onetrack

Carole King - Tapestry. Geez, these pictograms you're digging up, wouldn't be solvable by anyone under 60!

Peter's fast on the draw tonight. 😄

You've lost that lovin' feelin'. The Righteous Bros.

"I'm not crazy, my mother had me tested". From Sheldon Cooper in the Big Bang Theory.

These are some of the most infuriating "progressive developments" of our time...... 1. Intrusive and annoying ads or pop-ups, that pop up ceaselessly, when you're trying to read an article on a news feed website. I click the site off, I don't need that kind of constant crap. 2. Indians on help desks, who speak English with an accent that sounds like they're speaking with a mouthful of thick custard. Why do businesses do this? Everyone I speak to, has the same complaint. 3. The pop-ups that Willie speak of - the ones that carry on about how Joe Bloggs from Outer Dumbsville has purchased a gimmicky product. Who cares? I don't, and I don't need the annoying distraction. 4. "Help desks" that are no help at all. They provide FAQ's that never answer your question. Then, when you're asked if you want to speak about a problem, you're handed over to a chatbot. If you get to the point where the chatbot actually hands you over to a real person, you get a recorded message saying you're 4th in the queue, and the wait time to speak to the "help" person is 13 minutes. 5. The sites with pre-programmed forms to fill in that refuse to recognise legit records. Every time I change my phone plan, I go through the ID quizzing, and the forms refuse to recognise my MDL, saying "there's a problem" with that type of ID. I don't have any way of getting around this "problem" unless I try a different form of ID, usually my passport, which is then accepted. But if I go into my Telstra store, talk to a real person in the form of a Telstra employee, and present my MDL - their system accepts it, as he/she types in the details, no problem at all. 6. The websites that refuse to give you the freight cost of an item, until you've put the item in your cart, filled in all your personal and shipping details, and gone through to the "payment" page. I fill in a lot of gobbledegook, such [email protected] for email address, and some spurious basic address such as 1 xxx st. - with a correct postcode, of course. I'm starting to simply avoid these sites, and look for ones that show freight charges upfront.

The minerals and elements in the soil definitely affect the taste of the fruit or nuts. In my neck of the woods, the gravelly ironstone soils of the Darling Range produce superb-tasting citrus and stonefruits. Your Pacific Ocean-facing slopes are possibly mineral deficient, after millions of years of increased rainfall causing soil leaching, as compared to the lower rainfall, Western slopes of the GDR. The water in the Perth Hills is highly mineralised, with dams having a blue water colour, due to the mineralised water. The minerals are generally calcium, magnesium and silica, and they are leached out of the weathered granite and dolerite rocks, the pipe clays (kaolin) and the lateritic (ironstone) gravels, that are the common rocks and soils of the Perth Hills. This water is used to irrigate the orchards and provides additional beneficial minerals to the fruit and nut trees. "Cracker dust" (fine dust from dolerite or granitic rock crushing for roads and ballast) is often used as a fertilising agent, which dust acts as a slow-release provider of calcium, magnesium, silica, and other beneficial minerals to plants, as it breaks down over time. Elsewhere in W.A. where "light" sandy and sandy gravel soils proliferate, there is a need to apply trace elements to enable the plants to take up the nutrients in the soil. Failure to apply trace elements means poor crops and trees, and plants that struggle to thrive - even if you have applied other fertilisers such as nitrogen, phosphate or sulphate fertilisers. The primary trace elements needed are copper, zinc, manganese, and molybdenum. As indicated, only "trace levels" are needed in the application, but the results are impressive when carried out. For many decades, "light" sandy soils were regarded as useless in W.A., especially for grain cropping, until an ag researcher at the UWA in the early 1930's, found that trace elements were needed on the sandy soils to enable the plants to uptake the nutrients in the soils. Once this was done on a broadacre farming scale, the yields of wheat, barley, and oats multiplied enormously, and large areas of light land were then cleared for agricultural use. Trace element application is generally only needed every 5-10 years, it is a long-lasting soil beneficiation treatment.

This is pretty appropriate news...... https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-12/kpmg-contracts-with-federal-government-650-million-dollars/106789994

They call the Wind Maria. From the Rodgers and Hammerstein production, "Paint your Wagon".

Tom Cruise - Mission Impossible

There's a lot to be said for a very major reform of our taxation system, one that ensures taxes are paid according to the rules, and which system would not allow "creative accounting" or "loophole exploitation", as practised by many global corporations today, and who have done so, for many years. When the GST was introduced, it was supposed to result in a fairer and simpler system. It has turned out to be anything but that.

This is classic, check out the detail in the cartoon, even down to the instructions on the kneecaps...... The cartoonist is David Rowe.

Yep - no skills, but she wants to fly the plane.......

I have enough trouble trying to get my new Samsung phone to work properly with a screen swipe. It often fails to respond to a finger swipe. It's the most dubious activation of any operation you can devise - as compared to the accuracy and positivity of a switch. As regards voice commands - they are also on a par with screen swipes. I never use them, because I have poor hearing, and verbal communication is always a hassle for me. I don't use sat nav because I can't hear the womans instruction. I have great difficulty in understanding women speaking, due to the pitch of womens voices, which pitch is where I have greatest hearing loss. In addition, I do not trust any global corporation taking a record of my voice, and doing all sorts of things with it, in that they refuse to tell me what they are doing with it. Then there's the problem of several people talking, while you're trying to talk to a voice-activated screen, and the screen microphone picks up activation commands that weren't directed at it. I often hear SWMBO talking to our smart TV, trying to get it to carry out some action, and then she resorts to the remote control. AFAIC, touchscreens in cars are anathema to what driving is all about. It means distraction from the road, and other vehicles around you, and safety authorities have long treated screens inside vehicles as a major road safety problem.

Essentially, the near collapse of the Liberal Party and its dubious and deficient policies has seen disaffected right wing voters vote for ON and Teals in the hope of getting rid of Labor from positions of power. But not one of the parties currently vying for leadership of the nation is addressing the elephant in the room - rocketing house prices that are unjustly enriching property investors, and which prices are making housing unaffordable for the younger generation who missed the property/housing gravy train. At least Federal Labor has recognised the problem and is trying to do something about it by tackling CGT rules and negative gearing rules. But of course, that brings howls of outrage and bitterness from those property owners who do not want to see ANY downturn in housing or property prices. That large cohort are nearly all conservative voters. Unfortunately, history tells us property bubbles have a way of exploding by themselves in a very hurtful and shocking manner, if Govts don't take measures to rein in property investment exuberance. Just like the shock kids get, when a party balloon explodes, a lot of property investors who are sitting on millions in gains, are going to get a nasty shock, when there's a sudden and severe economic downturn, and the property bubble does go bang.

Kia has already issued a worldwide recall notice for a wide range of their models, whereby a software error causes the screen in these vehicles to go blank. The old Windows problem recurring? 😄 As Kia and Hyundai use a lot of common design and components, I would expect Hyundai to start having similar problems soon. Give it a year or three, and I'll wager we'll see quite a number of reports of screen failures in Chinese cars. As parts supply is poor for most Chinese cars, I can see major issues, and customer dissatisfaction, looming in this area.