Confused

We watch very little TV in Castle Bike, so I am not up with any of the current crop of TV ads. I even missed Masterchef, which I think I might have liked.

As I've been riding around, I've noticed ads like this one on billboards:


They've had me mightily confused. You've got someone that looks like Al Gore on the left, and maybe a Pakistani or Indian bloke on the right, or perhaps an Italian, and the text is "Which one of these men had a drug and alcohol addiction?"

And I'm riding along and thinking, "WTF?"

My thought processes initially went something like, "It can't be the Paki, because he's likely to be Muslim and not drink etc", and then I was looking for a hidden subtext and so on and wondering whether there was a trick to it.

Yes, apparently there is. I'm not supposed to be able to tell because the bloke on the left is not Al Gore, and the bloke on the right is Aboriginal. Could have fooled me.

Then again, that might be the point of the ads all along. I don't even pick the bloke on the right as being a blackfella. In fact, he is a dead ringer for a very nice Indian bloke I was working with last month.

Now that I think I understand these ads, let me just say that these ads shit me.

PS - posting has been lite as I've been hell busy at work.

Either this is bollocks, or Rudd is an idiot

Therese Rein says the Prime Minister gets by on three hours a night

If you so much as glance at the literature on sleep, you'll see that statements like that are rubbish. The myth of "great men" being light sleepers has been well and truly debunked. Thomas Edison was one of the worst for boasting about sleeping little at night, but he cat-napped all day.

James B. Maas, Ph.D., sleep researcher at Cornell University and author of Power Sleep, says that "when people are severely sleep-deprived, they lose verbal and problem-solving skills, can't concentrate and undergo rapid mood swings." Many disasters over the past 20 years have involved worker exhaustion, including Chernobyl, the Challenger explosion and the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

Mood swings? Three hours a night might well explain why Rudd is so rude to his staff, and such a prick to work for. Plus the way he talks could also be explained by sleep deprivation - I make no sense when I've been up all night, and he sounds that way most of the time.

However, making decisions while deprived of sleep hurts productivity. A National Sleep Foundation study found that people who work more than 60 hours a week make almost 10 percent more mistakes on the job than people who work less.

I guess that explains Fuelwatch, Grocerywatch and all those other idiocies that this government has thought up. And the stimulus package - probably put together by shagged out Treasury wonks at 3am.

Rudd might want to ponder this:

Napoleon is not less frequently referred to in the context of napping or polyphasic sleep than da Vinci. And his case is rather easy to falsify through historical records. When compared with an artistic genius of Leonardo, it seems even more preposterous than a brilliant military commander could possibly retire for a nap during a prolonged battle or during his intense life peppered with plethora of engagements. He is indeed said to have slept little and frequently suffer from insomnia at times of great stress. He was also often interrupted by messengers that might perhaps increase his propensity to napping at daylight. Yet he was to be woken up only with bad news. The hard rule was that the good news could wait. His memoirs indicate that he did not mind dying young. Consequently, he would disregard his doctors on the matter of sleeping little and drinking buckets of strong coffee. As Napoleon's life was jam-packed with stress, his short sleep might have been a consequence of his lifestyle. Low sleep diet did not translate well to Napoleon's military skills. Some contemporaries attribute his errors at Waterloo to sleep deprivation. Yet, during slower days he would sleep for sound seven hours, waking up at 7 and often lazing until 8. Then he would yet add an nap in the afternoon. Records also indicate that at Saint Helena he was a normal sleeper, and while stress was replaced with boredom, he often slept late.

This is even more classic - a comment on bloggers who try polyphasic sleep:

All blogs seem to roughly evolve through similar stages. They are invariably written by males, usually young and full of youthful optimism. There is a cultish aura around the whole concept. It parallels the work ethic and self-imposed or super-imposed sleep deprivation of Aum, Branch Davidians, OTS, or Peoples Temple. This monastic appeal is accentuated by the fact that the ambitious adopters often run various forms of diets as part of their "reform". There are lots of hopes associated with the "polyphasic experiment". Those usually revolve around being able to do more, and experiencing "increased energy"

Rudd is up there with the Branch Davidians of Waco fame!

Disclaimer - I usually got very little sleep when on exercise with the Army Reserve. I think we were lucky to get more than 4-5 hours over a 2 week period, yet it usually felt like we were getting 3 or less. Some nights, we got none at all.

When combined with a great deal of physical effort (attacking up hills with an M-60 gets the heart rate going), sleeping on rough ground and/or in wet clothes, being cold and miserable etc etc, it was not surprising that some were a mental wreck by the end of each exercise. I saw people get into fist fights over trival things, I was as irritable as hell, and I even managed to fall asleep standing up on a few occasions. I saw people confuse north with south (which is a small problem when reading maps), and watched as people became utterly incapable of making decisions. They had no idea what planet they were on, and some were reduced to tears because their brains had essentially locked up from lack of sleep.

I have yet to meet anyone who can run on 3 hours of sleep every night, and remain sane, mentally alert and pleasant.

Which is why the article in the SMH is either bullshit, or Rudd is a great flaming idiot who has no idea how to manage his own health and mental wellbeing.

Housing the homeless - for how long?

If you dig through my recent posts, you'll find my summary of a recent report on homelessness. The federal government is intent on building 20,000 more units of public housing in order to combat homelessness.

Well, that sounds good, you say.

But I ask this question - to what end are we building more public housing?

Close reading of the report shows that only 1 in 8 of those classified as "homeless" are sleeping rough in parks and under bridges - most are either living in hostels, or renting where they do not have security of tenure.

I'm not sure what the big deal is about living in a hostel. I've spent months of my life moving from hostel to hostel on a daily basis. Part of that was during a 3 month tour of Europe, and another was a sojourn across the US. Hostels range from the execrable to first class, and my fellow travellers ranged from fantastic funny people who I loved having a beer with, to low class thieves and rip-off merchants.

We slept on bunk beds in barracks that held anywhere from 4 to 40 snoring people (men and women), and we definitely didn't have en suite bathrooms. The food served up at breakfast was highly variable, as were the quality of the beds and the temperature of the water in the showers (some featured cold showers only).

I shared dorms with drunks, Jesus-freaks, jumbo jet level snorers, itinerant salesmen, old people, young people and people from just about every country you can name. I even slept on trains, memorably waking up one morning in the wrong country (having overslept my stop). One train was rather full, and required bedding down in the corridor on the carpet.

I never imagined that staying in a hostel made me a different class of person. I got a good nights sleep most nights, there were facilities for washing clothes, I started every day clean and scrubbed, and I could have ironed my shirt if I felt like it. The food was generally not to my taste, but I hit the road with a full stomach and a sense of purpose, even on those days when I had indulged in too much cheap French plonk.

