Rodd Island

This post may only be of passing interest if you are keen on death to rabbits.

Rodd Island was originally used as a research station for studying the use of chicken cholera to kill rabbits. I ride past it everytime I go around the Bay, and I finally stopped this week to read a plaque on the foreshore that tells you some useless information that can be trotted out at dinner parties.


I'm not sure how deep the water is out there. You could probably walk halfway to it at low tide.

What is a scientist?

Thanks to global warming, we hear a lot about scientists.

We hear that a majority think this, or the majority think that, or that such-and-such has signed a something-or-other.

Today, the SMH even made mention of an "emminent scientist", but that had something to do with turning "Colin" the whale into sushi - "colin in my colon", so to speak.

That got me thinking - what is a scientist, and even more curiously, what is an "emminent" scientist? How do you become a scientist?

The accepted wisdom seems to be that a scientist was someone that had completed a science degree. But that is a very modern condition. I am not going to bother researching this (too little sleep last night), but I presume that great scientists like Franklin, Archimedes, Edison, Pasteur, Curie and Newton didn't exactly follow that route. A degree is only thought of as a necessary condition in these times of educational achievement inflation. It used to be that a member of the aristocracy or the upper classes could develop say an interest in rocks, send away for a few books on the subject, have dinner with a local expert once a month and then build a collection from their estate in the conservatory. Next thing you know, this upper-crust twit with a taste for Oxford cloth and plus-fours has developed a new theory on plate techtonics or something like that (I made all that up - simply as an insight into how "amateur" scientists actually did a lot of the work until our degree factories started turning out white coated lab technicians without a spark of insight in their newly mortar-boarded skulls).

What about being published? Is that a necessary condition? I write quite a bit of stuff (mostly crap), have been published from time to time in various newspapers and magazines (I even made it into Penthouse once) - but I would never call myself a "writer", let alone an "author". Many "scientists" only want to get published in order to secure a job, or to help their application for their next research grant. The volume of publications that a scientist gets into is more a sign of their desperation for tenure or cash than an indicator of their achievements in advancing the field of human knowledge.

I went to uni with a bloke who was completely brilliant, and he became what I would call a scientist. He was the smartest guy in the state, as judged by the statewide final year exams at school. He walked away with the University Medal, which goes to the student with the highest marks. He went on to study at Oxford, where his lab was showered with cash from some patent or another so that he could poke the AIDS virus with machines that went "ping". From there, he moved on to UCLA and a nice lab in San Francisco that was awash with even more money for AIDS research. I figured that this guy was so bright, if someone discovers the cure for AIDS, it will be him. (He is also insanely hard working).

Anyway, about 10 years ago, Chris and I did a little round the world sojourn and dropped in on him in San Fran for a couple of nights of beer and catching up. Chris had a big advantage over me, in that he had 4 years of Ag Science under his belt, so he was able to tell one end of a sheep from the other. Believe me, that helps when discussing breakthroughs in AIDS research over a few dozen beers.

We got to talking, and we popped the big question after touring the lab and looking at lots of machines that went "ping", examining hordes of rats and seeing legions of white coated researchers scurrying this way and that. The question was this:

"JC, what exactly is it that you do?"

His answer was quite simple. And remember, this is the smartest, best educated, hardest working individual you are ever likely to meet.

"I spend my days writing applications for grant money".

Us: "OK, and after that? Do you poke around the insides of cell DNA with an electron microscope? Have a video conference with the smart cookies at MIT? Peer into test tubes?"

JC: "No, that's my day. I just write grant applications. And occasionally go to meetings."

Us: "And what do you discuss at these meetings? New methods for deciphering how the virus works? Ways to prevent transmission? New analysis methods?"

JC: "No, we generally talk about how our grant applications are going. And if we've been succesful, we fight over how many graduate students each lab gets."

Us: "Ummmmmmmmmmmm....... where can we get some proper American style ribs?"

So that's how the biggest brains on the planet spend their days.

JC did relent after a while and took us back to the rat lab to show us his favourite rats. He had lots of rats. He explained how many millions of dollars a year he spent on buying, feeding and housing rats. It was a lot of money. You could feed half of Ethiopia on the money that he spent on rats.

Us: "So what do you do with your rats?"

JC: (Stroking a fine looking specimen) "We inject them with stuff, then we kill them, chop their tails off, put the tails in a blender, and then test samples of the tail soup."

Us: "And how often does that happen around here?"

JC: "About every 5 minutes".

That is still the best explanation that I can give anyone as to how research labs work. A cure for AIDS will be delivered on the tails of a million expensive, well fed rats. In a blender.

