Dress like an idiot day

Today was Ride to Work day. Or to put it in its modern parlance, it was "Ride2Work". Dunno why they didn't fiddle with it further to make it Ride2WerkX", or something stupid like that.

Days like today bring out the gumbies by the score. There are those of us who hop on our bikes and plod to and from work everyday with little fanfare and no fuss, and then there are those that ride one day of the year and expect the sort of accolades that are normally reserved for winning Le Tour.

The people I really hate are those that dress up for the occasion. Yes, OK, I dress up in lycra everyday, which is about the stupidest, most ridiculous thing a middle aged bloke can wear - but I was beaten hands down today by a bloke wearing purple fairy wings.

At least I think it was a bloke. (Is it sexist to say "it"?)

FFS, why do these clowns have to show up and turn things like this into a fucking circus? Can we please have one day of the year that is tool-free?

I was so disgusted, I left Hyde Park without collecting a free feed. And believe me, that is a major event. Me turning down food (free or otherwise) is like Craig Thomson knocking back a hooker.

Dopey pedestrian

The Pyrmont Bridge is infested with flag poles. They're not a problem if you watch where you're going.

Which is a problem for some dopes.

I was waiting at the lights tonight when two blokes came walking towards me. One was rabbiting on and gesticulating wildly. He walked smack bang into a flag pole - fast first. His mate didn't even notice.

Dopey then started telling his friend in a very agitated fashion how he had just walked into a stupid flag pole - when he walked straight into a second pole.

Don't ask me how he managed to do that twice without breaking something in his face.

Spring swings

Friday last week - just about froze to death because I didn't wear a jacket outside the office at lunch time.

Tuesday - 36 degrees on the way home.

Today - got the chills in the canyons of the CBD at 4pm.

What is it with this weather? It's like living in Melbourne......

My disturbingly competitive nature

The first few minutes of any ride are always taken relatively slowly as the muscles are given time to warm up. On most rides, the warmup takes place in suburban back streets where one rarely sees another cyclist. However, I did a longer ride recently where I was out on the main road within 2 minutes, and that road sees a lot of cycle traffic.

About a minute later, this bloke overtook me. He's a bit like me - a definite MAMIL (middle aged man in lycra) who is a bit wide across the beam. I hate it when I get overtaken - the lizard part of the brain kicks in and immediately starts screaming, "KILL THE INTERLOPER". I had to let him go though - I'd done no more than three minutes cycling by that point, so I wasn't going to put the hammer down to catch up. Over the next few minutes, I watched him creep away of me until he was perhaps 250 metres ahead - and as my speed slowly increased as the legs fired up, his gains became smaller and smaller.

Then he stopped pulling away.

And then I started gaining on him.

I took this photo when I finally caught up to him. About a minute later, we parted ways, so I never got to overtake him. I'm sure I'll go to my grave regretting that I never got in front.

More dominant left stats

I remembered to count three times in the last week.

42:21 anti-clockwise to clockwise

20:21  anti-clockwise to clockwise

52:10  anti-clockwise to clockwise

So far, the results have varied from 1:1 to 6:1, with the bulk of the stats supporting the proposition that people prefer to walk/cycle anti-clockwise around a loop.

I'll keep at it for a few more weeks.

Why Henry Ford paid higher wages

Interesting snippet of economic history from Tim Worstall:

Ford wanted to reduce turnover among his workers: he was getting through 50,000 a year in order to have a permanent establishment of 13,500. By paying double the wages of everyone else he reduced his training and recruitment bills. Higher wages actually led to a lower total wage bill.

Thought for the day

Regarding the offensive joke told at a CFMEU dinner about Tony Abbott's chief of staff:

Environment Minister Tony Burke’s office said he expressed outrage to other people on his table and left “shortly after”.

The dinner was in Canberra. Unless Burke has his own car in Canberra, he would have left in a taxi or ComCar (Commonwealth Car).

When you use either of those means of travel, you have to sign a docket. Perhaps the Minister could release his docket for his departure from the dinner, which would show the time he actually left? That way, we could determine what "shortly after" actually means.

Gillard, divorce and hiding assets from soon to be ex-wives

The Bunyip asks some interesting questions. Go read the whole thing.

"Prime Minister, at the time you were handed Ralph Blewitt's pre-signed power of attorney, your lover Wilson was a married man with children and in the process of leaving his family in order to take up residence in Melbourne, where for several years he shared his life with you. Would it be fair to say that one obvious advantage of listing Blewitt as Kerr Street's buyer of record was that it shielded Wilson's wealth from his soon-to-be ex-wife and her divorce lawyers?"

Barrel tasting?

I was invited to a regional barrel tasting recently (couldn't attend). We're talking wine barrels here.

Thankfully, it was not an Adelaide barrel tasting. I wonder if anyone will ever be brave enough to organise one of them?

Bollocks all round

The Telegraph and the Herald both managed to over-sensationalise a pretty simple story this week when an Army Unimog rolled at Holsworthy Barracks.

First to the Telegraph: Army Mog truck known for rollovers - that's despite a handful of fatal rollovers during 30 years of service. I drove a Mog in the Reserves for a few years after my back packed it in - they were exceptionally hard to roll. In fact, you could drive them across the most amazing slopes without any fear of them tipping. During our training, our instructors literally had to force us scared-stupid trainees to drive them across slopes that we were certain would lead to our early deaths. You had to wear a seatbelt to stop yourself from falling out of your seat sideways! They are the most awesome vehicles, and I totally loved driving them.

We had one local rollover that I know of - an artillery crew were towing a gun somewhere off road and the gun flipped, taking the Mog with it. That's not supposed to happen - they are fitted with towing gear that rotates - but it did happen.

Which brings me to the SMH: Due to their four-wheel-drive capacity they have a high wheel base and are more prone than other vehicles to tipping. 

That's total bollocks. Yes, they have a high wheel base, but the portal axles allow the drive train to be mounted relatively low, so the centre of gravity is low. Just because they look tall to a stupid, never-driven-one, never-sat-in-one journalist, doesn't mean that they are more prone to tipping. The most "prone to tipping" vehicle I have ever seen is the Toyota Hilux, and you could drive a Mog straight over the top of the average Hilux.

During my service, there were quite a few vehicle rollovers in the Army. However, most of them were suffered by the (as it was then) newly introduced Landrover Perentie - they were a lot speedier than the Series 2 and 3 Landrovers that they replaced, and quite a few unsuspecting drivers who had grown up in the old gutless petrol Landies rolled them when cornering. It got so bad, the Army was circulating special pamphlets on the danger of rolling the Landrovers - I think there were a few fatalities.

I managed to avoid rolling a Landrover - mainly because I flipped a Landcruiser, and that scared the crap out of me. We were issued a batch of Landcruisers as a stopgap measure, and they were even faster than the new Landrovers (the Army never got around to fitting a governor to the Landcruisers, so they flew). I went over the crest of a sandy hill at the Lancelin bombing range with a section in the back. The road totally fell away to one side just over the crest, so when the wheels on that side disappeared into a rut several feet deep, over it went, throwing me and 9 or 10 troops over the side. I'd almost rolled one a day earlier whilst speeding on the beach - I was so busy putting it into the incoming surf that I didn't realise I was about to run out of beach, and when I turned, it  went up on two wheels. That was pretty exciting, in an unpleasant way.

