Epic fail - I swear this is the last

This is part IV in my series on Epic Fail - how the Police media unit, our local paper and the gormless Michael Mapstone of the Daily Telegraph got a story so terribly wrong.

For those that came in late, I suggest you click on the Epic Fail link and read parts I-III.

Here is Lysaght Park, which a stolen car driven by a drunken teenage driver supposedly "careered" across. Except that the car did not career across this bit of park, which is the park proper.



Instead, the car went across that narrow strip of grass where the tree is.


This is what it looks like when the tide is in - there is maybe a foot of water where it meets the sea wall. And that would be generous.


The sea wall comes out of the mud at a 45 degree angle, and then rises in a "sheer" wall to where it meets the grass. The "sheer drop" is all of 800mm (which you can see me measuring in the photo below). Note the "rock ledge" at the top where the wall meets the grass.


800mm. That's 80cm, or 31.5 inches in old speak. Or a bit over 2 1/2 feet.

The distance to the mud (sorry, that would be "rocks" to the Police Media Unit) is 2.4 metres on the slant. 2400mm. 240 centimetres. 94.5 inches. 7 feet and 10 inches.


Diagramatically, it looks like this from side on. The green bit at the top is grass (the "park"). The blue bit at the bottom is where the fish with three eyeballs swim. It's not really water - more a mixture of toxic sludge and viagra.

Here are some measurements for you.
Since I have forgotten almost all the maths I ever took in, someone else will have to work out the value for the red dotted line. The lower rock wall slopes down at about 45 degrees, if that helps.
Whichever way you look at it, it is not a 5 metre drop. Even I can work that out.

Do you want people to starve?

I was listening to a recording of Barney Frank (aka Daffy Duck) the other day and he came out with the line:

"Are you against welfare? Do you want people to starve?

I think this was in relation to the US car industry bail-out. Somehow he managed to equate stuffing billions of dollars into the maw of the UAW with starving peasants collapsing and dying by the roadsides (ala the Irish Spud Shortage).

It's a great line though, since it utterly demonises anyone it's used against. It's like saying, "Are you against motherhood?".

But I have a retort.

And that retort is obesity.

Study after study tells us that we westerners are getting porkier by the year. Our waistlines are explanding like a cane toad sucking on a cigarette.

But this lard epidemic is skewed - rich people are remaining lithe and supple, whilst the poor are going the way of Augustus Gloop.

So how do you get poor people to lose weight?

If you are the current government, you could always declare war on obesity (especially childhood obesity), and conduct the war via an information campaign (ie, TV ads).

I'm always fascinated by these "preventative health" campaigns. They are launched with great fanfare, with an annoucement along the lines of:

Obesity is costing the community $9 billion a year in lost work times, extra health costs and broken ambulance gurneys. That is why the government of (insert name here) has announced a comprehensive package of measures, including a $480 million advertising campaign, to combat obesity.

Two years later, after the campaign has been quietly shelved and forgotten about, we forget to do an after-action report to see whether the campaign had any impact whatsoever.

One nevers get done because at about that time, another report comes out telling us that we are fatter than ever. The $9 billion was never saved, and the $480 million was used as liquid tree fertiliser. You could surmise that spending money on these campaigns has the opposite effect, and all they do is give people the munchies.

So we know that advertising campaigns don't work.

In that case, how do we stop the poor getting so fat?

If they are on poor, they are probably recieving welfare benefits.

Therefore we could say that welfare is the cause of obesity (big jump there).

So if the fat bastards won't go for a walk around the park, we have to stop them eating.

We do that by cutting off their welfare.

ie, we make them starve, because it is good for them.

So, Barney Frank (aka Daffy Duck), being against welfare can be good for the community at large (no pun intended).

What "PM" really means

I reckon PM stands for "pick me", as in "pick me, Flapper".

Flapper was a fixture on Channel 9 in Perth back in the 1980's on things like Saturday morning kids shows. I think he used to appear with Humphrey B. Bear.

