you spin me right round

Evidently for the 8 cents a day we all pay, the ABC can no longer afford writers with any knowledge of how to conjugate verbs in English:

Earlier Alistair Cook (7) fell caught and bowled to Mohammed Hafeez and Ian Bell (3) was unfortunate to be bowled by Ajmal when the ball spinned backwards towards his stumps after his forward-defensive stroke.

We're doomed I tells ya, doomed.

And with this lightweight observation of the human condition, we creep a little closer to that magic 1000 posts. Actually, we don't know if it will be magic. It may be quite unexceptional.

quo? status quo?

"Mind you, MarshallStack is right about the Quo."

Discuss.

I'm sure at least one of you will :-)

by the way

Things that make you go wtf?

Last year (approx) it was all ads for sheds on TV. Still going on. But now it's ads for ride-on mowers. Hunnerds of them. Does everybody now live on acreage?

And this:

Maltby said: "For me, I am looking for a leader who will look to God for direction That is important to me. I want a leader who believes God is sovereign."

And these are same people who decry the Abrahamic religions (well, one of them anyway, although there's plenty of recent evidence about t'other) for seeking to control people's lives?

Anyway, if you believe God is sovereign, why have politicians?

against the wind

Even non-Queenslanders amongst my small but dedicated readership will no doubt have read about the recent travails of Queensland Health, not least amongst which was some cove spiriting off some $16 mil of their needed-elsewhere-badly-not-to-mention-taxpayer-supplied dollars.

Then there was Dr Patel and a few more 'incidents' that I will not presume to go into here.

Fault might ascribed to poor Ministerial decisions or oversight, or a department that is simply too big, or any other pretty standard political/bureaucratic shortcoming that one could conjure up with little effort.

But no: the problem is something deeper, something a bit more existential, as a recent letter writer to our regional rag explained:

"Queensland Health was built on the spiritual nature of man and his relationship to the supreme being. Nowadays it is being pulled down by atheistic socialism."

As they are wont to say, "you can't argue with that."

Nonetheless your views are, as they are also wont to say, welcome.

insert title here

I would just like to take this opportunity to wish all of my occasional reader the best of what you think you'd like as we head into this new/next /biggest whatever.

Over the past few days I have read a few things that make you go "wtf" and in some cases the nimble juxtaposition of some of these may have made the occasional reader go "hmmm....amateur" but fortunately I've forgotten them and, in any case, mere reporting here or even highlighting of the ironic juxtaposition would not have added to the sum of human understanding.

Ummm, offspring no 1 and I have been watching the Test and we have been...yeah, well, you know an' all.

Again, may you have all things and stuff.

let's go

Well not the actual title of the song but right in the groove for a Friday night.

It still makes me smile...as do some of the comments.

Reaching even further back into the recesses of the memory, we get this. Holy moley, there are actually some memories not exterminated by the quantities of beer that used to accompany going to a barn where these blokes might be playing.

Good times....

sugar sugar

A taste of some hilarity to come.

Sorry about that pun there.

god only knows

so Mrs VVB is flicking through the TV channels and suddenly there's Tony Abbott and I hear him say "...like you, sir, we are one nation indivisible under God..."

At that stage I started ranting and Mrs VVB was obliged to, again, (a) warn me of the dangers of going on like that and (b) change the channel.

Umm...we're not, are we?

Also, I suspect in this case 'sir' is capitalised.

cheap wine

We went to see this concert here in rapidly warming Capricornia a few weeks ago.

It was exactly the same here in RARA land, with the possible exception that where we were standing, we could get a little cool breeze occasionally. Under the tent where the true rockers were, was probably a little warm.

The voice was awful to start with but gradually hit its straps.

Ian Moss was little short of supernatural: how he can keep going for two hours, with blistering (sorry about the cliche) solos every so often is just amazing.

The only real complaint was some of our fellow audience members who talked - and yelled, and argued, and had tedious in-depth personal discussions - most of the night. Second last song was Four Walls, performed with tenderness and restraint, and I could barely hear it as various groups around us continued the conversations/arguments/ diatribes they'd obviously started the previous weekend - or possibly previous decade.

Having to drive a fair way home, there was no wine, cheap or otherwise.

like a rolling stone

Well there's stuff in this story that I wouldn't have dreamt of. Margaret Trudeau? Ronnie Wood? Really?

Anyway out of the gazillions of words that have been written about the Stones, these are some more.

Time to get some old CDs out.

black is balck....is baclk....is black

Du de duddle duh... du du daaaa, du du duddle duh daaaaa... da dee duddle da du du daaaaaa ...... di duh da duh da daaaaoooooomph-a-oo

oooompha-a-ooooooompha- na naaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa etc...

For translation, go here.

Yep, that's what it is.

