*rant.

A Tourist.
We've all been one, even when six years old and not legally responsible, we were all at some stage a tourist. Visiting somewhere nice, playing, relaxing, dining & drinking. In the early twenties some of us found enlightenment, VDs and debt backpacking and justified it as a personal growth thing. Honeymooners, dirty weekenders both long married & illicit, from family camping holidays to highway Zed grey nomads people seem to like to get away from home. I heard once that popular (meaning middle class) tourism & holidaying was started by promotion for hotels on the English beachside towns, but thats not important right now.

Let me give you a local or resident perspective. FCK OFF You vulgar, brash, insensitive, ignorant, unpleasant and otherwise inconsiderately occupying my valuable reality, parking, shop & highway bastards.

One bloke (25, sombrero, sunnies, Aussie flag boardies, zinc & a shit eating grin) yesterday was being towed by a boat on a plastic blow-molded kayak while pretending to paddle with an esky between his knees at a remarkably brisk 5 or 6 knots, on a hugely incredibly long rope - seriously it was like 70m long. I was travelling upstream & almost passed his 2 giggling idiot towing mates before I saw him. On a dam somewhere, thats pretty funny. But in an insanely busy waterway with hundreds of halfwits going hell west & croocked? C'mon.

Thanks for the squillions you drop in our local economy.
Now go home it's going to rain all next week.

4 minutes of a disturbed internal monologue

In a voice like a bison might have.

A young researcher isolates a new enzyme associated with antisocial and socially disruptive behavior. As a result of the very compound he isolates the young scientist officially publishes, describing it's make up and structure and as his is right he calls it Fuckwitylase.


Further study, by other researchers as he was undoubtedly sacked, shows that a: the most basic level of self control can moderate levels in the blood stream and some Buddhist monks can reduce their levels to undetectable & b: develops a reliable field test akin to Blood Alcohol Content devices currently on the market.

At first used in law enforcement. Speeding ticket? "Please just swab your mouth with this sir, hm that is 228 Parts per Million, less than proscribed 400ppm, so off you go sir and please slow down."

Then used in selection of politicians, Exec Office Holders & Officer recruitment in the armed forces.



Would this lead to the beige-ification of the said professions?

Would it result in such reduced risk taking behavior that society would stagnate?

Do men in need periods of insanity, frivolity, stupidity, caprice.

NBobbing in the South Pacific

Well folks I'm back after a week away on the job.
Was a good trip all up with no significant badness.
Good company, interesting countryside and boy does it make a nice change from the same old same old that I do week in week out. I get to do 2 or 3 of these trips each year where we set out in the good ship Lollipop and head out to sea to chase the poachers, villains & hopeless clowns that justify my meagre pay packet.
Some photos.
This is the good ship Lollipop.

The more observant among you will notice the red stripes. That indicates that she is in fact the QG Lollipop, I need to be vewy vewy careful on what I say in case Big Brother construes it as a criticism.
I believe I have spoken in the past about All boats being compromises. You trade off X for Y. Speed for comfort in this example. Note her beam - or width for you lubbers. She is very narrow in the hips. That makes her go like a cut cat when the big twin cats downstairs roar, but it makes for a very rock 'n rolly ride.

Exhibit B your worship.

You are looking out the back deck, across QG Little toot in her cradle. The alloy pipe structure is a gate that lowers on hydraulics to allow launch & retrieval at sea & at speed. Only sissy boys use cranes & davits (yes I'm looking at you Customs -blouses the lot of them) As you scroll down pay close attention to the horizon relative to the roof, if I could be stuffed I'd assemble it into a little animation, but I cant so just pretend it's one of those old flick books OK? Good.

What was really cool was that we were running with the sea, not into it. So instead of turning green & feeding the fish I was scarfing down left over pasta sauce as we steamed along.

So we steamed up the coast and overnighted at Fitzroy Reef. Google Map it. Seriously, Now. Go do it, there'll be a test after.

Neither words nor photos can begin to describe the brain bending beauty of this place. It is simply stunning.

I could happily spend a month there fishing & diving and napping in the cool bug-free sea breezes.

Here's a dodgy photo of the plotter.

I could stick in a tirade about global warming and the threat to the Great Barrier Reef & yah de yah, but I wont.

I will however digress for just a few moments.

I hope one day to own a substantial vessel. I'm not usually motivated by grand desires, in most things Im pretty humble in my wishes & dreams, but one day I'd like one of these. She is a Cloverlly Class dive tender Ex Royal Navy. Accom for 8 + 3, full compressor & gas mixing facilities. Slow as a fat kid & Ugly like a bucket of smashed crabs, but I like her lots. I really want to cruise the Western Pacific before it's buggered, I recognise that I'll probably never have the ca$h to do it under my own steam, so I need to find some other clown or clowns to ca$h up. I figure high-end live aboard dive charters in the region of $2K US/day would be about the market I'm looking for.

