old man emu

No. They are Shaun.

Huh???????

What was that all about?

Because at the time it was built, engines attached to vehicles based on the bicycle were started by pedaling. I imagine that there must have been some way that the front sprocket could be disengaged once the engine started.

What about a Rotabuggy? This was an eqrly 1940s British idea for the delivery of ground transport vehicles to paratroops. The vehicle is the standard Jeep to which is fitted a rear fuselage and an unpowered rotary wing. Only one prototype was made and flown. Being a new aircraft, it had to get bugs ironed out. During the time that the bugs were being dealt with, troop carrying gliders were developed, which could carry a Jeep internally. So the one and only Rotabuggy was put away and forgotten about.

4 hours ago, facthunter said:

Do a Test Drive, OME. Nev

That implies an interest in purchasing a vehicle. Purchasing vehicles involves parting with money. I've got none to part with.

But I would like to try a familiarisation drive, just to see how different or similar they are to ICEs.

I have a burning gripe with the media today is the way it reported the result of the election of Susan Ley as the new leader of the parliamentary Liberal Party.

Susan Ley has been the Member for Farrer since 2001. Twenty-four years' political experience. In that time she has held a number of important posts in both Government and Opposition. Despite her being a member of a Party I do not vote for, I can at least respect her political abilities.

So what is my gripe? It's the fact that the media has published reports with this headline: Sussan Ley elected first female Liberal party leader. If the leadership ballot had gone the other way, and Angus Taylor had won, would the headline read  Liberal party elects a male leader ? I think not. I don't give a rat's about the gender (and I use that in the 2025 meaning of the word) of the leader of any political Party. I'm just looking to the competency of the person to fulfil the role. Are we going to see a repeat of the sort of misogynistic attacks that plagued Julia Gillard's time as leader of the Labor Party? One would hope that society has moved on from that era.

57 minutes ago, spacesailor said:

But what is normal  speech  nowadays

What I meant by that was the type of speech that a person uses talking to friends or in a workplace environment - the way they speak casually. 

As a Grammar Policeman, the hairs on my neck rise when I hear people, especially on the ABC making the mistake of not matching the verb number with the noun. Nouns must agree with their verbs. A singular noun needs a singular verb and a plural noun needs a plural verb. However, this error is o prevalent that I am beginning to accept it as an example of the evolution of English grammar.

Somewhat distantly related to the content of that ad, my daughter-in-law showed me an email she had received from one of her staff. When I rad it, I figured that I could not have written in using my most formal writing style and quick access to a dictionary of thesaurus. My D-i-L told me that the writer was a young woman of limited education. The email had be composed using AI. Without addressing the subject of the email, my D-i-L simply replied asking why the sender had to use AI. The response was that the sender did not want to sound bitchy. 

I'm sure that the sender would have received a better response if she had used words and phrasing that were part of her normal speech.

I agree with Onetrack about the Nashos who did not go to Vietnam. My wife's first husband was given an exemption because his father was dying. He served his time in a transport base at Holdsworthy and was able to come home every night when he wasn't away transporting stuff. His time wasn't stressful. 

I have a mate who actually was a Reg in the engineers. He did his stint in Vietnam. I really haven't broached the subject of his service with him, but I can say that he is getting counselling, provided by DVA.

As I drove on Tower Road, Bankstown Airport on Monday, I noticed that a couple of parking bays had EV charging units. Other than that I know nothing about them.

I wonder how they can sort out absentee votes. For example, if you were from a Melbourne electorate, but were in Surfers Paradise on polling day and voted absentee there, how would your electorate get your ballot paper?

I couldn't say 'your vote' because it's a secret ballot so no one can tell who marked a particular ballot form.

The Dunning-Kruger effect describes a cognitive bias where individuals with low ability in a specific area overestimate their competence. In pre-PC days, wasn't that called the Peter Principle?

1 hour ago, nomadpete said:

In a real democracy, we all would get to vote on who gets a seat on the mars ship.

Call me a MAGA maniac, but he gets my vote.

I think that we should give Elon our whole-hearted support. Provided that he is on the first rocket to Mars.

You can only be cursed if your culture teaches you that you CAN be cursed. If you are not of that culture, curses don't work.

Look at Christianity. If you say that you are a Christian but don't follow it tenets then you will be cursed with Hell fire. Do you think that a Hindu would take any notice of that?

39 minutes ago, Jerry_Atrick said:

No doubt many are critical of his strategy and apparent overreach, but few would be critical of him going to get the hostages.

Many times hostages have been recovered by planned operations which directed the recovery operations to specific places. Bin Laden and Hussein were caught without the harm inflicted on the whole population. The Israeli government's idea seems to be that every single Palestinian is an active member of Hamas, so is a legitimate target to be destroyed by whatever means available. Isn't that an echo of the policy of the government of Germany from 1933 to 1945? Isn't that why the survivors of that German policy ask the rest of the world not to forget?

13 minutes ago, nomadpete said:

The Modern movie industry reinforces the notion that violence and retribution can solve any problem.

That is the US movie industry. We are starved for movies from other countries. The English, with their long theatrical history produce movies with stories that do not require violence. Even if violence is needed in the plot, actual depiction of it is muted, or simply implied. 

Australia's problem is that we allowed Hollywood to take control of the distribution of movies in the first half of the 20th Century. By gaining that control, Hollywood stifled both our own industry, and access to other English-language producers. It really wasn't until the 1970s when that political ogre, Whitlam, gave government support to the movie industry that it began it growth to what it is today. Now we have Fox Studios in Sydney and Warner Bros in Movie World in Queensland. The social pages of our newspapers often inform us of the presence of some international movie star who is here to make a movie.

Once again it is clear the the Hollywood bean counters decided that the bottom line would be enhanced by moving production out of the USA. Now it is too expensive to produce any type of motion picture entertainment in the USA. 

Or he could take the "stud bull" approach and use semen collection methods. One shot collected and diluted into a number of smaller doses.  A bit like firing 12G birdshot as opposed to 12G slugs

I hope that the US movie industry collapses. Then we might get some movies that don't involve violence from the first to last scene. 

Before the election, I was proposing that the young voters would have a big impact on the results. I thought that they would be supporting the Party which had the strongest policies regarding environmental matters, both locally and globally. That would have suggested that the Greens would increase their numbers in the Lower House. Now we know how the Greens did, I must admit that my thought was incorrect. 

It would appear that the Young People were either seeking the security of a Party that had many of their interests in common, or else, they were turning away from Parties that had little interest in the Young People. Perhaps, too, they saw the Greens as being incapable of mounting a strong voice against either of the other two main sides. 

In Sydney there are a lot of vacant public houses which are deteriorating due to lack of maintenance. It is quite clear that this lack of maintenance is due to a lack of sufficient funding. 

There are also many areas where the houses in the early public housing estates were built on quarter acre blocks. The houses are small and look like a pimple on a bum. Each of these blocks could carry at least four town house types dwellings. The current tenants could possibly be placed in temporary accommodation while the new dwellings were constructed and then returned to the same community. However , the problem is not land and construction material. It is the taxpayer dollars to do it. And, I suppose the political will to seem like a government is favouring one part of the community over others.

I glanced at the window of a Gilgandra real estate agent today. There were several houses for sale priced in the $360,000 range. Cheap enough compared to Sydney, but a bit over the top for a small farming town 60 km from its nearest reginal city. 

1 hour ago, nomadpete said:

How is that a crisis worse than our situation in early 1980's?

Because we forgot, or were in nappies in he early 1980s.