Anyone that grew up in Perth in the 1970's and 1980's would probably be familiar with Flapper. Saying "Pick me, Flapper", was a common response to any question.

For instance, if you were at the bar in Claremont on a Friday night getting a round of drinks during happy hour, and you yelled "Who needs a drink?", the response would be a chorus of drunks shouting, "Pick me, Flapper".

It was also a common response in our Regiment when a call went up for volunteers. If an NCO went, "Right you scaly toads, I need two men to go into town and pick up some goffas", there'd be a chorus of "Pick me, Flapper" - which was tolerated, so long as you were out in the sticks, the RSM was not within earshot, and you'd served enough time to no longer be a new guy.

So that's where the "PM" on Rudd's jacket came from - a West Australian with a sense of humour.

Rudd declares war on illegal immigration

OK, technically he hasn't said that yet, but we know that he will before long. So let's just get used to the idea of Rudd declaring war on some other unsolveable problem.

I just hope the Navy doesn't take him literally!

(In fact, I hope they do. That might solve the problem).

The last day of school was.....when?

I love reading Frank Chalk. I can highly recommend his book. It's an enormous pity though that his blog exists at all, for it chronicles the horrors of the modern statist education system. Where the UK leads, us poor bastards in Aus seem to follow (with a delay of a few years or so). Every dumb idea that has been tried overseas just has to be tried out here too, which is interesting when you realise that it is the soft-headed lefties that always bleat about us having a "cultural cringe".

Instead of adopting good, homegrown ideas and solutions, many lefties abide by a "not invented here" mantra, and they worship at the alter of famous English socialists and marxists, and American liberals.

Until I actually had a kid at a state school, I took Mr Chalk's rants with a pinch of salt.

I'm afraid to say that I have now thrown away the salt shaker. It's rather horrible to wake up and realise that he's not exagerating. His blog is one of many modern expositions of the plight of the underclass that we have not seen the likes of since Dickens.

So here's a question for you.

When did the school year finish for state schools in NSW?

I thought that it finished today, but according to most students and many teachers, it finished sometime between yesterday and three weeks ago.

Junior had some friends drop by this week, and we asked all of them if they were going to school on Friday (today). All answered in the negative. One ceased going to school earlier in the week, and has been wagging (presumably with his parent's knowledge) since they did their year-end tests. Of these kids, both parents of one of them are teachers, and they are letting him wag on the last day.

This led to an interesting barney with Junior, since J and I were adamant that he would attend school up until the final bell. That's how we did it, and we had this strange expectation that the schools would see it that way too.

Boy, were we wrong.

We had a drink with a nameless person that we know socially, and as their partner is a teacher in a state school, we quizzed them on their attitudes to whether kids should stay until the bitter end.

They replied that their partner had their Christmas drinks earlier in the week, where all the teachers got hammered, and they all had hangovers the following day. The bit that blew me away was this - they got hammered on a school night because they did not want to waste a Saturday with a hangover. They got blotto, knowing that they would be incapable of functioning, let alone teaching, the following day.

"It's all about the children".

Yeah, right.

Junior's biggest complaint about attending school over the last few weeks has been that it is an almighty waste of space. Regular teachers have shot through, leaving them lumbered with temporary teachers who sit them in front of The Simpsons for entire lessons.

Even if Junior failed to learn a thing this week, at least I absorbed some wisdom.

Here it is.

When we talk of the "middle classes fleeing the state system for private schools", they are not fleeing because state schools have bad teachers or poor facilities or awful kids.

They are fleeing the parents.

Most of Junior's friends are lovely. They are nice young men. Polite, articulate and they all seem to have ambitions to go places. They are not lumpen troglodytes. Yet.

However, the values of their parents gives me pause. When we argued with Junior today about whether he would attend school or not, we were not arguing directly with him. We were arguing indirectly with the parents of his friends, who had allowed their kids to skive off. It was a hopeless argument, and we lost (for reasons I will not elaborate on).

When a private school talks about it holding certain values, it is now clear to me what that means. It is not necessarily that the school is trying to bash values into the heads of little barbarians. Rather, it is stating that the school might work for us as parents if its values match ours.

