Bruce Tuncks

I too love the stony desert parts. So much so, that I reckon they made a terrible mistake with the ghan timetable. You hang around all day in Alice Springs and miss out much of the landscape during the night. My supposition is that some townie executives reckoned the tourists would get bored watching the landscape as it slowly changed. I reckon they were dead wrong. Last time , years ago, in Alice Springs I found that I had sold a house there too cheaply. It cost $61,000 to buy a fire-damaged house and $35,000 to fix it. we only asked for $155,000 which seems like a good profit but don't forget this took 2 people 3 month's work. Anyway, the couple we sold it to had a divorce and it was sold for $300,000 ! And here was me saying how Alice Springs would be stuffed when it became a whistle-stop instead of a terminus! My advice is to NOT take any real-estate advice from me!

I knew a guy who was a vegan, and he was crazy! BUT i also knew him before he was a vegan and he was crazy then too... bugger, this proves nothing.

Ive gotta say that since I've got to know some old farmers, gosh I am impressed at how smart they are/were. It was quite difficult to stay on the land with the awful prices in the 90's. As you imply, there is nothing much to do with formal education involved here. I bet that Donald Trump had any university degrees he wanted bought for him. So much for formal education huh, although sometimes I detect an inverted snobbery where people think that they know more than they do, and that is more common among those without formal education. Once, I had an argument ( I backed off real fast ) with a "self educated" maintenance guy about the meaning of the word "torque" and he was wrong but it didn't really matter. He knew how to use the wrenches. What annoyed me the most though was knowing that he would be considered right by the RAAus.

I reckon an educated person would read a bible fully, analyse it, and reason it.

On another site, there are lots of discussions with theists. But they ( the theists ) seem to be poorly educated compared with the atheists. Is this always true, or is the other site an anomaly?

Gosh OME, I never knew they were so antique. I thought better of those romans... But I do know about why there are 7 days in a week and why they have Viking god names, well in English they do. The thing that impressed me the most is how interested most kids are and how we were never told in school.

Wood is like fish.... 100 years ago things were much better than now. My gran used to buy crayfish on sat night, and they were big and cheap. I was amazed when studying the endeavor replica , at how they used natural curves in the tree to help build the boat. We have sure lost a lot with our insane desire for population growth.

That's sad OME. I reckon we should be much better at not reelecting lazy people, but we don't do anything of the sort. This is being written from the safest National party seat in the country, and I don't think our local member is under any pressure at all to perform for her constituents.

I really don't understand why one side doesn't do proper anti-corruption things and then accuse the other side with being the corruption supporters.

The Innaminka pic and the first one with the water reminded me of how you found out if the water was too deep to drive thru... you first send your woman to walk it. If she disappears, then you don't drive in.

read = "red" when it is past tense? is that what the kid is saying? I completely agree with the Japanese idea that the proposed immigrant should be fluent in the local language. And while I dunno for sure, I reckon English would be easier for an arab ( for example ) to learn.

That's obviously true, OME, but I say so what! Of course we went through some bottlenecks, or else we would not have evolved. Nowadays, it would be very hard for any real improvement ( eg smarter) to make an impact on the population, there are just so many of us around. What is going to be really interesting will be to find other life, particularly if it has never been related to us. Mind you, I reckon that mars, for example, is too close to the earth for genuine quarantine to have worked, so we will need to wait for real exo-planet stuff I guess. ( I am only thinking of bacteria here , although little green men would be wonderful.)

I sure agree about the need for transparency when swapping workers from govt to contract. We will not make much progress against corruption without more transparency and protection for whistle-blowers. BUT australia has at last moved up in the anti-corruption stakes. I reckon though that we will need to do a LOT more .

I didn't like what the AFL did about the Clarkson affair. I reckon that he was so honestly non-racist that he reckoned all his players should be prepared to die for the ball, and that skin color had nothing to do with anything. BUT, I really like how they don't wear helmets and so I reckon they need to be especially hard on players hitting an opponent on the head.

