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G, aim, over = Game over.

A guy got pulled over by the police. The cop walked up to his window and asked, "Do you know why I pulled you over?" The guy said, "To check how tall I am?" The cop looked definitely unimpressed and said, "Step out of the car please." The guy said, "So I was right then?"

Signing OFF. Nev

This Place could NOT Be Wetter. Go off the drive and you will be Bogged. . Had my right eye Injected again today in Melbourne. No fun that. . Nev

Men's Shed Tomorrow. I got my old Au Fairmont aircond to work, so I will take it. I Thought the A/Cond Module was Cactus but it wasn't. Got a new alternator and Multi Vee belt tensioner and an electric window fixed. surprised I can still get the Parts. 1998 year build.. Nev

You can Pay over $120/Hr to have an apprentice cross thread your Oil drain Plug or strip the thread by overtightening it.. Nev

Quite some years Back a Toyota Corolla I think had a nut that retained a chain wheel or timing belt drop off and They said book it in Friday and we will fix it. They then found that one oil change period had gone a bit over the time but not the Mileage. No warrantee!!!. How could THAT make a Nut fall off? . They USED to be a Pretty good car. Nev

Many of them drive too fast to be able to stop quickly if something gets out of shape.. My last trip over the Nullarbour (sp) they Bar one, Behaved quite well That's a fairly civilised road. Nev

Heart attacks and cancer take out 1.2M Americans every year, they are America's biggest killers. A lot of that can be put down to their rubbishy, ultra-processed food, full of toxic additives. If you pick up a factory processed food and the ingredients label reads like a biblical text, or an extract from a science article, put it back. The food processing additives are nearly all industrial by-products, or based on petroleum-orgin chemicals. The worst part is buying food that says it has no additives. Not in their factory, anyway. Then you find out they are importing food ingredients from other countries, that have had illegal, un-approved or dodgy additives added, in that other country. Orange juice is an example. You buy Australian-packaged orange juice, it says, "no additives, just 100% orange juice". Then you find out they're importing orange juice CONCENTRATE from Brazil, where additives not approved here, have been added to the concentrate. So you're getting un-approved additives in your juice, yet the manufacturers here, tell you you aren't. Our food labelling system is as dodgy as a 3 dollar note. Another interesting angle is seed oils. RFK Junior, despite his crazyiness, does have some relevant points with his crusade against seed oils. Here's an example. Cottonseed oil is the most common frying/cooking oil used. It's used in every commercial kitchen, cafe and restuarant. Why? Because it's cheap, and no food business will pay a lot more, for better quality oils. The rub with cottonseed oil is - cotton is not recognised as a food crop. Food crops have all sorts of laws banning certain pesticides and weedicides from being used on them. Not so with cotton. Cotton is attacked by hordes of bugs, they love the stuff. So the cotton growers use millions of litres of highly toxic pesticides, and weedicides to assist in cotton growth - and half of them are not allowed in food production. But the cotton seeds are then processed to yield lots of cheap oil, which is then sold as cooking and frying oil. It is idiocy. I read an article the other day, where a cooking guru was lamenting the cooking show chefs, and their lack of attention to good, healthy cooking oils. The writer talked about how the celebrity chefs went to great pains to select premium foods and indulge in celebrated food preparation processes - then they reached for cheap, shitty cottonseed oil, to cook it all in!!

WTF is going on with the trucking scene? This is like a 3rd world country scenario. Yet, the authorities keep imposing more restrictions, more fines, more petty regulations - and this still happens. It must be time to start a root-and-branch teardown on the current system and start looking at driving training and skills levels. If you run up the back of another slowing semi with your truck, you should never have gained a truck licence in the first place. Too many cowboys driving trucks like they're race cars. I get too many truck drivers travelling too close behind me now. In the road train country, they are obliged to keep 200M between road trains, I often see two road trains much closer together than 200M.

At about 3 am on the Hume Highway between Yass and Goulburn, a semi-trailer was pulling into a rest area when it was struck from behind by another semi. This pushed the first one into four others already in the rest area with drivers asleep. The trucks caught fire and were totally destroyed. All drivers walked away with only minor injuries. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-30/hume-highway-truck-crash-multiple-vehicles-drivers-injured/106859504

SKEW gears are a bad way to do things There's one in a Merlin that causes engine double Mag outs and is the reason most Countries won't have Merlin engines on the civil register. The Howard Vee Motor is as rough as guts. The 600 cc Jap Motor is a Much better proposition. and they also made a Vertical twin.. I sold MY very nice Howard 2 years ago. Never left out in the Open, but still couldn't get Much for it. . Some KR racing Harley 750's have coned cams as the valves are inclined to make the Combustion chamber more compact and achieve a Higher compression ratio and better gas flow. It Puts a lot of end thrust on the camshafts. From a machining Point of view it's not difficult on a Cincinnati tool and cutter grinder. The cam profile itself is harder to do. You need a Master cam Nev

American life expectancy is not that high and is getting worse. Nev

Heart attack on a stick, like so much American-style food.

I saw a video clip on Facebook the other day where the guy stuck a stick in the end of the Tim Tam, dipped it in marshmallow, and toasted it over an open fire. He also dropped an Oreo into a cup, covered it with milk, popped it in the microwave for a couiple of minutes then ate it.

I loved Penelope Keith.

Is that your Scottish heritage coming out?

