Marty_d

Wish my school was like that, grade 5 would have been the best 10 years of my life!

I don't think I have your lawnmower, but I do have your multimeter and wire stripper...

I've got no problem with that OT... at least I'll be able to keep chatting with most of you blokes! 😁

I think it's ok if people want to identify with one particular part of their genetic makeup. I'm a bit of a mongrel so I just identify as Australian. Dad came from Sri Lanka (his paternal ancestors moved there from France around the time of the head-chopping) and Mum's heritage is Scottish/English/German etc. There's certainly no particular bit of this heritage that I strongly identify with, but I have no problem with people who do favour one bit over the others.

Nah, I was sanding filled screw holes on the outside of the shed. Plenty of time for random musings when you're doing prep work for painting.

Here's an idea. Why couldn't one of these social media giants build an ideas platform. Person with the idea posts it and their details are stored. Moderators thin out the bullshit. Blue sky investors pay a subscription to view the ideas and agree to pay the original poster a percentage of any profits arising from an idea they use.

I was musing on what I would do as a practical joke, if I could do absolutely anything. I decided that I would turn all the names of every deity, sub-deity, prophet, angel, demon, whatever - in EVERY holy book - bible, koran, torah, talmud, what have you - into the names of Cadbury chocolates. Including, of course, every reference anywhere in the Internet. Every time an attempt was made to reprint with the originals, they'd revert to chocolate names. Imagine the sermons.... "and Crunchie said unto Turkish Delight... oh, wait, dammit, what were their names??" Then there'd be the amusing sight of Cadbury's suing every religion for breach of trademark. Heheh.

Kids still are. Yes, they'll happily turn into vegetables if you give them endless screen time, but if you manage it they amuse themselves. This morning I went into the lounge room and two of them, who usually fight like cat and dog, are sitting together doing a jigsaw puzzle. When the middle one doesn't have his device he's outside carving and shaping wooden swords (which is great, except he doesn't always remember to put my tools back!) They still make cubbies too.

Bit of a problem, for a moderator...

Stop printing notes over $10. Problem solved.

Is that where the song "Walk like an Egyptian" comes from?

"Now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople..." and that song's been around since the 1950's.

Sounds better than sitting on a cloud singing praises.

How stupid is the idea of hell, when you think of it. What, demons are going to poke pitchforks in you for eternity because you don't believe in god? Sounds like a sad attempt at forcing people into the church doors, or else god is really compensating for something.

They stuffed up a bit today. Yes everyone with a mortgage is pissed off about the interest rate rise, but to say the government should fire the Reseve Bank governor isn't selling their economic credentials.

Fair's fair. They perve on us, we perve on them. The only trouble is we all perve on the ones out of our category, and no one welcomes ogling attention from those less attractive. So unless you're at the top of the food chain, it doesn't work for anyone. It's a philosoptical question.

Are we all happy? Good weather helps. I reckon you find the net happiness of Tassie peaks dramatically from January to March.

Nah, one of my mates tried that, got into real trouble. One of his girlfriend's friends was drunk and crashed in their bed, and when his girlfriend reached down she found the other girl's hand already there. Sparks flew, and not in a good way...

Do you look up and say "Huh? What's that you said?"

At 90? When are you going to spend it??

I reckon an ending fitting his morality and dignity would be more appropriate. Like being found dead of a heart attack in a seedy hotel room with a scornful adult actress, surrounded by incriminating documentation of dodgy business dealings, and a phone full of video of him laughing at the stupidity and gullibility of his MAGA followers.

I've been on a bit of a Daniel Silva reading kick - he writes excellent spy thrillers. Anyway, one of his books ("The Order") had an interesting premise - that the Jews have been persecuted for 2000 years, based largely on the christian religion's portrayal of them as "Christ killers", which in turn is based on a bit in one of the gospels which talks about Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Jerusalem at the time, not really wanting to make the decision to kill Jesus himself and the Jews at the time "crying out with one voice" (without even rehearsing), something along the lines of "Let his blood be on our hands and those of our children", or some rubbish like that. Anyway... as part of the storyline some scholars poke some holes in this version of "history". Namely: - Pontius had already crucified hundreds of Jewish political troublemakers and rabble rousers. One more wouldn't have bothered him in the slightest. - This meeting where the Jews supposedly bayed for his blood was apparently in the middle of the night, and that wouldn't have happened. - How the hell did a bunch of people call out quite a complicated sentence, all at once? So then it offers an alternate theory. That is, that Jesus was a political troublemaker, Pontius put him on a cross along with a few hundred others, and the Jews themselves (of which Jesus was one) had bugger-all to do with the decision. BUT - when this new religion started to get going, who were they targeting it at? The gentiles. Of which the Romans were one of the biggest populations to recruit to their cause. Imagine that - you're trying to get other Romans to convert to this religion, where this guy that was executed was supposedly either a great prophet or the son of god, etc. "But who killed him?" your prospective converts ask. "Ummmm.... the Roman governor... one of us, actually.,." At which point the target snorts and walks away. So what's the politically palatable answer? Blame the people he came from and lived among, of course! Your Roman convert doesn't give a toss about them anyway, they're just some inhabitants of a far-flung corner of the Roman empire, and certainly not of the aristocratic Roman classes. In addition, the gospels weren't written by buddies of Jesus (not actually sure of his real name, but it most likely wouldn't have been that) at the time he was alive. The earliest was written about 30 years after his death, and some of the later ones were 100 or more years after. So it was a good opportunity to rewrite history a little in order to give a boost to their fledgling religion. Now to be fair, I don't know how much truth is in this, if any. I do know that Daniel Silva heavily researches a lot of factual material before he writes his thrillers, and let's face it, knowing how the spin of politics works (and has always worked) it makes more sense than the biblical version.

I've never won anything, and don't expect to now - but if I'm going to give away money, I may as well get a bee's dick chance of winning a Cirrus at the same time.

It doesn't profit you to read his garbage, that's for sure.

Like anyone would really tell her!