I think one of my first posts was about sinkholes, and they have featured pretty regularly since…now here is another one! What the hell is going on here? Are we gradually being taken over by a subterranean race or is mankind and his wicked ways just slowly being sucked back into the ground we came from?:-) Any thoughts?
Or is it just me? I haven’t shared it with you until now but one appeared in the backyard of my rental property recently. Spooky huh! Or maybe not. 
Posted in Sinkholes
I have to share a story a friend of mine told me about her mother’s recent visit to hospital with you because I think it is the funniest and most heartwarming story I have heard in ages. The reason behind the hospital visit is not at all funny and I hope my friend’s mum has made a full recovery. Oh, and I should also express my sympathies for the staff having to deal with, what must have been, a tough situation. But it’s still funny! Names have been changed to protect the not-so innocent.
This was the P.S. to an email my friend sent:
“P.S. The hospital rang me Saturday morning to tell me to get in there- Dorothy had been a really bad girl during the night- had a nightmare that a team of assassins were going to kill her if she didn’t make a break for it- an unsuspecting nurse woke her to see if she was ok (she immediately assumed he was one of the bad guys) punched him and tried to do a runner- apparently it took three nurses to restrain her because she was not going down without a fight- that’s my girl- she’s 86 in April but she’s a feisty little thing.”
I hope I have that amount of spunk when I’m 86!
On another note, some of you may have been aware that years ago I wrote a book. It was never published and has since languished on my computer getting sporadic editings. Well, I have decided to post it here as a serial as I edit it. It’s called ‘Sharing a Desk with Elvis’, so keep an eye out for those posts if you are interested. And any constructive comments, I’ll emphasise constructive for some of you, you know who you are, are most welcome. First instalment coming to a blog near you soon.
Posted in Uncategorized
I was out on my bike today, on the bike path and wearing my helmet for those who care to ask, when I passed an area of road that is slightly wider than normal to allow for some roadside parking spaces. Apparently what this creates is a perfect space for revheads to do donuts because the road surafce is more tyre rubber than tarmac. My immediate reaction, a combination of old bastard and totally knackered by that point, was to think that the perpetraters should be taken out, lined up against a wall and shot.
Upon further consideration I realised that the punishment probably didn’t fit the crime and my thoughts wondered off on to why people would want to do such a meaningless thing anyway. The answer I came up was that they must enjoy it; kinda logical really. This is turn led me to wonder whether it was actually any more meaningless than lots of other things people do for enjoyment. Do you ever stop to think about the point of football? Or golf? Or just about any sport. Or hobby? Or anything really. I can understand that participating in sports has a benefit in terms of health and fitness. But what about watching it? Imagine trying to explain watching football to an alien.
‘So what do you Earthlings for fun?’ (I have assumed, for ease of reading, that all aliens speak English. If Hollywood says they do, that is good enough for me! )
‘Well, we like to sit around and watch two teams of people chase a leather ball around a field and try to kick the leather ball between sticks more often than the other team does.’
Is this really much different from…
‘So what do you Earthlings for fun?’
‘We like to get in our cars and drive very fast in small circles so that we leave big strip of burnt rubber on the road’
The only real difference to me is that one is illegal. I was going to go for anti-social as well but have you ever been to a football game?
So that, in turn, got me to thinking that maybe we need to take donut-ting mainstream. Why not make it a competitive sport, with a set of rules and everything? I mean, I read the other day that pole dancing was seeking Olympic recognition. So why not donut-ting? A little sidebar here. I was dragged along to a pole dancing show recently…I know, tragic…and I have to say I was really impressed by, along with a few other things 
, how athletic and demanding it all seemed. Not athletic to an Olympic level maybe but pretty impressive none-the-less. But I digress; one side benefit of making donut-ting an official sport, and therefore more mainstream, might be that it makes it less appealing to the revhead element. See, there is method in my madness…sometimes!
Posted in Uncategorized
Life is a funny thing hey. Since I took my New Years Eve vow of sanguinity I find that I have less of an urge to jump on here and vent my spleen. Good for me but not much good for blog output unfortunately. But I saw this the other day and thought it would make a great little entry. I really like the idea of the forum he is going to and the way it is being run. It seems like a good model for lots of other events. The mining resources rent tax , putting a price on carbon etc etc.
It’s a bit of a ‘no shit, Sherlock’ kind of article really isn’t it (especially the ‘The first myth that needs busting is the conceit that the human mind is organised, logical and rational’ statement. ). If you want to change someone’s mind or convince them of your point of view don’t overwhelm them with information, don’t threaten their world view and don’t perpetuate the myth. Actually it is something that the Liberals do very well in Australia and Labor does very poorly. Remember back to the Mining Super Profits Tax. The Liberals; a great, big new tax. The mining industry; this will destroy the economy and your job with it. Labor; a guy standing in a lecture theatre intellectualising the tax. Who won that argument I wonder! And right now with the ‘faceless men’ obsession the Liberals and the media have. Total nonsense but very effective. I mean how dumb is a statement like ‘Bill Shorten and the other faceless men’? But it is short, simple and gets traction.
I might need to send this to a few select politicians, me thinks. Hell, the whole of the Labor caucus!
Oh btw, the guy who wrote this article’s blog is interesting as well for anyone confused about the nature of the climate change denialist argument.
