Bruce

OME, I think you are an imposter. You are just a kid in real life. My first music was Elvis and the Everly brothers . And I still like them to this day.

When I was in the US at a gliding event, this guy turned up wearing a North Melbourne tee shirt ( yes it was a long time ago). I thought he had worn it for my benefit, but no, he was a genuine Nth Melb supporter. He had cable TV at home and he reckoned Australian Rules was the best spectator game of all, which was how he came to follow it.

Gosh OME, were you there when it happened? Apart from being too young, Alice Springs in the 1950's was too small to have any proper Bodgies , who I called what you say are Rockers. I am familiar with the rest, except for " Disco Kings". I have a friend who was a Bikie/Rocker/Bodgie for awhile in the late 50's. He said you had to ride your motorbike up and down the street a few times then sit outside the milk-bar and say F##k all the time.

Nah.... bodgies dressed like they did in "Grease" .They rode motorbikes or drove hot rods, with their widgie hanging on or at their side. This was in Australia in the 1950's and I was just a schoolkid.

The tragedy of my life was that I was too young to be a Bodgie. Bugger, I would have loved it as long as I had a good Widgie.

Here's a sobering thing I read... It is possible to look at a kindy group and predict quite accurately which kids are going to jail one day. Personally, I don't believe that, since those jail-bound kids may just as well become CEO's , think I.

Well said Jerry. You are of a younger generation than me, sorry if I was fooled by your name. Computers were unheard of in my school years. And my kids are well into their 40's. They have both done well in life and part of the reason is that we thought like you and looked carefully at schools. We too settled for private schools for the same reasons. Getting back to my days, teachers in Alice Springs were professionals along with the doctors , lawyers , civil engineers and maybe priests.. People with university degrees were treated with respect. Hard to believe, but airline pilots didn't quite make the cut. But my primary school was made of asbestos-cement sheets, and the walls were unlined. In grade 4, I got to sit on a wall side and store things on the nogging next to me. No cooling or heating, that was 30 years in the future. Some of the primary school teachers were great, although they did not have degrees on account of how primary teachers just went to teachers college. One teacher in particular was of Barossa Valley German heritage and I credit him with saving me from the stupid English idea that tradesmen were low class. ( Most subjects were very English, and we were just as bad at home with Enid Blyton and Biggles.) This teacher encouraged us to make things for our weekend homework... gosh if you turned up on Monday with a well-built kite, you got an "A" and lots of praise. One kid made a lamp from a beer bottle and managed to drill a hole through the glass with a bit of copper tube and some wet sand. He finished up a millionaire crash-repair business owner. We were supposed to be hostile to the Catholic kids ( who went to a separate school ), but we actually felt sorry for them because they used to get whipped by this nasty nun who had a length of electric flex and ( I see now) serious mental health problems.

Jerry, it is nothing to do with money. I had wonderful schooling and there was no money at all. There were other things, like the perception of the teachers as being respectable professionals, which more than made up any shortfall in money. Personally, I reckon the current negative things about state schools come from an unholy alliance between the nasty rich, who want state schools to fail, and the bleeding heart politically correct lot who want the state schools to sacrifice the good kids for the benefit of the disadvantaged kids. They "agree " that smart kids at state schools should fail.

Phil, you are just a kid who lacks experience. I am 71 and know better. Jerry etc are right here and you should not take offense at some rude person.

Looking after boys is a big problem in schools these days for sure. There is a serious shortage of male teachers, and no wonder what with the risks they have with accusations of molestation. My advice to them would be to wear a go-pro camera, but wait.. that would infringe the kid's privacy huh. There are actually boys who have been brought up in a single-mother household and sent to kindy and schools with all-female teachers who don't know they can pee standing up. All I can suggest OME is that you do what you can to look after the boys out of school. And complain to the state minister of education, in writing, whenever you have a point to make. They are supposed to reply but don't bet on it.

It takes hundreds of generations and a culling of the unfit environment to get any evolution going. Trust me, I grew up in Alice springs with freckled skin. Even aborigines could get sunburn there, so imagine how maladapted freckled skin is there. There is actually a rapid evolution going on right now among people. Weak eyes no longer exert a culling pressure and they are becoming more common. Among germs, antibiotic resistance proves Darwinism except that some people make their living from nutty religions and so they pretend to believe differently.

I like it Phil. It is true about how we belong in our tribes. I like the tribe I am in, which includes the likes of you and Jerry and Nev. Poetry-wise, I best like Omar Khayam, who I think of as the world's smartest man of his times and the first atheist.

