The Dump is:
For posting comments that don’t get up at the Drum, and for having a pleasant, mirthful or enlightening off-topic discussion.
It’s not for personal abuse of other commenters.
Please do that somewhere else if you must.
Play nicely or piss off.
However, why doesn’t a poster add a link for us to read and comment on here, much quicker. Maybe we can do a bit more bagging here, not that I speak for the moderators, yet.
NB: Being tiresome and boring, racist, sexist or just plain creepy is not playing nicely.
———-
The Pig’s Arms exists because a dozen or so years ago our other favourite playpen – the ABC’s Unleashed blogsphere started to go off. Like a sack of prawn heads in the sun. Something had to be done.
Moderation was taking forever. Comments seemed to be rejected randomly – outrageous ones appeared and reasoned ones were pinged. When they released the Drum / Unleashed ….. things actually got worse !
So many pieces from professional writers appear with no obvious merit. And the moderation has become, to put it frankly, appalling.
As a former contributor and a commenter, I was deeply disappointed at the plummeting quality from our pre-eminent media empire. And I resented so many challenging or dare I say, witty or funny posts in which we’ve invested seconds of our precious time – getting the chop.
So here, for all our benefit – is an open slather blog. Copy and paste your best rejected comments here for posterity. Does not matter whether you’re posting on the Guardian, First Dog on the Moon or wherever else.
And sprinkle pointers to the Pig’s Arms amongst your comments. Let’s try to rescue some of the old faithful.
Cheers,
Emm.
Window Dresser's Arms, Pig & Whistle 
On this weekend’s menu
Intestinal Breakfast
Fat Slag mixed with onion
Baked backwash with mushroom
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Yesterday’s Parliament was a doozy.
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You couldn’t make it up could you. There a rumour that Barney’s going to challenge for leadership of the Nats. What next, Adolf having a crack.
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Today should be a hoot too.
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Yep. The Shovel posted today that the government had reinstated the white Australia policy through an administrative error.
And the clown prince country member is said to be touting a return to the leadership backed by Queensland people unable to raise funds under whoever their current leader is now.
What a pack of fucking losers ! Out now !
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Thoughts for the week:
In Sport
In order to start winning, we have to stop losing.
Instructions for wearing scarves
Don’t wrap around your neck too tight or you might stop breathing.
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Sounds reasonable. Thanks Algy !
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Two very valid points. Will consider both.
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The Orient Restaurant advises:
Our Reputation Is Built On Our Food
Traditional Chinese Food Expertly Repaired
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I hope everyone is well. I have fattened hubby up to 75.1 kg. We’ve progressed a lot this last two months. Still have PEG but he’s down to close to half rations on that and the rest is going in orally. Time consuming to prepare the right kind of food. He’s basically having tapa style serves – looks quite cute. Remaining hurdle is safe swallowing of water. Has to have it thickened.
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I am viv and thanks for the update. Let’s hope for further improvement and things get easier for you.
I’ve started trialling retirement this week.
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Good on you Algy. I’ve set a date, in my mind, and find it an absolute drag to get to work.
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Voluntary redundancy for me. Not looking for anything until next year maybe February. If and when I go back to work the plan is part time.
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I’m sick and fucking tired of going to work and putting up with bullshit and stupidity.
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Was it something I said ?
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I hear you Big, sounds like my year in review. Not that I know for Emm. For some reason, I have a comment here awaiting moderation/
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Bullshit from the organisation, you know, competent people (or in our case, incompetent) are promoted to their level of In-competence, and stupidity from the young people who seemed to have learned fuck all and are proud of it.
No, Emmjay, you weren’t there, I mean, you were in an episode, which, surprising to Foodge et al, wasn’t real.
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Big, a carbon copy of where I was working. restructure didn’t get the job in a merged team, too old,, looking for some smart arse to drive change, in the meantime the former boss has found himself a little poodle to follow him around, same age as Junior, mentioned something they read in a book, boss most impressed. In the meantime Junior is actually apply practically what the little poodle had read. Fuck all chance of any of it being implemented.
Yes a bunch of youngsters who know jack shit but impress the boss with their book reading.
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We don’t have too many youngsters in management, in fact, there’s one who has put in the hard yards and done some study. The woman promoted to top boss has no nursing qualifications in our specialty, no management qualifications, no personal qualities and is quite rude. On the medical side our big boss is always looking for the next promotion whilst a known bully has been promoted to 2IC.
The general mood is so low that there’s an insidious drain of people retiring early or just leaving to work in private hospitals. I can empathise with your plight. I keep being asked what I will do when I retire? Anything but go to work!
