An open thread where, at your weekend leisure, you can discuss anything you like.
42 Responses to “Saturday Salon”
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Frist.
My new iMac is a thing of beauty. With a smooth easy keyboard action uncluttered by drifts of ciggie and cigar ashes and spilled and sticky booze. So far.
And given we’re supposed in be total war, clash of civilisations mode, how come we don’t see patriotic ads like this now?
Which iMac did you get?
I’m pissed off with Perth’s Maxi Taxis. As a Wheelchair user, I booked one on MONDAY to take me to my local ALP Member’s electoratte office opening for Friday at 3pm. That cab arrived 2 hours late.
The Return Journey was more horrifying, I had rung at approximately 7.20pm from her office to pick me up. A second call was made approximately 20 minutes later, where the company said they couldn’t get any drivers and that they would put me on priority.
I ended up ringing a further 3 times with no joy until 10pm, when with still no guarentee of a cab, a very kind lady who was buying a pizza at Dominoes, offered to give me a lift home to Middle Swan from Ellenbrook, which was out of her area, but was greatly appreciated.
I usually don’t have this problem as I have a regular driver, but unfortunately, he couldn’t do the job because his cab was broken down.
I wouldn’t be surprised if all the Maxi Taxis were sitting at the airport and the casino.
“Which iMac did you get?”
The current one. The tilty slab which replaced the luxor model. And I had her customised as a lightening fast web GT and hard crunching multimedia machine. She’s very smooth and very quick. Takes a wireless quadruple click and scroll mouse too. Gonna beef up the speakers and put some ‘go faster’ stripes on the sides though.
Nabakov, stop celebrating consumerism. Nice choice of computer, however.
mick, the picture of you on Blogger is cute
A world of learning awaits you at Wikipedia. Here’s what I discovered today:
“Calling someone a cunt is generally considered impolite.”
Which is the whole point of calling someone a cunt. Or a prick for that matter.
Personally I think “scrote” has a nice vinegary saxon ring to it. Or even around it.
And yes Bob, Mick does look awlful sweet on blogger – albeit a bit emo.
Bah. When I was at school, we used to line up four or five of his sort, make them bend over and use them as a toast rack.
But afterwards, when youse settled down for a slap up feast in your rooms, you were quite sure it was vegemite on the toast? And that the welsh rarebit was supposed to have a piquant mushroomy chestnutty flavour?
Well it didn’t take long for the first carbon scam to turn up.
Radio national Friday afternoon comment show enthused over a (Sydey based I think) business that was offering a fart atonement for pets service.
For $20 per year (per pet) this person claims to cancel the greenhouse gas methane gas emission from family pets farts, and even people. The logic goes that farts contain mostly Methane gas which contributes to global warming. So a simple but positive thing that people can do for the environment is to have their own and their pets farts exponged.
This would be a cute joke if it were not aimed at little old ladies and their bank accounts, not to mention being incorrect in its logic.
The fact is that farts are environmentally carbon neutral. True, methane is a potent green house gas. It is however short lived in the atmosphere because it reacts with ozone to become a less potent green house gas CO2 and H2O. It is formed by the breakdown of sugars in the gut. These sugars come from food that we eat, and that food is essentially green ie grown yesterday. So unless your farting is a product of drinking petrol or eating coal then it is environmentally neutral. In fact our breathing converts those same sugars into energy so that we can live. If people are to be guilt riden about farting then they should also stop breathing. More fool the New Zealand government for attempting to impose a fart tax on farmers.
What do these people do to clean farts from the air? The ABC was remiss in informing us of this part of the service. But it could simply be planting shrubs and trees in their back yard and letting the grass grow long in the block next door.
Or in other words nothing at all. SCAM.
Be ready to be blown away by the audacity of carbon frauds as they come to light.
Everyone:
Australian values? ….. What load of codswallop!
The Howard government is yet again showning its contempt for Australian heritage. Today, its Department of Defence is putting the historic 42 RQR Barracks at Archer Park in Rockhampton up for auction. They ignored a petition signed by thousands of taxpayers and ignored all offers to preserve the small part including the orderly room building; it’s the whole block that’s being flogged-off regardless. Guess where the money will go.
I have decided againt going to the auction to protest – as a pensioner I cannot afford the fuel to go all the way there and I certainly can’t afford to be arrested and fined for protesting …… but there are other ways for a citizen to lawfully show his disgust. And come ANZAC Day this year, Howard will be rabbiting on about how his government honours those who fought in The Great War. Ha!
