onetrack

Well, I have a great piece of positive news. My Hilux is suffering from noisy rear wheel bearings, so I thought I'd get a couple of new ones. I started looking around, and you have to buy a kit with seals and collar, as well as the bearing. The best price I could find was around $104 each. Now, I'm a bit fussy with bearings, and I much prefer to buy German, American, Japanese or even Taiwanese bearings, as I consider them superior bearings to Chinese, and even Thai-made bearings. As my Hilux was built in Thailand, I suspect it has Thai, or even Chinese bearings. I think that's the reason they haven't performed as well as I'd expected (the Hilux has done 190,000kms and has done a lot of heavy hauling). So I kept looking around, and I was amazed to find a website throwing out Timken bearing kits to fit my Hilux - on "clearance" - at - wait for it - $4.89 each!! The company is in Doncaster in Vic, so I ordered them last night - and blow me down, they were delivered this afternoon!! The two bearing kits cost me a grand total of $25.79 including delivery!! The company is Precision International, and I reckon they must have packaged them at first light, and run them out to the airport to catch the early morning flight to Perth!! What is even better - I opened one of the packets and the bearings are actually Made in Japan!! Bonus! So this little exercise has made my day!! Thank you muchly, Precision International!

We have been blown inside out here on the left coast for the last 4 days. It seems a very large and very intense high pressure system in the Bight is responsible for it. I can't recall such vicious and constant SE/E winds for so many days, in a long time. But this afternoon, the wind died away to virtually nothing, and it is a total relief to be able to do something outside without getting turned inside out.

Yeah, but could you have matched the mental rambling??

Red, your link is a Faecesbook scam site, designed to suck in anyone who believes everything they read. There is no $5M contribution to a homeless centre by Barnaby Joyce and Pauline Hanson, it's all TOTALLY FAKE NEWS. Just like the FB stories and photos of Pauline Hanson collapsing in Parliament, 100% lying, total BS.

Yeah, I bet it's a Big and Beautiful Gold Present. A golden bomb in the shape of Donald, specially delivered to him in person, by an Iranian courier! They know just how much he loves getting personal, gold-plated presents!

They are defunct as a political party, just as they have done to themselves in W.A. They've simply lost touch with the voters, the current makeup of the Nation, and the everyday persons desires. And by far the biggest problem all parties will have to address soon, is the unaffordability of housing, the thing that is uppermost in the everyday voters mind. Too much overseas investment money allowed into our housing market, the Chinese must own over a quarter of Australian housing at present. There's a house just around the corner from me, it is brand new, it is ten years old, and has never been lived in. It is owned by Chinese investors. They need to be taxed out of the market.

Trump is BS Central. There wouldn't be two consectutive words come out of his mouth with an element of truth in them. To Little Donny, the big surprise is the Iranians didn't come begging for him to stop as soon as his bombing campaign started - but they have turned into the best guerrilla fighters the Middle East has seen in decades. Something the Americans can never understand, nor can they adopt any strategy, that works to defeat a guerilla campaign. There is no "big present" to the U.S., it's all Trump BS, trying to make himself look like a winner in the third week of fighting, when we all know war is a protracted and costly business. Just ask his best mate, Putin.

GON - In nearly 30 years, they've never even looked like achieving any effective status, let alone "major party" status.

Get rid of these EV tax breaks that only favour the rich and well paid. Introduce a road user charge according to kms travelled, and it will all be a much fairer system.

But are all these items that inflation is hitting, and the shortages, providing all that excitement you were looking forward to?

When GST was introduced, the Govt made a huge windfall tax gain from finished goods already in stock, used machinery and parts, used vehicles, and a myriad of other items, that were previously untaxed, when these items were purchased by people who couldn't claim the GST back. That was every consumer. Businesses paid nothing, because they got the GST back, but everyday consumers got shafted again.

It is - https://7news.com.au/sunrise/pauline-hanson-up-for-100k-pay-boost-after-barnaby-joyce-move-pushes-one-nation-into-minor-party-status-c-22042872

OME, I normally look for, and give way to pedestrians and pushbikes on footpaths. Here in W.A., it is legal to ride a pushbike, or an e-scooter on a footpath or shared walkway - provided speed limits are adhered to. Those speed limits are 10kmh on footpaths and 15kmh on shared walkways. If I had sighted a pedestrian or a cyclist on the footpath, I would've stopped. As I said, I was proceeding slowly and cautiously out of the servo. I could've easily stopped and given way to anyone on the footpath abiding by the rules and regulations. As it was, this bloke was certainly guilty of "riding furiously". He wasn't just riding furiously, he was indulging in dangerous or reckless riding, on a par with using a motor vehicle in that manner. He was not "driving defensively", which is where you drive to the conditions and allow room to stop if another driver does something wrong. He was in the wrong - although I know today, that each driver or rider is allocated a share of responsibilty, in the event of a crash. https://www.transport.wa.gov.au/active-transport/riding-walking-wheeling/safety-guidelines-faqs/rules

Most them have aged pretty well, considering they were nearly all into excessive amounts of drugs, sex and rock-n-roll - and many weird working hours.