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My former boss seemed a nice person, but as Manager they were a complete narcissist, devoid of leadership and management skills. Undermined their direct reports by going directly to their pets. My former team will fall apart in the coming months, one told me they will leave in the next one to six months, another will retire in the same period, whilst another intends to take extended long service. Most in the combined team will do likewise. They won’t even get why. The morale when I’d left within the the overall team wasn’t low, it didn’t exist.
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Everything has turned to shit with this govt – blame them ! Good quality managers have never been in abundance, i.e. wrong people too often promoted.
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To be honest, Viv, I doubt it is any government’s fault. This appalling management system has been evolving in our health department for twenty years. I’ve always said that we need managers more than we need nurses or doctors in management, but we have a CEO who is neither. he started out pretty good, now it’s all programmes and acronyms.
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New managerialism, Big. Working on a piece that’s relevant for you, Algy and me – called C21st Slavery.
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I find that nursing adopts new management theories about fifteen years down the track, medicine about twenty five. The same with educational theory . I did a course on adult assessment and training about twenty five years ago. It was progressive , in that, if the learner demonstrated competence they were fast tracked to demonstrating competence. Ten years later, medicine has ‘ invented ‘ adult learning principles that are thirty years behind the former, treating learners like children.
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Ours became a merged entity a few years back. Started well but communications from CEO down dried up. Boss started well enough, technically very good and well connected, but came apparent fairly quickly that they weren’t a manager, had little idea what my team and I even did.
Life’s full of programmes that get junked three or four months later, acronyms, so many you can’t keep up with what they all mean. So much resonance with Big M there.
Weirdest thing was I was invited to a workshop in my last week along with my fellow puntees included. A new program with an acronym, complete with a “cute” little symbol who was the same as the acronym with a y on the end. At that workshop and organising were the same managers who knew full well that we were leaving the building two days later.
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Big M – I’ve had far too much experience with hospitals this last 12 months – private and public. Communication is one of their big failures. Dealing with fuckups meant that at one point one senior nurse asked my husband why was I angry. Well I wasn’t so much angry, I was fucking annoyed by their incompetence yet again when I’d already done my best to sort out one matter they totally ignored it, didn’t pass the info on or in another case didn’t phone me. Because I was so on the ball I managed to avoid their disasters being worse. They don’t have case managers which is needed for complicated patients (i.e. not a simple single problem). It makes the whole idea of that My Health thing a total farce.
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Viv I’m sorry to hear how the care made things so much more difficult. FM is working with a hospital to create a system for multi-disciplinary teams to bring together all the specialists needed to resolve complex breast cancer and colon cancer cases. It’s fiendishly difficult- even just to get all the information and people together at one point of time. But you are right about the broader issue of clinical staff just doing their jobs properly. These days the pressure is on to push staff to patient ratios down. And this creates crap conditions for staff as well as patients. Let’s all thank shitty conservative tax cutting coalition counts for that.
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My nickname Nurse Barbara didn’t come about by accident. Most of the time the problems were the nurses – it was the system. In two cases the surgeon just came back for quick looksee. Hubby couldn’t communicate much as groggy and had tube up his nose and tubes in neck, stomach etc. Another Surgeon was much more hands on. They’re all different. But the communication problems were universal. Little understanding of his nutrition requirements and how it worked. Putting in the wrong type of tube so I had to get an adaptor so I could hook him to the pump. They didn’t get him off the drip until 12 hours before I was due to take him home despite the fact that four days prior I had talks with them about need to get him back on to tube feeding. As a result on two occasions I had to transition him to tube feeding which meant minimum of 6 feeds a day. The feeding is slow so I only had a one hour break before I was programming the machine and hooking him up. You can imagine my despair when the same mess happened again. By that stage hubby just wanted to come home as he knew he got better care at home !
I can see how hard it is to cope with complicated patients because of shifts etc and I watched and listened during handovers. It’s not nearly as good as it should be. Experiened nurses were usually total gems. The public system was far more responsive than the private.
I wish FM all the best and when the system is in place that it gets passed on to all other hospitals to copy.
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The worst thing that happened was turning nursing into a uni degree.
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I understand your frustration, Viv. If a hospital provides one service, say the provision of a PEG, then it should have the entire package, say stoma nurses with their own clinics/home visits, plus one brand of equipment. I think this happens pretty seamlessly in paediatrics where there are teams for everything from home oxygen to tube feeding to tracheostomy in the home, etc. Adult care seems more haphazard and poorly thought out.
I can understand where FM is coming from, but cancer surgery/oncology is far more integrated in Newcastle than anywhere else I’ve lived. This is more due to the efforts of health care workers who have made a decision to have a collaborative approach. All work in public and private so the level of discussion is the same. I don’t understand why it is so difficult in other places!
