Open Thread – Weekend 2 April 2022


The Combat of the Giaour and Hassan, Eugène Delacroix, 1826

Subscribe
Notify of
guest

2.1K Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
John H.
John H.
April 4, 2022 10:49 pm

Zipstersays:
April 4, 2022 at 10:25 pm
Also long covid has been documented in people with no signs of persistent infection but typically expression of inflammation. That’s very difficult to understand and is documented with other viral infections. I think it is a neuroimmune issue but that’s arm waving.

still doesn’t explaimn why the statin works.

there is a clear mechanism of action for the statin in long covid

Statins reduce inflammation by inhibiting fractalkine.

Don’t like to 2 hour youtube lectures. Link to the primary research.

Zulu Kilo Two Alpha
Zulu Kilo Two Alpha
April 4, 2022 10:49 pm

Cassie can fill us in on the details.

I was looking forward to Cassie’s perspective, indeed.

Lazlo
Lazlo
April 4, 2022 10:50 pm

Open source does not matter – nothing in IT remains a secret. Twitter’s position is not based on their code but their audience.

Barking Toad
Barking Toad
April 4, 2022 10:51 pm

The Gutwein resignation.

I understand he’s fucked with cancer.

For once the “I want to spend more time with my family” might actually be true.

Sancho Panzer
Sancho Panzer
April 4, 2022 10:54 pm

Sorry to hear that Toad.
He seemed like a decent bloke.

Elizabeth (Lizzie) Beare
Elizabeth (Lizzie) Beare
April 4, 2022 10:55 pm

As a child I lived with a backdrop view of the blue mountains from St. Mary’s (about 10 kms from Penrith, which is a town right at the foot of the mountains). I was enthralled by the technique we were told about in 4th class – the the mountains were uncrossable at first because people descended into the valleys, whereas Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth ‘followed the ridges’. I used to look at the outline of the mountains embedded in my memory and picture the explorers walking along the outlined ridges. I didn’t have much clue about mountain travel at that age but I’ve always told international visitors since that ‘they followed the ridges you know. Unpassable till they did that’, and the visitors would feel informed. I suspect that in truth the mountains were readily crossed before 1813, but the ‘impossible to cross’ myth was put out to stop convicts heading out.

Nelson_Kidd-Players
April 4, 2022 10:55 pm
Sancho Panzer
Sancho Panzer
April 4, 2022 10:58 pm

Lizzie.
Did you ever meet Blaxland, Wentworth and/or Lawson?

Bruce in WA
April 4, 2022 10:59 pm

OK, I know the Cat’s not a “social” site, but …

This is one proud Grandad whose granddaughter has just been chosen to be on the State team to represent WA in the national secondary school debating comp in Canberra in May. Just four kids from the whole of WA and she’s one of them!

Guess I’d better stop telling her a woman’s place is in the kitchen! 😉

Knuckle Dragger
Knuckle Dragger
April 4, 2022 11:01 pm

Eating ice cream.

Sometimes I wish there was such a thing as chilli ice cream.

But only sometimes. Most of the time I am aware it would taste like a mouldy box. Of chilli.

Zulu Kilo Two Alpha
Zulu Kilo Two Alpha
April 4, 2022 11:04 pm

Guess I’d better stop telling her a woman’s place is in the kitchen!

Pass on all good wishes and congratulations, to the young lady – you have every reason to be proud!

Frank
Frank
April 4, 2022 11:08 pm

Open source does not matter – nothing in IT remains a secret. Twitter’s position is not based on their code but their audience.

All that shadow banning and assorted censorship that gets denied would come out if it exists in the source code.

Lazlo
Lazlo
April 4, 2022 11:10 pm

Blaxland has a Macdonalds – good for a quick pit stop. Lawson a bit dreary. Wentworth a Grand Hotel.

Zipster
April 4, 2022 11:13 pm

Don’t like to 2 hour youtube lectures. Link to the primary research.

if we hang around waiting for the medical establishment to get its act together we would be dead.

one specialist said to me, she wasn’t convinced by the flccc protocol. quite frankly I don’t give flying fuck if she is convinced or not. All I wanted since she was unable to provide any actual diagnosis let alone any treatment (and not the first either) was to try the statin. nope.

after a year of being on and off immunosuppressant, countless blood tests and having developed increasingly deleterious symptoms sitting around waiting for the medical establishment to find a solution wasn’t an option. its only through the kindness and generosity of certain persons on the cat that I was able to try the statin and it worked.

