Having achieved “huge success” in Victoria last year, SPC Ardmona’s Collect-A-Tub program has gone national through Coles and BiLo. When you buy certain Goulburn Valley “fruit snacks” in a plastic tub, you get points for your school, which can eventually be redeemed for “sporting goods“. High-scoring schools will be “rewarded” with visits from athletes while the highest scoring wins the Flying Fruit Fly Circus.
Sounds all very admirable, active and healthy and no doubt it speaks to the national anxiety about food, exercise and childhood obesity, but as a parent my critical antennae went up when I first saw these collect-a-tub ads on TV. Continue reading ‘Fruit, glorious fruit’
Well, I’m back from Sydney. When I was in Sydney, it was freakin’ cold, and I ducked into David Jones on Friday arvo and bought a hat. Harris tweed, from the Outer Hebrides (it has subsequently been suggested to me that tweed from the Inner Hebrides is just so not the thing). Thanks heartily to all those who offered and shared hospitality and cheer! (Particularly LP comrades tigtog, Phil, suz and dk.au.) While there’s no doubt that Brisvegas and Melbourne have better bars than Sydney (though I blame the licensing laws), I can say truthfully that hat shopping in the Emerald City is fabulous. And while cheaper licences would bring an alternative to dank pubs full of pokies for the tippler’s indulgence and facilitate Sydney’s self image as a “global city”, I can say that any claims that Sydney folk are so big city that they’re not friendly are completely false. Now… back to work!
Continue reading ‘What I did on my holidays’
Apparently Alexander Downer reckons he’s “never known such a bunch of cry-babies as the Labor Party”. I laughed when I read that, because last night I watched Downer’s amazing performance on the SBS World News. Here’s a summary:
Mean old Peter Beattie is bagging people, Kevin Rudd is smearing people, the media is writing mean headlines, Kevin Rudd is sneaky, “This is pathetic. It’s pathetic… it’s pathetic”, Labor is smearing people again, and Kevin Rudd is smearing people.
As Tim Dunlop wondered, “Can accusations that Mr Rudd is a poopy pants be far away?”
But the most interesting line in the SBS interview was this one:
STAN GRANT: But there are valid questions in the handling of this [the Haneef case] — the fact the SIM card was not found in the car, as was told to the court, the fact we now hear police had written personally names in Dr Haneef’s diary, the fact this has been so public that there have been allegations of leaking. It’s a wonder we’re not a laughing stock, isn’t it?
ALEXANDER DOWNER: No, but we don’t want to become a laughing stock by becoming like America, where the media are the judge and the jury.
Get that? Our foreign minister just declared that the United States of America is a laughing stock. Why do you hate our greatest ally, Alexander? This knee-jerk anti-Americanism is not a good look from a cabinet minister. We know that their legal system is no laughing stock — just ask David Hicks.
There is this funny rule that says if you leave any task undone for over a week its urgency usually disappears so I’m wondering if the same rule applies over at News Limited and Blogocracy where almost two weeks have passed since a post was pulled. At the time Tim Dunlop posted this.
Apologies for the recent absence and lack of response, not to mention lack of posts. Yep, the editor here pulled a post yesterday, which I ain’t happy about, though of course, in the greater scheme of things editors pulling copy is hardly unusual. Nonetheless, it is something we are discussing.
A week is a long time in politics, the big media cycle is probably only twenty-four hours, but the blogosphere always remembers, so I’m just wondering, does anyone know what happened?
If you’d like to come along tomorrow night and have a drink with Troppo’s Nick Gruen, please note a time change to 8pm, and rsvp-ing either by leaving a comment here or emailing me on mbahnisch (at) gmail (dot) com would be really very much appreciated.
Howard may be warning of madness and chaos if Labor is elected, but it appears no one who’s not inclined to anyway believes him. Newspoll tells the usual story this morning - very little movement in voting intentions. Over at The Government Gazette, they appear to have given up on the preferred PM theorem, perhaps consoling themselves with the success of their stop Costello campaign (not that he ever started), aside from his longstanding fan Glenn Milne, who’s beating a fairly dead drum on this one. Howard’s obviously frustrated at Rudd’s strategy of constantly eliding the differences with the government, the latest episode in this saga being Tasmanian forest policy. He shouldn’t be surprised, at any rate. It was the exact game plan he used in 1996.
This Chinese-built motocross motorcycle is not, by all reports, a particularly good example of its breed. This Honda motorcycle puts out roughly twice the horsepower, has suspension that can tolerate the abuse of the Crusty Demons of Dirt, and is put together with the skill and attention that all Honda’s products are reknowned for.
The relative merits of motocross motorcycles is probably not of great interest to most LP readers, but there is a point to all this. The Honda costs roughly $10,000. The no-name Chinese bike, a full, adult-size 250cc motorcycle, can be delivered to your door for around $1400. Even Honda’s diminuitive CRF 50, a tiny minibike whose equivalent was too small for me as a nine-year-old, sells for $2000.
You might be thinking that these are just another example of a cheap and nasty Chinese-made toy, but there’s more to it than that. Many of the motor scooters currently infesting Australia’s inner cities are Chinese-made. Zongshen, one of the Chinese motorcycle manufacturers, is already dipping its toe in the Australian road-registerable motorcycle market. How long will it be before a Chinese-made car follows, and just how cheap will they be? You have to wonder Ford’s decision to assemble small cars in Australia again will be completely priced out of the market by the time they start production. Tim Colebatch isn’t exactly unique in wondering what the continuing rise of China’s manufacturing sector, and demand for resources pushing the dollar ever-higher, will do to Australian car manufacturing.
