Fat Cars for Fat People

It makes sense somehow - if you're overweight, you need an overweight car.

Obama's obese limo got stuck in Ireland. He's not obese, but a helluva lot of his countrymen and women are. His presidential limo sure is.

Only in America could an obesity epidemic influence the automotive market. It seems that even as fuel prices skyrocket in Yankeeland, people still buy SUVs and the like because they're too big to be comfortable in vehicles that drivers in the rest of the world accept as "right-sized".

I guess if the natural order of things follows here, as it most often does, we'll continue to be saddled with the same lumps of automotive lard that have proliferated across the Pacific.

When you drive something as small as an MX5, it becomes an issue as many of the people driving Toyota Lardcruisers and the like simply don't see you.

One of the situations that often makes me smile is when I'm returning to my parked Mazda to be confronted with a driver (more often than not female) extracting a four-wheel drive from the front end of the parking space it's in, as they thought it was empty.

The diminutive proportions of the MX5 frequently fool them into thinking the space is free, and they are well and truly committed before they wake up. I always keep a straight face.

Critters

Something is digging up our back lawn.

It is obviously a smallish critter, and it eats lawn grubs.

It leaves small holes (about 10cm deep and 3cms across). It seems to settle on a particular area, usually about 9 or 10 square metres, and gives it a thorough going-over during the night.

This adds up to Perameles nasuta (Long-nosed Bandicoot), which makes sense based on my memories of catching bandicoots as an eight year old in Central Queensland.

We used to get an old pine box, and a piece of corrugated iron. We’d prop one end of the box up on the iron with a stick. From memory, a school ruler (1 foot then, 30cm now) worked well. We’d tie something to eat to the ruler with a short piece of string, and put the object under the propped-up box, well towards the back.

This usually worked as a trap, because the bandicoot would pull the string as it gobbled up the tucker, the ruler would move, and the box would fall. We learned early to put iron underneath, or the bandicoot would dig his/her way to freedom.

We usually put the bandicoot in a sugar bag, and took it to school for morning talk. The hero was the one who put the bandicoot in the sugar bag. They scratch. It would then be released in the scrub some distance from home.

We knew when there were bandicoots about because we’d see the holes.

OK – some mysteries remain.

If bandicoots - how do they get in?

Our backyard is surrounded by a Colorbond metal fence set in concrete. If it is bandicoots, do they clamber their way in from structures or trees down the back?

I always believed that bandicoots can’t climb.

Maybe they’re possums – but possums don’t dig as far as I know.

Whatever critter it is has a weakness for strawberries. They have nicked some nice ripe ones from my daughter’s garden.

She is not pleased.

Why?

I came across this mess whilst out buying mower fuel this morning.

It's obviously been destroyed last (Saturday) night.

I must have led a sheltered life, because there's no way I can understand why anyone would do this. It can't have been easy, probably involved a number of people, and I'd be surprised if bodily injury wasn't occasioned in the process.

Perhaps whoever was responsible used his/her head.

No damage would result to a head belonging to someone thick enough to do this.

The Warwick Diaspora

Recently, on my way to Sydney by road, I passed through Warwick.

“Passed through” is not strictly correct, as I ended up spending a fair chunk of time there. This was on account of my GPS failing.

I didn’t get lost, but the GPS stopped working just before Warwick, where I’d stopped for breakfast, and it became apparent that the cable that charged it up from the cigarette lighter had gone to the great recycling depot in the sky. I therefore had to hang around until Dick Smith opened, to snag a replacement – which I did for $2, but that’s another story.

There was no way I was driving into Sydney without a working GPS.

My Dad was born and raised in Warwick, and it is, along with Charters Towers and Ipswich, one of those places in Queensland where every second (or third) Queenslander comes from.

Warwick is the site of the notorious egg incident when a disaffected local egged Billy Hughes PM at the time (November 1917).

In those days, there was a furious tussle between the then Queensland Premier Thomas Joseph (TJ) Ryan and Billy Hughes, PM at the time, about conscription. The only way to travel interstate back then was by train, and Hughes had stopped in Warwick to give a pro-conscription speech from the railway station platform.

This went down like a lead balloon in Irish-Catholic Warwick, and a local called Brosnan threw some eggs at him.

Apparently the eggs thrown were particularly noxious and the thrower was very accurate, knocking Hughes' hat off. Hughes took great exception, and ordered the nearest member of the Queensland Police to “arrest that man”. This sergeant, who was Irish Catholic (as was the egg-thrower) is reported to have told Hughes that as a federal politician he had no jurisdiction in the matter, although the words used are lost in the mists of time.

Perhaps he spoke the 1917 equivalent of “get stuffed”.

One of the upshots was the formation of the Federal Police. The story goes that Hughes (also called the “fiery particle") got more and more worked up as he travelled south, to the point that he came up with the idea of establishing his own police force, so the next time that someone threw an egg at him, he could extract vengeance.