Lazlo
Lazlo
April 4, 2022 11:14 pm

Frank, you do not need source code to understand what they are doing. It is all in plain site, by their actions.

Zulu Kilo Two Alpha
Zulu Kilo Two Alpha
April 4, 2022 11:16 pm

Blaxland has a Macdonalds – good for a quick pit stop. Lawson a bit dreary. Wentworth a Grand Hotel.

Which of the Blue Mountains towns was supposed to have been a hotbed of couples, having an extra marital affair, to sneak away for a quiet weekend?

It was said that the mark of a gentleman was not to recognise another gentleman, at the railway station at #######, on Sunday afternoon, catching the Sydney train, with a lady who was not his wife?

Salvatore, Understaffed & Overworked Martyr to Govt Covid Stupidity

Which of the Blue Mountains towns was supposed to have been a hotbed of couples, having an extra marital affair, to sneak away for a quiet weekend?

All of them.

Lazlo
Lazlo
April 4, 2022 11:19 pm

Z2KA I believe it was Medlow Bath.

Knuckle Dragger
Knuckle Dragger
April 4, 2022 11:25 pm

there was also a referendum on gender ideology aimed at children and it resoundingly was voted against by 92-6%.

If I was a fellow fond of a wager, I’d back it in that there would be precious few renovated churches in Hungary.

Crossie
Crossie
April 4, 2022 11:25 pm

Pedro, just checked my bookshelves, I also have Len Beadell’s “Too Long In The Bush” as well as “Beating About The Bush”. A lot of good Australian stuff was published in the 80s and I bought as much as I could find.

Dot
Dot
April 4, 2022 11:26 pm

Possibly Lazlo.

Critics of twatter need to find the “settings” of the site. This was dug up on you tube in the last few years IIRC.

Lazlo
Lazlo
April 4, 2022 11:28 pm

I have no need to consider their settings Dot since I don’t give a flying F*CK about them.

Dot
Dot
April 4, 2022 11:32 pm

If I had the money I’d buy old churches & presbyteries of any denomination and give it to the mother church…if it couldn’t be staffed, make it a Diaconate (with a family home) or an Abbey (home becomes a monastery) – hopefully self sufficient at least for fresh produce, old school.

It’s sinful but I’d do it mostly to piss the right people off – you know, the greatest advertisement for Christianity, theism and the Catholic church of all time – Reddit athiests.

Lazlo
Lazlo
April 4, 2022 11:32 pm

Mind you, Z2KA, the Hydro Majestic has nothing on naughtiness compared to Japanese Love Hotels. They are mind blowing.

Salvatore, Understaffed & Overworked Martyr to Govt Covid Stupidity

Mention of Medlow Bath, so I searched up the Hydro Majestic. Crikey, has it changed since last I was there.

When I had the kebab shop it was a weekly run over the blue mountains to Sydney for shop supplies. Used often stop at the Hydro Majestic for a few minutes just to walk around the old building & lament the state it had fallen to, and to marvel at the view.

It had the feel of an abandoned 1960’s concrete beach shack. Wow, has someone ever put some dollars into it now!

Crossie
Crossie
April 4, 2022 11:37 pm

If I was a fellow fond of a wager, I’d back it in that there would be precious few renovated churches in Hungary.

My late husband and I drove through Hungary in 2019 and found that northwestern parts were modern and prosperous and the southern areas bordering Croatia poorer and more rural with small towns and villages though motorways construction even there was in full swing. Tourists from Poland, Czechia, Slovakia and points further east travelled through Hungary to get to the Adriatic coast so that must account for the extensive motorway constructions.

We weren’t in Hungary long enough to know how well their churches were attended though I expect much better than in Western Europe.

Dot
Dot
April 4, 2022 11:41 pm

When I had the kebab shop

Are you the bloke who sold kebabs outside ANU in the late 1990s/early 2000s?

Elizabeth (Lizzie) Beare
Elizabeth (Lizzie) Beare
April 4, 2022 11:42 pm

Movie time. We recently watched the new ‘West Side Story’ available on Netflix, deciding to do so with some trepidation. In our minds we ‘own’ that show, for whenever we view the original (which is about once every couple of years) we both go gooey with the te adoro’s to each other at the approporiate moments. This Romeo and Juliet romance set in the 1950’s New York slums has it all for high octane opera. The music is out of this world Gershwin, and the Sondheim score moves from tight and terse to intensely flaring passion and then can shift to the gentlest of understated romance as true love blossoms before it is thwarted by the fates of family and gang. The music builds into the crisis lived over the next day after a dance where love begins. The pacing is terrific, the charactisations set, and the inexorible begins as the time goes from after the dance to the lovers in the balcony scene and then to the gangs planning their territorial rumble. The lovers meet later, declare a future togther, and we know all is soon to be lost, for the mode is Shakespearean tragedy.

