Random

It’s five years today since my Mum died. In the same way as with Dad, sometimes it seems like only a few years. On other occasions it feels like decades.

Our house has a few things that were Mum’s - some cutlery, crockery or glassware; paintings that Mum and Dad bought over the years. But some of these paintings can be seen in our children’s places. Having a few of these types of items around is OK, but you (well, I) don’t want to be burdened by it.

After an early and fast start to the day, Eliza May arrived.

Well done Emma and Ben.

Thank you Lord!

After a deal of consideration and prayer, I will be voting “No” in the upcoming referendum about a “Voice to Parliament” (Voice).

It’s not a decision I’ve arrived at lightly. Let me outline some of the reasons behind my decision:

1. The idea of a Voice that advances the ideas or aspirations of one (small) portion of the population without allowing all other members of society the same opportunity is inherently racist. If aboriginal people have a separate Voice to the federal parliament and executive government then why not any and all other groups? This seeks to divide the nation and promote the interests of one group over all others.
2. I do not believe the federal government is serious about meeting the needs of the poor or disenfranchised. If the federal government was genuinely interested in seeking to remedy issues faced by aboriginal people then they have wasted the past 15 months since their election. The government already has effective and fully funded aboriginal voices in parliament. I understand there is something like eleven current members of parliament who are of aboriginal descent. The government could form a bipartisan subcommittee of these members to consult and advise on aboriginal issues. A genuine, elected Voice is only a parliamentary subcommittee away.
3. There is a federal department called the National Indigenous Australians Agency whose role is “committed to implementing the Government’s policies and programs to improve the lives of all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.”¹. As I understand it, the federal government currently pays something like $35 billion for assistance to aboriginal people. This is in addition to society-wide services. If the gap between health and educational outcomes is so wide between aboriginal people and others, how about an audit of the $35 billon currently being spent to determine if those funds are (a) being spent in accordance with their funding agreements; (b) achieving the outcomes that should have been indicated in these agreements. What’s the bet that billions are being wasted on duplicate administration, greedy lobbyists, ineffective programs, and lining the pockets of middlemen (and women)?
4. As I understand aboriginal culture, no one mob can speak for another. If that is the case then how can a Voice comprising 24 people possibly represent or lobby effectively and appropriately for the hundreds of mobs around Australia? It would be the equivalent of asking all local councils in Australia to elect 24 representatives who will make decisions and representations to federal and state governments concerning funding, priorities and services for all LGAs. It is in no way conceivable that the 500+ local councils would receive fair representation because each LGA is different in terms of perceived needs, demographics, aspirations, socioeconomic base and future outcomes. Local issues need to be understood and dealt with on a local level.
5. Whether or not you believe the Uluru Statement from the Heart is one page or 26, the 26 pages surely provide insight into how the Voice would seek to advise parliament and the executive government on matters that affect aboriginal people. It is clear that both a treaty and financial reparations will be on the agenda.
6. I believe and understand that the government has expressed sorrow for its past actions towards aboriginal people. Equally, the government has extended a hand towards reconciliation. These measures need to be accepted and forgiveness granted for us to move forward as a nation. Continually being made to indicate if you feel sorry for events in the past will never lead to healing. Forgiveness sought and granted is the only way that progress towards one nation can be achieved. A Voice, treaties, reparations and “truth-telling” will only continue to tear at the wounds of the past.
7. Finally, a society will never achieve equality of opportunity by mandating inequality in its founding document.

It’s been three years since Mum died.

I received a phone call from the hospital at around 1:15pm during our office Christmas lunch. I stepped outside to take the call and was told by the attending Doctor that Mum had died of a cardiac arrest and that the hospital staff had honoured her request of not attempting resuscitation. She had been hospitalised leading up to a medical procedure but her slight frame was not up for it.

It’s five years today since my Dad died. Sometimes it seems like only a couple of years. On other occasions it feels like ten or more years.

