watching the wheels go round and round

In a sign that Straya Day is just around the corner, today I saw my first car sporting its brand new, made in China, Aussie flag. Inhabitants - perhaps denizens is closer to the mark - of the car were four very large young men, tattoos very visible, dark sunglasses and a set to their mouths that indicated a little thuggery would liven up their day immeasurably.

And the Council wants us to go down to the beach to celebrate Australia Day, when the pub directly across the street closes its carpark to accommodate the queues for the bar. Last year was bloody frightening, to be honest.

I'm relieved that at last some notable Australians, who tend to get listened to seriously, are speaking up that the trend of lots of youths wearing the flag as an invitation to violence is not really what Australia Day should be about. The question is, how many years will it take to reverse the trend?

Meanwhile, the Democrats have lost the traditional seat of Massachusetts, previously owned by the Kennedy dynasty or, later in the evening, the Bee Gees. What this means is that the wheels have fallen off the communist, socialist, leftard takeover of the United States by B. Hussein Obama and we can expect his party - who like all communists, socialists and leftards are weak, spineless, traitors - will be running back to Iraq, Kenya, Indonesia or wherever the hell they came from, pdq. After which all will be well with the world because the filibuster will be reinstated. A filibuster is what I used to call it when I fell off my bicycle.

OK, you can stop laughing now.

In the UK, previously British owned Cadburys has been bought by US firm Kraft which means that its next product, the iChocolate, can only be months away. Thousands of good upstanding British citizens will lose their jobs specifically because someone said they wouldn't, and they'll be replaced by illegal immigrants from Islamia. The Times has all the commentary.

Finally, a nice young man visited us but people had to call him Your Most Extremely Extremeness, because that's what he is. His mother claimed to be the Queen of Hearts (tm), although I could have sworn that was Juice Newton. The only downside is the thousands of forests that had to be cut down to report on his extremelitude in the newspapers, and the coal that had to dug up and burnt to power the proverbial packetloads of pixels to those who are internetically energized, information-wise.

So that's all. Going forward, I forecast fewer blogposts and more meditation, including regular breathing. The political class have emerged from their summer hideaways to engage in their meaningless, forest-devouring, coal-munching, pixel creating twitter (not tm in this case). According to the PM, provided about 357,000 assumptions hold true, we'll all be $16,000 better off in 2060.

The PM also noted that we will be older but in fact, regrettably, many of us will in fact be deceased and I want to know what he's going to do about it.

in the mood

Some x months ago I would do a Friday night post featuring a YouTube clip of some band or song I really like or I thought was appropriate to a Friday mood.

Some y years before that I would occasionally do a post on one of the many cars that I have owned over the years, using as a motif the 1/43 scale model of that car from my 'collection.'

Now I don't do nothin'. Two weeks back at work - the first was great, whereas at about 9.10 am this last Monday I raised my voice (I think for the first time in the two and a bit years I've been here) and then punched a 4-drawer cabinet (definitely the first time).

Yes, we're back in the swing (insert YouTube clip of Sparks here, or not, depending on whether I can be bothered, no, I couldn't as you will have seen by now).

I'm still spending the odd angry hour trawling the comments threads of stories in the Times, because these provide the backdrop to the mood of the British nation as it heads into the general election which I suspect may be the major political story of the year. It'll put Kevin10 to shame.

But there's not much else to say, so I won't. I'm not in the mood and, as I've observed before, there's plenty of others who do it better if you really want to engage.

But some of this stuff will surely get you wondering.

The diversity of human...well, it's not really undertaking, is it?

woke up this mornin' (repeat)

What on earth, I wondered, was a "monkey woman"?

Learn the answer, and also learn a bit about pork.

Sounds like a rattling good read.

norwegian wood

Company name sign on a ute belonging to a tree lopping firm:

"Hugh Wood"

You wouldn't read about it, would you.

Would you?

baby don't speak no evil

Extract from an article in a journal I was reading yesterday:

Cloud computing is made possible by new technologies for virtualising
applications from hardware so they can scale, by architecting applications as standardised multi-tenant web services, by engineering for massive scale and by simplifying the way users access applications using the internet.