So what is the new version like? Disappointing, in a word, and in so many ways, but thankfully they can’t ruin the music and song. As with the original, the singing is dubbed, but the actors this time don’t mouth-sinc very well. His chest is barely moving, comments my ex-Chorister, as the love-struck young man exults in his dubbed-in awakening. The dancers are sharper, as is the dress, and something of the 50’s innocence of it all is lost in the update, especially at the dance. Although the dancing is still good, the choreography is wilder, less structured and the attempt to take it into the streets for the ‘America’ song is interesting but loses intensity by becoming too cluttered. Similarly, taking the lovers on the subway and then to a church to make their declarations loses the play-acting of a wedding, with manequins of Mama and Papa providing approval, which is especially poignant in the original. The wooden performance in the church is hardly a substitute.

Anyway, it all winds along as it should but flatter in tone, though the rumble part is well played and dramatically filmed, with Chico, the Puerto Riccan man Maria was meant to marry before she met the Polish Anton, coming out as better than in the original, so there is that. But what is this? The ex-Chorister beside me is complaining – where is ‘I feel pretty’? Seems they’ve dropped it in favour of the church and subway, I reply, because we’ve just had the rumble and Chico is out there hunting down Anton. But no. They haven’t dropped it; unbelievably, they’ve decided to drop it in here, after the rumble ffs, and there she is, dancing around feeling pretty in a dress shop after all we’ve just been through with the rumble getting out of hand and her brother is dead. I guess the idea is to juxtapose her impending knowledge of this with her existing heightened emotion, but that was importantly there before the dance, ffs. It was an essential part of the build up to the young girl’s recognition of herself as touched by the dance eternal that drives us all. It was just so terribly out of place this late in the show.

And the whole of the scripting was so over-written. Every social situation was tediously ‘explained’ and every emotion was also put into unnecessary words. One for the millenials, we decided.

Dot
Dot
April 4, 2022 11:45 pm

Reddit Athiests

Courtesy of Ghost Gum.

https://youtu.be/leVLmE1Er5U

Salvatore, Understaffed & Overworked Martyr to Govt Covid Stupidity

Are you the bloke who sold kebabs outside ANU in the late 1990s/early 2000s?

Are you the racist who called me wog & tried to get out of paying?

Elizabeth (Lizzie) Beare
Elizabeth (Lizzie) Beare
April 4, 2022 11:47 pm

make that with two ‘n’s = millennials. They can have it.

Give me the original version every time.

Dot
Dot
April 4, 2022 11:48 pm

Did anyone here watch The Heights? I presumed it was a trash fire…

Saw the extended ad for the new Top Men err, Top Gun movie – it looks okay. Maybe the only hollyweird fillum made in the last five years worth watching.

Ice Man is a 4 star Admiral…LOL

Dot
Dot
April 4, 2022 11:49 pm

Are you the racist who called me wog & tried to get out of paying?

I always liked your bonhomie and good cheer. Your prices were fair my brother.

Salvatore, Understaffed & Overworked Martyr to Govt Covid Stupidity

Your prices were fair my brother.

Definitely was not me then.

Crossie
Crossie
April 4, 2022 11:51 pm

Thanks Lizzie, I won’t bother to watch it then. The original West Side Story is an artefact of its time and updating it was never going to be that successful.

Elizabeth (Lizzie) Beare
Elizabeth (Lizzie) Beare
April 4, 2022 11:52 pm

ooops. Do I sense some lost bonhomie, mes amis, some aggro in the air?
Two guys heading for a rumble perhaps?

I guess it is a little late for too much civility, or my fave word, courtesy.
Carry on then. I will innocently bystand for a minute then I’m off to bed.

Zulu Kilo Two Alpha
Zulu Kilo Two Alpha
April 4, 2022 11:53 pm

Saw the extended ad for the new Top Men err, Top Gun movie

Apparently, if you go through the real life fighter tactics school – the real “Top Gun”, and you mention the film, you shout the bar in the Officer’s boozer.

Lazlo
Lazlo
April 4, 2022 11:59 pm

When you’re a Jet you’re a Jet all the way from your first cigarette to your last dying day.

