Guess what this came out of

Here it is, with the flash turned on. Guessed yet?











It came out of my mixmaster. It's a roll of chocolate chip mix. You make the mix and then roll it into a long turd, wrap it in gladwrap and chill it for an hour in the fridge. You then slice off rounds about 1.5cm thick and bake for 12 minutes at 175 degrees.

Absolutely delicious. From a Stephanie Alexander cook book.

If you thought differently, you are either one sick puppy, or German.

Angela D'Amore MP - how symbolic

Angela and her minions were handing out balloons today, so I grabbed one for Monkey. He had just exploded a Westpac balloon, so I was desperate for something to molify him.

"The results" here are of course that she has succesfully managed to inflate a balloon and tie it off without leaks. A big achievement - possibly the most she has achieved in her time as the local MP.


I ran into one of her Labor party fellow travellers a short time later and asked him if he would be getting a similar balloon for his kids.

The answer was a very quiet, "Not fucking likely", for his kids were standing nearby and neither of us likes mouthing off in front of the impressionable ones. He didn't mind saying "fuck" in front of them - he just didn't want to say the words "Angela D'Amore".

He did comment that the balloon was the wrong colour for her - it should have been red. Conservatives like me might not like her that much, but her fellow party members absolutely fucking loathe her. If John Howard were to pay a visit on the same night that she organised a free piss up with strippers, unlimited prawns, beer and a big screen TV showing the footy, most of the Labor party members would be lining up on the other side of the suburb to shake Howard's hand.

I also spotted our Mayor just down the street. He's a Labor man through and through, and he should be sitting in Parliament instead of her. He glanced up the street at Angela's office, saw that she had arrived to press the flesh, so he crossed the road and walked up the other side. There's no love lost there.

Fools with Fiats

Today was the biggest day of the year in Five Wog - an annual festival called Ferragosto. I think that it means "day of garlic breath", although it could also be the patron saint of white string singlets. The festival involves closing off about half a kilometre of street and then filling it with 10 types of tacky, tacky stalls. I had the worst hot dog since... since... since a trip to the footy a few years ago. But I also had some good gellato, and found that the shop that makes it is within easy walking distance of home.

A festival like this always brings out the wogs in droves. It's almost as bad as a World Cup soccer match against a country like Brazil or Namibia. Maybe not Namibia. One sign of that is a street full of wacky Fiats. I had no idea that of the tens of thousands of Fiats that we imported during the 1970's that as many as a dozen across the whole country would still be in working order and not rusted into seven or more major bits.


The festival always rams one thing home - how shockingly bad our roads are. This is the one time of the year when pedestrians can walk down the street, and it is not an experience that I would recommend. I'm sure the Ambulance service brought in a few buses to take away the people with rolled ankles from all the pot holes and ditches in the tarmac.

I don't know if these Fiat's made it here under their own steam or not, but I am sure that several roads will be blocked on the way home tonight whilst the owners of broken down Fiat's await a tow truck.

Apparently a new statue was unveiled on Friday to commemorate Ferragosto. I saw it when it was still under wraps - the tarp was at least 20 or 30 feet high.

I am not sure why we need a garlic statue that big around here.

Gillard ices kiddies

The Daily Telegraph has kindly drawn to my attention the fact that kiddies at Balmain Public School are freezing their nads off because the outdated electrical system at the school can support heaters or computers, but not both.

That's an interesting choice. I give you heating, or I give you death by computer-induced pneumonia. Way to go, Julia. You really thought that one through.

Personally, I reckon the problem could be overcome by installing large human-driven power generating systems, like the wheel that Conan pushed as a kid in Conan the Barbarian. Pushing that wheel was the reason why Conan grew up big and strong. The kiddies in the photo in the Tele all look a bit aenemic, so a bit of exercise pushing a big wheel around to produce power for the computers would have the advantages of keeping them warm and encouraging them to grow up to look like this:


I guess the alternative is obesity. You don't hear about fat kids complaining about being cold much. Then again, if I was faced with the choice of running into a present day skinny Balmain junkie off his nut on crystal meth, or a future Balmain junkie (like the above) off his nut on crystal meth, I think I'd prefer that we stuffed the kids full of hot chips with mayonaise on top in order to keep them warm.

Heat would have been a complete luxury at the rather austere boarding school that I attended. We were allowed to undo our top buttons and loosen our ties when the temperature hit 40 degrees in the classrooms, and we kept warm in winter by playing an awful lot of sport. We didn't have time to get cold.

We even had to put up with cold showers, unless we were in year 11 or 12. The way our boarding house operated was that the bell to get out of bed went off at 7am. At that point, there was a run for the showers. We had two lots of showers - one at each end of the boarding house, and the showers consisted of a single open room with 5 shower heads dotted around the walls. One stood around in a "waiting area" just outside the showers, wrapped in a towel, waiting for your turn for a shower. As there were about 70 kids in our boarding house, and 10 showers, one could wait a while. Especially since one shower was known as the "power shower" - ie, it usually produced no more than a trickle of water.

The thing is, the boiler was just not big enough for 70 kids to all get a hot shower. It would last about 20 minutes, and that was it. I suspect it was all part of a cunning plan to ensure that we were induced to be showered and dressed and ready for breakfast in record time. The reason the younger kids might end up with a cold shower is that the youngest always went last. They were last in line for breakfast. Last in line for lunch. Last in line for dinner, and last in line for hot showers. The rule was that older kids just pushed in front, and everyone respected it. Some newly arrived year 8's didn't appreciate that rule at the start of the year, but the odd black eye usually sorted them out.