During my time in the Reserves, my friends and family managed to survive numerous civilian rollovers. We've had three in the family, and there were plenty of others when I was at Uni. At one B&S that I attended, I watched an old Renault roll several times during the morning-after circle work. Each time, a gang of drunken spectators would flip it back on its wheels, and off it would go again (unless a tyre went off the rim, and a tyre change was required). I won't say that any particular model of car was prone to rolling - the most prevalent feature was a drunken and/or tired driver. Idiot civilian drivers roll cars every day - a Mog rolls once every 10 years, and somehow Mogs are prone to tipping???

One last comment about the SMH story:

The trucks, known throughout the army simply as "Mogs", have been in service since 1982 and feature almost nothing in the way of safety measures for troops sitting on bench seats in the back.

Wrong. They don't "feature almost nothing in the way of safety measures". You can get rid of the "almost" - they have absolutely no safety measures. None. Nada. The troops in the back are totally reliant on a well trained driver up front keeping them safe and sound.

This is so much fun

Life of Brian is a treasure trove of excellent names.

Petition rigging

Yes, it really is that easy to sign these things with a totally bogus name. Thanks to the Bunyip for bringing this to our attention.

I wonder if I can sign up the entire cast today?

The very dominant left

I blogged earlier in the week about the supposed human preference for travelling anti-clockwise rather than clockwise. My last traffic count of people going around The Bay was inconclusive.

I remembered to count twice this week.

The first was 106 to 17 - a ratio of over 6:1.

The second was 48 to 9 - still a killer ratio in favour of anti-clockwise.

Two surveys do not a theory make, so I'll try to remember to count a few more times next week.

Hey, where did the pain go?

As I mentioned earlier today, I had a short break from the bike recently. The first few days back in the saddle were ok, but by day 4, my legs were screaming at me. Not when I was riding, but when I was doing very little, such as sitting around the office or trying to lever myself off the couch. I was reduced to hobbling around the house almost in tears.

Things are much better this week. The legs have finally hardened up again. Or I have lost all feeling below the waist. Better go stub my toe on something and see if it hurts.

The pain might be gone, but so has the power. I barely crawled home over the Anzac bridge today - first hot day of spring (33 degrees) and a pretty brisk head wind - and my legs struggled to maintain any sort of pace at all. Perhaps I haven't hardened up at all - and I am really as soft as a very squishy marshmallow.

Torn

I'm torn between being obsessive about reaching a simple goal and relaxing and living life a little.

The goal? I'd love to have a flat stomach again. It's hard in lycra - it makes guys that weigh 64kg with 2% body fat look like they have a pot gut. For blokes like me, it's pertinent to ask how many days until the twins are due. But it would still be nice to totally get rid of the beer gut after lugging it around for 15 years.

I've slowly been chipping away at it - there's no dramatic secret. I simply ride at a reasonably quick pace for 70-90 minutes 5 days a week, and try and fit in a longer ride on one day of the weekend. Every now and then, I have to pull the belt in another notch, and I know I am getting somewhere. Even the love handles are harder to grab hold of. The more miles I ride, the faster it disappears. Simple.

But it's easy to backslide. I had a few weeks off due to illness, and the guts suddenly reappeared. Getting rid of it is all about discipline - doing the miles is the main part. I find that if I am riding, I want to eat well, avoid grog, fast food and soft drinks. It's a virtuous circle.

However, I am cognisant of the fact too much riding can make Jack a dull boy. I've been invited to plenty of events in the CBD that occur after work (like seeing James Dellingpole when he was in town) and I have ignored them because it would mean catching the bus home - a day without riding (because I would have to bus in the following morning as the bike would be at work).

Resolving this dilemma isn't going to be easy - I'm not very good at balancing things.

Failing to use The Force

Did a lap of Homebush over the weekend. As I was approaching the park, I saw a bloke in the distance consulting a map. I went on a bit of a meander in another direction, and then met up with him about 10 minutes later. He looked lost, so I asked him if that was the case.

Yes, he had no idea where he was going. He wanted to see all the big stadiums. I told him that Olympic Park has a simple loop road around it - go in either direction, and you'll find what you are looking for. There was a constant trickle of cyclists going past in both directions, and most of them would be doing the loop. I told him to just jump on someone's wheel and he'd be right.

He looked at me very sceptically, but I could see him turning that idea over in his head as I pedalled off.

What fascinated me is that he was on a very flash bike that was covered in all sorts of electronics - yet he lacked a handlebar mounted GPS. His bike had just about every other gadget short of a bread maker and a coffee machine. It actually beeped at him as we were talking (perhaps the toast was done?)

I'm amazed that he didn't know enough to trust in The Force.

The ABC, child labour, and stupidity

I had a few free minutes on the weekend, so I flicked on the idiot box and did a bit of channel surfing. I settled on an ABC program called Renovations, because they got away from the old barn that was being renovated and visited a brick works that produces hand made bricks. That was much more interesting.

The brick works had been around since the 1840s (I think) and yes, they were making bricks mostly by hand. The clay was mixed by machine, but a bunch of blokes spent all day slapping a blob of clay into moulds by hand, turning out the moulds by hand, stacking the bricks in the kiln by hand and then stacking the fired bricks outside (to dry? None of this was explained). Most of the discussion centred on child labour, and how kids as young as 5-8 are working in brick factories and building sites in the third world today.

It looked like hard work, lugging all that wet clay and unfinished and finished bricks around, and the host and  some academic sounded appropriately horrified at the use of child labour.

At the very end of that segment, the host made a comment along the lines of, "The industrial revolution really was a horrible, shocking thing".

No, no, no, no, no - you idiots.

What they showed in this small brick works was how things were done prior to the industrial revolution. They showed how bricks have been made since the times of ancient Egypt - by hand, and using kids. There was no mechanisation and no factory system - it was a collection of individual brick makers renting space and equipment from a brick master. The individual brick makers brought their kids to work.

The industrial revolution swept all that away with the introduction of mechanised brick making equipment, which eliminated the need for child labour. A modern, mechanised brick works probably employs the same number of people, and produces 1000 times more bricks than the by-hand blokes.

By the way, I voluntarily started working on a building site at age 7, mixing cement, carting cement and carting bricks for the brickies who were putting up a commercial building next door. I did it because it was an interesting thing to do. I got to learn how foundations were laid, how to mix mud to the right consistency, how to use a string and plumb bob, how to slap mud on bricks, lay them and build in single and double brick. It was more fun than building things with Lego. And they let me use the compactor, which was excellent. It's not something I'd want to do for a living at that age, but I survived it, and the carting of bricks certainly improved my strength.

Queenslanders

We had a BBQ lunch today and invited a Queenslander.

Before we tucked into the prawns, I was very careful to explain that the bowl full of water in the middle of the table with a lemon floating in it was not lemon soup.

Racing in the wet

Cycling Tips has some great photos from a very wet race in Italy. I wish I could take photos like the ones at that blog.

I like riding in the rain, but I'm not sure I'd like it after six and a half hours. Have a look at the later photos, and how much filth is on the faces of the riders. It's amazing how much crap gets flicked up into your face from the tyres in front.

Thank goodness for the invention of cycling knicks and lycra - if it wasn't for that, you'd chafe like crazy every time it rained a bit.

Some of you old buggers might like the 2nd photo from the top. At 70, Gimondi still looks pretty fit and attractive to the ladies.

