rain

In the olden days if you wanted to know what the weather was going to do, you'd listen to the radio and after about 5 months they would report whatever Lennox Walker said it was going to do.

Now you sit glued to the pooter monitor watching the Bureau of Meteorology website. Some times this is exciting, like when you are watching a big storm come over. Once we were watching a big storm come over and then there was a big bang quite close outside, and then the screen went black along with, it must be said, the rest of the insides of the computer, the cordless phone and a number of other eeee-lectrical appliances.

That was in the days when our part of Brisbane used to get storms. After a while we noticed we weren't getting as many and it became quite safe to watch the BOM website, secure in the knowledge that, inevitably, any big yellowy-red-rendered storm would bifurcate perfectly about a kilometre away and miss us entirely.

This is also true of our little corner of sunny Capricornia. It rains in Mackay, it rains over Shoalwater Bay, it rains over Gladstone, it pisses down over the Sunshine Coast but any random blobs of blue coming our way do the bifurcation boogie just the other side of Keppel and we get none.

What a bummer.

When I was at school we had to study Shakespeare and stuff. I don't recall us ever studying any contemporary literature, but that said I don't recall lots of things from school. Now of course the kiddy-winks get their heads stuffed with whatever flavour-of-the-month politically correct garbage the relevant State Teacher's Union deems fit to include.

Anyway it doesn't matter because you can go on the internet and find things like this. Sheer brilliance, not to mention hilarious, it gives you the shits that other peoples can write so good.

Found via Phillip CHallinor, who will bear watching as the UK elections draw near. He has a low tolerance of chicanery, he also seems to have more than one man's fair share of chicanery of which to be intolerant.

one world

You'll get "hours of fun reading the comments. The Trilateral Commission, the Jews, take away our guns at your peril, socialists in Canada, Obamascare, the Second Amendment, you only get true reporting in Britain, communists, bring back Joe McCarthy, the smell of sulfur (sic), the Second Revolution...

Looks like 2010 is going to be a waaaay baaaad year.

Courtesy of the ever-reliable sPeak you're bRanes.

(not) leaving on a jet plane

There 's been a lot of snow and ice and generally cold stuff in the Northern hemisphere recently. Not entirely surprising as it is the winter season. But the stupendousness of the degree of cold and amounts of snow and icy stuff has played merry hell with transport systems including trains, planes and automobiles.

On the news the other night they were telling us all about this - it is news after all - and there were interviews with seriously inconvenienced travellers on both sides of the Atlantic, people who were travelling to be with family and friends at Christmas and weren't going to make it in time or at all, at all.

The interviews were enlightening for those who, like yer estimable correspondent here, just lurrve to jump to stereotypical conclusions.

The Yanks interviewed were philosophical and some could even laugh a bit about it. On the other hand (or side of the Atlantic I suppose, for consistency), the Poms without exception whinged, and whined, and moaned, and bleated, and "the gummint should do summat about it" and "where's me compensation?" and on and on and on and on.

Do we still let them in here or is it only bomb-toting reffos who get a guernsey?

reeling in the years

So I'm thinking that we need to do a post, get back in the swing, you know.


The lack of posts has been the consequence of a couple of factors, including lots of work travel and also - probably of more import - a lack of inspiration.


I wonder whether anyone's done a carbon/pixel/heart attack count of the blogging over the non-event that was - eventually - COP15 at Copenhagen. You can just imagine them, can't you, banging away at their keyboards late at night, early in the morning, during the day when they were meant to be working, about how it was such a limp-dicked excuse for meaningful effort to combat climate change, or alternatively it is all just a resumption of teh left's desire for a collective State to reign over us in place of the poor excuse for representative democracy we have now, depending of course on where you happen to be.


VVB used to be driven by a loathing of John Howard so visceral, so elemental that if I'd been able to write better, do more research, actually concoct a rational argument, this might have been a successful blog. But...


Not sure where that last bit came from, it never appeared likely in the slightest.


Anyway with the workload not declining and spending a lot of time on the road away from even reading blogs and similar sources of bile and opinion, yet again the urge to blog has ebbed.


You get things that might induce a short post. Such as what is it about soccer that provokes levels of violence not associated with other codes of football. Even when it appears - and here I don't know as I don't follow the game - that the teams involved are not immediately associated with ethnic groups who used to provide the


(3 days later)


the what? damn good question. That and a

(2 days later again)

It's Christmas Eve and all around us are doing what people do on Christmas Eve which is, of course, blog.

I thought of something really good to blog about while Mrs VVB and I were wending (what is that wending stuff - I've never done it knowingly but it just jumped off the keyboard) our way home, but by the time I'd got home and had a little lie down it had utterly disparu.

Anyway Merry Christmas to all deluded souls who pass by here and I promise that 2010 will be another year.

Although in what way, I cannot foretell.

30 odd foot of grunts

Here comes another one...

Here it comes again...

Here comes another one....

When will it ever end?

it's wonderful wonderful

Some teasers:

I got a beef with Jay cos I don't know what his game is / Sucka says that Updike blows when compared with Martin Amis.

GO GO GADGET GONADS!

Now go here and I doubt you'll be back.

holiday

Look, you've probably noticed already but there's nothing going on here and, on current indications, this will remain the dominant paradigm until I retire in 6 or 7 years' time.

Or have a holiday.

In the meantime America will default on its debts, the Chinese will buy us, Christmas Island will sink under the weight of too many (evidently overfed) Sri Lankans and the West Indies may just, just purloin the Sir Frank Worrall Trophy.

There's nothing much in all of this except that I honestly don't think I've ever used the word "purloin" before.

It did make me feel all warm.

Oh no, that's the temperature doing that.

history never repeats

But one thing that you can bet will be repeated until your eardrums turn to something probably resembling licorice:

"Labor's gigantic big new tax."

You didn't hear that here first, either.

In the past I've kind of banged on about why government by targets supported by bureaucratic sausage machines doesn't work. I've noted that Blair introduced it with a vengeance in the UK, it didn't work, and of course that nice Mr Rudd is doing the same thing here, where the result will - unsurprisingly - be similar.

Today someone asked me did I "do the math" or "do the maths." I said that when I went to school, I studied mathematics, not mathematic.

Well, actually "studied" is not the completely accurate term. John McGee, you did well as a maths teacher. You taught both of them.

Vis-a-vis the introduction of more Americanisms into our lingua franca, something else has got up my throat recently but it's been dislodged. I think because I came to the conclusion that I, too, had allowed the cultural hegemon to slide a few of its popularly accepted neologisms into my cranial cavity.

Cavity being the operative word.

I'm now quite tired and am going to (a) pack for yet another trip and then (b) have a good lie down.

Good night, Mr Abbott. You just stay away from that naughty 'Cardinal' Pell.