old man emu

I've got an idea for gun control in the USA! Invoke the spitir of teh Second Amendment which says "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." The spirit of that amendment was to provide secutiry for the State. Therfore, make it a condition of gunownership that a person join a militia unit and attend training that leads to the unit being well regulated. If a person does not do that, then no firearm. People would find it too inconvenient to give up their time for that, and so would hand in their firearms.

I think that the only thing that can save the democracy of the USA as it moves into its second 250 years is a review of its Constitution. A review and rewriting would permit amendments which have had to be made to be presented in a more organised way, and some of the recinding amendments removed. I think that a new constitution should make the format of the government similar to ours and most other democracies. That is, the People's House should be the place where the people who run the country do their work. That's where the person responsible for the various ministries report back to the representatives of the People. There could be a House of Review to monitor laws proposed by the representatives. Finally, the Head of State should be as apolitical as possible, and have no power to make the sort of Orders that we have seen Trump do.

Tha car was parked outside in the rain. It's looking cleaner. I did have a clothes dryer, but haven't needed it for years. I've hung the clothes out under cover and they can drip dry.

Some things are good, like the block on the gear selector by the footbrake. A lot of things that are controlled by modules receiving data from sensors can cause difficult to correct faults. I'd say that alot of gadgets on the dashboard are marketing gimmicks. Remember when all we needed was a couple of warning lights, a speedo and a fuel guage? Cars got us fron A to B with those simple things.

I got a further 12mm on Tuesday and then the clouds clared away. There's more cloud today, but I don't know if much rain will come from it. Just in case it does rain, I'm hanging my washing on the verandah.

Apparently the expansion of AI is making a massive drain on the ability of all forms of generation to keep up the electricity supply. The hardware side of AI is something that gets little publicity. Add to that the electricity required to run the Internet, and soon ther will not be enough left to run a 40W light bulb.

Bring back manual wind-up windows!

Since Australia is one of the few countries that drives on the left we have to accept that the majority of vehicles built worldwide are for right hand drive. It is annoying if you have grown up with the indicator lever on the right, but eventually you retrain yourself if your vehicle has it on the left. Can you remember the push-button gear selector in, I think, early Valiants?

I'm glad that you know and keep alive that bit of Australiana. Said Hanrahan published in the anthology Around the Boree Log by "John O'Brien" pen name of Monsignor Patrick Joseph Hartigan, published by Angus and Robertson in 1921.

My lawnmower has sat in the shed for two years. I hope it will start if needed.

Bugger! Sucked in again. Who can beleive anything that is published? Do you still beleive that it rained at my place last night?

I ws given a guage by a friend when I had said that I didn't know how much rain I had got in a previous rain event. I didn't know how weel it would catch the rain as the mouth is ony about an inch square. Also, I oftern wonder how well guages catch rain becasue they are set up vertically and rain normally falls at an angle. Anyway, what it captured is only indicative of the rainfall within its immediate surrounds. It doesn't tell yoou how much rain fell 100 metres away. We'll see by the end of the week if the drought is broken.

Had a shit of a night's sleep last night! Kept getting woken up by the rain pounding on the roof. When I got up this morning water was laying is sheets across the ground. I had to go out and clear twigs and leaves from the drainage channels I dug back when the last big rains came. I measured 50 mm in the rain guage, and it is still raining. The rain event is supposed to last for the next couple of days.

Just heard that electricity prices are set to reduce shortly. I heard it on the ABC radio news with a quote from responsible person. Why? In the report it was said that renewable generation was now at 50% of requirement in South Australia, New South Wales and South-east Queensland. A lot of this has been due to the development of storage batteries. We've come a very long way in the adoption of renewable generation, haven't we?

AI is becoming a rabid dog.

A bystander was also hit. Enquirie s are being made to see which gun that bullet came from.

freind was a tpo. The correct word is "friend." In case you didn't know, "I'm a friend of Dorothy" was a code used by Gay men before being Gay was legal. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the USA Naval Investigative Service (NIS), the predecessor to the modern-day Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), was investigating homosexuality in the Chicago area. Agents discovered that gay men sometimes referred to themselves as "friends of Dorothy". Unaware of the historical meaning of the term, the NIS believed that there actually was a woman named Dorothy at the center of a massive ring of homosexual military personnel, so they launched an enormous and futile hunt for the elusive "Dorothy", hoping to find her and convince her to reveal the names of gay service members.

When are you blokes going to recognise irony?

Does that mean he's cracking on with the renovations?

Oh, Lord! No! Another orchestrated assasination attempt!!!!!!!

Is there some sort of euphemism or secret code in Dot and the Kangaroo? Different reference : Has anyone ever told you that they were a freind of Dorothy?

You have to remember that when we Boomers were growing up, our fathers were still relatively young men who had experinced many horrors and these had been shared with other young men. After the war the bonds formed in military units were stretched as these young men drifrted apart from old mates and tried to make a life for themselves. ANZAC Day was a day on which those bonds could be reformed. In the years 1946 to about 1966 Australia had a different culture than it has now. Excessive drinking was the norm at celebrations. My Dad was heavily involved with his local RSL Sub-branch, organising the Dawn Service amongst other things. Mum, my sister and I would attend the local Dawn Service and bid farewell to Dad, not expecting to see him until late that evening, and showing the effects of a glass or two. In 1958 a play, The One Day of the Year, contested attitudes to Anzac Day. The play was inspired by an article in the University of Sydney newspaper Honi Soit criticising Anzac Day and the author's own observations of how ex-servicemen behaved on that day. You can imagine how controversial it was. Its production was banned by the Adelaide Festival of Arts Board of Governors in 1960. The author and cast received death threats. I read this play in high school. Typically the mass media did not understand the play, and concentrated on the initial aims of the Boomer, Hughie. Hughie and his girlfriend Jan, university students, plan to document Anzac Day for the university newspaper, focusing on the drinking on Anzac Day. For the first time in his life Hughie refuses to attend the dawn service with his Dad, Alf. When he watches the march on television at home with his mother and Wacka, a WWI returned man, living with the family, he is torn between outrage at the display and love for his father. Wacka then explains to Hughie that for the returned, ANZAC Day reunions are for reforming those bonds formed in the horrors of war. Alcohol is the balm that soothes terrifying memories and releases memories of the good times, and the larrikin acts that relieved tension. At the end of the story, Hughie has a more sympathetic view of what ANZAC Day means to his Dad. The mass media and "intellctuals" missed that point. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_One_Day_of_the_Year

It's hard to know the origin to the line. One wonders if it came into being at some RSLClub late in the afternoon of one ANZAC Day in the 1950s. It's hard to pin down its origin. The earliest attested appearance of current spelling is 1535 ("Bischops ... may fuck thair fill and be vnmaryit" [Sir David Lyndesay, "Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaits"]). https://www.etymonline.com/word/fuck

Very, very, very old. It has been attributed to a German POW camp Kommondant and I have also heard it attributed to a Japanese POW camp Commondant.

There was a TV show set in Melbourne with the actors satarised their being Greek. The show was called Acropolis Now. One of the characters was Effie, played by Mary Coustas. The character "Effie", was a stereotypical second-generation Greek Australian prone to malapropisms. A common one of hers was " how embarassment". https://www.facebook.com/nickg1/videos/the-first-time-that-now-iconic-phrase-howembarrassment-was-heard-on-aussie-tv-on/2132406587584055/