onetrack

RGM, my kidney function was checked, all is fine, the last blood test result showed everything within a satisfactory range. PSA levels and an enlarged prostate are all I have to worry about now, but even the last PSA reading was back to an acceptable level. I was surprised to find my urologist wasn't overly concerned about an occasional high PSA reading, he reckons they bounce around, and are not necessarily an accurate indication of prostate problems. Litespeed - Sorry, I've become very attached to my kidneys, and don't feel like sharing them with anyone. Although normally, I'm a caring,sharing person, I draw the line at sharing my kidneys. 😄

I'd avoid architects at all times unless I wanted to burn up a lot of money. They're good at producing offbeat designs, but often, they're impractical or costly to build. Some can produce superb results. I've found a young structural engineer, he's great, I tell him what I want, I draw a sketch, and he produces the designs and plans in a straightforward manner, and even does all the council paperwork, ready for submission. Here on the Left Coast, there was a big change in the building permits setup in 2012. Previously, you submitted plans, and the council had to do all the legwork figuring out if it was legal and safe, and met all the requirements and laws. Now, you submit plans, and either you, or your engineer, have to personally guarantee they meet all the regulations and safety standards, and all the councils have to do, is look over all the paperwork, and either pass it, or reject it.

The docs discovered I had high blood pressure when I injured my left shoulder about 2-1/2 years ago. The Asian woman doctor I went to first, went ballistic when she found my blood pressure was 200 over 100. I told her it was because of my injury and pain levels and simple stress of being in a doctors surgery, but she went on a rampage about my blood pressure and concentrated on that, and barely looked at my shoulder injury. She put me on Perindopril Arginine, which is an enzyme blocker, it stops the enzyme that hardens your arteries. It seems to work, my blood pressure came down, I went off the pills for a couple of weeks and my blood pressure shot back up again. I like to think I'm pretty healthy, but the internal damage with advancing age is unseen.

There is a way to express dissatisfaction with an elected representative, and it's called a petition. You need to gather up a lot of signatories before a petition can be presented, though. In many other countries, a process called Recall Petition is used and it has electoral and legislative support. A Recall Petition can be brought to the Govt of the day to express disenchantment with the elected members performance and to request that they be replaced. In Australia, there is no Recall Petition process - simple petitioning must be used. There have been discussions on introducing a Recall Petition process, but the discussions have bogged down in how the fine details would be worked out. https://www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/researchpapers/Documents/recall-elections/Recall Elections E Brief.pdf

Litespeed, I owned a business and employed a number of people (up to 103 at one time, much later in my business career), and a lot of the utes were "work" utes. But they were all registered in my name and I drove them all at various times, some a lot more than others. Sometimes I'd drive them a lot myself (mainly when new), then they'd be utilised by employees. We used to rack up some miles, often working 75 and 80 miles from home base. Over that distance, we'd camp out in caravans, motels, or whatever other form of accommodation was available. A lot of work was remote, so not too many facilities. I was in business from age 16, and I've never worked for anyone else in my whole working life - apart from 2 years National Service.

I think there's been a substantial degree of original photo manipulation in all of the above! 🙄

That's quite a large degree of heating!

Oh dear, talk about "knee-jerk" politics! She sounds like Gina Rinehart! I wonder if she's going to propose poisoning all the Aboriginal watering places, too!! - like Gina's old man suggested!!

Well, I can't complain about those old Holden "classics", they served me very well over many years. I've owned no less than 52 Holden utes, starting with an EH fitted with the optional 179 engine. I did 105,000 miles (yes miles) with it, and traded it in on a new HK Belmont ute, and it still didn't burn much oil. But the drum brakes were crap, and only a VH44 booster fixed them to a certain degree. From there, followed a big succession of HQ, HJ, HZ, and WB utes, a HQ 308 sedan, and even a 4WD F100 (with the Cleveland 302). I've still got a WB 1 tonner, it was the Melbourne Airport runway ute, and it's painted in the CAA safety yellow colour. It will get restored in due course, it would've been an easy restoration if the 2nd owner of the 1-tonner (out near Warragul) didn't get it bogged to the gunwhales in a creek, and let water stay inside it, for possibly weeks - so the floorpans are in poor shape. You can't blame the design for mistreatment and abuse. The Holden utes took me places that are declared "4WD Only" to todays drivers, and I regularly towed 1000-gallon fuel tankers with the Holdens, and even carried 1-1/2 tons once in the back of the EH. However, it was a short and slow trip! The brothers boss carried 2 tons of clearing chain, draped between a car trailer, and his EK Holden ute!