Salvatore, Understaffed & Overworked Martyr to Govt Covid Stupidity

Pedro the Loafer says: April 4, 2022 at 10:21 pm

I have about half a metre of books on celestial navigation on the shelf at Casa Pedro.
There is a lot of satisfaction in being able to fix a position the old fashioned way.

Just finished one of Mark Felton’s books (I think it was “Zero Hour”) in which 32 blokes escaped from Oflag [forget which one]

Anyway, three of them hike like blazes across the German countryside by night, for sixteen nights, then begin to wonder where they are.

So they “took a bearing” & established they were about two miles from the Dutch border. (Meaning they’d covered 200 miles by night over the past 16 nights)

They had only what they’d carried from prison camp, which was only stuff sent to them via clandestine methods, i.e. hidden in the lining of Monopoly sets & so on. Tiny compasses & little maps, etc.

There was a lot of well-trained navigational skill cooling its heels in those Oflagers.

Rex Anger
Rex Anger
April 5, 2022 12:34 am

West Side Story.

Sharts vs. Jebs.

I think I much preferred the original, with its rapiers, thumb-biting, archaic language and the supremely pissed-off Prince of Verona trying to keep 2 angry mobs of Italians from burning down his city…

rosie
rosie
April 5, 2022 6:09 am
rosie
rosie
April 5, 2022 6:10 am

It did.

sfw
sfw
April 5, 2022 6:53 am

Gabor

I use a mp3 converter called mediahuman, it’s on a desktop, I convert the youtube to mp3 and then put the file on my player, I don’t like using my phone to listen but you can do that to if you have an android phone. I think you can put the converter on a phone and do it direct. There are heaps of other converters out there. I just finished ‘Sword of Honour’ by Waugh, amazing book.

https://www.mediahuman.com/en16/

Gabor
Gabor
April 5, 2022 7:03 am

sfw says:
April 5, 2022 at 6:53 am

Thanks, got them.

Cassie of Sydney
April 5, 2022 7:41 am

Some mornings it’s really nice to wake up, open my computer and read some good news. Nowadays it doesn’t happen very often however yesterday I woke up and read that Victor Orban’s government in Hungary had been re-elected with a big majority. Of course the MSM, on hearing of his electoral win, haven’t wasted any time ramping up the vilification of Orban, when he’s not smeared as a Putin puppet, he’s smeared as a Putin ally or a defender of Putin, all because, unlike various MSM scum in the West, Orban and the Hungarians know their history and, wait for it, they actually understand the neighbourhood they live in, but we shouldn’t expect dumb arsed progressives in the West to understand such trivialities as history and geographic reality. Orban also knows how foolishly the Ukrainian government has behaved in the last decade. But this is the world we live in, we now have a scenario where Orban, despite taking in almost two million Ukrainian refugees since the conflict started, is daily smeared by Western MSM scum as a reactionary Putin ally.

Oy vey. Speaking of all things Jewish, and you’ll have to forgive me as I do have a vested interest in “all things Jewish and Israel related”, despite the fact that I haven’t been very happy with Israel’s Covid management…but that’s another story, I awake today and read the Oz front page and then I read the piece in full on the old Open Thread, that the “Climate 200” independent candidates….who should all be more accurately labelled the “Simon Holmes a Court” candidates or “we’re really GetUp candidates but we now call ourselves something else to hide the truth” candidates or “we’re rich inner city hypocrites who’re more than happy for working Australians to pay more for unreliable power” candidates, aren’t really very independent at all! How amazing. The “Climate 200” and associated groups are just cashed up 2022 version of GetUp supported by a host of progressive scum. So it’s been nice to wake up today and I read how “Climate 200” and their candidates, such as the one here in Wentworth, Ms Allegra Da Big Spenda, has on her team an anti-Semite….you’ll know the type, those progressive, far-left, GetUp affiliated anti-Semites who insist that they’re not anti-Semitic despite only ever singling out the sole Jewish state on the planet for opprobrium. This person working for Spenda’s campaign actively supports the BDS campaign against Israel and actively supported the BDS campaign during the Sydney festival back in January of this year. Now let’s sit back and watch progressive scum at their ABC and The Guardian either ignore it or say…..oh she’s not anti-Semitic, she’s just anti-Zionist! Same thing sweeties. Worth noting that this exposure is only coming from Rupert’s media….so amen to News Corp. It confirms to me that these “independents” are just a closely allied, well-heeled gang of very unsavoury far-left hypocritical progressives and it’s good to see some light being on them.

