Where is the cone of silence?

Going to work on the bus would be so much more enjoyable if each and every seat was fitted with a cone of silence.

It only took one stop from home this morning before my entire trip was ruined by two "old friends" meeting up and sitting behind me and chatting all the way in. I heard all about how one was 3 months pregnant, the work problems of the other, how a couple they know has divorced after 5 months, how her mother can't drive, what her father is doing now that he is retired...I could go on and on, but I'm afraid my brain fell out halfway into town in protest at being fed such a high intake of drivel, and it has refused to work in the normal fashion since.

The best bit was listening to one of them talking about taking redundancy from that amazingly fast moving and customer facing organisation called RailCorp. She spent 20 minutes explaining to her friend why she was hanging around - essentially she was waiting for redundancy, and wouldn't leave until she got it.

Well, shucks. If you hate the place that much, why don't you just do us all a favour and bugger off now? She had this whinging, whining voice and I just bet that she was the type that sat around for 7.5 hours per day complaining about how busy she was and how underappreciated she was and how much she had to do blah blah blah - whilst actually getting nothing done and actually interfering with those that are trying to do something useful and productive.

Redundancy - hell! Find them and fire them. Useless bunch of public tit-sucking bastards.

World's worst drivers

I caught a taxi home tonight. No, this is not a story about a terrible taxi driver, although I have had plenty of them in my time. I had a very competent driver for once, which was nice.

We were driving onto the ANZAC bridge when I heard a car screaming up beside us in the next lane. We were doing 80, and it was clearly in 2nd gear. The driver was revving the ring out of it. I couldn't see all the car at first - just part of the bonnet - as there was a car in the lane next to us. What I could see was an old Commodore with a mangled front bumper and a dented side panel. The car was dropping back and then surging forward to almost rear end the car next to us. The driver was clearly an idiot without a clue.

My taxi driver shook his head and muttered something about poor driving. I mentioned that it looked like the driver didn't know how to change gears.

Then the car beside use changed lanes and the idiot-mobile came fully into view. Every panel dented. An absolute bomb.

Being driven by what looked like a suspicously 14 year old Aboriginal male, with several other pre-teens in the passenger seats. No seat belts in evidence. Just three yahoo-ing young males in a car on a busy road.

I hate to write this and say "stereotype", so I won't. All I will write is what I saw.

I saw no other idiot driving on the bridge tonight. No other idiot driving on the way home, which is unusual as the young stud-wogs usually like to drag race their wogged-up rice burners around the City West Link. Just a couple of blackfellas driving like utter numbnuts.

My taxi driver got an eyefull of them and moved us into another lane to put as much distance between us as possible. And he was Asian.

The disconnect between Kyoto and immigration

How much do the eco-nuts think we have to cut greenhouse as emissions and water consumption? 10%? 20%? 50%? Whatever the cuts turn out to be, they're going to be made tougher if the population keeps growing at the current rate.

Immigration is currently something like 130,000 per year. The population is around 20 million. In 20 years time, when we are supposed to have hit these targets, the population will have grown 10%.

So, in order to cut our emissions or water consumption to 20% below what it is now, we are going to have to make even heftier cuts per head, since there will be more heads to go around.

Why is it that none of the eco-boogymen are making a connection between all the usual environmental terrors and immigration? I have no problem with bringing lots of people in, but please don't say that we can have our cake and eat it too. If we want immigration, and we want to cut consumption of oil, water, land etc etc, then we need to be ready to make even bigger cuts per head than the headline numbers suggest.

Why demand health eqaulity?

As I passed a shop the other day, I noticed a poster that said something like "Demand health equality for Aboriginals".

OK, that's nice. Catchy slogan, feels good and all that.

But why do we have inequality today?

Is it because we lack health facilities and health professionals (doctors, nurses) out in Woop-Woop, or is it because some people are treating themselves (and their families) badly?

The first one is easy to fix. Since these luvvie groups are righteously "demanding" that we fix the problem, I suggest we conscript doctors and nurses from those areas where there are lots of them and pack them off to Woop-Woop for a few years. Kind of like how we conscripted people into the Army during the Vietnam War. I'm sure that will be popular, and doctors and nurses won't mind being torn away from their families and inner-city clinics for a few years somewhere north of Alice Springs. We give each doctor and nurse in the inner city a number, and draw numbers out of a Lotto barrel until we have enough to do the job.