Violence against women - Afghan edition

Disturbing, weird and just downright nauseating.

In late 2009, U.S. and British forces ordered a study of Pashtun male sexuality. They were worried that homosexuality and pedophilia among Afghan security forces and tribes could create cultural misunderstanding with allied troops, according to a copy of the report obtained by The Washington Examiner.
...
Afghan women, emboldened by the presence of U.S. troops. have complained about beatings they've suffered at the hands of their husbands. The domestic violence reportedly stemmed from the inability of the women to become pregnant and produce sons, highly valued in Afghan society.
When U.S. civil affairs teams (and other special forces units) quietly investigated the problem, they quickly discovered a common denominator. Virtually all of the younger men who beat their wives (over their inability to become pregnant) had been former "apprentices" of older Afghan men, who used them for their sexual pleasure. Upon entering marriage, whatever the men knew of sex had been learned during their "apprenticeship," at the hands of the older man. To put it bluntly, some of the younger Afghans were unfamiliar with the desired (and required) mechanics for conception.
To remedy this situation, the Army called in its psychological operations teams, which developed information campaigns in Pashtun areas, explaining the basics of heterosexual relations and their benefits, in terms of producing male offspring. It may be the only time in the history of warfare that an army has been required to explain sex to the native population, to curb the abuse of women and young boys--and retain U.S. influence in key geographic areas.

Things you hear on ABC radio

I was flicking stations in the car this morning and caught the news on TripleJ. The lead story was about a "march against violence" in Brunswick (I think) following the murder of Jill Meagher in Melbourne.

I'd prefer a nice little remembrance ceremony, but the types who attend these things just love to "march".

What's the bet that some of the types that march are also the types that in a few weeks time will be complaining about  harsh jail terms and screaming that we lock too many people up. Wouldn't surprise me if they also love to hate the Police and are the first to get violent and abusive at any other protest.

REALLY dodgy advertising by Cue and Myer

This billboard is on the side of the railway overbridge leading into Circular Quay station. Sorry about the really poor quality - the lights had just turned green and I was riding away one handed.

The big words says "Cue made in Australia" - but there are words in a much smaller font that say "is predominantly" - meaning the whole thing actually reads "Cue is predominantly made in Australia". It's just the kind of thing you'd miss if you were driving under here at 40km/h.

I really don't care if their garments are stitched together by 12 year old slave kids in Bangladesh - it's the deliberately misleading aspect of it that I can't stand. Why Myer agreed to it is beyond my understanding.

How a newbie bike commuter can navigate using The Force

GPS units are a dime a dozen these days - there are plenty of options if you want to mount a smart phone with GPS on your handlebars, or a bike specific GPS. When I started commuting though, none of these options existed. If you were going somewhere unfamiliar, you photocopied maps from a mapbook, sticky-taped them together and then marked the route with a highlighter. Or you got really tricky and wrote out a route map with all the turns and distances between them.

I did that once or twice, and then decided to use The Force.

My reasoning was that almost every other cyclist on the road knew where they were going, and as there are a fairly limited number of options for where people are riding to at 0630, chances are that if I simply tailed one, I'd end up getting to where I wanted to go.

And it worked almost every single time. If I developed a gut feeling that a cyclist was starting to lead me astray, I'd stop and wait for another one to come past and then follow them. On busy routes, like the Canada Bay area into the city, there are hundreds of cyclists trundling along each morning. Waiting more than a minute for another cyclist to come along is pretty rare - unless the rain is absolutely bucketing down.

Commuters are generally pretty easy to spot. For starters, most of them tend to be wearing a back pack or they've got panniers attached to their bike. Some of them tend to be riding fairly casual, upright bikes. Those on fancy road bikes are usually covered in fluorescent material. Once you know what to look for, you just tag on behind them and away you go.

This bloke was a bit different - he's entirely avoided the lycra look, and he's certainly not riding a flash road bike. However, Mr You Can See My Undies went flying past me when the lights went green, and I had a bit of trouble catching up to him to take this photo (I blame it on Friday Legs). If the weather is balmy and the ride is short and flat, there's no need to spend a motza on all the go-faster gear.

It's going to be interesting when they start demolishing the monorail. It broke down last week - two trains were stranded due to a power outage, and they had to bring in cherry pickers to get the passengers out. Thankfully, I've never had to be rescued when my bike has broken down.

Statistics on the "dominant left"

The "dominant left" is not a political thing. I wrote about it back in August. Instead, it refers to the apparent preference for us to move in a counter-clockwise direction.

I ride around The Bay twice a day. Or at least 1/3 of it. There's a bike/pedestrian path that loops around the whole thing - it's a very pleasant 7km trek.

On Friday, I decided to count the number of people going clockwise and the number going counter-clockwise to see how much truth there might be in this theory.

In the early stages, the dominant left was up 18-7, and I thought the theory was really on a roll. But then I hit a few gaggles of people coming the other way, and it ended up being 35-28. That's really not dominant at all.

It's not much of a sample either - I only covered 1/3 of the loop, and I did the count once. If I remember, I'll do some more counts next week and we'll see what we end up with.

Another problem is sorting out those who are doing the loop versus those who are only using part of the trail to get somewhere else (like me). In the morning, I ride counter-clockwise to get to work. In the evening, I ride clockwise. The direction I travel is not governed by a dominant anything.

That said, when I ride around Homebush, I always go counter-clockwise. I can't think of a single time I have gone the other way. That holds true for individual and group rides. How weird is that?

Lies, damned lies and opinion polls

I once had a job interview with a polling company. I'd done the serious Maths subjects at school, gone on to do some reasonably serious Maths units and uni and was generally half competent with crunching numbers. I was looking for work, so the agency I was signed up with sent me off to a polling company.

I flunked the interview totally. I was asked some fairly deep questions and my mind went totally blank. Ah well, so much for that career. About all I recall of the company is that they were in a dingy brown office at the cruddy end of North Sydney - a long hike up a big hill in the hot summer sun, and well away from the flash companies in the North Sydney CBD that employ the hot looking chicks.

During the interview, I was handed a fat blue book full of polling results and we spent quite a bit of time talking about the methods used to properly weight a survey to avoid skewing the results. For the people who interviewed me, that was a big deal. The quality of their reports hinged upon them getting that right.

According to what Paco has discovered, it's not a big deal for those doing the Democrat polling in the US.

Go and read it.

There. My duty is done.

Pedestrian runs into cyclist

All hell seems to have broken loose over at Prick with a Thing - a right punch up has been going on in the comments since last night.

And the topic? Some wowser with a blog trying to make it unlawful for anyone to walk anywhere after they've had a few beers. That's right - walk.

Perhaps this is an opportune time for me to weigh in with my experience of riding down George St at peak hour tonight. Apart from nearly mowing down half a dozen pedestrians who decided that if they stepped out in front of me against the lights, I'd be able to slow down from 40km/h to avoid hitting them. They only stepped back when they realised that:

1. I had no hope of slowing my bulging mass, as I was moving a lot faster than they expected, and
2. I really had no intention of putting my fingers anywhere near the brake levers - they could step back onto the kerb where they belonged, or they could get flattened

It's interesting how when you're on a bike, your body stance and facial expression can clearly convey a message to a pedestrian without any words being spoken. ie, "I have the right of way. Wait for the green light - now get the fuck off the road, or it's going to hurt. A lot."