I think private schools are getting it wrong when they talk about values. They push the idea that this school or that can teach a kid values (and I happen to believe that is true to a large extent). But they should shut up about that, and instead talk about the values that they are looking for in parents, rather than the values that they want to teach to kids.

Anyway, I hope that those useless, drunken teachers at the unnamed school all get a wombat spunk sandwich for Christmas lunch.

Greenpeace demonstrates how to make a protest look bigger

"Damn, I knew we shouldn't have outsourced the job of touching up our protest photos to the Iranians".

We need a new coroner

The current one is fucked in the head.

IT support with a difference

From Blackfive.

"You installed an unauthorised screensaver on the company PC? Line up against that wall over there with the other miscreants."

Epic epic fail part III

Our local rag arrived on our doorstep today, and it featured this story about a stolen car with a drunken driver and six passengers losing control and going over a "5 metre" drop in Russell Lea.

Here is my initial coverage of this story, Epic Fail.

And then there is Epic Fail, Part II.

Since the local rag contained the same error as the Daily Telegraph, I started to wonder where they got their information.

The Police media centre of course. A quick look at the Police media archive found this:

About 2.10am today (Sunday 14 December 2008), a stolen blue Toyota sedan was being driven east on Byrne Avenue at Russell Lea when the driver lost control and the vehicle went over a rock ledge, dropping five metres into the river. At the time of the incident, the car contained the driver and six male passengers, one of whom was travelling in the boot of the sedan. The passengers were aged 17 or under and were affected by alcohol. The driver fled the scene prior to the arrival of police. Investigations into the incident are continuing.

At least the Police got the name of the road right, showing that Michael Mapstone at the Telegraph can't even copy a press release accurately. Must have been a ripper Christmas party at the paper the night before. It must be a tough life, copying press releases and trying to pad them out to make an exciting story.

However, the Police press release itself contains one howler of an error and two blunders.

The howler of an error of course is the "five metre" drop. If the Police are having problems measuring distances at the scene of a crash, I hope they are managing to calibrate their radar detectors properly this Christmas season. Think about that if you get a speeding ticket over the next two weeks.

As for errors, the car did not go over a rock ledge. The banks of the river have been lined with stone walls to prevent erosion - I think a fair bit of the land might be reclaimed as well (over to Bruce to explain). It wasn't a rock ledge - it just went over the stone capping at the top of the sea wall.

On top of that, the car didn't go into the "river". That implies wetness. The only dampness evident would have been the wet crotches from those in the car when they wet themselves in fear as they went arse-wise into the river bed. Or stinky mudflat, as I prefer to describe it.

For scale purposes, I took a photo of this shopping centre today. The two fellows in the middle of the photo are not 2 metres tall, but they provide enough scale to show that the roof if maybe five metres off the ground.


If I told you that we put a car on the roof of this shopping centre, stuffed 7 teenagers into it and then drove it backwards off the roof onto the concrete path below, how many ambulances would you expect to send to the crash?

Zero? Seven? Somewhere in between? Maybe the odd Coroner's wagon? How many fire trucks would be required to turn up with cutting equipment to extract the survivors?

Would you expect the driver to hop out and run away?

These, you would think, would be fairly obvious questions to someone with an inquisitive mind (like a "reporter").

How, for instance, did the seven people in the car manage to get out and clamber up the five metre wall to safety? If they landed in the river, why are they not wet? If the car dropped five metres into the river, why are there no photos of Police divers preparing to go into the water to attach a tow rope to the sunken vehicle?

I doubt the Police media centre has a single real copper working in it. If there was someone in there with experience of frontline policing, they probably would have picked up this anomoly in an instant. As far as I know though, the pubes doing that job were all brought in from RailCorp, and I doubt any of them ever worked on the frontline at a station before they started issuing stupid press releases about on-time running. They know diddly about trains and squat about plod-work.

Over the last 20 years, every government agency has centralised the function of media liaison within a specialist department, and these departments have grown and grown and grown. Back in the early 1990's, I had to deal with the media bloke at CityRail. That was it - one bloke. I read a story earlier this year that said they now have something like 31 people doing that job.