I mean, how else are we going to get people to go and work out there? We have inequality within Sydney where we have lots of GPs per head in the east and not that many per head out west. Why? Because doctors do not want to live and work out west. How keen do you think they'll be to go 2000km further west? Not much I bet.

The other cause could be people not treating themselves very well. I don't mean smoking and drinking and fighting and eating bad food. You can also get horrible health outcomes through not washing yourself properly (like having a shower), not washing your hands after having a poo, poor food hygene, not washing clothes often enough etc etc. These things lead to lice, ear infections, eye infections, gastro, skin diseases and so on.

If our problem is that some people aren't washing their kids and their carrots and their clothes often enough, then I reckon we can fix that by rounding up all the luvvies that printed these posters and shipping them off to Woop-Woop for a few years, with the express purpose of having them cook and clean and wash for these families during that time.

I'm sure they won't mind that either.

I mean for fucks sake, if some kid is getting infections because the parents are too whacked out to wash them properly, how is "demanding equal health outcomes" going to fix anything?

Boneheads.

Moisturiser is bad for you

I walk around bare foot as often as possible, so I have reasonably tough feet. The flipside though is that they are ugly. Callouses and rough bits abound from top to bottom. J took one look at them a while back and recommended that I start rubbing moisturiser into them.

I finally got around to taking her advice and the results were bizarre. My foot skin (not fore skin) started flaking or peeling off in great rubbery sheets. Everywhere I went, I was trailed by blobs of epidermis. My feet now look like I've contracted leprosy.

I figure that what's happened is that the thick layer of completely dried out leather on the surface has gone rotten at the first sign of moisture. It doesn't know what to do with a bit of moisture, so it hits the eject button and decides to depart from the rest of my skin.

Next thing you know, I'll be sitting in the shower with one of those pummice things scraping off layers of skin. Either that, or a cheese grater.

This did happen to me once before - many years ago. I spent the entire summer barefoot, and had a sole thicker than most shoes. Come winter, I started wearing socks and shoes again and lo and behold, one day the entire sole peeled off in a single continuous slab of sloughed off skin. It looked like one of those odour eater things you put into your shoes. Very wierd. I think I am getting the same thing now, only in slow motion.

Men just shouldn't moisturise their feet. It's unnatural.

Toe nail-less

The nail and I finally departed company tonight. I gently peeled off the bandaid that was holding the nail in place and the nail came with it. Ah well, it is no great loss.



Except that I now need to put something over this manky nail bed for the next month until it toughens up. You can't just put a sock over this in the morning and not feel a certain level of discomfort. The nail bed is always tender, so a bandaid applied daily is a good idea for a while.



This is going to play havoc with my body surfing plans for this weekend. Wearing a flipper over an exposed nail bed is....ugh.

How the bus affects perceptions

I like the read small format newspapers on the bus - things like The Economist and The Spectator. I am now in the habit of folding down the corner of a page if I think there is something worth following up on that page - like adding a book to my Amazon wish list, or blogging about a particular topic that catches my eye.

But what I am finding of late is that I fold down all these pages, then get home and find that they no longer interest me. What on earth made me think tonight that I'd want to read a book about Ronnie Wood? Or a book on musicophilia?

They must be pumping something into the air conditioning on the bus. Probably helps to keep the proles happy and contented on their way to/from the daily grind.

Theft

Hooray. A thief has been busted at Bondi. I hope they bury her up to her neck in the sand and let the sand crabs do their worst.

If only ther were sand crabs at Bondi.

It only takes one person like that to make your trip to the beach an absolute misery. I usually leave all my valuables in the car and take just my car keys and a $20 note to pay for breakfast. Everything is carried in the rattiest looking bag that I own. I wear an old and unfashionable shirt with holes in it and leave that ostentatiously draped over my ratty bag.

It also helps to swim before 7am, when most crims are still in bed.

Toe - oh no!

Well it had to happen. I had a shower, walked out of the bathroom and the monkey ran straight into my foot, kicking my toenail upwards in the process. That was enough to detach the front of the toenail and the right hand side. The nail is now only attached in the bottom left hand corner, which is fairly typical (I think I have lost this nail 7 or 8 years in a row now after skiing).