We’re living in the house that he and Mum lived in for close-on thirty years at the end of their lives. There are a few remnants around the house–the odd bit of furniture, some cutlery, a stack of slides and photos to continue to cull and distribute. It’s funny looking at some slides and photos that Dad features in when he was in his twenties and thirties (he was usually the artist, not the subject). Here we are sixty or seventy years later and everything has moved on apart from that frozen image.

My wife and I have been customers of the nab for the past 27 years. But no longer. Over the past couple of weeks we have opened a new account with a bank that is not one of the ‘big four’.

There were a number of direct debit arrangements to change; screenshots of the details of commonly-used payees to grab, and ensuring we had csv downloads of our recent transactions.

After 11 years, 435 books read and 418 reviews I have deleted my goodreads account.

I loved it when I first began using it (before Amazon owned it), and it is still useful to obtain some information about a book or author; but my screen seems to be increasingly consumed by advertisements and banners; and I seem to get logged out about once a week for no apparent reason.

I wanted to keep a record of what I have read, what I thought about it at the time, and what I may want to read in future. Goodreads met that need for quite a while, but for the time being I’ll keep those records in a spreadsheet instead.

For much of my adult life I would have described myself as centre-left on the political spectrum and with some concern for environmental issues (amongst a range of other issues).

When I was growing up the left-oriented party, the Labor (sic) party would stand up for workers rights and social justice whereas the right (the Liberals) were more interested in big business and sound economic management. It was said that one voted Labor to fix the country then voted Liberal to fix the economy.

In the middle of the evening Heidi Abigail arrived.

Well done Emma and Ben. All glory to God.

After nearly two years of governments changing narratives, being asked to trust ’the science’ and called a ‘wacko’ by the NSW Health Minister, I thought it time to post a series of questions concerning the state of the world today.

There are few answers in the following, but there are some assumptions, suppositions and a few conclusions.

Firstly, some questions:

1. I thought ‘science’ was a process of questioning, creating hypotheses, testing, evaluating, peer review. Why then have many scientists who don’t agree with the narrative been silenced by their peers and funding providers?
2. Why are doctors in Australia being threatened with sanction and/or deregistration if they even discuss the possibility of adverse reactions to vaccines and alternative treatments with their patients?
3. Why did the TGA approve the use of the mRNA ‘vaccines’ when other therapeutic treatments were available? The TGA had to effectively ban alternative therapies because mRNA vaccines could only be approved for emergency use if no alternative, effective treatments were available!
4. Why has Australia resisted undergoing trials of alternative treatments (Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine amongst others) when reports from overseas were indicating dramatic improvements in patient outcomes?
5. Why has the mainstream media (MSM) been strangely silent when it comes to questioning the narrative? Have they been threatened with reduced advertising revenue from big pharma and their associates?
6. Why was there almost nothing in the MSM about truck blockades on our borders in September/October? Why was there no coverage of the assault of a third year nursing student in western Sydney by police when searching for exemption papers? Why was there no coverage of the attempted self-immolation of a woman in Melbourne who felt overwhelmed by the vaccine mandates?
7. Why does the NSW state government continually change the metrics that are reported about cases, hospitalisations, vaccination rates, etc. Why has vaccination status all but disappeared from hospitalisation reporting?
8. Why does our Prime Minister say he is against mandates yet has done everything possible to support the coercion and disenfranchisement of people who don’t wish to be vaccinated? Federal laws always take precedence over state laws so the federal government could easily seek to uphold laws and agreements (vaccination handbook, Nuremberg declaration) that speak against mandated or coerced vaccination.
9. Why have so many Australians accepted vaccinations with no knowledge of the long-term effects of these vaccines? How can they be giving informed consent with unknowns such as the exact makeup of the vaccines? Why were the pharma companies indemnified from all adverse effects?
10. Why was Pfizer granted 75 years to release their vaccine test data results? Surely the FDA should seek to have this information released ASAP?
11. Why has twitter, facebook, youtube, google, instagram and linked in banned people and/or articles that seek to raise issues of concern about mandates, masks, lockdowns, vaccine safety, etc.
12. Why does ’the science’ vacillate between the efficacy of masks, social distancing, PCR testing, lockdowns, various treatments? And if the science is so settled (and it isn’t), why are there such divergent approaches between countries, states, council areas based on the same science advice?
13. Why have many churches been so quick (and indeed eager) to embrace segregation and closures? A close reading of the early verses in Romans 13 would suggest governments should only be followed when they are governing for good, not for a contrived and beat-up medical emergency.
14. Why lock down the healthy and strong? Why not seek to care for the elderly and vulnerable and let the rest of us get on with our lives?
15. Why impose vaccine mandates (essentially coerced) on certain industries or classes of workers when the vaccines are not particularly effective, diminish with effectiveness over time and don’t stop people catching or transmitting the virus?
16. Why would we continue to inject people with a ‘vaccine’ with significant adverse events and without an open discussion of the risks of the disease versus adverse reaction in each age group?
17. Why did the WHO and Merriam-Webster dictionary change the definition of ‘vaccination’ and ‘vaccine’ in the past twelve months?