Anyway back to where we were.

We overnighted at Fitzroy after a big night of Trawler boardings. The next day we steamed for 130 odd miles down to behind Fraser Island. Another huge day, that's the run the Rock & Roll photos are from, we had 25+ knots of wind straight up the jaxie and had the Lollipop surfing down waves, at one stage hitting 20.2 Knots, which while not Rocket-car fast is really going in a lump of alloy That big.

We anchored up in the lee of Fraser and hit the bunks. Blessed sleep. Funny, I actually got used to the constant humm of the Gen Set running all night and woke three times with a start last night in the silence of home, my point being it doesn't take long to get used to something

The next day we launched Little Toot again and went for a big blatt around the islands & up & down the Sandy Straights, some lovely countryside through there. And then it rained & rained & Fkn rained. Holy mother of dog it rained, at one stage visability was down to about 5 meters and the wind against tide pushed up a 3/4 m chop; commonly referred to as a kidney killer, because you have to drive standing up, but slightly hunched over the helm and that's where the pounding gets you- in the lower back, about kidney-ville ugh.

So we pounded back to the Lollipop, for a hot shower & a big feed and it was all good.

Back into Hervey Bay to top up with about 3 thousand litres of diesel and 80+ of ULP.

Washed the Lollipop from stem to stern. Secured her alongside and caught the train to home & hearth.

8 huge days and I'm ready for days off.

Hope all are well.

Dad's home & doing ok, which means Mum is over the moon.

And we can all sleep soundly knowing that the Wallabies were able to defeat that mighty powerhouse of Rugby Union, the Welsh.

Generic

All will remember and probably own VHS cassettes. Most remember Beta cassettes, some Beta Max, a few Betacam & probably only commercial operators would know Betacam Pro and that last great tape gasp Betacam Pro Digital. It was an interesting story of competing manufacturers and their licensing decisions that ended up with VHS ( in many ways the inferior format) taking global predominance. Look it up if you could be arsed. The nub of it was VHS became the Generic standard globally. It was only once this was established that video hire business became viable.

A sound & vision technician works with a fairly limited suite of plugs. 6 or 7 standard connectors can connect pretty much anything to anything across manufacturers. Except for Sony. Sony in many ways set the bar of technical reliability and performance to which other manufacturers struggled to match, but they had this stupid extended jack plug that no other manufacturer used. Same diameter, but with an extra sleeve. It may seem trivial, but believe me it's a grade A Piss me off. Nokia is obviously cleverer than the Rest of the World too and uses a 2.7 mm Headphone socket. Industry standard is a satisfactory 3.5 mm plug. Arse Clowns, the pair of them. Generic is good.

The PC VS Mac competition was good for consumers on a macro level, but gentlemen would have done it without whacky Mac peripheral connectors.

There is much talk & work being conducted on a range of renewable energy sources for industrial, domestic and transport use. Great cool & excellent. Having a crack at a variety of source options is probably smarter than putting all effort into one direction*. Here diversity is good. But I was thinking about the transport element. We need to find a way to transport in bulk and deliver a safe, non polluting, low mass, lots of ergs in a can or a fluid to allow vehicle refueling. It's gotta be the same from Cairns to Carlton. Roll up at a refuelling point and take on power for the next X00 kilometers of the journey It must be Generic. Without this the transition will be strangled - possibly deliberately so by those with interests to maintain the market for fossil fuels and control of the current refuelling marketplace.

I'm proposing that deviations from certain international industrial standards be punishable by 100% import tariffs and perhaps some unpleasantness for convenient board members of the offending company.





*As a side thought - my money is on a GM Algae that can eat coal fired power station exhaust and make natural gas. This is fed back into the system resulting in remarkable efficiency gains & reduction of emissions.
This then escapes from a power plant and goes rogue, over the course of months spreading to infection sites across the globe. A new engingeered form of unicellular biological pollution. It grows fastest in the most polluted areas of the earth - following it's food source. Perhaps it's temperature sensitive, so it affects equatorial areas more. It establishes reserves in deserts so is un-eradicable and spreads covering & discolouring everything but killing trees & shrubs causing mass carbon release and landscape degradation through soil loss. This run off sediment will "fill in" harbours & estuaries exacerbating the effect of sea level rise impact on those cities adjacent to waterways. But that's because I'm an optimist.

The crippled shopping-trolley of crap we call an exsistance

Ok. This should give you the equivilant of a coupla thousand words to start with.

I was steaming home when a nice man in his 04 Falcon became a new & interesting hood ornament for my Hilux. My insurer who shall remain nameless tried to duck & weave and minimise their "Exposure." A poor strategy on their behalf, met by my war-face led to a "Recalculation." The end result is a $400 excess and a $400 "co-contribution" making it an $800 momentary lapse, but better than the original offer of "Suffer in your jocks."







