willedoo

2WEB Bourke community radio used to be amusing to listen to. These days it's a lot more professional and has lost a lot of the character it used to have. Back in the 80's there was an old Aboriginal bloke who would do a segment. He was known as 'the man of many mistakes' due to continual stuff-ups. If a record stuck he wouldn't lift the needle and move it forward; he'd ditch it and put Slim Dusty on. He loved Slim; every time something went wrong he'd put Slim on. Another long time legend there was May Watkins who did a country music segment. The station started as a school project broadcasting out of the cleaner's storage room and grew from there. I can remember one schoolkid used to do a show. He was fairly young and didn't have any concept of genres of music. He'd just play them as he found them so you never knew what you'd get on his show. Back in those days it was often the only radio station you could pick up in the SW corner of Queensland and over the border around Moomba and Innamincka.

Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is Jewish, something I didn't know until the Gaza war brought it into the news.

They'll be happy to get some good production world wide. The Ukrainian tonnage being down due to the war must have some effect on trade.

Wellcamp Airport at Toowoomba recorded a low of -5.7C this morning.

Major Tom for VP.

But then again, I'm no judge of popular tastes. As an example, I can't stand Macca and would rate him as Australia's most boring radio presenter, yet he has a huge almost cult-like following nation wide. This is a typical Macca segment: (radio caller) Jim: "G'day Macca, this is Jim". Macca: "G'day Jim, where are you calling from?" Jim: "I'm out on the Birdsville Track fixing a flat tyre". Macca: "Which tyre is it Jim?". Jim: "The flat one Macca". Macca: "Yes, I had a flat tyre once. Oh well, time to play the magpie recording again until I can think of something more to say".

I find with Roy and HG that their routine has a use by date. Same old stuff year after year.

The worst part about the Olympics is that ABC radio has Roy and HG covering them. Nearly every time you turn the radio on they are there. They were slightly funny 35 years ago.

I think it's photoshop, not the pie shop.

Kamala has been raising a lot of campaign funds which must have the orange one concerned. Her pick of running partner for VP will be interesting. There was speculation today on social media that Pete Buttigieg might be in the mix. Kamala might do ok especially if she does a bit of homework to minimise stuff-ups in policy positions. If she's well briefed before interviews she won't have too much trouble.

If you don't vote you don't have much of a mandate to complain about those elected.

My auntie was one but only because all nurses were commissioned by that stage of the war. When my dad caught up with her on his first leave he said he didn't know whether to kiss her or salute her.

I've got a new phone for the upcoming 3G shutdown. It drives me batty with the spell check thing. I haven't found out how to disable it yet.

I did change tactics slightly. The following year I gave up on the inkwell and just threw them on the floor and squashed them with my foot. That didn't impress her either. I think she was a bit stuck up. There weren't too many to choose from in those small population areas (girls, that is, flies were in abundance)

I don't think it did. I chased that girl until I was 14 to no avail. Maybe the dead flies were a bridge too far.

I like the old one when someone mistakenly calls an NCO Sir and the reply "Don't call me Sir, I work for a living".

Sergeant. The 'a' jumped syllables. Tricky devils they can be.

I did - it turns them into walks. I tried to impress a girl I was keen on at primary school by showing her how I'd filled my inkwell up to the brim with dead flies I'd caught. I don't know why but she wasn't impressed.

It wouldn't link to this site but if you were posting about the renovation on X, the hashtag would be a way other X users could post a link to your X account or the account of anyone else using that hashtag to talk about you and/or the renovation. If the postings on X about the renovations became popular, people would spread that hashtag around and #OmesRenovation would be trending.

The Flinders Ranges are a beautiful part of the country. I spent a fair bit of time working around there in 1984. We were contracting for Santos and spent the better part of a year around there and up around Lake Eyre. The job started at Frome Downs, and being based at Toowoomba, we went down via Noccundra then down the Silver City Highway and cut across one of the Quinambie Station tracks to Frome. It was great working there every day with the Flinders as a backdrop. That was a year of a particularly cold winter. We only had sleet at Frome Downs, but it snowed around Toowoomba which doesn't happen there very often. It was a Turnkey job so we were able to clock up a bit of extra production and take a rare day off, so we drove up to Arkaroola but unfortunately didn't have the time to see Wilpena Pound. After Frome we went up to Lake Callabonna area. From there we worked around Lake Eyre South, up the west side of Lake Eyre on Macumba Station, around the top of Lake Eyre and then north up into the ephemeral lakes region across to the Simpson Desert border. It was a great year for adventure and sightseeing but a lot of work. In those days our standard hitch in the field was six weeks on/two weeks off but the work was there and I was saving money so did ten week hitches for most of the year. It knocks you about a bit when it's seven days per week of fourteen hour days. At one stage in the north above Lake Eyre, the country was difficult to move a camp into so we were traveling to the job four hours each way over the sand dunes. The good part was I got to camp out in the desert in solitude on occasion. It's nice sitting around the fire and knowing there's not another human within 100klm..

The hashtag will locate all posts that contain that hashtag. In the last screen grab, you can see people can attach multiple hashtags to their posts. They are a link of sorts, but general and not specific to one post.

Another one trending this morning is #HarrisButtgieg2024, related to speculation Harris might pick Pete Buttgieg as a running partner for VP. Clicking on the hashtag brings up stuff like this

The hashtag will link to any posts related to the title of the hashtag. In Xcrement there is an area on the right of the screen showing which topics are trending and a lot of these are preceded by a hashtag. You can enter a hashtag followed by whatever you seek in the search bar as well. In the attached screen grab below, the hashtag #AFLPiesTigers will bring up everything related to their match. I saw one this morning in the trending section that was #DonaldtheDodger. I didn't click on it but assumed it was all about Trump dodging death, but maybe it was just all about Trump in general.

It's supposed to be a peaceful thing but there's been a lot of debate and criticism of the IOC's decision to allow Russian and Belarusian athletes to compete as neutrals. Conditions are that they must not be active supporters of the war and not work for the country's military or security services. In more normal times almost 50% of Russia's Olympic athletes are members of the military in their day job. Of the 57 Russian and Belarusian athletes declared eligible, an investigation by the Netherlands-based Global Rights Compliance found 33 had backed the war. According to Ukraine’s Ministry of Youth and Sports, at least 487 Ukrainian athletes and coaches have been killed over the course of the war. In Russia athletes and the elites don't go to fight in the war. It's in sharp contrast to Ukraine where they have lost so many talented people from the fields of science, sports, education and the arts, all fighting in front line jobs. It's easy to excuse the IOC by saying politics shouldn't come into it, but in my opinion Russian and Belarusian athletes should be banned, whether competing under a neutral flag or not. A lot of Ukraine's athletes who would have been competing are now dead because of those two countries.

In the mid 80's myself and a few mates rented a Batak house on the shore of Lake Toba in Sumatra which had a complimentary dugout canoe thrown in. It was one of those small hollowed out log types of canoe. I was never game enough to get in it. Not a strong swimmer and Lake Toba is very deep, up to 500 metres. It was on Samosir Island in the middle of the lake so there was a very sharp drop off in water depth from the shoreline. I suppose it makes no difference whether you drown in ten feet of water or a thousand feet, but the deep water there certainly added a physiological factor to it.