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In USA a far right influence group called Turning Point Was started up by Charlie Kirk & Bill Montgomery They promoted open gun ownership & anti vax Covid conspiracy. Kirk died by gun violence Montgomery died of Covid. The dildo of consequences seldom arrives lubricated.

Tonight, at midnight, lift your left leg up off the ground. That way you’ll be starting the new year off on the right foot.

I emailed Spacey, Says he's well, but not wise. Says he can't log in at all. Didn't explain why.

This 1982 photo shows the Simpson Desert the driest I've ever seen it. The only vegetation visible from the air was the shrubs and trees, no grass to be seen. The drought broke the following year with a lot of flooding. The photo is taken from a Cherokee Six just entering the Simpson from the east en route from Windorah to Alice Springs. Everything went ok until halfway across when the alternator died and the battery went flat, so no radio or instruments, just the compass. We landed on the strip at Ringwood Station on the western edge of the desert, and luckily the station owner was home to see us come in. He drove over and picked up the pilot so he could use the station radio to call Alice Springs airport to clear a space for us to fly into there, being pre satellite days when the stations relied on HF radio for communications. We got to stay overnight in Alice waiting on the new alternator to be fitted, then on to Bililuna in W.A. the next day. Another surprise there on landing - the client (Shell if my memory is correct) had given the crew three days off as the Halls Creek annual races were on. We took off again to Halls Creek which took us straight past the Wolfe Creek crater, so that was a good sight from the air. It was a memorable trip for different reasons. When the battery went dead over the Simpson, it really got us thinking how little preparation we had in regard to survival gear if we had to put down in a dune corridor. We didn't even have near enough water required to stay on the ground any length of time. As a comparison of seasons, I took these photos with a digital compact camera in the Simpson in 2010 after an extended wet period. Most of the green you can see is grass and herbage that burns off with hot, dry conditions. It was very different to the other deserts I've been in which have more permanent vegetation in the dune corridors, and much more spinifex. Edit: Just as a post script, it wasn't far from where these three photos were taken that I came across an old survey marker peg that was the site of Geosurveys Base Camp #1 from Reg Spriggs' first motorised crossing of the desert in 1962.

There's a DIY kit for everything.....

Season's greetings to all 🍾

Message from Spacey: Thanks Red750 . I cannot sign in at all ! . So please tell everyone I'm fi e . & wish them all a great year . spacesailor . Bryan .

I think the message is that the USofA cannot be trusted, no matter who has the *residency. Or which political mafia (party) is in charge. At present, DjT can wear the blame.

On Facebook today. CALL TO ACTIVISM ·· 🚨READ THIS BEFORE IT DISAPPEARS. RUBIO’S CAREER AT RISK AS TRUMP UNDERMINED GLOBALLY Marco Rubio knew exactly what the United States promised Ukraine. That’s why he hoped this clip would stay buried. As Volodymyr Zelenskyy visits Washington and is met with hostility instead of solidarity, and forced peace terms that could have been written by the Kremlin itself - one truth keeps resurfacing: the United States made Ukraine a promise - and Donald Trump is now undermining it on the world stage. At the time, Marco Rubio was a sitting U.S. senator, speaking on the record - not speculating, not guessing. His fiery speech about why America must defend Ukraine was powerful: After the Soviet Union collapsed, Ukraine was left with the third-largest nuclear arsenal on Earth - tactical and strategic weapons capable of reshaping global power. Instead of keeping them, Ukraine signed a 1994 agreement with the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia. The deal was clear: Ukraine gives up its nuclear weapons. In return, United States and the UK would assure its defense. Ukraine kept its word. They dismantled the arsenal. Twenty years later, one of the countries that signed that agreement didn’t just walk away. It invaded Ukraine. Rubio warned this betrayal would echo far beyond Europe. He explained that countries like South Korea, Japan, and Saudi Arabia were watching - being told the same thing Ukraine was told: don’t pursue nuclear weapons. Trust us. We’ll protect you. And then he asked the question that now hangs over American credibility: If Ukraine gave up its nukes and still got invaded, why would any country ever trust U.S. security guarantees again? Here’s the part Rubio can’t escape. He understood the consequences. He articulated them clearly. He warned the world. Now Trump undercuts allies, weakens NATO, and treats Ukraine like an inconvenience instead of a frontline partner - undermining America’s credibility in real time. That’s why Rubio’s past isn’t just awkward. It’s consequential - and his past words on Ukraine are now a liability in a party run on Trump’s loyalty tests. Because he knows the promise was real. And he knows Trump is breaking it. And here’s the question MAGA never answers - because they can’t: If America’s word meant nothing to Ukraine, why should any ally ever trust the United States ever again? That’s the damage MAGA owns. And that’s the truth they’re desperate to bury.