Note all the black gunge under the nail - all the old blood that has been sitting there for 3 months. The nail has also ripped a bit at the front. There is still a soft, white chunk (that looks like a maggot) attached to the toe.



It was pretty much vertical at first, but it slowly subsided back down towards the nail bed. I have now wrapped it up in tape to hold the nail down. It will probably stay that way for a few weeks until the bottom left hand corner decides to let go.



And yes, everything under the nail is soft and squidgy.

Who would want to be a doctor and have to put up with this sort of stuff all day?

Locals should be barred from Centrepoint

The Centrepoint tower is the tallest freestanding structure in Sydney. For a while there, I am sure it was the highest thing in Australia, or even the southern hemisphere.

Regardless of how high it is, the tower has a feature common to all these tall things - a revolving restaurant. I prefer to call them revolting restaurants, since I have never been to one that has served up the kind of food that I would go back for. They're all about the view and that allows them to get away with a fairly miserable standard of nosh. Don't get me wrong - it's buffet food that is better than boarding school and military buffet food... but that's not saying a lot.

I blame these people for the root of the problem.

We went to the buffet restaurant again last night. The in laws were in town and the idea was to give the kids a treat - and as far as kids with their undiscerning palates are concerned, it's a great idea. Pity that some of the adults have to suffer by going along. I think a better idea would be for the adults to go to the very flash restaurant one floor down, and leave the buffet as a kids zone. Then everyone would be happy.

What gets me about the buffet is the price. It was over $220 for 3 adults and a kid. They really sting you on this deal. Even if you eat nothing but prawns and oysters (which is what I set out to do), I reckon you'll consume no more than $30 worth of food at market rates. And we're talking about cold seafood here - food that requires zero preparation by the kitchen staff.

The buffet had a couple of zones. One was doing salads and seafood (small, cold, farmed prawns, oysters natural, mussels in something, baby octopus in something), another did roasted meats and spuds and things, and the last was doing Indian and Italian - butter chicken and ravioli essentially.

The desserts were beyond the pale. Really. Jelly with no icecream? That is a new low.

They do their best to get you through the place in 90 minutes. We would have been out of there in about that time, if the lifts weren't such a disaster. I think they can only have a certain number of lifts moving at any one time, so one of the four lifts arrives, the doors open, you enter, the doors close and then you stand there for 2 minutes wondering when you will start moving.

My mood was not enhanced when at the start of the whole saga, the security guard at the bottom of the tower bundled us into a lift and then sent us to the wrong floor at the top of the tower. The lift then refused to take us to another floor, and simply returned us to the ground. We then had to go up again. I wasted a good 5 minutes of my life in that lift.

The view was obscured a bit by windows that seem well past their prime. They didn't look clear at all, so the view appeared to be perpetually shrouded in a light mist.

Essentially, it is a big feeding barn for Asian tourists who don't know any better. It's nice to do it once, but after that, the locals should not be allowed back. Given the number of sophisticated and wonderful entertainments and eating places in this state, it's a bit of an embarrasment.

Crash bandicoot

I had to drive over to Luna Park last night to collect Junior about 11pm. I went the long way around the north of the harbour - just for old times sake, since I used to live around Milsons Point for a year or so.

I got completely lost of course. I have little sense of direction.

I decided to take the short way home by going across the Harbour Bridge. Is faster, but much less interesting (unless you have a thing for driving over bridges and paying tolls).

That turned out to be a big mistake. Once we hit the Western Distributor, five lanes of traffic turned into gridlock. Gridlock that seemed to last forever. It was made worse by the stupid drivers that decided to zip down the outside lane to my left, heedless of the fact that it merged about 50 yards in front of where we were stuck. Those people really annoy me. I should have driven the Disco half into that lane and just blocked it to all except mopeds.

The source of the gridlock was eventually revealed as a half-cooked car in the middle of the Distributor. The front end was burnt out and and the molten and cracked road underneath was being shovelled up by firemen. Five lanes into two creates almighty congestion, even at 11.30pm at night.

We had gone barely a kilometre when we passed another crash. Some idiot must have planted it on leaving the crash scene (probably due to frustration) and lost it when taking the sweeping bend onto the ANZAC bridge. The car was sitting across the two left hand lanes, but all the wreckage was on the right. I reckon he went straight into the concrete divider on the right and then bounced back across the traffic into the left hand lanes.

