bits and pieces part (n+1)

Killing off the princesses

Well you keep reading about girls who think they are, or want to be, princesses. There may not be many about in future if some behaviour I saw today is commonplace: namely, two separate incidents where young women just stepped off the kerb in defiance of the red light - well, I am a princess and people must understand that I come first - and both almost got run over. They'll need to figure out that wandering through the mall while texting, and expecting that everyone will clear a path, doesn't work in all circumstances.

Promoting the princesses

Maxine vs the lying piece of shit, eh? Ms McKew comes over as very intelligent, able to marshall the facts and responses, and not averse to a stoush. The Libs will need to do better than trot out the Mad Monk with his silly put-downs. Or the lying piece of shit with his "the candidate" turn of phrase.

Wannabe princesses

Brendan Nelson puts his foot in it, then turns up in Parliament to declare that black is, in fact, white and the rest of us were wrong, or deaf. Or stupid. As well as getting valuable column inches in the Letters to the Ed. Get over it, you stuffed up.

let the good times roll

One of the benefits of getting out of your normal surroundings is the opportunity to reflect on a few things from a different perspective. Whether you come to different conclusions, or simply the number you first thought of, is another matter. Anyway, here a few reflections prompted by a quick trip to Melbourne this week.

A colleague and I stayed at a brand new serviced apartment building in the Dockside area ("development"? "precinct"?). It was very new, with a kind of sleek but somehow not very substantial design. In fact its appearance - its surfaces - were a prelude and introduction to what I saw later when I ventured out to dinner.

Having obtained instructions to walk to the Dockside restaurant precinct ("strip"?), I was quite struck by the comparative absence of life. There was this enormously wide road (in fact only 2 lanes each way but with a broad median strip and tram tracks on one side made it seem far wider), but hardly a car. And no one walking along it as I was. The immediate comparison was with those pictures you see of Pyongyang. With Telstra Dome a massive edifice on the right, and it being just on dusk, it genuinely felt a bit odd, verging on surreal. Having read for some years about the 'buzz' of Docklands, you couldn't help wondering where it all was.

Of course, it was soon revealed - lots of expensive boats, the three (?) apartment towers and the the row of restaurants. And all of a sudden, people everywhere, mostly young and mostly dressed up. I was on the mobile to Mrs VVB, assuring her of my safe arrival, as I walked up and down looking for a suitable eatery.

I had sort of expected to be dining with my colleague and his wife, who had accompanied him to stay for the weekend, but it turned out they had family in Melbourne and gone off elsewhere. So I was dining alone, which I loathe. Trying to pick a restaurant out of many - about 20 odd I think - is hard. I had enquired at the hotel desk, but for their recommended place you definitely needed to book. The menus out front showed that most of these places were more expensive than I am used to. Anyway I found one, which managed to turn out a pretty much indigestible fish and chips and it still cost $30. THe salad was great.

While waiting and eating, I had a bit of a think about the whole design of this area. The mian builings were all very arty from my perspective, lots of brushed aluminium and sleekness, strange angles (ie not 90 deg) and appalling public art. There was a lot of variation in the fit-out of the restaurants, fortunately.

I'd read about the boom which had accompanied the building of the area and then the decline in demand which I believe saw owners soon sitting on a capital loss. Then I thought about the row of restaurants. Was there any covenant that decreed that only restaurants could operate? I looked at the full tables of people, obviously more accustomed to forking out this sort of money for dinner than I am, and wondered what happens if it all goes a bit sour.

For example, we had assertions in the late 90s that the business cycle was now dead and it's all good from now on. This country is certainly riding a wave of prosperity, driven mainly by raw materials exports. There's lots of disposable income and, either by personal predilcition, (they prefer flexibility, or they prefer to rent and invest elsewhere), or because housing affordability has fallen, more people are renting and spending the difference on consumption.

I wondered about any linkages between a specifically designed restaurant strip, apartments that look like they are going to date very quickly, apparent lack of any other retail or services (and I didn't venture further so that stuff may be about but if so there's not much of it). Is such a precinct sustainable in the longer term? Is it designed to mutate and change or is it some mega version of so-called consumer durables that in fact aren't?

It pretty hard not to think about this stuff in a value-free way so I tried to eschew the usual VVB doomsday scenario stuff. It just all seemed to me to be rather incompletely thought-through design. Not so much that the developers had just come in, ripped everything up and plonked this stuff down, because obviously a lot of reclamation work had gone on and it is certainly a massive undertaking. More that it felt as if it wouldn't age all that well. The scale and proportion of the apartment towers is massive. Lower rise and more integrated design, including shops and other services would seem to be a better way of ensuring some longevity.