Mary & Joseph were going to name him Jerry. Just as the scribe started to write, Mary stubbed her toe. Christmas Adam comes before Christmas Eve. Christmas Eve isn't happy.

I can confirm that I am both alive and well. I have been popping in for a look around, but I don't think I have signed in lately. I do tend to drift in and out. I did send Spacey a private message a couple of weeks ago to see if he was ok, but no answer.

Your best typo yet... "untittingly" 😆

??? He posted it on Facebook. He's always coming up with this oddball sort of stuff. He posted this one this morning - "I must admit that Joan and I had a battle of words last night. You know you are getting old when New Year’s Eve sees you playing Scrabble."

Here's a random thought... Happy new year everyone.. Hope it is a good one!

Mine doesn't. There is no filler cap at all.

In 1971, a man sent himself a message nobody remembers—and accidentally invented the way 5 billion people would communicate for the next fifty years. Cambridge, Massachusetts. BBN Technologies. A basement lab filled with machines the size of refrigerators, humming and clicking, connected by wires to a strange new network called ARPANET. Ray Tomlinson sat alone. He was a 29-year-old computer engineer working on a problem nobody had asked him to solve. ARPANET already allowed people to leave messages on shared computers—but only if you shared the same machine. If you wanted to send a note to someone using a different computer, you were out of luck. Ray thought that was silly. So he started tinkering. Not because his boss told him to. Not because there was funding or a deadline. Just because it seemed like something the network should be able to do. He wrote a program called SNDMSG—"send message"—that could transfer a text file from one computer to another across the network. It worked. But there was a problem. How do you tell the computer where to send the message? You needed a way to separate the person's name from the machine's name. Something clear. Something simple. Something that wouldn't confuse the computer. Ray looked at his Model 33 Teletype keyboard. Most keys were letters or numbers. Punctuation was sparse. But there, on the upper row, sat a symbol almost nobody used. @ It was an accounting symbol—shorthand for "at the rate of" when calculating prices. It had survived on keyboards mostly out of habit. Ray figured nobody would miss it. He made a decision in seconds that would shape the next half-century of human communication. Username @ Computer Name. Simple. Elegant. Permanent. He typed a test message. Something forgettable—probably "QWERTYUIOP" or another string of random characters. He sent it from one machine to another, both sitting in the same room, connected through ARPANET's sprawling network. It worked. Ray sent the first networked email. To himself. In an empty lab. With no witnesses. He later couldn't even remember what the message said. "Entirely forgettable," he called it. But what happened next wasn't forgettable at all. Within weeks, ARPANET engineers started using Ray's system. Within months, email accounted for 75% of all traffic on the network. People who'd been sending memos and making phone calls suddenly had a faster, quieter, more efficient way to communicate. They loved it. By the 1980s, email spread beyond research labs into universities, corporations, and eventually homes. By the 1990s, it was everywhere. The @ symbol—Ray's casual choice from a forgotten accounting character—became one of the most recognized symbols on Earth. Today, over 330 billion emails are sent every day. That's 3.8 million per second. Email created entire industries: marketing automation, cybersecurity, productivity software, spam filters, customer service platforms. Careers were built on it. Relationships formed through it. Revolutions organized with it. And Ray Tomlinson never tried to own it. He didn't patent email. Didn't trademark the @ symbol. Didn't start a company or demand royalties. He was an engineer, not an entrepreneur. He built it because the problem was there, and solving problems was what he did. In 2012, Google invited Ray to their headquarters to celebrate the 40th anniversary of email. They gave him a cake shaped like an @ symbol. He seemed slightly embarrassed by the attention. When reporters asked him about inventing email, he downplayed it. "I just happened to be in the right place at the right time," he said. "It was a fairly obvious thing to do." To Ray, it wasn't a revolution. It was just good engineering. In 2016, Ray Tomlinson died of a heart attack at seventy-four. Gmail's official Twitter account posted a tribute: "Thank you, Ray Tomlinson, for inventing email and putting the @ sign on the map." Millions of people saw it. Most had no idea who he was. Because Ray never became famous. He never gave a TED talk or wrote a bestselling memoir. He never became a billionaire or household name. He lived quietly, worked on projects that interested him, and died having changed the world in ways most people never realized. Think about that. Every email you've ever sent—job applications, love letters, meeting invites, password resets, breakup messages, acceptance letters, apologies, thank-yous, spam about discounted furniture—all of them carry the ghost of Ray's decision in 1971. That @ symbol you type without thinking? Ray chose it in seconds, alone in a lab, solving a problem nobody had asked him to solve. No venture capital. No product launch. No press release. Just an engineer noticing something missing and quietly building it into existence. The world celebrates founders who raise millions and disrupt industries. We make documentaries about visionaries who change everything with bold speeches and flashy keynotes. But some of the most important revolutions happen in silence. One man. One keyboard. One overlooked symbol. One message sent to himself that nobody remembers. And suddenly, billions of people had a way to say: I'm here. Are you there? Ray Tomlinson didn't change the world by shouting. He changed it by typing. And fifty years later, we're still using the language he invented—one @ at a time.

