Ancient times

Somewhere in this photo lurks your heroic blogger, sometime around 1985.  I'm not sure where it was taken - take your pick between Bindoon, Nannup and Northam.  All featured kangaroo ticks, leeches, rock hard ground and boiling by day and freezing by night.

Who built a zoo on a swamp?

We've just done the Perth zoo, which is somewhere that I have not been for about 25 years or more.  It is no longer a series of concrete bunkers and steel bars and other animal prison-type enclosures.  Rather, it is a paradise of greenery and winding paths and very nice enclosures.  We only got to see about 1/3 of the zoo before the monkey wandered off to the Land of Nod, but I was quite impressed with what we saw.  I wouldn't even baulk for an instant at paying $18 to get in again - particularly when parking outside is $1 an hour.  Yes, that is one dollar.  Eat your heart out, Sydney.

It's a great place to visit, and we will be going back.  But there is just one thing that you need to remember to pack - mosquito repellent.  They have done their best to replicate a jungle environment, and it has worked.  All they need now are a few million leeches to go with the mosquitoes.  I swatted five whilst watching an orangutan strut her stuff.

Thank heavens for Qantas

I don't fly that often anymore - I have no need to jet around the country on business at the moment, and I've found that flying with young children is more trouble than it's worth.  The wonder drug is supposed to be Phenergan, which many parents claim as the keys to their sanity.  We tried it on the monkey last night about half way through our trans-continental odyssey, and it made absolutely no impact.  He continued to do laps of the jumbo, and when that wore thin, he started climbing over the row of seats in front of us (thankfully they were empty).  I arrived on the west coast around midnight our time a gibbering wreck.  By the time we fly again after this trip, I reckon most of my frequent flier points will have expired.

Road trips are not a problem.  You can simply pull over at a McDonalds or even a paddock and let the sprogs out and coax them to run over the horizon for half an hour or so, and no one else will be bothered.  The aisles of modern aircraft are just too narrow for monkeys to race up and down, particularly as he stumbled from time to time and crashed into grannies trying to sleep.  Good thing he has such a wicked smile - they generally patted him on the head and sent him on his way.  I don't know what I'd do if I didn't have a handsome little charmer.  If he was an ugly little brute, my life would be very difficult.

The hosties were an absolute marvel, playing with him when he crashed into them, giving him colouring-in books and other goodies to play with and not scolding me on all sorts of safety grounds when he climbed up on the seats and tried to get into the overhead lockers.  He even got a chocolate icecream, which I instantly dubbed the $600 icecream (although it will be $300 if we get one on the way back).

The contrast with Virgin couldn't be starker.  Virgin might be a fun airline for people that like to party like Mercedes Corby, but it is a shocker for families with young kids.  The hosties treat kids like some sort of loathsome swamp creatures, there is no in-flight entertainment and there are certainly no free chocolate icecreams.  Given that the icecream brought the monkey to a screaming half for 15 minutes, I might ask for half a dozen on the way back.  Even if he pukes chocolate icecream vomit everywhere, it will be worth buying 90 minutes of peace and quiet.

So although the monkey is not even 3 yet, I am considering getting him a Qantas frequent flier card, because he is never flying Virgin.  He can fly with them when he is 18 and wants to chat up cute little Virgin hosties, but until then, he can put up with the old boilers on Qantas.  

Mechanical incompetence

My bike mechanic contacted me today to advise that the rear cluster that I prefered was not available (that's the collection of 9 or 10 gears at the back of the bike). He asked me if I wanted a 25-12 or a 25-13 cluster instead.

Err....... dunno. I went for the 25-12, with me frankly having only the vaguest idea of what he as on about. I've been riding bikes for over 30 years now, and have clocked up 12,000km in the last 4 years, but what happens down below in the technical area is all Greek to me. I don't understand my lack of desire to become a bike nerd, since I used to spend every second weekend rebuilding old cars. I've helped rebuild eight engines (if memory is correct) ranging from four cylinders to straight eights and V8's, spent hours fiddling with dual-carb setups, been baffled with the required tolerances in an automatic gearbox rebuild, and utterly, utterly confused by auto electrics. We'd start with an engine rebuilt after work on Friday night, and I'd usually conk out 12 hours later once the engine was out of the car. My mate, the dodgy Roger, would keep going for 24-48 hours straight, not sleeping until the engine was back in its rightful spot, making all the right noises.

Much of my mechanical aid seemed to involve making tea and sandwiches, passing the correct spanner and wondering what to do with the icecream container full of leftover washers at the end of the project, but I still got my hands greasy more than most. I don't get the ethos of these youngsters who take their car to a mechanic to get performance mods fitted. Don't they understand the fun involved in buying and fitting something like a lumpy H2 cam, or swapping out a set of pistons for higher compression versions?