I love sitting in my new home in Flagstaff, Arizona listening to streaming JJJ. Its 3pm Friday here and I’m listening to the 9am Sat news. Lurve the interweb.
Just came back from a snowy walk with our new pup around 700 years old Indian ruins.
I could get used to this place. Trying not to miss Australia too much.
‘ave a good weekend.
Yer’ll need a decent random number generator as well as those go-faster stripes, Nabs
Anyway I reckon youse is a bit of a ponce, going out and buying a new iMac. A real, self-sufficent Aussie bloke would have gone out with an axe and carved himself a PC out of an old red-gum stump. With a USB port made out of baling wire for his ironbark web-cam.
Mind you don’t spill champagne on it Nabs, or you’ll have Phil Oakley appear in a mullet and a Judge Dredd T-shirt.
The Federal Govt wants to allow those who call and organise for consumer boycotts to be sued and the government to fund plantiffs court cases against such groups.
Woohoo! She’s back! Ms Ove has finally declared war on commie greenie backpackers http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21275013-7583,00.html
It’s all a bit lame. If she really wants to join the ranks of psychopundits like Coulter and Malkin, she’s going to have to call for these people to be killed.
Tavarich,
1. Ditch the white mouse and get a standard PC wheel thingy.
2. Once every 3 months or so, pop the box and vacuum (ever so carefully) out the dust.
3. If you are not hardwired to your cable modem/router the AirPort on the G5 is a dud but can be bolstered by a neat repeater station for $80 called Cisco Linksys Wireless G Range Expander. it speeds up the connection 2X.
4. If you ever crash the system (very rare, usually due to downloading a corrupt system plug in) do not load the system on top of the old one straight away but start up the Mac off the disk and save your system preferences and plug in files as copies to a folder otherwise all your drag and drop capabilities will go down the toilet and you will be forced to reinstall most of your apps. After that, reinstall the system off the CD and then drag the system files you saved in another folder back into the system files and Bob is your uncle.
5. Sometimes your posts on this blog will have feral characters (like the ones that came to meet Mr Cheney in Sydney), simply refresh (after you have submitted).
I note with interest that an illegal-aliens trail theme park has started up in Mexico. Participants thrill pretending they are wetbacks dodging border patrol and running through the arroyo at night trying to get across the border.
I can think of nothing better to revive the stagnant NSW economy we hear so much about in the papers. This is a killer of an idea for Homebush Bay: prime swamp real estate lying moribund now that the Olympics is a distant memory.
You buy your ticket from an unshaven man of Middle Eastern or Asian appearance. You are tutored in ways of asking for asylum – you will need those skills later – and are put on a leaky old ferry in the middle of the night.
You run the gauntlet of Navy patrol boats and Coastwatch. If caught you undergo interrogation by Immigration on Cockatoo Island.
Fun for the whole family.
Shorter Ove:
Shorter shorter Ove: Backpackers are living in Bondi! I live in Bondi! It’s an outrage!
Doesn’t anyone care about the COLOSSAL SQUID!
What’s wrong with you people?
Frank, I note that Macquarie Bank has recently launched a new Sydney taxi company – called http://www.limetaxis.com.au/ Lime – aimed primarily at wheelchair-dependent passengers. While you wouldn’t necessarily want to rule out a degree of altruism in their motivation so to do, it seems pretty self-evident that they can see a money-making niche that existing taxi providers aren’t filling.
Maybe the good news is potential for Australia-wide expansion.
“Fumes pour out the exhaust, choking local cats”.
Yeh man I can dig that. So uncool. All we want is like fresh air when we are out of Turf.
The “local cats” or the backpackers?
Wow…..now THAT sounds like a plan. Thanks for the tip Ms Ove.
The sublime cowboy and I (and the 2 calves) are off o/s in about 4 weeks, for a budget backpacking trip ’round Asia and Europe.
We start at Laos sponging off visiting some Development worker friends who live in Salavan (sp?) for a week or two, then Cambodia, then a homestay in Chiang Dao, and, if it is do-able, & a visit to the Karen refugee camps in the North.
Then it gets expensive as we fly off to London bunking down at various friends places for a bit before hitting Europe.
Anyone reading this from Europe who would like to meet an authentic/eccentric Aussie Family is encouraged to save us from the gutter-defacating-combi option on this leg of the journey.