JC did come through with the great American ribs. Trouble is, he directed us to a place that was deep in a suburb that had never seen white men before. It was a pretty cool sort of joint - I guess the owner had played basketball at one point, for photos of black basketballers adorned almost every surface of the interior. We ordered, acted like Martians from another planet (ie, sat around and were completely oggled by about two dozen locals who could not believe the temerity of one honky, let alone two, walking into their turf.

We collected our ribs and split. The next day, we mentioned to someone we met that we'd been to wherever it was. The expression on their face would be like if you walked into Faluja a few years back with a herd of pigs and a sign saying, "If you're sick of rooting goats, try a pig for once".

Anyway, I have a slightly jaundiced view now of scientific research, and people purporting to be scientists.

This is my view of a real scientist.

When we were at uni, we went on a road trip one weekend to JC's farm. Or his parent's farm, to be more specific. We spent Saturday night making petrol bombs and trying to set a recently fallen and rather wet tree on fire. The tree had to go, so we were performing a valuable service for this parents.

The petrol bombs were made from empty beer bottles, and the empty beers bottles were made by drinking the beer that they contained. The more we felt like burning things, the more bottles we required, so the faster we drank them, so the faster we got drunk.

JC, having an enquiring mind, wondered whether a mix of diesel and petrol would do better service as the oil in the diesel would stick to the tree and burn longer. That progressed to mixing up a mild form of napalm, which we set off by perching molotov cocktails with a burning wick on the tree and then shooting at them with various rifles. JC then progressed by trying to evaluate the probability of one or all of us ending up in Casualty before the night was over... and calculating whether we would run out of beer before we all passed out, or ended up with 3rd degree burns.
I have no idea how the night finished up, and I think JC's note book became indecipherable about the point where we ran out of beer and start on VO Invalid port.

But the next morning, we had one scorched tree and a herd of rather frightened cows.

So we blew up the tree with dynamite and went home.

Now that's science.

Scorched.TV is a crock of crap

http://www.scorched.tv/

What a pile of badly put together crap.

On the advice of Tim Blair, I decided to shoot a short clip of the rain falling in our backyard, and the water puddling on the lawn and turning it into an impassable swamp.

I tried to upload my clip to scorched. No matter what link I clicked on anywhere in the website (like the one below that says UPLOAD VIDEO), up pops.... guess what?



A stupid pop-up box inviting you to send an email. How are you supposed to upload a fucking video clip using an email box that does not allow you to attach an attachment?


As a fucking idiot put it some time ago, these people are cretans.

PS - the sand pit is now a mud pit. It looks like I won't get to have my daily ride today because it is just too WET and fucking DAMP and NOT DRY out there for it to be pleasant.

To the Harbour Bridge - and beyond!

I'm trying to ride 100 miles a week. To stave off boredom, I try to head for a different point of the compass every day. Yesterday was North Sydney day.

Here's a panoramic shot from the Sydney Observatory, looking west. Click for bigger view. This is where all the fitness fanatics hang out at lunch time - there must have been 50 trim people running around, doing situps, boxing etc etc.


Here is the view looking east. Not so attractive. But when I see all those RTA breakdown trucks parked there, it makes me wonder how many idiots run out of petrol on the bridge. Must be a lot. Is it getting worse with higher petrol prices - ie, people running their tank emptier and emptier as their wallets get lighter and lighter?


Here is the observatory itself (this one's for you, Ross). If I had bothered to take my bike lock, I might have popped in for a decko.


Clover Moore is spending big on building bike lanes, which I like. But the construction work is a bit hard to get around - here is a lane under construction near the Slip Inn (don't ask me about street names in Sydney - I navigate from pub to pub). This is a bastard of a hill to get up with two lanes missing, being squashed into traffic and having agro drivers behind you fuming at the road works.


Another bastard of a hill - you have to ride up this to get onto the bike lane on the bridge. When people walk down this hill, they hang onto the rail and lean back about 20 degrees.


There and back was almost 2 hours exactly on the road (including stops to take photos). Not a bad bit of exercise.

Memories of cars ancient

I was reading this fascinating story over at Flight Level 390 about a brake failure when it reminded me of a beast I used to own - a Rover 3500 like the one shown below.

How did I make the connection?

Fi-fi (the plane) had a broken skid sensor wire in the brake system. Fi-fi is some sort of new-fangled Airbus, the model of which I am always forgetting, but it was the bit about the sensor that triggered a memory.

This Rover, from 1969 (or thereabouts) had a brake pad wear sensor for the front pads. It was a very simple arrangement - the pad had a wire embedded in it so that when the pad wore down to that point, it made contact with the brake disk, completed a circuit and triggered a warning light on the dash. From memory, it was the same light as the handbrake - if you disengaged the handbrake and the light stayed red, it was time to replace the pads.