Then again, perhaps not. But there was nothing like rebuilding a V8 with some go-faster bits, putting in a 2 inch exhaust system with extractors (and no poofy resonators to make it sound faster - even a small V8 sounds like God tearing the sky apart if the exhaust is setup properly), taking the roof off and blasting through the Harbour Tunnel at 100mph around 1am. I used to love going into the tunnel at the speed limit, and holding it until I reached the bottom, then dropping a gear and planting it. If that didn't give one a woody, then it meant that very thin and watery blood was circulating through that particular body.

But now, I look at a bike mag description of carbon impregnated something or other clusters and shrug my shoulders. None of it makes any sense.

SBS must pay well

I just went for a drive, and who should pull up at the lights next to me but Margaret Pomeranz.

And what should she be driving? I am pretty sure it was a Mercedes SL320, but I can't be sure as I didn't get a clear view of the rear of the car as she took off. I can tell you that it was black, had two doors and was a soft top.

The Red Book tells me that these things retailed for $200,000 when new, and would still cost you up to $51,000 today.

I might have been wrong - it could have been an SL500, which retailed for $285,000 when new.

Now wonder she has such a firm grasp on what "working families" want to see at the movies.

I'm not voting for Hillary

And how could I, given that I am a resident of Sydney and not even a US citizen.

Why then did I spot a car today that had a "Hillary" sticker on the rear bumper? What's the point of that? Does having a Hillary sticker help to inflate your sense of smug self-importance?

As far as fatuous, useless stickers go, it's even worse than "Free Tibet". (Why is Tibet going for nothing? Is it so bad, it's worthless?)

Bad dad

I am the bad dad.

I took monkey to a playground today, which already contained several other kids, and I walked in eating from a bag of chips.

I immediately had half a dozen pairs of small, beady eyes fixed on my chips.

Some of the kids walked over to me to ask for a chip, whilst the remainder walked over to their parent and started tugging on their leg asking for a packet for themselves.

I am surprised that the other parents didnt form a lynch mob and drive me from the playground.

Next time, I am going to buy monkey an icecream and then send him into the playground. That'll teach them.

Farting around with blog settings 101

Class seated? Put away that chewing gum, Saunders, or it's off to the headmaster for you.

Now, open your blog manual to page 42. If you click on the Layout tab at the top of your editing screen, it will open up a thingy where you can add and arange your page elements. The Layout tab should appear under the name of your blog.



Once you are in the layout section, you can make a complete bollocks of your blog in 10 seconds flat. Each element has an "edit" button, and clicking on that will open up all sorts of amazing options. I decided to mess with mine after perusing Rage and Biscuits.



As you can see in the above screenshot (which includes the obligatory kiddie p0rn, since that is the topic of the day), there are plenty of little things that you can tweak in the blog settings.

That will be $50.

They've taken all the fun out of shopping trolleys

I had this really insanely manic urge tonight to put one foot up on my shopping trolley and to go push-push-pushing down the aisle at top speed.

Until I noticed a fatal flaw - the bastards have removed the cross bar that used to join the back wheels - and that was the perfect spot to put one foot, get the trolley moving, and then put the other foot up and then see how far the trolley would go before crashing into a wall of olive oil bottles.



No wonder the kids of today are bored, sitting at home going all square eyed in front of the X-box. When I was a wee newt, I used to love hooning around the supermarket on the trolley. I don't know why my mum put up with me doing it, but I was a careful hoon. I made sure I didn't knock down more than one granny or promotional stand per week.

I have two theories as to why this has happened, and both involve the terms "lawyers" and "safety nazis".

I wonder if I can fashion a bit of wood that I can take to the supermarket and fit across this gap so that I can once more sail down the aisles, free as a bird.

Which Blair? project

The inner Dilbert in me has been hankering to get out for a while. Following some discussion over at the Blair graveyard, I decided to run some simple troubleshooting tests on why the new Blair-gasmic site runs more slowly than a one legged dog.

The first screenshot shows my processor going nuts with just one Blair tab open in Firefox. Prior to opening this tab, the processor was idling along almost at rest with six other tabs open. (I've been checking out Kae, Margo, Paco and missred, which should have appeared on my sidebar by now). Note that this particular Blair thread shows comments.



The next screenshot shows how my PC takes a breather when I switch back to the just the main page of Blair-dom. But it is still working much harder than normal. My PC is usually like Kevin Bacon - in that it flatlines all the time.



