entrance to the Art Gallery (we went to see the Turner to Monet show). This is a great painting - most people think it's a photo that's been blown up. As I went around the gallery, every few minutes I'd hear an alarm go off, and I couldn't for the life of me figure out what the alarm was for. It turns out that it is a proximity sensor in front of this painting - people are so taken by it, they lean over to touch it, and then the alarm goes off. I sat at this spot and watched a number of people as they tried to poke the art. Personally, I'd attach a taser to it. That's fuck 'em.



Chooks in windows. Manuka.



Another Manuka chook.



This sort of building fascinates me, mainly because it is so unsuited to our climate. You wouldn't think of moving to Switzerland and building a Federation style house with a low pitched roof - the snowy climate would ensure that your roof collapsed in the first week of winter. Buildings should reflect the local climate.

If that's the case, why are we so happy to import Euro-fads that might make sense in Berlin or Venice or Bath, but make no sense whatsoever out here? We need some sort of censorship bureau that bans the import of books on European architecture. I like European architecture - I even like Bauhaus and all that. But I like it in Germany, not Australia.



This photo didn't come out that well, but check out the bird in the window. Nice touch.



Another version of a building that I don't mind, but which is about as appropriate in Australia as a mink coat in Cairns.



We popped into the old Parliament House, and one thing to note is that the heritage people have buggered it up. The place was built in the 1930's - back before anyone had air conditioning, so all the doors and windows were designed to open. They all had fly screens on them, since Canberra is built on three sheep stations, and the place had a lot of flies in summer.

Get this. The heritage mob have removed all the fly screens and for all I know, installed air conditioning.

Will this spark a war between those interested in heritage and those promoting global warming? After all, they've taken a building that was designed around good environmental principles (air flow and all that) and turned it into something that requires a poultice of power to keep it cool in summer.

Typical heritage fuck-up. Just goes to show that if you see someone from a heritage group sniffing around an old building, you are probably looking at someone that has no idea what they are doing.

The other disaster that the heritage mob have inflicted on the old House is that they have scattered furniture seemingly at random throughout the place. When the place was built, a stack of furniture was commissioned, and it was all very specific to a function and a place. A certain type of table was put into a certain type of room.

The modern heritage mob of course have no idea, so they have put furniture in places where it is completely inappropriate. It would be the equivalent of a Martian putting a toilet seat in the lounge room, thinking that just because people sat on it, they had put it in the right place.

Oops

A most tragic photo. This is what happens when you ask someone to carry the wine sack, especially when the person doing the carrying is younger than the wine which the sack contains.



That is a bottle of Lake's Folly 1995 Cabernet, which I planned to drink on Saturday night at a rather fine restaurant. Ah well. It smelt so good, I almost drank some off the floor.

My disappointment at losing this bottle has been tempered by Google - I just did a bit of reading and found that the 1995 was rated only 83/100. That may be so, but I tell you this - it smelt fantastic when spread all over a dirty tiled floor.

I used to drop into Lake's Folly every year or so to pick up as many bottles as they'd let me buy (there was always a per head limit on the number that you could get, so the trick was to pack the car with non-wine snobs and add their quota to your purchase). I gave that up when Mr Lake sold out. They may still be making smashing wine up there (no pun intended), but half the fun of buying it was the ambience of knowing that you were buying from a boutique, quality producer.

I think that is my last bottle of Folly. That closes the end of a wine buying era for me.

Really interesting looking caravan

If you are a fanatical follower of all things Top Gear, then I suggest you look away now. I am about to show you two photos of a caravan.

Spotted this thing on the Hume whilst heading to Canberra. I've seen a lot of caravans, and even stayed in a few (but never towed one), but I've never seen one like this.



That is a very funky piece of work. I doubt even Clarkson would want to drive a Hummer through that.



Slowing down for this photo did have one deleterious effect on the holiday. This was taken at the bottom of a very big hill, and I had to slow down to 80 to get the photo. I then had to tromp it to get back up to 110, and tromp it hard due to the size and steepness of the hill.

Not long after, I noticed that the back window was a bit filthy, which was odd. The car was relatively clean, and the Hume is not a gravel road, so why was I having trouble seeing out the back?

As soon as I wound down the window, I got a whiff of the problem. All we could smell was that lovely smell of oil starting to burn.

I pulled over and went round the back for a look. The entire back of the car was covered in a fine mist of oil. The underneath of the car was covered in a thick coating of oil, but there were no obvious leaks anywhere, and the dipstick showed that the sump was full.

Wierd. We continued on, albeit at reduced pace, and with me fingering my NRMA membership card, wondering when a tow truck would be required.

We stopped about half an hour later, and a check of the dipstick showed that the oil level hadn't budged. I gave them back of the car a clean, and then settled down for a slow trip to Canberra, with one eye latched on the mirror to see if the back window started to fog with oil again.

Nope. We made it to Canberra in a slightly whiffy car - you could smell it from 20 feet away, something like a fish and chip shop gone terribly wrong. But no more oil seemed to be leaking, so our collective fingers were crossed.

Being Easter, every mechanic in town had lit out for the coast, so I was left wondering whether we would have to hang around in Canberra until Tuesday to get it fixed, or whether it would survive the trip back to Sydney.

In the end, we drove over 600km with what seemed to be no ill-effects. I have this horrible feeling that when I got the car serviced recently, one of the idiot mechanics over-filled the sump. When I put my foot down, it simply blew out a whole pile of oil that was in excess of the "full" level.

So it could be a very cheap leak (ie, steam clean the underside of the car), or a very expensive leak (transfer case problem). We'll find out tomorrow.

Sunrise over the Anzac bridge

Aaaw, ain't that nice.

