Old Koreelah

Cars and where to park them is one of the biggest headaches for urban planners. Just after the Fukushima earthquake we visited Japan. In Osaka our young tour guide was doing it tough, with few tourists and a depressed economy. She needed a car for her business, but had to pay $100 each week for the right to park in the street. Meanwhile, in the Old World, buildings collapse onto cars and sleeping families. I won’t complain about our minor irritations.

Why not? A generation or more ago a mate tried to get our local council to curb and gutter his streets. Council couldn’t afford it without a big increase in rates, so he organised all the residents into a working bee. They borrowed moulds, etc from the council and they did it themselves!

Very different to the way many of us were raised. Aim high, work and study hard, patient, start with a small, affordable car, house… I’ve finally succombed to consumerism; tomorrow I will take a load of used treasures to the dump. Worn, leaking wellies, power tools that I’ll never get around to repairing, my collection of computer printers that don’t like me… Plurry hard to toss out stuff that, not so long ago, I could never afford to buy.

…for which he has never been forgiven by the Murdoch press and their lackeys.

Spacey you seem to be confused about that “recession we had to have”. I presume you’re thinking of Paul Keating. He was long before Rudd, under whose government Australia was just about the only country that DIDN’T have a recession.

Red would you use that term to describe the NZ situation, where the indig. people have had their own reserved seats in parliament for over 150 years?

List of achievements? Apply that to any government. Perhaps we should give this group a bit of time to make their mark.

I’ve seen that. Mate and I were testing his racebike at Oran Park, sharing track time in 30 minute sessions with cars. As we stood watching a Torana being thrown around the track, know-all mate was very critical of the lines taken through corners and the rough gear changes. The car came in to pit and out stepped Stirling Moss, who was preparing to run that XU-1 at Bathurst with Our Jack.

Remember that American lament: “ forty channels and nothing to watch”. That disease has reached Oz. Some nights I flick channels and occasionally find a treasure- usually on SBS, NTV or ABC. Tonight we’re staying at our kid’s place, with screens everywhere, but usually turned off. We just spent a few hours playing fun card games with the grandies.

Unusual straight veg lines across huge areas, indicating faultlines, folds…. Reminds me of the Peel Fault and associated cuestas running from Currabubula to Warialda and also the stark geological division running N-S in Zimbabwe.

GE images indicate very interesting geology in that part of the world.

That’s the trend all over, Bruce. Fascinating to see previously antagonistic proddies pushed into the same ever-diminishing churches. (Reminds me of fish in shrinking pools during a drought.) The Tykes can’t seem to recruit priests locally, so they have lots of Africans and Filipinos. Empty churches in their thousand are being sold for residential redevelopment, even in the Bible Belt of USA.

Nice, but they could have added decent wheel spats!

Today I drove past yet another Woolworths truck, delivering groceries to small towns. When the small, independent local grocery shop is forced out of business, I predict Woolies stop this delivery service and put up their prices.

Not far north of you, we’re sitting in front of the a. c. in a heatwave.

It’s been argued that although the Wright Bros’ ground-breaking work laid the foundations of flight, their litigation handicapped American aviation for a decade. When American aviators joined the Great War, they mostly used French aircraft, because the Europeans had progressed far ahead of the US.

I’ve seen that thoughtful tradition in older residential areas where people have established gardens. Culled plants are heaped on the roadside and eagerly collected by other keen gardeners. Bit more scenic than the obscene piles of last year’s Harvey Norman furniture.

Those stories make my eyes water.

I have quite half a dozen citrus planted right next to my shed/workshop, so they get a good dose of nitrogen fertilizer every day. The lemon tree usually has 50+ lemons on it, but they’re not available year-round.

Too plurry right, OME! A generation of Americans were raised on Westerns with lots of killing. People joked that they regularly had to get the dead Indians cleaned out of their Television sets. That sort of exposure would have a profound effect on developing minds. A few of them became gun nuts. Sadly, sales of firearms increase after every shooting; the gun industry loves it! Even the punch-ups on TV are unreal: our hero gets knocked cold regularly and recovers with barely a headache. He absorbs numerous blows to the face, but never loses any of his pearly whites. In the real world people can die from a single punch.

I received this urgent text a few minutes ago:

I once explored the interior of a Vietnam-era APC. Tried to fit into the gunner’s and driver’s seats but gave up. Got out fast with claustrophobia.

Totally f’ing mad! Even during the so-called Wild West there was gun control. Dodge City disarmed all arrivals.

Banning modern tools and weapons might be hard to enforce, but might help. I fear many communities have already lost most of the old skills, but have seen others which haven’t. When walking along a beach in Arnhem Land with my wife we encountered a bunch of young local blokes making small fishing spears totally from stuff growing nearby, then hunting in the surf. They showed us one they’d caught.