Those old Rovers also had a really simple method of telling you when an indicator bulb had blown - the indicators would fail to "blink" on that side on the dashboard. If you indicated to go left and the little green arrow light came on and stayed on, it meant either the forward or rear bulb had blown. I guess it just took a bit of forward thinking in the design of the electrical wiring to make that work.

I don't know why they had the brake wear sensor - perhaps pads wore faster in those days (although since they were probably full of asbestos, they might have lasted longer than a modern set). Maybe pads weren't checked at the regular service, or so many people did their servicing themselves at home that they generally forgot to check the pads.... who knows. But I thought it was a great bit of engineering, and an interesting safety feature.

Given the number of cars that I see driving around these days with no working tail lights, you'd think some sort of blown globe warning system would be engineered into every car on the road. If they could do it in 1969, I'm sure it could be done today.

My only stipulation would be that they didn't use a British wiring harness. I never drove my old Rovers anywhere without a can of WD-40 handy. Or two. I used it a lot.

Little fuckers

Found another franger in the street today - an ansell ultra thin number.

I am going to have fun with these fuckers if I ever catch them at it.

Your choice - feed them or shoot them

There's a nice little story over at Bolta's about feral dogs eating a dead bloke.

I blogged a while back about a mate of mine who was a cop in WA back in the late 1980's/early 1990's and what he had to go through when dealing with our indigenous brethren.

One of his postings was to Kalgoorlie. He told me how they used to drive around at night in a paddy wagon shooting feral dogs with their Police issue pistols (using privately bought sub-sonic ammo, which makes less noise). He thought it was great target practice, and by the sound of it, he shot an awful lot of dogs.

Collecting the dogs was easy. They'd pick up a drunken blackfella to start with, put him in the back of the wagon, and tell him to get out and collect the carcases after they'd shot each one. They'd then drive to the tip, and have him offload all the dead dogs and cover them up with garbage.

They'd then give him a lift to wherever it was he wanted to go - back to his dossing spot, or the pub, or a fast food outlet.

What they were doing was so totally illegal in so many ways, it's not funny. But it helped to keep a really serious problem under control - a problem so bad, him and other Police risked their careers to do it. I'm sure he also had a lot of fun shooting the dogs, but that wasn't the motivating factor. He was more worried about all the people who were being treated for dog bites, especially young kids.

If I was him, I would have done the same. I hope there are still coppers out there that would do the same today.

Who gave this bonehead a car?

Yesterday must have been the annual "Death on the road day", but I guess I missed the announcements for it. Check out this bonehead at the eastern approach to the ANZAC Bridge, turning across several lanes of traffic after he realises "Oops, I don't want to go to the land of bogans".



It's not clear in this video, but you should have seen the shocked look on his face when he realised I was filming him - that's when J and I start laughing.

You, sunshine, are an utter bonehead.

I say that it must have been the annual "Death on the roads day" as I went for a ride in the afternoon and was nearly cleaned up at two separate roundabouts. The worst time to go for a ride is around the time when school finishes for the day - by far, the worst drivers on the roads are distracted parents picking up their kids. I have been guilty of leaning back and searching around on the floor for a dropped Buzz Lightyear, but only at red lights and things like that. Many parents seem to think that it's fine to turn around and feed their offspring as they hurtle down a packed freeway at 100km/h.

Anyway, I was not on a packed freeway. I was cruising the backstreets of bogan land, checking out real estate. Mainly real estate that I can't afford to buy, but a bike is a great way to look at houses. You can pull over really quickly, park anywhere, travel quickly enough to see a lot of them in a short time, yet slowly enough to have a good look at what you are passing without holding up the traffic behind you.

Both miscreants were driving small, 3 door hatchbacks. The first was a woman who was deep in conversation with her friend in the passenger seat. I saw her coming down the road towards me (I was turning right through the roundabout) and at no point did her eyes flick left or right to look for traffic coming from anywhere in the known universe - she just zoomed through the roundabout like she was wrapped in some sort of God-like protective bubble. I thought about chasing her and yelling in her ear, but got over it.

I minute later, a Boxster went past a mite too close, and I did chase him and caught him a few hundred yards up the road. I was about to bollock him very loudly from six inches away, when I noticed that he had one of those WWI waxed fighter pilot moustaches (he was about 50 I'd say), and I was so impressed, I just said, "You got a bit close back there", which I had to repeat once, but I think he got the message.

About 5 minutes after that, another little sub-$12,000 piece of Korean shit just about took me out at another roundabout - and even though I had the right of way, the guy beeped at me! He beeped at me!