The errant pedestrians were a mixed bag - old women, young women, middle aged women. Not a single bloke amongst them. None had earphones in, none were yapping on a phone. (Woman not yapping on a phone? Were pigs flying too?). None appeared inebriated in the slightest - they were simply in a hurry to get across the road to catch their train or bus, and they weren't above breaking a few rules to do so.

And then there was the idiot bloke. I was stopped at a red light (cyclist stopped at red light? Had hell frozen over?) and was watching the pedestrians crossing in front of me when a bloke ran across the road way back from the pedestrian crossing, and then ran straight into my back wheel. He bounced off, steered around me, stepped onto the footpath and kept on going without looking back or saying sorry. There were no cars behind me - I had two lanes to myself. The silly git simply wasn't watching where he was going. He didn't appear pissed at all - he was just a bloke in a suit hurrying to be somewhere else at 5.15pm. Possibly the Apple Store, which is what I was stopped out the front of.

So there you have it - my version of a man bites dog story. People out walking do stupid shit all the time, and  plenty of them do it sober. If we're going to ban anything, we should ban people with shit for brains being allowed to do anything. Including breathing.

(No pedestrians were maimed in the making of this posting).

Moonbattery

Thanks to Tim Blair, I wasted a few minutes of my life reading this dribble by a noted Fairfax columnist. I am reasonably familiar with Central Station (that's a train station for you out-of-towners) as I worked there many moons ago. See the photo below? In order to get to my workplace, I used to enter a door near where that bloke is standing. Except to get to the door, I had to leap over a metre wide puddle of piss each morning, because the doorway was a favourite place for winos to sleep. And the winos that slept there pissed in their pants. Every single morning. Before I got to work. And boy, they must have had a lot to drink before conking out, because the puddles were enormous. And deep. I am pleased to say I never, ever misjudged that leap and landed in a puddle.

Central Station was that kind of place. It's been spruced up since then - the stonework has been cleaned, the old pavement replaced and the dingy, dirty alcoves have been opened up and filled with shops. It's a hell of a lot better than it used to be.

But it's still an old train station.

Farrelly writes:

Still can’t believe people aren’t clamouring to fill these colonnades full of chic little tapas bars and smoky music joints.

Which just goes to show how out of touch she is with the economic geography of the area. Le Prick recently reviewed a fabo tapas bar at the other end of town that I am dying to try. What I hated most about the review is that not long ago, I was spending part of my working week in a building right over the road from Barrafina,  so I could have eaten there by now. However, I am no longer at that end of town, so a visit will have to wait.

But back to Central. Barrafina might survive where it is by extracting $50 from each patron on each visit. It's patrons can afford to spend $50 per visit because there are lots of financial companies clustered right around it, full of well paid employees. Barrafina would never survive at Central, because Central is full of people who are in a hurry to be somewhere else, and aren't interested in lingering over a beer and a few plates of boquerones - spanish white anchovies, extra virgin olive oil, parsley and chilli {seis}  13,20.

Having worked in the area, I can tell you that the office buildings down that way are full of public servants in grey, plastic slip-on shoes; or public servants in cardigans their mum knitted. The sort of people who don't live in the inner city - they all lived at least an hour away by train. Somewhere further out than Merrylands perhaps. Those people don't provide enough of a market for fancy tapas. The people I worked with didn't even go out for lunch - they were so stretched with mortgages etc, they brought vegemite sandwiches to work. They didn't even go out for coffee. The other inhabitants of the area are overseas students. Crammed 10 or 12 into a 3 bedroom apartment, buying rice in 5 kilo bags and living on packet noodles.

Farrelly might wish for a chic tapas bar, but that won't make it happen. I wish for a nice little pub at the end of my street - something like The Lord Dudley. It would be just close enough for me to be able to walk, but far enough away that we couldn't hear the drunken patrons spewing out at midnight. However, we all know that isn't going to happen - there needs to be a market for a pub like that to survive, and if you ask me, that market doesn't exist in this area.

As for "smoky music joints", it was thanks to Farrelly and her nanny-state mates at Fairfax that the "smoke" has long since been removed from "smoky music joints".

"Free speech will prevail, and you'll suck it up and like it"

Obama - lawyer for slum lords?

Oh dear. It seems the Dear Leader has feet of clay.

Have a read of this - if true, I don't know what to say......

In March 1994, a year before "Dreams" was published, Obama was the lead defense attorney on an obscure case in Cook County Court that has heretofore escaped examination by the national media.

In this case, Obama defended a Chicago slumlord and powerful political ally who was charged with a long list of offenses against poor residents. The defendant was the Woodlawn Preservation & Investment Corp., controlled by Bishop Arthur Brazier, a South Side Chicago preacher and political operator.

Brazier's burgeoning real estate empire included a low-income housing project at 6223 South University. Today, MapQuest describes the Woodlawn neighborhood as "quaint and sedate." But in the winter of 1994, it was a frigid hell.

Brazier was closely allied with Obama and his firm, not least because Davis was on WPIC's Board of Directors. Davis was also the corporation's registered agent, and he received the court summons when the city filed suit on the South University apartments.

Brazier's WPIC had failed for nearly a month to supply heat and running water for the complex's 15 crumbling apartments. On Jan. 18, 1994, the day the heat went off, Chicago's official high temperature was 11 below zero, the day after it was 19 below.

Even worse, the residents were then ordered to leave the WPIC complex in the winter chill without the due process they would have been afforded by an eviction procedure.

Some light weekend reading

Comet Storm - it took me well over an hour to read the whole thing, and that was broken up by a nap in the middle. Fascinating bit of research. If you don't have an hour to spend reading the whole thing, just read the first bit to get a flavour of what he's on about.

That led me to this album of pictures of Odessa Craters. I noticed that quite a few craters are near farmsteads etc - before aerial and satellite photography, did the people living there realise that part of their farm was an impact crater?

I also read this blog on huge floods. What spun me out is the idea that huge pot holes in the bassalt were caused by whirlpools of water.

Have a read of all of it. It's amazing how some people spend their days....

What's the bet.....

Apparently Antarctic sea ice is now at record levels.  As in record high levels. I haven't seen any mention of this in the papers that I normally read.

What's the bet that when all that record amount of ice starts to melt or calve off as icebergs, the warmies are all over it proclaiming "unprecedented levels of melting in Antarctica".

"Behead chickens who insult Islam"

Lebanese men ransack US fast food chains Hardee's and KFC as they protest against the controversial film "Innocence of Muslims" in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli

I know that it's pretty insulting to call "fried chicken" a "food", but what has smashing up what is probably a locally owned franchise got to do with it?

Even climate alarmists get filtered by the SMH

The SMH environmental section today carried a story lifted from the Guardian about how the Arctic will be free of summer ice by 2015-16. That claim was made by Professor Peter Wadhams:

"This collapse, I predicted would occur in 2015-16 at which time the summer Arctic (August to September) would become ice-free. The final collapse towards that state is now happening and will probably be complete by those dates".

Interestingly, the good Professor was also featured in the Grauniad last week, but his message that time clearly didn't please the likes of Ben Cubby, the environmental editor at the SMH. Why is that? Well, look at what Professor Wadhams had to say then:

A leading British academic has called for accelerated research into futuristic geo-engineering and a worldwide nuclear power station "binge" to avoid runaway global warming.

