Propping Up Lamp-posts

Someone has to do it.

Young Turk

This young bird is a total punk - look at that rebellious hairstyle. You can tell he's a troublemaker.

He's a weiro, otherwise known as a cockatiel, Australia's smallest but most troublesome cockatoo.

Exciting Start to 2011

As noted by Mini-Rob earlier, the forecast for the New Year is exciting for weather-watchers.

After the hottest year ever, 2011 shows ominous signs of being even hotter. I predict that by mid-week there'll be high levels of grumpiness in Perth, and I'll be sleeping on the back lawn to stay cool.

UPDATE - It turns out that this forecast was merely a prank, perpetrated on us by the Bureau of Meteorology on us hapless citizens - there were never going to be four days of 40. Well they've hoaxed us one too many times. From now on, I will switch permanently to Weatherzone.com for all forecasts. After all, who else has the ability to determine the weather inside Floreat Forum?

National Holiday Road Toll

Listening to all the reports on the national holiday road toll at this time of year, I started wondering why it is that this one particular type of fatality attracts so much attention. After all, heart disease and other circulatory diseases account for over ten times as many deaths as traffic accidents, so why isn't there a national tally of this more significant problem, particularly when Christmas is a time for over-indulging in food and drinks, and is the biggest time of the year for clogging your arteries. The reason is that car accidents are more spectacular. How illogical is that?

Here are the top causes of death in 2008, from the ABS. Car accidents are not even in the top twenty.

	2008
Cause of death	no.	Rank
Ischaemic heart diseases	23 665	1
Strokes	11 973	2
Dementia and Alzheimer disease	8 171	3
Trachea and lung cancer	7 946	4
Chronic lower respiratory diseases	6 255	5
Diabetes	4 191	6
Colon and rectum cancer	4 120	7
Blood and lymph cancer	3 889	8
Heart failure	3 360	9
Diseases of the kidney and urinary system	3 224	10
Prostate cancer	3 031	11
Breast cancer	2 788	12
Pancreatic cancer	2 291	13
Suicide	2 190	14
Skin cancers	1 857	15
Hypertensive diseases	1 824	16
Influenza and pneumonia	1 742	17
Cardiac arrhythmias	1 547	18
Cirrhosis and other diseases of liver	1 490	19
Falls	1 348	20

The Return of Joey

Actually this is Joey's close friend.

Christmas Down Under

Being on the bottomside of the earth, everything in Australia is upside-down. For example, these decorations from my neighbourhood are topsy-turvy (more turvy than topsy).

Whom Did I Spend Christmas With?

It was this fellow. First name Joey.

Unique Thought

On a Christmas Day when the temperature reached 40 degrees, our original thought was to head down to the beach. Surprisingly, 200,000 people had the same idea.

Note the lone baby, celebrating by itself at the bottom right. She invited her other baby friends but none turned up, so she was left with six mini-mince pies and some baby sherry to have by herself.

If you can name this beach, you might win a prize. Or you might not.

Joyeux Noël & Feliz Navidad

With only eight hours till midnight and the official start of seasonal festivities, I'm taking this opportunity to wish my sole reader of this blog a merry Christmas. She is a Señora S. Casal of Corrientes, and every Tuesday she sends me a chicken empanada by parcel post. Speaking of which, I should mention that I'm actually a vegetarian, and so I've been donating her meals to the local retirement village (which was at the centre of a salmonella scare only last week).

Horrifying Scenes from Solihull

Late news from Solihull. The scene below was captured by my local correspondent on his way to Tesco's for some prawn cocktail crisps. After snapping the behemoth with his mobile phone, he just had enough time to hide in a shed it stomped past, crushing or lasering anything that moved. Hopefully he made it home safely.

The only hope is that it runs out of petrol and they can't afford to refuel it. 

U3

Due to overwhelming demand from literally one person, here's another pic from the U2 concert on Saturday. The event left such an impression on me (or brainwashed me) that on Sunday I returned to listen to the final concert, although without a ticket I was forced to park outside the venue in my car, alongside many other poor U2 fans who had the same idea. Interestingly, the selection of songs was somewhat different between the two concerts, and Bono's jokes were also not repeated.

Fortune Cookies

At my work Christmas Party, it's traditional to distribute Fortune Lollies, the cheapskate version of Fortune Cookies. Here are a sample of the type of message people receive. Luckily nobody reads this blog, otherwise this could spoil tomorrow's fun.

Your office romance has been discovered

Meh.

Never give up, unless defeat arouses that girl down the corridor

Confucius says: go to bed with itchy blah blah, wake up with stinky finger

The end is nigh, and it's your fault.

