willedoo

I miss the cattle egrets around my place since the cow died. She had her own personal egret that I used to call Ernie. Ernie and the cow were inseparable up until the old cow passed on at almost 20 years of age. I don't know what happened to Ernie but he probably flew away and found another cow somewhere.

I remember when I worked in the Kimberleys in the 1980's we used to drink Emu Bitter. It was strong, almost 6% from memory. I can also remember the next morning you would feel like you'd been kicked by an emu.

I went out onto the verandah a few minutes ago and saw a small brush tailed wallaby joey only about six metres away. The only time I've seen the little ones around here is when they are still in the pouch. This one looked like it was not long independent. He spotted me and hopped away into the bush with no sign of a mother anywhere. There's some nice wildlife here. I just wish I could get rid of the foxes. They kill the neighbours chooks and last night one killed a swamp pheasant half way up my driveway, judging by the pile of feathers there.

When asked about the four keel design, one of the blokes said - wait for it - " That's why I'll catch 'em ".

What is it with this fascination for sweet food. I get the part that sugar is addictive, but is it purely the demands of society for sweetened food or is the food industry guilty of pushing something addictive to sell their products. I went into Woolies this morning to buy some cocoa which is usually in the aisle with the baking goods. Baking cocoa that is, which is what I drink. Before I tracked it down in the baking aisle, I spotted packets of drinking chocolate in the aisle with the tea and coffee. The only difference was that the drinking chocolate contained an artificial sweetener. I thought that was a bit odd as tea and coffee is sold without added sweeteners. I know Milo is sweet, but I guess if you want to drink unsweetened chocolate, you have to stick to the baking cocoa.

I feel sorry for Joe Biden and his state of health. He put up a brave front in his address to the nation, but unfortunately he can't take his eyes off the teleprompter and there was zero eye contact with the camera. It was sad to watch. Without the teleprompter he's barely coherent which was the case with the following press conference. When he loses his train of thought mid sentence he just throws another point in preceded by the word 'Look,'. He'll have enough work to do keeping up to things in the next six months. Expecting him to be mentally able to be president of the US for another four and a half years was just ridiculous. Hopefully it's just age related memory loss and not the start of something more sinister like Alzheimer's disease. Sometimes people can get to the stage Joe is at now and not get any worse. In rare cases they can improve with environmental factors like being in a less stressful situation. Hopefully he'll pick up a bit when he retires and gets some rest.

The Secret Service director has finally stepped down from the job after her awful performance at the congressional hearing. One of the congress committee members questioning her mentioned that 57 minutes elapsed between the time law enforcement officers first photographed Crooks acting suspiciously and the time the shootings began. It was just one of many failures. It seems incredible that an assassin in that situation can climb onto a roof of a building occupied by police 150 metres away from Trump speaking. https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/head-of-us-secret-service-resigns-after-trump-rally-shooting-20240724-p5jw1a.html

I've been in HMAS Ovens, the Oberon class sub at Fremantle. It's well worth doing the tour.

One member on the congressional committee that was grilling the secret service director made a good point. He was having a go at her about being over focused on DEI hiring and made the point that the security detail on the day included women who were a lot shorter than Trump. He's right on that one. SS agents are tall blokes for a reason. They need to be able to physically shield the protectee from an assassin's bullet. If Trump or any other protected person towers head and shoulders above an agent, there's no point having that agent on the detail.

Watching Trump on the stump speaking, it looks to me like he's seriously studied the speaking methods of evangelists. It's that same hypnotise the dummies style of delivery.

I can't see the head of the Secret Service being in her job much longer. She's been hauled before a congressional hearing and about the only honest part of her testimony was when she admitted it was the most significant operational failure in decades. The rest of it was a combination of fibs, excuses and evasiveness. When asked about police seeing Crooks using a rangefinder before the shooting she replied "An individual with a rangefinder is not a threat." If she thinks a person aiming a rangefinder toward the protected person is not a threat, then maybe flipping burgers at McDonald's might be a better career choice. When quizzed as to why the roof was not secured she said that it was too steep and dangerous to post agents on the roof, so the inside of the building was secured instead. That's a straight out porky as the roof is almost flat. It's about as low a slope as you get on a shed. A 70 year old man climbed up there and posted a video online of him standing up on the roof she said was too dangerous for agents to be on. I don't know why they stuff around so much, they should just sack her and get a competent person in charge before someone under their protection gets killed. The failures might be further down the line from her, but her denials and burying of the head in the sand speaks volumes about her suitability for the job.