So the younger kids would all be waiting at the doors to the dorms at 6.58am, waiting for the bell to go - kind of like a running of the bulls, but without the bulls - and the doors would fly open at 7am and they would dash for the showers, trying to get in first, or at least be first in line. Some dorms had a rule that you had to wait in bed, so beds nearest the door were always sought after at the start of the year (I think the first to arrive at the start of the school year got to select their bed). The doors were made of thin plywood, and I remember the odd kid being too slow to turn the door handle as they ran for the door, and they would end up smashing partway through the door. We were always having doors repaired.

The downside of a bed near the door was that if a dorm raid took place, you were always the first to cop a pillow in the face or a head covered in shaving cream, or finding yourself lying on the cold lino floor with your now upside down bed sitting on top of you.

The older kids would lazily rise a few minutes later and saunter out to the showers, pushing to the front of the queue. Some might simply walk into the showers and throw a younger kid out, but most had the grace to give you a 10 second warning to wash the soap off before tossing you out.

The kids these days have it soft. Pussies.

The old and the new

Two railway bridges side by side, somewhere out towards Meadowbank (I think - my geographic knowledge of western Sydney is pretty patchy. I generally point towards the Blue Mountains and say, "There be bogans" when people ask me what is out there).

The bridge on the left, as you might hope, has not carried railway traffic for many a year. It looks worse close up than it does in this photo. It's been converted into a bike/pedestrian bridge, and I now wish that I hadn't been underneath for a look. It always feels pretty creaky when I ride over it, and I'll now worry that I'll go crashing through the boards Indiana Jones style one day.

Visiting a housing commission area

Leichhardt hosts one of the less notorious housing commission developments in Sydney - an area called Orange Grove. As is typical of these developments, there are no orange trees. There are no groves for that matter - except perhaps groves of weeds. The only orange thing in the entire area is this orange mechanical contraption, which will presumably be used shortly to demolish some of the apartment blocks. As you can see here, several blocks have been boarded up and fenced off, and although I don't have a clue as to what is planned, I hope they will be running bulldozers through the area until there is nothing left.




The Orange Grove "estate" consists of several parallel streets of apartment blocks like these, and only about 1/3 of them seem to be slated for demolition or redevelopment. The rest are still occupied. As far as I can tell, the occupants all wear tracksuit pants of some description, don't own a pair of leather, lace-up shoes, smoke, think a rats tail is the perfect adornment for a 4 year old child and prefer to spend their days slop-slopping around in ugg boots.


The hilarious thing about this development (sorry, grove) is the limited amount of parking. I guess when the place was designed in the 1960's, being poor meant not owning a car. It probably also meant not owning a TV, and being lucky to own a small, 3rd hand fridge. Furniture would have been pretty sparse as well, and might have been provided by a charity. Eating out would have been having a serve of fish and chips once a month as a treat. Or an icecream.

Now of course the place is overrun with late model cars, and I presume being poor means having an XBox rather than an Xbox 360, and having to put up with a flat screen TV of less than 100cm across.

Lizards

A simple test of the 12x zoom on my Canon Ixus, when mated with the stabilising influence of a badly made Chinese piece of crap tripod.

Our garden is normally full of lizards, but as soon as I pulled the camera out, they all ran away. Maybe they thought the tripod was some sort of alien anal probe. Only this brave little sucker stuck around for some happy snaps.

Not bad for a 12x digital zoom.

For Bruce - some canals

Five Wog is not the Venice of the West.

But look in the bottom left hand corner - is that another shopping trolley that I spy?



Bruce - this is the cricket oval at Timbrell Park you were thinking of.


And the cricket nets.


This is the canal beside Timbrell Park - currently undergoing a cleanup.




Like I said, it ain't the Venice of the West.

More on railway carparks

Here are three aerial photos of the carparks at Meadowbank Railway station and Concord Hospital. I have not changed the scale when moving from one photo to another, so the size of the carparks is directly comparable.

The first is the railway carpark - it is in the middle of the photo just below the yellow lines.

Here is Concord Hospital and its carpark.

I tried cutting and pasting the railway carpark into the hospital carpark - with my inexact non-photoshop software tools, I found that it would go in roughly 35 times.

I am sure though that if you told the nurses to catch a train home at 2am, they'd lock you up in one of the mental wards.

Another sound reason why cars rule the planet, and those that think otherwise should visit Concord for a refill on their medication.

Yes! Another sunken shopping trolley photo!

Another trolley in another canal - the trolley is in the right hand corner.


This was taken near the Bones Cafe, Timbrell Park.

Is Leichhardt Council packed with loony lefties?

Decide for yourself.

International Day of Mourning.

Pffft.

Another symbol for grocerychoice

I just tried to find the Grocery Watch website, only to find that the stupid bastards have decided to call it "grocerychoice" instead.

You might at this point be asking, "Why do you have so many photos of shopping trolleys sitting in bodies of water"?

I don't know. I just like to take photos of shopping trolleys in stupid places, like this one in the middle of the Bay at Rodd Point - this is where our Olympic rowers train. When I rowed, I caught quite a few crabs, but I hope none of our rowers ever caught a trolley like this one.

I typed in our postcode and had a look at the results from grocerychoice.