He must have seen the look on my face, which was KILL KILL KILL, for he pulled alongside, wound down the passenger window and apologised profusely for beeping, and even more so for trying to kill me. That calmed me down in an instant - so much so, that I said sorry as well and wondered for a moment if he in fact had the right of way. No, I had the right of way, and was well in front of him in the roundabout - so much so that if he hadn't stopped, he would have hit me from behind. He had simply approached the roundabout too fast and with no intention of looking to his right for entering traffic.

I notice that the abuse that 4WD's used to cop in the media has subsided. Good. 98% of the grief that I cop as a cyclist comes from the following vehicles:

• small hatchbacks
• tradesmen in utes
• vans, especially couriers
• taxis
• any form of fuckwit in something like a WRX

Yesterday, I could have added a 2.5 tonne truck as well. The idiot tradesman driving it overtook me with about 2 inches to spare. The traffic built up, I overtook him, then a few minutes later, he did it again. He did it four times in the end - I was getting ready to reach into his tray and throw his toolbox onto the road when he turned right and got out of my life. (Before throwing his toolbox out, I had a good look at him and found that he was really fat, so if he tried to chase me on foot, he would have no chance).

I think the trick to throwing a toolbox onto the road from a truck is to make sure they are really stuck in stalled traffic, find an escape route and then do it. Never do it where they have a chance to catch you.

Anyway, from now on, I am going to avoid the 2.30pm to 4.00pm timeslot like the plague.

And in case you are wondering, most of my riding yesterday was on roads with marked and separate bike lanes, so it's not like I was getting in the way of any cars.

Header photo

Loonies who frequent this site might have noticed the absence of my usual photo at the top of the page. I've taken it down until I find something interesting to put up.

How pissed would you need to be to not notice you are on fire?

The wierd and wacky world of pubs and their patrons.

Is improving policing really this simple?

I'm going to copy the entire text of this article from the Daily Telegraph, just in case it gets archived into the bowels of their site where even Google can't find it:

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

Muggings and robberies drop as police ordered from desks

By Gemma Jones

August 18, 2008 12:00am

A DRAMATIC change in the approach to crime-fighting in central Sydney has slashed muggings in half and reduced the incidence of other serious crimes.

Police have been ordered out from behind their desks and less important tasks have been shelved to get as many as 30 more officers into the CBD to target criminals.

Detective Inspector Jenny Hayes said the fundamental shift, which began three months ago, was already reaping dramatic rewards.

Muggings have fallen from a monthly average of 38 to 19 in July, and robberies have dropped by as many as 100 a month.

In July last year, there were 229 thefts from vehicles in the city. Last month, there were 126.

"Policing operations have changed in the city. It's very different from three months ago in that a lot of police are on the street," Insp Hayes said.

"It's a complete change: that is, flood the city with visible police and target offenders or suspects.

"We have different priorities. We redeploy police now, we use more drug dogs to show a lot of high visibility, we take police from less important tasks."

Instead of being ordered into the street in a show of force, officers - many of them plainclothes detectives - are targeting specific crimes.

Police released further figures on Friday showing an almost 400 per cent increase in drug searches compared with the corresponding three months last year.

Officers have doubled the number of regular searches, and "move-on" orders to potential troublemakers have increased by 23 per cent.

Break, enter and steal offences have plummeted by more than a third compared with this time last year.

Officers are working with licensed premises to fight alcohol-related crime, but it is too early to tell if voluntary lockdowns and the introduction of plastic glasses are reducing assaults.

Insp Hayes hoped there would be a marked reduction in assaults during the next six months.

"We're trying different sorts of policing strategies; you really want to see a difference," she said.

Sydney Chamber of Commerce executive director Patricia Forsythe said the reduction in crime was being noticed by business owners on the notorious George St cinema strip.

"There were previously a few hot spots. There was a period when we were seeing regular high-profile crimes along that George St area," she said.

Ms Forsythe said the benefits of the police change were evident.

"It seems to be having some positive effect," she said.

"Police on the beat and street lighting are two of the most simple, but most effective, strategies you can employ."

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

Well, who would have thunk it.

I'm sure Inspector Hayes will shortly be moved on to other things - punishment for being too effective.

Guess what this came out of

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











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

Absolutely delicious. From a Stephanie Alexander cook book.

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

Angela D'Amore MP - how symbolic

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

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


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

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

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

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

Fools with Fiats

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

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


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

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

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

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

Gillard ices kiddies

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The kids these days have it soft. Pussies.

The old and the new

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

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

Visiting a housing commission area

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




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


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

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

Lizards

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

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

Not bad for a 12x digital zoom.

For Bruce - some canals

Five Wog is not the Venice of the West.

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



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


And the cricket nets.


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




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

More on railway carparks

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

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

Here is Concord Hospital and its carpark.

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

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

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