My favourite movie genres are submarine movies and courtroom dramas. One thing they both have in common is that a lot of the movie takes place with limited indoor sets. As a result of not having much outdoor scenery and effects to add to the movie, those genres have to rely on good acting and screenwriting to be successful. They are very much dialogue movies.

It wasn't until I watched the above clip a second time that I noticed John Fogerty plays three different guitars in the clip with a bit of clever cut and splice happening. All Les Paul Gibsons but different. If my memory serves me well, John Fogerty often has multiple guitars in different tunings on stage when performing.

I think Harris might grow into the role if she gets the nomination. Up to this point she hasn't been very noticeable but that comes with the territory of being VP and having to play second fiddle. As her confidence grows she might turn out ok and roll Trump. Trump has been doing well, but in reality he was only a small number of points ahead of Biden. Among the Democrats, Harris has polled a close second behind Biden and importantly, polled better in some crucial swing states and among women voters. Her campaign is off to a good start raising $81 million in its first 24 hours, an all time record for a presidential candidate. Meanwhile, Trump is as sly as a dunny rat as always. He's saying that if Biden is quitting the race because he doesn't think he's fit for another four years, he should quit now. Trump is pretending to be concerned about Biden's fitness as President for the remainder of the term whereas the reality is, he'd like Harris to take over now as President which would be a big distraction to her campaign. As VP, she has all the time in the world to run an effective campaign against Trump. He knows he'd have a better chance of beating her if she had a higher workload and the distractions of being the incumbent President at short notice. Joe has said he's staying until the election and will be out campaigning for Harris. How quick things can change in politics. Trump's golden bullet is rapidly losing it's shine. Despite repeatedly calling for Biden to step down, Biden actually doing so is Trump's worst nightmare. He knows running against Biden at the election was his best chance. Trump's calling for Biden to stand down was just a tactic to run him down and make him look weak. He didn't want him to actually do it.

John Fogerty and Reverend Billy together.

It's Hammer Time: (revenge for Jerry posting Billy Joel)

Two versions of Joe's letter:

Jimmy Fallon said there's no chance of Joe Biden spreading his Covid because Democrats have been distancing themselves from him since the debate.

onetrack, as you can probably guess from my avatar, I'm a long term Phantom enthusiast. The F-4 has always been my favourite Western aircraft. There's a lot of good reading on the subject out there, including autobiographies of F-4 pilots and crew who flew them in Vietnam. One that's a must read is the biography/autobiography of Colonel Robin Olds. I think it's titled Fighter Pilot from memory. It covers his whole Air Force career including WW2, but a big part of the book is about his time in the Vietnam war when he commanded the 8th.TFW based at Ubon. As good as the personal accounts are, my all time favourite is one I consider the Phantom bible, 'Engineering the F-4 Phantom II: Parts into Systems' by Glenn E. Bugos. It's a great book if you like the technical side of things. Another very informative book I have is a reproduction reprint of the USN F-4 flight manual. Lots of good stuff in there.

We're lucky with our local air museum as the area is a very popular retirement destination for people from all parts of the country. It amazes me the amount of talent there on the mechanical side as well as the piloting side. A lot of people retired from the civilian aviation industry as well as the RAAF and Navy aviation. One bloke there flew Navy planes off the Melbourne and there's ex RAAF pilots that flew the F-111, Mirage and CAC Sabre among others. Most of the volunteers are getting on in age now and we're starting to lose a few. A lot of irreplaceable experience goes with them.

A good barnacle scraper.