Your taxes at work.

Most of these people have no frontline experience whatsoever in whatever agency they are fronting for. You don't have medical people briefing the media about health issues, or ex-teachers doing briefings about education. They have all come from the media itself, meaning that they probably have some sort of media studies degree, and no life experience to go with it. They certainly have no technical expertise in the area they are paid to represent.

In short, they don't know what they are talking about. But they know how to handle the media (or so they think), and that's the important thing. It gives the Minister and the CEO a warm, fuzzy feeling that the media is being managed by "experts".

Bwahahahahahah.

They think they know how to handle the MSM, but I get the feeling that most of them are yet to discover the blogsphere. They've heard of Facebook and MySpace, and might have even attended a conference (at your expense) on how to deal with this new media.

But they still don't have a clue. They won't let frontline staff talk to the media - contravening the media policy in most government agencies is about the worst thing you can do. You can stuff up and kill someone, but for goodness sake, don't talk to the media about anything at all. That will get you fired. Killing someone - well, that's just unfortunate.

Anyway, it frustrates me no end to read a story like this, and find that the facts diverge in several areas from what the public has been fed. If you can't trust the Police to get the facts right, who can you trust? For fuck's sake, these people are supposed to be the type that turn up in court on a regular basis to testify about the facts. Facts, people - facts. Facts, facts, facts.

It's a sad reflection as well on the print media that covered this story, particularly when our local paper got it wrong. I can partly understand the Telegraph screwing it up, since they wouldn't know Russell Lea from a cup of tea - until you look at the photo that they published of the crash, which clearly shows a drop of much less than five metres.

But our local paper is based not far from the scene - you'd expect local reporters to be able to conduct a reality check on a press release, especially one that happened a kilometre or two from their office. Would it really be that hard for a reporter to pop down to the scene and have a look?

Note to Police - next time so juveniles get drunk, steal a car and run it down a short drop off onto a mud flat, try this.

Zap the little bastards with your tasers and watch them roll around in the mud. See if you can get two or more of them to "mud wrestle" as they jerk around under the influence of 50,000 volts. Don't relent until the tide comes in.

How to count global warming protesters

From the "Greenpeace protest manual", first published in 1978. 25th edition.

When counting participants at a rally, count them from all four sides. Start at the front of the rally, then move to the left, and keep going left until you have counted everyone from the front, rear, left and other-left.

Ensure that anyone jogging, cycling, pushing a pram, walking a dog or photographing a monument in the area is also counted, since they are all impacted by Global Warming. Be especially vigilant to count babies in prams. Due to the baby boom, assume there are three babies in every pram.

Canberra is a popular location for balloon flights. Be sure to count every balloon aloft. Assume for counting purposes that a balloon can lift 127 people.

Don't forget to count all the people working in the buildings around the rally site. Anyone having a fag outside the fire exit must be counted.

It is always a good idea to hold a rally outside a cemetary...

All photos are to be sent to our bureau in Iran for approval and touching up before they can be released to the media for publication.

Don't let the skeptics fool you!

A 5% carbon cut vs population growth

Krudd has made a complete hash of explaining what a 5% cut in greenhouse gases actually means. One set of numbers gets given to one group, saying that its really a 34% cut (allowing for population growth) and the rest of us get told 5%.

If he keeps fiddling with the numbers like this, he'll turn this into another Enron.

Speaking of which, Enron made most of its money from trading electricity. If they hadn't gone bust, they would have been the first company into the carbon trading market. That puts a bit of perspective on the whole thing.

The Greens, as usual, are saying nothing about population growth through migration. If you want a good backgrounding on this, listen to this podcast on Counterpoint. It'll only be available for another week or so, so get in now.

Epic Fail part II

When I go for a ride that is not designed to get me to work, I call it a jaunt, or a jape, or a caper. I never call it a stunt. Those words are supposed to mean that the ride will be fun and mentally relaxing, even if it is physically strenuous. That's why I tend to stooge around in an undisciplined fashion and ogle things that most cyclists would tear by at Warp IV.