Dad is mending well. He is weak as a kitten and has no stamina, but is in relatively fine spirits. He's joking with the staff & visitors, but I can tell he wants out. He make frequent references to the "Escape Comittee Meetings" and "Tunnel George is progressing well." OK, so a big zero points for subtlety on his part & sensitivity on mine.
I am still blown away by the events of 5 weeks ago. I really don't know what to add but thank you all for your best wishes, it looks like the crotchety old bugger aint done yet.
Moving on.








On the home front Blue Helmets report no serious skirmishes or breaches of the Norwegian Accord cease fire. Some activity continues in this geopolitical hotspot. The Junta accuse the insurrection forces of the BLA (Bobette Liberation Army) of laundry sabotage. Namely dumping clean clothes back into the dirty laundry hamper as it's easier than putting it away.
In return the Freedom Fighter Forces allege the Junta's Secret Police have been interfering in the legitimate social activities of "Friends dropping around uninvited & unannounced at 8:30 PM on a sunday evening."
Relative to some of the engagements of the past few years this is Very Small Beer indeed.

Sorry folks, that's about it for today.

S'funny that I've been having all these slightly crazed thoughts 3am at frequently culminating in "Hmm, should Blog about that," but when I'm sitting here all good to go I can't think of any of them.

Fathers Day

This is going to be a very heavy one folks, so by all means bail now & come back when you are in a strong state of mind. Please excuse the venting and if you are concerned by disclosure of personal information - Kindly F*ck off.



I was away for most of last week with work. I returned on Thursday a creased & salt encrusted bundle of sleep deprivation, hungering for my family & my bed. The Bobette had been home sick from school (minor Upper Respiratory Tract infection) and as I had been away & SWMBO had been in Brisneyland doing executive banking things we had parked The Bobette out at my parents. I knocked off on Thurs PM and rang mum to say I was on my way to get The Bobette. 5 minutes later I get a call from mums mobile, I assumed she wants me to pick up milk or papers or something on the way. I answered. All I can hear is mum weeping & The Bobette (with obvious terror in her voice) yelling 4,5,6,7,8,9,10 then I hear a tinny 3rd voice saying "you're doing great honey the ambulance is on it's way."

Ooh F*ck.

Then I hear mum say through sobs "It's your father, come as quick as you can."



My old 94 Hilux aint a high performance vehicle and I think I probably took five years off her life as I hit the afterburners and made the 20K trip to Mum & Dads in what at the same time felt like an hour but was probably record time.



I pulled up at their house & there is an Ambulance in the driveway. I sprint inside. The Bobette is obviously shattered, Mum is going to pieces & 2 Ambulance officers are working on my Dad who is flat on his back on the bedroom floor. They get me on CPR while they get lines in and intubate him. I'm on his chest counting out the compressions and I look down at his face. Big F*cking mistake as he looks completely f*cked. The Great & Powerful Bob Brain kicks in and says "He's not your Dad, he's just some old fat bastard you are helping." Possibly the most cellophane thin & transparent coping mechanism ever, but it kept me going.

We got him started again, the Packer Whacker* gave him 3 shocks and he's arching and twisting, has a bit of a spew, which clogs the intubation tube down his neck, but we've got him going. We load him onto a gurney, get him into the Ambulance and they take him off to hospital.

Was it an hour or was it 5 minutes I have no idea.



But here's what I do know.



My 15 year old daughter gave me back my Dad. She saved his F*cking life.



By the Ambulance logs she did unassisted CPR for at least 12.5 minutes effectively on her own. Mum was there but not helping as she was falling to pieces. Everyone, seriously everyone from triage nurses, cardiologist, to the Ambos - everyone has said that if she hadn't done what she did Dad would be in the morgue today. A Herculean effort. Unbelievable for one so young & so blond.



Now of course apart from her beauty, wit & grace (transparent arse covering) one of the things that most attracted me to SWMBO was her capacity to deal with a situation. She may do the girly tears & hand flapping later but in a jam she is calm together & capable. This is the first time The Bobette has demonstrated this capacity. And then some!



She is a Surf Lifesaver and had done a refresh on her CPR recently so it was all fresh in her mind, but with the Clubbies they are trained to operate as a team. The Bobette was flying solo.



She is quite understandably traumatised by the experience & we are taking advantage of all the school & surf club counselling staff & support.



So now dad is in a induced coma at the Prince Charles Hospital in Brisneyland. He has had 2 stents put in and is a long way from being fine. We may yet lose him & I accept that.



But I wanted to share how proud I am of my kid, and how not to spend fathers day - in an ICU stroking his hand hoping that the crotchety old bugger aint done yet.



