Open Thread – Tuesday 10 May 2022
2,473 responses to “Open Thread – Tuesday 10 May 2022”
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calli at 7.54:
the sunset over Darwin tonight was spectacular, aided as it was by great towers of clouds, many grey with stored raindrops. Others white and puffy and back lit with the orange/red setting sun. There was a moment when the great, burning orb touched the sea…faster…faster…and then it was gone. Nothing quite like a tropical sunset over water.
We sat on the roof, a little beer garden perched to catch the cool breeze.
Welcome to heaven.
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H B Bearsays:
May 13, 2022 at 10:44 pm
Plenty of cock smokers with their finger in the pie at the Pies.
My take on that shit-show.
Eddie, being intimately involved in TeeVee, thought there was going to be a yuuuge boost in TeeVee broadcast rights.
He further thought this would flow into a yuuuge increase in salary cap.
He loaded up on back-ended player contracts.
Big TeeVee rights didn’t arrive.
Left holding the bag. -
At the same time?
In the same room?Frenzied scenes, with Pistol, Boo and the Beetrooter – the latter: “I wanna know what Hollyweird is, I tells ya”
“Give it to me, in those unmentionable places, you bizarre monstrous weirdoes!”
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Various reasons people here made the decision to get jabbed:-
.1 To keep or gain employment;
.2 To visit ailing relatives in care;
.3 To travel interstate to visit relatives;
.4 Based on a personal health decision of the risks of covid.
I’m sure there are others, but which ones deserve to be called TrAiTorS and which ones can be given a free pass as having taken a reasonable decision?
Show your workings. -
the 70’s were also a time of truly awful monetary management and deeply deluded regulatory overreach.
among such wonders were price controls as an attempt to rein in inflation. nixon literally tried to freeze wages. it was a hilarity of failure and debacle, because in the war of diktat vs supply and demand, supply and demand is undefeated.
if you mandate a price higher than market, demand collapses.
if you mandate a price lower than market, supply dries up.
this “rocks are hard, water is wet” levels of basic understanding.
the simple fact is this: in a free market, the cure for high prices is high prices. -
Just wondering why you’re so wound up and abusive to people here?
you’re full of shit, milt
listen to your shame-based gibber
value-laden and vacuous … what? everybody needs to conform to your idea of proper
don’t make me go back and dredge out out the vicious crap that you unleash from time-to-time
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Dover Beach:
BREAKING: Turkey’s President Erdogan says his country does not favor Sweden and Finland becoming NATO members
Always on the cards.
Then Turkey can go ally itself with some other market group that will put up with his bullshit.
…and take back all the Turks in the EEC who supply him with lots of lovely foreign currency. -
Just putin’ it out there – did anyone see the immaculate Brunette from Compass Polling on Sky after dark on Thursday night?
The most magnifique hair, evah. 🙂
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CryptoWhale
@CryptoWhale
If you invested $250 million in Luna one month ago, the fourth most popular cryptocurrency at the time, you now have $0.06Cryptocurrencies are a gigantic scam. It should be illegal to promote them in any form. Luckily, as they are now worth nothing, governments can ban them without any blowback.
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Sancho Panzersays:
May 13, 2022 at 11:53 pm
The bonhomie* and good humour needs a lift.
I expect to see a big improvement tomorrow.
…
* From Latin, via French. -
Sancho Panzer:
I’m sure there are others, but which ones deserve to be called TrAiTorS and which ones can be given a free pass as having taken a reasonable decision?
Show your workings.I refused because I’m a grumpy old fart from the National Grumpy Old Fart Church.
Also I’m a committed Contrarian with Sadistic Tendencies.
So, up yours.
Shithead. -
Just home from a gig.
Sunday blues arvo cancelled due to floods.
More time to harass the peanut gallery here I suppose.
Look, I’d like to take credit for living in the heads of cock smokers but as good as I am , I must admit that by myself that level of antagonism creating the mind consuming emotional fits we witness requires help.
I’ll let you in on my weapon of choice.
The truth.
Look what it does to the pathetic.
Every time. -
What we witness here daily is pathetic people, disgusted with themselves but unwilling to admit it , fight truth by lying and fabricating narratives to which they then attack.
Complete nuff nuff , loopy shit to witness.
The anger that should be directed at the government instead gets directed at those holding a mirror up which is of course reflecting submission and failure back at them.
