Today CNBC reported that there was a 24 hour blackout in Lebanon.
That’s catastrophic for a bankrupt nation with severe food shortages and as the CNBC report says, this caused food spoilage and food poisoning and God herself knows how anyone can operate a Covid hospital under those conditions.
So I thought I’d check up and see how you’re going cash wise, because, let’s face it, nobody wants to embarrass themselves by putting the bite on a pauper.
Boy was I relieved to see that you have $2 billion dollars. No wait, that was $202 billion. So I guess you’re probably not wandering around with the backside out of your pants and holes in your socks.
And then I remembered that the good people of Lebanon are out of cash and out of electricity. However, being in the Middle East, I’m guessing that they do have a fair bit of sunlight.
And I remembered that your company is in the business of generating electricity from sunlight and storing it in huge batteries.
Now you’re a famously smart guy and I’m betting that you can see where I’m going with this.
So what about you join the dots and show some magnificent global philanthropy. Nobody’s going to call you a mug for stepping in.
And I’ll be happy to put in a good word for you with the Nobel people. If they have’t got a category for single-handedly saving a failed national state, I’ll ask them to make one.
After all, you saved South Australia as a warm up for the major league.
If I see another news item showing a clip of a person getting a jab, I’ll spit.
As much as I’m keen on not being locked down – and I’m looking forward to seeing my kids and grand kids, I think it’s important to remember that 80% single vaxxed New South Welshpeople means that there will be over a million people in NSW including kids under 12 – ALL of whom have the potential to be Covid infected and infective in the community. (So do we, vaxxed people. It’s just unlikely that we’ll get very sick).
Let’s take a wildly optimistic guess that only 5% unvaxxed people will get infected = 20,000 and that only 5% of these end up in IC = 1,000 seriously sick people.
Did you know that NSW recently published the fact that 47% of people currently in intensive care (IC) are unvaccinated – and ALL the people on ventilators (which means they are seriously up shit creek) are unvaccinated.
This will put a massive massive strain on the whole health system in our state. FM works at a large private hospital (600 beds) and they are gearing up for a huge influx of Covid patients six weeks on from doing what Victoria did easing the lockdown and remember that that resulted in nearly 2,000 infections a day. So my guesses above could be WAAAY under the reality.
Let’s hope I’m wrong.
I’m not saying that NSW should continue being locked down like Fort Knox, but do take care brothers and sisters – and vax up to the eyeballs.
Whoever doesn’t believe that the ’70s were the epitome of Australian Cop Dramas, cop this …
Lockdown has provided a massive opportunity to romp through the best TV ever made. Once we exhausted Vera (The modern British version of Colombo), I slept through most of Midsummer Murders (REALLY ? Every week somebody gets knocked off in some bizarre ritual killing driven usually by greed and revenge). Surely if that happened in your borough, you’d move somewhere else.
Of course, there’s the many series of Death in Paradise. Same – but on a Caribbean Island. Shetland… what is it with islands and houses in isolated places that draws the murderers ?
Nora Linde with her Cop de Jour
And on SBS On Demand, for Pete’s (or was it Olaf’s) sake Sandhamn Murders on a Swedish Island where people go to bed in broad daylight. There’s more sex and a lot of drinking, teenage misadventure, infidelity, quite a lot of bicycle riding, running and scooting about in boats, more drinking, a lot of cop procedural but with that freelance nordic style casual dress and fine dining detective work.
There is a good looking boy cop played by a series of handsome nordic blokes, whose rather attractive – not too attractive but rather available female offsider would be a good sub at a pinch but the up close work is never consummated – leaving room for some tension with the female lead who starts out being a banking lawyer, and somehow morphs into a prosecutor who frequently finds herself running alternatively into the handsome detective and her ex-husband. There’s quite a lot of teenage girls being drugged and locked up in boats, and small lighthouse towers, quite a few mysterious drownings, amazing tans, lots of Volvos and BMWs and truly lovely seaside houses. Broken and repaired marriages. Traumatised children of divorced marriages, dodgy real estate deals and fraud. This is one island rich in motives, heads banged on rocks and bodies recovered from the sea in various stages of disrepair. Did I mention the drinking ? There are many bedside hospital scenes with people clinging to life and but for one or two, pulling through (Go for it Big and Hung !)
And everyone sounds like the Swedish chef in the Muppets.
But when it all boils down, Columbo is the real deal. The daddy sleuth of them all. Peter Falk won several golden globes / emmys and millions of fans.
…Inimitable style, incredibly slow pace, relentless pressure on the murderer., inexorable logic.. and smart arse murderers who take Colombo for a fool – big mistake…- this episode has a cameo appearance by Eddie Albert. Great line “Mr Colombo,. some men don’t like to go out looking like an unmade bed.
