How tuff are Aussie blokes?

[layback40]

Rowan Atkinson: our honeymoon with electric cars is coming to an end

Over a decade ago, fans of BBC’s Top Gear will remember when it was Rowan Atkinson’s turn to have a go at the Star in a Reasonably Priced Car segment.

This is back when Jeremy Clarkson’s running gag centred around the BBC’s shoestring budget, meaning they had to torture their guests with various crap cars and see which of them could get around the (airport) track fastest without any tyres falling off. In Atkinson’s case, the car in question was a Kia Cee’d.

Better known as Blackadder or Mr Bean, in real life Atkinson is a proper car nut and a recreational race driver. At Top Gear, he snagged the fastest time without harming the poor cheap car (a time that would later be usurped by 0.00.1 second). Having been crowned top of the leaderboard, Atkinson gave a little bow as the crowd cheered. He was particularly pleased to learn that had beaten adrenaline junkie Tom Cruise.



Atkinson was also the star of the Johnny English franchise – a parody of James Bond – which featured plenty of car stunts, many of which Atkinson did himself terrifying his co-star and fellow comedian Ben Miller in the process.

Last year, he shared his selection of supercars, including a McLaren F1 which cost him $830,000 (US) to buy new and another $2,000,000 to fix after he ran it off the road. It was sold for $12,200,000. The rest of his collection features a Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG, a 1951 Aston Martin DB2, Aston Martin V8 Vantage Zagato, and an Acura NSX.

Mr Bean knows his cars.

‘Electric vehicles may be a bit soulless, but they’re wonderful mechanisms: fast, quiet and, until recently, very cheap to run…’ wrote Atkinson, in a recent article for the Guardian. He then confessed to feeling a little bit ‘duped’.

‘When you start to drill into the facts, electric motoring doesn’t seem to be quite the environmental panacea it is claimed to be…’

He added, ‘I bought my first electric hybrid 18 years ago, and my first pure electric car 9 years ago.’ That makes him one of the brave few with enough money to wade into the dawn of EVs when the charging network was patchy and range anxiety similar to a 90s-era mobile phone.

As a former student of electric and electronic engineering, he held out some hope that electric car batteries might one day save the planet, though he was not as sweet on the idea as the zealous climate mob that throw condiments at oil paintings.

Atkinson was prompted to write an article titled, I love electric vehicles – and was an early adopter. But increasingly I feel duped by the ban on selling new petrol and diesel cars from 2030.

This proposition is a nonsense given the acute shortages of raw materials, but the intent is there to force every single citizen into the seat of an EV, whether they want one or not. This is not capitalism, this is collusion between the state, manufacturers, and the mining companies sitting behind the EV ‘dream’.

Atkinson says the quiet part out loud:

‘Electric cars, of course, have zero exhaust emissions … but if you zoom out a bit and look at a bigger picture that includes the car’s manufacture, the situation is very different.’

He then quotes a Cop26 climate conference in which Volvo admitted its EVs produce 70 per cent more emissions during production than an ordinary car due to the lithium-ion batteries (which makes you wonder about those sprawling battery farms).

‘They’re absurdly heavy, many rare earth metals and huge amounts of energy are required to make them, and they only last about 10 years. It seems a perverse choice of hardware with which to lead the automobile’s fight against the climate crisis.’

Thank you, Mr Atkinson. That’s exactly what we’ve been saying since the start. It’s all well and good to want to ‘save the planet’ but you cannot make EVs ‘green’ through wishful thinking.

The bulk of his article contains a plea to stop using cars as a type of ‘fast fashion’ and instead make better use of the 1.5 billion cars already in operation. Atkinson’s fondness for Hydrogen will end up where everybody else’s does – in the hoverboard pile – but he makes a good point about synthetic fuels.

He doesn’t touch on the real problem, and that is the power grid’s complete inability to handle a nation full of electric cars. We’ll probably be issued with a ‘licence to charge’ and slotting into strict time slots like some kind of dystopian nightmare.

While trawling through the comments on the Guardian (some of which dismissed the article as ‘dangerous rubbish’ and another that came to the conclusion ‘the future will be horses’) I couldn’t help but notice one complaining: ‘Green spaces are public and no one expects to have their own garden.’ 15-minute cities aren’t just a ‘conspiracy theory’, they’re a genuine desire for some. Forget Atkinson feeling that EVs are soulless, the commentary from the Left about wanting to live in tiny flats with no space, no cars, and bland lives has made me wonder if this is why they fantasise about the concrete prison-style vista of communism.

That is an aside…

Electric Vehicles are a dream – a love affair for many. Myself, I remember queuing at Macquarie Shopping Centre to have a turn sitting in the ‘froot’ of a Tesla. They were fast, fun, and weird. A taste of science fiction.

They are a lot less fun now that they have become a tool of government edict and a command by an increasingly coercive and incompetent state.