Nuclear power? And not even a word about wind or solar? Can't print that!

Even worse, the professor then failed to say really bad things about Big Oil:

Asked whether the latest evidence made a ban on drilling for carbon-releasing oil and gas necessary as Greenpeace has contended, Wadhams said "philosophically" such exploration made little sense. "We have been conducting a global experiment with the burning of fossil fuels and the results are already disastrous and this would accelerate them," he argued saying that there were also practical worries because of the enormous difficulty of dealing with any spillage or a blowout under moving ice where oil would get trapped inside the ice in a kind of inaccessible "oil sandwich'.
But he said at least that companies such as Shell had shown some responsibility by carefully planning its expected exploration in the Chukotka Sea off Alaska and had shown a willingness to use ready-made containment domes that could cap off a well if anything went wrong. He was more fearful about drilling methods in the Russian Arctic where environmental concerns were lower down the agenda.

That's an interesting bit of filtering by the SMH.


I just need to put an entry in my diary now for 2016 to see whether the prediction of an ice free Arctic in summer comes about.

US newspaper ad revenue in free fall

Quite an incredible little article from Carpe Diem:

I think part of the problem is that if you print crap that people aren't prepared to pay for, your revenues will collapse. People will either read crap for free elsewhere, or they'll pay to read a premium product produced by someone else.

Estimated print advertising revenues of $19.0 billion in 2012 will be the lowest annual  amount spent on print newspaper advertising since the NAA started tracking ad revenue in 1950.   

Edumacation

A friend emailed sent me a newsletter recently that they'd received from an "Education officer". They asked me how long it took me to spot the obvious mistake.

My main roll will be to ensure that the new National Quality Framework is implemented

Really? My main roll is a sausage roll. My olde English teacher wood role over and dye if I rote a sentence like that.

Another Labor stimulus package?

Hell, I hope Gillard and Swan don't find out about this latest GDP boosting effort in China:

Since 2007, 15 bridges have collapsed in China. Only three of them were more than 15 years old at the time of their collapse, according to a report by the Shandong Business Daily.On Aug. 24, a 330-footlong approach ramp of Harbin’s Yangmingtan Bridge fell over, killing three and injuring five. The bridge had been in use less than a year and is the eighth bridge collapse in China this year. The Harbin administration has so far not openly addressed the case.
Zhao Wenjin, the lead commentator of Lanzhou Daily, commented on the incident, saying, “With each collapse, we need to reflect: why are we chasing GDP?”
According to a Jingyang Net report, Wang Yang, Party secretary of Guangdong Province, said at a provincial Party meeting in 2009: “Sometimes the GDP number looks good, but it didn’t really create wealth for society. It was, instead, a waste of society’s wealth.
“For example, building a bridge creates GDP. When the bridge collapses and is taken down, it creates another addition to the GDP. When the bridge is rebuilt, more GDP is created. As such, one bridge resulted in three additions to the GDP. But it was a tremendous waste of resources.”

Via Samizdata.

Pancakes and ribs

We took the little tackers to Darling Harbour on the weekend - although I find most of it to be a disgusting tourist trap, there's a few things there that the kids love to visit. So we indulged them.

After a couple of hours of running around, it was time to get fed. We settled on a place to eat via the simple method of walking in and sitting down at the closest establishment - when you've got hungry kids, that's usually the simplest way of cutting short the whinging.

Once we were seated, we discovered that we were in a pancake house. I guess it's been 30 years since I've been into one of them - I tried them in Perth once as a teenager, and never went back for seconds. Having been taught how to make pancake batter at an early age, and entrusted with the frying pan and shown how to flip them by age 10 (as in throwing them up in the air by flicking the pan and catching them), the stuff they serve up in these pancake barns just doesn't do it for me. I find them to be too much cake and not enough pan - if you get what I mean. I don't like them as thin as crepes, but I like them thinner than pikelets. You have to be able to roll them up and eat them with your hands, which means they have to be thick enough to avoid tearing.

Enough of that.

We settled on two types of pancakes for the kids, and the adults selected a filled crepe and beef ribs (no guessing who had the ribs).

The crepe was good, but the filling was only just warm. It seemed to vanish pretty quickly though.

I got a large slab of beef ribs. They had the texture of being cooked slowly in a steam oven the day before (something I can't stand - the meat ends up with the consistency of jelly), and the sauce appeared to have been painted on at the last minute. As a stomach filler, I have few complaints. However, they were far from the best ribs I've ever had. "Salad" consisted of one baby tomato chopped in half and two lettuce leaves, drizzled with a bit of dressing. The chunky chips were not bad.

The pancakes were what I expected - thick and cakey. You know that awful cake mix in a box you can buy at the supermarket? They reminded me of that stuff. We ordered 4 pancakes and between the 4 of us, we could barely finish 3. It was not the size that stopped us - it was the texture. They're edible if you drown them in sauce or icecream. However, they refuse to slide down your gullet unless they are smothered in some sort of lubricating liquid.

Having watched the place in action, I can understand why the above was so. The restaurant seated a lot of people, and there must have been 20 more in the queue outside when we left. Turnover was ferocious. The kitchen was turning out meals like McDonalds turns out hamburgers. It was not the sort of place where you get hand cut fries and freshly made sauce. Oddly enough, it was very popular with Japanese students.

The bill was just over $70. It just served to reinforce my prejudices about Darling Harbour - crowds, bad food and expensive. We should have walked up the road to one of the pubs for lunch.

Preference cascade

What’s a “preference cascade?” It’s people who believed they were alone in their beliefs who suddenly find out that they are part of a much larger group. It’s human nature to not want to be an oddball. It’s human nature not to want to be a one-man revolution. It’s when you find out that most of the people around you share your views that revolutions are made.
It’s perfectly illustrated by a post by Glenn Reynolds explaining how revolutions seem to appear out of nowhere.

Read the rest here. It's really quite interesting.

Gado Gado soup?

I was in town on Saturday (listening to the riotous march go by, wondering what the hell it was) when I felt a bit peckish and started looking for lunch.

The places that I normally go when I'm at work were closed, so I wandered the streets around the QVB looking for something interesting.

I settled on a place called Ipoh - mainly because it was the only joint open. I was tossing up between a laksa and gado gado, and settled on the latter. I like a good gado gado - lots of crunchy vegetables, a bit of boiled egg and all topped off with a good peanut sauce. I sat at my table, reading an old copy of The Spectator, expecting something like this to turn up:

Instead, what I got could best be described as "peanut sauce soup". I like a smattering of thick, chunky sauce - I got a bowl full of running soup. I like crispy vegetables that you can smear a bit of sauce over - I got soggy vegetables steaming in soup. I couldn't identify the carrots from the tofu - it was all just brown bits of stuff.

I won't be trying that again.

As for the march and riot - I missed the whole thing. I had popped into the office, and heard it go by. I'm quite used to hearing noisy marches on the weekends when I'm in the office - most of them go unreported. The traffic on George St gets held up for 10-15 minutes as the weekly mob walks by, chanting and waving their banners, and that's it. Yesterday's mob sounded no different than usual - I thought they might have been state school teachers protesting about budget cuts - just goes to show you can't tell what's going on from the noise. From 20 floors up, all you hear is a lot of noise, and you've got no idea what they're chanting.

