monkeysarefun

This one was found illegally shot recently.up in Queensland At 5.2metres long, it is basically a dinosaur - , I wouldn't want to be the guy on the door asking to check his ID.... .I would just be - "Yes sir - usual table sir,, that's a nice leather jacket you are wearing..."

It is a $15000 fine apparently. These girls are at least on top of it where it is probably safe Or maybe not..

I always thought this summed up our current lot:

Its been a dry spring here, pretty much 2 months with no rain at all. So when Friday was a wet one, all the birds came out to wash the dust from their feathers. This is a Galah on the power lines outside my house.

I'm just glad that my mum never found out all this stuff about him cos I'd have never been allowed to read the Railway Modeller.

Tonights Four Corners about the NBN rollout was particularly heartening if you are concerned about the mad skilz of our current political leaders- the 'adults' who are now in charge. You know things are rough when you start to consider a move to New Zealand.. Seriously, if I was Governor General I'd replace everyone in Canberra with these guys - they'd do a lot less damage and be much cheaper. (Or should that be 'Cheeper'? seeing that they are birds! Heh heh heh.) Fun fact - birds are left handed, hence why celebrity southpaw Paul McCartney was in a band called Wings.

Yes, I've seen the first Episode of 'Black Mirror'!

Finally had some rain over the weekend after 79 days or something of no rain. Which made the Galahs happy because they could perch on the powerlines outside my window and wash the hard to reach bits under their wings. And drove into my kitchen the first Huntsman I've seen this year so far.

I hate the Sat Nav voice always intruding - "turn left 600 metres" and so on every few seconds. That is not an issue if you are in Darwin and want to go to Adelaide. Follow Tiger Brennan Dr to National Highway 1 in Holtze 16 min (18.3 km) Continue on National Highway 1. Take National Highway 87 and National Highway A87 to Main N Rd in Adelaide 33 h (3,004 km) Take King William Rd to Victoria Square in Adelaide 10 min (3.6 km)

Don't despair. Although your admission means that you will never get full citizenship, you can probably still get here via a 457 work visa.

A ha! you said 'ring!' Which is another naughty Australian slang word, making your post especially funny!

You blokes have been too busy with that brexit stuff - whatever that is - to take in actual news. But, here is a quick catchup on the current state of our government here. Our deputy PM looks like this: Here he is again. And again, with an Australian flag behind him. And yet another.. And this is him, having a beer with all his mates. All in all, he looks true blue Aussie as. But then sudenly a couple of months ago out of the blue , THIS picture appeared.... Yes, that's a sheep. And that can only mean one thing. He might be a New Zealander. Under our constitution part 44 or some number, you cannot be a New Zealander AND be our deputy PM at the same time so the High Court is currently sorting it all out using big books. Hopefully this week they'll come up with something and either he'll be an Australian and be allowed to drink beer and stand in front of our flag, or - he'll be a New Zealander and have to put up with jokes about him having sex with sheep.

Thats a decent start.

Well done! You are more Australian than our deputy PM.

First you have to take the standard Australian citizenship test to see how simple or difficult we need to make the explanation... https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexkasprak/can-you-tell-the-difference-between-clean-and-dirty-aussie-s?utm_term=.wkx2kbV6N#.mbrr2Z1Lw

There is a bit on the Eyre highway where you can take your hands off the wheel for a while because it is just under 150km between bends. As to your car lasting Australias roads, there is amazing archive footage of the early motorists fanging it through deserts and tropical jungles and geting through it all pretty much unscathed. I think the first few years of road travel from Sydney to Melbourne was basically through cow paddocks with many stops to open and shut gates along the way. If you are interested, here is a bit of a potted history, there is a better series put out by the ABC but I can't find it on youtube so this will have to do..

Its this time of year that the male willy wagtails sing through the night - maybe its one of those depending where you are. I've got one that roosts in my Illawarra Flame tree and sings away, in the early hours. I've just spent a few days away in the Blue Mountains. Very peaceful except for the occasional siren, truck air brakes and dog barking. When I went to check out the lady at the desk asked me if I'd heard their resident lyrebird, I said I hadn't and she was surprised because it had been particularly noisy that week, doing its siren, dog barking and truck braking sounds. I wish I'd realised that it was a lyrebird because there was no way that I'd have picked it not being the real occasional siren, truck air brakes and dog barking and I'd have recorded it. I'm now guessing that most of the various bird sounds was from him too! Lacking my own recording, here is a youtube clip of one in action

I don't have a particular site to recommend but if you are basing your google search on just model railway topics then try adding diorama and box diorama to the search terms, lots of military and ship modellers use forced perspective in their scenes.

And young you in return would probably belt future you back for selling it for a song about two years before the prices went crazy! (If that is in fact what you did do of course!)

Well as they say in the Old English homilies - , you can lead a horsetan to water, but you can't make him drink! Even the Americans think they are a good idea

Ahh but - they did send the V8 ute over there for Vauxhall to flog , and it was the best one you can get! The HSV Maloo. Richard Hammond liked it, the others just talked about pie keys or something - whatever that is.

Nice. There definitely was a high attrition rate back then. Big motors and drum brakes, modifications you'd do yourself, rubbish lap seat belts, poor safety standards. For instance my Torana had a little latch that you'd lift to fold forward the drivers seat and let the rear passenger in. But they only had a lap belt so if I had hit anything they'd have hit the front seat, breaking the latch and pushing my chest into the steering column, or - if they were a particularly fat person - propelling me through the windscreen But you didn't think of those things then, you just wanted a cool looking car to impress the ladies. Every Australian town has a cenotaph with the names of those who gave their lives at Gallipoli and the fields of France in WW1. But from the 60's through to the '80's I reckon in any given small town there would probably have been a similar number of young killed in the same 4 year period on the roads. My school year somehow escaped the carnage, but the year below me lost 9 out of 45 to car and bike accidents between 1981 and 1985..

The Torana was a shorter beast than the Falcon but when I was working on it - (checking the dwell angle , gapping the points, using my timing light - all those skills that are forgotten by the modern young person , like shoeing horses and stuff) I could still stand inside the engine bay beside the motor and have my feet on the ground. Admittedly I am in the more petite range, but not a jockey.

I remember an Electronics Australia magazine that I bought in the early '80's (cos I was doing an electronics traineeship with what was then OTC), and it had a project where you could make your own cruise control for your car using something like a Valiant wiper motor and Dick Smith parts. For a few mad minutes I did seriously consider giving it a go for my Torana but I'm glad I didn't because Electronics proved to not be my thing and so I'd probably now be dead.

This is my mid-life crisis mobile. 6 litres of SSV redline. - Brembo brakes, Cat back exhaust, power chipped, 6 speed manual gearbox - all those things I'd have killed for when I was 18 - if they'd been invented in 1981. Cars these days have all that electronic stablilty stuff and traction control which is meant to make them safer, but I do think once you get to a larger V8, its kind of the opposite. In the old days you'd plant your foot in your GT HO and the wheels would just spin in the one spot until the rubber wore off, but with this ute, you plant it and it grips and propels you instantly into what had until then seemed to be a far away dangerous bend.. But on the plus side, I've never got stuff to the tip so quickly before!