Strokes can be very devastating, but it's amazing how many people actually recover some quality of life after a severe stroke. However, I know a former farm machinery mechanic in a small country town, who sold up and retired about 18 yrs ago, and bought a motorhome to travel around in. Then only a couple of years later, his wife had a massive stroke, which totally disabled her. He has to spend all his time within a short reach of her, as she's virtually helpless. No more than 20 mins away. He's 83 and in a gopher himself now, and he's been caring for her constantly for more than 15 years. He confided to me, "This is not what we planned, for our enjoyable retirement!"

Marty already gave you the correct answer a day ago.

It's a lot easier to manipulate a small turnout of voters, and it's even easier when you have multiple billions at your disposal. If we had a voting system like America has, Clive Palmer would already be our President - but with our better system, Clive has SFA chance of even having a say in running the country, and that has to be a very good thing.

GON, the Nomad aircraft was a badly engineered piece of equipment from the word go, and it would have needed billions to re-engineer it to make it durable. One of the problems with it, was a decision to use thinner aluminium sheeting than originally called for in the design. There were a substantial amount of additional design flaws, including faulty engineering calculations, that made it a death trap. Don't forget it killed its chief structural engineer and test pilot on a test flight, and it ended up with a Godawful safety record. It was a disaster from go to whoa, and you can't blame Fraser wholely and solely for the Nomad fiasco. He took the correct decision to scrap it, because it was a national liability. I wasn't a fan of Fraser either, but he did make some good decisions occasionally. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAF_Nomad

Dutton already has form when it comes to deporting undesirables from Australia. But neither Dutton, nor Australia, is alone with this system, many countries already carry out the same deportation of violent criminals. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-tyne-53095334

Gee, that's a bit severe on the old Holdens, Pete! The brother and I bought Dad a new HK Holden Premier wagon in 1968 - and I drove it often, and I can honestly say it was one of the best cars I'd driven, up to that time. I loved driving that Premier, it was only a 186 and 2-speed Powerglide, but it went like the clappers, stopped beautifully (disc brakes) and it was a very comfortable and smart car to drive. I have very fond memories of that car, and I'd love to drive a new one of them again - which is impossible, of course. We traded the HK Premier on a new HQ Premier wagon in 1974 (202 and Trimatic) - and the HQ was a slug, with wallowy handling, and gutless to boot. However, it did last quite well under his ownership until he died in 1988, and I sold it in 1990. But the vehicle I do miss the most, was my yellow-with-black-stripes, HJ Sandman ute, that I bought new in July 1975. I used it for work and wore it out and it ended up being dumped on the local country tip when we sold our farm in 1995. Unsurprisingly, it vanished from the tip within hours, someone knew what a collectible was! The VIN plates would probably be worth $10,000 today, and it wasn't until about 20 years ago, that I found out, that GMH only made 380 Sandman utes, in total!

Modern tyre construction designations in the image below. The "plies" are made up of "cords", which are usually made from Rayon or Nylon. New tyre manufacturing is extremely tightly controlled, and is actually a highly complex process. Retreading should be under the same conditions as manufacturing new tyres. Good tyre retreaders inspect used tyre carcasses with great care, and reject any that show even the slightest signs of damage, rubber hardening, previous repairs, or overloading. Anything even slightly suspect would be rejected, there are tens of thousands of used tyre carcasses to choose from for retreading purposes. https://karyapolymer.com/what-are-radial-tires/#:~:text=Each ply is made up,fabric or steel and rubber.