The final test was to close down the Blair-hog (sob, sob) and check the outcome. The result is that the processor utilisation drops back into single digits, and hovers around 3-5%.



I then did the same test using Safari, and found that processor utilisation went up a bit, but only by about half as much as it does with Firefox.

I am not going to try it with IE, as I view that browser as a bucket of shit. I don't hate Microsoft or Bill - I just think the new browser is a pig with lipstick. It's a preference thing.

So it appears that some code-cutting monkey at News Ltd has not bothered to do any cross-browser testing of his site, which is a sin that normally merits being forced to listen to Britney for about a month.

Someone should try doing a test like this with Opera (I don't have that loaded).

It's feet up for a week

I dropped the bike off at the shop this afternoon for an overhaul. It started with the rear wheel blowing out (as in part of the rim ripping away from the wheel), progressed through a replacement of the rear cluster (the back gears), then the replacement of the front crank (which has been creaking for a few thousand kilometres), had some handlebar tape added and then a replacement of all the brake cables (and the pads as well).

The shop did a simple stretch or wear test on the chain using a small tool that did something that I cannot describe. Apparently if the chain is worn or stretched 1%, it has had it. Mine was off the dial, it was stretched so far.

Ah well, the old beast has done 12,000km so far, so it's well and truly due for a bit of TLC (it certainly gets none from me). It's going to set me back about $800, but that's less than a car service, and not bad when you consider it has taken me to work and back, and to other places, on most weekdays for the last 4 years.

I am going to spend my free time wisely - mainly by stuffing myself with every vanilla slice that I can find.

No riding this week

I popped out to the bike tonight to do the usual weekly pre-flight checks before facing a week of riding to and from work, and quickly discovered that I'll be on the bus for a few days at least.

The rear rim has completely split for a reasonable distance around the rim. I don't know when this decided to burst at the seams, but no one heard it happen. I've had tubes blow out through the sidewall of a dodgy tyre before, but I've never seen a rim split and peel like this.



This is how I found it - it had peeled out as far as the photo above shows.



I tried to take some close up photos to show the interesting metal fatigue cracking, but my hands are too shakey to take a good photo. I need to dig out my tripod and find something to light the scene.



There's no hurry - this baby isn't going anywhere until I can find the time to visit the bike shop.

Been there, done that

Boy, would the owner of this car have been ticked off this morning. I go down this street from time to time, and often see two cars from this company parked outside what I presume is the owners house. This morning, there was a Police car sitting there as well, along with two Plod doing paperwork (the hilarious thing is that the Police could have walked there from the station, which is less than 50 metres up the road).



My guess is that sometime during the night, a car came ripping down the street and smashed into this parked car, pushing it up onto the verge and also into the other company car parked behind it. What a crummy way to start the day.



Since the Police were there, and there was no sign of another car, I assume it was a hit and run, possibly by some drunken tool heading home from the pub around the corner.

A similar thing happened to me about 10 years ago. As I was walking home, I went past the lane way where I parked my car. It looked a bit odd - like the bonnet was open. When I got closer, I found that the entire front end was smashed in and the bonnet was bent at a 30 degree angle. The car was really quite mangled - I have assumed to this day that it was collected by a truck, since there is no way that a car could have had enough run up in that short, narrow lane way to build up enough speed to smash my car up that badly. I have always had a sneaky suspicion that it was a council garbage truck, but was never able to prove it.

The good thing is that if the owner of this car ever catches the culprit, he has a shop full of interesting tools to try out on his extremities.

Hippies in the trees

There must be something about this spot under the trees at Darling Harbour. When I cut through here recently, there was a bloke doing a spot of head banging on a mat facing Mecca. Today, we have a wierd beard with a guitar.



I must remember to nail a beehive to one of these trees.......

P plating poseur

Here in NSW, the land of liberty, there is a long list of cars that people on P plates are not allowed to drive. I looked it up the other day, and it was at least 10 A4 pages long. It seems that anything with 8 cylinders or more grunt than a ride on lawnmower makes the list.

If you ask my humble opinion, it's entirely possible to kill oneself whilst riding in a shopping trolley (I refer to a car similar to the Barina, although you could choose to take the literal meaning). I believe that safety on the road is 90% attitude and 10% the car that you are driving. Put a granny in a Porsche, and you are likely to have a safe, slow moving granny. Put a tool on a ride on lawnmower, and you have potential chopped-up violent death. (I write this with the experience of rolling a ride on lawn mower whilst executing the lawnmowing equivalent of handbrake turns).