What was interesting was the mood on the street when I walked out. The CBD was full (as usual) of people shopping and seeing the sights and so on. When I was waiting for the lights to change at each intersection, I had a listen to what people were talking about. Perhaps half had seen the protest go by, and the rest had been totally absorbed in shopping and had missed it completely .

Those that had witnessed it weren't happy - the women in particular seemed quite scared. The normal happy mood had soured quite badly.

And remember - all they had seen was a few hundred noisy, aggressive protesters with moronic signs go by - the rioting in Hyde Park was yet to come.

Are lefties more tolerant? hahahahah

Thanks to the Catallaxy open forum, I found this wonderful thread on Democratic Underground. It's worth your time to have a quick flick through the comments. But don't stay too long - it gets very depressing very quickly.

The thread opens with this:

my heart is breaking. my daughter is turning into a republican
I was raised by a feminist and am a proud liberal. I have a low tolerance for republicans who buy into the right wing hypocritical bullshit. 
I have three beautiful intelligent daughters. One of them is living with a republican. I just saw her post something on facebook that made me realize I'm losing her. 
my heart is breaking. anyone else go through this. how do you deal?

How do you deal with this? FFS - your daughter is a grown woman, and she is entitled to lead her own life and to have her own opinions and to form her own attachments and friendships. Lefties always bang on about their "progressive" values - how they are more open, less conforming, and more tolerant and free-thinking than us evil conservative....but the responses on that thread reveal a mindset that is all about control of others, the closing of minds and a complete absence of tolerance towards anyone who thinks differently to them.

My parents are staunchly conservative - but one of my siblings is a complete hippy. In fact, about 25% of my cousins are complete hippies. I'm talking dreadlocks, living on communes, facial piercings and an odd fondness for Combi vans. Do the conservatives in our family shun the hippies? No. My parents got over the conversion to hippie-dom because deep down they accept that we all have the freedom to choose how we live our lives, and it is not their place to interfere. The supposedly staid, intolerant, backward looking, closed-minded conservatives are able to put aside their distaste for the hippy lifestyle because of their core belief in freedom. They don't have to like it, but they accept it.

I'm amazed at these supposedly liberal types (using the US terminology) who prattle on about diversity and tolerance and free-thinking etc, but who are completely unable to put it into practice in their own lives. It's no wonder they are so open to a big and controlling government - they thinks it's fine to control how their family members think and act (even as adults), so it's no big deal to control how everyone else acts and thinks.

Junior will be heading out into the big, wide world in a few short years. I've accepted the fact that it's highly unlikely that he will every hold down a white collar job. The professions are not for him. He'll never join the military. He doesn't even like team sports. He's heading for the arty side of things. I just hope he succeeds wildly as an artist - preferably fronting a heavy metal rock band and rooting at least 1,000 gorgeous groupies every year. He'll tread his own path and make his own decisions and experience his own mistakes. And he'll vote for whoever he damned well wants to.

Packing tips

And now for something a little bit different. The first minute is a bit quiet and boring - the last 3 minutes are an eye opener. Those of you who have spent a bit of time carting everything you need around on your back for an extended period will probably spit your beer/tea/false teeth all over your keyboard when you see the packing style of the second cyclist.


My two cents worth - cyclist number one still packs too much stuff. I can go away on my own for a three day weekend with little more than my wallet, keys, phone, toothbrush and a spare pair of jocks in my back pocket. Still - at least she has her shit squared away.

In my youth, I went overseas for a year. I left with a single echelon bag and returned with a single echelon bag. During my travels, I spent a week or so roaming southern Europe with an American woman like cyclist number two. Her makeup bag weighed more than everything I was carrying. I don't get it.

What is the point of going to uni?

An interesting point about how the modern university operates:

Current universities are built still upon the limitations of medieval book production technologies. The whole idea of a lecture, one person shouting at a crowd, comes from the idea that books were simply, pre-Gutenberg, too expensive for all to have a copy. Thus they must be read out to the students. This is clearly no longer true but 600 years later we're still working within those past technological constraints. I think it's therefore fair to say that within higher education there's some resistance to change.

I'd never really thought of it like that.

Most of my university units consisted of left wing lecturers reading out chunks from left wing text books that someone else had written In most instances, they could have replaced them with a speaking monkey and a teleprompter. A well-spoken monkey would have been easier to understand than some of the muppets that we had to put up with. I was about the only person in one course that could understand the lecturer - after each lecture, all the other students would borrow my notes and run off to the nearest photocopier. Most of them wouldn't have passed if I hadn't been there to translate his mangled english into the written form.

I remember the shock in my third year of walking (actually, probably staggering half-cut) into a tutorial and finding that it was being led by the lecturer, rather than the usual Honours student that usually ran those things.

This is the worst part of university reform - but I doubt it would bother most modern students:

I hope of course that Alex and Tyler do succeed. As they point out, their first course takes half the time for all of the same material as that traditional university technology. Think how much we would all save if a first degree took 18 months not three years (for the English that is). Think how much more if it were not done on campus. But the great problem is going to be those who currently make a living from a slow campus degree: and unfortunately they're also the same people who determine what a degree is.

Egads - the horror of only having 18 months at uni! Back in my day, it was a Bacchanalian feast of booze and sex (except for the Engineers - all they got was the booze), so you had every incentive to string it out for as long as possible. The horrible little swots that attend today probably wouldn't be interested in majoring in debauchery and mayhem, so an 18 month degree would suit them down to the ground.

I doubt they'd even know the meaning of "toga party".

Antony Green on the Greens and other stuff

Always worth a read.

He's put up the sort of graphs that I really like.

Snotapocalypse

I laughed quite hard last month when Tim Blair complained that his sinuses were blocked to the point where he could only breathe through his eyes.

ha ha.

I was quite amused by all the suggestions for sinus irrigation, which seemed to consist of squirting a large volume of salty water up each nostril.

More ha ha.

Then the bloody flu hit me last week. Like a hammer. I've spent most of the past week in bed suffering from the shakes, the chills, the sweats, the overwhelming desire to vomit and the most god-awful headaches that drugs don't even put a dent in. And to cap it off, there is snot production of the likes the world has never seen before. If I can breathe through my nose, it means it's dripping like a tap. If I can't breathe through my nose, it's blocked so tightly with dried snot that a session with an electric drill wouldn't make much impact. Breathing through the eyes is problematic because even they have been getting gummed up with some sort of dreadful goo. I have to soak it off my eyelids and eyelashes at 3 in the morning because it feels so awful, and again when I crawl out of bed a few hours later. If I manage to get out of bed.

So I succumbed to giving the nasal irrigation thing a go.

Take one old drink bottle that's you can squeeze in order to jet water up your nose.

Fill with water and add a teaspoon of salt and another of bicarb.

Shake.

Tilt head over sink. Pick a nostril. Squirt.

It worked quite well. On my first attempt, clear water went up one nostril and then poured out the other. And it poured out green. I squirted half a litre of salty water up that nostril, and the water came out green from start to finish. So I refilled and kept going until the water ran clear.

Guess what? I could breathe.

For about half an hour. Then the whole works gummed up again. But it was a blessed relief for a while. I've since discovered that Chemists have shelves devoted to pre-mixed packets of nasal irrigation stuff.