Posted in General
One of my favourite blogs is a Crikey blog called Pure Poison. With it’s name taken from a quote, “Intellectual dishonesty is pure poison…”, and with a stated purpose of exposing ‘the intellectual dishonesty, the flimsy arguments and the distorted data wherever they appear in the mainstream media….’ it is probably little wonder that I visit it quite a bit, what with me being such a fan of the quality of our media n all. Anyway, I was reading a post today which showed another example of how Andrew Bolt chooses to either mis-represent, cherry pick, or just totally ignore, facts in making an argument and it go me to wondering how and why he does this. And, not only that, but how he manages to attract so many followers with arguments that anyone with a modicom of sense could see the holes in.
For a while I was working on a theory that he was doing it deliberately and cynically to build a media career. Glen Beck is a US example of this kind of right-wing media personality but he seemes a little unhinged, even to the point where I think he might have a mental illness. I can understand why his arguments are both irrational and poorly supported. But Andrew Bolt appears sane enough and, I would have thought, intelligent enough to know that he is peddling nonsense. This is why I was leaning toward the idea of him doing it as part of a long-term strategy.
But George Monbiot at the Guardian in the UK may have provided the answer on his blog. I don’t want to spoil it for you but it gets really interesting in the second and third paragraphs. It appears I have over-estimated both Andrew and his faithful followers.
Posted in How our media sucks.
I know that at times I have tended to focus the negative aspects of the climate change debate so today I thought I would give you all heart that some postive things are happening out there as well.
For starters, this article confirms that insurance companies are factoring the impact of climate change into our premiums. Now this may not, at first glance, appear to be a positive thing. But I think it is. I’m of the opinion that many people will not start to get serious about climate change until it hits them in the hip pocket. At the moment it is the solutions to climate change that are costing us money and, understandably I think, impacting on the support for action. I remember a discussion I had once with my business partner in the UK. He believes in climate change but said that it would be so much easier to not believe. If you believe in it then you need to accept that you are going to have to make changes in your life, mainly sacrifices, and that our world is going to change significantly, which is a pretty scary proposition. But if you don’t believe in climate change, then it’s just business as usual. So while climate change solutions are costing us, people are likely to rationalise and diminish the impact of the issue and the need for action. However, when inaction is costing us money, and for most of us our insurance premiums will cost us more than the Carbon Tax will, then people are more likely to call for action I think. So, a conditional thank you to the insurance companies.
Then there is this article, which, with a headline like “A good news year for climate campaigners” seems to fit pretty pretty well in this post, and which is written by someone who appears to know a lot more about what he is talking about then I do. Enough said, I’ll just leave you to read it.
This article I find particularly interesting. Although the basic theme is that we don’t have a single fuel that could act as a bridging fuel while we crank up renewables, the message over-all is that we are not only facing a need to change our fuel sources to combat global warming but also because we don’t have as much of the tradtional fuels left as some would have us believe. Comments like ‘The first thing you should know about oil is that worldwide production has been on a plateau since 2005. This is despite record high prices and furious exploration and drilling efforts.’ and ‘That means that each year just to stay even, the industry must develop new oil production capacity equivalent to the current capacity of the North Sea, one of the world’s largest fields.’ might not sound like the best of news but again this is a good news story I think. What the article suggests is that we have extracted all the easy to get to oil, gas, coal etc over the last 150 years. What is left is increasingly difficult to extract, refine etc. and is of increasingly lower grade. To cut a very long story short , it costs a lot more per unit of energy gained. And, with every increase in cost per unit of traditional fuel sources, alternate source become increasingly more viable. So yes, good news I think.
And finally the piece de resistance. Bolivia is set to pass the ‘Law of Mother Earth‘. I’ll let you read it yourself but the law ‘redefines natural resources as blessings and confers the same rights to nature as to human beings, including: the right to life and to exist; the right to continue vital cycles and processes free from human alteration; the right to pure water and clean air; the right to balance; the right not to be polluted; and the right to not have cellular structure modified or genetically altered.’ What a beautiful piece of legislation hey! And why not? In many countries of the world a souless entity like a corpration has been conferred the same rights as a person. So why not a living entity like nature?
Posted in Uncategorized
I just rang Reading Cinemas in Mandurah to find out why Hugo in 3D had disappeared off their schedule. It turns out that it has been bumped because they only have so many 3D projectors and Journey 2 : The Mysterious Island, the sequel to Journey to the Centre of the Earth, has just opened. Now I am not denigrating Journey 2 because I haven’t seen it. But only in Mandurah could a movie that has a critics rating of 94% on Rotten Tomatoes, 11 Academy Award nominations (including Best Picture, a major feat for a childrens movie) and with reviews like ‘Hugo is an extravagant, elegant fantasy with an innocence lacking in many modern kids’ movies, and one that emanates an unabashed love for the magic of cinema’ loses it’s slot to a movie that rates 40% on Rotten Tomatoes.
But to be fair to Journey 2, it does rate 72% among viewers. I’m really just having a rant because, after having been ripped off and under-whelmed by 3D movies, one finally comes along that has reviewers saying things like ‘Setting the benchmark for 21st century family films — 3D has never looked better and Hugo’s story is universally appealing’ and it lasts about 2 days in Mandurah! 
Posted in Uncategorized