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Sorry Big. I missed this one been flat out trying to nail down the next job gig.
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Only wrote it this afternoon . Job gig, Fuck mate, take a tree change. Get orff that bloody treadmill .
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My hubby took retirement as opportunity to go to lost of car racing. Went to Bathurst – it’s on this weekend – but he’ll be watching on the tele. With 3 ha of land there’s plenty for a bloke to do.
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Every now and then why think about a tree change to a small country town. The limiting step is that Mrs M has to live somewhere that has oncology services available. We are spoiled here because she can walk to the oncology clinic!
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We have that in Albury. A cancer hospital adjacent to the public hospital. Been operating about two years. It has all the day stuff plus hospital beds on the 3rd floor. It’s pretty big. Hubby’s PEG was the last surgery he had in private hospital and was done by same surgeon who sorted out the ulcer disaster and he also fixed a hernia at same time. Albury-Wodonga is close to `100,000 and there are lot of smaller villages within 20-30 minute commute. Depends on whether you want to stay in NSW or move over the river to Victoria.
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Good to hear Viv.
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Great news, and kudos to you for your ongoing care. Thickened water? Tritiated dihydrogen oxide? Oh wait, that’s heavy water.
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It’s Nestles’ Resource Thicken Up – basically xanthan gum. There are levels of thickness – it makes water crap so I give him a little cordial in it or use juice.
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Yes, I assumed gum or psyllium, could help the nuclear physics bent.
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Go to the cordial shop and buy Shiraz. 🙂
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I always have that in my wine section in the pantry. Thickened wine unfortunately tastes crap.
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It’s not easy, Viv. Being within walking distance of cancer hospital, oncologist and heart specialist has been fantastic. When Helvi wasn’t able to eat we had a special kind of high nutrition drink supplied by the hospital at cost. We still get calls if we want more of that.
I managed to fatten Helvi from 56 to 66 kilos but that is from a base of 78kilo. We are doing alright. It seems hard to realize it was this time last year the shit hit the fan. We had good care apart from a couple of hitches at emergency but the nurses and doctors there are pushed to the limit. Overall we had good care both private and public.
Australia needs to get away from ever lowering taxation. Hospitals and health needs good funding. We are now shuffling to the end but I am fucked if I am going to get bashed up by my own slippers in some old aged care home.
All the best Viv. Sorry I haven’t been in contact a bit more often.
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Thanks for that Gerard. We’ve come through okay – Hubby just managed to have added problems which may or may not have been caused by medications during Chemo. A bleeding ulcer, twice and the gall bleeding and nearly bleeding to death meant more hospitalisation. We’re half hour from all the hospitals. But, gosh, I thought Helvi was a slim woman and you’re telling me base was 78 kg. Our fattening up scores are on a par in terms of weight put on. His pants no longer fall down! Hubby’s back to walking Lola and doing a little mowing at a time etc. All the best to you too.
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Some news items can be fun.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2018/sep/28/poor-mr-anus-the-council-candidate-given-a-bum-deal-by-facebook
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Funny stuff. 🙂
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And_justice_for_all 5h ago
22
23
Lol at the LNP shills trying to discredit Labor after the past 5 years of lnp clusterfuckery.
Honestly the whole labor party could put lipstick on a pig, call it barnaby and fuck it for all I care. They’d still make a better government
Comment of the month for sure.
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That’s gold HOO and so true
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Algy scored another Guardian Pick. Well done.
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Yes I saw that.
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You must have served your sentence.
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Yes I think so. Might have only been a sin binning.
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I got sin binned for 24 hrs a few weeks ago. When I read back my comments I thought it was a bit unfair. No one likes Nigel much, can’t blame them, he doesn’t speak for me. 🙂
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Nig is fine, Pops in every now and again with a comment. Someone with a 3000 at the end pops in every now and again on my comments, not a nice person.
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Yes I see him comment occasionally. Never really says much.
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Just makes annoying comments and not interested in debate.
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Listened to that new version of Never Can Tell – it’s nice but I can’t get past the Pulp Fiction scene.
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I’d forgotten about Pulp. We play the Chuck Berry version in our Uke band. I was delighted at how beautiful it is turned into a ballad and sung so well 😊
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Gerard Henderson on Turnbull (from The Australian’s daily news email: As if he hasn’t done enough harm, the former prime minister continues to make mischief outside of Australia.
The other snippets in that email are all crazy contradictory. We have Abbott wanting our energy to go nuclear as well.
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gerard should stop mincing and open his eyes
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He gives me the creeps. Head always looking down and then eyes looking furtively up as if someone was going to be mean to him – don’t hit me !
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Some stories are just too important not to be broadcast.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/14/american-town-launches-uranus-examiner-newspaper-missouri
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Thinking of eating out? This restaurant’s add sound good.