I wonder how much the design reflected recent socio-economic trends such as smaller families, but more apparently lots of unmarried people living alone, longer working hours, and restaurant patronage so common a pastime as to be almost stereotypical behaviour.

It's also very easy to be nostalgic for more familiar streetscapes and it's even easier to think about picture-postcard European streetscapes with low rise apartments, lots of cafes sprinkled with other shops with people about everywhere and conclude that all design should be like that because it has persisted and adapted for so long. Nor of course do we want some romanticised 1950s streetscape with no services available.

If we do get some fairly dramatic economic downturn at some stage, how resilient will such an apparently monocultural urban design be compared to an area with more diverse settlement and activity patterns? Can human ingenuity overcome any apparent design flaws - yeah, I know, this is starting starting to get awfully value-laden despite the protestations, so it's really all about that I just didn't like it - and enable the area to change usefully and gracefully?

It'll be fascinating to watch.

how green was my valley

Of late I've had a very little bit to do with some people who have a number of ideas, and real world projects, about things that can be done to, in the broadest interpretation of the term, make the world a better place.

Pretty subjective and to be consistent with views I should hold on tolerance, I shouldn't take too much exception to those of serious alternate disposition.

When it comes to environmental issues (hereafter referred to as 'stuff'), it gets interesting. There's a line of argument that environmental advocacy (for want of another term) is in fact environmental religion. In other words, that the seemingly more widespread adoption of environmental stuff has gone beyond 'true believers', but in reaching the mainstream the proselytisers have gone beyond science into unvalidated assertion. And because environmental values/sustainability seem to be axiomatically a Good Thing, it's easier to dupe the masses.

As someone never too immersed in matters environmental (and I can hear the cackles of certain readers from here), I don;t have either a track record of activism/advocacy (or even practice) or a sufficient understanding of the science to back up what I've started to think about recently.

My cop-out position is 'common sense': ie we have growing population and dwindling non-renewable resources. Does not compute, as they used to say. Can technology again ride to the rescue. History says yes, the true believers indeed say yes. Is it likely to be a total solution? Unlikely at current rates of population growth and resource depletion, I'd reckon.

Another cop-out, my usual answer is always "somewhere in the middle".

Anyway I think all of this might get tested in the next few months as I come up somewhat more closely against the true believers than has been the case heretofore. I think it's a Good Thing.

In other news - or entertainment, if you're of such a mind...

Highlights from The Hon Alexander Downer MP, Minister for Foreign Affairs, on 7.30 Report with Kerry O'Brien:

"Significantly partial British withdrawal." (Red Kez)
Downer argues the numbers.
Kez talks about Syria.
Downer reiterates the numbers - again - and talks about Basra.
NB Mr Foreign Minister - it's at the other end of the country.
"Everybody has an exit strategy" (Downer)
"Oh not everybody has an exit strategy." (Downer, several seconds later).

caught in the act

What is it called when you're in the middle of a meeting and something happens and the chair says "you should put that on your website."

Well kind of embarrassing is one, especially when it's only a semi, kind of, partially anonymous blog - well it's anonymous to those outside the poisnal circle. Still, no one picked up on the comment which was just as well. Could have diverted us for hours, it could have. Which was the last thing we needed, agreed?

It's moreso when you can't remember the incident that sparked the comment. So I hope you read this before we catch up tomorrow, Mr Chair.

I should copyright that 'smart' stuff....oh wait, that's already been done.

In other news, a strong groundswell of support for the trampled-on citizen's rights of David Hicks seems to have provoked a change of mind, if not change of heart, by the federal government. A realisation, if you will, that justice must also be seen to be done. Or perhaps a realisation that the 'processes' put in place by the US fall far short of accepted norms of justice. Oh no wait, that was because of the polls.

When you wish upon a star....

OK, back to work. Smart stuff :-)

here there and everywhere

During the increasingly longer periods between posts at VVB, I have been trying to figure out why the periods have in fact become longer. As is often the case there are several likely factors and last night I decided to try to capture them in print - well, electronically anyway - as a bulwark (?) against the likelihood that the periods will continue to get even longer. As confused as I am? Good, then let us begin.

It's partly a reflection on blogging, brought on by a few posts I have seen recently which have spoken about stuff which I have been feeling. As it matures - and bear in mind that VVB is only a bit more than 12 months old and I've only been following blogs for about 2-3 years - the blogosphere seems to have become much more of an echo chamber. Of both right and left wing types, and of course 'vast' in both cases. And I feel it's become quite draining to read, over and over again, the same arguments from the same posters along with the same rebuttals.