I first heard about this incident from a Uni lecturer called Dr Denis Murphy when I was studying the history of Queensland in the seventies at U of Q. Murphy was a charismatic figure, who unfortunately died of cancer in 1984.

Had he survived, I’m convinced he would have rivalled Peter Beattie as a Queensland politician. He certainly got me interested in Queensland history, and taught me that Queensland and Queenslanders are different, something that many federal politicians have forgotten to their cost.

One who either forgot or never knew this salient fact was Jo Bjelke-Petersen and this ignorance ultimately led to the failure of the Jo for PM campaign.

Irish Catholics (with some help from Lutheran Germans) pretty much built Warwick. My father used to relate the story of being horsewhipped at age six by a Protestant cow-cocky because he’d strayed on to his property taking a shortcut home. He was called a “dirty little tyke”. My dad did it pretty tough as a youngster in Warwick. His mum died when he was eight.

So Warwick has a personal significance.

It also has a Diaspora, and they’re all over Queensland.

The Warwick statue pictured, by the way, is not T. J. Ryan. It is another Irish politician who hailed from Warwick - George Byrnes, who was the first Mayor. He was, of course, an Irish Catholic.

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Long Legged Festival

The Vietnamese have their own unique version of high fashion.

It's about as camp as a row of tents, but they demonstrate heaps of enthusiasm. And there's some big names (e.g. Heather Marks) involved.

But a Long-Legged Festival?

I guess there's no word in Vietnamese for catwalk.

I don't remember girls with legs like that back in 1970. Must be the improvements in nutrition.....


Come to think of it, Long-Legged Festival probably accurately captures the gist of it all.

The Animals

This 1964 clip makes the Animals look like a bunch of dweebs, but they sound great.

The keyboard work and Guitar riffs on this are amazing.

Click on the video, watch it full-screen, put your headphones on, turn the sound up and enjoy.

GFC Revisited

Remember the Global financial Crisis?

I do. At a conservative estimate it cost me over $80000 of my hard-earned.

No doubt, there are heaps of other Self-Funded “Retirees” in this country in the same boat. I put the word retirees in inverted commas, as I’m not in fact retired, but still work for a living.

I work not because I have to, but because I enjoy what I do, but there are plenty of people out there with packages less sustainable than mine who have had no choice but to return to work as a result of the GFC.

That are, no doubt, more than a little unhappy about this.

It is, however, no longer news. It’s no surprise, then, that these remarks published last month scarcely raised an eyebrow in our mainstream media – 

  "Blame for this mess lies everywhere – from federal regulators who cast a blind eye, Wall Street bankers who let greed run wild, and members of Congress who failed to provide oversight," Mr Coburn, the subcommittee's top Republican, said.

"It shows without a doubt the lack of ethics in some of our financial institutions who embraced known conflicts of interest to accomplish wealth for themselves, not caring about the outcome for their customers."

This from a top Republican.

So what happened to the Rightist meme of blaming previous administrations for making it too easy for the less well-off to take out housing loans in the USA? It’s been conveniently dropped, of course, because the heat is off, and was never sustainable. It provided a distraction for a while.

It was a classic example of blaming the victim used to defend the ideology of the worst kind of fundamentalist thought – far more dangerous than any fundamentalism driven by creed or ideology.  I’m talking about market fundamentalism, espoused by Libertarians such as Ron Paul and his ilk. God help us if he ever gets a crack at the White House.

In essence, the good senator (Tom Coburn) is simply summarising the bipartisan Levin-Coburn report which lays the blame squarely at the feet of the Masters of the Universe in Wall Street.

From the report in Business Spectator of 14^th April 2011 –

Case studies from the go-go years of the real estate bubble formed the bulk of the report, which said a runaway mortgage securitisation machine churned out abusive loans, toxic securities, and big fees for lenders and Wall Street. 

It cited internal emails by Wall Street executives that described mortgage-backed securities underlying many collateralised debt obligations, or CDOs, as "crap" and "pigs." 

"Crap?"- "Pigs?" - I’ll use some strong language of my own.

These two-bob mug lairs have stolen large chunks of my hard-earned, because they lack anything that faintly resembles ethics or morality of any kind, and harbour a serious misunderstanding of the word “theft”.

And to think that forty years ago, I was conscripted to fight in a civil war in Asia because in the long run it was supposed to be in my best interests to preserve the supposed advantages of free market capitalism.

Pull the other one – it has bells on.

The only hopeful aspect of this situation is that the senate report is being referred to the Justice Department. Read it - sobering stuff...

On past performances, I don’t hold out much hope that justice will be done. I wonder how difficult it would be to track down these individuals? A lot can be achieved through a bit of basic Googling – and a class action is not beyond the bounds of possibility.


The Agent Orange class action provides a blueprint.