There were no other smashed up cars around, and the Police hadn't noticed that they had another smash just up the road to deal with.

Most of the other drivers on the road didn't seem to notice either. I saw the busted up car and wreckage from way off, and slowed down to swerve around it at a safe speed. Other idiots, still pent up with frustration from the gridlock just behind them, came flying up behind me and tried to swerve around me to get ahead. All they got was a bumper bar under the front wheels.

I don't blame them for not noticing. Junior failed to see a thing, and the wreck was on his side of the car. He didn't notice the big, gouged out headlights sitting on the road in front of us (that I swerved around) or the torn-off bumper bars or the glass strewn right across the road or the bits of metal and plastic scattered in all directions.

I think people mentally switch off after being stuck in traffic. That was pretty clear last night.

One prang can easily need to another.

Computers for kiddies

I don't agree that shoving computers into schools will do anything to improve education outcomes.
However, if you want to give kids computers, what is the best way to do it?

There are two basic approaches - you give them to the suppliers of education, or you give them to the consumers. ie, you buy "pooled" computers for schools, which then sit in a dedicated classroom somewhere and get used for a few hours a day, or you get the parents to buy a laptop for their kids.

Funnily enough, the "supplier" approach seems to dominate the state sector, whilst the "consumer" approach dominates the private sector. Funny that.

If you're going to do it, I reckon the best approach is consumer driven. People are likely to get a lot more satisfaction out of a computer if they own it themselves. A privately owned car is a lot more useful and flexible than public transport (but don't try mentioning that heresy in the corridors of power). People like owning their own stuff. Don't believe me? Try sharing a single mobile phone or iPod amongst your family and friends. Civil war is generally rapidly achieved from attempting something as stupid as that.

How do you ensure that every family can afford a computer?

Kids really need a laptop - something they can lug from home to school and back again. Face it - if you want kids to become "computer literate", they are much more likely to learn about how things work from fiddling around with it in their own time. You can only learn so much in a classroom. Stuffing around on FacePlant or whatever it is called will teach them heaps more than any stuffed squid of a teacher ever will.

Did you really learn to drive via driving lessons, or did you pick up most of your skills out on the road in your own time with no instructor?

The answer is vouchers.

Laptops are not expensive any more. When I first started buying them at work, they cost around $10,000 a pop (but a PC back then also cost $4,500). Your average "corporate" laptop with lots of bells and whistles should now be under $2,000. You can buy an entry level laptop for $700. I know that because we own two of them. They don't have a lot of bells and whistles that we'll never use - they have just enough to be very useful. And at $700, they are cheap enough for us to own two. We might own three before long.

So my solution is to give families a voucher per kid every three years. The voucher should be enough to buy a laptop with some basic software that they'll use in class plus some anti-virus stuff. You can do that for about $900 if you are prepared to put up with Works instead of Office. You can do it for a bit over $1,000 if you install the Education version of Office.

The thing I like about vouchers is that people can buy a fancier laptop if they want to. Let's say you get a $1,000 voucher. If you want a $2,000 laptop, you can have it - so long as you are prepared to make up the difference. You don't have a government committee setting standards and issuing tenders and evaluating different makes and models (which are constantly changing) and having to deal with the logistics of buying hundreds of thousands of laptops per year. You simply handout vouchers and let the market do the job for you. Parents can shop where they like. They can buy an Acer or a Lenovo or an HP or whatever they like. They can buy the fanciest thing in the shop or the most basic. They can get a 40GB hard drive or an 80GB hard drive. You let them make the decisions based on the performance they want and what they can afford.

That would of course send the education beauracrats into a tailspin. If you give out vouchers for laptops and allow parents some choice, next thing you'll be handing out vouchers for schools and allow parents to choose where to send their kids based on the performance of the school and what they can afford.

It also makes people put some skin in the game. If the computers belong to the school, no one cares about them, and they take a beating. If your family owns it, I'm pretty sure most parents will make the kids take care of them. If they don't, well, they don't get another voucher and they have to pay for a new one out of their pocket. I like the idea of pushing the authority for choosing what to buy back to the families, as well as the responsibility for looking after them.

