willedoo

It seems funny hearing people refer to 4% as high interest rates. It was 17.5% when I took out a variable rate loan to buy my place, and the loan peaked at around 20%. My father was paying around 22% on his business loan at it's peak.

Even though election analyst Antony Green has retired from election night broadcasts, he still crunches numbers and runs his election blog. He comes up with some interesting stats. On his blog he was breaking down the S.A. Labor government's votes and swings and found that in safe Labor seats with a margin of 15% or more, there was a predominately large swing away from Labor, and in Labor seats with a margin less than 15%, there was a swing to Labor.

I tried the beer when I was up in the country, but it was hard to get, warm and tasted like the worst home brew you'd ever tried. Rotten egg gas smell when you opened them and no two bottles were the same. Apart from right hand drive cars driving on the right, another oddity was a couple of years later when Ne Win introduced new currency based on his lucky number 9. He also demonetized three existing notes which rendered 75% of the country's cash invalid. It wiped out most people's savings in a country that relied heavily on black market cash and hammered the economy. The military government was a bit crazy. In the first place I stayed there was a window between floors in the stairwell. In the distance seen out of the window was a big red building, and on the wall a poster with a stern government warning not to look at the big red building. I imagine in the big red building there would have been a government agent with the job of looking through a telescope to see if any foreigners were looking at the big red building. I wouldn't have even noticed the big red building if I hadn't seen the warning sign, so of course the natural response on reading the sign is to look out the window at the big red building.

It was a crazy place back then, probably still is. It was fairly hard to find a safe place to eat in Rangoon from what I remember. We used to eat at the Strand for British food and the Karachi for Indian. Back then the Strand hotel was still like something from the days of British rule. The most far up north I got was Pagan, never made it as far as Mandalay. It surprised me how dry it was in that area, almost semi-arid with a lot of eucalypt plantations. The gum trees were a welcome smell having been away for a long time. My first impression of Burma was landing there on a Bangladesh Biman flight and getting a taxi into town. The taxi was a big yank tank from the late 50's, right hand drive and driving on the right side of the road. It's still like that, some left hand drive vehicles but predominantly right hand drive vehicles driving on the right.

When I was in Burma in 1985, about the only reminder of the war was a lot of psp used for rural fencing once you got out of Rangooon into the countryside.

I think that inland rail project was originally heading to Toowoomba. They talked about plans to have a big transport hub at Wellcamp,just west of Toowoomba with the Wellcamp airport, the Toowoomba Range road bypass and the inland rail all meeting up there.

A pantech.

I've seen that chain trick done before, real desperation. Also ran into a bloke who'd had that many flats he'd run out of spares and was running on mostly single wheels after taking off the blown tyres and bolting the bare rims back on. The biggest cause of flats on dirt roads is running over bolts that have shaken out of trailers on the corrugated roads. The wheel runs over them, flips them up and they puncture the tyre. You need good eyesight to spot them.

Given the right (or wrong) conditions, that is.

The most prone to swaying is the middle trailer on a conventional triple. They can get a sway up with the front and rear trailers fighting against it, not unlike a dutch roll in an aircraft.

ome, by short roadtrain, I'm assuming you're referring to B-doubles.

It's interesting seeing how preferences pan out. The Victorian Liberals retained the seat of Nepean in yesterday's by-election. They had a primary vote of 38.5% and a swing of 9.6% away from them (most likely to One Nation). After preferences were allocated they ended up with 63.5% which translated to a +6.8% swing. One Nation was in second place with 24.7% primary vote which could account for a fair bit of the Liberal preference gain. Third place was the Independent on 21.3 primary and in fourth place the Greens on 9.3 primary. That's the two candidate preferred final percentage figures estimated on the Independent polling in the top two. It might change slightly due to One Nation ending up in place.

How's this one for an example Nev. I'm only about 77kg but can't shake the belly fat no matter what I do. While not huge, it's not ideal either. I don't drink alcohol, the only animal protein I eat is seafood, don't have dairy products, gluten, sugar or any sugary foods or drinks. I eat almost no processed, packaged food and never eat junk food. Diet consists mainly of grains, fruit and vegetables. I get quite a bit of exercise for someone my age, partly targeted, the rest from physical work. Every day I do heaps of gut related exercise, sit ups etc., yet still maintain belly fat. There hardly any fat on my body, just around the midriff. There's nothing left to cut out of my diet, zero saturated fat and zero sugar, only the natural sugar found in fruit. There's a lot of people around like that who have the same issue. Also too many who eat all that stuff you listed.

