I will be listening to my iPod more intently now...

This is very clever ... some comments say other versions have been done before, but who the hell cares. It's good. Watch.

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Kiwis lay claim to pink lady Jessica

Here.

'They can have her', says The Right Magnanimous Aussie.

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Brilliant idea

(via jjjjound)

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Build it and they will come; throw it away and build on it...

A group of architects from the Netherlands have a crazy idea to take all the plastic floating out there in the Pacific Ocean, and recycle it into a floating island the size of Hawaii. Climate refugees would be able to move there and live in recycled plastic homes, and work on farms or grow seaweed. The entire island would be totally self-sufficient once built, producing its own food and energy, and managing waste. While totally off the wall, this is an intriguing concept that gets our imaginations in motion about what we can do with that ginormous mass of plastic floating around in the ocean!

What a great idea. I hear Christmas Island is past capacity...

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Time for a purge of my blogroll

- because of this ineffable pap.

My reaction may seem churlish, but I have principles, and I cannot brook support for someone who gives praise and encouragement to a Labor hack based on one interview, without actually living in this state and seeing how the perfumed spin differs markedly from the stinking reality.

UPDATE

QED. Here's another interview of the NSW premier that should change Andrew Bolt's mind.

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If this doesn't knock your socks off, nothing will

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MTR 1377: Right-wing OR Conservative?

Banter between two of the hosts of the newly-launched talk station in Melbourne:

STEVE PRICE: The most successful talk stations do occupy the right-of-centre opinion on politics in particular but life in general. I don't know that there's a successful left-wing radio station in the country.

ANDREW BOLT: I'm not right-wing, and I think you're wrong to suggest this will be a right-wing station. I think conservative is more the go.

This brings us to the question is there a difference between right-wing and conservative?

The best answer I have ever come across I found in a comment to Free Republic (comments 13 & 24):

Is there a difference between "conservative" and "right wing"? "
First, think about where that term "right wing" came from. It came from the left-wing, liberal, communist-leaning, main stream media.

I have always refuted the term "right wing" because if you stop to think about what it means to be conservative, you find that conservativsm automatically means nowhere near a wing of any type. Conservativsm is just plain old conservative, that's all, and nothing else even makes sense.

The reason the MSM invented the term is to try to convince the stupid people that there must be therefore a "middle" where people are "reasonable" and know how to compromise with communists.

Way too many people have bought into the idea that there is a left, right, and a middle.

Re-drawing the political landscape in graphical form, you see more of a horse-shoe shaped line. Graph political ideology against rule of law, and you will see that Constitutional conservatives are located at the top of the curve, right in the middle.

Not on a "wing".

Well said. And I'm with Bolta on this one.

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Turnbull

As you would have heard by now, Malcolm Turnbull announced this week that he will not be recontesting his seat of Wentworth at the next federal election. Good.

You may also have seen a well-known blog site suggesting that Malcolm be offered a seat in the NSW parliament with a view to him becoming the next Premier of New South Wales.

Puh-lease. Malcolm as Premier would be as likely as seeing Kyle Sandilands as co-host of Play School.

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Queasy And Nauseous, Tired And Sick*

A QANTAS flight from Sydney to Canberra was forced to abort a landing after the pilot was alerted to a flap defect.

QF779 was delayed by about 25 minutes yesterday afternoon as it circled Canberra Airport until getting the all-clear to land, the airline said.

A Qantas spokeswoman said the pilot of the Boeing 737, carrying 77 people, was following standard procedure after an indicator in the cockpit showed a defect with one of the plane's flaps during pre-landing checks.

With only 77 pax, I'm surprised they didn't abort the takeoff.

*Courtesy Airline Acronyms

Big News in Britain

...general election date announced - May 6.

#Open wide, come inside, it's the ABC cafeteria...#

The ABC (Australian Broadcasting Creche) comes up with a novel way of harnessing creativity:

THE ABC is encouraging staff in Sydney to exercise their creative talents by using Lego in the staff cafeteria in an initiative that is already facing plenty of internal derision.

Now, I am not disparaging Lego. Fine thing. Used it myself when I was a little sprog. One of the best things ever to come out of Denmark (along with their butter cookies); but Lego is something I would expect to find at the workplaces of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook, not at the headquarters of Australia's national public broadcaster.

I can just image Kerry O'Brien sitting down to his Fettucini Puttanesca and wondering if the ABC of the future needs wheels or different coloured bricks for each storey.

I'm sorry, but this whole idea is BS.

The ABC is meant to be a place of serious journalism. If management want staff to be creative, tell them to go home and watch Play School with their kids; but don't encourage staff to play with Lego.

If building little buildings from Lego were to lead to less political bias in the ABC's reporting, then I would be all for it. Of course, this is as likely as getting Kerry to give lessons on how to use the stuff.

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Lady Sonia McMahon, RIP

Lady Sonia McMahon, widow of former Australian Prime Minister, Sir William McMahon, has died in Sydney, aged 77.

Lady McMahon was responsible for putting Australia on the front page of newspapers all over the world back in 1971, and for all the right reasons.

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YouTube has gone down itself

This is my comment on YouTube's blog about its awful new layout:

This is a hideous re-design of a popular website. Whoever is responsible has obviously done a course in how to deconstruct the user-friendliness of a website, and has graduated with first-class honours.

My viewing history is no longer accessible from the home page, and the related video selection is a mere shadow of its former self. Also, when I click on a related video whilst another video is playing, previously the new video would play straight away. Now, I just hear sound from the new viedo and the whole screen freezes. I use Safari, and I have to exit the browser and come back in, but even doing that does not guarantee a fix. Painful.

I hate the whole damn thing.

Why do people feel the need to fiddle with something when it clearly works fine. It's obvious that the more people who use a website, the more who are going to be impacted by these re-"designs".

I will be cheking out other video-sharing websites and may just take my future uploads with me.

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