Its about density Jerry. Density of water = 1, density of humans = just under 1 (lungs full of air) to just over 1 ( lungs full of water). Density of sand and soil particles = 2.6, so a mud or quicksand has a density between 1 and 2.6. So, contrary to hollywood, it is impossible to sink right under in quicksand or mud. You can sink in a silo of grain ( density = .7 ) if you struggle enough. People have died like this. Of course you could die in quicksand if you were head down and legs out.

Phil, it is impossible to sink in "quicksand" until you drown.

I agree that self-inflicted problems should be treated differently. This old school mate was for awhile the senior doctor at the casualty of the RAH ( adelaide hospital) and he resigned in anger over the fact that there was nowhere to send the druggies after they had been patched up. Nobody , not even the prisons would take them. They were dangerous because they could suddenly lash out, believing that they were about to get murdered. An ER ward is the worst place imaginable for such people, with periods of quiet then sudden lights and frantic activity. To protect the staff and other patients, the government responded by letting a contract to Chubb security, so the overcrowding there got even worse.

There are only a few ( mainly white) cultures that treat women well. Among aboriginal australians, girls of 14 have generally been bashed and raped a few times. This came from a senior nurse who had worked for many years at the Alice Springs hospital, routinely fixing the horrific injuries which these women turned up with. Although I grew up in that town, I had no idea about this, but it did explain something which had puzzled me. That was why the women who had been kidnapped by white squatters didn't return to their tribes when they could escape.

Political correctness can go too far and do real harm. For example, it is politically correct to demand a gender balance in the fire departments. I can only hope that it is a big and heavy but politically correct person who is unconscious and needs carrying out the burning building but there is only only a small woman to do the job. This is not fanciful. I know first-hand of a girl who was having a non-violent mental episode but the ambulance would not come because they only had an all-female crew on duty and they had a policy that " mental cases" needed at least one male crew because of his strength.

They sure need to do some auditing of the UN. The waste and lack of accountability are horrific. Apparently there is hardly any oversight going on. The most extravagant party I ever went to was put on by the UN FAO (food and agriculture organization ) in Cairo. Hollow-backed swans made from ice and filled with prawns was a dish I had only seen before in movies. There were and are genuinely hungry people not far from the Cairo Hilton and I was shocked that they spent thousands like they did. And the main topic of conversation? Anger at the US for quibbling over UN funding.

I liked the way the New Zealanders said "no" to nuclear ships in their main harbors. This was a dreadful thing to do, we were told at the time, but I since found out that nuclear ships are not allowed into New York and San Francisco harbors. We have just had 2 nuclear reactors in Melbourne harbor and I am disgusted with the greens and their mates in the labor party. Why were they not protesting? They have stopped us having a much safer in design and much safer in siting reactor to supply electricity to Victoria.

A big hidden export is Australian real estate. Chinese investors are making the news these days, but it may well be that US investors are bigger. They certainly were in the past. It is the Chinese investment in our real estate that fills Bunnings with all those Chinese goods we like so much. One little-known consequence of the Iraq war was that Australia lost its biggest middle-east market for meat to US interests.

Meat and minerals and Jabirus.

The big grid companies will soon start valuing power by the time of day. This will enable them to pay very little for the power you have to sell and charge you heaps for the power you take when the sun isn't shining. As I've said before, to live off the grid, it is the cost of the stored power which matters. One way out is to live a hippy life and just go without power for those times. You would need a different wife from the one I've got. My wife would go ballistic when the fridge stopped working.

At the meat-sheep farm here, there are thousands of birds. lizards and other mainly small animals which would be killed if we were to change to growing grain or other vegan food. We would have to plough up their habitats. If you could just hear the cacophony of magpies and other birds you would agree that this would be a nasty thing to do. And as for the sheep, they have a good life until their lights go out. I reckon the vegans are the nasty killers here.

The trouble with big grids Col is that they empower the forces who rip off the average consumer to deliver obscene money and perks to those who control the big grids.

Just think about the wars in our history and there was not one where it was a good idea to be involved. What was there in it for Australia to be part of the Boer War? And WW1 was worse. In WW2 it was we who declared war on Japan, not the other way around. If Turnbull etc make us part of some anti-chinese thing, they are worse than stupid. Who thinks badly of Sweden or Switzerland for being neutral in WW2 against the nazis? Well I do just a bit, but my opinion isn't taken much notice of in Canberra.