willedoo

They need to take a closer look at their gear. I've never had a cant hook that can't hook.

I'm starting to plan a new project, namely building what I call a log jinker. The goal is a mini version of the timber jinkers you see on the road when semi's are hauling logs. It's in two sections - the rear section which works like a standard log arch, and the front dolly section which would hook on behind the ute. There's quite a few variations around the basic designs but I like the winchless type in this video. The first part of the video shows a bloke hooking up a log with the front section only and skull-dragging the rear of the log on the ground. The later part of the video shows the rear arch being employed to carry the log fully suspended off the ground. The biggest challenge will be how to build it at minimal cost as I had a big clean up three years ago and foolishly tossed out most of the steel I had. I also have to source wheels and hubs as I only have a couple of old 13" wheels that came off a trailer and no hubs. Three years ago I also threw out wheels and running gear off a Nissan Patrol, a heap of Landcruiser wheels and two sets of running gear and wheels from a Suzuki LJ80 Stockman as well as hubs and axles off a couple of trailers. I wish I still had them but if I keep my nose to the ground I might find someone throwing stuff like that out. The reason for it is that I have a few logs on the ground around my place and would like to retrieve them and try out the eBay chainsaw slabbing jig that I've never used. There's a bit of brush box, forest red gum, ironbark, bloodwood and some unidentified big tree that fell across my small dam. I think it's some type of tall growing acacia; the timber is hard and dark red and should polish up nice. If the rig works it should be handy in the long term for different jobs.

I've seen Americans writing cant hook as can't hook.

Bouncebacks from lower velocity rounds hitting steel are bad also and they get up enough velocity to do damage. Small slivers are often razor sharp (and hot) and larger pieces have some fairly sharp, ugly shapes to them. Not as dangerous as getting hit by a ricochet though.

As far as his question "how did the blood get smeared?". Secret service officer holding a cloth on his face (see first photo above). Take that cloth away and it's exactly where the smear or smudge was.

I don't.

The dude is dreaming. None of the people who got hit were anywhere near close enough to him to splatter blood on Trump. As far as his question as to how the blood got streaked, that's a simple one and has been mentioned on this forum before. There's a lot of blood in your ears (that's why mosquitos always go for them) and it doesn't take much of a nick to bleed a lot. Trump was face down on the deck with blood running from his ear down his cheek. Someone should explain gravity to that bloke in the video.

I probably don't have enough first hand experience to know too much about the management side of things; most of what I've heard is hearsay from people. One story I heard was of a station handed over to an Aboriginal corporation whereby they mustered all the stock, sold it off, spent the money and ended up with no breeding stock. True or not I don't know. When I first worked in the Kimberleys in the early 80's we were doing a large prospect on Billiluna and Sturt Creek. We were camped on Billiluna and it was Aboriginal owned then. I remember my boss telling me that when the Wilsons had it before that it had one of the best Hereford herds in the Kimberleys. It was fairly run down when we were there under Aboriginal ownership and the cattle were a mixed up lot and certainly nothing to write home about. They had a white manager as far as I can remember. They were still semi traditional; the men used to go and play with the cattle during the day while the women went out in the spinifex hunting snakes and lizards. It's a small world. We ended up doing another job in the Flinders Range area a couple of years later and got to meet the Wilsons who then owned Frome Downs. Bill Wilson opened up the Tanami track as a stock route in the early 60's being the first to drove cattle across there. Times have changed - the new NT government is promising to seal the track on the Territory side.

If you look at people of Anglo-Saxon descent here in Australia, if you go back long enough our ancestors were warriors who would hunt and wear animal skins and light fires with flint stones. Now most are stuffed if a Wooliies and Coles aren't close by. The same thing that happened to us is happening to the Aboriginals. The only real difference is over what time frame it happens. It took our society and culture a long time to change. The Aboriginals haven't had the same amount of time, only from 1788 to now.

His insanity knows no bounds.