So take this car for example, photographed today on the streets of Sydney about 100 metres from the Central Police Station. (The Central Police Station is in fact nowhere near Central Station, which is a railway thing at the other end of town. When Central Train Station was built, it was the centre of town. It is now on the southern fringe. The Central Police Station is roughly in the centre on the north-south axis, but is actually on the western edge of the CBD. Call it the central-western station if you are a pedant.

If I was compiling a list of cars that P-platers should not be driving, I'd make it a one lined list. That one line would say:

"A P-plater shall not drive any car that looks like it will be driven in a dick-headed manner".

For all I know, this cock-mobile may in fact be legal conveyance for a P plater, but in my book, it is a four wheeled coffin for a young man with a tiny little cock.



So here is my annoyance for the day.



To start with, I am ticked off that our ham fisted government of bed-wetting numpies has seen fit to infringe on the liberty of fucktards by limiting the stupidity of the vehicles that they might ponce around in. If you want to cruise around like a wingnut with no balls, I am not going to stop you. However, I might open fire if you decide to parade up and down my street with the techno blaring and the fat pipes rumbling.

Apart from that, it gets up my nose that you can park a moving infringement notice like this less than a hundred yards from a major Police station, and not one Plod noticed that, like duh, this pile of pus might need checking out. A Plod car actually cruised past as I extracting my camera from my pocket. Not a single Plod in the car looked in the direction of this bucket of fly-attracting turds.

So much for Cops being observant.

If you're going to make little four-wheeled wank buckets like this illegal for certain classes of driver, the least you can do is enforce the law. If you can't be bothered doing that, strike the law from the books. Baseball cap wearing gimps should either be strung up by their thumbs for daring to set foot in a tasteless crapulent anal pimple like this, or they should be free to crash it into as many power poles as they like.

I hate poseurs who drive things like this.... but I hate politicians who strike a pose when they make useless laws to ban them.

Too hot, too cold - where are the three bears?

This is a story about not trusting technology too much.

I have recently had terrible trouble deciding what gear to wear for the ride home. Going into work is easy - it's always cold, so I wear the gloves, the boot covers, the leggings and the jacket - and if I owned a beanie that fitted under my helmet, I'd wear that too (in order to stop my ears from falling off).

The ride home is different. On some days, it is a balmy 20 degrees, and wearing all that stuff leads to sauna-like conditions inside my clothing. I frequently have to stop about 1/4 of the way home and strip off a layer, which means carrying my large backpack in order to hold all my discarded clothes. I hate carrying the large backpack - I want to wear just enough clothes to be warm, have no requirement to take any off, so I can ride with my small backpack.

On Thursday, I decided to dispense with the strip partway and left work with my jacket in my back pack. All I had on up top was a lightweight jersey. It seemed a bit chilly when I left the office, but the thermometer on my bike said the air temp was 20 degrees. It didn't feel like 20 degrees, but if that's what the electronic doo-dad said, then that's what it must have been.

By the time I got home, I was frozen. I practically fell off my bike like a bright yellow popsicle. But the thermometer insisted it was still 20 degrees. Just as I was about to thwap it over the fence with a cricket bat, it came to life and decided that it was actually 12 degrees. The separate outdoor temperature guage that I have in the backyard thought that it was 10.

All I know is that I was unable to even blog about how cold I was. I spent the night wrapped up in two jumpers, standing over the heater in an attempt to warm up.

Stupid bloody technology.

Garcon! More Bearnaise!

It's been a long, long time since I have been to a swish restaurant that offers no options for vegetarians. Most places these days make some effort to cater to those that do not partake of flesh, but this place took no prisoners. The menu was meat, meat and more meat. The wine list offered swimming pools of very fine red wines. A small bowl of chips on the side was about as far as the kitchen stretched when it came to vegetables.

And what a fine lunch it was, stretching over 4 hours and three courses. It was so overwhelming, I have not eaten any dinner. I have just sat around the house like Jabba the Hutt trying to digest half a cow.

As good as the steak was, the occasion was far from perfect. The waiters were as clumsy as trainee jugglers. It took them half an hour to take our orders. Wine glasses went empty for long periods. Laps were doused with ice cold water from knocked over bottles. In short, if the food hadn't been as good as it was, I would have recommended setting the place on fire.

My main consisted of an enormous lump of rib on the bone, cooked rare. And it was rare, which is why my stomach is having such a tough time tonight. I used to inflict rare meat on it at least once a week, but now it seems to only have it once a year. My stomach is out of shape in this regard. But enough of that.

That one steak cost nearly $50, so as you can appreciate, it had to be good.

Was it worth $50?

No. Especially not with the Fawlty Towers style service that we experienced. But I was not paying, so to me, it was a free steak. Gotta love that.