The Teachers Union would also go ballistic at it would introduce inequality into the classroom. We'd have an el-cheapo basic thing, whilst Bill next door might have something that cost 5 times as much. Bully for Bill. If his parents want to splash out on his education, let them. It's their money. I'd simply explain to Junior when he came home to complain about the paucity of expense that we forked out for his machine that he can have a cheap laptop and a two week ski holiday, or an expensive laptop and a week picking up litter at the local park during the holidays. Kids need to be taught about trade-offs and the fact that you can't have everything you want. Kids also need to be taught about value maximisation and how to evaluate different alternatives. Giving everyone the same committee-chosen machine teaches them nothing about the real world.

I also can't stand the thought of the education beauracracy being put in charge of going out to tender for laptops. They'd take forever to make a decision, probably choose a bad compromise and then not care about the consequences as it is not their money. You need to move purchasing decisions to where people care about it being their money.

I bet Kevin and his Kohorts have not thought this through. Because they are idiots that have never worked in the real world.

Air safety factoid

The reason you’re made to open the window blinds when you’re landing and then they turn off the cabin lights to make it dark, is if there’s an accident, the emergency services can see in the windows if they need to, and also that passengers’ eyes are accustomed to low light in case they need to evacuate in the dark.

From the Transport Blog.

Are we winning in Iraq?

Of course we are.

You know why?

Because I say that we are.

That's all I need to know. I know that self belief is very important when it comes to winning anything. A tennis game. A chess match. A job interview. A war. If you talk yourself down, you're willing yourself to lose.

Me - I reckon we're going to win, because I have belief in me, and belief in our country, and belief in the "western" way of doing things.

Anyone who says we are losing is just a chickenshit who is too afraid to stick up for western values.

Education policy

The Labor policy on education is one of the most misdirected piles of crap I have heard in a while.

Here's my ideas regarding education policy.

Broadband, laptops and other bits of techno-gee-whizz do nothing to educate people. Nothing.

I have been using on-line education tools for years. I learnt how to configure Cisco equipment by doing computer based training. I have read endless manuals on line. Some of them have been good, but all have suffered from the same problem - boredom. Teachers can be boring, but most educational content is more boring than sitting through a meeting of the Democratic Alliance of Teachers Special Needs Education Supplement Assistant Writers Punctuation workshop.

If you want to have a good education system, you need to develop the best education content in the world. Buying laptops is easy. Hell, I went down to Officeworks and bought two without batting an eyelid recently. It's also attention grabbing.

But a laptop without good educational content is as useful as an X-Box with no games to play on it.

Laptops have to be imported. Developing educational content is something that can be exported, and requires a high level of skills. Just the kind of thing that you need a talented workforce for.

I also don't get why the Feds have such a big interest in education policy. Doesn't that belong to the states?

And you don't need highspeed broadband to get an education. Kids used to get distance education via a fairly low bandwidth system - the old pedal radio!

In the end, the only thing that will make you better at something like calculus is practicing solving equations with a pen and a stack of paper. It's that simple.

PS - my new laptop has not made me a better writer. The type of content that I provide for this blog has not been improved by new hardware, or even by loading Vista. Good content only requires good "wetware" - that grey thing between your ears.

PPS - computers in schools equal electronic fingerpainting.

What a lousy burger

There is a fancy burger shop not far from the office. I have previously seen it at a distance, and always made a mental note to visit it one day and see how luxurious their burgers really are.

I finally got the chance today.

A plain burger meal set me back $9.50 - chips, Pepsi and a burger that consisted of a bun, some meat, a few gerkins and a great slather of mustard. And I mean a slather. Noah could have floated the ark on the flood of mustard that had been poured across the bun.

I should mention here that I hate Pepsi. Finding that they only sold Pepsi didn't get them into my good books, but I can live with that. Not every fast food joint is perfect.

The chips were very average. Un-crunchy. Not soggy. Not undercooked. But not even a hint of crispiness.

The bun was..... I don't know how to describe the bun. It was not a floury bap. It was not a plain vanilla mass produced white lump of bread that you get in a supermarket. But it wasn't any good either.

And the mustard. I like mustard. I like all sorts of mustard. But I like fancy mustard in small quantities. I can't bear to have cheap mustard slathered on with a paint roller.

They had about 6 beef burgers, about the same number of chicken and possibly some other types of burgers. I didn't pay that much attention.