Malcolm Gavey - legend

I spent a bit of time working in the public transport sector. Every day, I'd read internal reports of staff that had been abused, punched, spat on, assaulted and in one case, threatened with a handful of poo.

Now I also travelled by public transport at the time, and I had to deal with those same people at many different locations, and I occasionally found that I wanted to sock them in the mouth, but I never did.

I kept my peace. I kept a civil tongue in my head. I smiled and didn't let them get to me. Because I always remembered that whilst I am an edumacated, well brought up and sane human being, they spend all day dealing with people who are drunk, abusive, mad (as in mentally disturbed), thieving, vandalising and violent.

Transport is one of those areas where you rapidly come in contact with the entire cross section of humanity, because so many people are using it, and you bump up against them face to face. A busy train station or bus station or airport might process tens of thousands of customers in an hour, and there will always be a percentage who will be one or all of the above. Whilst 98% of your customers might be like me (and hopefully like you), there will always be the oddballs that make life fucking impossible for everyone else.

You know who I am talking about.

The guy that sleeps in, arrives late at the airport, tries to check in 2 minutes before his flight leaves and then starts abusing the check-in staff for being utterly hopeless.

The idiot that attacks the airport bar and gets too pissed to fly, but then goes mental when refused entry into the plane.

The panhandlers that walk through trains asking for spare change, getting aggro at those that don't cough up.

The inconsiderate bastards who have 110 decibel phone conversations on an early morning bus.

Fare dodgers, litterers and smokers that refuse to believe that non-smoking zones apply to them.

Officials have to deal with these cretins all the time, and after a while, when dealing with the general public, the default setting turns to treating you like a cretin until you have proven otherwise. At most, they might only spend 15 seconds of their life dealing with you - they are not going to invest a lot of effort into being nice and trying to understand your situation. They have a job to do, policies to apply, and procedures to follow, and they don't have the time to frigg around with people being idiots.

Which is why I think Malcolm Gavey is a legend. He saw some bloody interstate tourist blatantly breaking the law - someone he will in all liklihood never see again - and he applied the law. He applied it fairly and consistently. He didn't bend over. He didn't budge. He didn't fold in the face of an angry southern lawyer. He held his ground.

Keep it up. We need people to do their jobs, not bend to the whims of the middle class.

Early morning kick off

Curse having to be at my desk at 8am.... for meetings that are supposed to happen, but no one else shows up apart from moi. That means getting up around 6am, fluffing around for about half an hour, getting on the bike, riding for 40 minutes, showering and shaving and getting dressed for work (15 minutes) and then wolfing down a quick breakfast (whatever time is left over between tying my shoelaces and the meeting kicking off).

The outcome of all this is that I am starting to see more mornings like this.... which is really quite nice. Crawling out from under the covers at sparrow's does have some advantages.



This stretch of tramline should be renamed the "pigeon alleyway of death". I ride down here most days because it is a car free way to get across most of the city from west to east. One just had to avoid being squished by a tram or two, which isn't too hard, as they are big and slow and the drivers can't chase you if you get away from the tram lines. Which is nice.



This stretch is plagued by dopey, fat, useless feral pigeons. They are even more asleep at 6.45am than I am, so I have had plenty of near misses down this way. From time to time, I'll pass a blob of flattened feathers on the road that indicates an ex-pigeon that was a bit slow in getting out of the way of someone, but I have managed to avoid having any human/pigeon interaction to date. I don't fancy having one of the bastards taking off and flying straight into my face. If that happens, the CBD will be littered with dead feral flying rats from one end to the other.

For transport buffers, that spacey looking cylinder up on the left is a monorail station.

Things best not ordered for lunch

I had a smashing steak sandwich for lunch the other day. It was really, really good, and the thing that impressed me was that the chef had propped the lid open with a small stack of onion rings. Proper onion rings - not the crap ones that you get in Hungry Jacks for instance. How often do you get onion rings with your steak sandwich? Not often, you say? I get them almost never. Except that I might get them a bit more often now, since I know the place to go.

The thing is though that the steak sandwich was a bit of a chore to eat. The steak was fairly chewy, and it was still very pink in the middle. I am used to making steak sandwiches out of fillet when I do them at home, but obviously your average cafe is not going to be able to do that and charge only $9.50 for your meal. So they have to substitute other things, like shoe leather and bits of gnarled elephant ear. OK, maybe the steak was not that tough, but I certainly had to pick it up and attack it like a caveman attacking a mammoth bone.

It was a steak sandwich fit for a man.

Which made it the perfect food for three of the four people at the table next to me. They were obviously all from the same office - three blokes (lads I guess you might call them) dressed in suit pants and expensive cotton shirts with no tie. They looked like rugby playing accountants (as in Union, not League). Seated with them was a female work colleague, and she was a very dainty type. She made the terrible mistake of also going the sandwich.

It was alright for the boys - they rolled up their sleeves, tucked bibs into their shirts, scratched their balls and hoofed right in. Within seconds, the three of them had avocado and aioli smeared from ear to ear, and juice running down their forearms. They were ripping and tearing chunks of that steak like sharks having a go at a whale. It was messy and bloody and looked downright tasty.

The poor woman though was trying to eat the sandwich like it was a green salad. She would peck at a bit, then put it down and wipe the corners of her mouth, then chew a bit and have another peck. By then, the boys around her had oven roasted tomato and bits of onion ring under their fingernails and up their noses and they were picking bits of rocket out of their chest hair. Much sucking of fingers could be heard, even over the noise of trucks going past.

And she continued to peck away at it, probably dreading the moment when she would have to start tearing at the steak when it got uber-chewy. I left before that part, so I don't know how this story ended. But I know how it should have started - with ordering risotto instead of a steak sandwich.

Someone has a sense of humour

I was walking somewhere the other day - please don't ask me where - when I wandered past one of those red light/speed radar revenue raising camera jobbies on a pole.