What a pile of crap.

The site ignores the fact that we have a vibrant shopping strip here in Five Wog - we have five butchers on the main drag, and until recently, two fruit shops (the lease on one expired and he is in the process of setting up in another location just up the road). We also have two excellent bakers (both Vietnamese). Just down the road are the Flemington Markets, which are far and away the cheapest place to buy fruit and veg in Sydney. Over in Glebe, not 10 minutes away, we have an excellent wholesale butcher who charges at least 25% less than the average supermarket for better quality meat.

I know the internet is a great thing, but for the purpose of monitoring grocery prices, it is a pile of steaming crap.

Rain of stink

These two photos were taken at Rhodes, where a fancy series of apartment complexes are being built along the water. The site is horribly contaminated with all sorts of nasty industrial wastes, so there is a processing plant going full tilt there in an attempt to clean the place up.

The plant is visible for miles around as it gives off a column of steam.

Well, it looks like steam from a distance.

I made the mistake of riding under it last week, and I can tell you, it ain't distilled water. A few drops of something landed on me as I went under the cloud of "steam", and whilst they didn't burn a hole straight through my lycra clothing and then through my arms and out the other side, it did have a certain reek to it.

A nasty chemical reek.

I have been trying to work out what the smell is all week, but I can't place it. I have smelt it before, but I can't figure out where or when. It's not an "off" odour like rotting sheep or dams of liquid pigshit, and it's not a "clean" chemical smell like household cleaners. It's kind of oily and nasty - something that really catches on the back of the throat. Maybe it's what an oil refinery smells like - I might have to ride down to Botany to see if I can smell something like it there.

Hang on, no I won't. I have got no fucking interest whatsoever in riding through a haze of chemical crap.

I don't know how the residents put up with it - people live just across the road from this. I'd be in MOPP 4 gear if I was them.

Look out for stories in a few years time about three headed puppies and the like.

Where did Hoover go?

This is some sort of old, abandoned Hoover plant over in Ryde. It's a great spot - this looks right over the water, and expensive apartments are being built on the banks of the river opposite. Other old industrial sites next door have been flattened and turned into flash apartments.

I thought about sneaking in through an open roller door to have a look around inside, but thought better of it. The place is probably haunted by prototype vacuum cleaners that never made it into production.

Baking bloodnuts

Oops, that should read "baking ginger cookies", which is kind of the same thing. I bought a balanced set of books the other day - one was "Running the war in Iraq", which does not appear to be listed on Amazon, and another was a Marie Claire cookbook. As I was plowing my way through Iraq, J flicked through the cookbook and left a series of sticky notes attached to various pages. It's funny how she got through 9 months of pregnancy with hardly any cravings, but now that the little fellow has arrived, she suddenly wants all sorts of things.

Last week, I was baking a chocolate cake with espresso syrup. That was excellent. Then there was a request for a lemon curd cake, which I have not delivered on yet. But I could deliver on ginger snaps (I guess the term "gingernut" is trademarked), and have been churning out a batch every second day since we got the book.

I have been trying to discover how much ginger in a ginger biscuit is too much ginger. The recipe wants 1 tablespoon of glace ginger - I am up to triple that, with not ill effects on the bikkies.

I am not much of a cookie baker by the way. My last effort looked like badly flattened dog turds.

"Running the war in Iraq", by Major General Jim Molan, is a good read by the way. Hat tip to Habib - his bodyguard didn't like the idea of the General carting a rifle around. It made them nervous! Like I said, get yourself a Webley and a moustache.

Can public transport save the planet?

I seriously fucking doubt it.

Here is the customer carpark at Meadowbank Railway station - this is it. Space for 20 cars, if you are lucky. A double deck 8 car train seats something like 800 passengers, and you can jam 2000 into one if you really want to. 20 car spaces, 2000 spots on a train (if you crush people in). Something does not add up.















Here we have one of the staff carparks at Concord Hospital. One of the car parks. This car park goes on forever. If you park in the back corner, you almost need to catch a bus to the entrance of the hospital.















Now this is a public hospital, owned and run by the NSW state government - the same people that own and run that railway station just up the road, the one with the pathetic number of car parking spaces.

You'd think that if the government was banging on about 'saving the planet' and other such malarky, they'd be doing their utmost to encourage people to get to work by any means other than a car. If they really meant what they were saying, then all departments would have understood the message, and would be doing their utmost to get their staff and customers to not drive to their place of employment or where they get served.

If they really meant it, the railway station would have a carpark as big as Concord Hospital, and the hospital would have one the size of the current railway carpark. (Please, don't ever fucking allow that to happen. I do not ever want to catch a train to and from hospital).

Concord Hospital by the way has a large loonie bin wing. Aren't you happy to know that all those mental patients seeking treatment at Concord drove their cars there? That in itself kind of explains half the problems with idiot drivers in Sydney......

Can't give them away

Spotted this in a back alley today - what appears to be a TV in perfect working order, put out on the kerb for anyone who wants it.


We were in a similar situation last year - we had a TV about this size, and I had gotten sick of tripping over it every time I walked into the garage.

We tried giving it to a friend's daughter, who was at Uni, but it turned out she had a better TV than we did.

We tried numerous other friends, thinking they might want a second or third TV, but all turned their nose up at it.

We eventually handed it over to St Vincents, and I reckon it is still sitting in their shop - even the "poor" would be insulted at the thought of watching a TV with a cathode ray tube in it.