Rowan Atkinson summed the reality up best when he was running laps in the reasonably priced car.

‘I know what you’re supposed to do. The problem is … doing it. That’s the challenge.’

[layback40]

I find it ironic that the colours red, white, and blue stand for freedom, until they're flashing behind you.
I changed my password to "incorrect" so whenever I forget it the computer will say, "Your password is incorrect."
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.
I'm great at multi-tasking--I can waste time, be unproductive, and procrastinate all at once.
If you can smile when things go wrong, you have someone in mind to blame.
Never tell your problems to anyone, because 20 percent don't care, and the other 80 percent are glad you have them.
Doesn't expecting the unexpected mean that the unexpected is actually expected?
Take my advice — I'm not using it.
Hospitality is the art of making guests feel like they're at home when you wish they were.
Television may insult your intelligence, but nothing rubs it in like a computer.
I bought a vacuum cleaner six months ago and so far all it's been doing is gathering dust.
Every time someone comes up with a foolproof solution, along comes a more-talented fool.
Behind every great man is a woman rolling her eyes.
If you keep your feet firmly on the ground, you'll have trouble putting on your pants.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.
Ever stop to think and forget to start again?
I got 8 out 10 on my driver's test--the other two guys managed to jump out of my way.
There may be no excuse for laziness, but I'm still looking.
Women spend more time wondering what men are thinking than men spend thinking.
Give me ambiguity or give me something else.
He who laughs last thinks slowest.
Is it wrong that only one company makes the game Monopoly?
Women sometimes make fools of men, but most guys are the do-it-yourself type.
I was going to give him a nasty look, but he already had one.
Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine.
The grass may be greener on the other side but at least you don't have to mow it.
I like long walks, especially when they're taken by people who annoy me.
I was going to wear my camouflage shirt today, but I couldn't find it.
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.
Tomatoes are technically a fruit, is ketchup a smoothie?
Money is the root of all wealth.
No matter how much you push the envelope, it'll still be stationery.

[layback40]

Poor Greta. Life without petroleum and petroleum based products.
One crisp winter morning in Sweden, a cute little girl named Greta woke up to a perfect world, one where there were no petroleum products ruining the earth. She tossed aside her cotton sheet and wool blanket and stepped out onto a dirt floor covered with willow bark that had been pulverized with rocks.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“Pulverized willow bark,” replied her fairy godmother.
“What happened to the carpet?” she asked.
“The carpet was nylon, which is made from butadiene and hydrogen cyanide, both made from petroleum,” came the response.
Greta smiled, acknowledging that adjustments are necessary to save the planet, and moved to the sink to brush her teeth where instead of a toothbrush, she found a willow, mangled on one end to expose wood fibre bristles.
“Your old toothbrush?” noted her godmother, “Also nylon.”
“Where’s the water?” asked Greta.
“Down the road in the canal,” replied her godmother, Just make sure you avoid water with cholera in it.”
“Why’s there no running water?” Greta asked, becoming a little peevish.
“Well,” said her godmother, who happened to teach engineering at MIT, “Where do we begin?”
There followed a long monologue about how sink valves need elastomer seats and how copper pipes contain copper, which has to be mined and how it’s impossible to make all-electric earth-moving equipment with no gear lubrication or tires and how ore has to be smelted to a make metal, and that’s tough to do with only electricity as a source of heat, and even if you use only electricity, the wires need insulation, which is petroleum-based, and though most of Sweden’s energy is produced in an environmentally friendly way because of hydro and nuclear, if you do a mass and energy balance around the whole system, you still need lots of petroleum products like lubricants and nylon and rubber for tires and asphalt for filling potholes and wax and iPhone plastic and elastic to hold your underwear up while operating a copper smelting furnace and . . .
“What’s for breakfast?” interjected Greta, whose head was hurting.
"Fresh, range-fed chicken eggs,” replied her godmother. “Raw.”
“How so, raw?” inquired Greta.
“Well, . . .” And once again, Greta was told about the need for petroleum products like transformer oil and scores of petroleum products essential for producing metals for frying pans and in the end was educated about how you can’t have a petroleum-free world and then cook eggs. Unless you rip your front fence up and start a fire and carefully cook your egg in an orange peel like you do in Boy Scouts. Not that you can find oranges in Sweden anymore.
“But I want poached eggs like my Aunt Tilda makes,” lamented Greta.
“Tilda died this morning,” the godmother explained. “Bacterial pneumonia.”
“What?!” interjected Greta. “No one dies of bacterial pneumonia! We have penicillin.”
“Not anymore,” explained godmother “The production of penicillin requires chemical extraction using isobutyl acetate, which, if you know your organic chemistry, is petroleum-based. Lots of people are dying, which is problematic because there’s not any easy way of disposing of the bodies since backhoes need hydraulic oil and crematoriums can’t really burn many bodies using as fuel Swedish fences and furniture, which are rapidly disappearing - being used on the black market for roasting eggs and staying warm.”
This represents only a fraction of Greta’s day, a day without microphones to exclaim into and a day without much food, and a day without carbon-fibre boats to sail in, but a day that will save the planet.
Tune in tomorrow when Greta needs a root canal and learns how Novocain is synthesized.