From the times I had to lead and unite 50 people from around the globe to become a travelling, functioning tribe while traveling around Australia, I have found the study of humans fascinating.
The inspirational or like here, the many pathetic of weak minds, character and will, all are open books. -
vr says:
May 13, 2022 at 10:07 pmJC- The break up fee for TWTR is $1b.
We don’t know the provisions of the deal eggsactly, vr. I’d guess that Musk’s lawyers would have conditioned the deal to the moon and back. Any decent lawyer would do that. Moreover, if he conditioned on them not lying about material disclosures I’m pretty sure they would have agreed to those terms. How could they not.
In any event, if Musk walks it will be the biggest flounce in history.
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Trader’s blog opinion
Frankly, it was only a matter of time, given the market conditions, for Elon to impose some hardball tactics with the Twitter board. If it weren’t for the Elon bid the stock would be in the 20s now for sure.
Some believe Elon will pay the $1b break up fee and walk away. I don’t believe that is the case and think the market is assessing correctly the new buyout price, around $40.
Yeah, as I said we don’t know the provisions’ fine print. He could argue the breakup fee, eventually re-bid at say 40 bucks and pony up the fee. In any event, getting the deal at 40 bucks would be a discount of 26% to the original $54.20. He’d save $11 billion and even if he had to pay up $1 billion, it would still mean he saved $10 billion. It’s still a flounce, but a profitable one.
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Rosie, baking is not my forte at all, so I won’t be visiting any helpful sites. I would be a useless reporter of these anyway. There are huge baking competitions held here, and it is quite a thing.
The Director of Activities (aka Hairy) has it all planned out for me anyway, kindly taking note of my interests and of places he’d like to visit or revisit. This is like a Royal Tour and I pity the poor Queen, for to keep moving and meeting up with people and on the hop constantly (plus a lot of figure-improving walking) is exhausting.
Yesterday, for instance, was to be a ‘quiet’ day with a ‘short’ drive. He’s got the gps going now. In the event however we went to Flatford Mill with our picnic lunch, the place where John Constable painted his extraordinary clouds in what are now chocolate-box scenes. As we approached the mill we were driving down country lanes and I thought we’re reach an open field in isolated splendour. No such luck. We round the bend of the last lane and I see a huge tourist bus appear in view, and behind it a very large car park, and that is Constable country today. Visitors everywhere. However, the mill and river and lock are all there, the cottager’s cottage is now a cute little museum (where I bought a handy woolen Boadicca-check rug), and the day was fine, the walkways peppered with ambulant OAP’s.
After lunch we head off and to my surprise I realise we are close to Sutton Hoo again – for his intention is to take me to explore the area of Rendlesham where recent archaeology has suggested a major hall of King Raedwald, of ship burial fame, had his headquarters. No signs at all suggestive of recent archaeology though, so it seems a wild goose chase until I see a sign saying St. Gregory’s Church. It’s a clue, a clue, I say, so turn around, we’ll go there. Cherche le church, I say as I said in the finding of the Bartlow Hills. He’s skeptical and sits in the car while I explore around the church and go into it, to come out exultantly saying yes, I was right, it is St. Gregory the Great, Saxon-named in the early seventh century. No sign to any recent archaeology, but we are on the Raedwald track al right.
Documents inside the church suggest that King Raedwald did have his religious centre here on this sacred site (the church is 13th century). Bede mentions that Raedwald had two altars here: one to the new Christian god and one to the old god/s. Each-way Raedwald, I’ve always called him. More recently that’s made me think of Albo and I thought we might go home now so I could catch up on the Cat and Aussie news.Not so. Next he drives me to a place called Dunwich, now a small modern village on the Sussex Coast, where a thriving port town in the C13th was gradually taken over by the incoming North Sea, so that the town was holus-bolus sent underwater, to live only in myths of chiming church bells and ghostly apparitions arising at night from the deep. In his Last Kingdom series Bernard Cornwall has my hero Uhtred there fighting and setting fire to a tavern of rowdies who were after his blood. More mythology, I murmur.
To round off the day with even more long hours of country by-ways driving (very scenic, and during which I demolished the best part of my fruit gum collection as a pick-me-up) we arrived at Aldborough much further along the coast, where a Tudor Moot Hall on the seafront is the main point of interest, although the town itself is attractive and redolent for Hairy as he spent a holiday there with his family in his teenage years. They played golf a lot there, but thankfully he didn’t insist on finding the golf course. We bought some lightly smoked haddock to have for dinner that night (we have a kitchen where we are). Freshly caught and smoked in Aldborough, and very delicious it was too.
