Listening to snippets of radio news or watching the television reports it is hard to get a grasp of the sheer enormity of the area in Queensland covered by water*. Thankfully that great information resource the Australian Bureau of Meteorology provides a regularly updated answer. *I didn’t mention the newspapers because they become irrelevant when [...]
READ MOREDecember, 2010
Unusually cold events, Andrew Bolt and the warmest temperatures on record
This latest northern winter is not the only unusually cold event to confound the predictions of global warming alarmists. So sayeth the sage Andrew Bolt on his Melbourne Herald Sun website having found an expert to quote on “evidence” suggesting winters have become colder and possibly longer in the past 10 years. I was about [...]
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Not so icy in the northern hemisphere at all really
We’ve seen all those pictures of snow bound New York, all those travellers stranded at airports. Must be a really cold snap in the northern hemisphere, right? Well, no, actually. Up in the Arctic circle something strange has been happening. Sea ice has been forming at one of the slowest rates ever!
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A serious discussion with my pit bull Punch about this Obama fellow
Punch and I have been in serious discussion over dinner about this Barack Obama fellow. And the verdict, let me tell you, is not good. I am now under considerable pressure to be advocating a Republican vote in 2012. Everything was going well enough when I brought up the subject of US politics. Punch appears [...]
READ MOREA government owned google – a quote for the day
During my time at the cabinet office, not a day went by where there wasn’t a Jim Hacker moment. “The problem with Google, minister” said the very high up IT man “is that it doesn’t find the pages we want people to read.” His solution was for the government to develop it’s own search algorithm [...]
READ MOREAn idea for Wayne and Joe from Germany
Treasurer Wayne Swan and would-be Treasurer Joe Hockey have been mouthing platitudes for months now about how to stop banks taking advantage of borrowers but they have not shown much concern at how those very same banks treat people who invest with them. These days clipping the ticket on funds they manage for people provides [...]
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Stock exchange merger: the Treasurer will surely say no
If further evidence was needed that public opinion would be against the takeover of the Australian Stock Exchange by the Singapore Stock Exchange it has come in the form of findings by UMR Research. The company’s managing director John Utting summarised findings from its December omnibus survey as being “surprising just how intense the opposition is [...]
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A Palin explanation but is she telling a little porky?
“I pressed an F instead of a P and people freaked out.” Just a simple typing error. That was the explanation Sarah Palin gave in a television appearance at the weekend of her creation of the word refudiate. Things like that happen when you Twitter but you have to be a really clumsy typist to [...]
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Somali terrorists at different ends of the world
As an Australian court was convicting three Muslims with a Somali connection of conspiring to plan a terrorist attack, the Dutch security service was giving the go ahead for a raid in Rotterdam that resulted in the arrest of Somali Muslims. Radio Netherlands Worldwide gave this summary of coverage by the national dailies. The arrest [...]
READ MOREWhen it comes to chocolate the original is best
Forget about your Trinitario. Let’s get back to the Criollo, the original and best form of the Theobroma cacao. The Maya domesticated the Criollo variety about 3,000 years ago in Central America, and it is one of the oldest domesticated tree crops. But while it still produces the finest possible chocolate, today, many growers prefer [...]
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