He's pushing his Trump Digital Trading Cards again. If you but 15 or more (at $99 USD each) you receive a small piece of the suit Trump wore in the debate with Biden.

It's hard to get the head around the cost of things these days. Admittedly I've been out of the loop on some prices for a while and have really noticed it as I'm starting back doing some things I haven't done for a few years, namely building renovation and a bit of fabrication. Some building materials haven't increased much but most have. The price of timber products is scary. Another one is the price of steel. As said I'm a few years out of touch on prices but the price of steel in general now is incredible. Gone are the days of taking it for granted. Every job now needs a bit of careful planning and research to keep it affordable. I look at every scrap of steel now as gold. Back in 2021 I was cleaning my block up to sell and gave away a heap of good steel as I didn't want to spend the time trying to sell it and couldn't take it with me. Circumstances changed and I'm still here but almost completely steelless. I figured out that at today's prices, what I gave away was worth thousands to replace. I had a lot of steel that had accumulated over the years, either bought or obtained for free. If I had a small job to do, there was always the right bit of steel lying around somewhere. It's a bit of a shock to the system to have to go to town and pay crazy prices when all you need is a small amount for a little job. On the bright side, the place looks a lot tidier these days. The metal scrap bloke took away five truck and trailer loads if you include old water tanks and vehicles.

There's quite a few youtube videos of her questioning people in senate comittees, including supreme court nominees. She's sharp and knows her stuff. She interrogates like a top notch QC (or KC as they are now). The only time she'd have any problems debating Trump is if it was in Fox studios, and poorly moderated with a public audience of MAGA nuts cheering the buffoon on.

It's an expensive offence, over $1,200 here and four points. Eight points during holiday double demerit periods or a second offence within 12 months.

I'm not very familiar with the history of coastal tribes, but from what I know of the outer areas I would use the term 'managed' the land rather than our concept of farming it. For instance, something like burning has multiple benefits and reasons dependent on the type of country. Burning off can manage fire hazard by staggering the burning of adjoining areas. It also provides a lot of tucker by driving reptiles and animals to a certain area where they can be easily hunted. Another side of it is seed regeneration, but that's a long way from cultivating soil and planting seed and watering crops. I think it's a bit of a stretch to look at fish traps as aquaculture. The way I see it, it's fish hunting, not fish farming. If the Aboriginals trapped fish and kept them in fixed stone enclosures while they fed them and grew them, then I'd call it fish farming. As far as that Pascoe bloke goes, I'd put more faith in the peer reviewed work of anthropologists and archaeologists. While I might not agree with every single thing they teach, at least it's well researched and peer reviewed. Theories and guesswork alone don't make science. There has to be some believable corroboration involved. I think a lot of his media fans give him oxygen because he's saying something they want to believe.

It's goodbye to winter. The last few days of winter are all forecast to be in the low 30's here. Oodnadatta on the weekend got to 39; 16 degrees above average.

That's one thing I always found amusing about the place. Nowhere Else is exactly that. I almost bought a place at Paradise once but didn't. I could have spent the rest of my life living in Paradise. I like Penguin and the big penguin statue.

I get a lot of mosquitos here and one thing I noticed is that the odourless Mortein spray is nowhere as effective as the regular stuff. It doesn't smell but it also doesn't work.