The camera was unable to photograph any offending cars because a sticker had been stuck over the lens.

The sticker read:

"Cops are tops".

Poor bastard

I was wandering around today, looking for a spot of lunch, when I looked across the road and spotted a bloke standing in the garden of a terrace house with a towel wrapped around his waist and a phone pressed to his ear.

I assumed that he had locked himself out of the house somehow, but why would he have taken a phone with him?

It was most bizarre - it was a very busy street.... not the sort of place where you want to stand around all day in a towel.

Hope he hadn't been tossed out by the missus.

The daily photo

I have this morning routine thingy that I am pretty manic about. I do things in a certain order, and have all my stuff-for-the-day in specific places. One of the things that I always do is turn on my camera before departing to check that the battery is not flat.

Except for this morning. There was an amazing fireball type sunrise coming up over the city - a kind of "hand of God" light shining on the CBD, and my fucking camera refused to take a photo thanks to the battery being a bit tired. What sometimes works is flicking out the battery and re-inserting it, which is what I did as I rode along (managing to avoid running over any stray dogs and joggers) and got this one photo.



Hope it was worth it.

The work ethic

What is a work ethic? How many hours a week is enough to say, "He has a strong work ethic?"

I used to have a fairly well paid management position. Not enormously paid, but more than enough for me to get by happily. I worked pretty hard for that money - I was in the office 6 days a week, and sometimes 7, and put in 10-14 hours a day. Doing 70 hours a week was pretty normal for me.

I don't know why I did it - there was no requirement to do it, but I think I did it because the work was challenging and interesting and there was an awful lot of it to be done. There were also quite a few bone idle buggers to be made up for.

I now have a job that pays twice as much, and requires me in the office for no more than 5 days a week, for 40 hours in total. Not bad going - twice the money for half the hours. You could say that I have scored.

This became apparent yesterday after I worked over the weekend. What got me was that it was the first weekend work that I had done for 12 months, and it felt quite strange to be at work on a weekend after not doing it for so long. Funny how working stupid hours can come to seem natural after a while.... it takes a major change in lifestyle to snap you out of it.

I don't know if workaholics are born or made, but I do know that I have it in me to do stupid hours if the work is challenging enough to really engage me.

I think I am rambling.

Let me close by harking back to the most work-shy organisation I ever worked at: a Federal Govt agency that I temped for back in the early 1990's. I lasted about 3 days.

My job was to pack stuff into boxes. Don't ask me what, and don't ask me why. They had lots of empty boxes, and lots of stuff. I packed all day long.

Right up until 4.22pm. That's when my boss walked in and demanded to know why I was still there, packing boxes. I was a bit stunned by the whole thing - I thought offices stayed open until 5pm, and that was when I was expecting to work to.

No, it was after 4.21pm, and it was time for me to leave.

I said that I would finish packing the box, tape it and then go.

No. I had to leave now. Stop putting stuff in the box. Put it down and go.

As I followed him out of the office to the front door, I passed office after office and cubicle after cubicle that was dark and devoid of human habitation. All lights were off, all computers shut down. We were the last to leave. By then it was 4.23pm, and the boss was agitated and anxious to be gone.

I found out the next day that the staff worked 7 hours and 21 minutes per day. Work out how many hours that equates to per week. They could have 30 minutes for lunch or 60 minutes, so those that took a short break split after 7 hours and 51 minutes of being in the office. The long lunch shift all left at 4.21.

And I mean 4.21. The next day, I noticed that at around 4pm, people started to turn off their computers. The really hard working ones would wait until 4.10 to shutdown, but by 4.21, all briefcases were packed and all staff were walking out the door. The manager was standing at the door with the keys, and he was out the door and locking it before the clock struck 4.22.

If someone rang at say 4.01, they'd be told that "I've just turned my PC off - you'll have to call back tomorrow", even though there was plenty of time to deal with the matter. As far as the staff were concerned, the blinds had been drawn on their minds. The work day was over.

I lasted one more day, and then called my agency and told them to get me a real job away from that fucking monkey house full of public servants in their grey cardigans, and their fucking 7 hours and 21 minutes a day mentality.

I hate them still. I hope they all died of testicular cancer.

Worth a read

A Professor of Criminology joins the Police.

Well worth reading - all four parts of it.

Seeing how his attitudes changed over six months from wet liberal to shotgun-toting cop is fascinating.

Tosser

Get a helmet and a proper bike, you tosser.



And get off the fucking footpath.

Cramps

Ah, the joys of putting young kids to bed. I watched a bit of Super Nanny when it was on, and always had a laugh at the hapless parents that couldn't get their 3 year old monster into bed. Then it was Super Nanny to the rescue, and all was right in the world.

Well, Monkey has reached that age where he much prefers to be out of bed at night, doing fun stuff with the rest of the family (like couch diving), rather than being in the farter, where he belongs. Child psychologists will probably go nuts at what I have to say next, but I have found the most effective way to get him to conk out is to get into his bed with him and lie there until he drifts into the Land of Nod.

Which can sometimes take some time. It tends to work, but the downside is that I tend to conk out with him. J has to come in just before midnight several times a week to wake me up and get me out of his bed. If I have done some really tough rides on the way home (tough as in fast, rather than long), then it might take me 5 minutes to flake out from the time I go horizontal. I rarely have a problem with going to sleep - 7 years of infantry exercises solved that problem.

The only thing that bites me is that the Monkey bed is only 2/3 the length of an adult bed, so I have to fold myself up to fit into it. It doesn't matter if I only spend 15 minutes lying there, but there have been nights where I have snored with the Monkey for 3 hours before J has given me a nudge. That can generate a nasty set of leg cramps.

I can therefore confirm that being stuck in a cell that is shorter than you are is a good form of torture.

