Dan and Skyline in The BlowHole
Red Meat Shown to be Good Source of Iron(y)
The new ad for red meat (”We were meant to eat it”) featuring Sam Neill is probably intended to be tongue-in-cheek (hard to believe anyone is supposed to take that “humans came down from the trees and started to eat red meat” stuff seriously). I’m not sure, though, that the irony of filming the thing on a salt pan was intentional. Admittedly, salinity isn’t normally talked about in connection with cattle grazing as much as with irrigation horticulture (I think - it might be that dry-land salinity is more explicitly associated with sheep and cattle removing vegetation that normally soaks up excess rainfall). Whatever the case, you’d think that the meat growing industry would want to steer clear of images which remind us of the fragility of the land and the degradation that, by rights, should be included in the price of every eye fillet.
Post Like a Geek
I’m posting this using the text-based browser Lynx, running on my old laptop. It’s interesting to see how gracefully the WordPress Ajaxery degrades on a mouseless, graphics-less interfaces. Quite well, I’d have to say, for something that looks as pretty as it does rendered on a modern browser. Most of the sites that I’ve tried out have been quite navigable. Bloglines has been the only dead loss so far, which I was a bit disappointed in - I would have taken some perverse pleasure in reading RSS feeds on the sort of display that these days is only found at airline booking counters and lotto agencies. Frames, it seems, are a bit of a killer, which I guess is why they fall foul of those Karmic principles of web design which seem to float around the place, often unexplained.
Browsing the web in plain text could probably get old quickly. But it’s the ultimate in popup blocking, and you’ve never had a more responsive back button.
Tub
More than 1,300 passengers on an Australian-based cruise ship have arrived in Malaysia safely after the ship broke down in dangerous waters near Singapore.John Richardson, a spokesman for P&O Cruises, said the Pacific Sky had anchored in the Malacca Strait for about 30 hours after experiencing problems with its starboard engine.
He said the Pacific Sky had been sold to another company and was on one of her final journeys for P&O Cruises.
Mr Richardson denied the shipping line had let the vessel run down before it completed its last cruise on May 4.
No, it wasn’t run down especially. That ship had been a rust bucket from at least the time that I started to work in the industry about seven years ago. Friends of mine who used to work on it regaled me with stories of weeks spent dead in the water while the Welsh Wizards (a crack team of hardy engineers who used to fly in by helicopter and perform miracles of engine rebuilding (sometimes achieved by abseling down the funnels with an oxy torch and a grim expression) on a variety of lame ships all around the world, each of them (the ships) well past it’s respective scrap-by date) worked their magic and drank the crew bar dry. I suspect that they’re on the Pacific Sky as I write this, probably winning the crew trivia competition.
My only encounter with the Welsh Wizards was in the Norwegian Sea. We had experienced what the Captain described as “some rather heavy weather”, meaning that our rather small vessel (by cruise ship standards) had spent the best part of 24 hours behaving like a brick-sized block of polystyrene caught in an eddy at the bottom of Niagara Falls. As the Captain made reassuring noises over the PA (”As you can tell, we’re experiencing a bit of movement”) and room stewards paused from cleaning up guest vomit only long enough to clean up their own, heavily epauletted members of the deck department wearing worried expressions started ripping the cupboards out of the crew gymnasium. One of the rather-heavy anchors, normally lashed to the front of the ship, had applied its not inconsiderable mass to one of the Netownian equations concerning angular momentum and velocity, and had found itself swinging freely in a series of paths the sum of which approximately described a hemisphere (radius the length of the chain plus the shaft of the anchor) with its largest cross-section being inscribed on the hull in a long series of noisy and destructive impacts immediately (and rather ironically) adjacent to the free weight storage. Fortunately, the steel hull proved sufficiently tensile to absorb the blows without tearing, but it was left with a rather handsome array of fluke-shaped indentations which the Welsh Wizards were called upon to panel beat using a variety of entertainingly dangerous techniques. They inured themselves to the risk of death using beer and karaoke, both in proportions which might be unhealthy for an ordinary man.
God Save Our Obsequies
Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone, an avowed republican, said she disagreed with the decision by organisers not to play Britain’s national anthem when the Queen opened the Games.“Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, is Australia’s head of state and, as such, it would be appropriate to play God Save the Queen, if for no other reason than to show respect for the sovereign,'’ she said.
She said she agreed that Australia should be a republic, but the Queen was the nation’s sovereign and therefore should be paid the respect of having her national anthem played.
If the Queen is “the nation’s sovereign”, i.e. if she really is the Queen of Australia like she’s supposed to be (something to do with The Australia Acts in the 80s, I seem to remember), then surely Advance Australia Fair is “her” anthem when she’s acting in that capacity. The fact that “her national anthem” is described as being God Save the Queen, the national anthem of Great Britain, surely reveals something about this whole Queen of Australia business.