Just drop a line to Mark and save us from an embarressing international disgrace LoL.
oops meant to strike out the sponging off option up there….
(sprung)!
How to get something onto the NSW election agenda? …borrow a Howard line and pitch for a federal takeover. If only. Keep Australia Beautiful Association reported this week that the volume of litter has increased nationally by 7 per cent in a year with highways the major problem.
While there had been a decline in some areas such as plastic bags and cigarette butts, glass and aluminium cans were up.
South Australia alone has had returnable deposits now for close to 30 years.
It hasn’t sent them broke. Come on Morris, Peter…let me down and I’ll be calling Johnny with a great wedging idea.
Glad you left that bit in sublime cowgirl. NGO’s are always good for a night or two OT.
Many are religious/christian, so try and look deep and concerned and a bit spiritual. When they catch you ‘on the piss’, a little too often, just look them in the eye and say “red wine is Jesus’ blood”.
Two more nights on that, for sure, before they throw you out.
Heh – the NGO we worked with many moons ago was Xian. I’m a believer, but severely misjudged the conservate time warp that existed in the institution at the time.
The youthful-feminist-Liberation Theology trip i was on at that time, contributed, amongst a few other things to nearly getting our visa’s revoked. It was a great learning curve though, and i thoroughly recommend a stint of aid/development work to anyone to give all idealist’s good dose of the complexities of reality.
(That a senior german expatriate in the town made it his goal to get me obscenely drunk via multiple bowls of cold cucumber/vodka soup whilst working for teetolling organisation probably didn’t help either.)
The Laos leg will be fine. These friends have known me for long enough to forgive my quirks. Rob was even a UQ Electoral Officer with me way back in our undergrad days. He is straight, but proabably one of the most decent guys you could even know.
Gee shucks, thanks Bob and Nabs. Wanna know something weird, that photo for a long time came up number 1 on a google image search on “mick”. Now it is number 2. Bloody Mick Jagger thinks he can beat me on the interwebs…
Oh and Nabs, I plan on going for the macBook as soon as I’ve landed my next contract… I’ll be sure to add racing stripes for speed.
Yes, I am aware of Macback, but here in WA the scheme is administrated by one compnay- Black & White, who have the majority of these cabs, while the other main company, Swan Taxis, have a smaller number.
I’ve taken the plunge and today I’ve bought a Vodaphone pre-paid Nokia 2310 mobile so I have some sort of mobile contact if this happens again.
It’s fortunate, that the return journey call was made from a State Govt MP office, so my member Jaye Radisch http://www.parliament.wa.gov.au/parliamentmemblist.nsf/AllDocs/B737D9A5FA07A70A482569FC002738DD?opendocument can kick some serious butt towards the Minister for Planning & Infrastructure
Also my sister is going to ring Black & White on my behalf next week to put in a formal complaint as well.
hmm, has my last post been caught up in the Spaminator ?? I did include a link to my local State Member of Parlaiments webpage.
“The “local catsâ€? or the backpackers?”
Mark, suspect it would be a mixture of both. If it were not for male backpackers from the old dart, I would have had no hesitation in putting it all down to local cats.
Geoff, there’s a story behind Macquarie’s investment. It’s a cheap way of appropriating some oligopoly rents for themselves – as discussed a year ago on this very blog here. I don’t think the disabled will benefit much.
This doesn’t look good for Turnball. [link]
Oddly enough it is clearly within the rules – which is more than you can say for most of the travel rorts that MPs have been caught pulling in the past. It’s clearly a waste of taxpayers’ money, but it is probably a better case for changing the rules than it is a particularly damning piece of evidence against Turnbull himself.
[Can't believe that I am vaguely defending that smarmy man...]
The Turnbull story looks like its a beat-up by the ABC, possibly as a distraction from the Iraq/Hicks/climate change problems besetting the govt. Rudd has not fallen into the trap. Rudd has already said Turnbull’s payments were legitimate.
Oz politics is interesting, but I think it will be overtaken by developments in US politics in the coming weeks. We will see the fallout from the Libby trial this week, while on March 1, the west coast state of Washington will introduce impeachment proceedings against Bush and Cheney.
Hey silkworm I do not think you can blame Aunty for this one. Looks to have come compliments of the richest media mogul in the world.
You know the guy who would never take full advantage of every tiny tax deduction available or pay somebody else to check it for him.