Now for some comments:

A great cover of a classic

A classic, acapella

And something more widely known (gotta love that really deep voice, and the others are pretty good, too!)

It’s three years to the day since my father died. Interestingly our society manages death by calling it something else. Years ago people ‘died’, more recently they are said to have ‘passed away’, but these days they just ‘passed’. Does denial make it easier? Perhaps in the short term; but giving it a different name may only prolong the grieving process.

Even though it is three years since the actual day of my father’s death, he really began declining ten years earlier and a few years after he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Over a period of 10 years the disease robbed him of some of his character and personality and presence. He spoke less, engaged less, slept more, shuffled around, fell over a few times and was eventually hospitalised and entered full time nursing care where he remained for three and a half years.

A few weeks ago I came across a milk crate in our shed as I was tidying things up. Upon closer searching I actually found three milk crates that had been obtained (presumably by the previous owner) and secreted away. Milk crates are funny things. They are super-useful for storing and transporting things in; they often appear in yuppie or hip cafes as seats; they are often branded with their owners name, and it is illegal to hold on to them because they are owned by dairies.

An Australian classic from the 60s.

^Well, it’s significantly less dramatic than ‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams’.

As we prepare to relocate from a small rural property that has been home for the past 11 years to a much smaller, domestic house and block closer to children we’ve begun clearing out/throwing away/tidying up what we brought with us 11 years ago and the extra that has accumulated in those same years.

As I’ve been clearing up the shed and carpeted man cave I’ve paused to reflect briefly on some of the items being thrown away or otherwise disposed of.

Another classic. A great song/hymn with an inspiring back story well sung.

Another classic, non-musical.

Another classic, not exactly musical.

And another classic: By one of the so-called supergroups. Roy Orbison’s vocals starting at 0:41 are some of the clearest, cleanest notes you could hear.

Another classic: The lead singer, Jay Siegel, can still hold that falsetto; and the backing soprano vocals by Kelley DeFade are unbelievable!

A classic: I particularly like the change up at around 1:35.

And here’s a bonus from the same impromptu concert:

Yesterday I decided to have a couple of fried eggs on an English muffin for breakfast. I got the eggs out of the fridge around half-an-hour before I was going to cook them. They sat on the kitchen sink for that time and when I went back to them to cook them, here was the condensation pattern:

A good egg with a smile, but looking a touch nervous over its fate.

At the end of next month it appears that I will be retrenched from my current position. I say “it appears” because the date is not firmly fixed and there are plenty of things that I do (and those in the same roles in other parts of the state who are also being retrenched) that no one else knows how to do, or even knows that someone currently does.

It’s a little surreal, somewhat disappointing, not unexpected, and not entirely unwelcome!

