old man emu

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/

I remember when the wife and I went to England, leaving my son at home to fend for himself. Typical smartarsed teenager, he had put a ringtone on my wife's phone that was the sound of police sirens. We were sitting in a cafe in the village in Yorkshire where they filmed the TV show Heartbeat when he phoned us. The place was filled with the sound of sirens and everyone was looking about for the emergency vehicle. Of course, it was the son. It was mid-morning in England, but getting on for dinner time in Sydney. The stupid bugger rang to ask his Mum how to cook some dish he wanted for dinner.

I can see the electrical and mechanical parts of t eelctricty generator wearing out, and maybe the blades degrading due to sunlight and moisture, but I reckon the towers would be OK. You'd just need to replace the generator bits, or perhaps replace parts on a service life basis.

AI often makes mistakes when it ignores punctuation, like this:

Like everything these days. Publish a story about a horror renter and it puts the wind up a landlord. Vetting of potential tenants is a pretty terrifying process for a tenant needing a home.

A person I know has a house or two in town that are unoccupied. Why? Because of the costs of repairing the damage that tenants cause. That is probably one of the reasons for the numbers of vacant houses.

I was going to argue the toss with Nev, but then I realised that I have often said that language is an evolving thing and with it speech. Therefore I must concede that nowadays the noun is mispronunciations, but hold that the verb is mispronounce.

A couple of things I notice with AI-generated voice-overs. The voice-over very often trips over "lead". The mistake is in the use of the long or short 'e' vowel sound. It will give 'leed' when the correct sound should be 'led'. Another sure sign of AI generation is when the voice-over falters of there is a full stop or comma in what needs to be said. It often happens with 'U.S.A." or when saying a number in the thousands where there is a comma such as $60,000. As soon as I hear one of these mispronounciations I click out.

We often get these 'random thought' posts. I do it myself a lot. Best to simply read the post, chuckle, and move back to the original topic.

Sorry, Red, but you have it wrong. The mean is the mathematical average of all numbers in a data set. The median is the exact middle value of a data set when the numbers are sorted in order. Here is an illustration where the an original set of scores has two more included. In the illustration, the numbers 75.5, 83, and 41 &90 are obtained from the original data. The numbers 73.1, 82 and 42 are what one gets after inculding the two extra scores. We give a stvff because a lot of us here have decided that accuracy in posts is important. That is why we like to see where the support for a comment comes from. In my post here, the diagram comes from a Google search for the difference between 'mean and median', as well as the fact that back in the day I did a course in statistics at Uni, and the topic is usually included in high school Maths.

It's nice to know someone has a knowledge of the various terms used in Statistics.

Apparently YouTube is messing with its algorithm so that popular channels from the USA which present material that is anti-Trump are not coming up on peoples' feeds. I look at two or three of these channels and this past weekend several of the creators have posted videos telling the stroy as it applies to their own channels. It is pretty clear that YouTube is engaging in a practice that limits adverse comments relating to teh Trump Administration. Goebbels would be in Seventh Heaven if he were alive today to see this.

Overnight on Sunday we got about 3mm, but then the rains started during the day and kept up into the evening. I don't have a guage, so I can't say how much we got, but whenyou look at data from around about, it would seem that 30 - 45 mm was common. There wasn't enough rain to create running flows, but at least the topsoil is wet. It is too late around here to plant Canola and teh sub-soil moisture might not be enough for cereal crops. With the price of diesel and fertilizer, it is going to be a gamble if anyone does crop this year. One thing you have to remember is that, while you might get a good healthy growth of wheat plants, it takes a lot of water for those plants to fill seeds, which is how you get the tonnages you want from a crop.

One day there will be no Trump. What will we do with this thread then?

Meanwhile, back in Washington D.C., the defrauding of the US taxpayer goes on. A famous landmark in Washington is the Lincoln Memeorial reflecting pool The pool is basically a concrete lined wading pool. It is only about 60 cm deep. To be honest, as anyone who has owned a pool of this construction knows, eventually the base cracks and the pool leaks. That is what has happened. The pool was in bad shape and leaking huge amounts of water each year. So it has to be fixed. It's a big job with realistic cost of around $US10 million. As with all governments work like this should be granted by tender. However, Trump had the contract made without going to tender. The successful contractor was, in Trump's intial statement, " a guy who's unbelievable at doing swimming pools". During his Oval Office press conference, Mr Trump said the project would cost "less than $2 million". But the project contract actually turned out to be for $US6.9 million ($9.7 million). And earlier this month, it was hiked up to $US13.1 million ($18.3 million). Trump's reason for not calling for tenders was that the job needed to be done as quickly as possible so as to be finished before the 250th Anniversary celebrations in July. A "no-bid" contract was given to a company called Atlantic Industrial Coatings. The contract was awarded under an exemption meant for urgent situations to prevent "serious injury, financial or other, to the government". Called out on this no bid deal, Trump wrote, "I didn't give out the contract, 'Interior' did, to a contractor I did not know, and have never used before". Then there is the colour. The pool's dark basin, a signature feature" since it opened in 1924, was designed that way to create the illusion of greater depth and a more profound reflection. Trump says the precise shade he has requested for the pool surface is "American flag blue". It's a big area to be painted and anyone who has painted large areas knows it takes lots of paint and the colour can change between batches. "'Splotchy blue' is how I would describe the colour," said Mike, a local video producer. Trump's chosen blue "is more appropriate to a resort or theme park" "Trump has shown no respect for history," said Mike, the video producer. A local non-profit, the Cultural Landscape Foundation, has filed a lawsuit to halt work, arguing proper processes were not followed. Trump is the "boy named sue".

I loved Xi's expressionless face when he was with Trump. Or should I say very expressive face. Every time I saw Xi's face, I just read, "If I give this fwit enough rope, he'll hang himself." Xi was the stereotypical "inscrutable Asian gentleman".

Isn't it amazing how the Information Highway has led us to a destination where we have contempt for those who tell us that they are working for our benefit?