How many cubic miles of landfill are going to be gobbled up over the next few years as everyone dumps their old CRT TV's? It used to be that you could offload your old TV to a 2nd hand shop or a poor relation, but who wants to do that these days when you can buy a small flat screen job for the cost of a few slabs of beer?

GroceryWatch - as useful as....

........an almost completely submerged and totally rusted shopping trolley dumped in a toxic, slime filled canal. Useful only to pelicans that want to stand somewhere whilst they take a crap.

Woin! Woin! Help, woi're sinking! Woin! Woi're goin' down! Wot do we do, Woin?

Asleep at the wheel

This story has nothing to do with Kevin Rudd.

Or Woin Swan.

It actually has to do with someone asleep at the wheel.

I was doing my daily ride today when I pulled up at a set of lights. There were 3 cars in front of me, and I don't believe in doing the old "weave the bike through the traffic to get to the front trick" when it is uncalled for - I just take my place in the queue at the lights and wait for them to go green.

Well, the lights soon went green, and the first two cars took off and went through the intersection. The lights at the corner in question are on very short rotation, so it is unusual for more than 5 or 6 cars to make it through, but the car in front of me just refused to budge.

Not much point in me ringing my bell at a time like that, since no driver is ever likely to hear it. I waited for the woman behind me to start tooting, but I guess she was too polite, or was worried that I would take offense and smash her windscreen with a padlock on the end of a chain.

Not that I ever carry a padlock on a chain, but you never can tell when some goose on a pushbike is likely to go psycho and start breaking glass up and down the street.

Woops, better stick to the story. The lights went red, and the car in front still sat there. I tried peering in through the back windscreen to see if the driver was distracted by yacking on the phone, but there was no sign of that. He just sat there.

So I used the advantage of the bike and went around him. Once in front, I looked back to see what was going on.

His head was down - he was fast asleep.

I pondered what to do - he looked about 75 years old, so the thought suddenly occured to me that he might be dead, or in a coma or having a heart attack or any of those things; but he suddenly started and sat up and realised where he was. At that point, I was looking over his car and the woman in the car behind and doing the old shoulder-shrug thing at her; as in "I have no idea what this bloke is up to, and I don't know what to do next".

Thankfully, he didn't decide to ram the accelerator to the floor at that point, since I had nowhere to go. He just sat up and looked very, very confused.

It took me all of 30 seconds to start considering what I would have done if he didn't wake up when the lights next went green. I'd start by turning around, going back and knocking on his window, then working through the old checklist of how to deal with someone that is unconcious and possibly not breathing. Hell, it's nearly 20 years since I last did the old ABC on a plastic dummy next to the pool - would I be better off spending my time calling an ambulance or trying to do resus?

Geez, I'm glad it didn't come to that. Imagine having to yank an old bloke out of a car at a busy intersection in order to perform mouth to mouth and all of that.

What got me is how long it took me to mentally change gears from, "I am out for a pleasurable ride" to "I have to stop and assist this old dude who might be dying". At least I managed to change gears. All the people around me seemed to be stuck in the "I'm out shopping" gear, and showed no signs of even considering changing into "good samaritan" gear for any reason whatsoever.

Reba the arse-limpet

Is there a German word for "arse-limpet"? The krauts always seem to have a great word for every occasion. Shnickeltwatinboogen, or something to that effect.

Reba Meagher has really dropped herself in it this time. Government drivers never talk. Ever. About anything. They are your veritable clams. They might gossip amongst themselves in their idle moments, but talking to the media would be numbers 1, 2 and 3 on the list of Top Things You Don't Do In This Job.

I have taken the odd ride in a commonwealth car, as they used to be known. Back then, they used to look like this. Now that was a car. They used to black too - don't know when the decision was made to start painting them white. The dashboards also came equiped with the most fantastic knobs and levers - the sorts of levers you just don't get in cars these days.

Now it has been a long time since I went for a ride in one - most of you probably weren't even born back then (apart from you, Kae). But the code of silence - omerta even - was a big thing amongst the drivers.

They had to put up with all sorts of behaviour from MPs who ranged from being gracious, polite types who'd sit up front and chat about the driver's family and so on, down to the arrogant, drunken pond scum who'd sit up the back and treat the driver like shit. The drivers know everything about their passengers. They get to listen in on all sorts of dirt. They take people to locations that the passengers would hate anyone else to know about - like their girlfriend's house for instance. For all I know, they might witness a bit of coke-snorting and that sort of thing from time to time.

But they never talk.

Their lips are sealed.

Reba must be a right cow for this story to hit the press. You'd really have to press every wrong button, including the big red one that says "DO NOT PRESS THIS BUTTON" in order for a story to make it into the media. You'd also have to press those buttons over a period of time - things like this just don't pop up out of nowhere.

When the drivers turn on you, you know the government is doomed. Next journey for Reba will be a one way trip to an employment agency.

Update

You know, I'm probably in trouble with some secret chauffeurs society for even mentioning that I have ridden in a commonwealth car.

And how's this from the story - Reba tries to fob it off by blaming one of her staff for not telling the driver he was not required.

What type of person gets on the turps and then says to one of their staff, "Oh, and tell the driver he can go home"? If it was me, I would have rung the driver, or if I didn't have their number, rung the despatch centre and told them that the driver could knock off for the night. How lazy and stuck up can someone get?