Living in a hostel is not every one's cup of tea, but you can carry on a reasonably regular life whilst living there. People like fruit pickers manage to live in hostels for months on end and work every day. If you look carefully in many a country town, you'll find a hostel or two dedicated to housing these sorts of workers, who travel the countryside following the work.

One of my grandfathers was a train driver, and he spent most of his life sleeping in a room at the pub in a country town before starting the following days shift. A great uncle was a travelling salesman, who lived most of his life on the road, staying at commercial pubs. Ever wondered why many towns have a pub called the "Commercial"? That's where all the commercial travellers stayed. Even judges and lawyers did that when the circuit courts actually moved around, doing a "circuit" of the area. Geologists may spend weeks on end sleeping in a swag under the stars next to their Landcruiser, camped in the middle of nowhere.

Hell, we've even had the case of a federal politician who chose to sleep in his car on some nights in order to pocket his travel expenses.

My point is this - you don't necessarily need to have a permanent roof over your head to lead a happy and fulfilling life. You can work, socialise and even study whilst being officially "homeless".

So to what end are we, the taxpayer, paying for all this new public housing?

I am sure that if I make the above points to someone in the "charity-homeless complex", they will say, "Oh, but these people have drug and alcohol and mental health issues".

Really?

So what you are saying is that you're going to take someone who is a meth-freak, completely incapable of managing their life, and you're going to build them a nice, shiny house with all mod-cons and put them in it.

Then what?

Eh?

Then what?

Well, they have a roof over their head and security of tenure, so that should solve all their problems.

Hmm. I don't buy that argument.

For starters, our meth-freak had to come from somewhere. People are not born homeless, spend their youth homeless, then their teenage years homeless, and continue on into their 20's and 30's as homeless. We all start with a roof over our heads to some degree. At some point, something happens to trigger homelessness. A drug habit or drink habit that spirals out of control, a messy divorce, a mental breakdown - perhaps triggered by a bad drug habit. Whatever. Perhaps we should be treating the disease rather than the outcomes.

Theoretically though, using the official measures of homelessness, I became homeless at 8, when I went to boarding school. I spent the next 9 years sleeping in open dorms with 15 or so other kids, showering in open bathrooms and eating collectively in a dining hall. I then spent a year being officially homeless in a university college until finally becoming housed at 19 in a flat with two other drunks. During my time at uni, I served in the Army Reserve, and spent at least 3 months over a number of years sleeping rough on the ground in a park....er, military training ground.

I've lived in demountable homes for months on end, whilst working at wheat bins. I've spent gawd-knows how many nights sleeping in cars at music festivals, B&S's, or just after a big night at the pub. I've even slept in a rose garden in a park, after trying unsuccessfully to walk home from the pub one night.

When I finished uni, I then became homeless again by embarking on a tour of Europe, and on my return, spent a few months camping on a sofa with friends until they kicked me out.

None of that prevented me from eventually settling down, getting a job, starting a career (of sorts) and having a family. I previously mentioned a mate of mine who has started and run several successful businesses whilst living in a caravan.

But back to our meth-freak, who due to his meth habit, has severe mental problems and a predilection for petty crime. He prefers to spend his money on meth, rather than rent, so he has housing issues. And dental issues, and so on. I had a similar problem with beer when I was at uni, although I usually set my priorities this way:

1. Rent
2. Food
3. Petrol
4. Beer
5. Sundries

Often as not, I didn't get any sundries. Some weeks, if money was tight and expenses were high, I got no beer. But then I had a small measure of self control. Too many others ordered things this way:

1. Beer
2. Sundries
3. Food
4. Petrol
5. Rent

Oops, recipe for becoming homeless. Our meth-freak probably has this list of priorities:

1. Meth
2. Grog
3. Party drugs
4. Taxi fares (to score drugs)
5. Food
6. Rent

His problem is not being homeless. His problem is his drug habit, and how he sets the priorities in his life. Not everyone has a dream of living in a renovated 19th century manor house, or in a newly built McMansion. For some, housing is not a priority. Decorating is not at the top of their list of things to do. They care nought about plumbing, matching tiles with curtains and what sort of dimmer switches they should install. Unfortunately, our public policy appears to be being made by inveterate readers of Vogue Living and House and Garden. They think that just because they want the dream home with the 6 burner stove and the 50 inch plasma in the media room, that's what everyone else wants, and should have.

Anyway, we put our meth-freak into a new house. Then what? What do you suppose happens next?

In some cases, they will treat the place so badly (no cleaning, no maintenance, wild parties), that they will be evicted 6 or 12 months later (ok, maybe 5 years later, when the neighbours can take no more) and they will be back in a hostel, and the taxpayer will be stuck with cleaning a ruined house.

For too many soft heads, they see the problem as this:

"I am homeless, therefore I am a drug addict/junkie/useless loser welfare recipient/mental patient".

I see the problem as this:

"I am a drug addict/junkie/useless loser welfare recipient/mental patient, therefore I am homeless".

You don't cure their problems with housing. You cure their problems by drying them out, or getting them into work, or getting mental health treatment, then you worry about their housing.

In fact, if you treat the problems, you shouldn't have to worry about their housing, because then they will be in a fit state to deal with it themselves.

Instead, the government seems hell bent on creating another generation of the client class. You park someone in government housing, and then what? I expect that they will never leave, that they will sit there until they die. Those who are moving in and out of hostels are transient homeless people - one would hope that they would spend some months in a hostel, then get their act together and find somewhere proper to live. That's my expectation. If you take them out of that and park them in a government supplied house, where is the incentive to get one's act together and find your own place to live? All incentives to behave and move on are removed, and in fact there are incentives to misbehave in order to hang onto your nice, new taxpayer provided house.

I will end with the story of a bloke that I met briefly one day in a dusty paddock in a fruit growing area. He was an Afghan refugee with few words of English. He was sitting in the dirt, making bundles of cuttings of fruit trees. It's the sort of work that I've done a few times in my life. He was living in a hostel in town, and he was picked up and dropped off each day by the farmer. He'd been in the country for 6 months or more, having arrived by leaky boat. He was not supposed to be working, but he was.

I doubt he was down at the pub each night, blowing his wages. I bet he was the richest man living in that hostel. When the fruit season came to an end in that town, he packed up and moved to the next area of work. You can make a reasonable living doing that sort of thing - picking grapes, pruning trees, putting up trellises, digging in irrigation pipes, chipping weeds and so on. The pay is not great, but many pay in cash, and your expenses are low. His sort always find themselves at the front of the queue when it comes to being picked for this sort of work, as they are hard working, selfless and dependable. They do not view this sort of work as beneath them, and work as something only to be indulged in when they feel like it.

It would not surprise me if that bloke, who I will call Abdul the Afghan, is now living with his family in a nice house in an outer suburban area somewhere, and he is steadily paying off his mortgage like so many others. He came here with nothing, unable to speak the lingo, possibly illiterate in his own language, but his work ethic and thriftiness will see him rise in our society, whilst we are doing our best to trap so many of those born here at the lowest level.