Before I built the truck exhaust shower I just used a basic donkey heater to heat water for a bath. It was a 60 litre oil drum on it's side with a fire under it. I had it set up so I could pour a 9 litre bucket of cold water into it at the top which was plumbed down to the bottom of the drum. The 9lt. of cold would displace and push upward 9lt. of hot water which would flow out an outlet at the top. You could easily set one up with permanent sealed plumbing and use it by just turning on a tap as long as you had a pressure relief valve in the drum.

Quite a few years ago I had a diesel powered shower when I first moved a caravan onto my block before I built. It was 3" truck exhaust as the flue with a 4" truck exhaust jacket over it giving a half inch water jacket. The inlet cold water plumbed into the bottom of the jacket and hot water piped from the top of the jacket to the shower rose. The 3" flue extended below the water jacket section and had a swing in/swing out separate section at the bottom with a bottom in it like a cup to hold the combustible material and the diesel. The best combustible material was cotton waste of the type that workshops used to use as rags and to mop up oil spills; it's like a lot of tangled cotton threads. When I didn't have that I used to cut cotton rags into thin strips. It took a bit of experience to get a good hot shower. It was a fine line with the diesel and cotton as it had to have the right proportion. I had to have a shower using a bricklaying trowel to continually adjust the swing in/swing out position of the bowl to get it to draw right. I don't think I'd use the design again. A coiled copper pipe in water heated by a BBQ burner plate as a heat exchanger works better.

There's close to 20 Democrat Congress members calling for Biden to step aside. Obama has now joined Pelosi in trying to get him to evaluate his candidacy, which I think is the PC term for trying to get him to quit. It's not just the Presidency they are worried about but also control of the Senate and Congress in those elections. Biden did some interviews to try to show he's up to it after his woeful performance at the debate, but he muddled the interviews as well. We all know what he's trying to say and what he means, but he's getting increasingly incoherent. Here's an example from an interview the other day: "I remember as a Catholic kid growing up in an area where we didn't like, Catholics, didn't get. I'm the first President elected Statewide in the State of Delaware. When I was a kid, well, you know I was, I looked at John Kennedy and said, well he, God, he got elected, why can't I get elected? By the way I'm proud to be, as I said, the first Vice President, first black woman served with a black President, proud of the, the first black woman, the Supreme Court. There's just so much we can do because together we, there's nothing. Look, this is the United States, America." As said, we sort of know what he's trying to say but it looks and sounds bad. The best case scenario would be that he got no worse over the next four years, but that's unlikely given the rate of him slipping lately. For sure, if you put Trump's ramblings to print, they would read just as incoherent. But I think there's a difference. A lot of what Trump says and the rambling delivery of it is purposeful dumbing down to pander to a thick audience and voter base, whereas Biden seems genuinely confused on many regular occasions. Trump knows his audience adores him and every sound that comes out of his mouth, so he plays to that. It makes me wonder whether now that Trump knows he has almost got it in the bag and has the rusted on dumb ones on side, will he now turn the crazy dial down a bit to chase the business and middle class vote.

I've got a hot drum wood heater and it can sound and act a bit like a pulse jet when starting it up under certain condition. If you want to get the fire going quickly you can put in the kindling, some wood and newspaper then give it a good splash of diesel as a fire starter. The pulse jet effect happens if, once lit, the heater hatch is not open far enough to supply airflow to match the amount of combustion happening in the drum. The diesel cranks it along a fair bit with the exhaust going up the flue and air intake via the front lower vent and the slightly open door. If the door is not open far enough, the combustion starves for oxygen and blows back outside through the door and vent. This reduces the pressure inside the drum and I think it also stops exhausting through the flue momentarily allowing some O2 the enter from that source. This causes the flame trying to escape the front of the heater to retract back inside where the whole cycle starts over and repeats. Each cycle takes a split second creating that typical pulse jet buzzing sound and will keep doing it until the hatch is opened wider to balance the airflow and pressure. Just as a safety warning - never use diesel or anything like it to restart a fire where the firebox has some embers and is still warm. Diesel is safe with a cold start of a wood heater but if restarting a hot or warm heater it can explode. In that case it will produce white smoke which is the tell-tale sigh that it's near flash point.