And all this from a Labor politician, someone who is supposed to be looking out for the battlers, like our driver.

Some people have no class, grace or manners.

Another reason why I missed seeing Penny Wong last week

I needed to find out exactly where the Petersham RSL actually was. I have a rough idea where Petersham is (having been to the Oxford Tavern once or twice), but had no idea where the RSL was. So I brought up this page and then clicked on "map".


I bet someone at Telstra had a worse night than me.

How do you lose a turtle?

When I was out shopping today, a leaflet blew onto my foot. It read:

"Teacher from AAA public school has lost their turtle"

"Please call 1234 5678 if you find it".

How in God's name do you lose a turtle? I can understand a rabbit bolting out the door, but a turtle?

We do have a new Chinese restaurant around the corner though.........

Have street signs got a future?

On my recent wanderings, I noticed a Council worker taking down old streets signs and replacing them with new ones. Our Council is an amalgamation of two other Councils, and I suppose someone got sick of looking at the old Council names on the signs.

I have no idea how much this is costing us ratepayers, and I don't want to know.

But it did get me thinking about the utility of street signs. They've done fantastic service for a long time, but are they now redundant as the world moves from a mapbook to GPS? In a few years time, most cars will have a GPS, and GPS will probably be a common feature in most mobile phones. It might even go Dick Tracey and start appearing in watches (assuming people continue to wear watches and don't just start using their phone as a clock - after all, the original watch was a pocket watch).

I have been considering whether to get a GPS mount for my bike handlebars, but can't find one that fits a pushbike. The GPS that I have in the car can be mounted on a motorbike, but not a pushbike, and I can't justify the expense of buying a separate, bike-specific GPS just yet.

That day will come - that I am sure of. It might be a year or two down the road though.

So, does anyone care to place a bet as to when Councils will give up on erecting or replacing street signs, or will they just continue to do it forever because "that's just the way we've always done it"?

SMH confuses APC with howitzer

Although the SMH thinks so, this is not an APC - not with that enormous cannon poking out of the top.

It is not designed to carry infantry into combat, which is really the whole idea of an armoured personnel carrier. This is an armoured bit of artillery.

Update - I'm not the only one on the interweb asking that question. Turns out that it is a Czech built howitzer.

Pics on youtube.

This clip gives the average numbskull a good idea that they are a big shooty cannon thing, not a carry people around thing (apologies to the Disident Frogman).

Frankly, if you can't tell the difference between the two, then you really shouldn't be reporting on the topic at hand.

It took me less than 10 minutes and a bit of Google bashing to get the answer.

Nobody shops in the land of Far, Far Away

I am so confused. On the one hand, my local Council tells me to shop locally. It's supposed to be good for the local economy, good for the environment and presumably helps cut down on traffic.

On the other hand, I am castigated by a silly cow in the Daily Telegraph for being too lazy to drive more than 2km to a supermarket.

That is borne out by the discovery that almost 70 per cent of those living in inner metropolitan areas, and 58 per cent of shoppers in outer metropolitan areas, travel less than 2km to do their shopping.

Supermarket executives understand our laziness and take advantage of it.

Ever heard of the expression "time is money"? Travelling to a more distant supermarket not only consumes more petrol - it consumes that precious commodity that is constantly running out for all of us - time. I am not lazy when I shop locally - I am simply making a rational choice given my circumstances.

Aldi is the cheapest place to shop and Coles is cheaper in 52 of the 61 regions surveyed around Australia.

But even though we know it is more expensive, more shoppers use Woolworths stores to do their grocery shopping - 30 per cent compared with Coles’ 25 per cent and Aldi’s 6 per cent.

Aldi is cheaper because it sells shit. When Aldi first opened in NSW, I put on my pith helmet and went and did an anthropological expedition to their closest store to me.

I didn't buy a single thing.

Not one of their products appealed to me. Cheap and nasty jam. Awful looking carrots. Mutant tomatoes. Toilet paper from hell - even the stuff that we had in boarding school for bum wiping was better than the Aldi offering.

Besides, how much home cooking does the average family do these days? How many meals are prepared at home, and how many are either eaten away from home (the office working buying a sandwich for lunch) or take away/home delivery for dinner? Given that the average family are spending more and more money on take away food, the best thing Woin could do is compare the price of Chicken Tikka Masala, Fried Rice and Red Beef Curry between suburbs.

Even then, price is not always a factor. We have tried take away from every Thai restaurant that does home delivery in our area, and we have settled on one and it is not the cheapest. Convenience is not even a factor - they all take about the same amount of time to get the food to our door. The winner is the one offering the best quality, even if they are 10-15% more expensive than the next best restaurant.

I am rich enough to no longer having to put up with eating shit.

How long until GroceryWatch sinks from sight?

Thanks to Andrew Bolt, I get to read this article by Dennis Shanahan from The Aus today.


I completely agree with Dennis. I'm like him. I even buy books on shopping - I can recommend The Science of Shopping: Why We Buy by Paco Underhill. Woin Swan could learn a lot about the behaviour of shoppers in grocery stores if he took the time to buy it and read it. (You can too - it's a great read. It is one of the more frequently "borrowed" books from my library. And no, you can't have it. Get your own copy).

I have lived and shopped in many places, and in the end, the primary driver of where I shop is convenience. Ever heard of that old real estate expression, "location, location, location"? Well, it certainly applies to me. I live within a 10 minute drive of 4 major supermarkets, and if I stretch the drive to 15 minutes, I can add at least 2 more.