Note Colombo started at the same time as Bluey – what contrasting styles !
ANd the late night send-up… revoiced Bargearse
Sounds a lot like Judith Lucy, Tony Martin and Rob Sitch doing the voice overs…
I was too young to be allowed to go to the 196x concert, but I was there in 1973!
Somewhat up he back – closer to Redfern than the Randwick Racecourse stage and with the aid of herbal chemistry, I have to admit I might have missed a bit of the Sydney concert. So many distractions…and so few big screens (none, really since it was way before they were invented).
Around the same time I went to Santana at the Horden Pavilion – although I can’t forget “Black Magic Woman”, I can and have forgotten everything else. Drats.
A lot of people say to me, “Emmjay, you’ve got an Ag Science background, what’s going on with the National Party?”
And that’s true. I have deep connections to the land (I have a backyard amongst the latte-sippers of Inner West Cyberia) and I am deeply connected with Gaia’s biosphere (I have some plants and sometimes wildlife flies (or scurries) in from time to time).
But I think what qualifies me to give advice in this sphere is that my sciency Darwinian background provides me with a useful framework for coming to grips with this terribly troubling National Party leadership vacuum.
Without a doubt, the best framework for understanding this matter comes from our old mate Charles Darwin. Let’s look at the Nats from this perspective.
The Nats are, of course the love children of the old Country Party, known by that phononymic joke allegedly born in Federal parliament “I’m a Country Member”, to which some wag responded “No, but I’ll try.”
The crux of Darwin’s Theory is that in every population there will be genetic mutations. And the Nats are redolent with genetic mutations. I should have rested my case after that last sentence.
But Darwin posits that some of these mutants will have characteristics that give them some superior fitness to survive and thrive when their environment gets seriously crazy – like when coal mining overtakes a rural person’s central focus or when everyone in the bush who grows stuff that’s getting hammered by climate change, votes for some clueless bozo with highly frayed moral fibre and less comprehension of science than pond scum.
Darwin theorises that Nature will weed out those individuals who are not “fit” – as you know, his phrase was survival of the fittest. Not those who are necessarily the most physically fit, but those who can adapt and thrive – be fit in changing environments – say, like a 2 degree increase in global temperatures. Although, one might hazard a guess that mental fitness could come in handy in the current Cretinacious Period.
It was not always thus, and in the Decentfolkus Period, the Nats – or the then Counts were led by men (and it was always men) who were marked by actually looking after their constituents as opposed to looking after themselves and a handful of their white shoe clad mates.
That was before the Akubra, the Drizabone and RM Williams boots became tropes in the Pretentious Period.
But enough of this wordy sciency stuff. You’re almost certainly hanging out for a decent table that distils a complex topic like “How did the National Party come to peer over the edge of a precipice that is increasingly looking like their extinction ?”
According to the above web page, we can summarise this in a few short paragraphs…
And I quote:
“Earle Page, the party’s second leader, is its longest-serving, at 18 years, 5 months and 8 days. Page also had the longest service in the House of Representatives, representing Cowper (NSW) for 42 years between 1919 and 1961.
The shortest-serving leader was Charles Blunt, who served 11 months between 1989 and 1990. Having deposed his predecessor Ian Sinclair, Blunt lost his seat in the general election.*
In its first 69 years since 1920, The Nationals had seven leaders.
In contrast, the period since 1989 has also seen seven leaders, including Joyce’s two non-consecutive terms
The 44 years between 1940 and 1984 was a time of unparalleled stability, with just three leaders (Fadden, McEwen and Anthony).”
Psephologists at the Pig’s Arms Socio-economic Institute have taken this one step further – identifying that no leader of the Nats with the slightest clue, has been born after 1960.
And here we see it, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls and gender non-specific people, the epoch which has triggered the threatened demise of the once great Country Party began with long haired louts in the Rollingstoneaceous Period of the 1960s.
And although it is pure speculation whether the next leader (and I use the term loosely) of the Nats will be a lump of anthracite or the methanous fart from a Holstein Friesian, what is fairly certain, is that if the Nats don’t get their (literal) shit together, they’ll be political toast in the coming climate change era.
Editor’s Note 1. Stay tuned for our next hard-hitting article – Pond Scum – how the Nat’s tried and failed to trash the Murray Darling Basin Plan….
* Editor’s Note 2 – this is not to suggest that the Hon. Blunt member was altitudinally-challenged, but that his successful challenge of his leader was met with the kind of voter backlash sadly lacking in the most recent Bonoboesque farrago.
Editor’s Note 3. It has been brought to our attention that that we may have mixed up the captions in the photographs, but we can’t for the life of us figure out how.
Editors’s Note 4 – NoAntony Green was harmed in the writing of this folderol.
Window Dresser's Arms, Pig & Whistle 