Monday 31 August 2009
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:
Click
to
enlarge
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:
Click
to
enlarge
Best political & intergalactic tweets seen recently and other stray thoughts
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?"
Sunday 30 August 2009
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.
The Shooter's Party and hunting in NSW North Coast national parks
The Shooter's Party is not playing well on the NSW North Coast where the natural environment and diverse flora and fauna are still our biggest tourism draw cards and, where residents appreciate their contact with wildlife.
I haven't yet spoken to anyone who favours allowing gun-toting hunters into national parks or the creation of private game reserves stocked with exotic or feral animals.
This 25 August 2009 The Daily Examiner letter to the editor expresses a common view:
Political shenanigans
THE media has had a field day of late reporting on the political shenanigans that the State Labor Government has been resorting to in order to get its legislation through the State's Upper House.
It is their cosy relationship with the Shooters Party and Fred Nile that has culminated in the controversial bill being proposed that will allow sporting shooters to hunt and kill feral animals and a range of native fauna on public land, including national parks, under the guise of conservation hunting.
That political bond saw the creation of the NSW Game Council whose current chairman, Robert Borsak, has political ambitions of his own, and apparently dreams of joining the former council chairman as an Upper House Shooters Party representative.
Last Friday, the ABC's Stateline program reported the scandal and alerted the nation to a website which contains Mr Borsak's account of an elephant hunt he undertook in Zimbabwe.
His gleeful description of the poor animal's screams and subsequent death throes (he had only managed to break its spine with his first shot, so inept are his shooting skills), is sickening indeed.
However, I urge any doubters as to the real motivation behind the Shooters Party move to log on and read that story so as to fully comprehend the implications of allowing the Shooters Bill to progress.
I believe that the majority of those that read and understand the blood lust that is clearly conveyed in the article, would not only refuse to countenance recreational hunting in national parks, but would support moves to put a stop to this barbaric sport altogether.
JOHN EDWARDS,
South Grafton.
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