Oh, which reminds me, speaking of progressive scum, since the member for Grayndler is more than happy to use an old rehashed rubbish story about Morrison and a rival candidate of Lebanese background back in 2007 during the Cook preselection, all to smear the PM, perhaps the member for Grayndler could explain his unabashed friendship and association with a well known racist, Jeremy Corbyn. The member for Grayndler doesn’t even hide his liking for this racist, always happy to catch with the racist over tea and scones when in the UK. Or is it that the member for Grayndler doesn’t have a problem with Mr Corbyn’s unapologetic racism….because it’s directed at Jews?

Boambee John
Boambee John
April 5, 2022 7:44 am

Salvatore

I can see how a Victorian, where the entire state is so small it could (without much of a stretch) all be said to be “on the coast” would mistakenly believe Toomwoomba to be inland.

I was born in Toowoomba, in an era when a trip down (or up) the Toll Bar (the range road towards Brisbane) was an adventure.

Boambee John
Boambee John
April 5, 2022 7:45 am

vrsays:
April 4, 2022 at 10:24 pm
If Toowomba had to contend with a king tide, my place in Brisbane would be under water.

About 700 metres underwater! Some king tide.

johanna
johanna
April 5, 2022 8:27 am

New fred, peeps.

Helen
Helen
April 5, 2022 11:48 am

Something to ground you blokes, you’ve been too much yap yap

Here is the money shot.

Here is the whole story if you want more, mowah!

GreyRanga
GreyRanga
April 5, 2022 2:04 pm

You’re a mean lady Helen, something I did not expect. That will teach me to click on links. Could have been worse, jacqui jackie.

Nelson_Kidd-Players
April 6, 2022 10:27 am

Aw, gee, thanks Helen!

duncanm
duncanm
April 7, 2022 12:45 pm

Speaking of movies not worth watching, I tried to watch the (lauded) “The Revenant” the other night.

An excess of violence for violence’s sake, half of it. I mean really, as much as I like a good mauling, the 10min bear attack scene was OTT.

But that wasn’t the problem I had with it. Leonardo’s near death in the Arctic with a bunch of misfits. Despite being effectively ignored apart from some superficial stitching – and strapped to a stretcher – he has a miraculous recovery and walks his way out the wilderness to seek his revenge.

None of the topography or weather made any sense. He’d be crawling along a riverbank on his hands and knees in 3 feet of snow with the sun low in the sky one minute, then up on the top of a huge canyon on bare ground, sunshine and leafy trees all around him the next. The other group had to climb a huge mountain (why?) to ghet to civilisation, but he found some easy route which didn’t involve climbing over anything substantial, and that was after he’d spend a fair while floating down a river to escape the Injuns.

Apparently, they shot for 9 months. It shows in the editing, as I think it keeps jumping from winter to spring/autumn and back.

Then, there was some mysterious woman the baddy Indians were on a quest for.. but I couldn’t work out who the hell she was, or where she was. She wasn’t the (long-dead) wife of Leonardo he kept dreaming about (including a ghostly hovering over his body while he lay prostrate.. how sexual!), and she never turned up as far as I could tell (unless she was the bird they had in the French camp?).

The two redeeming features were the costumes and makeup – trappers were suitably covered in mud and blood, and clothed in god knows what… and constantly wet. At least that part was realistic. And Tom Hardy was a very believable baddy.

.. but really, it was so disjointed and lacking in a coherent plot that I gave up when he was about to burst into civilisation and reek his revenge on the psycho who left him behind.

duncanm
duncanm
April 7, 2022 12:46 pm

Helensays:
April 5, 2022 at 11:48 am
Something to ground you blokes, you’ve been too much yap yap

safety warnings, please!

1 9 10 11
  1. Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu urges removal of UN peacekeepers from Lebanon, claiming they are ‘hostages of Hezbollah’ Benjamin Netanyahu has…

  2. And your daily chuckle comes courtesy of the Daily Telegraph: Former Prime Minister Scott Morrison has joined the Board of…

  3. Andrew Bolt on Mzzz Allan: Victoria’s Premier has a secret she really should share with all Australians. Or she’s a…

  4. Sacred duty. https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1845455779484270690?t=fMzDRGEAZoUf0Fes2hxAnQ&s=19

  5. Stupid Forking Liberals. Again. Herald Sun sez: Former premier Jeff Kennett has come under fire from Liberal Party members after…

2.1K
0
Oh, you think that, do you? Care to put it on record?x
()
x