I guess this kind of discussion/argument used to take place mainly in the front bars of pubs. If so, presumably there wasn't the vast quantity of 'stuff' (argument, assertion, and so on) that ubiquitous computer ownership or availability facilitates. I imagine that a stoush down the pub on a Friday night would be something to look forward to, while wading through it every day is somewhat tiring. So more power to those who manage to do it and, to be fair, probably in fact do make a lot of effort to keep it fresh.

On the obviously other hand has been the Rudd 'honeymoon' and the possibility of a change of government. Now there's plenty of analysis elsewhere on this issue elsewhere and I certainly couldn't add anything new, apart from the probably obvious comment that any change of government is exciting in a way - the thrill of the new, I suppose. VVB of course is no fan at all of the current federal government, full ownership of which was ceded to Mr Howard some time ago. It may sound like fantasy but I actually wouldn't be as opposed as the casual reader might think to a Liberal government of a different hue - ie one without Howard and few of his main men. Mainly this apparently heretical view derives from the fact that as long as the Washington Consensus rules the 'western' (actually Anglo-Saxon I guess) democracies, there's bugger all difference between the nominally left and the nominally right and as long as a government shows some appreciation of those aspects of life on earth that can't be priced, I'd be supportive. A Labor government would not necessarily change policy settings as extensively as we might suppose - or hope.

So a government that was less socially divisive would be wonderful. One that was less egregiously market-driven government than the current one would be also good, if unlikely for some time, and it would matter less what was on the letterhead.

But back to the track. The possibility of a federal Labor government is exciting. You get that feeling of something in the air. And, entirely coincidentally, I've had best of Bob Dylan on the car stereo this last week. Listening again to Blowin' in the Wind, Times are a'changing and so on suddenly started to get the juices flowing a bit. I was too young at the time those songs 'hit' to appreciate what they meant (we did sing Blowin' in the wind in primary school but we also did 'marching' every week, along with pledging our allegiance to God, Queen and saluting the flag, which was flying from the flagpole outside, course). However the insights subsequently accumulated and internalised makes it feel - a bit - like I 'was there'.

Lack of attachment aside, what those songs do in fact is foster feelings of change but, most particularly, of hope. That things can be better. That we'll take account of the things that matter to us, not just those that have a price tag attached.

In fact even in conversation today I was lamenting the marketisation of everyday life. A friend was telling me about his house that, because of some local peculiarities in the real estate market, is now in fact worthless. The land has appreciated but in pure financial terms his sensible course is to demolish the house and build a new one to extract maximum return from the land. But he and his wife like the house, even though it needs some renovations. So they'll renovate rather than rebuild - in effect valuing the social (or sentimental) aspect rather than the financial.

Not as good an example in the recounting as it seemed at the time of telling, but I hope you get my drift. All the emphasis is on getting rich, at whatever cost. Economic liberalisation has brought us greater wealth so, therefore, more liberalisation will bring us even more wealth. But no one counts what we lose as we go. One day, enough people will. And what about that other economic law, the law of diminishing returns?

The last factor impinging on the lack of postiness is that I am extremely f'n busy at work and don't feel as much like putting together even the usual desultory VVB rant. I'd rather pick up the guitar and in fact I should do so as there will be another 'do' coming up at work and I'm pretty damn rusty.

So enough from VVB for now. This weekend (after I've bottled batch number 14), the story of another of the motor cars that have blighted my life. Not.

Afterthought: for those amazed/intrigued/bitterly disappointed at the admission about an alternative Liberal government, let me just say:

• (1) Malcolm Fraser - redemption is possible (can't imagine that ever happening with the lying little piece of shit currently ensconced at Kirribilli, rather than the Lodge, though); and
• (2) all Labor governments are not necessarily good just by definition. All governments get tired and most get enraptured by their own publicity.

The thought that comes after the afterthought: having been mentioned approvingly in dispatches earlier this week at Club Troppo, apparently because I am possibly for turning, let me clarify. Which is, of course, code for digging a deeper hole for oneself: I think the current federal government is the worst in living memory. But some previous governments under nominally the same label have been bearable. And no doubt some future ones will be also bearable.

.

takin' care of business

Here's a ripper yarn out of the UK about the delicate interplay between business and government. There's a lot of it about of course - just ask any citizen who lives near a planned tunnel. Anyway, in this case the potential incoming Conservative government in the UK says it will repudiate any contracts relating to the proposed UK ID card. Lots of crossover with us here in Oz on such a subject, of course.

It seems that the main industry body for the IT industry weighed in with some ill-judges threats about the inadvisability of breaking any contracts. And that if the risk of said potential breakage seemed to go up, then the monetary compensation might need to compensate. Pretty standard business response. Except in this case, the potential future gummint has said "just try it, Jimmy" or something to that effect.