But do I hop in my car and drive down the road to Franklins in Drummoyne because their Coon cheese is on sale this week?

Get off the grass. I walk to my local supermarket, as I do almost every single day, and buy what we need from there.

I don't care if they are more expensive. My shopping trolley contains two types of items - core items and non-core items. If the basket is looking too expensive, I ditch some of the non-core items. That's how I keep the weekly shopping budget under control. I can save more money by dumping a packet of chocolate chip cookies that we don't really need than by getting in the car and driving to another supermarket. If we went to the cheaper supermarket, we'd probably spend the same amount overall because the non-core items, the treats, would be left back in. Or I'd trade up to a better brand of ice-cream.

GroceryWatch is a complete non-starter for me. Partly because when I am looking for a place to live, I look for somewhere that is within walking distance of the local shops. There are very few locations in Australia where you can find two big supermarkets within walking distance of each other. Two that I can think of are Bondi Junction and Cremorne (both places where I have lived).

And guess what? Even though I had two supermarkets within a short walk from several of my old abodes, I always shopped at the one that was more convenient. In Cremorne, there is a Woolies and a Coles. The Woolies is reputed to be the better of the two - it is even famous as a pickup joint (single people with bananas in their trolley are on the prowl), but I still chose to shop at Coles because it was right next to the bus stop that I alighted from on my way home.

Does Woin understand any of this? Or is he lying underneath that trolley in the photo above, desperately trying to keep it from sinking without a trace?

Almost a memorial once

It's strange where life takes you. Back when I was a chocko grunt, some sculptor friends of my parents were putting in a proposal to do the Australian Army National Memorial.

the central focus of the memorial is two bronze figures representing Australian soldiers facing east towards the rising sun. The figures stand on a raised podium paved in a radial pattern, which refers to the Army insignia.

Seven cylindrical pillars recall the seven major conflicts in which the Australian Army has been involved in the twentieth century. The pillars stand in water, reminding the visitor of the long sea journeys involved in all Australian campaigns.

They asked me in passing if I could pose for them, since I was the only "digger" that they knew. As it turns out, I never did. Don't know why - it was a long time ago now. Probably too lazy to get out of bed (I was a student after all). And it's not like I'd served in any conflicts, or even been overseas on a peacekeeping mission or anything like that.

But if I had posed, these figures would not be wearing slouch hats. They'd have been wearing a giggle hat, and their sleeves would have been rolled down, not up.

I've been to the memorial. I could go on and on about it, but I won't. It's a memorial, not an exact depiction of reality. I like it. I wouldn't change it, nit-picker that I am.

I just wish I'd made the effort to pose for the statues. That would be a cool thing to say to the kids every time we visit Canberra - "Let's see the memorial to Dad".

There's a lesson there for the kids - don't be so bloody lazy. Get out of bed and get cast in bronze.

The Wiggles guide to carbon trading

I hope I am not infringing all sorts of copyright law by dragging The Wiggles into this story, but I can't tell it without them.

Monkey was running around yesterday singing the Wiggles tune, "Yummy yummy, fruit salad", so I made a big bowl of fruit salad. Strawberries, mandarins, banana, grapes, kiwifruit - that sort of thing. As I peeled and sliced and chopped, he sat on a bar stool watching and singing "yummy, yummy - fruit salad" over and over again. In a nod to the rapacious multinational expansion of the colourful foursome, he even sang the Spanish version.

But when it came to eating the fruit salad, he turned up his nose and said "yukky".

Nothing could entice him to actually eat any of the fruit. Not even a single slice of strawberry.

That's what the Australian public is like at the moment - supposedly 86% are running around singing, "yummy, yummy - carbon trading" without any of them having a clue as to what it entails. They might be singing the words, but will they say "yukky" when faced with the end result?

The sly thing about this whole "carbon trading" spin-fest is that no one believes it will apply to them. I went to the supermarket yesterday, and I didn't come home with a six-pack of carbon, or a two litre bottle of carbon, or a tin of freshly picked carbon, or a 1 kilo packet of carbon. I turned on the heater, and instead of carbon coming out, out came heat.

"Carbon" is a wonderfully intangible thing to most people. My rubbish bin is not full of carbon. My pantry is not stocked with carbon. There is a bit in the fridge, in the form of fizz in a bottle of lemonade, but that's about the extent of it.

When I pump diesel into my car, I can see the thing that I am paying excise on. When I buy a bottle of wine, I can see (and drink) what I am paying duty on. When I get my pay packet, I can see where my hard earned readies went in income tax. But carbon? You might as well try to tax "happiness".

And that's the beauty of it - the GST was contentious because it was a tax on things that we can see and feel and wear and eat and drive and sit on etc etc. A carbon tax is a tax on...... what? I can get my head around a tax on a fax machine, but not a tax on carbon.

But I am still looking forward to the dummy spit when people stop singing "yummy yummy".

A site worth looking at

Carbon Sense. Get your reading glasses on.

What roll does a dictionary play at the SMH?

The sub-editors at the SMH must be having a really hard time of late. Or they had a big night out last night. Check out this story from the paper this morning:




















The driver of the Soarer lost control and crashed into a telegraph pole on Lenore Lane in Erskine Park, causing the car to role six times.

Dictionary.com gives this definition of role:

–noun

1.	a part or character played by an actor or actress.