So once again, I ask of this homeless policy - what is the end game? Are we seeking to help the homeless to stand on their own two feet and to make their own way in the world, or are we seeking to trap them for the rest of their lives in government housing and welfare dependency?

For if it is the latter, we have put ourselves on an endless treadmill where every decade or so, we need to fund another massive expansion in government housing to house the next crop of homeless.

Keeping track of the rent, part 1

The Australian is reporting today that the price of prestige homes has tumbled 40%. As I mentioned last week, it appears anyone asking rents over $650 in our area is nuts, and rents over that price are tumbling. I've therefore decided to start keeping tabs on properties in the 2046 and surrounding postcodes, just to see if there is any truth to this or not.

I did a search today for houses with 3 or more bedrooms, priced from $700 to $1,000. Next week, I'll widen the search to start at $600, and see if any of these properties have dropped into that lower bracket, or been rented.

• 434 Great North Road ABBOTSFORD $700
• 85 Renwick Street DRUMMOYNE $750
• 9a Wrights Road DRUMMOYNE $780
• 30 Preston Avenue FIVE DOCK $800
• 9 Coralie Street WAREEMBA $800
• 20 Thornley Street DRUMMOYNE $900
• 6 Shackel Avenue CONCORD $950
• 32 Polding Street DRUMMOYNE $1,000
• 7 Burnell Street DRUMMOYNE $1,000
• 32 Barton Avenue HABERFIELD $1,000
• 41 Barton Avenue HABERFIELD $1,000

We have a few properties in the area that rent for $1,500 per week, but I thought I'd not bother with them.

Guiness

Damn, I just remembered I was supposed to write a post about Guinness. I have not had one in years - mainly due to the happy arrival of kids, rather than any distaste for the beverage. Drinking Guinness until late at night and Monkeys climbing into bed at 6am saying, "Daddy, get up" do not go well together.

I think I have also been drinking in the wrong sort of pubs, on the odd occasion when I do go out for a bevvie. Spotting the Guinness logo on a beer tap has been like the green shoots of economic recovery - you read a lot about them, but never actually see any.

After all that, I spotted the right sort of beer tap the other weekend, and ordered a pint of dark muck. Actually, I didn't order it - J ordered it.

I was quite surprised when she turned up at our table less than a minute later with my Guinness. Having toured the Guinness brewery back in the early 1980's (when I was 15 or 16), and drunk quite a few pints of it on a 2 week long jaunt around Ireland, I know that it takes some time to pull Guinness properly. It looks like the tour that we took back then is no longer available; tourists having been siphoned off to some sort of Guinness museum.

How long should it take to pour a Guinness?

What Diageo calls the "perfect pint" of Draught Guinness is the product of a lengthy "double pour", which according to the company should take 119.53 seconds

This tradition comes from when Guinness was served from the cask, and initially older beer was poured into a glass until it was 3/4 full, then left to stand. When ordered by the customer, the glass was topped up from younger, gassier beer, producing the traditional head. As the beer is no longer blended from different ages of beer, the double pour is no longer required for the mixing of beers but is still maintained as it produces a better pint as the head does not over fill the glass and need to be discarded.

I'm a traditionalist that believes in the double pour. I saw the concept explained in the second paragraph in action in a small pub in rural England, when our family hired a manor house over Christmas one year. The pub was small - not much bigger than a large lounge room in a McMansion, and it had a normal patronage of only a dozen or so regulars each night. The arrival of our family, and our thirst for beer, easily tripled their sales for the length of our visit.

The publican had a problem with beer sitting in kegs for long periods - he sold a wide variety of beer on tap, but it could take weeks to go through a keg, given the slow rate at which he sold it. I remember doing a taste test one night where he pulled beer from an old keg and a new keg and we did a "vertical" tasting of beer. I think my palate these days is too wasted to detect any difference, but back then, I certainly could.

How does this relate to Guinness?

My recollection of the Guinness that we drank in Ireland is that it was deliciously creamy, right to the last drop. The head was still in place when the glass was almost empty - it was a point of pride for a barman to be able to pour a head that was so thick and creamy, that it didn't quickly fade away like it does with lager. You could write your initial in the head with your finger, and it would still be there when the glass was empty - that's what I call a good head.

The stuff I had recently though was nothing like that. The mouth-feel was all wrong, the creaminess was missing, and the head was gone before the glass was half empty. I didn't bother drinking the last third of the glass - the magic had gone, and I am not in the habit of drinking pathetic Guinness.

That's my rant.

What a beat up

First, may I express surprise that the SMH did not blame the earthquake in NZ, and subsequent suspected tsunami, on global warming. That would be a first.

Second, may I give the SMH an award for stating the fucking obvious - that Police being posted to Afghanistan will take pistols with them. Sheesh. A company I was doing work with two years ago was sending people to PNG for various bits of work. You had to be ex-police or ex-military to be selected, since the company expected their staff to be armed at all times when on the job, and to know how to use a pistol and shotgun (and to be prepared to use them too). If contractors in my line of work are being handed pump action shotguns and pistols in PNG, it goes without saying that our coppers going to Afghanistan will be tooled up. I'd be giving them Steyrs too.

Then we have the beat up of the day - linking the mining company that has been given the go ahead to start a uranium mine with arms dealing.

I love this headline - "Secretive arms tycoon behind new uranium mine". Let's pull it apart:

• Secretive - sounds like Dr No, or Dr Evil. I think they are accusing him of being secretive because his company is private. Got that? Private equals secretive.
• Arms - funnily enough, I view "arms" as something that goes "bang". A "long arm" being a rifle for instance, which goes "bang". Arms are shooty things. His company makes the Predator drone, but not the weapons that get hung on it. In other words, he makes a big remote controlled toy. Funnily enough, another division does rail system maintenance - why not call him a "secretive public transport supplier"? 'Arms' just sounds so much nastier, doesn't it?
• Tycoon - ooooh, he's rich. Must be a Republican too. Since he is an arms dealer too, he must have gotten rich in a dodgy way. I look forward to the SMH describing Therese Rein as a "Secretive low cost labour exploiting tycoon".

To cap it off, the story says: "reportedly holds $US700 million ($877 million) in Pentagon contracts." The US defence budget was around $700 billion this year, meaning that this company got 0.1% of all expenditure. Woopey-doo.

By contrast, Boeing earned $32 billion last year from defence contracts. Not all of those were US based of course - 16% came from overseas - but Boeing gets 53% of its income from defence contracts. Nice, friendly Boeing - the company that makes the planes that enable SMH staffers to fly to global warming conferences in Bali and so on. I don't recall the SMH ever describing Boeing as "merchant of death" etc etc. And Boeing actually makes shooty things, like the Harpoon anti-shipping missile, airborne lasers, and the JDAM bomb - something that makes a very big BOOM; and ICBMs - things that make an even bigger boom.

