old man emu

So not all caused by humans.

It's great to see a photo of one's Dad in a museum collection. I've got private photos of my Dad taken during his service, but I got the biggest thrill when I found a photo in the Australian War Memorial collection of my Dad in a war zone. He did serve in the Western Desert, but was wounded. That crearted a disability that made him unsuitable for infantry duty (no right index finger to pull a trigger), so he was attached to an narmy hospital where he was a warehouseman. Somebody has to receive and issue new bedpans. Dad had his own copy of the photo, but seeing it in the AWM collection with him identified by name is great.

If the population of the Southern Hemisphere is much less that thhat of the Northern Hemisphere, where's the heat coming from to create the expected Super El Nino?

Just got home from the daytime service. A large number of people of all ages attended, including kids from the three schools and the pre-school. These kids marched in the parade along the main street to the memorial, and representatives from each school laid a wreath. Seniors from the high school read the poems, At the Going Down of the Sun; The Inquisative Mind of a Child; Commemoration of the Fallen, and In Flanders Field. You know the song, I am Australian? I mentioned the Coo-ee March. We add antoerh verse: I'm a band of Coo-ee marchers, From Gil to Sydney's shore; We sailed to France Fought bravely In the muddy hell of war. I'm a digger. I'm an ANZAC I'm a proud Gilgandra son. My heart, my home, my country. I am Australian We don't have the generic war memorial in the main street with a statue of a Digger standing atop. We have a statue in the main street to commemoriate the Coo-ee March. It was sculpted by a member of one of the local families.

Getting back to topic. Today is ANZAC Day. I've just come back from the Dawn Service in my town. A lot of people came to the service in ages from five to ninety-five. My town has a very strong tradition of remembrance becasue it was from here that the first citizen's recruiting march of WWI began. https://cooeemarch1915.com/ In a while. I'll go back into town for the daytime service at which there will be a lot more people. However, as I was listening to the radio on the way home this morning there was talk of how the change in origin of our population is going to reduce the importance of ANZAC Day to the national identity. To be brutally honset, ANZAC Day is something that relates to those of us who have links to a British ancestry. Aboriginal people did participate, but thier descendants do not seem to want to be involved. The organisers of the serices in my town have tried to simply get the local Aboriginal community to provide a flag to be flown alongside the Australian and New Zealand flags, but to no avail. I don't want to dwell on that point, so don't you. There are only a few people in town from what we might call the immigrant countries. They are good citizens, but do not have the heritage of ANZAC Day. I suspect that in our major cities the ratio of Anglos to non-Anglos is weighted towards the non-Anglos. Those non-Anglos are Australians. Think of the Italians, Greeks, Germans, Dutch, Hungarians etc who came here after WWII. Their decendants are dinki-di. In the future those whose parents came from India, Africa and Asia will reformulate what an Australian is. But I think that the ANZAC tradition will not be a big ingredint in that fomula. Is that a bad thing? Lamentable, perhaps, but as a nation's character evolves, some traits disappear. Should we cling stubbornly to the Past, or accept an evolving Future. I know that you will have strong feelings about this due to how you were brought up, but soon we will be gone. Will our descendants have teh same feelings. Considering what the make up of the Nation will be in say, 50 years, will the clebration of ANZAC Day be important?

At its very simplest, an assualt consists of touching another person, or being in close enough proximity to continue moving towards touching. An assualt can either be consenteed to, or not. If there is consent, then the assualt is lawful. Those sorts of assaults can range from a handshake, to a hug, to a kiss. Even a tackle in a football game is an assault consented to, as long as the tackle style is lawful under the rules of the game. In the situations I have mentioned, consent is normally assumed as being part of normal interaction. In all other cases, touchin another person is an unconsented assault. Have you ever undergone a procedure in a hospital? Do you remember signing a document to confirm your constent to undergo the procedure? In the case of the podiatrist, the more serious assault arises from the use of a cutting tool on a part of the body. If one visits a podiatrist for a procedure, one has in one's mind that the assault is consented to. However, the podiatrist is not a mind reader, and therefore for the podiatrist's protection, that consent must be confirmed. The consent can be revoked at any time thereafter.

There's not much growth whenour manufactruring base has been exported to low wage countries. We still are up there with the leaders in intellectual property, but that too goes overseas. We don't apply it to create employment here.

Have you ever done any geneological research? Pages and pages of records to go through which takes ages. If AI can do the grunt work, then I'd say that it as a good use for it.

Here is an example of how the AI program Claude is being used by the presenter to confirm family records. It is an example of my point that there are so many uses for AI that most of us have never thought of. However, I would rather read a novel written by a real person than one created from prompts to an AI program.

Unfortunately for some of these people with qualifications gained overseas, our, one might say "racist", professional bodies do not accept them. Threfore, while the immigrant awaits acceptance of their qualifications, they have to do menial tasks. I knew of a radiologist who had to wok as an aged care worker because his qualificatins had not been accepted at the time I knew him. In fact, when I last saw him he was starting a cleaning business. His wife's nursing qualificatins had been accepted and she was in employment.

You are required by law to enrol if you: ■ are 18 years of age or older ■ are an Australian citizen, and ■ have lived at your current address for at least a month. The gain Australian citizenship a person has to have been living here for four years, including one year being a permanent resident. Given the four year wait, a governing Party is not going to be importing supporters given the three year term of parliament. So I say that allegation of vote rigging does not stand up. What annoys me is that is seems a very large number of immigrants, especially from India, do not have teh qualifications or skills the country requires. I will concede that a lot of qualified immigrants cannot use their skills because of our laws that make it hard for qualifications gained overseas to be recognised. I suppose that is why we have foreign students gaining qulaifications here and then applying for residency and eventually citizenship.

Just look at this sh!t show.

Individually we are intelligent beings. Just recall the last time you had to come up with a decision to some problem or task that was facing you. If you were successful, or not, your level of knowledge incerased. But that knowledge will remain inaccessible to the rest of us without a language to use to communicate it from you to us. The first method is the spoken word. After that the problem to be overcome is making a permanent record and that leads to writing. Once somethng is writeen people must learn to interpret your symbols, i.e. that's reading.

James Valentine passed away on 22 April 2026). He was an Australian musician, and radio and television presenter. As a saxophonist he was a member of Jo Jo Zep (1982), Models (1984–87), and Absent Friends (1989–90). Valentine was treated for an oesophageal cancer in March 2024 and was alerted to a tumour in his omentum in June 2025. He died in on 22 April 2026 using voluntary assisted dying.

Jerry, I've been watching some videos in YouTube. Really rivetting stuff - unclogging blocked sewage drains. What amazes me is that the drains come into manholes which just have half-pipe chanels in them. Don't you get a lot of smell from them? Also, in towns it seems that the sewage drains run across properties, picking up from each house as they flow towards the mains. Also the houses seem to have water pipes running all over teh place from the hot water boilers. I understand that the hot water feeds through radiators in rooms, but with all that water to be heated, and then for it to lose its heat, what are heating costs like? Finally, and a bit yucky, those drains always seem to be clogged with what the plumbers call "wipes". The look like handkerchief-sized cloth. Don't they have bum fodder that breaks up in the water as it goes down the pipes?