National Wattle Day 1 September 2009

Wattle tree at night from Photography Tips

The first day of September has been National Wattle Day since 1992, but Australians has been celebrating the wattle somewhere around the country since as early as 1838 and 1899 and it became our national floral emblem in 1988.

There are at least 900 wattle species found on this continent and there is always a little wattle flowering somewhere.

World-wide it is probably the floral emblem to which the greatest number of people are allergic or to which they have developed a perfume sensitivity - according to hayfever and asthma suffers I know.

Some reports say about 5% of all Australian are sensitive to wattle pollen.

So happy Wattle Day everyone!

How to make money while living in Australia....

While wandering up and down the byways of cyberspace I've noticed a great many "how to" posts on various subjects.
For a bit of a chuckle I Googled the search term "how to grow money" and came up with 66,300 entries.
This set me wondering just how many queries this might represent, but Google Trends told me that not enough people asked that question for it to rate a graph.
Apparently the world knows that money doesn't actually grow on trees or under bushes.
However, when I Googled "how to make money" over 10 million entries turned up and Google Trends had recorded the main countries.
What was interesting is that while the world has been asking since at least 2004, Australians didn't really start asking Uncle Google about ways of making money until late 2006 to early 2007 and have been searching ever since - with Queenslanders heading the national list by a nose.
Are we all turning into backyard entrepreneurs or out chasing rainbows?
Are searchers mostly down on their luck junior merchant bankers and stockbrokers or frantic retirees watching superannuation funds disappear down the gurgler?
Is half of good old Oz now desperately seeking silver?
Or is everyone just out there surfing the web for fun?
What is very certain is the fact that the Australian rich list hasn't suddenly swollen with a crowd of names never heard of before - so I guess that nobody's really getting rich from all those "how to" web pages.

How many people won the James Hardie environmental health trifecta?

In the 1950s I grew up in the outer suburbs of Sydney in a house where the outside eaves, internal kitchen walls, all of the laundry additions and garage cum playroom were made of asbestos-based building material.

Later on I purchased a family home which had ceiling insulation made from asbestos and hessian carpet underlay which I learned last week may also been contaminated by this dangerous James Hardie product.

Thankfully I did not work directly with asbestos, but I'm not sure that the acoustic ceiling tiles above my head in the first office job I had did not contain this substance.

I feel as though my family has - without our consent - been made to run in a very dodgy three horse race so that a big international company could grow rich.

Hanging is too good for James Hardie directors - past and present - who knew and said nothing.

Mark
Tweed Heads

Perceived security threats and how Australians rate them

According to a 26 August 2009 Roy Morgan Research telephone poll; if you are a male living in Victoria who intends to vote Family First, then you are more likely than not to feel that there is currently no country which threatens Australia's security.

What is fascinating about this poll is the fact that Indonesia is still the biggest concern for the majority of Australians surveyed.

The countries that 55% of Australians feel threaten us are:




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Best political & intergalactic tweets seen recently and other stray thoughts

rod3000 Can I suggest NSW Cabinet have a caged death match? Last one standing gets to be Premier for 18 months. ....from Tweetie

Since when is dying at 77 years and 6 months of age considered an "untimely death", when average male expectancy in the United States is in the vicinity of 77.7 years?

A Scots farmer is now officially riding on the sheep's back as he took home a record £231,000 for a stud ram, named Deveronvale Perfection.

GODWIN Grech, the Treasury official at the centre of the fake email affair, proposed a fee deal to the merchant bank running the OzCar fund whose chairman was a key backer and personal donor to Malcolm Turnbull.The effect of the deal was to enable Credit Suisse, the bank hired by Treasury to implement OzCar, to maintain its $5 million in fees, despite the fund being scaled back from $2 billion to $1.3bn. The Weekend Australian can reveal that John O'Sullivan, the chairman of investment banking for Credit Suisse, donated more than $20,000 to the Wentworth Forum, the Opposition Leader's political fighting fund. According to The Australian on 29th August 2009.

Australia spammed outerspace on 28 August 2009 with 25,800 messages from Earth to Gliese 581d, a planet outside our solar system which may support life of some sort. These messages will take 20 years to reach this planet - at which time expect an intergalactic spam filter to activate.

Best intergalactic tweet from the Hello from Earth project:
"Yidigunmardin nuruku yajingewa wuremulu jandange. Our dream, we're telling to them young kids. We're talking all this dream for the future.
Yidumduma Bill Harney
Wardaman people, near Katherine, Australia"

Senator "Barney Rubble" Joyce (playfully rewriting history) reduces investigations into Australia's breach of UN sanctions against Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq to merely a matter of; "The main issue with AWB was there was a concerted effort, a political motive to get rid of Australia's single desk".

Amusing DIGG cover headline for article in the Seattle Weekly, USA; Gays Too Late To Ruin Marriage, Straights Beat You To It

The UK Telegraph posed the question last Saturday; "It's a question that all animal-loving Christian evangelicals must address: who will look after their pets on Earth when the Rapture comes and they are taken up to heaven?"

The Australian says general public won't find new Telstra CEO's email address easily. Really, truly? ROFL

This morning I read an online James Jeffrey snippet in The Australian which ended with:

In the meantime, Strewth's inbox has been on the receiving end of an avalanche of Telstra customers who are exceptionally keen to be given Thodey's email address. All we can say is, good luck.

All I can say is - really?

I suspect that all one has to do is use the Team Telstra email address and render it as David.Thodey@team.telstra.com .

This was a functioning e-address at time of writing this post.

So if you have a complaint or two..........

Heard about Mischief the foul-mouthed feline?

A bloke in the Northern Territory reckons his pet cat Mischief can speak English and has a vocabulary of seven different words.

The Northern Territory News reports that ex-boxer Robert 'RJ' Duncan, of Palmerston, claims his cat can say seven words: mum, no, now, what, f**k, pr*ck and why.

"He can't say 'dad' yet, which is a bit of a pr*ck. That's how he got the word 'pr*ck' I reckon, because I say it a lot."

When the Northern Territory News first visited Duncan, 34, and his wife Sandra, 32, at their Gray home, the house-bound moggie grumpily declined to comment.

Instead, he scratched Mr Duncan a few times before bolting to his bedroom and barricading himself in his cupboard.

During a second visit, Mischief was much friendlier - and more talkative. All gathered heard him speak to Sandra, calling her "mum".

Mr Duncan said the two-year-old cat - which he and his wife adopted from his feral mother in Katherine - was most vocal at night.