Are all the staff at this newspaper twats?

Irony

Almost got cleaned up today - by a cycle courier of all people that went through a red light and attempted to weave through us pedestrians crossing with the light. I felt like shoulder charging the prick.

On a scary note, I have had two close calls whilst driving recently. I was taking the Monkey and Mr Squishy to day care one morning last week, and I got a green arrow to turn left. A lady in a Mercedes 4WD came blatting through the red from my right without thinking - her light had been red for a good 20 seconds, so it was not a matter of her running it. Clearly her brain was in neutral, but she realised what she had done just before plowing into my rear quarter panel and managed to stop. The look of horror on her face was evident even in my rear view mirror.

The other was driving around The Bay coming home with the kids from day care - another woman in a big 4WD put her brain into neutral and decided to spend her time watching the people running on the pedestrian path as she came around a curving bend. She wasn't watching what she was doing, and came well over the double white line into my lane. I was about to mount the kerb to get out of her way when she came to and rapidly yanked her tank back into her own lane.

There are some seriously mentally deficient people driving around on our roads. If it's this bad when I am chugging around in the 4WD, imagine what it is like on two wheels.

Seriously, if someone has a bushmaster cannon to sell me, I'll work out some way to rig it up on the car with a remote control fire system.

What the picture doesn't tell you

I picked up a paper copy of The Australian at work today - something I rarely do anymore - and had a quick look at this story on Obama. The headline "Barack Obama borrows Ronald Reagan's nuclear pitch" does not work as well online, as in the paper edition, it was accompanied by a photo of Obama tossing the first ceremonial pitch at a baseball game. In the online edition, no mention is made of the baseball game or the pitch, so the use of the word "pitch" falls flat without the photo.

What I did find interesting though is that the caption accompanying the photo, and the story, said nothing about the crowd booing at Obama.

It's like it never happened..... it's just been erased from history.

Fish fingers

I am under instructions to clean out the freezer so that it can be defrosted. With that in mind, I cooked up a packet of fish fingers for dinner.

I have not had fish fingers in 20 years. My idea of a fish finger these days is what we had for dinner at a very nice Italian restaurant a few weeks ago - sardine fillets, dusted with parmesan and herbs, crumbed and fried. Delicious.

The fish fingers from the freezer were not that good. They were nasty. I feel like a fish has crapped in my mouth.

I fed them to Monkey for the first time. He wolfed down my sardine fillets, but he turned his nose up at fish fingers. Since when have 3 year old kids scoffed sardine fillets dusted with parmesan? I was reduced to peeling the fish fingers in order to induce him to eat the contents. Have you ever seen the inside of a fish finger? Even then, he ate one, then pushed them off his plate.

Smart Monkey.

We have half a box left in the freezer. Even Junior is over them. So much for "waste not, want not". I want to waste them.

Beggars belief

Having worked in the Sydney CBD for 17 years or so, I have come to know many of the beggars that work the crowds. I know who has what patch. I know which ones are really barking mad, as compared to those that are play acting. I can sort the useless drunks from the scammers.

My work has taken me to just about every corner of the CBD at one point or another, so I have seen the full spectrum of begging in action. There are those that sit in a slumped and forlorn condition; there are those that stand with their hand or hat out, and there are those that walk up and down pestering the pedestrians.

My favourite is the woman who used to dress the part, and who hung around the southern end of the Pitt St mall, doing walk-ups and cadging change off people. A mate who was going home on the train sat opposite her one day as she counted her takings, and he followed her to the car park, where she hopped into a nice looking newish car for the drive home. For some, it is a career that provides a steady, tax free income. He was astounded when his count of her takings came to over $200 - not bad for a day's work, especially with the ATO nowhere in sight, and Centrelink welfare payments arriving once a fortnight.

Another long time beggar is a bloke that looks a tad like Bryla, who hangs around outside the David Jones store. He always has a hand printed sign on a bit of cardboard. Until today, I had not seen him for a few years, but I noticed that his sign had changed. It used to read that he was having legal problems, as in he was suing BHP for some nastiness, and needed money to fund his legal case. Today, it appeared that his legal problems had been resolved, but a family member had been struck down by health problems, and he needed money to pay their bills.

My favourite begging story comes from when I was in London many years ago, walking throught the tunnels from one tube line to another. There was a barefoot woman sitting on a rug on the floor of the tube, and she had a baby on the rug in front of her. The sign read that she was homeless, shoeless and needed food for the baby. I walked past just at shift change time - another woman turned up and took off her shoes. The shoeless one on the ground stood up, and it turned out she had been sitting on her shoes. She put her shoes on and walked off without a second look at the baby. The newcomer took her place, and assumed a look of dejection and need. God knows who the baby belonged to, but I doubt either of those two women bore it.

Gunns, protests and photo cropping

Due to a lung full of snot, I caught the bus into town this morning. As the bus went down George St near the QVB building, I spotted a small protest out of the corner of my eye. I hopped off at the next stop, and walked back to take this entirely crappy photo with my rubbish camera phone. At least it provides a bit of context for the size of the protest, which was against Gunns and their pulp mill in Tasmania.


Here is my count of the protesters - 11. There may be some short arsed wingnuts hiding behind the idiot in the superhero costume, but at most, there could be no more than 15 people at this protest. No one was giving them the time of day.


Here is a photo from the Tasmanian Times, showing the same protest.

Notice how it has been cropped to make the frame look nice and full. In reality, there was a tiny knot of people on a largely empty street.

The Tasmanian Times bills itself as providing:

A forum of discussion and dissent — a cheeky, irreverent challenge to the mass media's obsession with popularity, superficiality and celebrity. Balance is appeasement.
Fairness is truth.

Hmm. How superficial is it to manipulate a photo to improve your position?

Interestingly, with Al Gore in town today, the Fin Review ran two stories on his presence (I have no links to them). Neither mentioned that 30-odd protesters staged a demo outside the venue where he spoke.

Funny how protests always get coverage if they come from the correct side of the political spectrum, but go unnoticed if they fail to march in lock-step with the media mindset of the moment.

It snot good

I am a ball of green snot, cloaked in flesh.

That kind of precludes any pedal time this week, since my lung capacity is about 50% of normal. I am seriously considering attaching a straw to a squeezy bottle full of water, sticking the straw up each nostril and thence attempting to clean out the cavities betwixt my ear'oles.

I've always found the best cure for immovable mucous is a quick dip in an ocean full of pounding waves. Nothing like getting dumped whilst body surfing to ram a few litres of ice cold salt water up the snoz. That generally does the trick. You know it's working when fish start surfacing around you to eat the balls of snot that are drifting around in pools of goo that make the Exxon Valdez look like the aftermath of sneezing whilst topping up the engine oil.

The problem is that it takes 2-3 days for the testes to descend after a swim at this time of year.