I think they are going back to before that. . Putin's promises aren't worth Much. They point blank Lied to the UN. Nev

Brigitte Bardot, the French actress and singer who became an international sex symbol before turning to animal rights activism, has passed away aged 91. Bardot had been ill in hospital in Toulon, according to local media. The star’s animal rights charity announced her passing on Sunday morning with a statement.

Poor little bugger. Talk about the worst job on earth.

There are three living species of zebra: Grévy's zebra (Equus grevyi), the plains zebra (E. quagga), and the mountain zebra (E. zebra). Zebras share the genus Equus with horses and asses, the three groups being the only living members of the family Equidae. The skin of the zebra is black. The stripes are the result of differences in the concentration of melanin in the hairs - more melanin = black, less melanin = white. The differences in concentration can be explained by the concept of the Turing pattern. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_pattern . Sometimes this effect goes wrong and a zebra has a coat without stripes. In those cases the coat looks brownish, but may have feint stripes or small spots. Why does the zebra have stripes? Zebras suffer the scourge of flying, biting insects. Laboratory experiments have shown that alternating aras of black and white visually confuse these insects and they do not land on striped areas. Other experiments in which horses have been covered with striped horse rugs reduce the numbers of insects landing on the horse. (There's a commercial opening! Make horse rugs with a zebra pattern. I wonder if a checked or tartan pattern would work.)

We all know about the English mathematician, Alan Turing. He's the bloke who was very instrumental in developing a machine to decode German military messages created using Enigma machines. But what did he do after the war ended? Well he want back to being a mathematician working on developing computers. However, he must have got bored with that field of study. When Turing was 39 years old in 1951, he turned to mathematical biology, finally publishing his masterpiece "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis" in January 1952. "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis", which describes how patterns in nature, such as stripes and spots, can arise naturally and autonomously from a homogeneous, uniform state. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_pattern Turing proposed a model wherein two homogeneously distributed substances (P and S) interact to produce stable patterns during morphogenesis. These patterns represent regional differences in the concentrations of the two substances. Their interactions would produce an ordered structure out of random chaos. There's an explanation of this process in the attached video. Go to timestamp 3:18 It is interesting that the stripes of an individual zebra are unique to that zebra, in the same way as your fingerprints are unique to you. This individuality is also the basis of eye pattern recognition used in security systems.