The one thing that really gripes me was the Bearnaise. Or the lack of it. Bearnaise was an option - a $6 option on the side. Now I reckon that if you are forking out $50 for a steak, then everything on the side should be free. Vegetables, sauces, naked women - all that sort of thing. One should not have to pay extra for a sauce when the cost of one steak approaches what our family spends on meat in a week.

But $6 is what they charged. When the sauce arrived, I was expecting to be presented with a soup tureen of sauce. If not a tureen, then at least a jug. Well, call me disappointed then, since it turned up in something that was a cross between a thimble and an egg cup. Perhaps an egg cup designed to hold pigeon's eggs. It was not a lot of sauce. I would have complained about it and demanded more, but my attention was distracted by another clumsy waiter flicking ice cubes down one side of my body. By the time I got over the shock and returned to my food, the waiters had buggered off and I was left with a small puddle of Bearnaise.

And I was hungry too, so I just devoured the steak (with a dab of Bearnaise) and thought no more of it.

Until I got home. Boy, would I have felt ripped off if I had been paying for that. From now on, I'm avoiding the high-class steak houses in tourist traps and eating at pubs where the restaurant has an excellent reputation.

Welcome to cranky old fart-hood

I reckon I am halfway towards my retirement persona of becoming a Colonel Blimp. That moment came the other day when I was buying some tools at the hardware store and bought myself one of those grab-handy things on a stick. The sort of thing that you give to convicts who are sent out in chain gangs to pick up rubbish from the side of the road. A very Council worker kind of thing.

I actually paid money for it. I voluntarily handed over cash for a symbol of the cranky.

I originally wanted to get one a few years ago after spending half a day doing Clean Up Australia - spending a few hours bent over picking up rubbish just about killed me. I don't mind picking up rubbish, but I have no desire to end up bent over like one of those old Vietnamese strawberry picking women. But could I find one anywhere? No. I was told to try calling one of the handicapped groups, but never got around to it.

Then I spotted on at the hardware store, and I had to have it. I use it to pick up all the crap that the drunks drop when they stagger down our street from the pub on the weekend. Soft drink cans, beer bottles, chip packets, burger wrappers - that kind of thing. And the drunks leave an awful lot of crap, and some manage to do it every night. Sometimes I think that half the junk in our bin at the end of the week is stuff that I have collected from the gutter outside our abode.

The only problem with the cranky old fart grab-handy thing is that it is made of rather fragile looking plastic. It's nice and light, but it has no heft. I want something with a bit of a heft to it, so that if I ever catch one of these bludging turds tossing a chip packet on our verge, I can scone them with it with extreme prejudice. I figure the best way to remove the litter from out street is to crack the heads of those that drop it, rather than me endlessly picking it up each morning.

Fuck it - I'll trade it for a .303.

Oooo, that's gotta suck

The traffic going into town was really slow this morning - even I was moving faster than the cars on the Anzac Bridge, and it's not every day that an old, fat wheezing bastard gets to zoom past a four lane parking lot.

Soon found the culprit - smack bang at the top of the bridge, in the middle lane.



If I was her, I would not be out of the car - not on that road. I'd be sitting in my seat with the hazards on and the seat belt pulled tight. It just takes one fucking tool to be lane swapping like a monkey on speed and it's bye-bye, baby. Get off the fucking road.

The agony that is Victoria Road

The RTA, in its wisdom, has decided for some time to operate a flow control mechanism at the end of Victoria Road - if you look in the middle of this photo, you can see a line of traffic cones veering off to the left - they are there to ensure that the three lanes on the left all go left, and only traffic in the far right hand lane can go right. At some point in the morning, a truck pulls up here and a bloke jumps out and removes the cones, and the two right hand lanes can go right.



There is only one problem with this system - dickhead drivers. At least once a week, I turn up at this spot and find a line of angry, beeping drivers in the 2nd lane from the right, because a bozo has driven down the lane and wanted to turn right, but has arrived at the front of the queue to find that he has to go left. Bozo then stops, refuses to proceed, and tries to butt into the lane to the right. Traffic banks up for half a mile.

Drivers in that lane get ticked off, and refuse to let him in. Everyone blows their horn - some continuously. (As an aside, I have noticed that the house closest to this point has been up for sale twice in the last 6 months. Might be something to do with the cacaphony of racket at 7am).

I decided to photograph this debacle when I saw it last week, and what should be the vehicle causing the mayhem?



Yes, the logo on the side says "had an accident"? This is a van from a car rental company that rents cars to you when yours is at the panel beater. So I presume this bozo has had a prang doing something stupid, and now finds himself doing something stupid - this time in a rental vehicle. Typical, isn't it?