George Foreman, the champion boxer, has passed away, aged 76. No information has been released as to the cause of his death. https://www.perthnow.com.au/entertainment/celebrity-death/boxing-icon-and-olympic-gold-medallist-george-foreman-dies-aged-76-c-18123256

Back to the original thread subject - here's my "positive" report for this week. (SWMBO says I've been too grumbly and short-tempered this week. Might be, because I'm fighting to finish several projects). Thursday night, we went to the W.A. Gravity Discovery Centre, located about an hour N of Perth in the Yeal Nature Reserve, which is halfway between the coastal City of Yanchep, and the rural inland town of Gingin. The night Observatory tour we went on, is called the Adults Only Stargazing Date Night. The tour included dinner, and about 2.5 hrs of stellar and sky discussion and learning. We got there at 6:30PM for a supposedly 7:00PM dinner time, but we were told some people were running a little late, so the dinner start was put back to 7:15PM. We spent 45 minutes checking out some of the site attractions, such as the informative galleries. The whole setup is owned by the University of W.A. and comprises several display galleries as well as a "leaning tower", and the GDC Observatory - which is a retractable roof building housing several large telescopes - which we all got to peer through, to view some of the planets, and some of the more prominent and well-known stars. There were only 5 couples in the tour, and we got a nice meal from the little cafe, with the (pre-ordered) choice of chicken or steak, followed by cheescake dessert. Then we headed off into the darkness (aided by the tour speakers small red light, to ensure our night vision was preserved), to view stars and planets from the Observatory. He had a big green laser pointer which he used sparingly to point out the various celestial bodies of interest, and he waxed on comically for about a couple of hours, talking about star formations and collapses, the various features of planets, the research on Gravity Waves, and a host of other celestial and physics of the Universe that left our heads spinning. He reckoned he'd been doing this for 30 years, so he knew astronomy inside-out! Someone asked a question about satellites and how they affected sky-viewing. He got quite animated about this subject, and especially about Musks Starlink satellites (and he constantly referred to Musk as "Mush"! 😄 ) He talked about how he'd set up cameras to take dozens and even hundreds of shots of the night sky - only to find in the morning, that his sky shots were criss-crossed with satellite trails! - which left criss-cross lines all over his great photos! He said, "about then, you start having homicidal thoughts (about Musk)". 😞 I was staggered to find out, that there's now around NINETY THOUSAND satellites in low Earth orbit! - as against perhaps only a couple of hundred, say 30 years ago. We had an absolutely PERFECT night - a perfectly clear sky, cool to the point of being chilly, no moon (moonrise was around 10:00PM as we finished up), and as dark as we could get, allowing for the fact we were just 70kms out of Perth. Naturally, the City lights glow was still pretty visible on the Southern horizon. All in all, we had a very enjoyable evening, doing something a little different. The Adults Only Stargazing Date Night is currently unavailable, we got the last booking date for the event, for the time being. I'm not sure when there will be another repeat of this event, they might be struggling to get staff to run it, as it appears they rely a lot on volunteers. https://gravitycentre.com.au/

Not in my neck of the woods. The Bandags were very good, due to their tread band design. It was the everyday, molded recaps, that threw treads here.

It looks like a whole lot of dead wood to me!!

If you put something in the water of Corroboree Billabong, you'd get the end bitten off it, within 10 or 20 seconds!

I've got some Michelins on my little old 5 tonne Isuzu truck (8.25R16's) that are over 30 years old! - and they're still going O.K.! The tyre companies are the ones saying tyres are only good for 5 or 6 years - guess why? I can recall when the local Michelin agent (Bell Bros. in W.A.) used to recap Michelin truck tyres with Bandag recaps, they'd buff a letter off the "Michelin" name on the side of the tyre to show the number of times the tyre was recapped. I remember seeing recapped Michelin truck tyres, where there were only the "I" and the "N" left visible, from the Michelin name on the side of the tyre!

Pete - There were no oars - and the strict instructions from the crew were NEVER to hang any body part (or anything else, for that matter), over the side of the boat!

I was once marooned and left drifting in a large billabong full of giant crocodiles, thanks to TWO outboards that BOTH refused to run!! (look up Corroboree Billabong). The primary outboard failed to start, then the backup outboard failed to start as well! We drifted for a good half hour before another boat came to our rescue! Meantimes, we sat and watched as two 4.7M crocs devoured a water buffalo!

Ford Model A's all used steel wire spoke wheels. The first 2 years of production (1927-29), they were 21" wire wheels, the second 2 years of production (1929-31), they were 19" wire wheels. Get us a photo, Spacey, so we can ID the car.