I stooged over to the site of Epic Fail again yesterday, forgetting to take my tape measure with me.

Damn.

And no, I had no desire to measure the height of the sea wall by jumping down into the mud and seeing how far up my body the wall came. Bike shoes have holes in the bottom for ventilation, and they are wonderfully efficient at allowing mud, slugs and wet grass to make contact with your toes.



I ask you to consider this paragraph from the Daily Telegraph:

The vehicle had been travelling east on Byrne Rd when the driver lost control about 2.10am, careering across Lysaght Park and down a 5m drop on to rocks at the water's edge of Five Dock Bay.

Look at the words that I have bolded.

To start with, it is Byrne Ave, not Byrne Rd. I know that, because I used to live there.

When I read the phrase careering across (a) park, I think of that great scene in the Blues Brothers when, during the car chase, they leave the highway and career across the reservation. Many police cars crash as they go over the bank, and one ends up on the back of a truck.

Now that's careering.

But look at the photo above. Check out the width of the "park". It's about 5 metres wide. The lay of the land in this area is that you have two parks about 100m apart - Lysaght at one end and Russell at the other, and they are joined by a strip of grass with a path on it - like an hourglass. The car went across the thin bit between the parks. The grassy bit at that point is just wide enough for two dogs to crap side by side. If it was any narrower, the council would have to build a boardwalk along here.

To me, careering denotes a long, long, long slide. This was not careering. It wasn't even really a park either.

I've already covered the 5 metre drop.

Then we have the bit about rocks at the bottom.


With that, I produce Exhibit B, the above photo. Yes, there are "rocks" at the bottom, but this is not like the drop at The Gap. We are not talking about boulders the size of houses. We are talking about fist sized rocks, squelched into a lot of dark, stinky mud.

When I read a phrase regarding a long drop onto rocks, it brings to mind one of those typical movie scenes where a car goes over a cliff and dramatically explodes in a fireball halfway down.

This was more a plop into some mud rather than a drop onto rocks.

And that was an interesting intellectual exercise in the use of language and hyperbole.

The sad thing is this - we've just discovered that this story contained two factual errors and a bucketload of beatup - and that's just from looking at about 1/3 of the story. If this is a representative sample of what the media feeds us, heaven help us.

It's no wonder they have fallen for all the crap regarding global warming, Krudd and O'theone.

The reporter, Michael Mapstone, needs to get a grip on reality and go back to the basics - like reporting the facts with accuracy. If I want to be entertained by fantasy and unreality, I'll go read a Greens policy statement.

This rant is far from over.

Merry Christmas

J has been busy with photoshop.

Epic fail

Seven candidates for a Darwin Award missed out on recieving this prestigious recognition of talent this morning when they attempted to drown themselves in the Harbour, but failed to realise that the tide was out.

This is how the Daily Telegraph described this failed leap into the history books:

A SMALL car packed with seven young people plunged into Sydney Harbour yesterday.

In what police labelled a remarkable escape, only one of the vehicle's occupants was injured.

The young male, who was travelling in the boot compartment of the blue Toyota Corolla hatchback, was taken by ambulance to Royal Prince Alfred Hospital with cuts to the head.

The driver of the vehicle fled the scene while all the remaining occupants were unhurt.

The vehicle had been travelling east on Byrne Rd when the driver lost control about 2.10am, careering across Lysaght Park and down a 5m drop on to rocks at the water's edge of Five Dock Bay.

Here is the spot in question. If that's a "5m drop", then the Telegraph needs to start handing out new tape measures to its reporters, starting with Michael Mapstone. That's not even a 5 foot drop. 3 feet, or 1 metre, might be more like it.

The story tells us that the driver was pissed. The more I read of this prang, it sounds like the reporter was drunker than the driver.



You can just see some faint skid marks where the car went across the footpath.


The car barked this tree as it went past. You can see some faint skidmarks on the grass as well.


Here's where the car went off the road.