While there's obviously more at play here, it's instructive that the Conservatives would so blatantly, for want of a better term, take on a major industry, particularly one which is always touted as essential to contemporary economic growth (IT often being labelled a 'driver' of other sectors as well as an industry in its own right). Of course it's always that little bit easier to be hairy chested in opposition but, from our perspective in Australia, you don't often see a government of any persuasion muscle up so openly.

The other aspect of interest is that the Conservatives are opposed to the ID card, which to my understanding is more a true conservative (ie old style Liberal in Oz terms) position. In other words, even the threat of global terrorism is insufficient to warrant such a prospective intrusion into individual rights, especially the right to privacy. Seems you wouldn't get that robustness (dare I say 'faith'?) from a government of any stripe here, because everyone's bought into the clash of civilisations/here come the endtimes scenario (I very nearly wrote 'narrative' just then, dangerous).

And with the obvious exception of Bob Brown, everyone here seems to have accepted a world in which the interests of business reign supreme. In fact the current storm in a short black cup about coal really shows it up: if the Libs here were fair dink, they'd accept the need for investment into alternative energy sources instead of leaving it until the very last minute when the current major energy companies realise that they need a new revenue stream to meet the next three-monthly growth projections. Isn't that why we don't have gas light lighters any more?

FInally - isn't the Times of London a great read?

head injuries

If Peter Garrett is going to continue using the extremely irritating pseudo-business phrase 'going forward' as frequently as he did on 7.30 report tonight, I might have to go forward to reconsidering my vote. Where's the Maintenance of Less Irritating Forms of English Language Usage Party when you need them?

Apart from that phrase intruding into my consciousness as I was scoffing dinner, I didn't really pay a lot of attention, but whenever I glanced at the screen Malcolm appeared the more polished performer. Garrett seemed to hesitate a bit more - you could almost hear the media training cogs clicking over. Watch out for the crocodiles. There was a bit of that from Turnbull as well. Interesting, really: after a few years they will become very practised at not answering the question at all, but at the moment the natural inclination to do the right thing and address the substance of the question still seems dominant. Wouldn't it be nice if we could have a bit more of that from those who dominate the ether?

Also, dark suit, Peter. We are on TV, not stomping about the environment.

the Torana's tale

When you look at the list and pictures of the various cars we've owned, it's strongly British for the first 30 years and then goes a bit European. This is the only Holden amongst them. I never really owned it, but this is its story.

We came home from Pakistan in late 1979. Mrs VVB was pregnant with offspring no 1 and we were due to go to Singapore after the birth, a period of only a couple of months. We were essentially broke in cash terms - living in Pakistan had eaten up our little savings as the allowances were out of date for most of our two years and when they were adjusted, it was only from when the process (an inspection) was done, about a year late. So buying a car for a couple of months was out of the question as was renting even moreso.

Uncle was still alive and running the former family car business, now just a workshop and small second hand yard. Following the two oil shocks and, of course, the Whitlam government, the economy was in a hole. Thirsty V8s were not popular and he had this Torana SLR (4.2, not the SLR5000 as per the model) on the lot. The deal was I would use it and then flog in the larger and (hopefully) more receptive market of Canberra rather than Dubbo.

So we came home, Mrs VVB moved in with my folks (as I recall) and I got on a commuter flight to Dubbo. The flight was via Orange and we landed just on dusk. A few folk got off - it was about an 8 seater - and the pilot helpfully unloaded their baggage. He then turned the lights off in the terminal, as there were no staff on duty, and locked it up. Now, to the best of my memory the lights on the runway also went off, but I can't swear to this. We took off heading due west and had barely gained much altitude before we could see the lights of Dubbo in the distance.

This was amazing. Having grown up there and travelled by road to Sydney many times as a child, Orange was "are we there yet?" away. But here it was, rushing towards us on the horizon. Perspective, it's a strange animal.

Barely a few minutes later we touched down and uncle was there with this green beast. It being a Friday night, he was overdue at the bowling club, where he was on the committee, for the regulation several sherbets so he gave me the keys and I adjusted the seat and mirrors. He warned me about the power it had and I assured him that I had been driving the office Caprice v8 in Pakistan and I realised it wasn't like my old British bangers. No, he said, it's very different.

I fired it up, manhandled it into first (the gearshift was like pushing a rock through a concrete abutment), eased forward and wound on a little lock and then applied a very little throttle. I reckon I nearly did 3 doughnuts in the airport carpark before I wrestled it straight and through the gate. I agreed with his assessment that it in fact did drive differently to a Caprice and we continued to agree over a number of cleansing ales with his bowling mates.