Identical twins (monozygotic twins) come from the same fertilised egg, so they start with almost the same DNA. As the embryo splits and develops, mutations) can occur. Environmental factors in the womb — blood supply, position, nutrition — differ slightly. Over time, epigenetics (how genes are switched on/off) makes them even more different. So they’re genetically similar but not 100% identical in every cell. Monozygotic twins do not have identical fingerprints. Fingerprints form in the womb between about 10-24 weeks of pregnancy. They’re influenced by random physical factors: pressure in the uterus, amniotic fluid movement, and how the fingers touch surrounding tissue. Even with the same DNA, those tiny differences lead to unique ridge patterns Identical twins may have similar-looking fingerprints, but they are always distinct. Identical twins can also differ in: Birthmarks Handedness (one left-handed, one right-handed) Susceptibility to certain diseases Personality traits

There doesn't seem to be a lot of positives to celebrate lately.. So, here's one: (https://www.bournemouth-kawasaki.co.uk/2024-yamaha-r125/) Son just put a deposiut down on it. I test rode it and it certainly screamed more than a 125cc bike - the max xx(14.6bhp being max power) for a learner. Got it for a bargain and not quite what they advertised it for... and it is in mint condition... Watch out for the gripes thread as we go to insure it..

Let's face it. The American Empire is in its terminal phases exacerbated by the mania of Trump. China does not need to conquer militarily. It has conquered commercially. The irony is that it applied the lessons taught by the American Dream. I also think that Russia is declining in importance. Putin is 73 years old. Just look at our thread where we advise of the passing of famous people. So many of those passing on are past their "three score and ten". Can Putin and his philosophy have long to last? The European Union is strengthening itself. At the moment it is spending some effort on military defence in response to Russia's activity, but at the same time is going ahead comercially. India is a growing commercial entity, but not a military one. Southeast Asia just wants to make money. The problem areas are Africa and the Middle East, but these areas are involved in localised tribal conflicts. None of the countries involved there have the ability to become world powers.

I'm happy now!

The new BOM site wants to be part of social media, that seems to be the main problem. You can still access all of the old BOM site at - https://reg.bom.gov.au/

https://www.bom.gov.au/australia/charts/synoptic_col.shtml?utm_source=chatgpt.com

How all this scanning started was that an old close mate I'd known since 1971 passed away recently and I've been looking for photos of him from the old days to scan and forward on to his daughters. Scanning old photos is a bit like letting the genie out of the bottle, then down the rabbit hole you go.

A random thought struck me when I woke up this morning. 2026 is the 70th anniversary of the Melbourne Olympic Games in 1956. I attended one day of those games on a school excursion from Deniliquin High School. I was 12 at the time, in Year 7. We went by bus from the school.