Flying Monkeys

An interesting Monkey photograph, this time featuring Monkey, flying between beds in the cheapest hotel in the Southern Highlands. Our room was so cheap, it featured 30 year old decor and 30 year old beds. Our family of five put up with it for two nights because, well, it was cheap, and we intended to spend very little time actually occupying this room.


It was so small that the beds were not very far apart. Monkey spent the better part of an hour leaping from bed to bed to bed, and I spent some of that time trying to photograph him in mid-air. My digital camera is great for photographing many things, but not flying Monkeys. I fiddled with the manual setting mode, but could not get it to agree to take a photo at say 1/100th of a second or faster.

There is about 1 day in 365 that I pine for my old SLR camera, but even then, that's only for about 5 minutes on that one day of the year. The rest of the year, I put myself in the hands of very cunning Nipponese engineers.

If we were at home, Monkey would of course have been yelled at very loudly for jumping on the bed - since he has already broken one doing just that. It's amazing how attitudes change once you check into a hotel.

I have to say that bed jumping is marvelous exercise for young kids. Once he bombed out for his afternoon nap, we couldn't get him up. We almost had to resort to feeding him chocolate in his sleep in order to rouse him. We are such good parents......

Where the walls have shag pile carpet

We ventured into the Southern Highlands for the weekend to attend the wedding of a cousin on J's side. J's family are originally from Croatia, and they all have surnames lacking in vowels like Crvckckwvkc (pronounced 'vishafish') and cool first names like Drago. Half of them are also bonkers. The other half are even more bonkers. The fun part is working out whether the person you are talking to is half mad or three quarters mad.

They are great people - hard working, outgoing, self reliant, family oriented, church going and all that sort of stuff. To them, the idea of accepting a pension after a life of hard work is sponging off the government. They are also pretty insular, and some don't take kindly to an anglo interloper like me - but they sure know how to put on a wedding. If I didn't have the kids to look after, I would have been unconscious under the table before the main course arrived.

We stayed in the world's cheapest hotel, which laughably called itself a "country club". When I hear the words "country club", it brings up visions of manicured golf courses, black servants in tuxedos, G&T's in comfortable chairs in the pavilion and people riding around on horses going "hi-yup!"

I never pictured pink walls, brown carpet from the 1970's on both the floor and the walls, and beds that offered less support than Obama offered the Iranian protesters. I swear I slept on a hammock two nights in a row.


Ooo baby, that wood panelling really does it for me. And the one plastic chair for the room.


The shower cubicle was minuscule. The Southern Highlands get a lot colder than where we are down on the Sydney plain, so having a shower first thing in the morning could be murder. There was no heater in the bathroom, and the walls were ice cold. Bending down to pick up a shampoo bottle from the floor meant contact first with the back wall, then every other freezing tiled surface as one bounced around, yelping as tender skin stuck to ceramics here, there and everywhere. My sleep was interrupted by the occasional marauding pack of bikers roaring past, or drunken yahoos rampaging through the car park.

The last lot turned out to be our cousins, starting a vodka frenzy.

The food at the wedding turned out to be pretty shocking. It was held in a civic centre, and J described it as "Council food", which was exactly right. I had gristly, lumpy, overcooked lamb on a bed of the most horribly dried and abused roasted potatoes, surrounded by carrots doused with too much sugar. After 8 years of boarding school food, a year of university college food and seven years of Army food, I can eat just about anything, anywhere at any time. This was a meal that I ate less than half of. It was that bad.

Then again, you don't go to weddings for the food. Or the coffee. I was able to stand my spoon in this cup of coffee. Drinking it was like indulging in a thinly watered down mud face pack.


When the desserts came out, J pointed at them and went, "Oh look, genuine Croatian pastries". I sampled the pastry tray, and came back with a lamington. Since when has a lamington been a "genuine Croatian pastry"?

The kids were given a bowl of ice cream, and the kitchen managed to bugger that up as well. It had been frozen, thawed, frozen, thawed, frozen and thawed until the initially cheap-as-dirt icecream was a mass of sand-like crystals. Monkey loves icecream. He will drag chairs into the kitchen and pile them on top of each other to reach the freezer in order to get to the icecream, and I have seen him using every implement in the kitchen to pry the lid off the container. He can eat icecream at every meal. This morning, he wanted boiled eggs with icecream for breakfast.

But he wouldn't eat this stuff. He pushed it this way and that and then shoved it away. Even I couldn't eat it.


He then did the most insane thing ever. He zoomed off to a table nearby, and started sticking his finger into the dessert of another guest. When I caught up with him, there was a woman sitting there going, "You'll have to stop him doing that, Steve will go nuts if he comes back and finds his food tampered with".

Steve turned out to be this guy, and his brother is only slightly smaller, and was sitting next to him. They're both lovely blokes, great to have a yarn with. Although I am sure he weighs more than 120kg - more like 140kg.

J's sister has two boys in their early teens, and they are in awe of the ultimate wrestlers. They spent half the night trying to work up the courage to go and talk to them. J's sister is about 5 1/2 feet tall, and J, her sister and the two enormous cousins were all very close when they were young. J's sister finally managed to convince the boys to come and meet their heroes, and the eldest asked if he could show them some moves. Instead, he said, "Nah, I'll show your mum some moves so she can keep you two in line." At that, the two of them turned white. The idea of their mum body slamming them out of bed in the morning in order to get them to school was too much to take. I was hoping one of them would pick one of the boys up by the ankle and, dangling him upside down from one enormous paw, question him as to whether he was treating his mother with respect. They're those sort of blokes.

The wedding by the way was fantastic. The groom cried (I am used to them fainting), the bride and groom got up and sang at the reception (and they can both hold a tune), the mother of the groom did a tune as well and even the priest got up and belted out "Crazy little thing called love". The speeches were a treat and actually worth listening to, the kids behaved themselves (to a degree) and the people at our table were nice and talkative.

The older kids confined their foodfight to just their three tables and no drunken fights broke out. I only saw one person chundering, and that was a five year old that had taken onboard too much cake and lemonade. The teenagers didn't get drunk or sneak out the back for a fag or a pash. No one crashed their car on the way home. None of the adults sleazed onto someone else's partner and disappeared for a quick shag. Nothing was smashed, no fires were set, the Police stayed away. No one took all their clothes off on the dance floor, and no one passed out on the toilet or under a table.

Considering at least a few of those things, if not all of them, have occurred at some of the weddings I have attended, in short, it was all quite amazing.

The canary in the housing market

From our anecdotal observations in just this area, the top end of the housing market has gone very soft. We've been thinking of moving, mainly because this place is falling down around our ears, and J has been keeping a close eye on local rental properties for some time.

The magic point in the market in this area seems to be around $650 per week for a 3 bedroom home. If you ask more than that, chances are no one will nibble, let alone bite. J has been watching asking prices drop from $750 and $700 a week by $50 to $80. And that's just in one week. Those properties at the top end - costing a grand or more - are advertised week after week after week.