At Edenhope, there was actually a "buildings inspector" who was insane. The council CEO told me that they had no choice in the matter, in that they had a statutory obligation to provide the "service" and that he was the only qualified applicant. Once he dismissed a footing ( 90cm diameter was specified) because they had built a 90cm square footing. But when he dismissed a fire-proofing job on a wall ( 3m width specified ) because he wanted the whole wall fire-proofed, he was taken to court by the owners who were bankrolled by the COUNCIL. Yep, they paid the costs of some people to sue their own employee. I personally refused to deal with him after finding that he really thought that his "approval" meant that he liked the thing, and not that it obeyed the regulations.

BUT I do like Spacy's point ( that public servants should be held to a high standard ) even if he didn't say exactly that, that is what I understood and agree with.

Interesting I reckon how the value of the missiles compares with the value of the repair job. I would think it was smarter to wait for the first bit of damage to be under repair before hitting it again, then you could kill some repairmen and that adds to the value of the strike. Nasty calculations huh.

In defence of my opinion about "horse husbandry", I was at a place which introduced such a thing as an associate diploma. The girls ( yep, they all were girls) were referred to as the "horse tarts'". I was told by one student guy that if you needed a release, you started by knocking on their first door that night. When it was put to him that you could surely get to the last door, he reacted with surprise... it had never occurred to him that this was possible. On another occasion, I went past a classroom in riot... the poor lecturer had tried to explain how Pythagoras could be used to help set out shed footings. The girls didn't want to hear such high-mathematics rubbish! Yes, maybe as a degree they would have been better, but the numbers of enrolees would not have been there. Personally, I regard the whole thing as a scam on the taxpayer and it sure destroyed my socialist ideas of free higher education being a good thing. I reckon that free stuff should be restricted to the top 10% of students. We were close to this in the 50's and 60's, with Commonwealth scholarships.

Have you noticed its hard to buy imperial drills at Bunnings these days? And as for nuts n bolts, the proper imperial ones are getting harder too. I would like to buy a kit containing all the nuts n bolts that Jabiru use in their 230. I sent an email to Jabiru but alas they didn't reply. Gosh it's hard to buy bolts because you need to know the grip length first. I quite understand Bunnings telling their guys to forget imperial stuff.

There are too many "micky mouse" courses around these days. Training kids for non-existent jobs with no regard to their ability or interest in studying. We finish up with undermining the high-schools and wasting taxpayer's money on rubbish. "Horse husbandry" comes to mind here. BUT there are some courses that are not like that at all, and we should not restrict those courses to the rich. Dentistry comes to mind here.

There are some sports which clearly don't need a commonwealth games.... Swimming, for example, has the world championships. Soccer, cricket and a lot of others. I reckon the best thing that happened in South Australia was when the Elizabeth Aquadome was built to deliberately exclude top-line sports and therefore make the thing available to ordinary folk. ( Make no mistake here... elite sports practice excludes the public for weeks at a time ) . So far, they have not fallen too much for woke nonsense, like the idea of excluding men so that moslem women can please their god or their menfolk, better. So maybe we should be supportive of Dan's move .

I'm with Octave here. And, I still don't understand why the games can't be given to a grumpy old man who has to work within a fixed budget. Most of the contributers to this site would be fine. Maybe, in an act of madness, Victoria agreed that hosting the games meant giving away financial control to some committee of foreigners?

I agree with old K here, except that once in Brisbane ( Morayfield) we were sitting under the verandah when a kooka came for refuge. The kooka plainly decided that the people were less of a risk than the magpies who were after him/her. I have since noticed that magpies are the bitter enemies of kookas.

Apparently we were supposed to metricate in 1974! Yet here I am, in 2023, still thinking that my tyres require 35psi. I hate kilopascals. But, having assembled a Jabiru, I feel sorry for the yanks that they are stuck with such an archaic system... apparently they still have roods, whatever they may be.

Ono! Here's me thinking that Facthunter was really a 14 year-old girl pretending to be a grumpy old pilot, now I have to worry that he is an AI !!