We guarantee 90% satisfaction of our food.
Or Looking for a job, these lines would look good on your resume.
Grate communication and atention to details.
Experienced in all faucets of accounting
I am great with the pubic.
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Someone needs a proofreader. Still 90% satisfaction is not too bad.
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Years ago we were at the Gold Coast. The black board outside the Real Estate office. ‘One bedder with On Sweet’ They still can’t convince me that Real Estate is a profession.
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I had to deal with many house salesfolk professionally for a number of year. They are paid a shed load of commission for doing very little. Elevating them to an “Agent” elevates their importance way beyond their ability. Little more than shop assistants in fancy suits. We used to say they were dressed up like pox doctors clerks.
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Scotty No Moustaches Here will balk at every other religion demanding their celebration gets a fair go mention in this you beaut proposed law protecting Easter and Christmas. Haha. What a flood gate he wants to open.
Knocking on the door of the lobby that believes the myth Public School teachers are oppressors who will not permit a kid to sing a Christmas carol. Pfft.
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Wisdom for the week:
Someone is not electable if they cannot get elected.
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This one amused me. How to call someone an idiot with actually saying so.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-09-07/scott-morrison-not-being-malcolm-turnbull/10208598
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The bloke is a first grade dill, bring on an election.
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He is HOO, I just love the way she calls him an idiot without saying the word
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http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-09-05/great-barrier-reef-foundation-chief-scientist-peter-j-mumby-gbr/10204132
Mate, I don’t care how nice you are or how frigging smart you are. Just give the money back and tender for the work just like everybody else. Get the picture!!
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http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-09-04/country-football-wheatbelt-afl-must-adapt-or-die/10196314?section=sport
What a shame Guthrie stopped us from making comments.
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The comments only lasted a month or two. No doubt a cost saving. Rubbish. Sometimes you can comment on their Facebook but articles are selected.
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Thought for the weekend :
We need a radical turnaround of 360 degrees.
Or important advice:
Lemon Iced Ted (600ml) Keep refrigerated. Perishable.
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test
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The only real cricket.
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True
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Testis, testes, tested. You passed.
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You’re all balls Big.
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Dickhead.
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No, all nuts.
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Deep.
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Internet fixed this morning after the water board cut straight through our phone line and internet line whilst fixing the sewer. Took Telstra three goes to do it. Took him 30 minutes this morning.
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Hehehe. Here’s interesting news: we are having a spit lamb roast for Father’s Day. (think about it)
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as long as it doesn’t spit too much.
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He can only eat custard,soft scrambled eggs etc. He can smell it and wish.
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Oh yes I had realised that a step up for him. But I liked the word play.
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Good word play. It was yum of course.
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I’ve left $20 here for Nigel – have a drink or two on me.
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Thanks Viv. Will enjoy a drink after I got one in for Gordon. 🙂
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That’s the general idea. I have to wait for my self imposed 5 pm.
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Test
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For some reason you ended up in the spam queue. Talk to Emmjay, I don’t know why this happens but from time to time it does.
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I think it tends to happen if there’s a URL in the post. My phone is a bit fluffy and refused to log on so I couldn’t approve it without having access to my laptop 🙂
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I can only think that Madam Asbestosa’s goat photo collection didn’t serve her well this time around.
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They’re fucked.
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Good government starts today with generational change viv. Well that’s what Scotty the Stupid would have you believe.
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Public cottage. Nice touch.
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One has to be clever with their wording as you know. They are big on pulling dow posts
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One near the lodge. Gold
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Turnbull should have gone to the GG last night. No judgment, ever.
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Absolutely viv. He should be calling an Election for October 6. Though he’d fo something stupid like call it for 29 September. Dutton almost makes Abbott look ok no scrub that thought.
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Get the armchair out and a large bag of popcorn. Enjoy a spectacular period of the LNP get stuck in each other
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Pretty to watch
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Like watching a train crash in slow motion.
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And now we have Scotty leading the country . He didn’t have a clue what a Treasurer did what hope as PM.
Were these clowns ever thinking of the people this week or just themselves.
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I suspect this ‘leadership spill’ is all theater, and Morrison has always been the front runner. I mean, no one really thought that dead-eyed Dutton would be a serious challenger, did they? I also think that Bishop sees her future on the world stage, so Foreign Affairs suits her agenda.
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Have a look in your pants.
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All I can see is elbow skin and grey hair.
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Too much information 🙂
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Gosh she was such a great singer.
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Vale Aretha
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Test
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Pass ?
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Operating off my phone at the moment. Sewer being fixed and repairers have cut the phone and internet lines. Had to reset my password on wordpress.
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