Bruce Tuncks

I'm one of your lot Octave. One day my son rang and said how he was leaving Alice Springs and " Could I buy him a farm?". Of course I said "of course". He sure has more money than me these days and that is fine by me. I worry about the wife though. Since we sold our old house in Adelaide, she has too much money to spend... oh well, say I.

My gripe is not against happy families, it is against courts which are often biased against the blokes. A bloke I knew well had his wife leave him and take the kids. He paid her for half their house at the time. She recently threatened to sue for another lot of money, and he is still paying ( after 20 years) for a kid who has become a professional student. In addition, he is paying, for the second time, for his house. Yes, he did trust her too much the first time around. A Daughter-in-law ( defacto) was asked by her auntie" If you were to leave him now, what would you get? This made me wonder how many times you need to sleep with a guy to get half his property. I do know a great catch of a guy who in my opinion has missed out in life from being too cautious and having too much money. He has never been married .

I reckon that sex dolls are much cheaper than the girl ones. Even 20,000 dollars is peanuts in comparison to supporting a woman plus her offspring. And there are versions with built-in heaters so you get your bed warmed in winter. ( I'm speaking from adverts here, the wife wouldn't let me have one I know. What about her old age? Do you poms have to support her then too? I have to say that I was horrified at how the wife on that doctor in the seaside village pommy show ( Doc Martin I think ) could act irresponsibly with "her" kid and with the support of the government. On another tack, I always thought that if you could prove the kids were not yours, then you would be off the hook. Is the true father getting off scot free because of this? It is the family court system, plus the lack of expenditure on men's health, which makes you realize that there is discrimination at work here. I once read that the female child is at much more risk from the mum's new boyfriend than the biological father, but custody seems to always be awarded to the women.

What mechanism is there for fatigue with a carbon-fiber structure? I understand the mechanism for metal structures but carbon-fiber is quite a different material.

I thought that in SA they passed a law which made it an offense to have traffic restrictions up unnecessarily. But I saw zero evidence of this law working the last time I was there.

Hermannsburg used to be in my backyard. But the airstrip is overgrown now since cars got so good with airconditioning etc. If you ever see the picture of a Conellan's dragon rapide which crashed there on take-off, I would appreciate a copy. I reckon it shows that the rapide just cleared the fence but not the trees nearby but it did not catch fire and so there were possibly no fatalities. I always assumed that the crash was caused by the high density altitude coupled with the low power of 2 gypsy engines. This was all because Menzies was an anglophile and he wouldn't let connellan's buy beechcraft. My memory might well be faulty. I think it ( the pic) was in the "centralian advocate" because my first job in life was folding the paper as it came off the press, but this may be wrong. ps... I was aware of the restrictions surrounding the place as well as the royalties but I didn't know about the toll road.

I do think that people who identify as aborigines get thousands of dollars more a year than white welfare types . Tucker money, kid money, royalty money, free housing, and I didn't know about dog money. There would be more, for example rent money from the commercial properties owned by aboriginal corporations. I have no incentive to add it all up, but it amounts to a lot. Preferential treatment for covid vaccinations is on lots of notices right now, and preferential treatment for university enrollment is just another example. Why, I ask you, do people with plainly white skin identify as aboriginal? I suggest for the money.

Actually, Marty, there are next to none who do well enough at school to even get to the year 12 grade... when I last discussed this here, I was told that it was racist and, furthermore, an aborigine had just graduated medicine in WA. I looked her up, and she turned out to be a blonde white woman. This was when I discovered how much difference there could be between a "legal" aborigine and a black. This woman had been briefly fostered by a part-aborigine family and this was the basis of her getting "indigenous" treatment. My mistake was that I thought that aborigines were blackfellows. When I was at school, I well remember how the % of aborigines dropped as the years advanced. There were none in HS year 10 for example, but in grade 5 primary school, the second to top kid was part maori and part aborigine and part white. He was good-looking and good at footy and smart at schoolwork. ( He subsequently died young of alcohol-poisoning, which was a great waste ).( the top kid was a white nerdy guy who was not even chosen to play footy) I have a niece who has just enough aboriginal blood to apply for extra treatment, but she was way too lazy to study hard and became an assistant to architects . I sure tried to tell her to apply for medicine. Why, I wonder, is this so? Maybe if you have a short time-horizon, its too easy to not work hard this year?

Marty, there are thousands of gp's who bulk-bill more than a million apiece. The material is not secret, you can google it up but have to do some detective work to fish out the figures. Now my wife says that they have to pay out lots so they get nothing much left..... total BS, say I. A similar thing to when John Howard sold Australia's natural gas... I was one of the few who calculated it was at 5 cents per liter. The figures were obfuscated in millions per petajoule or something like that. ( I don't think that Johnny was a bad guy, but I thought him a fool. I think he honestly thought there was infinite gas in Australia) He sold 50 years worth to China I think. If you google up starting medical salaries, you will get about $400,000 per year. I was once on a no-account committee for attracting students to the university of Adelaide. We could have filled the medical faculty several times over with straight "A" students but were prevented from doing so by the feds, who at the time erroneously thought that every graduate from medicine would cost the feds a million a year. So they worked on reducing the number of graduates, and this sure put up the salaries. A specialist gets about 3 million a year. Have you ever noticed the Sattlers and Vogues in their waiting-rooms? These are the cast-offs from their wives. There is quite a competition among air-head nurses to snag a wannabe specialist. Yes, there is a bit of empty jealousy here. I erroneously thought at the time that computers would de-skill the job and reduce the salaries.Well this might still happen, but it hasn't yet.Mind you, my gp uses a computer all the time and I like it. Surprisingly, the medical course is not that hard to pass, but it is hard to get into... so being aboriginal sure would help.