Old fart

What is it about getting old and going senile?

Whatever it is, I forget.

I am nearing the end of a 3 month course of pills that are supposed to banish my acursed ball rash for good. I have to take one pill per day, and of course I have had a hard time remembering whether I took a pill today or not. I have been reduced to the iniquity of having to go to the chemist to purchase a weekly pill jar - one of those things where you put a pill into a container for each day, so you know whether you have taken your dose or not.

God, I'm only halfway to 80. What's it going to be like when I get there?

Parking a tiger

I have spent some time recently in a rather secure building - one of those places where security guards roam around seemingly at random and throw you out of various rooms if you are spotted using a mobile phone for instance.

One of the rules is that you can't eat or drink in the place, but the air conditioning is ferocious, so one tends to dry out very quickly. There are water sensors built into the floor, so if you do take a bottle of water inside and it spills, you are in the poo. The guards have a wonderful habit of poking around constantly looking for food and drinks - even a Chuppa Chup is beyond the pale.

Which brings me to lunch. Or the fact that I almost brought up lunch.

Our crew decided this week to try somewhere new for lunch, so we visited a pie shop. I had a Tiger, which is a pie with mash, mushy peas and gravy on top. I like a Tiger from time to time, but usually at 2am down at Harrys's at Wooloomoolo. Having one at lunchtime on a hot day, some distance from a Frigate, is just too wierd.

The Tiger did not agree with my insides. I was talking to (actually yelling at - the place is really noisy) one of the guys when I did a tremendous burp, and the Tiger came decidedly close to ending up on the floor.

Yes, it would have given new meaning to "parking a tiger".

I wonder what security would have made of that? The rules say a lot about not ingesting food and water, but nothing about regurgitating it.

Legs of evil

There are days when I am pretty pleased with myself... days when I go hooting and hollerin' up hills like they don't exist.... days when my legs are pumping furiously but my lungs are hardly having to suck any air in.... days when the miles fly by and I get home and I am left thinking, "How did I get here?"

Then some bastard with legs of pure evil goes tearing past me, with seemingly no effort, and I am hard pressed to catch the flying sod to grab a snap of his chiseled calves.

Today was one of those days. The only reason I caught him is that I roll down steep hills extremely fast - certainly much faster than skinny little sods with no mass. I have to brake on some hills to avoid running them down, even though they are pedalling furiously.



Oh, and if you think he is a bit hard to see with all that sun in front, you are right. I try to time my rides so that I am not riding into the sun on the way home, as there always seems to be at least one stupid pedestrian who will step out in front of you just at that moment when the sun pokes out from behind a tree and blinds you.

So here we have the legs of evil, from slightly side on. This guy eats hills.



So, on a more pleasant note, I give you sunset from the Anzac Bridge. Like riding into the fire of night.

Paying for stuff

How's this for absolutely fucking moronic...

There I am, walking up to the counter at a cafe to pay the bill after feeding my face. I have bothered to look at the menu, so I know the bill comes to $12. I have a $20 note in my hand, ready to pay and split.

But I am beaten to the counter by two fiendish women, who proceed to get the bill and then haggle over who should pay for what. At this point, I can't pay as the waiter has totalled up their account and can't clear it and process mine until he has dealt with them. The curses of modern technology - he can't open the till to get my change until they have forked out.

After 30 seconds of examining the bill in great detail and deciding that, yes, they had one soy chai latte and some other beverage and some toast, and that one should pay $5.20 and the other $4.80, they proceed to search through their handbags for their purses.

Oh for fuck's sake.....

At this point, I start tapping my foot. One of them shoots me an evil look, which states that it is her right to be a complete dipshit in a queue if she feels like it. I believe she then decides to fruitlessly root around in her handbag for the next two minutes to punish me for daring to tap my foot in her direction.

One eventually extracts a purse, and pulls out a $50 bill to pay for $4.80 worth of toasted bread. The other, just to completely fuck my morning, pulls out a bit of plastic and waves it around, expecting the waiter will agree to put a $5.20 transaction through the plastic-swiping machine.

Right. Ladies, this is how you pay bills. I know that some of you might not be used to it, given that men used to do it for you, but that all finished about 30 years ago, so I would expect that by now, you would have learned the etiquette of paying for a meal.

If it is a cheap cafe, and they expect you to pay at the counter as you leave, make sure you have your purse or wallet in your hand when you get to the counter. If you have a good idea of what it will cost, have that amount in your hand when you ask for the bill. That way, the whole process can be over and done with as rapidly as possible, and irate men in the queue behind you will not ram your head through the glass of the cake stand.

If the bill is small, and the two of you eat out all the time, learn how to "shout" each other a coffee.

Thank you.

Bum fight - the aftermath

I rode past the location of the bum fight this morning, and slowed down to have a look at the pavement.

Big splotches of blood were still splattered here and there. The publican was busy hosing down the area of the beer garden, but wasn't bothering with the blood out on the public footpath. Bit silly of him if you ask me, since it seems that they might have been patrons of his until they started fighting.

Why blame us?

I am sick to death of fucking loons blaming the poverty of places like Cuba and Africa on "The West" in general, and the English speaking part of the west in particular.

Why are we well off?

Because we have a good system of government that is not perfect, but it does the job. We have a clean justice system that creaks, but works. We have functioning transport systems, water networks, electricity networks, health systems, education systems, air traffic control systems, a banking system, warehousing and distributions sytems, a solid legal framework and all the other stuff that we forget about, but surrounds us in our everyday lives.

So just how did we "make Africa poor?" Did some nasty person go to Nairobi and go, "Oh look, a nine storey hospital - I am going to steal that and put it in Melbourne". Did someone else visit Darfur and go, "Wow, they have lots of freeways here. I am going to take them and put them in L.A.".