However, if the price is $650 or lower, the place disappears from the market faster than a cow trying to cross a pirahna infested river.

I wonder if people are downsizing from the top end of the market - abandoning the $1200 apartment with the water views and settling for a $650 house that is a few blocks back from the harbour? Is that a sign that the froth has definitely left the economy?

Everything you ever wanted to know about homelessness

Thanks to two articles in the Silly today (two for the price of none!), I now know a lot more about how homelessness is defined in Australia.

As they used to say on Twin Peaks, "The owls are not what they seem".

The articles in the Silly pointed me at this report from the 2006 census. I doubt you want to wade through 95 pages of tables and text, so let me try and summarise some pertinent ideas for you.

For starters, you need to understand how "homelessness" is defined.

Primary homelessness describes the situation of all people without conventional accommodation, such as people living on the streets, sleeping in parks, squatting in derelict buildings, living in improvised dwellings (such as sheds, garages or cabins), and using cars or railway carriages for temporary shelter.

OK, I can understand that. I've seen a number of them in my time. Most of them were drunk, getting drunk, or sleeping off being drunk.

Secondary homelessness describes the situation of people who move frequently from one form of temporary shelter to another. On census night, all people staying in emergency or transitional accommodation provided under the Supported Accommodation Assistance Program (SAAP) are considered part of this category. Secondary homelessness also includes people residing temporarily with other households because they have no accommodation of their own, and people staying in boarding houses on a short-term basis, operationally defined as 12 weeks or less.

Hmm, been there, done that. What I did not expect to find is that someone who has been in a boarding house for months is classified as homeless. The way I have always envisaged the homeless is those that do not have a fixed roof over their heads - ie, rough sleepers. This is getting interesting.

Tertiary homelessness describes the situation of people who live in boarding houses on a medium to long-term basis, operationally defined as 13 weeks or longer. Residents of private boarding houses are homeless because their accommodation does not have the characteristics identified in the minimum community standard (Chamberlain and MacKenzie 1992): they do not have a separate bedroom and living room; they do not have kitchen and bathroom facilities of their own; their accommodation is not self-contained; and they do not have security of tenure provided by a lease.

I bolded that bit about the "minimum community standard", because that tickled my fancy. Essentially, if you wanted to, you could continually increase the number of homeless by fiddling with that standard. In a decade from now, the way McMansions are being built, the minimum standard may be that if you don't have a separate media room for your 50 inch plasma TV, then you are defined as homeless. Similarly, you could halve the homeless rate overnight by simply saying that living somewhere with a shared bathroom is no longer defined as tertiary homelessness.

I notice that not having a separate bedroom and living room counts as tertiary homelessness. When I was in my 20's, I knew quite a few singles that lived in bedsits in Kings Cross. Some were international flight attendants, who did not spend much time at home, others were professionals and so on. Does owning your own bedsit in the Cross (as they all did) suddenly make you homeless?

Now comes some stats:

• Boarding houses - 7626 persons, 28% of total
• SAAP accommodation - 5110 persons, 19%
• Friends and relatives - 10,923 persons, 40%
• Sleeping rough - 3715 persons, 13%

Total of 27,374 in NSW, or 104,676 across Australia.

If you ask me, if you have a place to stay for the night, then you are not homeless. If you have shelter from the elements, so that you can stay dry if it rains, and you have access to lighting and heat and water, then you are not homeless. Dossing in a public park with no tent and no fire obviously equates to a fairly miserable situation - but not one that I am unacquainted with, having spent months sleeping like that out bush during my time in the Reserves.

There was many a warm night when I could not be bothered raising my hootchie, and I slept in my clothes wrapped in a large garbage bag - I didn't take a sleeping bag at times to avoid the extra weight and bulk in my pack.

You tend to stink after a while - clothes impregnated with days and nights of stale sweat take on an odour not quickly forgotten - but I also know from experience that after a day, you no longer smell yourself. You might stink to high heaven, but your nose simply ignores the experience.

My prejudies aside, it's worth remembering that of the 100,000 or so classified as "homeless", only 13% are sleeping rough, and even then they are probably moving in and out of hostels and shelters on a regular basis. Or, alternatively, you could say that the homeless statistics are inflated by a factor of 8 by those that have a vested interest in fluffing up the numbers - the "homeless-charity complex", to coin a phrase.

The survey divides each city up into regions and finds that:

It is usual to find a higher rate of homelessness in the inner suburbs of capital cities. This is the case in Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, Hobart and Brisbane. People often gravitate to the inner city, where services for homeless people have traditionally been located.

I bolded that last bit. I have to ask, why do is the highest density for services for the homeless located in areas that are the most expensive to do anything? Surely, if you have a set budget for homeless services, you want it to stretch as far as possible, so you setup shop where land is cheap - like anywhere but the CBD. Are the homeless gravitating to the CBD in order to tap into existing services, or are the services gravitating to the CBD to serve the homeless? It's a bit chicken and egg, isn't it?

Or are those services, such as charities, simply in or around the CBD because that is where they setup shop back in 1920, when the city was much smaller and there were slums in The Rocks and Redfern etc, and they've stayed there every since our of inertia?

Or, the CBD usually has the highest concentration of pubs, and some pretty manky pubs at that, who will serve anyone at any time. And if you get thrown out of one for weeing on the bar, it's a short stagger down the road to the next pub. Plus if you need a feed, there are plenty of fast food joints selling fat and salt topped off with plastic cheese - the perfect thing after chundering half digested port all over your shoes.

There are also lots of people in the CBD, so if you spend your days cadging money from pedestrians, you go where the density of pedestrians is highest. I doubt that there are a lot of homeless people in the CBD because of high rents or lack of accommodation - the homeless are there because it is a happy hunting ground. Booze, food and easy marks abound.

The report also includes new information on marginal caravan park dwellers and Indigenous homelessness.

We have a family member who is currently living out of the back of a van up in Queensland. Another member regularly takes to the road and lives out of their van. I would not class either as broke, or even poor. They have the potential to earn good money; they simply choose not to, preferring life on the road. A life without attachments and chattels, where they can "live in the moment". I will now have to tell them that the are homeless vagrants.

They also include living in shipping containers as homeless. My godfather, who was a state MP for decades, lived in a shipping container for months whilst his house was built. I am so going to enjoy telling him that he has been a homeless bum. I don't remember him complaining about it too much at the time.

Hell, my mum grew up in a hessian shack in the bush with a dirt floor. If I rang her tonight to tell her that she grew up officially homeless, she'd laugh her head off. They had a farm and food, they had clothes, they had a Model T ford and pots and pans and furniture and a bible and they went to church every Sunday. Although shoes were an issue - she didn't get her first pair until she started school at age 12, having been home schooled until that point. And sure, if it got a bit hot, her mother improved the ventilation in the kitchen by chopping a window in the hessian wall with a pair of scissors.