This is why I don't do politics or science by meme, or in this case a simple graph, because we are find a set of numbers that suits our agenda and just publish it. Is the above the cost of generation, the wholesale price, or the retail price. Because, the latter two have factors that can distort the market. For example, Denmark's wholesale price is connected to the European markets believe it or not, so if an expensive dirty coal plant happens to produce and sell energy at the same time or within a price setting period, the wholesale price is largely set to be based on that price... which is far more expensive than wind or solar. That is wholesale price distortion. Of course, other European markets are subject to this as well, but since the grid is segmented, not all are setting the same wholesale price. Then the distortions at the retail price are local market conditions, taxes (of which Denmark has a lot - even VAT (GST) on electricity! Wowsers. Not even the UK levies VAT on electricity. So the retail price may not be at all reflective of the generation price. I prefer the Levilised Cost of Electricity comparison, which seeks to take out some of the more artificial price setting. According to Google AI, Denmark wins on wind, but loses on Gas and Solar: Note, the cheapness of fracked shale gas does not include the cost of cleaning up. Also, if Denmark decided to stay gas (or presumably coal, etc), from the above, they would be paying roughly double or more to produce electricity. I would suggest that the numbers show that wind and solar is much cheaper - for them. Not so much for the USA, again except this does not cover the true clean up costs. Which sort of shows the point of renewables - the optimum mix will be determined by local conditions. And, yeah, in some cases, even fossil fuel generation will make sense.. So, lets do a like for like comparison. South Australia, according to Google has around 84% of its electricity generated from wind (44% of total electricity generated) versus solar (33%). According to your chart, Denmark has a touch under 70%. That would suggest for South Australia, solar and onshore are very cost effective producers of electricity and offshore not so much (at least not yet). Also, because of SA's rapid deployment of storage, they seem to be already reaping some economies of scale benefits because of a rapid roll out, but as there is only commentary, it is hard to tell. In addition, in SA, gas is more than double solar and coal is almost triple the cost of solar, and around double of offshore wind. It does though, beat offshore wind, so unless we can address the issues that cause that, offshore wind (which probably has more constant wind). But interesting, SA is more wind and solar as a percentage of its generation, yet on a levelised basis, SA is cheaper. And as someone who has worked in the generation business, I am sure you're aware of the importance of this measure over retail or wholesale prices as a true indication of the comparative cost of generation. Thee price that is paid at the "pump" is only in a small way related to the cost of generation.. that, in @pmccarthy's vernacular, is the politics end of the argument. The cost of generation is the data end, and renewables are already at a big advantage there. Take politics out of it, and there really is no compelling reason to do so., The sun doesn't always shine - no.. Only at night or seriously overcast days is it that bad, but when it is shining brightly, we can store the excess and save it for when it isn't shining brightly. Even today, they are developing nocturnal solar panels which can harvest the infrared rays during radiating cooling of the earth to generate electricity (https://www.moeveglobal.com/en/planet-energy/sustainable-innovation/nocturnal-solar-panels-energy-without-sunlight). And there is a new technology that it looking at capturing vibrations from the wind and earth instead of using blades to generate electricity - fewer parts, cheaper and less landfill: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibration-powered_generator This is the point. Fossil fuel burning is destroying the planet (in conjunction with a lot of other stuff we do). And now, it is no longer cheap to do it; and it will get more expensive. So we have to seek out alternatives. To not do it is kicking the can down the road and just making it more expensive to fix. It can be done; the tech is already here and it is improving very quickly. It is the politics that is the issue. In the mean time, if you want to take a meme-led approach, go for it. As for wind and solar not yet powering most of a country - well - no.. but it does most of a state that is the physical (admittedly not population) size bigger than many countries. But it's a ridiculous assertion because a place should use the most appropriate renewable/s, not an arbitrary renewable, anyway.

Wonder how they'd go fried in batter.

It would have been interesting to watch them do it. There's a young Russian bloke on Youtube who would just grind something like that by hand with his angle grinder. He's one of the roughest I've seen. He built a V twin out of scrap in his back yard with only an arc welder and angle grinder. A couple of things he got a mate to turn up on a lathe but most of it was built by hand, except for donor Ural barrels, heads and pistons. The bottom end was all hand made.

Actress and presenter Dame Penelope Keith has passed away. Notes online simply say died c. June 2026.

Geez, what a nightmare of a job, trying to machine those cam lobes! They must have used an eccentric rotating jig?

This is the camshaft on the Howard 8hp motor. The cams look bent but they have that weird shape to work properly with the 90 degree shaft. The magneto runs off the left side of the camshaft and the external oil pump from the right end.

Both the Howard V twins, the eight h.p. and the 12 h.p. like the one above have unusual shaped cams. Their camshafts run at 90 degrees to the crankshaft rather than parallel like Harley V twins. The magneto is coupled to and runs directly off the end of the camshaft.

This sidecar outfit is a wild bit of gear. It's an older Ural frame, same type as the M-63 frame I picked up recently, but has the current type of leading link Ural front end. The engine is a Howard rotary hoe engine, the Howard Twelve, a 12hp water cooled V twin, mounted sideways. This photo has been bugging me for a while now. I know those faces and the country in the background looks familiar, but I just can't get a handle on it. They did a short video on Youtube with a couple of them doing wheelies in it while one filmed.