Did hordes of merchant bankers go charging across the Serengeti, pillaging steel mills and judges and case law and contracts and curriculums and central bankers and dams and bridges and ports and 15kv power lines and train tracks and airports and lighthouses and entertainment centres and football ovals and office blocks and traffic lights and.....all the rest of it?

I think not.

The Russians tried to do something like that to Germany in 1945, and they pretty much laid waste to the place... and look at it now. We managed to bomb and shell and shoot up just about all their plant and infrastructure, and then stole what was left, and the bloody place shot up again like a weed.

Why is that?

Maybe being poor has nothing to do with having your oil or gold or ivory or diamonds "stolen" by the west. Maybe it has to do with the way you organise yourselves. You organise yourselves any way you want. We'll stick to democractic capitalism, you sort out how you prefer to run things. If you end up rich and fat, good luck to you. If you end up on the bones of your arse, blame yourselves, not us.

As I have learnt to say in another forum: "SUCK MY NUTS".

And give us back our aid, you fucking leeches.

The sheer horridness of going to work

I thought today was going to start as a wonderful day. Check out the mist on this playing field, which I passed on the way into town. It had a peaceful, mysterious feeling.



Twenty minutes later, I am torn between reporting a barking fuckwit in a van to the Plod and hauling him out of the front seat and braining him with a tyre lever (a tyre lever for a bike by the way is about 4 inches long and made of plastic). Braining someone with a bike tyre lever would generally have to consist of ramming it up a dickhead's nose.

So much for Monday starting out on a happy, planet-loving note.

The middle of the day was spent on the Monorail, in the stinking heat, with a broken down air conditioner. In a carriage full of sweating, fat chicks that disdained both a shower and deoderant. Hell is other people's armpits.

Then I went past this on the way home. This is outside a pub called Paddy Maguires, and I used to drink there a bit back when I worked down that end of town. It has a beer garden which faces the tram lines, and you can see part of it to the left of the escalators.

The two idiots on the ground were fighting when I got to this spot. I had stopped to swap the lenses in my sunglasses to a darker shade, when I heard some yelling and swearing and looked up from my lens-swapping exercise to see people in suits standing around tut-tutting and walking away from two drunken dickheads rolling on the ground.



Everyone kept their distance, especially those in the beer garden. I know from long experience that if you get up out of your chair in that beer garden, you'll never sit down again. A full blown gang riot could have been in progress at this spot (which is also right out the front of a Harry's Cafe de Wheels pie cart) and the pie scoffers and beer swillers would not move a muscle. Except perhaps to pick up their mobile phone... and even then they'd just use it to take a photo, rather than call the Plod.

It took a few minutes for a security guard to appear, and all he did was hold up one hand and make a phone call. The two idiots continued to roll around on the ground, with me missing most of the action as I was fumbling with my camera. I didn't want to get that close, since both turned out to be covered in blood. I presume one or both of them went at the other with a glass, and the results were rather reminiscent of an abattoir.

When I got home, I commented to J that if it had been a man assaulting a woman, I would have been over there like a shot and kicked the bugger in the balls. But it wasn't anything like that - it was two drunken wastoids having a biff, and as such, it did not merit my involvement. The biff was not even interesting enough to hold my attention for more than 30 seconds. I looked, I photographed, and I rode on.

There is a measure of space (I think) called a AU, which stands for Astronomical Unit (I think). It's an enormous distance - something to do with the sun (I think). If I was the Plod called to this bum-fight, I would be measuring things with TU, which is the length of my truncheon at full stretch. Given that these idiots were already covered in blood, whacking them a few more times with a lump of wood would do no harm.

Someone really pissed God off today.

A day at Darling Harbour

Darling Harbour is not one of my most favourite spots. It might be on the water, but it has no beach or waves. It has little grass. The shopping centre is wall to wall tack and the food court will leave you five minutes away from a heart attack. Grossly fat couples waddle up and down the promenade, stopping every few minutes for another bowl of chips or an enormous ice cream.

Speaking of ice cream, here is nearly $24 worth of ice cream. I will never complain again about going down to Balmain and spending $10 on a big tub of the gourmet stuff.

Although this stuff was pretty gourmet - Belgian chocolate, vanilla (made with proper bits of vanilla) and an excellent peppermint version. The waffle cones were also made on the spot. Even though it cost and arm and half a leg, it was excellent.



There was a big powerboat race on the Harbour today - which we missed. However, they had a smaller version with four runabouts zipping around Darling Harbour. I think they were promoting boats that could take you out for a close up view of the race - for a small fortune.



These little suckers were fast. It was a small, tight course, and they hammered around it with gusto.



Between races, they'd pull tricks like this one. I heard an announcer say something about "leaving the boat just on the prop" - whatever that meant.



By the way, this boat is advertising "erotic massage", which is what bliss is all about.



Yes, they really were getting the nose up out of the water.



This is what one of the big boats on the harbour looked like (stole this from a newspaper).



We had a little cruise around a pond on some paddle boats. Putting the paddles into reverse in a hurry stirred up the bottom, and guess what popped up - a flubble of McDonalds drink containers.



Outside Home nightclub about 2pm - a patron having a "nap" in one of the comfy chairs.



Spotted this on the way out - a wogged up Mitsubishi something-or-other with phat rims and a number plate saying "WHATDA". I think that WHODA would have be more appropriate, as in "who the fuck would be stupid enough to do this to a nice car?"



Spotted this on the way home. It's an electric scooter. I read about these in some motor magazine the other day. Because it is so underpowered, you don't have to register it. The bloke that reviewed it said that it was so slow and undergrunted, it was terrifying, and he took it back to the dealer after two days. He was going up this shallow incline so slowly, even I would have overtaken him if I was on the bike.