My father, known to his grandchildren as “Poppop”, was known for his fairly quick and somewhat acerbic wit. He was also a pragmatist (wonder who inherited some of those characteristics!)

An example of his somewhat unusual humour was when he bought a mobile phone at around age 80 and then proceeded to try to understand the instructions as they related to the phone in front of him. He annotated one page of the instructions with various questions as to “where?”, “what?” and “which?” because the physical phone button titles didn’t correspond to the titles in the instructions:

We were informed this evening that at approximately 3:30 this afternoon our first grandchild, Micah Theodore, arrived.

Well done Emma and Ben, and thank you Lord for the safe arrival.

Around 17 years ago I kept a daily journal. My memory told me I kept it for over twelve months writing every day and then let it diminish to zero.

Reality tells me that I kept for around 8 months on a daily basis, but that there are over 350 entries including a false start in 1999, another false start in 2000 but some consistency from late 2001 to near the end of 2002 and then sporadic entries for the next couple of years.

I have two resolutions:

• 1920 x 1080 on my work notebook
• 1366 x 768 on my primary home notebook

One of our vehicles was nearing the end of its useful, economic life and so we began the process of searching out a suitable replacement.

The vehicle to be replaced was a Mazda Tribute - a 3.0 litre gas-guzzling SUV that has transported us safely but expensively for the past seven years. It was bought second hand in 2011 when it had around 60K on the clock and we’d taken it up to around 255K in those seven years of ownership.

Appropriate leading up to Christmas:

I had a thought this morning – not always a good thing – that if I were creating a website where the purpose was to present Biblical truth regularly, then it would be hard to go past the name “Bible Butcher: Fresh Meat Daily!”

Perhaps it is a good thing that I’m not creating such a website, otherwise biblebutcher.com may have been registered.

I came across an article on local news site this morning that spoke of something I’d never heard of – the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death

Fascinating – that a lady in America in the 1940s, Frances Glessner Lee made dioramas of murder scenes to assist in the training of homicide investigators.

The level of detail is extraordinary. More detail and pictures can be found at the Smithsonian American Art Museum site.

Something else that needs to be seen to be believed …

Some words I like:

gravitas

clarity

chutzpah

appalled

Never seen anything like this:

After remaining resident for some 3 1/2 weeks, the beetle in my ear was removed quickly and efficiently by the ENT specialist earlier this week.

Warning, very mild horror story ahead!

I woke up with a start at around 1:15 this morning when a bug fell into my ear. I tried to shake it away and push it off but it obviously felt the safest place to be was further in my ear canal. I jumped out of bed, turned on the bathroom light and continued shaking my head and poking at my ear to try to encourage the bug that my ear wasn’t a good place for him/her/it.

My wife, eldest daughter and I had the privilege of attending the Midnight Oil concert in Coffs Harbour on 19th October. In total the Oils played 23 songs and, at the time, I thought a lot came from their albums of the middle period from the early to mid eighties. I thought I’d work it out and let everyone else know, too:

I was surprised to discover just how many songs came from Diesel and Dust. The era from Place Without a Postcard to Blue Sky Mining are my favourites and twenty of the twenty three songs came from those albums. Two other songs were from earlier albums which I do quite like, and there was one cover which I also knew. I’m not as familiar with their later material (from Earth and Sun and Moon, Breathe, Redneck Wonderland and Capricornia) and there were no songs from that era!

I’ve often been intrigued by the moon. When I was a teenager I had a (very) modest refractor telescope and would spend parts of evenings outside in the cool inviting mosquito bites as I looked at the moon, jupiter, saturn and venus. I could identify a fair proportion of the southern hemisphere night sky (well, that “fair proportion” was probably 5% of what was visible).

But back to the moon: Around 250,000 miles from earth, sufficient to give light at night for at least half of the month, exactly the right relative size and distances from the earth and sun to provide eclipses, powerful enough even though inert to provide tides through gravity.

No further commentary needed