The next day I set off back to Canberra. I must have used about 3 tankfuls of petrol, it drank juice like it was going out of fashion. Induced, I have to admit, by a very enthusiastic use of the throttle. I had never driven any thing like this before, even my old Triumph 2.5Pi, when it was going well and had instant throttle response, didn't have the kick in the back that this thing delivered. I very nearly threw it off one corner, after which I moderated the enthusiasm a tad.

Suffice to say we got home safely, if somewhat poorer. It was a kind of fun thing around town because of the non standard twin exhaust - of course you were forever poking it in the guts, especially in the tunnels on Capital Hill, just to listen to that sound. It snorted and rattled and the idle was all over the place, there was no suspension to speak of and the seats were crap, but it made you feel very alive.

So young offspring no 1 made his first car trip in it, home from the hospital, which probably explains why he now owns a Calais V8 (pictured above because I can't, for the life of me, get it to appear here).

But I couldn't sell the damn thing, even to a couple of mates I knew who bought and sold cars to supplement their wages. So uncle was obliged to take it back and we choofed off to Singapore. The lung cancer crept up on him, he had been a lifelong smoker. He had to liquidate the business which was pretty much in debt by then and he died alone in 1982.

Would I own one now? Dunno, I'd have to drive one again, they were really crude. The SLR5000 was always the model to have and a couple of mates at work in fact did own them. Perspective, it's a strange animal.

here we are now, entertain us

I got far too much stuff on to even commit the usual VVB skim across the top and apart from that, the world is rubbish except where the ever reliable Gerry gives you something to restore hope. All our various politicans and pundits and paid informants and disinterested observers and professional agitators and men on the Clapham omnibus can take a long walk off a short pier.

In the meantime, all you fans can avail yerselves of a lifelike Kurt from Modellautos von Raceland. Enjoy and we'll see you this time next year.

we built this city...

And also its infrastructure. So we've had several years of increasing ambient noise about the state of the nation's infrastructure - roads, rail, dams, skills and so on. The blame game is rampant - federal, state, whatever. About 20 years' worth roughly speaking, we used to more or less have what was needed, now we don't. As the drought in particular bites deeper, water becomes the headline issue and the debate mutates to whether we should curtail use or build more capacity, and then mutates even finer to whether we build dams or desalination plants.

Not surprisingly, to VVB's point of view, is the seemingly corresponding period of time that an obsession with budget surpluses has ruled economic policy in the country. A reliance on market forces - ie the in this case the willingness of private capital to invest in long-lived assets without an immediate and commensurate return on investment - has not, as continually promised, resulted in provision of said infrastructure. Bugger me, I wonder why not?

So to get around this we invented the private public partnership, or PPP, which compounds the problems because it relies on highly sophisticated (for which read dodgy) contractual arrangements between government and a private provider. Merchant bankers and the like have much experience in these types of contract, government typically didn't. And even if suitable expertise was recruited, the desperation of governments (and we're talking all persuasions here) to do the deal ended up with stupid arrangements like Cross-city tunnels where the poor bloody taxpayer gets it coming and going.

Now this is a very simplistic analysis - in fact it's not even analysis, it's jumping to a conclusion based on a simple correlation without proving causation - except it just makes sense, doesn't it? So how long can this insanity go on? Maybe this post on Club Troppo - although focused on application of currently orthodox economic theory to developing nations rather than our own highly evolved island - points to a ray of hope?

I foughtignored the law

Today's Weekend Australian magazine features, in its regular foreword, 10 things you didn't know about Philip Ruddock, Attorney-General. Now, all you out there, stop that hysterical cackling - it doesn't include the often-whispered but never proven fact that he is fact not human but some breed of alien.

The real kicker is this, no 7: "The event in history he would most like to have attended is the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215. 'It probably has far more to do with democracy and the rule of law than any other event. Whatever else they say about me, I am committed to democracy and the rule of law'".

Good grief. How the f**k do they get away with it?

war....what is it good for?

Via Gerry at Diogenisan Discourse, we join our voice to a global march against the continuing war in Iraq.

Just like we marched in 2003, but things are changing. Those who would lie and mislead their citizens are being exposed. Help us by joining your voice against the hunger for war that Bush and his henchmen have unleashed and that our current government has slavishly followed.

Mrs VVB and Phil

may the circle be...

Here's a couple of stories from the Times of London, seemingly unrelated except for the fact they both touch on what bastards some people can be.