A half reasonable idea very badly executed.

Another missive on the Aboriginal plight blah blah blah

You know, one day, a lot of people in this country are going to wake up and realise that parts of Aboriginal Australia are not Third World - they are worse. At least a big chunk of the third world is picking itself up by its bootstraps and ceasing to be Third World. Just look at what is happening in China and India, and what has happened to the stuffed economies of Eastern Europe, let alone the Tigers of Asia. In all those countries, a mix of education, investment, trade and the dynamics of capitalism have pulled hundreds of millions out of poverty.

None of these things appear to exist in many Aboriginal communities. Investment by "foreigners" (ie, white people) is shunned. Education is a joke - especially so when 20 year old males need an interpreter when they land in court (refugees from war zones in Africa have better English than Aboriginals who have grown up in an English speaking country). Trade is minimal, because little of value is produced. In fact, trade is all one way, with the "white" economy providing everything required for life to exist, and the "black" economy producing little in return (except for oodles of drunkeness, violence and despair). Capitalism is also a no-no, thanks to the perverse thinkings of Nugget Coombes.

In short, they are failed states.

What do many people do when they find themselves living in a failed state (or at the very least, a fucked up one)?

They move.

Where do you think all our refugees have come from? I don't remember any refugees coming from say England or India or Singapore. They are coming from Lebanon and Somalia and Afghanistan and the Congo, and 30 years ago, they came from Vietnam.

They have obeyed a very old, and very simple human impulse. If the conditions in your current location are crap, go somewhere else where they are nicer. Chances are, things will work out better for you and your family if you go somewhere nice.

People from all around the world figured out years ago that Australia is a much nicer place to be than say about 130 other countries. Same goes for the US and the UK. Even Kiwis prefer to live here.

So why is it that someone who lives within our borders finds it so hard to move to somewhere that is nicer? We have no controls or restrictions on internal migration. I can pack up tomorrow and move to Melbourne. I have previously moved about as far as you can in Australia - from Perth to Sydney (ok, you could go to Brisbane and travel further, but you get my point). Moving is not that hard - I have moved within Sydney something like 14 times. I moved office 15 times in 14 years. It can be done.

So if conditions are absolutely terrible in say Aurukan, why are people not leaving? All you have to do is stick your stuff in the car and go. I moved across the country with all my kit in a duffel bag, and I hitched a ride with my Godfather. In other words, I had very little stuff, and I didn't even have a car. I also had very little money.

It can be done.

The best thing the federal government could do is to send a bus with a big trailer to these communities once a fortnight. All it has to do is drive around with a loudspeaker, with the driver making an offer to relocate to the nearest capital city anyone who wants to leave. No charge, no questions asked.

Anyone that is still left after six months can go fuck themself.

Your flat today is brought to you by.....

What a crap week for tyres. I seemed to end up with a flat twice a day, which kind of took the fun out of getting to and from work. By the end of the week, I had changed my daily luggage allowance to include two spare tubes instead of one. It was getting that bad.



The above photo was taken outside the back gate of the oval where the Balmain Tigers play during the rugby league season. Parking along here is impossible in winter.

The worst thing about my flat tyres this week is that one was a very slow leak. Very, very slow. I would pump the tyre up in the morning, ride to work, find it was still solid when I got there.... but it would be dead flat at the end of the day. I would pump it up, get home, find it was still solid.... but it would be dead flat in the morning. It was one of those leaks that took ages to find in the water bucket. Tiny little bubbles would come out like this - bubble..............bubble....................bubble......................bubble.

When finding leaks, I am more used to BUBBLE-BUBBLE-BUBBLE-BUBBLE and then the tube is flat.

I almost threw a hissy-fit on the side of the road on Tuesday because as I was crossing an intersection, my pump fell off the bike. Thankfully, it came off without going through the spokes, but it meant that I had to abandon the bike in a flower bed and totter out into the traffic to retrieve my pump.

Just before I got to it, some turkey decided to do an illegal U-turn, and ran right over the pump. It still pumps air, but takes about 50% more effort as part of it is bent. If they hadn't driven off in a hurry, the driver might have ended up with the pump spearing through their back windscreen.

Odd sights

When I spotted this woman, I thought she had a very colourful paint job on her bike. On closer inspection, it turned out that every inch of her bike was covered in "no whaling" type stickers. Every pet cause was represented there, including a climate change sticker on her helmet.

I guess it's there to hold the tinfoil in place.



Then there was monkey-boy, which is what I call the idiots that ride around on no-gear bikes that are nine sizes too small for them. This fat bastard, who is not wearing a helmet, was spotted "racing" around the Bay.... which meant that he would pedal like crazy for 20 metres, then sit down and cruise whilst he got his breathe back. I had to brake to take this photo. He'll obviously grow up to buy a WRX with phat rims and a spoiler. Idiot.



Interesting sview on the power under the hood of this beast. This is on a Toyota ute by the way.

No birds

So I lied. We have lots of birds.

To start with, the Ibis. An import from west of the Blue Mountains I am told - forced to move to the city due to drought. Well, the drought is over, so how about fucking off home and get your stupid bills out of our rubbish bins.



How about a flock of seagulls (and if you remember the band, you are very old). What is this - the cricket? And not a chip in sight for them to fight over.



A flying rat. The pigeons in town seem to be getting fatter and slower. There is a street that I ride down each morning that I am going to rename the "Pigeon Alleyway of Death". It is the haunt of sluggish, barely mobile pigeons that refuse to get out of my way as I hurtle towards them at slightly over walking pace. If I arrive at work covered in blood, it will be thanks to me running over a pigeon. You might think pigeons are squishy, but I am talking about pigeons the size of wombats - and they will easily send a rider over the handlebars.