And this is the tortuously steep and winding road that the driver failed to negotiate.


Epic fail.

I suspect one of the passengers might have yanked on the handbrake. I once had an in-car punchup with a drunken Chook when he continually tried to do that to me. He was ably assisted by another drunken fellow, Nick the ex-copper.

Post script.

Here is the photo from the Telegraph. Does that look like a five metre drop to you? The car is only 2/3 of the way over the edge, and on an angle. Assuming this is a Toyota Seca, or something similar, the specs tell me that it is 4.1 metres long.


Hmmmm. A car that is 4 metres long, with 1/3 of it left above the bank. At most, that makes the drop 2.6 metres, but you then have to account for the angle. I can't do the bloody maths anymore, but it's probably under 2 metres.

Five metres, my arse!

One simple step to save the planet

Is it possible to go for a walk to the shops without being annoyed by pairs of Greenpeace haridans? I swear, if they bug me once more, I am going to start driving my 4WD 200 yards to the shops - just so I can avoid these fools.

At least they have discarded those koala suits, which is a pity. When they're wearing half a tonne of Chinese made fake-fur, not only can you spot them from a mile away, but their vision is so restricted by all the sweat running into their eyes that they have difficulty finding a target. Plus they can't hear you sneaking up behind them in order to plant a boot right up their arse.

Take it from someone who knows about these things, even if it involved wearing a Care Bear suit instead of a koala suit.

The dreadlocked simpleton who bailed me up today (or who tried too, as I walked past going "pfft" and rolling my eyes) had this as his one liner:

"I'm sure you want to join Greenpeace and save the world".

Hmm, think about that for a moment. All you have to do is fill out a form, pay some money and Hey Presto! , the world is saved.

No more poverty.

No more disease.

No more hunger.

No more wars.

No more Al Gore. (Oops, got a bit carried away there).

I think that saving the world will require a bit more effort than swiping a credit card and then putting up with greenspam emails for the rest of your life - or until the Greens get around to eliminating the use of electricity, and sending us out into the rice paddies for a living.

Ponder for a moment the hubris in that statement - they're almost as bad as Gordon Brown (although he thinks he has already saved the world). Greenpeace has surplanted Jesus and Budha and Mohammed and so on as the path to salvation.

One might call that "getting carried away".

I do wonder though whether Greenpeace still has a mission to perform now that The One is headed for the White House (unless Gov. Blago trips him up first). Is there any point in still having Greenpeace and all these other 'save the planet' type organisations when the yanks have elected someone that will push their agenda left, left and left (I don't think you an use the phrase "left, right and centre" where O'payoff is concerned.) Their job is done - after 30 years, they have succeeded in getting a true believed elected. They can pack up their tents and go home. They can close their offices and fire their rent collectors (oops, donation seekers) and sack their lobbyists and cease publishing their newsletters. Their fleet of ships can be laid up and their warehouses full of posters and papier mache heads can be recycled in an environmentally concious manner.

Think there is any chance of that happening?

Ha ha ha ha ha! Not when the biggest, fattest, juiciest, richest gravy train is about to leave the station. These rent seeking leeches, ticks, vampires and cling-ons will be the first clamouring for a wheelbarrow or ten full of cash.

I'm just hoping the O'blago will send the 7th Fleet down to Antartica to sink every Jap whaler afloat. Not that I am against whaling, or the Japanese in general. I want to see what happens to all the 'save the whale' operations once whale hunting has gone the way of the Combined Fleet.

Bladderfish paste

We've had a tin of genuine foie gras sitting in the back of the pantry for some time now. It was a gift after some relatives visited Europe, and a good one, because I like the stuff.

I decided that it had been taking up space in the pantry for long enough tonight, which meant that it had to be eaten.


I've been putting off eating it, because even a small tin like this seemed too much for one person. J doesn't eat it, and it would be wasted on the kids. That meant waiting for another foie gras lover to come for dinner so that we could share it.

Well, so much for that idea.