2.	proper or customary function: the teacher's role in society.

3.	Sociology. the rights, obligations, and expected behavior patterns associated with a particular social status.

And this is the same paper that features an education correspondent on a regular basis. Or should that be edumacation?

Disney must be making a sequel to Cars - and this driver tried out for a part six times, only to be knocked back by a power pole.

Does this explain everything that is wrong about Gaza?

Death by mango, from the SMH.

I normally find Paul McGeough to be a complete pillock when it comes to reporting from the Middle East, but in this instance, he appears to have just stuck to writing it as it happened. Either that, or it started out as one of the usual SMH rants against the evils of our immigration detention system and the heartlessness of those that sit on our Migration Review Tribunals, and then someone went, "Hang on, let's think about this for a minute".

• One man murders another because he can't make change to buy a mango
• Instead of going to the Police or relying on the justice system, the murdered man's clan declares war on the murderer's clan, leaving 29 dead and 60 wounded (these people are all armed with AK-47's and RPG's remember)
  
• Businesses and homes are destroyed
  
• Women are locked up
• This is one of hundreds of clan fueds in Gaza
• They believe in dividing up Government ministries based on the "spoils" system

So, we have people that don't believe in the rule of law, have no concept of how a modern government should function, have complete disregard for what we would deem a workable system of justice and who kill each other at the drop of a hat, and then get the rest of their family to get involved in killing as well.

In short, a bunch of mysoginistic, neanderthal murders.

My question is this - what the fuck was Akram al-Masri doing in Australia in the first place? What fucking fruitloop thought it a good idea to let a knuckledragger like him into the country? I'm just glad he got booted when he did. These are not my idea of the sort of people that I want to live next door to.

Not hearing Penny Wong discuss CRAP

I have just returned from failing to get into the Petersham RSL to see Penny Wong, Minister for Destroying the Economy, er, Climate Change, talk about the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. There were 10 or so people queued up out the front, and the guard was turning people away as the room she was doing the talk in was already full.

Don't get your hopes up - the security guard told one complaining queue-er that, "It's not our fault - this is a small RSL. The person doing the booking should have found a bigger place".

The booking was of course made by Anthony Albanese - Minister for Infrastructure.

Oh, the irony in that. The Grand Poo-bah in charge of Australia's infrastructure can't even get the planning for a simple talk in the suburbs right. Would you trust this man to fix up the Pacific Highway?

Did I ride my bike there?

Hell no.

I drove the 4WD.

Just think on that Penny and Anthony - I made a wasted trip in my gas-guzzler (diesel-guzzler actually) because you couldn't get some simple infrastructure (room) sizing right. Oh woe, think of the planet! Think of the polar bears. Think of the fact that I am home in time to watch NCIS, even if it is a repeat.

[No baby fur seals were harmed in the making of this blog post].

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Update:

Why did I not ride my bike?

No bike lanes between here and there.

No secure bike parking at the RSL.

Really, really crap road surfaces (which is one reason why I have a 4WD).

Bad lighting - dangerous for cyclists.

In short, completely crap infrastructure for cycling. That's infrastructure, Mr Albanese. Do I need to spell it out for you?

Swanbourne beach - where nude people get shot at by the SAS

The title for this post is slightly misleading, but Swanbourne is an interesting spot in that some smart cookie decided to site the only nudist beach in Perth alongside the live firing range at Campbell Barracks, home to the SASR.

The sign in the link above brought back memories of being on both sides of the line - lying on the sand with my togs off, and visiting the barracks to borrow some radios from the SAS Q Store.

Why did I have my togs off? Well, back when I was a uni student, I dated a vegan greenie for a while, and one of the things that she liked to do was get her gear off and lie in the sun. I didn't do it very often - body surfing in the nude is just not my thing, and Swanbourne Beach never seemed to get good surf.

The reason I was sent to Campbell Barracks is that it was a given that all radios that we were issued in the Reserves were crap. They were all Vietnam War-vintage, and I guess more than a few of them might have been dragged through the swamps around Nui Dat. The batteries could explode if the drain holes clogged up, the handsets failed on a regular basis and the pins that connected the handset cord to the radio body were a complete dog - the only way to get any sort of connection was to lick your finger and spread saliva over the pins before screwing on the handset cord. They had less range than two tin cans and a bit of string - radio operators had to be adept at climbing trees in order to get reception. Those green piles of crap with aerials attached have long been replaced, and whilst I never got to use the new squawk boxes, I was pleased to see the old ones bite the dust.

Anyhoo, the only people in WA that had half reliable radios were the SAS, so whenever we did an exercise of any import, we borrowed a couple of theirs. An "exercise of import" was where the Minister for Lard, Kim Beasley was likely to show up and have a decko at our kit. It was important to show him stuff that was working, even though the best thing would have been to show him crap that didn't work so that he'd get the idea that we needed new kit that actually worked.

The military mind sometimes works in strange ways.

How did it feel to be wandering around the home of the SAS?

A bit wierd generally. They aren't a bunch of 10-foot tall supermen with arms like Arnie and a brace of pistols on their belt. They're very much like you and me, albeit much fitter. I know of two blokes from my Army Reserve regiment that did the SAS selection course, and one of them obviously made it through because my parents bumped into his parents in the street a year or two ago and they mentioned that he was in Afghanisatan doing nefarious things, and that he remembered serving with me.