If you see someone feeding breadcrumbs to pigeons, feel free to stick a plastic bag over their head.

Porn for kiwis

You'll have to wait for the good bits. How's this for a job? Mucking out the ponds at Darling Harbour. It would only be fun if your day could be spent sucking up the remains of dead pigeons.



Ah, fountains. Why are modern fountains so dreary? I could create the same effect in my backyard with a couple of garden hoses. I guess this "installation" cost about half a billion dollars in Arts funding.



OK, if you came for the Kiwi Porn, we are getting to the good bits.



Ooooh, more sheep.



PHWOAR! Check that out! Try not to spoof on your keyboard at this point.

Hello Gumby

Pet hate of the day - fucking Gumby (way up ahead of me, circled in yellow) who blatted through three sets of red lights as I watched, and possibly a fourth over the hill. And the stupid tool wasn't wearing a helmet.



One of these days, I am going to be forced to watch one of these dopey pricks go under a bus, and then I guess I will be expected to render assistance. I will try not to kneel on their balls as I do so.

Then there was Gumpy Mk II on the way home. OK, the sun is obviously shining brightly at this point, but in a few months time, it will be dark at this time. Gumby is wearing a black shirt, has no rear light or even a rear reflector. Even the back of his helmet is black (I did not realise the side was red until I got home and looked at the photo that I had taken as I went past).



Wake up Gumby! Make yourself visible! Cars are not yet fitted with Cyclo-Matic Bike Detection Systems!

And when it does get dark, stay off the fucking bike path so that I don't go steaming into you at full tilt.

Who let these nuf-nufs out on the roads?

Off with socks

Today was white sock cleanout day. I have managed to accumulate 12.5 pairs of fairly worn out and useless white socks. These are not all proper pairs - the sock monster has struck in many cases, so I have "made up" some pairs by matching socks that look similar, but are not the same.



I wear white socks when I ride. I don't know why they have to be predominantly white - must be a hangover from sports days at school. What shits me the most is that out of 25 socks shown here, almost every pair is different. It's not like I have 12 pairs of socks that are identical, and it doesn't matter if I lose half of them - I will still have matching pairs. No - those cunning sock selling bastards will only sell you mixed pairs, so losing one sock means buying a whole new pair.

I bought replacement socks today. In order to get around the above problem, I bought two packs of three socks. Each pack has a blue pair, a red pair and a black pair. My thinking was that as the packs were identical, I would have two identical blue pairs, two red pairs and two black pairs. At least if I lose one sock, I will still have three others that match, and can keep wearing them until I lose two more.

But no. The cunning sods struck again. When I unpacked them, I found that one pack came with a grey piping that the other was missing. So my pairs are not identical.

Nooooooooo!

Mine is bigger

This is the biggest kitchen slug that I have despatched so far. I came this close "<-------->" to treading on it the other night - in my bare feet.



You should have seen it at full stretch - when it was going across the floor in full power mode. He was probably 50% longer.

One teaspoon of salt, and it's game over.

Note the slime trail that it's leaving behind. I'll have to try to photograph the web of trails that appear on the lino floor each night.

Commitment

They're hard to spot in this photo, but there are a couple of boatloads of rowers out there on the water. It's not long after the sun has started to peep above the horizon, and they've been outon the water for a while. Certainly longer than I have been on my bike.



Ah, the sun poking out over the city. Kind of looks a bit like a nuklear fireball in a way.



More rowers, this time a few crews heading out from the sheds (which are just to the right of the photo). It's alright for the crews - after a few strokes, they'll be nice and warm, but the coaches in the speedboats will spend the entire training session freezing their nads off.



They're a tiny little speck, but there is a rowing crew out in the middle of the harbour there somewhere. It's a bit like one of those old newspaper competitions where you had to find the football.



Rowing - a sport that requires a bucketload of commitment. More than me cycling, since it is only me that has to get out of bed. An eight requires 8 rowers, a cox and a coach to get out of bed on time and be at training on time for every single training session. A football team can train with a few members missing. A boat crew is screwed if one person fails to show.

It's why I always think of it as one of the ultimate teamwork and commitment sports.

Heavy firepower?

Another week, another pile of steaming drivel from our local press.

I do not have a link to any of the articles, but at least two papers this week said that our diggers in Afghanistan have been using their heaviest firepower yet - some 81mm mortars.

Heavy firepower - pffft!

When I was a chocko, we had a couple of these in our Regiment, and they were assigned to the support platoon, which got all the heavy stuff like the mortars and the anti-tank weapons. It was heavy in the sense that if you had to carry it, it weighed a tonne. But it was "man portable", which essentially means some poor bastard trudging along with a big lump of stuff being carried in the least uncomfortable manner.

There was no comfortable way to carry it - it was simply a matter of lugging it in a manner which hurt the least.

We never really got to use the mortars, the excuse being that we did not have enough grunts to properly fill out our infantry companies, so there was no point in having a support platoon as well.

I think the real reason is because that Fat Bastard Beasley was Defence Fuckup at the time, and we didn't have any money for shooting off training rounds, let alone the real thing.

Anyway, I would not be describing them as a heavy weapon. Big arsed artillery of the 155mm range? Yes, that's heavy. 500lb or 1000lb bombs? That's heavy. An 81mm mortar is just a grenade launcher that packs a bit more punch and shoots a bit further.

I wonder if there is a single working journalist in this country today who has ever had any connection, however, tenuous, with the military.

Doubt it.

Why Abbotsford?

Why has David Hicks decided to pitch his tent in Abbotsford?

Because it is a lovely, whitebread kind of place.

He can't live in the East - it's full of Jews. I don't think he'd be too happy living in Vaucluse, which a friend of mine once described as "Vaujews". I'd live there - I'd love to live there, but I don't think he'd want to be surrounded by yarmulkes.