And speaking of green.....the snot came out a bright iridescent green. The sort of green that suggests it would glow in the dark (if you were the sort of person who collected snot, put it under a lamp for a short period and then viewed it in a totally darkened room). All I could think of after viewing it is that it's the sort of stuff you'd see in a horror movie - a scientist in a lab coat would hold up a specimen to the camera, explaining that he'd just scraped it out of a pipe at Fukushima, and in the split second before the camera went black, you'd see the green stuff leaping off his scraping tool and dissolving his head.

I thought the worst was over on Saturday, so I went for a test ride. Just a short, one hour easy ride around the suburb. Nothing serious. Hills were taken gently. I didn't race any cars and I doubt my heart rate got anywhere near 80%. I felt good. Really good. The legs were fine, the lungs were clean. Even my eyeballs were free of goo.

All was good, until about 2 hours after I got home. Then I crashed something horrible. Back came the fatigue and the shakes and the headaches, and it was back to bed for me for the rest of the weekend.

Bugger.

More icey good stuff

After the storm in a teacup that developed after my last post, I thought I'd stir the pot a bit more.

On 27 August, the International Arctic Research Centre put out a press release headlined "Arctic Sea Ice Cracks Record Low, and More to Go".

This press release was picked up by Ben Cubby, the indefatigable environmental editor at the SMH. His story, "Arctic ice cap takes a heating, satellites show" How do we know he picked up this press release? Well, his article states:

The ice cap had contracted to just over four million square kilometres, about 77,000 square kilometres smaller than the previous record low in 2007, data from the International Arctic Research Centre and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency indicates.

The only reason I knew about the IARC was because I Googled it after reading Ben's article - which was also published on 27 August 2012.

I would have thought that it was reasonably obvious that Ben's article was about sea ice. After all, he quotes Will Steffen as saying:

''Because as the ice melts it uncovers darker water beneath, which traps more heat - it creates feedback.

Get that? It uncovers water beneath the ice - not land.

One fascinating point about the press release from the AIRC is that it mentions the WWF. Astute readers may know that the WWF owns 1/3 of Earth Hour, and that Fairfax owns another 1/3. A massive multinational globalised advertising conglomerate owns the last 1/3. It's odd that Ben fails to mention anywhere that this scare mongering about melting sea ice is being pushed by the WWF - a company that his employer has secretly partnered with. Well, it used to be a secret.

The ice loss is also attracting the attention of industrial interests such as oil and gas development and shipping. WWF is concerned that new developments in the region should take into account the ability of already stressed Arctic systems to absorb more change.

This summer, researchers and WWF staff are taking part in the "Sailing to Siku" expedition to the Last Ice Area between northern Greenland and Canada where the last summer sea ice is projected to remain longest. Scientists on the expedition are assessing climate-related changes to this little-studied, but increasingly important region. This in one of several WWF projects to encourage resilience to climate change in the Arctic. WWF is also working of projects to reduce global carbon emissions.

When Ben used the press release, he largely managed to omit that it was about sea ice, and he made it about "Arctic ice" instead:

The Arctic sea ice extent has hit its lowest extent since satellite records began, according to data from the IARC-JAXA Information System and the U.S.-based National Snow and Ice Data Center. More melting this year is likely, as the lowest sea ice extent has typically been recorded near the end of September, a month away from now. The shrinking sea ice is one of the most visible early impacts of global climate change.
"Record-breaking ice minimums are becoming the new normal", says Clive Tesar of WWF's Global Arctic Programme. "We're breaking records on a regular basis as the sea ice continues its decline. ......This summer, researchers and WWF staff are taking part in the "Sailing to Siku" expedition to the Last Ice Area between northern Greenland and Canada where the last summer sea ice is projected to remain longest. 

In fact, "sea ice" is mentioned 11 times in the original press release from the AIRC.

Ben also mentions the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency in his article. Their press release mentions sea ice - wait for it - 20 times!

So I think I am on pretty safe ground when I state that this was all about sea ice - in the Arctic.

Now, to Greenland.

Yes, a lot of Greenland sits above the Arctic Circle. That is true. However, the ice sheet that covers that Greenland land mass is, funnily enough, not used when measuring Arctic sea ice. The picture below from the National Snow & Ice Data Centre makes it pretty clear what they are looking at when measuring sea ice, and the ice sheet covering Greenland ain't included in that white bit. Sure, there is sea ice along the eastern coast of Greenland that is measured; but they don't look for sea ice on land.

So, let's go back to Ben's article. It talks about Arctic ice and has a photo of Greenland - and presumably a photo of ice covering the land bit of Greenland, since it was used in articles elsewhere to illustrate the possibility of the Greenland ice sheet melting.

The source information from IARC and JAXA mention "sea ice" 31 times between them. Ben mentions it once, in the very last line of the article, and an inference to sea ice from Will Steffen:

The US National Snow and Ice Data Centre, which keeps separate satellite records of the extent of sea ice, is expected to publish further results over the next week to confirm record-breaking low.

Next time, I'll be more attentive to detail. I'll remember to say "Arctic sea ice" rather than just "Arctic ice".

Anyway, I think we can say that the photo that was used to illustrate this story is a great photo; but it has little or no bearing on what the story is about.

I am now going to write a story about the picking of organic bananas in Queensland, and illustrate it with this picture:

Coffs Harbour is of course in NSW, not Queensland. But who cares about the geographic exactitude - right? (And that's not a real banana by the way).

It's all just ice - right?

OK, as usual, this is me being picky. Our first image is from the SMH, and it shows a story that Ben Cubby ran about melting arctic sea ice. Someone forgot to tell Ben that back in 2011, some kraut dudes from the Max Planck institute wrote a paper saying that we'd never reach a "tipping point" as far as melting Arctic ice is concerned. Anyway, cast your eyes over the photo that the SMH ran to accompany this story about melting Arctic ice.

I did a tineye search on that picture and got quite a few hits. Interestingly, two of those hits were from Time and the Grauniad. Both described the photo as showing melting water in Greenland. 

Time story.

Grauniad story.

So why has the SMH chosen a picture that appears to be of Greenland to illustrate a story about the Arctic? Laziness? Sloppiness? I notice they only mentioned Getty Images, and left off Uriel Sinai in the credits. 

I visited the website for Uriel Sinai. He has an entire folder there of shots from Greenland. In fact, this was his home page when I dropped by. So I guess it is pretty clear that this is a photo of Greenland. And it is by Uriel Sinai, who is not credited.

Does this matter?

It matters to me. If the story is about the Arctic, use a photo of the Arctic. Don't use a photo from another region entirely. Be accurate and truthful.

Could sausage rolls get you fired?

After viewing this episode of "bike riders can't cook", which features some chilli laden sausage rolls and a few unsuspecting managers, you realise you could only pull this sort of trick in a workplace with a lot of trust and camaraderie.

I tried making sausage rolls for the kids last week (except I left out the six types of chilli). The kids demolished them. There's a lot to be said for the humble sausage roll.

It gets worse

I took the kids to the park. Whilst one of them was playing on a slide, a little girl came up to me and said, "Are you one of the Masterchef judges?"

Dear God.........do I look like the bald, short stumpy Greek git; the fat, overdressed pompous git or the other git?

I think I will ride 1,000 miles this week.

Low Life

I was reading a copy of The Spectator at the dining table. Specifically, I was reading Jeremy Clarke's Low Life column.

The youngest looked at the caricature and said, "Daddy, that's you".

No matter how hard I tried, I could not convince him that it wasn't me.

Maybe I need to clean up my act......