From that life of hardship, which was pretty typical of settlers in the wheatbelt back then, and was shared by my father in separate circumstances, they went on to great and important things. Growing up rough did nothing to hold them back. And whilst the housing was rough as guts at times, and they lacked refrigeration and electricity and telephones and so on, dad says that he never saw his father without a tie and hat. Ever. How many people in similar circumstances today would turn up every day for work in a suit? How many would even turn up for work?

It is common for homeless people to move from one form of temporary shelter to another. It is also common for homeless people to move both within and between states.

It costs money to move interstate, unless you hitch all the time. Is homelessness a result of poverty, or something else?

The minimum community standard is a small rental flat––with a bedroom, living room, kitchen, bathroom and an element of security of tenure––because that is the minimum that most people achieve in the private rental market. However, the minimum is significantly below the culturally desired option of an owner-occupied house.

....there are a number of institutional settings where people do not have the minimal level of accommodation identified by the community standard, but in cultural terms they are not considered part of the homeless population. They include, inter alia, people living in seminaries, elderly people in nursing homes, students in university halls of residence and prisoners.

Drat. I was going to say that this standard equates to the sort of accommodation I had at uni, and some of my student mates lived that way for 4 or 5 years, depending on the type of degree they were doing. I don't remember it ever doing any of them any harm - except perhaps to their livers. I don't understand why a uni student, who may be working part time and studying and so on, can live a "normal" existance in a university college, whilst a non-student in the same standard of accommodation is somehow seen as being terribly disadvantaged.

In some communities, local SAAP workers send homeless people to the local caravan park if there is no alternative accommodation available. Caravan parks may also house some people on a longer-term basis who are unable to re-enter the private rental market.

Shearers, fencing contractors, miners all live in caravans. My sister bought a Coaster bus from a shearer's cook, and the cook lived in it for years as she travelled from farm to station to farm. What's so bad about living in a caravan? A mate of mine, who has been a millionaire and lost it all a few times, and is now running his own multi-million dollar business again, spent a few years living in a caravan whilst he poured every cent he had into a business venture.

Living in a caravan should not preclude anyone from holding down a job, saving money and living a normal, albeit different, life. His caravan had a shower, hot water, a nice bed, a place to eat and a kitchen where simple but good meals could be prepared. What more do you need in order to live life?

Local informants talked about ‘makeshift cabins and metal sheds’ and people buying blocks of land, but being ‘unable to build a house because they could not find work’. There were few households with someone in full-time work and a household income of $1000 or more. The number of blockies was low.

Ah. Some people have scraped up enough money to buy a few acres of land, but are struggling to find the money to build a house on that land. Gee, how did it come to pass that someone sitting on say a $100,000 block of land, which they own outright, is considered homeless? Sure, they might be living in a tin shed on that block, but what is wrong with that? I helped build a house on a farm once, and the family moved in once the roof was on. No walls were put up until it started getting cold, and even then, the windows were made of clear plastic fertiliser bags. The floor was paving blocks loosely deposited on top of compacted sand. It was a great house for a family of four, who were also putting everything they had into getting a business up and running. If you ask me, your house does not dictate your circumstances.

The Australian Government’s White Paper on homelessness has proposed two ambitious goals: ‘to halve homelessness by 2020’ and to provide ‘supported accommodation to all rough sleepers who need it’, along with interim targets for 2013.

It's never going to happen. I will predict now what will happen. Some people who are currently renting privately, but who are on low incomes, will see a huge amount of new public housing being built. They will engineer their circumstances in order to take advantage of that new housing. They will reduce the amount of rent they pay by going on the public tit. Demand will outstrip supply, and the number of homeless will continue to grow.

I'll be interested to see what happens when all that new accommodation is built for rough sleepers - whether they will take it up. By 2013, can this mob guarantee that I will never have to step over a drunken bum and a huge puddle of piss to step into my office? I doubt it.

Since the White Paper, the government has announced a further $6.6 billion to be spent on the construction of 20 000 homes for public housing, the largest expansion of public housing for many years.

Will this induce more people to seek public housing, as it is cheaper than private housing? Why pay rent if the government will give you something for next to nothing?

It is known that some groups are particularly vulnerable to homelessness, such as young people who have been through the care and protection system

Let me get this straight - government fucks these kids up via the "care and protection" system, and then we think that the solution is for the government to get even more involved in their lives via the provision of housing?

Second, it is important to recognise that most people do not sleep rough on a permanent basis. .... only two per cent... was consistently without shelter, but 49 per cent of the sample had slept rough occasionally.

If that is the case, why do people make such a big deal out of it? Is sleeping under the stars from time to time the end of the world?

Most commonly, families become homeless because of a housing crisis or domestic violence. Adults in families experiencing a housing crisis are typically unemployed or outside of the labour force. These families are usually poor and often have accumulated debts. In most cases, the family is facing eviction because of rent arrears.

Looking after this group invites moral hazard. What is to stop an unscrupulous mob from renting a house privately, then refusing to pay rent over an extended period, using every wheeze to delay eviction, and then sponging off the state once they are evicted and suddenly "in crisis", running to Today Tonight with a sob story worth of tabloid television air time.

Some families become homeless as a result of family breakdown involving domestic violence. .... One form of early intervention is family counselling to help couples work through their relationship issues, and another form of intervention is to remove the perpetrator of violence from the family home.

If you ask me, if a bloke thumps a woman, it's lockup time for the bloke. I'm talking a few months in prison at least. I see no reason for a woman with kids to be out on the street after taking a bashing from a bloke - he should be behind bars, and that's it.

If the woman takes it that far though, the court should make an order that she is never to hook up with him again - possibly on pain of her being locked up. I am sick to death of these mental females that get their face punched in, then shack up with the bastard again and go through it time after time after time. One chance, that's it.

A significant proportion of the people with a long-term housing problem have substance abuse issues and/or mental health issues, which complicates their exit from homelessness

That presumably means that they have totally fried their brains on cheap plonk or drugs, and are essentially incapable of living a "normal" existence. I have a solution for them, and we used to call them looney bins. If someone is so far gone that they are pooing in their pants, then putting them in a nicely furnished apartment is not much of a solution. The sad fact is that they probably need to be put into a mental institution of some sort for the rest of their life. Those brain cells are not coming back.

Phew, I am exhausted after doing all that. time to open a bottle of metho and have a drink.

Multiculturalism at its finest

Funny how no one mentions multiculturalism when people from different ethnic groups start to kill each other in large numbers.

Few talk of brutality by their own side except to rationalise what went on. "We Han Chinese are organising to protect ourselves," says Chen. Uighurs only talk to me cautiously, out of fear of police reprisals and also of Uighur informants.