Oh, yes, salt lakes have claimed many a victim, I've seen a couple where the machine was never recovered. Here's a bogged episode from 1966. You can see my near-new EH Holden ute in the first of the photos. Location, Bulyee, W.A. The brother was driving the D6C, enlarging a "Table" dam. A Table dam is where the wall is positioned about 4-5 metres away from the excavation. This was a design used from the earliest days of "tank-sinking", when horses, camels, donkeys and even bullocks, were used to pull simple hand-operated scoops and road ploughs, to excavate dams. The "Table" was made to allow the animals to turn around with the towed equipment. In later years, when bulldozers appeared, it was a simple enough job to excavate the section where the Table was, to make a "straight-push" dam, and thus considerably enlarge the dam capacity. The brother got caught by a pile of accumulated sand in the front corner of the dam, washed in over many years of filling up. But the accumulated sand pile sat on a layer of greasy, muddy clay. So when he drove onto the sand pile, the entire pile "took off" down into the deep mud in the middle of the dam, sliding intact on the underlying greasy mud - so it carried the D6C out into the main mud-filled area, then broke up, and dropped the D6C "right into the sh**". He was on hard bottom, but couldn't climb out, so local farmers arrived with their "big tractors" of the day - little Massey Fergusons! We even had a little International BTD-6 dozer helping - but they couldn't even get the D6C even halfway up the dam bank! So then the Hills Bros rolled up with their "big hitter" tractor - a tandem International A-554! Two A-554's coupled together without front axles, and boasting a massive 110HP!! The tandem A-554's made short work of dragging the D6C out - just by itself! The other tractors were still hooked on at the same time, but got left behind! Unfortunately, the photos of the A-554's and BTD-6 in action were amongst those lost - but the BTD-6 can be seen at rear in the second photo. The last two photos are of another bogging event with the D6C, when extending another dam. A stunt we used to use regularly when deeply bogged, was cutting a decent-sized log from any nearby whitegum, generally about 250mm in diameter and about 3M long - then digging down at the rear of the tractor (easier access at the rear), then dropping the log into the dug-out area, then tying the log to the tracks using old 1/2" (12.7mm) steel wire rope. Once the log re-appeared at the front of the tractor, you'd cut the SWR with a few accurate blows with a sledgehammer, where it sat across a grouser (the rib on the track shoes), and the log would then fall away. We would keep short lengths of SWR on hand for de-bogging missions where a log tied on was needed. Usually, just one log was all that was required. Two logs required, was a REAL bog disaster!

Getting bogged can be connected to stupidity or sometimes to necessity and at other times, just bad luck. I'll own up to this one, just not sure which category it belongs in - necessity I think as a crossing had to be found one way or another. This is crossing the Macumba River in 1984 and it was like wakling through a minefield as you couldn't visibly pick the soft areas from the hard. I found the soft bit. The scary bit was looking at the flood debris in the tree tops on the opposite bank. Taking into account a 10' bank, that would put this machine about 30' under water in a flood like that. Edit: the rippers are upside down as it had previously been ploughing explosive cord into the ground with one central ripper, similar to the way they lay cable.

There's something about getting bogged that attracts cameras. This one wasn't my doing. What possessed the driver to think driving on to a salt lake was a good idea, I'll never know. Even in those days it was a serious environmental breach for starters. I got woken up at midnight after they'd been trying to dig it out for hours and given up on the shovel, so had to walk a machine for about eight hours, pull him out and then turn around and walk it back again.

More scans of old photos. It's great we have access to good, cheap digital photography these days. A lot of these old instamatic and compact cameras were woeful when you look back at it. This is the fastest donkey in the west. The photo was taken out the driver's side window of the woopie doing 40 kph.. The donkey kept that speed up for a kilometre beside us before he tired of the game and veered off, which he is doing in this photo. Until that day I had no idea how much stamina and speed feral donkeys had. The location is near Lake Eyre South.

Former MP and Senator Nick Bolkus, a Greek Australian who was Minister for Consumer Affairs and Administrative Affairs in the Hawke Govt (1988-1990), and Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs in the Keating Govt (1990-1993), has passed away peacefully, aged 75. He was an MP from 1980 to 2005. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-12-25/nick-bolkus-obituary/106178484

I like the text at the bottom.

Obviously the article thows up a lot more questions than it answers. And of course. snail mail is subject to similar issues. The problems I see are that individual email servers can be configured differently, and, although I guess a lot more reliable than snail mail, issues of reliability have to be questioned. For example, the execution of legal court documents - how does one prove the receiver received it. I know summons are served by bailiffs, couriers, and the like, but lesser documents are usually done by mail. Where there is no physical recording of receipt (I can set up my own mail server which will contain my email address and switch off delivery receipts for example). Forgery of emails is stupidly simple. I can forge the email I receive or purported to send. Who did the forgery - the sender or the receiver? Unlike paper copies (which can too be forged, but a lot easier to pick up), there is no definitive record unles someone deploys a stsndard of file system protection (of which the standard's name I forget). How does this help scammers. While personal letter usage has undoubtedly dropped off the charts, all government and most financial services correspondence is done by snail mail. You will sometimes receive notification to expect the snail mail and to not treat it as junk mail. This means those scammers that phish via impersonating government departments - for example the nations revenue service - will have a field day; anbd it will be the more vulnerable to fall prey to it. Of course, I am sure there are answers to the questions, but I don't trust bureaucrats nor corportate types to think of them until it starts happening.

