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About as defective as the bloke himself.

The scary part about getting older is seeing the younger set going ga-ga over some historic, vintage footage, from ancient times, about 50 or 60 years ago - then you look at it, and realise you were there as an adult, and everything is very familiar! I can also recall when middle nephew (about 10) came home from school and asked his Mum (SIL) if she had any old photos for a school project. When his Mum said, "How old?", he replied, "Oh, from about 60 years ago, when you were little!" His Mum was 30 at the time! 😄

1918 sounds a long time ago. A mate of mine had a father who served in the 5th.Light Horse Regiment in WW1 and served at Gallipoli in 1915. I couldn't work the mathematics of that out until he told me his dad was fifteen when he joined up and had put his age up. Then he didn't marry until a bit later in life so was about 50 when the mate was born.

The first time I ever went out to the far SW Qld. country was in the early 80's and some of the roads were horrible back then. I flew out to Durham Downs so didn't get to experience the roads until later that night when a mate conned me into sharing the driving to take an empty float down to the NSW border to pick up a D7G. The trip from Durham to Noccundra literally took hours; we hardly got out of second gear. Not so much corrugations, more just rough with bulldust holes and silcrete rocks sticking out of the road surface. We had a couple of hours sleep at Noccundra and headed south from there at first light. In some places there was no imported road surface, just the natural ground surface that had chopped up to bulldust. I remember one area where the road was about 200 metres wide consisting of bulldust tracks where vehicles had been driving out wider and wider to find a hard surface. When we got to the border, there on the NSW side was the clay topped, formed up and wide Silver City Highway that you could have landed a plane on. There wasn't many tourists in those days. The roads are much better now due a lot to the grey nomads contributing so much to local economies. Councils now do a lot more road maintenance and a lot of those roads on the Queensland side are now formed up proper roads. The other contribution to better roads is the development of the oil and gas industry out there. When I was first there in 1982, the Jackson oil field wasn't even a thing. My brother and I did a job there camped by a creek bed like swaggies, living on tinned food; there was nothing there execpt us and the dingos. 18 months later there was bitumen, an airport, all the usual oilfield facilities, contractor's yards and donkey pumps all over the place.

The big problem with corrugations is that sometimes you have no choice but to put up with them if you want to get where you have to go. Depending on the vehicle, sometimes it's better to travel a bit faster rather than real slow, or as Nev pointed out, drive on the other side where the wave shape is more in your favour. Which ever way you tackle it, eventually some part of the vehicle will complain.

Isn't that where your wife writes it for you?

Faaaark. I was born in 1972. If I lived backwards I'd be about to hit the end of WW1.

That story reminds me a bit of my grandfather. He lived alone for a lot of years. My grandmother died in 1958 and my great uncle who lived with them died in a car accident in 1963, then the grandfather in 1972, so nine years on his own. A neighbour rang him one day and noticed he sounded a bit odd on the phone so went around to check on him. He found my grandad with a broken nose and a badly swollen face after pranging his '38 Oldsmobile into a tree stump hidden in the long grass in a paddock. He'd been that way for about a week. That set things in motion where he didn't really bounce back at 88 years of age and eventually pneumonia got him. My dad was the same. Rolled the quad bike and broke the bottom of his leg bone and just kept working on the farm for a week like that until my sister visited and saw him with a foot half the size of a football. I'm glad I didn't inherit that trait; I'm not shy about going to the doctor if I think it's needed.

Maybe I'm just a cynic, but.... The very first task that AI should complete successfully is to redesign itself to use far less electricity and no water. If it can't solve that problem, why should we trust it to do anything else?

Did that include the $57.45 worth of stock in the stores?

I'm writing a book. It's all about things I should do. It's called 'Oughtobiography'

My scarey random thought for today.... I just realised that 1972 and 2026 are as far apart as 1972 and 1918....... Pause for mind boggle.

That's great news, Willie. One of the problems with getting old is getting older alone. I'd hate to do that. I have a mate doing that now, he and his brother built a big shed on some rented land in the deep SW of W.A., alongside the Blackwood River, which is quite a scenic spot. However, his slightly older brother (79) recently developed dementia (last year), and has moved out of his half of the shed, into a nursing home in a small nearby town. He was assessed as being unable to look after himself. So my mate is now living alone in that big shed, and I've noticed how much he's deteriorated in the last year or so. He keeps falling over, too, as he loses his balance easily. He fell over last week in the yard, and went straight backwards onto the ground, and gashed his head open. So, being the tough old codger he is, he wrapped his head in towels and drove himself to the local nursing post (there's no local doctors or hospital). The nurse there was shocked to see him, there was so much blood, she thought he'd been shot. So then he had to wait 13 hrs for an ambulance to transport him to Busselton Hospital, 60kms away. The doc there stitched him up and sent him home, but when I rang him a couple of days later, he said he was having problems doing jobs in his workshop, and thought he might have had some degree of concussion - although the doc ruled that out with the standard tests. He's just turned 78 last month, and I'm concerned about how he will go into the near future. He's on the bones of his bum, he was never a good money manager, and his ex-wife cleaned him out and took the house, so he ended up in the shed. He's totally resistant to any idea of moving into any form of retirement village, and he can't afford it, anyway. I reckon he would do a lot better with a partner, but he's got no time for women now, so that's unlikely to happen. One of the advantages of having a woman around, is that she can at least raise help, or find you quickly when you've taken a turn for the worse.

Just found out that Lorraine Bayley (Grace Sullivan) passed away on 28 February 2026 aged 89.

Thanks Nev, you reminded me of the old trick of driving on the other side of the road to lessen the effect. I haven't been out there for a fair while so had forgotten that one.

I've figured out some positives. Life is good. We've had twenty seven inches of rain so far this year and the country is looking great. It's finally stopped raining and the beautiful clear and cool weather is here. I have a debt free roof over my head, lots of food, a motor car that works, I can walk, talk, breathe, hear and see and have plenty of fun stuff to do. The first photo is the front yard, the second is the back yard, and the third photo is my best mate outside the kitchen window trying to shame me into giving him some dog biscuits. I've known him since he was born, so he's known me his entire life. There's nowhere I'd rather be.

It would be hard to reject an offer like that.

This one is not recent, but is noteworthy. Actress Catherine O'Hara died in January this year. She had dextrocardia with situs inversus, a condition in which the heart and other major internal organs are reversed from their normal positions. She had an extensive film career. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_O'Hara

I think it will be one or the other. If they are going to get anywhere they'll need more like him.

"Jerry built" has a couple of possible sources. From an 1856 use in Liverpool, "built hastily of shoddy materials," from jerry "bad, defective". Thr jerry could also be a corruption of "jury" as used in the term "jury mast", a temporary mast put up in place of one that has been broken or carried away." and the earliest citation given is from 1616, with the spelling lury mast. It is wrong to associate "jerry built" with anything German, unless the thing was built by a post-war German refugee working for a shonky house builder.

The Later versions Have More Interference on the fit and Pass a Higher load test. Factory ONLY assembly.. Nev

High speed stall on Jets they describe similarly. It's like a shudder. I've experienced it. The road surface has been subject to Compaction. by oscillating Impact forces reaching a Harmonic. As Drivers seek better surfaces the Ridges spread out on the New Path. It appears to Be directional to a Point. IF you drive on the wrong side of the road the effect seems Less. I've Known People to tear the shock absorber Mount Points off the Chassis. I've wrecked 2 rear shock absorbers south of Winton. Nev

It's not a good thing to Have something Jerry-built. OME will tell us where that saying originated. Nev