Also, have lost font options. Again. Buddddyyy blogggggerrrr.

No....they're back.

Is back.

rough boy

I caught up with an old school friend last weekend - hadn't seen him for over 40 years. We exchanged e-mail addresses and cemented the reunion online...so to speak.

Epically strange...still digesting some aspects. Anyway given all of that I figured it was relatively safe to give him the link to VVB: it's semi-anonymous but various folk, mainly from work, have the secret password.

He wrote back to say he'd spent a pleasant (yes, I know...) few hours trawling my back pages and passed some kind comments on what he had read. Yes, I know, redux.

Anyway I've done similarly tonight and was quite taken with how much I used to write before I either (a) started trying to be wry, or (b) just got lazy.

All of which is simply a prelude to something entirely different, namely this. I'm kind of a ZZ Top fan but I don't think I've ever seen a David Lynch film (he is a filmmaker isn't he, or an I mistaking him for someone else?). Not that it matters; it's a quite entrancing little article which is borne out by the entrancing little comments thread.

The ideal thing to post on a Friday night...sleep well.

and now this

Now with added link to article that I could not add after I'd posted without.

Well it let me add it, but not post again.

WTF is going on?

you don't get me i'm part of the union

A couple of things struck me as I read this article.

First, evidently it's OK to refer to the The Association of Professional Engineers, Scientists and Managers (APESMA) as a "union". Valuing consistency as I do, I expect the ABC to also use the "union" word when it next refers to the Australian Medical Association. I mean, they are both associations of professionals, are they not? Somehow, I don't like my chances.

Second, and for a moment disregarding who said what to whom but accepting that somewhere in the murky midst there is a skerrick of truth to the article that design responsibilities will be sent offshore at some indeterminate future point, where does that leave Australian industry policy?

For those who have more interesting things in which to dabble, I should point out that "industry policy" as she has been practised in these parts for some decades has been that low value-added ("metal bashing") has gone offshore while Australia retains the vital higher value, more knowledge-intensive work.

Hah. Do we train as many engineers as China and India, even on a per capita basis?

So, what's the new policy? Well, once wages and costs in the "developing" countries get high enough, they'll need to outsource their low value added manufacturing.

At that time I suspect Lee Kuan Yew's comment about "poor white trash of Asia" might start to look fairly applicable.

bad english

Apostrophe Enforcement Unit.

I am all in favour, particularly after visiting our local Woolies yesterday for the week's necessities and seeing some specials on a far wall under the banner "special toys for girl's and boys."

Evidently boys only come in plural while girls in the possessive. It makes a kind of surreal logic, I guess.

Also, I canm still not publish from the post. Have to go back into 'edit' and do it from there. Weird.

the rise and fall of saddam hussein and the incredibly big spiders from mars

With Gaddafi's passing and the details about him being in a drain, we are again reading about Saddam Hussein who was found in a spider hole.

Has anybody thought to ask what kind of spider has a hole big enough that a man could fit inside?

the muzic, i haz it in me

@To
choose McCartney over Lennon.... my god.To be fair, McCartney is considerably better at the criteria of being a living artist...

Discuss.

Don't worry about the singular of criteria, that word evidently doesn't exist if what I see every day is any evidence.

wah wah

Some readers of this little blog will probably recognise this quote:

"Eric Idle tells how after Harrison was stabbed in his home by an intruder in 1999, he was being carried out by two medics who had only just started work. Harrison looked up from his stretcher and asked, "So, what do you think of the job so far?"

It's a new one on me but seems entirely plausible.

And in fact, after consumption of a couple of aged-in-the-fridge roses(*) at work and then a couple of gin & tonics at home, I feel a bit philosophical too.

I feel especially philosophical about some stuff that I read this morning and thought, "I could weave a little blog post about that" and promptly forgot about it/them until tonight when I was looking to weave just such a little blog post.

I wish I could remember them - quite poignant they were.

(*) Note to readers who have an RSS feed on this blog, for whatever unaccountable reason: something I did when putting that asterisk in was obviously a macro for "publish", because that's what happened. Hope you liked the original spelling, comes to to you courtesy of Seagrams and Schweppes.

giggle eyed goo

In lieu of writing about nothing, allow me to introduce you to a new - I hope - mindworm or eyeworm; which, in the manner of all things modern, should probably be represented as iWorm.

Ha bloody ha, I kid you not. It's a laugh a week around these parts.

Anyway you may get the odd giggle therefrom.

what's going on

It's not that nothing is going on. It is, but it's nothing of interest to blog readers and I've run out of things that conceivably may be of interest to blog readers. And apart from the irretrievably obsessed, everyone seems to be writing less anyway.

But are they enjoying it more, we ask ourselves. Because there's no-one else in the room to ask.

I also done spellchecking, although it appears I have not done grammar.