A local crop-duster and farmer by the name of Gerald Repacholi pulled that stunt here in W.A. and had his pilots licence suspended. He took off from a moving trailer at Jandakot with a floatplane, after seeing it done in the U.S. Repacholi then became the subject of a CASA programme designed to force him out of the industry, and his fights with CASA are legendary. He went to jail for a couple of years for perjury. He managed to keep flying and crop dusting, but ended up having a serious crash that effectively ended his flying career. He also went bankrupt with his farming operations, expanding in a period, where several bad seasons occurred. See "the evidence of Gerald Repacholi" heading, in the court case in the link below. https://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/cases/cth/AATA/2006/578.html?context=1;query=Repacholi;mask_path= https://thewest.com.au/news/wa/wa-pilot-survives-air-crash-and-blaze-ng-ya-336974 Gerald Repacholi died in 2017 at age 70, but his "cowboy" record in aviation still lingers on. I'm fairly sure he died from cancer, possibly initiated by numerous factors in his rough and tumble life. https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/name/gerald-repacholi-obituary?pid=187224835

I've never seen an arrow pointing out which side the filler cap is on.

Another scan; this photo was taken north of Lake Callabonna, South Australia, in 1984. It's not a natural lake but a clay pan between sand dunes fed by a never ending flowing bore. At the time I estimated it was easy big enough for three ski boats to use at the same time, as a size comparison. It was one of those South Australian government bores that flowed unrestricted for many, many years before they finally started to close them down. I don't think there's any left flowing like that now. The bore was sunk on the side of a sand dune and the flow had cut a deep ravine in the dune that was deep enough to die from the fall. If that didn't kill you, the boiling water would. You had to go 500 metres downstream before the water was cool enough to have a hot spa bath; I'd estimate it flowed about a kilometre all up from the bore to the lake. Judging by irrigation bores I've seen, I guessed the flow at between 20,000 to 30,000 gallons per hour, flowing year after year. Evaporation over the large lake area would have accounted for a fair portion of the water loss.

Here in OZ, the Lams system is a winner. Basically a sensible power to weight ratio, tat ,eams a large selection of motorcycles are approved if under 47hp and up to 210kg approx. Max capacity is 650cc. This allows a large range of small to medium size bikes that are adequate even to tour on and certainly enough to ride for many years and not get bored or suddenly find yourself moving up to a bike that far exceeds your ability. My Twin has just bought a new Truimph speed 400 for his partner for her brithday. Lovely bike and small enough for a small framed lady but big enough for fun and safe open road riding. Triumph have just released a recall for the timing chain and stopped sales until the bike is retrofitted. So it will be delivered with the change next week. We had to wait for a red tanked one, red is faster...

Didn't know where to put this, a magpie on CCTV imitating the neigh of a horse. I've known they were reputed as clever call imitators, but I've never heard one do this. https://www.facebook.com/reel/2286842478814689

You don't have to! It crawls up by itself!

For several days now I have been getting constant winds of about 15 kts from the Southeast. It is an unusual situation since air coming from that direction used to bring rain, but the sky has been completely clear. I wouild have liked to see a synoptic chart, but it seems that the BOM thinks they are not worth posting.

I was driven in a Landrover from Tumut to Gundagai to watch the torch runner go by.

Incidentally, the brother has only recently found this D6C, the very first Cat, and the first new bulldozer we ever bought (out of about a dozen dozers in total), and it belongs to an old prospector in the W.A. Goldfields, and it's still fully operational! It's probably done around 50,000 or 60,000 hours by now. We bought this tractor new in November 1966, and sold it in 1972 (traded on a new D7F), and it had done over 13,000 hrs, back in 1972.