You will die alone and poorly dressed.

Your colleagues secretly agree that your bum is too big for your body

Help. I'm being held prisoner in a Pascall lolly factory.

Someone has googled you recently.

I apologise for the innappropriate nature of some of these fortunes. I blame someone who shall remain nameless but knows who they are, and should be ashamed of themself. 

From My Solihull Correspondent

Thanks very much to my friend in Solihull, this is the current view of my old house.

Madame Dog at Sunset

It's a shame that this blobby dog got in the way of my photo of last Friday's marvellous sunset.

Space Insect Lures Thousands

Yesterday evening booming bass sounds and melodies reached me at home. From the balcony, I saw strange lights and a stream of people heading towards Subiaco Oval. I felt a strange compulsion drawing me to follow them, and after a short walk, this is the sight I came across. Tens of thousands of people aged between about 25 and 45 were trying to get closer to this vast insect with strobing coloured legs and beams of light shooting straight up into the sky. A tiny humanoid called Bono seemed to be in charge, although he only spoke in song and verse, but everyone was under his spell.

U2 in concert. I2 was there. 

Nighttime in Wembley

You're looking at a cruise missile launching on the left. The glowing in the centre are my disco balls hanging from the rear view mirror.

The view from the backseat of my car after drinking half a litre of orange cordial

In truth, this was a regular photo from the back of my car. On the left is the lamppost across the road. I went to rollip.com and jazzed up the photo for fun, and it became a fantastic scene.

Mothman Prophecies

Mothman was seen on the rooftops above Woodlands last night. Normally a bad omen, this time I think he was likely just trying to catch the sea breeze and cool down on a humid night.

Frog Visitor

Watering my garden today, I was spraying a pot plant when this creature jumped out and hopped up the fence.

Why is our Climate Broken?

As we approach the end of Perth's second driest year ever and hottest of all time, I'm wondering why? Beyond the long term pattern of increased CO2 in the atmosphere leading to the greenhouse effect and global warming, what are the local reasons that our weather is so extreme this year? Having watched literally hundreds of weather reports presented by Channel Ten's Michael Shultz I feel qualified enough to make an informed comment. Here are theories I've heard this year -

1. Reduced sunspot activity has led to less solar energy hitting the atmosphere and with less energy this leads to weaker weather systems over the oceans that aren't strong enough to push through the high pressure system that can sit over the middle of Australia for weeks at a time.

I can't find the reference in New Scientist magazine to the article that explains this all, but believe me, it's true !

2. Westerlies have moved south by 6 degrees, due to changes in upper atmospheric temperatures http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2010/3065125.htm
This means that the storm systems and cold fronts that used to hit the South of Western Australia now tend to pass too far to the south. This theory is also true.

3. Land clearing - trees generate rain. And the massive clearing in the wheat belt has increased the aridity over the inland significantly. http://www.sciencealert.com.au/features/20090710-19945.html .

The easternmost part of the Western Australian wheatbelt has less rainfall than the uncleared wilderness country lying immediately to its east, even though there is an overall natural trend of rainfall to decrease from the west to the east. Land clearing has altered the albedo of the ground surface by replacing relatively dark native vegetation with relatively light cereal crops, resulting in less heat absorption by incoming solar radiation and consequently less low-level turbulence as that heat is re-radiated. Low-level turbulence is an integral part of the rainmaking process; a process also affected by the removal the surface roughage (the tree layer) that provides transpired moisture, which also assists in the creation of low-level atmospheric turbulence. (http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=9946)

This theory is definitely true.

4. La nina. I would explain this one further but instead I need to go and make a pizza right now.

5. Back from the pizza for the fifth theory, that our erstwhile Premier Colin Barnett is behind the reduced rainfall. I have long suspected that the Bureau of Meteorology has fraudulently conspired with the State Government in order to hide true rainfall figures. It often rains at my place and yet nothing registers in the official rain gauge. This indicates that the WA government is manufacturing a crisis in order to push ahead with endless desalination plants, thus enriching their private friends. This theory is likely true but as yet unproven. Please add comments if you have evidence.

Purple Glowy Balls

Possibly the classiest Christmas decorations ever created.  Straight from Guanghzou Industrial Park's Factory Number 22 to Innaloo K-Mart and then to me. 

Snotty the Snowman

Made from real snow, we have to keep the air con blasting chilled air 24 hours a day in order to save him from a puddly fate.

Wikileaks Scandal Reaches Perth

Prepare yourselves for a revelation. The latest Wikileaks cables from the US State Department reveal that I am in fact "Agent Turtle", the trusted informant to the US Consul General in Perth who supplies her with comments on both the WAFL and the Perth Wildcats.