You first need to get rid of the tens of millions of idiots who support him, and who post on FB pages that Trump has done nothing wrong, and he's the greatest leader America has ever had! Americans deserve all the shitty living conditions they're going to get, simply because they voted this moron in.

Trump knows what he's doing, just ask Nettinyahoo. Trumps scheme is to utterly bamboozle the Iranians by changing the direction of the war every day. He's simply stopping at present because someone told him at the rate they were burning up armaments and military equipment, they'd have to stop fighting next week. The 10 U.S. radar setups scattered around the U.S.-friendly Middle Eastern nations, destroyed by the Iranians in the last couple of weeks, have a total replacement value of nearly US$3B. And those radars were crucial to determine the what and where of the incoming Iranian missiles, rockets and drones. If you think it's been a costly couple of weeks for the Iranians, I can tell you it's been just as costly for the Americans. And those radar setups can't be replaced overnight - unlike Iranian Shahed drones. Another massive equipment loss was the KC-135 tanker, about US$80M, plus about 120,000 litres of jet fuel. In addition, several other KC-135's have been damaged by shrapnel and drone attacks, taking more aerial refuelling ability out of the equation. These U.S. losses are the reason the Yanks requested our Wedgetail AEW&C surveillance aircraft. Let's hope we don't lose it to some dumbf**k, trigger-happy Americans, or their Kuwaiti allies.

There's an actress that I haven't heard of in a long time. She was a stunner when she was young - when she got older, age and disease obviously weren't kind to her.

E-bikes and e-scooters are out of control, Australia-wide. Half the problem is the unlimited accessibility and ease of purchase of these things, the other half is no age restrictions and no training. And it's not just juveniles, either. The number of young males in their 20's riding these things at high speed with no registration, onto footpaths, then onto roads, then cutting through traffic, then back onto footpaths, is large. SWMBO and I were in Albany on the weekend. We filled up at an unattended (card only) servo, on the main road, Albany Hwy. We climbed back into the car and went to drive out the exit onto the highway - and a young bloke about 20 on an e-scooter, doing about 60kmh along the footpath, screamed past the front of the car, missing us by less than a metre. I was only going slow and looking back up the highway to my right for approaching traffic (there was none), and I didn't even see this bloke on my right, he was going so fast, he had no hi-vis or lighting - and the last thing I expected was a vehicle doing 60kmh on the footpath. Plus, there was signage, posts and other obstructions in front of the servo, that helped conceal the e-scooter rider. It's time laws were brought in restricting the sale of these things, a requirement for training and licencing (both bike and rider), and rigid enforcement of the rules. We've had idiots here just kill themselves, simply by falling off them at speed.

Do they provide armed security for the winner, to his car?

I'd really like to see what this great Australian Plan is, that One Nation has for ALL Australians in ALL States. I suspect there's no plan, except to blame immigrants for every problem that arises. Pauline Hanson is a Female Donald Trump. Says what people want to hear, but has no long-term plans, indulges in "stunts" to keep her name in the media, and picks people for her party members who have zero leadership skills, they only need to support a radical right wing agenda that focuses solely on, "too many immigrants from s***hole countries". I like going through the long list of deadbeat One Nation picks for representatives, who have turned out to be criminals, total rabbits, incompetent, geriatric, or who changed sides as soon as they were elected. And none of them, were immigrants from "s***hole countries".

You can be as gracious and articulate as the best of them - but if you continue to back a party that is no longer relevant to most people, and dead in the water politically, you will forever remain an "also-ran".

I'm sure it'll get much more exciting for you, when you can't afford to buy fuel to go to town, and you start to find all your groceries have gone up by 30% to 50% in price within a few weeks.

Property prices did pull back some, but there wasn't the property bubble that there is now. Sooner or later there will be a big property price correction. It might take a few more years or even a couple of decades, but it will come.

Well, for a start, I wouldn't stop sending out the begging letters. You never know when the $50M might run out. 😄

Early figures are showing Labor in S.A. enjoying a comfortable win, for a second term of Govt - while Pauline Hansons party appears to be sucking up all the disaffected Liberal voters. Ashton Hurn, the Liberal leader in S.A. who promised great things, is polling around 10% lower on her primary vote. Not a good sign for her continued reign in her job. The Liberals in S.A. will be holding a wake over the decomposed remains of the Liberal Party in the State, by the look of things. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-21/sa-election-day-live-updates/106476924