Channel 10 News just reported on the Jetstar plane that had an emergency landing in Indonesia.
To report the story, they used what was obviously stock footage of Jetstar planes rather than the actual plane in Indonesia.
How can we tell? Showing three different models of airliner in one story is a bit of a giveaway.
As the case against Mohamed Haneef falls apart via the Keystone bungling of the AFP, NSW cabinet has granted NSW police extended powers to be able to collect DNA samples from anyone arrested for any crime, not just more serious crimes such as murder or sexual assault.
Anti-terrorism has been invoked to justify these measures but Moroney’s attempt to defend the new laws against civil liberty concerns via a dazzling, emotive non sequitur is, well moronic:
I hear oppositions that these are breaches or potential breaches of civil liberties,” Mr Moroney said. “Let me say this, every police officer … [has] to be concerned about the civil liberties of everybody - not just a small few. We have to be concerned about the civil liberty of being able to leave your car on the street without it being stolen.
“I’ve got to be concerned about the civil liberty of not having your house broken into when you leave it. I’ve got to be concerned about the ultimate civil liberty of being able to go about your business … without being assaulted, or the ultimate breach of civil liberties … murder. And so I dismiss these issues.
This doesn’t explain how collecting DNA will prevent such crimes. The inference is that having the DNA samples (as well as increased identification checks when buying a SIM card) will help eliminate suspects which is very different from Moroney’s bizarre concept of civil liberties used to justify the new and unnecessary powers.
Three Welsh inventors are touting their Greenbox system that would replace car exhaust systems with an emissions capture system. It uses algae to absorb the emitted gases and hold them inertly so that the boxes can be easily transported for centralised processing of the car wastes.
The three, who stumbled across the idea while experimenting with carbon dioxide to help boost algae growth for fish farming, have set up a company called Maes Anturio Limited, which translates from Welsh as Field Adventure.
[…]
Through a chemical reaction, the captured gases from the box would be fed to algae, which would then be crushed to produce a bio-oil. This extract can be converted to produce a biodiesel almost identical to normal diesel.
This biodiesel can be fed back into a diesel engine, the emptied Greenbox can be affixed to the car and the cycle can begin again.
The process also yields methane gas and fertiliser, both of which can be captured separately. The algae required to capture all of Britain’s auto emissions would take up around 400 hectares.
The three estimate that 10 facilities could be built across the UK to handle the carbon dioxide from the nearly 30 million cars on British roads.
It’s a damn fascinating idea, so long as they can make replacing the box each time you fill up the tank a simple enough clickety-click type procedure.
Iechyd da.
ABC News:
Liberal MP Bronwyn Bishop is calling for more children of drug addicts to be permanently removed from their parents and offered for adoption.
Ms Bishop wants to see adoption, rather than fostering, used to separate children from parents who are battling addiction.
The backbencher, who is currently chairing a parliamentary inquiry into the impact of illicit drug use on families, has told the ABC’s Four Corners program the current system is skewed towards the interests of drug-using parents, and not their children.
“There are hundreds and hundreds of parents who are desperate to adopt children and give love and give good homes, but there is this ‘biology first’ principle,” she said.
How “addicted” do people have to be to have their kids permanently removed without hope of ever regaining custody? How will this be determined, and by who? Do both parents have to be addicted or only one? Are all drug-using parents automatically bad parents anyway?
Continue reading ‘Riiiggghhhht’
Is everybody reading their Potter or something?
Anyway, there is some discussion of the latest book in the Saturday Salon thread. This discussion will be spoiler-free, ‘kay?
But because I love youse all and sympathise with the speed-readers who are bursting to vent their satisfaction/disbelief/outrage at the twists and turns, here is my gift: over at the Leaky Cauldron they’ve closed down their discussion forum to quarantine it from spoilers except for one free thread that allows Deathly Hallows spoilers.
Enjoy.
P.S. I mean it about no spoilers here. Banning offence. The comments on this thread can now be about my horrible, horrible censorship of others’ right to be selfish arseholes.
Several senior Government sources have told The Sunday Age they were furious at the Australian Federal Police for their handling of the case and wanted to shut the issue down before it did more damage to the Government’s credibility.
“Our best option is to cancel the Criminal Justice Certificate, which was issued to keep Haneef here in Australia after we cancelled his visa, and that is my understanding of what our intentions are,” one Government source said.
The Age
Getting Haneef out of the country will get him out of the news, leaving the front pages free for the next crisis John Howard decides to confect in his increasingly desperate attempts to turn the polls, but the Government needs a pretext to give his deportation some respectability. Today’s Hun has done the honours:
Continue reading ‘Bricking It In’
Ugh factor warning!
My old dad once asked what it was that the rich man put in his pocket that the poor man threw away. The answer had something to do with small bits of cotton cloth which were surplus to requirements for a pioneering farmer. Except for church on Sundays, of course. Certainly what he could dispose of in the paddock with great accuracy at two paces had no conceivable value.
Listening to ABC Local Radio recently Bernie Hobbs told us of the latest in human waste resource-recovery technology – human urine for fertilizer.
The Chinese did it 5000 years ago, the Japanese did it 1000 years ago, followed by much of the rest of Asia. The Swedes were collecting it from multi-story apartments in Stockholm in the late 1800s.
Continue reading ‘P 4 phosphorus’
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