He can't go much further west than here, because then he would hit Auburn and places like that, and given that he is a prolapsed carpet head-banger, he'd have his throat slit faster than a goat at a feast. So the western suburbs are out.

The north shore would be a bit too la-di-da for David. It's full of merchant bankers, lawyers, stockbrokers and blonde women in pink jumpers driving a Volvo with a labrador in the back. I doubt a working class hick would be comfortable there. He'd have to understand what a latte is for starters.

The inner city would probably be a turn-off as well. I can't see him hanging around with all the fags and trannies in Darlinghurst and Paddington, and I don't think his ex-religion would endear him to the lesbians of Newtown.

I don't know what he makes of the Chinese. If he is as much of a white supremacist as I think he is, I doubt he would want to live in town, since it is wall to wall Asian students. No chow mein for David.

So it has to be the inner west. Abbotsford is a good choice for any KKK member, since it is about as white and non-Jewish a suburb as you can think of, and unlike say Cronulla, it is unlikely to contain any journalists.

I ride through Abbotsford a lot, and I ride through the back streets quite regularly (you do that kind of thing on a bike - you just go, "Hey, I wonder what's down there?", and take a left turn and go and stooge around). I have an idea of what Abottsford looks like in terms of it's racial makeup, and I can tell you that it is white, white, white. There is not a pair of slitty eyes or a patch of darkened skin to be seen. There are plenty of wogs (it is next to Five Wog after all), but there are nowhere near as many of them as in our suburb next door.

In short, I think he will be very relaxed and comfortable there.

Living next door to David

I do not have David Hicks as a neighbour, but he's reasonably close. According to the SMH, he is living just up the road in Abbotsford. That's the suburb next to ours, and I ride through there a couple of times a day.

Two interesting snippets from the sotry.

1. He is reporting to a police station. Given that ours is the closest, it would make sense for him to drop in here. That means I might bump into him on the way to the supermarket, since Plod are right next door to our local supermarket.
2. He has applied for a learners permit. Now that really worries me, as our quiet suburb is a favourite with driving instructors as a place for teaching the hopeless how to drive. Mixing it up with learner drivers is always a challenge, but now I have to be prepared to ride with someone who is short, mad, stupid and suicidal - and in charge of a vehicle.
   

Note to self - do not give the finger to any learner drivers for a while.

Is he planning to become our first VBIED?

Clover and her magnificent stupidity

If you happen to hear any news from NSW, you might be aware that we are lumbered with a putrefying albatros of a government. It has the Midas touch - in reverse. Everything it touches turns to shit. Health, education, little abused kiddies, transport and now property development.

And we are stuck with them for another 3 years, because Clover Moore, in a spark of absolute stupidity, strong armed a former government into legislating fixed four year terms.

Clover's finest hour is called the "Charter of reform of government", and she foisted it on us along with two other independents - Tony Windsor and Peter McDonald.

May all three of them rot in hell.

I wonder how long it will be before the media (especially the Daily Telegraph) picks up on the fact that this useless pack of nuf-nufs is essentially unremoveable and decides to rip into our three holier-than-thou independents?

Probably forever.

Zoom zoom - not

My Australian Cyclist magazine finally arrived this week, bearing within it a story comparing six different types of bikes - racers, hybrids, mountain bikes and a flat bar road bike.

Two things really leapt out at me from the comparison - the enormous difference that tyres can make with cycling, and the fact that they actually used the bikes for an extended period and averaged out the time for a standard commute on each type of bike.

Times ranged from 32 minutes on a racing bike to 41 minutes on a hybrid.

I have always wondered how much longer it takes those plodding mountain and hybrid bike riders that I pass each day to get to and from work. Now I know - about 30% longer than me. I just don't have the personality that allows me to sit back and watch the world go by - I want to thrash things along as fast as they will go, even if it kills me.

One thing that was mentioned about the hybrid was how the relaxed riding position didn't really allow you to attack the pedals, so the only thing to do was to relax and potter along at about half normal speed.

That would kill me.

Another interesting point was that the racing bikes were really too quick for most bike paths. I've often wondered that - there is a bike path along a canal near Leichhardt and it's a lovely ride, but the path is narrow, it meanders through the trees and it cuts through a number of playgrounds, so there are always young kids tottering across the path without looking. Paths like that are simply not designed with road bikes in mind - especially when your idea of cruising is to wind it out to warp 9 and hammer it until the lungs collapse. I've been riding along that path every now and then for three years, and I have never considered until now that the engineers were a bunch of pillocks. What is the point of a bike path that is not suitable for a reasonably fast commute?

Would road engineers build a freeway that could only be driven on at 50kmh? (Well, given the way we are going with creeping stupidity in every aspect of our lives, it might be possible in the future).

The best thing about the comparison is that it made me happy with the choice that I made four years ago to get a road bike. It suits my temperament down to the ground.

The thing is though, when I was coming home on Friday afternoon, I ended up being collected into a pack of at least a dozen riders as we were leaving town. I was sitting at a red light when bikes just started to collect around me, like fluff gathering on your favourite shirt in the dryer. Before I knew it, I was surrounded by a pack.

We all took off at the green, and the bunch stayed together on the first downhill section and didn't lose cohesion as we zipped through Pyrmont. But boy, did it fall apart as soon as we hit the Anzac bridge approach, which is pretty steep. The road bikes tore up the hill at the front of the pack, leaving the mountain and other bikes way behind. I managed to hang with the pack for all of 100 metres, and then I was left behind, struggling up the hill with the road bikes ahead of me and the mountain bikes behind. Left in no mans land.

I bet the buggers ahead of me didn't ride on the wet days like I did, so they were probably fresh as daisies, whilst I was knackered after a tough week.

Any excuse will do in the end.