I'd like to do some reading up on trade routes. I've always wondered whether the extensive fireplace site I saw in SW Qld. was a meeting and trading place for multiple tribes. I'd never seen so many fireplaces before; there were literally hundreds of them long a creek bank. It was a creek system feeding into the large section of Cooper's Creek near Durham Downs. The local tribe was one of the biggest, if not the biggest in Queensland, so it's possible all the tribal sub groups got together as one big mob there to have a bit of a shindig, and the number of fireplaces had built up over the years. It could only be that or a multi tribe meeting place. That was one of the more memorable sites I've seen. You see stuff all the time out there but some stand out and stick in your memory. Another memorable one was the biggest workshop I've seen, also in far SW Qld.. It was a significant site and covered a claypan probably about three acres in size. In that space you couldn't put a foot on the ground anywhere and not stand on stone chips. There was not much stone nearby and no obvious quarries so they must have carted the stone a fair way. For those not familiar with it, a workshop is where they work the stone to make knife blades and spear tips. The stone is very hard duricrust silcrete and clinks like glass when you drop one on another. The broken shards are sharp and can cut you to the bone. They stand around busting rocks until they get the right shape for a tool or spear head, then they work that into the final product. It takes a lot of strikes to get a suitable shaped piece so there's a lot of unusable offcuts left lying on the ground. They quarry the rock by digging it up to get the better quality rock. The surface rock is too weathered and doesn't work well. I think it was about 12,000 years ago they developed stone spear heads instead of using the sharpened point of the timber spear. Another memorable one I came across was a sad one being a massacre site. It was sandy country and I saw a circular low dune which would have been a typical campsite as the bowl shape inside a circular dune provides shelter from the wind in all directions. It was a campsite inside the bowl with fireplaces and grindstones and stone tools lying around. It was difficult to count the skeletons with the passage of time and impact of animals and cattle but there was at least twenty of them, possibly more. I'd say they were taken by surprise as they were all inside the circular dune. Another one I'll never forget was not anything flash, just small and unusual. It was in sand and spinifex country interspersed with rock outcrops south of the Camballin / Mt. Hardman area. The sand was low and undulating and had small boulders sticking out of the ground here and there. One larger rock shaped and sized like a small Eskimo igloo caught my eye. It was about 200 metres off the track so I walked over to have a look. I guess it was about 8' diameter and about 4' high in the centre and was hollow inside. Being curious I thought I'd have a look inside as there was a hole at ground level just big enough to wriggle through. I knelt down and had a peek inside to first check for snakes then lay down and wriggled inside like a goanna. There wasn't enough height to sit up so you had to lie on your back. Lo and behold, the whole inside of the rock feature was covered in artwork. It was nice and cool in there so I guess it was a good place for the artist to escape the heat and whittle a few hours away.

I think there's quite a few words they adopted from the neighbouring fishermen. The first I knew of it was quite a few years ago watching an old lady being interviewed on TV. I can't remember if she was speaking a tribal language or Kriol, but my ears pricked up when I heard her use the word Belanda which was a Malay word (now Bahasa Indonesian) for Dutch people. Apparently it derives from the Portugese word Hollanda for Holland. These days the Indonesians and some top end aboriginals use the word generally for all white people and not just the Dutch. I can't remember the other Indonesian words the old lady used in the TV interview but there were a few. As far as I know, the Macassans had semi-permanent settlements in the coastal area of the Top End. A lot would come and go between there and their base in Macassar but a certain amount would stay and some had Aboriginal wives. There's a beach named Maccassan Beach just south of Yirrkala.

I think the term is used referring to the fact that each tribe had sole ownership of their tribal land and their own tribal law and often a different language, so in effect they were each like a sovereign nation separate from each other with no common laws binding tribes together. That was a big sentence.

Mick Ryan has a new book out, 'The War For Ukraine - Strategy and Adaptation Under Fire'. It's a story that probably still has a long way to go but I wouldn't mind getting a copy. I'm sure it would be an interesting read as his opinions and analysis are always good to read.

According to Ukraine's President Zelensky, their new domestic long range rocket drone was successfully used in combat on Saturday. It only took 18 months to develop and get to the production stage. Most specs of the 'Palianytsia' are classified but they released a video saying it is ground launched and powered by a turbojet. They are saying there are two dozen Russian military airfields within it's range.

I saw a short clip of a bloke in England being interviewed on the street. His comments were amusing: "Being British is all about driving a German car to an Irish themed pub with Belgian beer and then going home buying an Indian takeaway to sit on a Swedish sofa in front of a Japanese television to watch American shows and all the while being suspicious of anything foreign".

Map of the world according to fish.