This first one (there seems to be some editing probs at the end but the main gist is evident by then) really cuts to the bone of what it means to be a family. In the wake of the people who died in the 9/11 attacks, some grandparents have lost contact with their grandchildren when the remaining partner has prevented access. Of course every story is individual and there may be another side to the ones cited, but that aside it must be utterly heartbreaking to lose not only your child but their children. You only need to look at grandparents out in the park with their grandkids, or talk to someone who has become a grandparent to realise that another strand, another depth of humanity suddenly kicks in. Grandparenting is an experience that is still in front of Chateau VVB so that's why I can only comment from observation.

These people are surely hidden victims of what happened on that day.

The second story is about something closer to Chateau VVB's heart, namely corporate governance. Now, even the normally placid Mrs VVB gets a bit riled when the next story about enormous corporate salaries comes on the news. So this sotry about the effect that greater corporate regulation is having on CEOs, in particular the substantial criminal penalties that can be imposed, raises another twist. Suppose the enormous salaries are in fact not about performance, but about the risks associated with getting it wrong. The story compares the penalties for some corporate crimes as being worse than for murder.

It would be easy and quite naughty to make a direct link by characterising high level corporate crime (eg fraud that affects lots of people) as a deliberate risk akin to, say, breaking into a bank and killing the guard while robbing the place. On the other hand, the laxer or more opaque the regulatory environment, the more people get tempted to do exactly the wrong thing. Is AWB such an example? And what would be an appropriate penalty (note to smartarses: not the bonuses they actually got).

Taking the link back to the intro, is it necessarily bastardry to commit fraud, or is it something else?

That's a mini. I have owned three of them over the years and these are their stories.

I bought the first one, a 1964 Morris Cooper (998 cc long stroke) in the middle of doing my Higher School Certificate. This made my parents extremely happy, they appeared to have the impression I wasn't fully concentrating on this most important activity I would ever be involved in. Probably correct.

Anyway I'd decided I wanted something newer and nippier than the 1956 Isis I had bought from my father. I couldn't afford a Cooper S but a few early Coopers were the right price. I found one that sounded OK, I was working at the weekend so father - who had been a mechanic for 30 years - went to check it out. Apparently the owner had done something to the brakes which rendered it unsuitable. I suspect this was more about trying to get me thinking about exams rather than cars, but no such luck. I found another one, cheaper, and we got it. It was similar to the model in the picture, in that it was green with a white roof, but it was very nasty - a previous owner had covered a good proportion of the interior with that sticky paper that you used to line drawers with, in an extremely tacky woodgrain design. I eventually got it looking halfway decent but the motor needed work, so we pulled it out and fitted rings and bearings.

After we reassembled it we couldn't get it to fire on all four. So the old man just stayed up, fiddling and farting about and I still remember as if it was yesterday the sound, at about 2 am, when he got it going right. The neighbours must have loved it (although one, with whom my parents were friendly, used to run a car repair business from his garage. Illegal? You bet. Did he get picked up for it? No - he was an ex-copper).

The early Coopers had the rubber cone suspension and driving this thing up to Sydney was a real experience - the road alongside Lake George used to be a real goat track and even with seat belts, you spent more time banging your head on the roof than sitting in the seat. And sleeping in a mini is a bit of an art, too.

A few years later I was sharing a house with some blokes, one of whom owned a Triumph TR5. This was a lovely piece of work and they were very rare - I bet he wishes he still owned it. But he wanted to ditch it so we trawled the used car yards together. At one yard we found two Datsun 240Z's and it was tempting to trade both our cars, as I owned a Triumph 2500 Pi at that time. However he did the trade and I didn't.

That said, the itch to change cars again was running strong so I went to Sydney. I very nearly traded the Pi on a Jaguar E-type: would have meant a truckload of debt (and woe, probably) so I shied away but it was very tempting at the time. I hadn't seen much else that caught my attention until I ran across a Mini K (1100cc) in that pride of place spot at the front of a car yard that is designed to catch your attention. It had been lightly warmed up and seemed OK, the real benefit was it would be a back trade and so I drove home to Canberra with the non-standard exhaust a happy burble in my ears - and vibration in my seat - and a few dollars in my pocket.

I owned that one for a year or so until I met the young lady who would eventually become Mrs VVB and we needed extra cash, so the K went for something - actually, several somethings - older and cheaper again.

The last Mini we had was when we were in Pakistan. I bought it from friends at the British Embassy - it was a standard 1000cc model, but I put a little steering wheel on it (the same friends got that out from England as there was nothing like that available in Pakistan) and it was a good little runabout. Mrs VVB was taught to drive in it by my boss's wife, after my attempts looked like ending our marriage prematurely - Pakistan is not the best place to learn to drive as any 'rules' are observed in the breach, including traffic lights. Anyway the boss's wife pronounced Mrs VVB as having been successfully taught, so I wrote a letter to the authorities that she should be issued with a licence, and she was. (Subsequently we went to Singapore where, on production of her Pakistani licence and after an eyesight test, she got a Singapore licence. Then we came home and she produced her Singapore licence - a much better one than from Pakistan, you will agree - and after an eyesight test, she got an ACT licence. Never having sat a test in any of the three countries).

