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This is the satirical headline story from the Bell Tower Times - Perths equivalent of The Onion. The bloke may not be familiar to East Coasters - but he's John Hughes, W.A.'s longest-lived car dealer, and a legend in W.A. He turned 90 last December, and still runs personalised TV ads and asks car buyers to call him personally, and regularly states, he's "W.A.'s most trusted car dealer". He's also Alan Bonds BIL. Yes, THAT Alan Bond. But John Hughes has managed to evade any of the Alan Bond taint, in his business dealings.

Our local Reject Shop was recently renovated to match photos of Dollarama stores, changing aisles from transverse to longitudinal. It still carries the old name but is ready to be updated.

Don't tell Jerry that!

Another little-known takeover has seen The Reject Shop sell out to a huge Canadian company, Dollarama. The Reject Shop got $260M for their business, and Dollarama has plans to change all Reject Shop store branding to Dollarama. In addition, Dollarama are going on a massive expansion drive, aiming to enlarge the range of stuff their stores sell, to compete with Target and K-Mart, and even Coles and Woolworths. Dollarama plan to nearly double the number of stores from the current 390 stores, to more than 700. In addition, Dollarama promise huge savings on their product prices, due to their massive buying power. Dollarama claim that in some cases, consumers will see major decreases in pricing of products they sell, sometimes up to half the current retail price. It will be interesting to see the result, the Canadians apparently love Dollarama stores.

I noticed on that unsealed road beside my place that the corrugations run from one side of teh road to the other. It's a road that only has one vehicle at a time on it so there is no need to keep to the left. Most people would drive straddling the crown. One would think that wheeltrack ruts would form and that the corrugations would be only in those ruts. I wonder why, then, that the corrugations are right across the road.

At the Men's Shed we have two old desktop PC's which were repllaced from the organisation that runs the shed, similar to the photo below, for use by members. I spend a few hours per week using one of them. The problem is so many websites now require security id by way of fingerprint or facial photograh. These machines do not have webcams or touchpads. The alternative is multi level confirmation with security codes sent to your phone or an email inbox, which probably requires a similar level of ID. Many require you to use their AP, but apps flatten your phone battery and cost money, chewing up your data costs. Surely, if you have a secure password that should be sufficient. Such passwords could be your mother's maiden name and birthday (year not necessary), a symbol, and to differentiate on different sites, a site abbreviation. As an example, for this site you could have,say, Murphy2306#SA. You are not likely to forget your mother's maiden name or birthday. This meets the requirement of 8 characters, upper and lower case, numerals and a special character. For another site such as mygov, you would use the same password up to the symbol and append MG. :- Murphy2306#MG. Another alternative is the model of your car, the rego, special character and site ID :- Commodore1JV6DZ%AP (for Aircraft Pilots).

For all their expertise in hardware sales, it is strange that Bunnings' attempt to get into the British market failed. Probably it was due to cultural differences such as we have seen with the failure of Starbucks and some other US mobs in Australia.

Is this bloke a personal friend? He seems to know you.... Another recent headline:- "Perth man still not going to concede that was a storm"