Why do they ask Gai Waterhouse?

Firstly I have won as many Melbourne Cups as Gai Waterhouse.

She has shit me for decades. She has done nothing in the Melbourne Spring Carnival. A few weeks ago one of her horses won a Caulfield Cup, her first one. Seriously she has no idea how to train horses for Melbourne. She should stick to the Autumn Carnival in Sydney.

When she wins a Melbourne Cup I might listen to her bullshit ramblings.

Post Race Update:

Gai continues her amazing streak. No doubt Channel 9 will be crossing to her for all the action. I do not know why. how did her big chance go:

Descarado did not finish.

Shonky Products and Zooper Doopers

When I was a teenager I played tennis during the summer months. Being in a country town I would often have to play the same people in the competition. One particular day I came up against a tennis player who i had never beaten before.

It was a hot day and before the game i ate an orange zooper dooper. I went on to win the game of tennis. "Wow" I thought, "the zooper dooper must have made a difference."

So for the next 4 weeks I ate an orange zooper dooper before the game of tennis but never played quite as well as that week.

So today I read the following article and was not surprised. Orange zooper doopers are cheaper and who knows, there may be some benefits in the flavourings and suger content!

Choice statement October 26, 2010 - 11:59AM
.People's Watchdog Choice unveils the 2010 shonkiest companies

The shonkiest, meanest and silliest rip-offs and scams have been named and shamed today at the 2010 Annual Shonky Awards, hosted by the people's watchdog , consumer group Choice.

A total of eight companies and products were chosen for this year's awards: supermarket giant Coles; Commonwealth Bank; pain relief brand Nurofen; whitegoods brand LG; wristband "sporting aid" Power Balance; rope producer Medalist; website babynamemeans.com and a selection of olive oil brands.

Advertisement: Story continues below While 2010 brings revised processes and new consumer and credit laws the annual Choice Shonky Awards continue to act as a reminder that consumers need to be as vigilant as ever.

Christopher Zinn, spokesman for Choice comments: "This is the fifth year of the Shonky's and you'd think most companies would be doing their best to ensure they're delivering good honest products and services.

"Yet year after year we're continually amazed by marketers' efforts to take Australians for a ride."

The 2010 Shonky winners:

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Company: Power Balance

Product: Power Balance band

Background information: Despite the promotion blurb promoting benefits for natural energy flow the Power Balance band is simply just a rubber band bracelet with a plastic hologram. Heaving endorsed by sporting pros it retails for a mere $60 alongside claims it somehow makes you stronger, more poised and just better. The band was tested at Choice under controlled lab conditions which showed it did little else than empty purchasers' wallets.

Dam Buster of.... Ballina

Yes readers the magical tour continues. I am just back after two days in the Ballina area of northern NSW. Some notes:

How long does it take to get a coffee made in the Northern Rivers area of NSW?
How can anyone function with the daylight savings / no daylight savings issues on the border and specifically the ariport.

Anyway back to Sydney for a few days.

Dam Buster of .... well Sydney

Hello everyone,

Yes I know it has been a long time between posts. The life and times of DB have been a little hectic to say the least.

So where am i? Sydney
WTF are you doing there? Workin
Why? Because I was requested by a client to help with a project
How long? until xmas at least

So there you go. Expect a few posts about why this place is different to Melbourne.

First thing - Coffee. In Melbourne you cannot turn around without tripping over a Barrista with a proper coffee. Sydney expect Gloria Jeans instead.. errk. I have found a few decent ones so far.

Second thing - Walking pace. Melbourne will take over as Australia's biggest City soon. Why? because we walk faster than Sydney-siders. Melbournians walk like they are 3 mins late for the 5;15 to Belgrave. Sydney-siders amble taking up the whole path while at it!

more to come...

In China they do things Different

The Herald Sun is reporting that in China they have the fastest trafic jam around:



Hmm 100km/hour is pretty fast for traffic that is not meant to be moving.

Seatbelts Do Save Lives

Or should I say, not wearing them costs lives.

The fact that it is 40 years since the law was passed regarding complusory seat belt wearing in Victoria has some signifigance to me. You see when I was 18 in my first year of Uni living i nMelbourne away from home I got a knock on the door on a Sunday night.

The girl who knocked on the door was from the same country town as me and she told me that her parents had heard a good friend of mine had been in an accident. Scott my mate, probably one of my closest friends at the time had been back to the country for the weekend to play footy, to catch up with mates and to have a good time before heading back to Melbourne to work.

He and I used to hang out in Melbourne as we were the only 2 guys from my year who moved to Melbourne, he for a trade, myself to go to Uni. Scott and I would catch up after work/uni and go for dinners, or beers, or both! In fact when the knock on the door occured I had a bag of his clothes in my cupboard because i lent him some clothes to go out in.

Back to the Sunday night.. the girl told me that it was quite serious and that I should make some calls. I rang my parents but the had not heard much. I rang friends and the news came back that things were not good.

Scott had been taken by Ambulance to Hospital where he was on life support. two days later his parents turned off the machine because he was brain dead. He was 18, the oldest of 4 boys and a true friend.

Over the following days I heard that what had happened was that Scott and another friend had been to visit some others and were on the way back to town, Scott a bit of a risk taker was not fond of the seatbelt in the old car as the clip was hard to undo (he had told me as such on previous road trips). He took a dodgy bend too fast and rolled the car about 400m from his parents house. Scott was thrown out, the passenger escaped with a fractured arm.