The dominant left

Another fascinating article - this time on our tendency to crash to the left.


“…This left twist effect seems to be generally apparent in animals. Circus horses enter traditionally the arena on the right and circle left wards. Foresters know that a wounded deer will always run away left wards, even if the closest forest is to its right. Even bees tend to circle leftwards when they spiral upwards to gain height in the air.

The basic driver behind this phenomenon seems to be the fact that all cells in nature are composed of amino acids which have a left spin. Chemists can manufacture amino acids with a right spin, yet we can’t use them. Apparently both types of amino acids existed in the primordial soup at the beginning of life hundreds of million years ago. Yet life developed only from those with a left spin. The favorite theory is that at that time – when the earth did not yet have the protective ozone shield – radioactive rays from the cosmos did more harm to the amino acids with a right spin. Yet why those with a left spin would be more protected – if at all – is still a mystery.”

People who are lost in the desert tend to walk in circles with a left spin, i.e. counter-clockwise.

Most or our supermarkets are organized the same way: entrance is on the right, the cashier on the left. Studies have shown that customers tend to feel slightly stressed – increased cardiac pulse, elevated blood pressure, slightly faster walking pace – and buy less when they have to walk in the opposite direction.

Same on the sports field: most track and field sports – from the 400 meter distance runner to the hurdle racer, they all run towards their left. Even the everyday jogger tends to run counter clockwise around the field or lake if he has free choice…”

Except from when I've been hit by cars, all my crashes have been to the right - so I am the odd man out here. I have noticed though that when I stop, I unclip my right foot. Most cyclists unclip their left foot.

I liked the bit about running around a track - I haven't run around a track in decades, but last time I did, I always ran counter clockwise. Weird!

I love the smell of hypocrisy in the morning

I just love the recent tone Fairfax has taken regarding the misdemeanours of our Prime Minister.

Consider their lines of thinking:

1. Fraud, corruption and illegal conduct by Police must be investigated by a Royal Commission. Right now. However, fraud corruption and illegal conduct by union officials and their hangers on are very ho-hum and of no interest to anyone.
2. Julian Assange must be not be silenced, and he must be given every opportunity to distribute his sensitive, stolen material. However, Larry Pickering has to be muzzled, and his attempts to uncover and distribute material that should be in the public domain are an affront to democracy.
3. Pickering has been drawing rude cartoons about the political elite since I was a boy. For instance, here's Malcolm Fraser and here's Gough. However, drawing rude cartoons of the current PM is  sexist. I guess when Abbott becomes PM and Pickering starts drawing him without his budgie smugglers on, Fairfax will find that hilarious and will eagerly print his work.
4. Fairfax thinks that Pickering should not be published because he writes rude and racey things and has a controversial past. Yet they employed writers such as Catherine Deveny and Marieke Hardy who are quite notorious for their low rent, filthy, controversial musings.

Add your own examples as you see fit.

In slush we trust

You can have fun creating your own posters here.

Nutrition and fitness

A couple of interesting posts of training and nutrition from Cycling Tips:

Five sports nutrition myths: the info I got out of it is that cramps are not caused by electrolyte shortages and supplements have the most impact on unfit people.

Chocolate milk - the perfect sports drink. Should be a welcome message for anyone addicted to that stuff. Pity it says nothing about iced coffee.

Coming back from a fitness slump - the comments are well worth a read in order to gain an insight into how some of these super skinny, mega fit people operate and think.

Greendoggle fail

From Carpe Diem:

Layoffs mount at U.S. wind power manufacturing plants as the production tax credit for wind nears its expiration. Another greendoggle for an energy source that can't survive without massive taxpayer life support.

Fail baby, fail.

Local elections - Part II

Disclosure - I'm not terribly keen on Angelo. My dislike for him started when he tried to sleaze onto the missus at a council event. If I'd been at the event rather than minding the kids, his nose might be a bit bent to one side in the above photo. But now that is over and done with, let's look at the guff.

This pamphlet is a lot larger and wordier than the Liberal party version. However, it boils down to the same sort of solid, boring, local government stuff. Libraries, parks, playgrounds, footpaths, roads and rates. The only thing that doesn't get a mention is rubbish. Good.

The top group photo shows Angelo in front of a crowd of locals. The bloke on the far left is a Labor counciller and the bloke on the far right is also a Labor councillor - and he was investigated by ICAC in 2010 over some property that his wife owned, but was renovated using Burwood Council staff and resources. I presume everyone else in that photo represents every last Labor party member in the area.

I have to chuckle at the last promise, which is about "fighting overdevelopment". Angelo has been Mayor during the development of the Rhodes peninsular, which is a massively built up residential area. I see nothing wrong with that - it's a good shopping precinct now, a former industrial wasteland now has homes on it for about 10,000 people and it's right on the train line. What the hell is wrong with development? And how do you define "overdevelopment"? Is it like pornography - "I know it when I see it?"

Soot - the carbon behind the melting in Greenland?

What causes melting in Greenland - CO2 or plain old C?

The soot from forest fires in Asia and factories in China might be more to blame than the CO2 produced by you and me.

Running the numbers on wind power

An interesting view on how wind power actually produces more CO2 than gas fired generation - when you take into account the impact of wind on the rest of the power generation system.

[A]s wind rarely produces more than 25% of its faceplate capacity it needs 75% backup - which due to the necessity of fast response times needs OCGT generation (CCGT can respond quickly but the heat-exchanger systems upon which their increased efficiency relies, cannot - so CCGT behaves like OCGT under these circumstances). CCGT produces 0.4 tonnes of CO2 per MWh, OCGT produces 0.6 tonnes. Thus 0.6 tonnes x 75% = 0.45 tonnes. Conclusion: Wind + OCGT backup produces more 0.05 tonnes of CO2 per MWh than continuous CCGT.

I love this comment, although he proceeds to go over the top by invoking Godwin's Law:

the purpose of the windmills is not to save CO2. it's to provide carbon trading/offset receipts for the banks and to support the Euro by a non-national taxation. There is also the political narrative: they are like the Easter Island Statures, a symbol of the power of the ruling elite whilst the workers willingly toil at green jobs.

More on BBC bias

More on the favouritism the BBC shows the Grauniad.

The Guardian takes a number of assumptions for granted: police are racist, businesses are corrupt, Israel is wrong, US Republicans are extreme, the welfare system is ungenerous, immigration is desirable, austerity and growth are antonyms. All newspapers have prejudices, of course: they would be extremely dull if they didn’t. The difference is that the BBC is taxpayer-funded and obliged by its Charter to be neutral.

You could substitute the ABC and Fairfax in there without any issues at all.

How to make a Ford go faster

How do you make a Ford ute go faster?

Put it on a tow truck.

If I get away from work and the weather is nice, I like to extend my ride home sometimes by heading up to the Abbotsford Rowing Club. I'm not heading up there for dinner or a beer - it's just a nice ride up the Abbotsford peninsular, and on the way back, I can treat myself to the occasional gellato from Trovatino. It's worth the extra few kilometres in order to get one of those inside me.

Post gellato, I generally don't take the most direct route home - I meander around the suburbs for a bit, looking at this and that. If you've got time to stop for a gellato, there's no need to go racing home at 100mph. Sometimes I'll head down to the water, and at other times, I'll go "inland".

And that's how I spotted this ute being towed away. Serendipity.