A quietly spoken woman in Shaanxi Lane confirms she saw out her window her fellow Uighurs slaughtering Chinese people. "But this does not mean they are animals," she says. "Do you know June 26?" - referring to the murder of at least two Uighur workers by Chinese mobs in Guangdong province.

Asked whether she saw Uighurs killed, she switches to English and answers in code. "Those women are Muslims," she says, nodding towards two women dressed in black with white headscarves. "Muslim women wear white scarves when they are in mourning."

A Chinese construction worker said he watched Uighurs slaughtering Chinese - "slicing their throats like lambs" - in Shaanxi Lane and then armed police killing Uighurs. Uighurs have claimed that "hundreds" of their own were massacred on Sunday night, but the facts are thin on the ground.

Can't we all just get along? Sing kum-ba-ya and all that?

Follow the logic

From Life at the Bottom, talking about poverty, health and life expectancy:

By no means can the poor not afford health or a nourishing diet; nor do they live in overcrowded houses lacking proper sanitation... or work 14 backbreaking hours in the foul air of mines or mills. Epidemiologists estimate that higher cigarette consumption among the poor accounts for half the difference in life expectancy between the richest and poorest classes in England - and to smoke that much takes money.

Notoriously, too the infant mortality rate is twice as high the lowest social class as in the highest. But the infant mortality rate of illegitimate births is twice that of legitimate ones, and the illegitimacy rate rises steeply as you descend the social scale. So the decline of marriage almost to the vanishing point in the lowest social class might well be responsible for most of its excess infant mortality. It is a way of life, not poverty per se, that kills.

He's talking about the UK, but he could of course be talking about the wretchedness and squalor of any number of Aboriginal communities, which seem to disgorge nothing but appalling health indicators, mindless violence, nihilistic behaviour and early death.

We know that Aboriginal life expectancy is poor, and that "something must be done". I wonder if smoking could also account for up to half the gap between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal life expectancy, and if so, what the government expects to do about it. Smoking seems to be amazingly prevalent in Aboriginal society - my brief encounters from time to time have found that almost everyone smokes from about the age of 10. Roll your own, unfiltered smokes seem to be the tar delivery mechanism of choice.

Smoking is of course a voluntary activity. I know that it is addictive to a degree, but I don't believe that it is as addictive as the nicotine-replacement industry likes to make out (being an ex-smoker myself). They have a vested interest in telling the smoker that it is not their fault that they smoke, that it is hard to quit, and that they need to spend lots of money on nicotine replacement patches in order to relinquish the filthy habit.

Again, the smoker is told that their "addiction" is not their fault. It is the fault of tobacco companies, luring them with irresistible advertising. It is the fault of their parents, who had the gall to smoke in the car with us when we were young. It's peer group pressure. It's always something else, and never the desire of the smoker to smoke because they enjoy the activity.

Anyway, who is going to be game to try and get between a blackfella and his smokes? Smoking in white society has been demonised to the point where smokers are seen as vaguely evil, worthy of punishment and morally decrepit. To be a smoker is a loser, and smoking in the wrong place at the wrong time can bring criminal charges. Smokers are the lowest of the low. They are bums, useless carbuncles on the backside of humanity, leeches who consume more than their fair share of health resources, weaklings who are unable to control their base cravings, knaves and fools for continuing to undertake an activity certain to hasten their demise, morally reprehensible for puffing away in the presence of children - an act almost likened to child abuse - financially stupid for being so idiotic as to fork out ever increasing amounts of cash for the cured leaf of an abominable plant.

Now, can we turn around and say that to blackfellas? Can a white man say that they are:

• morally decrepit
• a loser
• a criminal
• a bum, leech, carbuncle
• weak, useless and unable to exert any self control
• knaves, fools and financially irresponsible
• child abusers
  

You can say these things to a whitefella, but woe betide anyone who dares to even think about saying any one of these things to a blackfella. The racist tar brush will be applied in the blink of an eye.

Such pussyfooting around might explain why so many Aboriginals continue to smoke, and why there has yet to be an effective campaign to get them to cut back. So we continue to tip-toe around the truth, and in the meantime, lots more Aboriginals die young. The soft headed do-gooders of course insist that Aboriginal health can be fixed with more money, more nurses, more clinics, more doctors and so on, but the greatest gain will probably come from weaning them off the legal weed. And the extra money in their pockets could then be spent on useful things, like house maintenance, better food and so on - things that will produce further health improvements.

Good luck with that.

No rides for you

As if the lousy weather of late is bad enough, I had to go and contract a cold this week. It's been raining on and off for days - frequently enough to make any ride a wet one, if it went on for more than an hour. I've had a lot of couch time over the last few days, alternatively reading Theodore Dalrymple and sleeping.

Since I started reading Life at the Bottom, I've been having rather nasty little nightmares. I blame the lack of oxygen reaching my brain due to a bunged up windpipe, rather than the contents of that book. Still, it doesn't make for a good night's sleep.

When I woke up on Tuesday morning, I was quickly gripped by the worst coughing and hacking spasms that I have ever experienced in my entire life. I had a lump of snot stuck in the back of my throat, and it was refusing to budge. It seemed to be quite elastic, but firmly tethered at the far end - like the inside of a golf ball attached to a rubber band. I'd cough the thing up to the back of my tongue, but it would then refuse to detach and go any further, and that would make me retch and almost vomit. It was terrible. I gargled with cold water and warm water and even hot coffee, but nothing would tempt it to depart from its lair.

The best description that I can give of its consistency is that of half congealed blood. You know what blood is like when you get a really big clot of it, and it is no longer wet and liquid on the inside, but it has become a large, malleable ball of goo. That's what the snot was like.

I had to give up on my attempts to hack it out when one cough produced a lightning bolt of pain that went across both shoulders and straight up the back of my neck and into my head. I've never felt anything like it - it was like an electric current that zapped across and up with the utmost speed. I was sure a force 10 headache would have followed that, but all that came on was the usual cold and flu stuff - lethargy, difficulty in breathing and very, very loud snoring. Which is odd, as my vocal cords were so thickly coated in goo, I could hardly talk at times.

Ah well, back to the couch. And I've been too stupid to tape the Tour de France each night, so I don't even have that on disk to while away the time.

Act!onaid stupidity - international edition

I had a small rant at Act!onaid a few weeks ago. The top execs are very well paid, and if it was not for government grants, 93% of their income from donations would be soaked up by expenses.

Now we have an article from the UK Telegraph that lifts the lid on their ideology.

The more I see of some charities, the more I conclude that those running them and working for them are a bunch of power-tripping greedheads who have found a niche where they can wallow in guilt funded luxury and boss the little people of the world around. Apart from the Salvos and Vinnies, I am hard pressed to find any major charity that has not been taken over by management consultants who are more interested in a car space and a fat salary than trying to enable the less fortunate to lift themselves out of poverty and squalor.