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Today we took the train from Colchester to London Liverpool St Station, and tubed it to Australia House and did our civic duty giving Daniel Lewkovic LDP our vote in Reps and Senate. If he doesn’t get at least two votes from the UK we will know something is wrong with the system. Outside stood four people offering how-to-vote material – two for Labor and two for Liberals. No others at all. I took the Liberal handout just to publicly show my general inclinations and took pleasure in saying No Thanks to Labor. This was noted by a young woman who also followed us in to nominate the Wentworth Electorate in NSW. She sniffed to one side of me carrying my Liberal folder, nominating an address in Woollahra near Vaucluse where we are, and Hairy and I looked knowingly at each other: a classic Allegra-voter clone.
We ambled out of Australia House’s magnificent marble (all Australian marble), built in 1918. Over the front entrance is an Edwardian sculpture of two Romanesque-draped women fussing over a shield, the one on the right scantily clad around the boozums and the one on the left entirely unclad on them. Hairy shyly confessed to being greatly impressed with these ladies when aged thirteen he travelled to school on the top of a double decker bus past them. Especially the very perky chest-feeders (to use the modern parlance) of the unclad one on the left. Impressionable young boys had to take whatever they could in eye-candy back in those days, he explained.
We then wandered into St. Clement Dane’s (of the ‘bells of St. Clements’ fame), a Wren-church severely bombed in 1940 and beautifully restored now. It serves today as an RAF church and is perfectly kept with memorabilia and service details. Outside this church are two statues, one of ‘Bomber Harris’, head of bomber command (in strife these days for ordering heavy bombing of German cities) and the other of Lord Dowding, head of Fighter Command, where the inscription credits his organisational skills and leadership abilities with actually winning the Battle of Britain. Without him, it would have been lost, the inscription bravely states. Without my dad working on the spitfire engines too, I add to myself.
Reliving Hairy’s days as a male chorister at the Temple Church, we put our noses into the church for a reccie there, and walk through the Inner Temple garden where as a younger choirboy he used to play antique children’s games of Prisoner’s Base and Jimmy Knacker (a rough one). Half of these gardens have been fashionably left to be ‘meadow gardens’, full of various flowers spilling over pathways, and with cow parsley, which fills the countryside in Spring as now, signifying the country intent. Hairy prefers it the way they were, formal, but I quite liked the wilder look with flowers everywhere piled high. Only problem was they started off a sort of hay fever in me, and hence when we went to Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese place (where Dr. Johnson and John Donne used to hang out) and met with two old College friends of Hairy’s, I kissed the one I knew, put my hand out to the one I didn’t (a very high up knight government official these days, and also ex-master of an Oxford College), I was totally embarrassed by a coughing fit I couldn’t control. In Covid-conscious London, not a good look, but I mastered it sufficiently to redeem myself in their eyes over lunch. We ended up taking lunch elsewhere as there was a forty minute wait at the famous cheese shop; we ate at a famous hang-out of journalists from Fleet Street.
We walked Ludgate, Newgate, Aldersgate, the Old Bailey, Smithfield (once Smoothfield) and took a moment to ponder where Richard 11 met Wat Tyler, and where William Wallace was ‘executed’. Two men centuries apart who heard freedom’s call and died for it.
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We finished off today with a quick look at the pre-historical and Roman section of the Museum of London, which was noisy as it is currenting undergoing a big renovation. Came home to cook our British lamb chops with some Waitrose vegies. We have eaten out such a lot that these brief forays into my home cooking seem rather good. Miracles never cease. We leave here tomorrow and head to the Norfolk Broads, waterways for them what likes such. Our friends who have now sold their narrowboat recommend a day out on a self-drive boat here, but I am dubious.
Norfolk are folk from the North, and Suffolk are folk from the south. Not to be confused with the Sussex (South Saxons) and Essex (East Saxons). More to ponder on in my dreams. It’s bedtime here.
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FMD, some (obviously retarded) bloke vox popped at a polling booth by Sky reporters;
“Who are you voting for?”
“Labour”
“Why?”
“For lower taxes”They walk among us.
Glad to see the truth is finally sinking in with the public. Howard and Morrison have had the highest tax takes of the past thirty years.
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