I was relieved to see that Blogger's spell check, which I usually find pretty useless (for example, it doesn't give me anything useable at my usual mistyping of 'start' as 'strat'), at least found itself flummoxed by 'virtualising' and (oh yes) 'architecting.' That said, I was somewhat surprised to see that spell check did not recognise 'internet', although, given that this is a blogging tool, maybe it was looking for 'intertubez.'

No, it doesn't like that either.

Anyway, back to the article. I imagine that a time-honoured way for the IT profession to gouge fees, where there aren't fees to be gouged, is to write their proposals, reports and recommendations in something approaching Klingon in the hope that management will be impressed. Or, more likely, that no-one in management will have the fortitude to admit that they don't understand what is being put to them.

Well, that's my theory (my other one is about dinosaurs).

Disclosure

(Whispers) Actually, it's not mine at all.

(Tee hee.)

(*)

Oh, and go here and here to read some interesting comments threads. The UK will be the place to watch this year. I've commented previously that the Brit papers (mainly) do comments better than here, although the stab 'em and throw away the key brigade can be found out in force elsewhere, and parodied to within an inch of their lives at speek yer brrrranes.

But the UK election will put the Rudd/Abbott megacagefightshowdown ofthedecade (that's provided the decade has actually started, of course) in the shade, I reckon.

* I promise never to write 'tee hee' in a post ever again, at all.

living in a child's dream

John W. wrote:
Why is it you so called ozzies try to upset people who are not annoying you?It shows a lack of brain power & comprehension about how a Nation shouldexhibit itself to the World. I'm pretty sure the rest of the World will be again reminded how really childish Australia is. Shame you have'nt grown up like the rest of us...Grow Up!!!

Some of the other comments are crackers, too. However I am bemused by this "so-called ozzies" comment. What would we be otherwise? What about "so-called brits?"

Anyway, I'm digging a big hole in the backyard, at bottom of which I will find either coal, bananas, or China.

Oggie oggie oggie - which is in fact what it used to be even here, when I was (not) growing up.

Hoo roo.

shout

All right. We are now in the teenies, having more or less successfully negotiated the noughties. And as it's New Year's Day, we have to make some resolutions. I'm not sure if there's a rule that you have to, for example, make resolutions before midday (oh no! too late!) or nanna-nap time (coming up soon), sort of like how practical jokes have to be performed (*) before midday on April first.

(*) Do you perform practical jokes or is there some more appropriate verb?

Anyway as we are not unduly hungover and cannot find evidence of any such rule (having cast quickly about the room for clues, no, no posters on the wall or similar) then let us, without too much further ado, make some resolutions. Are we sitting comfortably? If not, buy a new computer chair like we did back in the noughties. Let us begin. No, now.

1. Remember to breathe.
2. Breathe more deeply and slowly.
3. While we are breathing more deeply and slowly, try not to shout at the television as much.
4. Keep breathing.
5. Try to realise that not all other motorists are as stupid and incompetent as they appear, so don't shout at them either.
6. Review resolution No 5 regularly, as I don't believe it is soundly based.
7. Don't shout at the inutterably stupid letters and SMSs in the newspapers.
8. Try to be calmer - slow, deep, regular breathing is said to an aid to this.
9. Work on upper body strength, all the while remembering to breathe.
10. Remember that just because somebody writes something, it doesn't mean it's either true or makes sense. Particularly anything that starts with "all right-thinking people" or "it's just common sense" or anything attributed to any established religion (particularly religions with a financial improvement fixation, whether for their adherents or themselves).
11. Actually, try to stop shouting all the time.
12. Practise the piano.
13. If this doesn't work, practise playing the piano.
14. And the guitar.
15. Continue discovering that playing the piano or the guitar seems to slow the breathing and the blood pressure and you can't shout at things while practising.
16. Remember that if you are, for example, going to play the guitar for people who, just for example, happen to be at your house for a New Year's Eve party, then it makes good sense not to do this after you've reached the point of intoxication where you, just to pick an example at random, forget the words.
17. Try to write better blog posts.
18. For example, don't continue to be so inextricably literal.
19. Work on whole sentence structure, not just randomly used words to create an impression.
20. Don't be so competitive, it's not a race.
21. Review resolution no 20 regularly, as I don't believe it is soundly based.
22. Keep breathing.
23. And don't shout so much.