The only downside to the Mini in Pakistan - apart from no airconditioning which was a bit of a bugger in summer - was its size. We used to go for long weekends up in Peshawar or further, in the Swat valley. In Pakistan the long distance buses -with bald tyres, people on the roof and lots of gaily flashing lights - operate on a 'first in, best served' basis, where they compete for the next fare. So we would be happily tootling up the Grand Trunk road to Peshawar and suddenly be confronted by three buses line abreast - on a two lane road - racing for the next passengers standing alongside the road. Very scary.

If I was to look for a 'fun' car to have at some stage in the future, a Mini would be high on the list. You never really lose the feeling they give you.

a tissue a tissue we all fall down

We have been falling for ten years, and we haven't hit the bottom yet...

...it's a very deep barrel and we need to scrape it...

Update - I suspect it's meant to be 'tissu', but wtf...

stuck in the middle with you

Previous statements of non-activity are hereby rescinded and rendered void, however temporarily. This is too good...

Today's AFR carries an article by Verona Burgess, a long time Canberra journo specialising in public service stuff. She notes the reappointment of four key departmental secretaries, including Peter Boxall, Secretary of the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations.

Burgess notes that the department has grown from 2871 staff in June 2005 to 3593 staff a year later, "with 105 senior executives, exactly half of whom are women" (my emphasis).

And also, presumably, that 105 includes one who can't currently be married under Australian law.

and now, a word from our sponsors

Despite only being relatively new, extremely unprofessional, deliberately unresearched and occasionally bitterly objectionable little blog, VVB has attempted to give me a chance to talk about various things that interest or disturb me. Of late, the disturbing bit has been winning. That's why there will be a return to the motor car stories, at least for a while.

It was all brought home this eveningon Monday when I was watching the news, and the story about the fracas at the tennis came on. I started to rant about how we have the Muslims and various Africans as the current enemies of freedom and liberty (anyone see the piece on Tamworth?) and yet here we have the Serbs and Croats who have been at each other's throats in Australia for longer than I can remember. We must be well into second and third generation Australian born people (blokes, mainly it would seem) and it's like they've stepped straight off the boat. All the old emnities large as day and at the tennis, for crying out loud: probably the last sport where most people behave relatively sanely (Leyton not included).

So I was all, like, WTF? And started ranting.

Mrs VVB came in, remonstrated firmly about my behaviour, language, attitude and so on and said "Top Gear" is on. What a good choice. Funniest thing I've seen in ages. "The car should be over there! Where my eardrums are!" "What happens with an Aston Martin at this point?" "It breaks down" (all laugh).

Which is another way of saying that the world is getting far too intense that I should be reporting it.

Update, several days later.

Too much to do, too preoccupied when I come home, the sameness, the staleness of the debate or whatever it is has got to me. Mrs VVB and I were having yarn over dinner about water, why the council wants to - or has to - turn down the pressure: to minimise leakages from the pipes. Why do they leak? Because they're old. If they're old, why haven't they been replaced? Because we can't invest to replace them. Why not? Because we have to run a budget surplus or the ratings agencies will mark us down. Why is that? Because of Milton bloody Friedman and Friedrich bloody Hayek and Maggie bloody Thatcher and Ronald bloody Reagan and now every government this side of Panama is in thrall to the Washington Consensus, and that's why we have bloody PPPs which are just a way to get around Budget deficits and still get things built, except they don't do what they're supposed to, they're not cheaper because government can always borrow cheaper than a private company and in any case the bloody risk doesn't get bloody transferred to the bloody project proponent like it's bloody supposed to in the first bloody place. But it's the next generation of taxpayers who'll pick up the tab and we don't have to worry about them because they're 8 elections away.

It's bloody insane and it's wrong wrong wrong but even supposedly social democratic (hah!) parties have been bludgeoned into line. And everyone else has been deregistered, when did we get to vote on that?

And this, gentle reader, was the beloved and I just having a friendly tete-a-tete about current issues over a spot of home-made Thai green curry and I'm carrying on like a pork chop. How it it get to this, we ask ourselves?

Mrs VVB works in health care where the clients are in situations so dire you'd rip your ears off before you have to hear any more, and the funding she gets has been frozen for two years and has just been maintained at that level for another one or two or maybe a generation.

