Bruce Tuncks

The young rams that is...

Yipes! I've seen these rubbers on many young rams and they sure hurt.

How about try and find out about him Spacey? He might well be delighted to get in touch again. You have lots of computer skills these days.

Me too nev... I have exactly zero older males in my ancestry to find out what they suffered from. They all died much younger than I am right now. A whole bunch ( well 3) died at 48! Not blood relations as far as I know. I thought that 48 was pretty old at the time, now I think it's real young. My paternal grandfather looked terrible as I remember him.... his face was distorted from being kicked in the head by a horse. He was an ambulanceman in ww1 in france. I imagine he was trying to put a wounded soldier on a horse-dragged litter when the horse was startled by a nearby explosion. He died from what the family said was the effects of poison gas, sometime in the early 1950's. But I can remember how he smoked a lot. He was a great guy and 50 years ahead of his time in his ideas. I credit his genes for my dislike of authority.

Last time I was hit by a roo, it was because I was going too slow! No kidding ! It hit near the rear bumper and if I had been going faster, it would have missed . Their brain is about as big as a small walnut. Apparently it is possible to put some device on so that they can hear you better. Dunno if that is true or not.

Nope PMC. I reckon they look sooo young. But sometimes I see a recent picture of them and, just like me, they are getting old. Remember Elvis? He was older than me and looked it when I was a kid. But now, when I see a pic of him as a young man, I envy him as not having got old. Well the fact is that he did and he died years ago, mainly from ignorance and stupidity I reckon. But even as a mature guy, Elvis looked his age. Not older or younger, but with a good make-up artist that I don't have.

PMC, is not "ded reckoning" a bit redundant in that deduced and reckoning mean the same thing?

Gosh I hope you are correct old K in that Australians have less tolerance of corruption than most .

And, the cheapest electrical way to stay warm is with electrically-heated clothes.

Spacey, you would need at least ten percent more power in than you get out. It would not be economical to try to do that with batteries. I suggest a wood-fired heater. Come to the farm here and there is unlimited firewood for you. Also, in the nearby national park, there is a sign which says that you may collect certain types of firewood for nothing. ( You were talking about 36 kW-h of battery storage ) At 4kW/kg, you would have to burn about ten kg of firewood during the day. At $600 a thousand kg, this is about $6 worth of ( expensive city ) wood.

And OME, your thoughts about distances were echoed at the 1974 world gliding championships at Waikerie . Apparently there is nowhere in the European landscape where you can land a glider and be out of sight of any habitation. Not so here as we all know, and the management worried about the mental health of those Europeans if they were to outland and be out of sight of any farmhouse.

Thanks guys.... I like all your stuff Old K, but you need to convince me more about Montgomery. I read how he was a big reason the glider-borne invasion of Sicily was such a failure. Apparently a lot of pommy officers had much more knowledge of gliders than Montgomery had, but they all failed to make him listen.( They tried, but his little-mans mental problems stopped him listening) In the event, plywood gliders, towed by Dakotas, crashed into Sicily, killing more troops than got out, just as was predicted. Sicily is a hilly little island with small paddocks surrounded by stone fences. It is no place to try and "outland" a heavy glider with a stall speed of near 80 knots, especially on a dark night. Worse, they got towed over an American fleet which had lived through 3 nights of bombing at night. The fleet opened up on the glider-tow operation. Many Dakotas let go their gliders which broke up on hitting the sea. Just how he was given the authority to so stuff up an operation is a big mystery to me.

I like to think that as well as proving that dictatorships are weaker than democracies, this war will show everybody that corruption makes you weaker than you thought. Even in Australia, we have far too much corruption and we are weaker because of it.

And yes, the Australian troops were there to fight evil. So when they saw a truly evil thing, they took action. I reckon they were great and I think their government was ok too.

I don't think those pommy troops were guilty of anything OME. I think their leaders were the guilty ones.

I was impressed at Iceland's efforts in reducing homelessness. They don't try to socialize the people, they just give them a roof over their heads. Yes, the recipients will be ungrateful and make a mess of the place. That is why I advocate special housing for mentally ill people, so that they don't freeze and also they don't just burn down the place for firewood. Alas, as well as the homeless, we have to fight against the woke lot who only want unaffordable stuff for their ungrateful recipients.

You could well be right old K, in that Yamamoto might well have never said that,( about wakening a sleeping giant ) but he sure did the deed. I reckon Yamamoto would have spoken Japanese mainly, and the wakening a sleeping giant is a bit of a European fairy-tale story. And, getting back to generals, I thought Patton was good, Montgomery was bad and Rommel was good. They were all described as failures. Rommel is the one I remember best, he was in reality too much of a cowboy to succeed. I was proud to read that the first defeat of German ground forces in the war was inflicted by Australians in Libya, Tobruk I think. What made me proud is how the Germans were surprised at how the troops kept fighting even when their officers were killed.

There is a Len Deighton book about the ww2 generals.... They all were failures, except the one who was in charge of US war supplies, and we don't even know his name. Thousands of bombers arrived complete with crews at the right time! Nobody else came near.

I looked up the numbers.... The french were by far the worst with 600 killed. Then came the poms and the Germans ( 48 ) followed by the Belgians (13) , the Canadians ( 23) and the New Zealanders. In the last 2 countries, the men have been given a belated apology. The youngest known killed was a pommy 16 year-old who had been the sole surviver of his group. Not one Australian or American. It sure is interesting that one of the reasons the war ended when it did was because the French army refused to attack ( Aprez-vous, mon general") was their thing, which became known to us us 1950's schoolkids as the "french mutiny ", spoken of in hushed tones by fat teachers . ( I also looked up PTSD and found that it was known of since the Greeks, over 2000years ago.)

Maybe I have anti-authority genes. If so, I got them from my WW1 grandfather, who was among a lot of "trouble making, undisciplined australians" who attacked a group of pommy MP's. ( The MP's had been taking it in turns to bash a tied-up pommy soldier ) Well the Australians left the pommy MP's unconscious, and every second war telegram to Australia consisted of whinging about our troops doing such things. ( How can we enjoy our lovely war with your savage and undisciplined troops mucking it up?) So I have Breaker Morant to thank for being born, because in the aftermath of his ( Breaker's ) execution by the poms, the Australian govt decided that henceforth no Australians could be killed by pommy court-martials. In ww1, lots of pommy troops were killed by their own side, I don't think any Australian was. This is pretty impressive when you consider that the world was about 50 years away from discovering PTSD.

I reckon Pearl Harbor was a bit sad. The Germans wanted the Japanese to attack Russia from the East, not wake a sleeping giant. Mind you, the Germans had succumbed to their own propaganda and believed that the US was impotent from being run by Jews. There is a great story about the German's best spy in the US. He finally( I think at the cost of his life ) got accurate US war production figures to Hitler. Unfortunately for the spy, Hitler just laughted at these "impossible" figures.

How about a test with a driving simulator? This would if done properly, reduce the test to a simple score.

Yep, Old K. There was a picture theatre in Alice Springs ( the Capitol) which was often catching fire. It was in Hartley street just near the old school. One time, the story was that 2 fire engines coming from different directions had a head-on at the fire. I am only repeating heresay here, but the projection box sure was blackened.

Onetrack, I think you are a better source than me.... I'm starting to think it was maybe a Field Marshall tractor.... did this have a single-cylinder 4 stroke engine?

It doesn't make sense to me that Melitipol is about to be abandoned by Russia. This town is near the shores of the sea of Azov, and is clearly of great strategic importance.