I heard on the radio a couple of days ago the median house rent in Brisbane is $780 p/w and $650 for units. It makes you wonder about the top end content in those median prices and how many affordable places are still out there. It would be interesting to see numbers of houses in various price ranges that result in those averages.

A lot of physiotherapists live in a dream world. Standing on two feet with your eyes closed is a pretty good effort for anyone in their eighties, one foot is unneccessary risk taking in my opinion. Most people aim to do it on one foot with eyes open.The only physio I've ever been to that knew what she was doing was a young lady who migrated here from Mumbai. All her assessments and advice were practical, common sense and effective. And it was all verbal with some written take home instructions, very old school. Most of them these days are all about box ticking. They take your money and send you home with an exercise programme where you have to log in every day to their site and tick boxes saying you've done the exercises. Not worth two bob. There's heaps of physio mobs jumping on the bandwagon to hoover up medicare dollars via care plans using BS like that. It's a license to print money.

It's fairly basic. onetrack, you're lucky enough to have a fast, fat burning metabolism like my dad had. You couldn't fatten him. A lot of people aren't as lucky and have slow metabolisms and a tendency to accumulate fat around the midrif. There are people who are vegetarians, don't drink or eat any fattening food and do heaps of exercise and can't shake the belly roll. And to diet it away doesnt work either as it's the last to go; the rest of the body will wither right away before the belly does.

I know a bloke who's well balanced - he's got a chip on both shoulders. I think he was born that way.

The original Flying Flea:

Remember that lightweight Royal Enfield called the Flying Flea made for airborne troops, Royal Enfield is putting out a light electric bike named the same.

It's been a long time between posts. My main shed renovations are at the stage of a much needed clean out, so I'm getting to the point of sorting some stored flight gear and moving on superflous multiples and unwanted items. I've decided to gift these helmets to a couple of collectors I'm associated with, one in France and the other in Greece. They're extra to my requirements and are better off where they're appreciated instead of a life in storage. I got them from a lady in Vinnytsia about twelve years ago, and realising how rare they were, I bought all of them, hence the extras. At first glance, they look much like the garden variety Soviet leather flight helmet, but these are different externally and internally and were only made in small numbers. In the years since I obtained these helmets I've only ever seen one for sale. They're rare but not valuable as in worth heaps of money. They were manufactured at Rostikinsky in NW Moscow where all the standard leather helmets were made, but the big difference is the use of the same noise cancelling headsets that the cloth ground crew helmets use. These use the glycerine filled earpads and the larger Ukrainian made speakers. The speakers are only different from standard in physical size; they still have the same 1500 ohm resistance. There's no literature or documentation on them, so I can only assume they were designed to try for noise reduction in certain helicopters, possibly the larger Mi-6 and Mi-26. Having said that, I reckon they'd go ok in the screaming Il-76 transport. The low bypass Soloviev D-30 turbofans on them are deafening. I have two of each of these helmet types spare, so will be sending what you see here to each of the collectors overseas (minus the foam heads).

Apologies for being off topic as it relates to E-bikes and scooters and not cars. With the new legislation coming into effect on July 1st., I'm noticing quite a few showing up on FB marketplace. In this region you don't normally see many for sale, but that's changing with the new restrictions. An example is this E-scooter on marketplace for $300. It has a 48v battery, 500w motor with a 20-30 klm range and a top speed of 35kph. I don't think I'd like to be standing on it at 35kph..

Good on you octave for being able to make a life long career doing something you have a passion for.

I don't know about that correlation between brain hemispheres and politicl leaning though. Look at people like Matt Canavan who has gone full circle from Marxist to leader of the National Party.

In that example I gave of plant operating, the right hemisphere is handling the blade work (or a bucket in the case of a digger) and the left side is dealing with the constantly changing numbers on the GPS.

Yes, particularly for people who read music, use sheet music and all the mathematical side of music.