So....draws breath.....I am going to be otherwise preoccupied for a while, I have work stuff to do when I come home so we're are going into a little hiatus. I may pop up in comments on your own blogs - and there's only a very few special ones I go to now where the inhabitants are friendly - or I may just go for a bloody long walk.

My neck hurts. Goodnight.

guilty

Yep, VVB is guilty. We see conspiracy theories all around us and you know what that means. Yeah, we're typical lefties, always too eager to draw a conclusion between unrelated facts. Not a rational bone between us.

What are the facts? (1) US President ignores most adviuce he has been given (well, as far as we know) and commits US to more troops in an unpopular war. (2) Australian PM fast out of the blocks offering the country's full support. (3) All of a sudden, after years of barely hearing anything about what our limited number of troops in Iraq actually do, they do something.

Colour me guilty, this is just too coincidental.

Now, let's hear about the unfortunate "international contractor".

to market to market

One of the little things that has been rattling around my thoughts for a while is the proposition, "what does it mean to live in a market economy"? Not in the meaning of privatisation of previously publicly provided services, but the little things that suddenly hit you.

For me, one of those has been White Pages online, and how the default setting is for the business directory, not residential. The implication is that we would mostly be looking for a business number, we'd already know any private ones. Or, on balance, we would know more residential numbers that we need, than business numbers.

I guess someone's done the analysis and that's why it's set to business. But I have to say it signalled to me another little chip away at whatever it is we mean by 'society'. It's much more important to be calling a business, so we can do business. Don't take your eyes off that GDP.

Anyway that's a little thing and if I want to get all bothered by it, problem bilong me. I'd be interested in anyone else's little examples, though. They add up, you know.

But this is a whole other thing: US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for detainees (actually, more against them than for them) threatens companies not to give business to legal firms representing detainees at Guantanamo (via Surfdom and prawfsblawg) (and elsewhere, for that matter). It'd be easy to dismiss it because it is the Bush administration which has taken bastardisation of the system of government to a new low and I guess we have no expectations of sense, decency or an understanding of the limits to government in a supposed democracy. But Stimson's comments betray either such a fundamental lack of understanding of the limits of the law, or just unbridled arrogance, that they can't be ignored.

If the government of a country is so focused on protecting economic activity that it will threaten companies about who they should do business with, there is a plot that has been lost (if you follow me), all legal niceties aside.

In this case, of course we also have to think about what Stimson's comments mean for David Hicks. We always knew he would never a get a fair trial, but did we expect this? Well, Mr Ruddock? Anything to say?

time in a bottle

There's enough bastardry and mayhem and surrealism around to keep an "I'm so sad" theme going for ages. But that would be very soul destroying for me and pretty flamin' unenlightening for youse, so instead let's resuscitate the stories that go with the various cars I've owned over the years. Not really political so maybe that'll be enough to get VVB dropped from the blogfeed.

Rather than start with an individual story, I'll lay out a timeline of ownership so all the stories will eventually hang together.

As you'll recall...ha ha...I have been collecting 1/43 scale models of all the types of cars I've owned, and here - time in a bottle indeed - is the assembled collection of models gathered to date. Only a few to go, but they'll take a few years as none of them are available commercially at the moment.

Well, the reason VVB isn't as rich as he might have been is because of the untold amounts of dosh outlayed on buying and maintaining all these cars over the years. Roughly, the list goes thusly, by year of purchase as near as I can remember (and the model year as near as I can remember):

1968 1956 Austin A30

1968 1956 Morris Isis

1969 1964 Morris Cooper

1970 1964 Austin Freeway station waggon

1970 1966 Datsun 1600 sports

1971 1968 Triumph 2000 Mk1

1971 1966 Austin 1800

1972 1970 Triumph 2500 Pi

1972 1964 Wolseley 24/80

1975 1969 Morris Mini K

1975 1964 Austin Freeway

1976 1966 Morris 1100

1977 197? Morris Mini

1979 1976 Holden Torana SL/R

1980 197? Datsun 1200

1981 1970 Mercedes 200

1982 197? Triumph Dolomite

1982 197? Datsun 200B

1983 1980 Mazda 323

1984 197? Toyota Crown

1985 197? VW Passat

1988 1974 Triumph 2500TC

1989 1974 Triumph 2500 Pi

1991 1972 Leyland P76

1992 1974 Triumph 2500TC

1996 1988 Toyota Corolla

1998 1989 Peugeot 405 Mi16

2003 1999 Saab 9-3 Monte Carlo

The apparently quick turnover of cars in many cases was due to having one off the road and buying another to keep mobile: both the first two Triumphs suffered major catastrophes and the Austin 1800 and Wolseley24/80 were both interim transport.

Next up: the three Minis.