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.

i am a rock

"I am an iiiiiiiiiiiiii-iiiiiiiii-aaaaaa-land."

I'm sorry, I have to cave in, I cannot be a rock, or an island, while all this....stuff....is going on.

I've read more rubbish over the past few days than I ever thought I could stomach.

Mind you, once I'd started wading through this lot of comments, I wish I could have turned back time.

So, setting aside - conveniently - that the CPRS, as designed, is indeed a dog's breakfast, we have, variously:

"It's a big new TAX."

Well, no, actually it creates a market. In this case a tax would, in fact, probably be a preferable instrument at least in the short term. But market-based instruments is how we've been doing structural economic reform for some time now.

"It's a big new MARKET that doesn't need to exist."

Like I just said, this is the mechanism that governments of all stripes now prefer. Mind you, it will get rorted by the financial services industry sooner or later. That's why we have markets and a financial services industry.

"These millions of dollars will go to the UN."

Umm, well actually, no.

"It's a gigantic communist plot."

I think the only genuine Commos left are in Cuba, so probably not, actually.

"It'll force us to accept more government interference in our lives."

Well, no. Or alternatively, indirectly, yes because that's what structural reform does until the economy reaches a new equilibrium.

And as for something I read somewhere t'other day from a Liberal Party parliamentarian that a majority of Party the branches recently voted against the ETS so the Bill needs to be dropped...since when did Liberal Party branches vote in general elections?

Y'know...just askin'?

Too much fun.

gold

No, platinum.

I have raised over $1000 for Movember. I get a free pressie and a mention in dispatches (although re: the aforementioned issue of dispatches. the MoFolks do not reveal from whence to whom).

Anyway I am quite chuffed and I have learnt a valuable lesson, namely: when fundraising, if you wish to be successful, it helps to have mega chutzpah and no shame.

I will carry this lesson into real life.

Oh, I'm already there.

Well, can that idea then.

goodbye blackberry way

Well here are back from 'holidays.' Let me coin a new old truism: "When you have a BlackBerry (R)(tm)(etc), you're never alone."

Also, it's when you go away that everything happens.

By about day 8 I felt like I'd started to relax, but by then we were safely ensconced back at VVBSea.

Also, why you'd pay to go and overlook the sea when you do so for free at (well, except for rates) at home is probably a very, very good question. It was a darker, deeper sea with bigger waves so I suppose that's why.

Here at VVB, to the best of my recollection, we let the US election, including the whole Sarah Palin phenomenon, pass by without comment as any comment from here would have made superfluous look like a tautology.

Anyway I hadn't been for a look at The Economist website for a while, so off I went and, seeing a Palin article, I wondered what the comment threads at The Economic were like. A lot of it was very similar to what we read everywhere else except, in the main, better expressed.

Including this ripper:

That she makes helium look dense is largely irrelevant to modern American politics.

I'd also really, really like to say goodbye to the Blackberry (R)(tm)(etc). But that just isn't going to happen.

electric dreams

We're going on a short holiday, amongst the Mexicans.

Just me, Mrs VVB, the Blackberry and the laptop.

You may officially feel sorry for Mrs VVB.

Hooroo, or ta-ra, or something.

blue turns to grey

The blog?

The work.

The lack of interest in anything else but.

Except...

I'm growing a mo for Movember. I'd link to my mo page but bang goes the semi-anonymity if I do.

While I was working out west last weekend, I missed our 40 year high school reunion, but the news travelled back.

"The number of deaths, suicides in particular, since the last reunion left me quite affected. It’s a sad reflection that a strapping younger teenager can end up like that… You can only wonder what had gone so wrong…"

Over the last couple of years, three former classmates - all blokes - have committed suicide.

Part of the fundraising for Movember goes to beyondblue. If you know someone who's growing a mo for Movember, donate to them.

Seems like us blokes need it.