With me! Bugger me, I thought it would be the other way around. I don't know if the other bloke made it through or not - I was backpacking around Europe when they were humping around nasty hills on selection, and I never discovered the outcome on my return.

Let me just say that it was a privilege to have shared a hootchie from time to time with such fine men, and I hope that they are safe and well, sitting on their mountaintop zapping Taliban. I'm sure that the nudist beach was put their deliberately so that as they sit there in their freezing abode, they can think back to all those jiggling ladies, and remember the freedoms that they are fighting for. The freedom to bask in the sun in the nude might seem like a frivilous freedom to be fighting for, but to me, it's as good as any.

The cloud mystery

Watch this. Short clip.

Doubt the ABC will ever show it.

Blogging one handed

My posting slowed down a bit last week because our family went from requiring 4 bikes to 5. J delivered a healthy 4.1kg boy the week before last, and both came home a week ago today. I am typing this with one hand as I am holding the little sleeping squishy fellow with my other hand. We now have three boys, which means keeping on top of the shopping and cooking and washing and shopping is a bit of an effort.

But don't they grow up fast? Junior is no longer a boy, and Monkey is no longer a baby.

And in case you are wondering how we will spend the baby bonus, I can assure you that a new TV is not on the cards. We definitely will need a bigger fridge in the next 6 months, but the rest will go on nappies and power bills and laundry powder and paying the council fee for a bigger bin and stuff like that.

Life is good.

Grocery Watch on the cheap

I just found a simple way to save the taxpayer $13 million per year - just check out the junk mail that turns up in the letter box over the weekend. We recieved 4 of the 5 supermarket brochures yesterday, and I picked up the 5th from a neighbours lawn. We have a good range of places to shop around here - Coles, Woolworths, Franklins and SupaBarn. All of them spell out the prices for the goods that they have on sale, and they update these handouts on a regular basis. Plus they deliver this information free to your doorstep!







Now, why didn't Woin Swan think of that?

How BHP lost a billion dollars - and the lessons for climate change

Those of us with long memories of the Australian business scene may remember when BHP blew a cool billion dollars on the purchase of Magma Copper. A friend of mine who worked for BHP in the 1990's related this story to me.

The Chairman (I think) was in his last year at the helm, was sitting on a huge pile of cash, and wanted to splash it around on a big deal in order to cement his name as a giant of the Australian business scene. He settled on Magma Copper as the object of his affection.

A young Business Analyst was called in to run the slide rule over the books and evaluate Magma as a possible purchase.

The young Business Analyst did just that, and reported back a few days later that the company was a dog, and should not be touched.

The Chairman sent him away to have a second look at the books.

The YBA did a more thorough investigation, and came back a week later to say that it was still a dog.

The Chairman sat him down and told him the following: "Look son, you don't get it. I want to buy this company. If you can't make the numbers add up, I'll find someone else that can".

The analyst, fearing for his job, returned a few days later with a glowing report.

BHP went on to blow a billion dollars, and the Chairman failed to make it into the pantheon of visionary Australian business leaders.

That story, which is all about ignoring data that doesn't fit your narrative, came back to me after reading these two papers (via Andrew Bolt) this morning.

I saw this sort of thing occur all the time at the government agency that I worked for some years ago - selective use of data happens all the time, but in this case, the consequences are way too serious for all of us to ignore the fact that it is skewing our perception of how the climate works.

Frangers help to kill Taliban

Private Anthony Carruthers from the Reconstruction Task Force patrols a vital rat line in which Taliban Extremists use as a supply route near Baluchi, Afghanistan.

Check out what is on the end of the barrel on his gat - is that what I think it is? If so, sensible man.

Good hunting.

SMH still using Iran's photoshopped missile photo

I grabbed this snapshot from the SMH webpage at 6.35am this morning - Sunday 3 August. That photo was exposed as a fake by LGF back on 9 July.


Why would they continue to use a fake photo? Any ideas?

-------------------

Update - the image is no longer on the front page of the SMH website, but they are using it in the "World" section.

Serving God and monny

I know I saw a photo of this on a blog earlier this week, but can't for the life of me remember where it was. One of the comments said that it was in Bellevue Hill, and another made mention of Photoshop.


Well, I just happened to be in the area this morning, and also had my camera handy, and I can confirm that no Photoshop was used in the original photo. It really does say monny.

The office of Climate Change is so behind the times

I had a quick look at the factsheets being promoted by the Office of Climate Change.

I clicked on this one:

What is causing the rainfall declines over southern Australia - ozone, climate variability or climate change?

That took me to a site call the Indian Ocean Climate Initiative.

Interestingly enough, nothing at that site seems to have been updated since 2005. Check this graph out for instance - notice the data ends in 2005.

Check out the dates on these publications:

• Partners agree in principle on membership and mission for stage 2 of IOCI, Bulletin No. 1, 23 May 2003
• IOCI sets path to unravelling change in Region's climate, Bulletin No. 2, 21 August 2003
• Bright start reported for the second stage of IOCI's Climate Program, Bulletin No. 3, 5 December 2003
• 18th Panel Meeting sets agenda to broaden dialogue on climate change, Bulletin No. 4, 15 May 2004
• Large weather patterns and climate trend - Path to better understanding, Bulletin No. 5, 17 August 2004
• IOCI reports key findings of recent research into south-western climate, Bulletin No. 6, 15 August 2005

Good to see that the most up to date information is being used to make the case for climate change.