Oh and I got a Play Station 3 combined fathers day & Birthday present.



* A Packer Whacker is Australian slang for a defibrillator. After Kerry Packer (Australia's richest man at the time) had a heart attack on the polo field & was restarted by one of the very few Defibs in NSW Ambulances, Big Kezza lashed out & bought one for every Ambulance in NSW - hence the name - a Packer Whacker.

Do you look at the world with an easel or a scanning electron micrograph?

Well howdy binge thinkers.
It's been a while and as per usual my poor old melon has been racing around with a million imponderables.
Today's topic: What price a rounded education? What is a rounded education?
Parents want the best for their progeny. It's as natural as, well, something really natural. What "The best" is, is about as subjective a concept as I can think of.

Science is important to me. Really important. Without a basic understanding of science an internal combustion engine, or an antibiotic is indistinguishable from magic. Here's a quick example; as part of The Bobette's ongoing treatment for a gastric complaint we have a rather wonderful Paediatric Gastro-enterologist, at the last appointment Dr E wanted to send The Bobette off for another XRay. I asked if an ultrasound would do the same job, Dr E looked at me with that look usually reserved for vegans - a mixture of pity & contempt. I expressed my concern that The Bobette had received many many pelvic Xrays and I want to limit her exposure. Why? because I have an understanding of XRay radiation and the attendant risk of cumulative doses. Remember the old lead aprons we used to get at the dentist? they weren't for fashion, they were to protect your next generation still swimming around in your shorts or loitering in your ovaries if that's how you are plumbed. On this occasion Dr E agreed that the Xray wasn't necessary, so I saved the Bobette another dose. Someone without that understanding would have blithely said yes Dr. - Better living through a scientific understanding.

I also believe there is beauty in some science.

Darwin's (or Walace's) klanger Evolution through Natural Selection changed our understanding of our world. Old sex mad Karl Linnaeus revolutionised our understanding of the flora & fauna we share the world with. The scientific method - observations, repeatable experiments, peer reviewed publications & collaboration may not be the only way to study the world, but it beats the living p!ss out of opinions based on intuition if you are developing a new cancer treatment. Quite apart from the utility of these & other scientific achievements they are (IMHO) beautiful ideas in their own right.

The creative arts are also hugely important to me.
I spent 6 years failing to complete a 3 year Bachelor of Arts. I love some sculpture & painting and I wish I knew more so I could appreciate it more, I love some literature. Dance leaves me cold and I think poets are largely a waste oxygen & real estate but that's just me. I believe there are some questions that are best explored through the arts. A dry statistical report could never deliver the understanding that say "The Killing Fields" or "The year of living dangerously" could. 1984, Animal Farm and Fahrenheit 451 changed my head- radically & permanently.

So how we understand our world is based on our understanding of & appreciation for two quite distinct ways of arranging our thinking.

The Bobette is coming into her last 2 years of secondary education and has to select subjects for these last 2 years. She is wonderfully creative and expressive. She is hugely talented in a performance sphere and can write fit to kill. She wants to pursue a career in journalism. I am passionate about the role of journalism in a democracy. (Ithink it is at least as important as the judiciary.) I am a keen and (I think) discerning consumer of news. I shot news for regional & metro newsrooms for almost five years, so I have an insiders view of the trade. I recognises the shortcomings & pratfalls inherent in the business, yet I still 100% support her decision to undertake an important & (sometimes) honourable trade.

I have been strongly urging her to do at least one science to balance her creative arts subjects.
This has been met with that same high carbon steel will that her mother is known for across several continents.
Now I am under riding instructions to pull my head in.
She is her own person. What is important to me is not necessarily important to her.
The best way to guarantee that she hates school & her parents and drops out to become a Meth Ho is to force her to do subjects she hates.
A B+ in drama will count better to her tertiary entrance score than a C- in Chemistry.
High school is not the end of her learning.
I (apparently) hold unrealistic expectations of what a 17 year old should know.
All reasonable points, so why do I feel she is getting the educational equivalent of fairy floss (cotton candy) & a caramel thick shake for dinner?

I was discussing this with my work partner, he suggested that I was being as narrow minded and closed as the Jesus freaks who want to banish evolution from schools. Just 180 degrees opposed in view. I disagree, I think the comment would be valid if I campaigned for pure maths science. But I'm not, I'm just looking for something anything on the quantifiable side of the ledger.

I seem to have had a minor victory tonight getting Geography onto the list in position 5. At least that's something.

That's it. That's all I've got for you.
Not world shattering or hysterically amusing, but if you wanted that you'd be over @ NatV's or The Good Dr. Yobbo's joints.

Aribear, there you go. You only needed to ask.

Shalom & go the Wallabies.