Yes Marty, but you can look it up too. For example, entry to medicine is much easier if you are black. ( million dollar salary for life ) Then there are several royalty payments. A few grand a year for doing nothing would be nice I reckon. Then there is the much easier and earlier vaccinations.I have to wait much longer because I don't claim aboriginality. A person I knew at the time was a teller in Alice Springs at a bank, and she told me that $5000 per month was the total of the tape for black families. ( A senior nurse in the same place told me that the injuries suffered by abo women were terrible and they had no avenue of complaint ). I read that the dietary problems the local indigenous suffered came under the category of " affluent malnutrition" and this is my observation too. Personally, I feel sorry for them and whenever I see a sign which says " do not feed the animals because it makes them dependent" I worry that the citizens of the remote settlements will starve when the wheels come off the whitefeller gravy-train they are living on. Every week a road-train full of groceries arrives, and the inmates use the remnants of their $5000 to buy stuff. ( remmnants because the bulk of the money bought grog) . They sure need more tough love but nobody seems to care, especially the woke lot.

I agree OME. Last time I was told off by a cop, I was in awe of his uniform which was just magnificent. As was his motorbike.

I notice Jacinda Price is described as "celtic- abo. Guess what she should identify as to maximise her income?

I still prefer a dna test if you have to decide before paying them lots of money. But I accept that the current definition is also ok, provided it is done properly. If you have a real community of blackfellows, then it would be ok, but if you only have a bunch of fat woke ladies, then no.

If they want "reparations", what of the recent immigrants? What of the recent non-white immigrants? What about those who never got any benefits from whites taking over the land? What about the value of monies already paid out? It's all to hard I reckon. But if you can claim aboriginal benefits by just declaring yourself to be aboriginal, then we all should make that claim.

I reckon that this is an objective question with a definite answer. An Aborigine is a person with more than 50% Aboriginal DNA. It is NOT a person who has ticked a box on a form, anymore than a male can claim to be a female. We are seeing some terrible sabotage brought about by the "woke" fools who would say that you can identify yourself as an Aborigine or a female and thus make it legal. They are doing the true Aboriginal a lot of harm, just as they are doing women's sport a lot of harm.

I liked hearing about how the poms are more civilized than we are here in Australia. When I was there ( only 3 days I admit ), I especially liked the polite signs " Please do not park here" etc. So keep it up Jerry, you might even make me a monarchist but I doubt it.

I reckon the absence of tombs etc in the great pyramid only goes to show that it really was stupid to "hide" treasure in a structure which is so plainly visible that you can see it for miles. The pharoah must have foolishly believed that the organization of the state would continue for a very long time, and his tomb would be protected. We see something similar in those rich people who are paying big bucks to be frozen with liquid nitrogen. I'll look into the ley lines, but I have to say that it's hard to see how aliens that have navigated to this planet would need them. ( the "pale blue dot" pic shows just how small this planet is in the immensity of space.) Hey, I just saw a new idea which is that the UFO's come from the multiverse! Wow !

Oops... it was not imhotep, he died way before they build the great pyramid.

Yes, the internet has led to some amazing things. And a couple of my misconceptions have been found to be wrong... for example, I was once told that GB produced more grain than Australia, and I believed it even if it was counter-intuitive. The actual figures show that Australia produces more. I am sure you are right OME about literacy in the ancient days. That graffiti quoted was written by foremen types though, and not ordinary workers. And the main engineer of the great pyramid ( Imhotep) had the back of the door and the wall it covered full of stuff about what a good guy Imhotep was. ( these doors were never closed till the king died apparently, or Imhotep would have been killed for this )

Old K, I don't agree that the ancients could do anything better than we can today, and there is a big difference between setting off in a dugout aiming at a seen island and setting off on a featureless sea. I well remember a guy called Von Daniken, who wrote a book called "chariots of the gods" while in jail for fraud. I was still in the workforce at the time. It was full of complete nonsense, and I had some fun debunking it. Especially the pyramids of Egypt, which ( in real life ) are complete with graffiti like "charlies gang are slower than fred's gang" ( pardon the terrible translation from the hieroglyphs ). Strangely, this graffiti was not mentioned in Von Daniken's book. Nor was the tilt of the pyramid levels, nor was the traces of clay found between the main building blocks. In particular, it was not explained why "beings" who had mastered space flight, would help build such a stupid thing.

how come there are so many tasmanian abos anyway? I thought they were extinct.

Thx, OME. On the subject of truck drivers, I will take your advice about the coroner. Is there anywhere else I can write to? The police? the pollies? On the subject of buses, I had dinner with the drivers recently and they said that the new buses had a recorder but the older one they had been driving did not. I reckon Spacey is wrong in that I would be less tempted to speed if I knew it was going to be noticed. Maybe the thought about getting into trouble for being late would make a difference, but I reckon that even then the proof of breaking the law would slow me down.

The only "backwards" story I know is the Tasmanian abos. Their forebears could sew animal skins and attach stones to branches to make axes.... when europeans arrived, both these things had been forgotten. It is thought that the whole older generation died off and did not pass on any learned skills to the kids. Perhaps they ate poison algae in fish, a notion which would explain the present-day phobia against eating fish.

You are right Old K. What I should have said is that the sea level was so low that primitive boats ( like dugouts ) could easily have made the trip. I reckon it's much bigger and deeper now. But not as deep as its gunna get, apparently the sea might go up several more meters.

Getting back to flat-earths Nev, I reckon that when you looked at an eclipse then you already had a particular cosmology in mind and you saw the evidence reinforcing this. Mind you, I can't think of anything sillier than the idea of a flat earth. There must be some money in somehow pretending to believe this stuff, but buggered if I can see how.