The first challenge was getting into the damned tin. It had a key stuck to the bottom, but no obvious tab to unwind. I don't eat those horrible little tins of fish - tuna and salmon and that sort of thing - and any tins that I do buy require a can opener to open them up. Being presented with a key, no obvious tab and instructions in Hungarian meant that my dinner plans looked like by derailed before they'd even begun.

It only took me 10 minutes to work out that I had to rip off the paper wrapped around the tin. Actually, that wasn't really the case. I was about to attack it with a chisel and hammer, and thought that I'd get a better grip on the tin if I removed the paper wrapping.

Oops.

The smell was the first thing that hit me. Over 20 years ago, we did a two week school excursion to Wittenoom, which involved living in the asbestos contaminated town for one week, and another week out in the bush living in tents, which involved visiting the asbestos mine (wearing nothing but boots, shorts and T-shirts). When out bush, we lived on what I have always thought of as "cat food" - tinned tuna and Spam, eaten on dry biscuits.

When you're out in the open air in northern WA, and the temperature is around 35 degrees, the tins of tuna that we carried in our backpacks were practically steaming when we opened them. I've never been a fan of that stuff, but the flies certainly were. As soon as the can opener made a big enough hole in the tin, a swarm of flies would descend and attempt to force their way into the tin. Eating it required one hand to shoo flies and the other to stuff it into the mouth quickly before any flies got in as well. No one chewed their food with their mouth open up there.

I took one look at that fly covered cat food, and have never been able to eat tined fish again.

I got a whiff of the same smell when I opened the foie gras. I don't know what it is about canning meat, but it really does impart the most horrible of properties to it.

I managed to get past the smell, and spread a bit on some toast.

It was good. Not great, but good.

Certainly good enough for me to polish off the entire tin in no time flat.

But is it worth going to Hungary to buy tins of foie gras for transport back to Australia? Only if you are incredibly desperate. If you ask me, it reminds me most of a tin of bladderfish paste.

You'll need to watch a lot of Red Dwarf to appreciate that last comment.

Is it that hard to count people?

From a story in WA Today:

From Saturday the community, which houses between 100 and 500 people, will be classed as a restricted area under Section 175 of the Liquor Control Act

Eh? Houses between 100 and 500 people? That's a rather wide variation. I know the WA education system has gone to pot, but surely people are still able to count with some accuracy?

It could be that the numbers vary on a seasonal basis, or when certain festivals (or whatever) are in progress. But if that's the case, then this is a very badly written article. If I was writing about a seaside tourist town like Yallingup, I might say that only 300 people live there in winter, but that the population swells to 5000 in summer with the influx of tourists and holidaymakers.

If the actual number of residents is in fact fluctuating that much on a regular basis, for whatever reason, it's no wonder we have so much trouble delivering basic services to blackfellas. Does this mean that families are moving here, there and everywhere, which means that their kids are also being yanked from school to school? What sort of strain does this put on those tasked with providing housing?

Or is the place setup to sleep 100 people (let's say 20 homes with 4 bedrooms, sleeping 2 adults and 3 kids), but they simply cram 25 people into each house when they feel like it?

Whatever. I don't have the energy at the moment to explore this conundrum. Let me just put it down to shit house sub-editing.

Elvis has landed

I have seen no mention of it in the local press (but then maybe I have not been looking hard enough), but the two water-bombing choppers that NSW leases every fire season have arrived. I was driving over the Anzac Bridge on Thursday, and both were parked on the dock below. A mate told me that he had gone past in the morning, and a crew was unfolding the rotors etc. When I went past, the rotors were out and a light was flashing on the top of each and they looked ready to go.

How on earth did they get there though?

There was no ship parked at the dock, so if they had come by ship this year (rather than by Antanov), then the ship had split early in the morning. I doubt they were flown in, given that they were being worked on in the morning.

The mystery deepens.

Elvis by the way is what one of the choppers is called.

Nice weather for ducks

I've been going stir crazy this week, unable to ride because of the awful, drizzly weather we've had here in Sydney. The photo below is a pretty good indicator of the sort of weather that finally changed today - a busted umbrella and a big pool of water in what is normally a dry oval.