I am going to give it another go. It might be that I selected the most boring burger on the list, and paid the penalty for my timidity. I should have gone for something that included everything, along with the kitchen sink.

Every place deserves a second chance.

Ethical question

There I am, getting ready to cross George St. George St is one of the main roads through the middle of the Sydney CBD. Quite a few lanes, lots of fast moving traffic.

The light is red, but a courier with a trolley load of stuff launches himself off the footpath and decides to cross six lanes of traffic against the light.

A car has to brake hard to avoid hitting him - before he has made it across the first lane.

Courier has many tattoos and a bad attitude. He was muttering to himself before he crossed the road. He abused the driver for not running him over.

Ethical conundrum. Should I have pushed him under a bus?

Fair dismissal

I walked outside the other morning to find my neighbour's car resting on all four rims. It had four very flat tyres. I knocked on his door to let him know, but he wasn't around.

I found out the story that night. He had employed a local kid to do some work for him. It didn't work out, so he fired him.

Gracious little bugger then slashed his tyres.

If you ask me, if the little bastard was that much of a turd, he deserved to get the boot.

I bet Kevin would say that he was misunderstood, and force my neighbour to re-employ the trumped up bag of shit.

Some people are just pricks. They should be sacked. Deal with it. The world is not a perfect place.

American imperialism

It's been a while now since I have heard Philip Adams open his yap and complain about Australia being flooded by American culture blah blah blah.

I am now waiting for him to write a column praising "Lions for lambs", being that it is an attack by a bunch of lefties.

But hang on, isn't "Lions for lambs" an American film about American culture and politics? Why on earth would anyone in Australia want to see it? It's got about as much relevance here as say knowing about the garbage collection policies of Podunsky, Alaska (I made that name up). So why would anyone in their right mind want to promote it?

But I'm sure Phil is just waiting to give it a huge plug, and encourage all Australians to go and see it. Just like Sicko, which has zero relevance to our health care system. It's fine for him to plug American culture, so long as it is that part of American culture that he approves of.

Well, thank goodness for that

Apparently a side effect of the drinking bans in the NT is a mass exodus of Aboriginies to SA - so they can hang around in a creek bed and get blind drunk again.

If I was a resident of the communities that they just left, I reckon I'd be saying, "Thank Christ for that."

I have a tough enough time living in a street with a woman who is a serial shopping trolley abandoner, some kids that drop McDonalds wrappers in the street from time to time and a knucklehead down the road who slashed my neighbours tyres recently (that's another story).

Imagine living in a small town in the middle of nowhere with hundreds of drunks, some of them violent, who sit around all day and night getting smashed, being rowdy and probably pissing and crapping wherever they like. There goes the neighbourhood.

Now they've split. If those communities have any sense, they'll burn down the houses that the drunks lived in and never let them back. Never. They might be able to get on with life now that the trash have moved down the road. I was going to say "white trash", but of course they're not. They're black trash, and they make life a bloody misery for everyone in the vicinity, and unfortunately those that suffer the most are other Aboriginals. No white bastard in Balmain is ever going to be kept up all night by these buggers.

We have heard plenty about the problems in these remote communities - the lack of medical care, policing and education etc etc etc. Part of that is because not many white fellas with the skills want to go and live out in those communities. Some of that is due to isolation. A lot of it is probably due to the drunkeness and violence and hopelessness.

Well, the drunks and the violent and the useless just packed up their bongos and moved to another state. There are probably some drunk and useless characters left behind, but I reckon that those that are left are the sober and useful types, and they might now have an opportunity to make things work properly without the dead weight drag of a bunch of useless bastards hanging around their necks.

The strain on policing, medical care, education, social services etc should all be much lower because the greatest consumers of lockup time, truancy, stitches, crutches and welfare benefits have split. Many of these communities may no longer need a copper and a doctor and a nurse because those that tied up 95% of their time are not there anymore. They are now camping out in areas that are better supplied with those services, so everyone should win. If you can't get police and doctors to work in those areas, move the patients and the crims to where the doctors and police actually are. If Mohammed won't go to the mountain, move the mountain to Mohammed.

At least I hope that's what has happened. This might finally be the chance for the up-and-at-'em types in these communities to get things going, knowing that their efforts and hard work aren't going to be trashed by some drunken knucklehead.