In exchange  I've received a Hungry Jacks voucher and a pair of night vision binoculars. But best of all, I get advance copies of 30 Rock, The Office and Community.

Disco Balls Glow Happily

Discovered today in a dark cupboard, a set of electric disco balls.

Lowering Standards

HI PEEPS. HVNG PRVOUSLY ABNDND HGH STNDRDS OF SPLLNG AND GRMMR A MNTH AGO I R AGAIN HEADNG DWN THT PTH BY MV1NG 2 TH MORE CONC1S3 TXTNG STYL OF TH FuTURe. AS A BuSY BLoGGR I JST DO NT HV TH TiMe FR SPLL-CHCKNG FoR PRoP3R CaS3 &C. APLGIES.

The White Ibis Posse

Down the road a posse of white ibises hang out. Someone should remind them that they're meant to be living in a swamp.

Decorations are Up and Cats are Festive

Look at the joy in this cat's eyes.

Midsummer Madness

With Britain now experiencing blizzards and temperatures as low as 20 degrees below zero, here's a scene from warmer times - a midsummer visit to a Welsh beach.

This photo was also used as album cover for 1980s folk band The Paddling Montagues

More Crud

You may not be aware, but crud and cruddedness is a venerable concept.
Here's Sturgeon's Law (1958) -

“Ninety percent of everything is crud”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law

Carrying on this tradition, I proudly declare that my blog certainly abides by this law. And this post in particular falls in the "crud" category. I had planned to post a beautiful sunset photo today but the heavy clouds and rain have kept me and my camera inside.

Anyhoo, here's the full explanation of Sturgeon's Law from the man himself -

I repeat Sturgeon’s Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of SF is crud.

Using the same standards that categorize 90% of science fiction as trash, crud, or crap, it can be argued that 90% of film, literature, consumer goods, etc. are crap. In other words, the claim (or fact) that 90% of science fiction is crap is ultimately uninformative, because science fiction conforms to the same trends of quality as all other artforms.

My Favourite Numbers of All Time

1. 99 = the optimal number of red balloons, and also the digital tv channel featuring some of my favourite programmes 
2. 65536 = number of rows that will kill my version of Microsoft Excel
3. 200 = the ideal speed for driving across the Nullarbor Plain (km/h)
4. 1.41421356 = the square root of 2, and how high I can hurdle in metres 
5. 1/2 = how many pence I paid for a lollipop at my corner store in the 1970s
6. 8 = my mental age
7. 2041 = the year I retire and take up lawn bowls
8. 102 = how many times I went to the cinema in 2008, my all time record

Brangwen of the Brecon Beacons

On a 1981 holiday to Wales, we encountered a mountain child of the Brecon Beacons, wearing her traditional Welsh red costume. Her name was Brangwen Mairwen Llannerchdyffern and she offered to guide us up the mountain in exchange for a bar of chocolate.

Happy 124th

Today this blog celebrates its 124th post. I would have commemorated the 100th if I'd remembered but I was too busy watching tv. Anyway, for this special celebration I will tell you the story of my new fridge.

On Wednesday morning I awoke to hear a buzzing and swishing noise booming from the kitchen reminiscent of a Chinook helicopter taking off in a storm. After checking that there was no Air Force activity in Wembley I worked out that the fridge motor was dying and that instead of freezing my food it was deafening it, which is not a known method of preserving food. So a new fridge was bought from Hardly Normal Superstore, and the salesman promised delivery "before 10am tomorrow". Tomorrow eventually arrived, and the delivery guy rang with the entirely unexpected news that he'd be delivering it between 10am and 1pm. By now I'd emptied the food onto the kitchen table in the heat. Knowing it would go bad shortly I had no option but to start eating as much of it as I could. In a race against time, I got through half a packet of veggie hot-dogs and half a kilo of salmon patties.

The new fridge arrived and the delivery guy managed to topple it over onto its side, crushing his foot and badly denting the top corner. He went off for medical attention (with his partner laughing continuously and offering no sympathy) and a replacement fridge was ordered. So I waited for another five hours, eating more and more food until the new new fridge turned up and normal refrigeration resumed.  In all, a successful day both in terms of calories consumed and in the excitement of viewing a real-life workplace accident.

Further Psychoanalytical Revelations

Analysis of the results from testing subject's responses to names of people reveals an interesting gender divide. Males often respond with descriptions of appearances, whereas females tend to respond with feelings. One male explained that when he hears a person's name, an image of that person appears in his mind, and then he describes one of their visual features ("old", "beard", "hot", "skinny").  Contrast this with responses from female subject J, whose emotional responses included "scary", "mad" and "dork".