[layback40]

Forgetting is a normal function of memory – here’s when to worry
Alexander Easton

As people get older, they worry about their memory more.
As people get older, they worry about their memory more. Photo: Getty

Forgetting in our day-to-day lives may feel annoying or, as we get older, a little frightening. But it is an entirely normal part of memory – enabling us to move on or make space for new information.

In fact, our memories aren’t as reliable as we may think. But what level of forgetting is actually normal? Is it OK to mix up the names of countries, as US President Joe Biden recently did? Let’s take a look at the evidence.


When we remember something, our brains need to learn it (encode), keep it safe (store) and recover it when needed (retrieve). Forgetting can occur at any point in this process.

When sensory information first comes into the brain we can’t process it all. We instead use our attention to filter the information so that what’s important can be identified and processed. That process means that when we are encoding our experiences we are mostly encoding the things we are paying attention to.

If someone introduces themselves at a dinner party at the same time as we’re paying attention to something else, we never encode their name. It’s a failure of memory (forgetting), but it’s entirely normal and very common.

Habits and structure, such as always putting our keys in the same place so we don’t have to encode their location, can help us get around this problem.

Rehearsal is also important for memory. If we don’t use it, we lose it. Memories that last the longest are the ones we’ve rehearsed and retold many times (although we often adapt the memory with every retelling, and likely remember the last rehearsal rather than the actual event itself).

In the 1880s, German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus taught people nonsense syllables they had never heard before, and looked at how much they remembered over time. He showed that, without rehearsal, most of our memory fades within a day or two.

However, if people rehearsed the syllables by having them repeated at regular intervals, this drastically increased the number of syllables that could be remembered for more than just a day.

This need for rehearsal can be another cause of everyday forgetting, however. When we go to the supermarket we might encode where we park the car, but when we enter the shop we are busy rehearsing other things we need to remember (our shopping list). As a result, we may forget the location of the car.


However, this shows us another feature of forgetting. We can forget specific information, but remember the gist.

When we walk out of the shop and realise that we don’t remember where we parked the car, we can probably remember whether it was to the left or right of the shop door, on the edge of the carpark or towards the centre. So rather than having to walk round the entire carpark to find it, we can search a relatively defined area.


The impact of ageing
As people get older, they worry about their memory more. It’s true that our forgetting becomes more pronounced, but that doesn’t always mean there’s a problem.

The longer we live, the more experiences we have, and the more we have to remember. Not only that, but the experiences have much in common, meaning it can become tricky to separate these events in our memory.

If you’ve only ever experienced a holiday on a beach in Spain once you will remember it with great clarity. However, if you’ve been on many holidays to Spain, in different cities at different times, then remembering whether something happened in the first holiday you took to Barcelona or the second, or whether your brother came with you on the holiday to Majorca or Ibiza, becomes more challenging.

Overlap between memories, or interference, gets in the way of retrieving information. Imagine filing documents on your computer. As you start the process, you have a clear filing system where you can easily place each document so you know where to find it.

But as more and more documents come in, it gets hard to decide which of the folders it belongs to. You may also start putting lots of documents in one folder because they all relate to that item.

This means that, over time, it becomes hard to retrieve the right document when you need it either because you can’t work out where you put it, or because you know where it should be but there are lots of other things there to search through.

It can be disruptive to not forget. Post traumatic stress disorder is an example of a situation in which people cannot forget. The memory is persistent, doesn’t fade and often interrupts daily life.

There can be similar experiences with persistent memories in grief or depression, conditions which can make it harder to forget negative information. Here, forgetting would be extremely useful.

Forgetting doesn’t always impair decision-making
So forgetting things is common, and as we get older it becomes more common. But forgetting names or dates, as Biden has, doesn’t necessarily impair decision-making. Older people can have deep knowledge and good intuition, which can help counteract such memory lapses.

Of course, at times forgetting can be a sign of a bigger problem and might suggest you need to speak to the doctor. Asking the same questions over and over again is a sign that forgetting is more than just a problem of being distracted when you tried to encode it.

Similarly, forgetting your way around very familiar areas is another sign that you are struggling to use cues in the environment to remind you of how to get around. And while forgetting the name of someone at dinner is normal, forgetting how to use your fork and knife isn’t.

Ultimately, forgetting isn’t something to fear – in ourselves or others. It is usually extreme when it’s a sign things are going wrong.