Again - he was 18, eldest of 4 brothers and a friend to everyone. he died within sight of his parents house all because he didnt like doing up his belt.

I do reflect on what could have been with Scott. A true mate who would have been a friend for life. To me it is already half a life ago.

So please Buckle Up.

Vote Early and Vote Often II

Before you vote on 21 August I suggest you read the following article penned by Mungo MacCallum in 2007 after John Howard was ousted:

The dubious legacy of John Winston Howard
Mungo MacCallum writes:

John Winston Howard was Australia’s second longest-serving Prime Minister, presiding almost unchallenged over the political landscape for well over a decade.

His time in government can not be dismissed lightly. However it can be dismissed heavily, so here goes.

Even on his political deathbed, Howard insisted that his government had delivered great economic reform. In fact in almost 12 years he implemented just three important changes, all of highly dubious merit.

The first was to move the responsibility for monetary policy from the elected government to the government-appointed Reserve Bank. This meant that he no longer had to take the blame for rises in interest rates, while of course continuing to demand the credit for falls. This early switch developed into a pattern: throughout his prime ministership, Howard steadfastly refused to accept responsibility for anything. Only on Saturday night, with nothing left to lose, was he prepared to own up.

Howard’s second legacy was the never-ever GST, a particularly nasty piece of regressive taxation whose only virtue is its universality; if a GST is absolutely comprehensive it is impossible to avoid. By compromising with Democrats to exempt some so-called essential items, Howard destroyed even this advantage. The GST remains an unfair and lazy way of collecting revenue, and has led to an immensely complicated series of benefits and hand outs to compensate for its ill effects. It is now entrenched as monument to Howard’s political dishonesty and economic incompetence.

The third innovation was, of course, WorkChoices. Unheralded and badly thought out, this grab-bag of ideological thuggery was thrust upon a startled electorate when an unexpected opportunity arose, and the results are now clear. Some of its worst features have already been quietly disposed of, and most of the rest will go as soon as the senate allows. What is left will indeed constitute reform of the industrial relations system; but it will not be the “reform” of which Howard boasted.

Howard’s other claim is that he leaves Australia a stronger, prouder and more prosperous country than he found it.

Stronger? Well, that it depends how you measure it. Howard huggers have always claimed that in international affairs, Australia now punches above its weight. What they actually mean is that Howard was duchessed by George W Bush, who found him a very amenable acolyte. The rest of the world saw us in that light. Stronger should mean more independent, and self-confident. The only bit of Australia in which those qualities are more obvious is the Australian cricket team.

Prouder, then? Certainly more arrogant, less tolerant – the pride that is counted among the seven deadly sins. But prouder of real and lasting achievement? What achievement?

And more prosperous – some people certainly are, much; and the country’s overall wealth has grown, although Howard has had very little to do with that. But we are also far, far deeper in debt, and less secure as a result. By an economist’s measure, our material wealth has grown; but if prosperity is seen as a wider indicator of quality of life, as genuine happiness, Howard failed us badly.

And if we are wealthier, at what cost? We are certainly not the people we were in 1996 when the government last changed.

For more than eleven years, John Howard led us on a voyage driven by greed and fear, into parochialism and paranoia, selfishness and racism, bigotry and corruption, and other dark places in the Australian psyche where we never should have gone. It was a mean and ugly trip, and it will take us all a long time to recover.

As he left the Wentworth hotel on Saturday night surrounded by his weeping and cheering entourage of orcs my main feeling was not of exultation or even euphoria, but of relief—the same sort of reaction I had to Cathy Freeman’s win at the Sydney Olympics, or at the moment, 17 years ago, when I stubbed out my last cigarette. The result was long-anticipated and entirely welcome, but how dreadful I, and many others, would have felt if it had not happened.

And on that note spare a thought for Labor’s patriarch, Gough Whitlam, who against
most expectations has survived to see another Labor government in Canberra. The final word should be his: a great quotation which he used in another context altogether, but which is utterly appropriate for November 24, 2007: E quindi uscimmo a reverder le stelle.

It is the last line of Dante’s Inferno, describing the poet’s return from hell, and it means: And thence we emerged, to see the stars again.

But if Howard was wrong about most things, he at least got Peter Costello right.
For eleven years the man sat there drooling, lusting after the leadership of his party, talking up a storm to his credulous colleagues, plotting with sycophants, sending out his dwarfish messenger Glenn Milne to relate improbable stories of his talent and support. He never actually had the guts to do anything about it, but by golly he let it be known that when the opportunity came, he would show us all.

And when his party was not only ready to offer him the prize, was indeed in real need of his services, Costello spat the dummy right out of the ground. Prime Minister, with all the trappings of office and all the resources of government, would be just fine; but leader of the opposition, the challenge Kevin Rudd took on at precisely Costello’s age before sweeping to victory in less than a year, looked just a little too much like hard work. Poor Petey-pie, too old at fifty, too lazy at any time.

When his colleagues are considering a farewell gift for him, they should pass over the gold watch and all chip in for an iron lung. This would at least remove any lingering doubt over whether Peter Costello would work in one.

I think what Howard stood for is aligned to what the Liberal Party want back.