After a miserable week of constant rain and the temperature around 20 degrees, the forecast today is for 34 - and I imagine it will be humid as hell. After checking the weather last night, I made a commitment to myself that I would be up at 6am and try and ride for two hours. I wanted to be out and back before being outside started to feel like being inside a sauna.

However, it was still raining at that time, and the drizzle didn't cease until 8am, which is when I expected to be getting home. My ride was therefor sandwiched between the weather and the schedule of stuff that we have today - a birthday party for a 4 year old (complete with magician), visiting the dentist, tennis and other family things. I managed to squeeze in an hour of rotating the pedals and that was it.

Strangely enough, I had bad dreams about cycling last night. I distinctly remember a dream about being on a long ride somewhere, and being unable to clip my shoe into one of the pedals. To the non-cyclist, or a cyclist that doesn't have cleats, that might sound like an odd sort of nightmare - but for me, it was as bad as being chased around the room by a gibbering, three headed blood-drinking monster.

I therefor headed off in some trepidation - in the back of my mind was the seed of an idea that something horribly mechanical was going to go spectacularly wrong. Sod's Law has it that you always break down when you are at most distant point from home, and generally also in an area with no mobile phone coverage.

But nothing of the sort happened today. It was a nice day for a ride, apart from the humidity that made it feel like I was pushing through waves of warm, wet cotton wool. Apart from that, even the trees seemed to appreciate the change in weather.


By the way, if you want to see some truly spectacular photography, check out Stuck in Customs. The guy is a wizard with the camera.

The area around Wareemba/Abbotsford is fairly well known for its spectacular Christmas decorations. I had a quick look around the back streets of Wareemba where the best displays are, and found that most of them haven't been put up yet. I guess the weather we've been having was not conducive to clambering over the roof with electrical thingys.


Check out this post of mine from last Christmas to see what these trees will look like before much longer.

The next 5000 days of the web

As of Dec 2007, the web was only 5000 days old. There's a mildly interesting talk on TED regarding the next 5000 days. If you have a good broadband connection, the talks on TED are well worth browsing through - they can be a bit hit and miss, but the good ones are really good. Each talk is 10-20 minutes, and the speakers hammer through a topic quickly and they generally provide some thoughtful and interesting insights into whatever it is they are talking about.

The talk that I have linked to, on the next 5000 days of the web, prompted a thought to pop up in my mind. We've spent the last 10-15 years connecting just about every company (public and private) in the western world to the internet. If you go back to say 1995, most companies were not connected - not even for email. Those that were connected might have had a dial-up conenction from a mail gateway, with it dialing up every half hour or so to send and recieve a few messages.

We've come a long way since then.

However, I reckon most company networks are not really "participating" in the web. They are leeches - information goes into them (employees looking for things), but not a lot of content or information goes back out. Very little posting of anything happens from the corporate world. In essence, we have a lopsided web, with information pouring into it from "non-restricted" networks (such as your home network), but very little getting onto it from "restricted" networks (and I am not talking about secrecy here - just that many companies have policies that stop you from doing it at work).

Here is my prediction - if people can do something at home, and you restrict them from doing it at work, they will find a way of doing it at work. They will go around you. If you build a wall around the workplace, someone will soon figure out a way to go over it or under it or through it - perhaps without the company even noticing it is happening. Devices like my very annoying Nokia N95 allow you to post to your blog from your phone, which is one new way of doing it. People can also take private laptops to work with private wireless or broadband connections and do it that way.

I am wondering how long it will take companies to realise this, and how they will react. Will we see policies that attempt to restrict how you use your mobile phone in the workplace (ie, no blogging in meetings?), or will they just give up and go with the flow?

I predict the first option, and legions of nosy new inspectors wandering around the place looking over your shoulder as you work. In this world of evolving technology, there is one constant - the need for some people to snoop on and control the activities of others. Working with arseholes like that for years has turned me into a libertarian of sorts. Watch out for the first unfair dismisal case where someone is fired for blogging on their own phone on company time.