Alexander Easton, Professor of Psychology, Durham University

[layback40]

A German woman married an American and lived with him in Virginia. She was not proficient in English and had problems when she went shopping.
One day she went wanted to buy chicken legs. Unable to be understood, she clucked like a chicken and lifted up her skirt to show her thighs. The butcher smiled and gave her the chicken legs.
Next day she needed to get chicken breasts, so she clucked like a chicken and unbuttoned her blouse to show the butcher her breasts. The delighted butcher immediately understood.
On the 3rd day, when she needed to buy sausages, she brought her husband to the store.
Please scroll down.
















What were you thinking?

Her husband speaks English.

[layback40]

We, the semi-Elderly:

A Lot in this to think about – Read on – the bottom line says it all:

Thanks for being my friend.

We grew up in the 40s – 50s – 60s:

We studied in the 50s – 60s – 70s:

We dated in the 50s – 60s 70s:

We got married and discovered the world in the '60s – '70s – '80s:

We ventured into the 70s – 80s:

We stabilized in the 90s:

We got wiser in the 2000s:

And went firmly through the 2010s.

It turns out we've lived through NINE different decades,

TWO different centuries, and

TWO different millennia.

We have gone from the telephone with an operator for long-distance calls to video calls to anywhere in the world. We have gone from black and white photos to color slides to YouTube; from vinyl 12-inch records to cassettes to CDs to online music, from handwritten letters to email and to WhatsApp.

From listening to the cricket live on the radio to black and white TV, then colour TV, and then to HDTV.

We went from black and white movies at the cinema to colour films at the cinema to black and white TV, to colour TV, to VHS taped movies, to DVD movies, and now we watch Netflix. We got to know the first computers, punch cards, diskettes and now we have gigabytes and megabytes in hand on our cell phones or iPads.

We wore shorts throughout our childhood and then long pants, oxfords, Bermuda shorts, etc. We dodged infantile paralysis, polio, meningitis, H1N1 flu and now COVID-19.

We rode skates, tricycles, bicycles, invented cars, bicycles, mopeds, gasoline or diesel cars and now we ride hybrids or 100% electric.

Yes, we've been through a lot but what a great life we've had! They could describe us as "exennials" people who were born into the world of the forties and fifties, who had an analogue childhood and a digital adulthood. We're kind of Ya-seen-it-all.

Our generation has literally lived through and witnessed more than any other in every dimension of life. It is our generation that has literally adapted to "CHANGE".

A big round of applause to all the members of a very special generation, of which are UNIQUE. Here is a precious and very true message:

TIME DOES NOT STOP! Life is a task that we do ourselves every day. When we look, it's already six in the afternoon; when we look, it's already Friday; when we look, the month is over; when we look, the year is over; when we look, 50, 60, 70 and 80 years have passed!

When we look – we no longer know where our friends are. When we look – we lost the love of our life and now, it's too late to go back.

Do not stop doing something you like due to lack of time. Do not stop having someone by your side, because your children will soon not be yours, and you will have to do something with that remaining time, where the only thing that we are going to miss will be the space that can only be enjoyed with the usual friends. This time that, unfortunately, never returns.

That day is today!

WE ARE NO LONGER AT AN AGE TO POSTPONE ANYTHING.


Always together, always united, always brothers/sisters, always friends.

[layback40]

When the shearing sheds are silent, and the stock camps fallen quiet
When the gidgee coals no longer glow across the outback night
And the bush is forced to hang a sign, 'gone broke and won't be back’
And spirits fear to find a way beyond the beaten track
When harvesters stand derelict upon the wind-swept plains
And brave hearts pin their hopes no more on chance of loving rains
When a hundred outback settlements are ghost towns overnight
When we've lost the drive and heart we had to once more see us right
When 'Pioneer' means a stereo and 'Digger' some backhoe
And the 'Outback' is behind the house. there's nowhere else to go
And 'Anzac' is a biscuit brand and probably foreign owned
And education really means brainwashed and neatly cloned
When you have to bake a loaf of bread to make a decent crust
And our heritage once enshrined in gold is crumbling to dust
And old folk pay their camping fees on land for which they fought
And fishing is a great escape; this is until you're caught
When you see our kids with Yankee caps and resentment in their eyes
And the soaring crime and hopeless hearts is no longer a surprise
When the name of RM Williams is a yuppie clothing brand
And not a product of our heritage that grew off the land
When offering a hand makes people think you'll amputate
And two dogs’ meeting in the street is what you call a ‘Mate'
When 'Political Correctness' has replaced all common sense
When you're forced to see it their way, there's no sitting on the fence
Yes, one day you might find yourself an outcast in this land
Perhaps your heart will tell you then, ' I should have made a stand’
Just go and ask the farmers that should remove all doubt
Then join the swelling ranks who say, ' Don't sell Australia out!’