Bruce Tuncks

I once had a student who was of French extraction but his English sounded good. he was not a student of mine except once i filled in for a sick colleague. I set them an assignment which included the question "write a paragraph on arc welding under each of the following headings...(1)Amperage (2) polarity (3) electrode size.... etc Well I saw this student trying to meet me around the place, when he finally did he asked me " why I wanted them to write about "zee arvesteur". It took some doing, but i finally discovered that the word "headings" had fooled him. A slang word for a harvester is a header. I have since wondered how much he was learning in his classes.

You cannot speed up language training too much. There was a case in SA where Flinders University demanded a 2 weeks "crash course in english" for chinese students. I think those students lived together and spoke chinese at home.Anyway, they learned NOTHING in the 2 weeks. At a minimum, you would have to remove the students right away from their native tongue and take 6 months. Even then they would not be good. There are some people talented at picking up a new language and some are the opposite. I well knew an opposite guy, he was smart enough in his job but he spoke a broken Polish/English mixture and nobody could understand a word he said. While I knew him, he went back to poland ( first visit since 1939! ) and nobody could understand him there either. Here was a non-stupid guy removed from his own language for 50 years!

Yeah, we could have an acre for millions of refugees, except that they would all move to Sydney at the first chance. I reckon our present unaffordable big-city real estate would get much worse. In the olden days, my ancestors had to go to places like Alice Springs to get work. No longer, the politically correct fat ladies have said that this is "cruel" and so they all move to cooler and greener parts. Draw a map of Australia, leaving out the uninhabitable bits, and you will see that we are a small country.

There was a pic of a half-track where they had wheels for steering up front but crawler tracks at the back. This idea is used on tractors to this day .

AND, try as I might, I don't understand government finances. What harm does it do to print more than you tax as long as you don't set off inflation?

Quite right OME. You could apparently swap a bale of wool for a new car! Now you have to pay more for it to be shorn that you can sell it for. But things are a lot better than twenty years ago, with the price of meat quite good. There is a story of a farmer at Bordertown who shot himself after being offered 20 cents for each of his sheep.

Those russians sure are doing a good job of being the bad guys huh. I wonder why the republicans, who I think represent the rich, are more friendly to Russia than they used to be.

I reckon the republicans are too bad for that OME. Might well be that the democrats are bad too, but on a least-worst basis, they smell like roses.

Thanks Willedoo. I'm surprised that fixed defences are still viable more than 100 years after WW1. When I saw drone attacks on trenches ( I think it was the Azerbijan war) it seemed to me to be the very end of such things. These days, with drones reporting to artillery, I would still have said that fixed defences were obsolete.... well, looks as if I was wrong huh.

We could see a civil war if Trump is elected methinks.

We had to do that "saluting the flag" stuff in Alice Springs when I was at primary school. Later, at the then-new Anzac Hill school, the foyer had portraits of QE2 and the governor -general, Sir William Slim. I believe that the GG was in real life a pedophile although this is called "unproven allegations " to this day. As if a ten-year old orphanage-boy could come by legal "proof" against the GG. The vice-regal car would visit an orphanage and a good looking boy would be lifted into the back seat to spend an hour with the GG while the driver etc made themselves scarce.

Alas, the animals are dumb and we are not.

I was told that starfighter pilots used to ring their wives if they finished a flight without crashing.

I don't believe it either but I like the story...

Spacy, Don Dunstan actually was the premier and he tried to stop subdivisions happening on the best farmlands ( around Elizabeth ) by establishing Monarto for future growth. I well remember how he was pilloried by the papers and this eventually helped with the downfall of labor in the state.

I reckon the ukranian surface drones show that people with navy ships ( US, EU, Aus etc ) don't want to know about these things. On a similar tack, is there a country in the world which uses greed AGAINST the drug sellers? The perps do it for money, but a country has unlimited money and can offer new identities and immunities as added inducements to betray the bosses. I don't think it should be an even fight, all but the loyal idiots would be scrambling for the better deal. My men's exercise group would all be out trying to buy drugs for the rewards and the cops would be lording it over all.

Me too,pmc. My number could have come out but didnt. My mate Graham had his number come up though, but they didn't send him anywhere. He had an IQ about 200 and my theory is that they didn't want the bad publicity of getting their smartest new recruit killed. Good stuff you did in the cadets, there were no cadets in Alice Springs in those days. ( Graham came second in the state of SA from a school that hardly got an "A" in yr 11.

Just body disposal, pmc. I was thinking that the sea would make a good body-disposal alternative method. Whaddeya reckon? I'm afraid that the existing cemetery owners have got the game sewn up, only leaving the sea.

How about this for an idea.... you plan to disappear your body, and then you provide your ex-spouse with a bunch of post-dated letters so the world thinks you are still alive. then your super or pension payments will continue.

Name the worst person you can think of and there will be some of his atoms in you right now. That's how statistics works. As far as not paying for the funeral, if you don't buy a prepaid one, the executor will just charge it to the estate. I bet you would get a better deal with a prepaid. I once reckoned that a sandy-soil paddock at the farm would be fine for funerals, but the red tape is very discouraging. ( My plan was to dispose of the bodies while they held a memorial service elsewhere. I was planning to use an auger to make a vertical hole and charge extra for head first or last)

I hasten to deny haveing any expertise here.... When my mother announced one day about the pre-paid funeral, I was aghast saying that we would be double-crossed for sure. In fact, we never were.

Marty, even when you have paid up-front, you can still be over-ridden after you are dead. In my mother's case, we had an argument at the funeral director's place over religion, which my side won when we found that mother had specifically not ticked the box marked " donations to the clergy". Never was it said that we didn't have the power to make any decision, but I guess that you would have to pay more in the case of a pre-paid funeral. Most funerals are paid for from the estate of the dead person anyway, so it is a convenient way to atone without any direct cost to yourself. As an aside, I will say how the grumpy old funeral director counselled against a priest , this was a surprise to me. He said that unless we personally knew and trusted one, he recommended not employing a priest. He related a couple of bad experiences he had seen.

I was just reading that whenever donations to poor countries happen, then swiss banks etc soon get about 7.5% in secret accounts. I reckon these accounts and those who protect them are legitimate targets. AND I wonder what amount is actually lost in corruption... it would be a multiple of 7.5%, maybe 5 times?

My father-in-law had a medical turn before the plate arrived. I always said that he staged the event to avoid the collection, which he denied. He did, much later, say he didn't want any religious stuff at his funeral. This was disallowed because when you are dead then you are only a bit of property. The funeral director apparently had a deal going with a local priest in Darwin, and the main heir ( great grandma ) was easy to manipulate.

Gosh I'm sorry PMC. I just love the ( old) heidelberg paintings. Thanks for the one-up.