mike carey

I guess it points to the probability that if you went out in it you'd be snap frozen.

Some things are enduring yet completely different at the same time. After the evening news tonight ABCTV broadcast the King's Christmas message.

A joyous and happy Christmas to you!

It's a nice touch. As you might expect, not quite what I am seeing from my window on Christmas afternoon.

The congress of shepherds, they'll be watching flocks by night before we know it. The 'Australian' shepherds look a bit like border collies, which are frequently used as working dogs here.

Had to google it as I'd never heard of them. There are several breeds of dogs that are associated with sheep (and other) farming in Australia, this is not one of them.

https://twitter.com/BradyHaran/status/1606589873942679554?s=20&t=OcbLibpVv_boOINo-77msQ

Summer is finally here. I had the heating on the evening of the Solstice, two days later it's been 29° and it's forecast to be 31° for Christmas and 32° on Boxing Day.

Qantas Airbus A380 flight QF1 from Singapore to London Heathrow made an emergency landing in Baku (in AZ but not the AZ you might immediately think of) on Friday morning after sensors detected smoke in a cargo hold. The indication was apparently a sensor fault. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/dec/23/qantas-plane-en-route-to-london-makes-emergency-landing-in-azerbaijan

And everyone knows that a preposition is a bad word to end a sentence with. In Latin. As Churchill allegedly noted, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which he would not put.

I'm not entirely sure what you're talking about without knowing where you saw the two terms, but at a guess 'Followers' (and following) are what members do to create a list of other members in whom they are interested. The '+ Supporters' that appears under your handle (among others) is the group of forum members who have made a financial contribution to the site. There are other groups like 'Newbies' and 'Members'.

Most states and territories in Australia have banned single use plastic shopping bags over the last 10-15 years, and in most there were howls of 'How will we manage' to which those of us who'd already done it went 'What's the problem?' Shops sell reusable plastic bags (Aldi included), typically for 15c, and maybe 30-40% of shoppers buy them, and most also sell durable bags. We're starting to see more paper bags for sale now. A market also developed for charities and others to sell simple tote bags designed to fit supermarket self-checkout areas. I almost always manage to remember to take a bag with me (my current one is an NZ New World supermarket bag). Jurisdictions here are starting to ban other single use plastics like cutlery, straws, stirrers and takeaway food containers, and also single use plastic bags in the F&V department. Compostable alternatives are becoming available. Kerbside collection of recyclable waste is routine here, and also happens at multi-residence developments. Soft plastics collection was done by supermarkets (with product labels increasingly indicating which to 'return to store') but their contractor stopped taking it and only a few local government areas collect that material now.

Damn, I was in Melbourne yesterday!

And I thought you were just taking the piss.

Picky, picky, picky!!

If you have by now found your way home, that's a start.

I'm taking this as a personal attack. The very idea! You Yankees all take such liberties! 😁

Yes, I am reading more of twitter than usual. I'm waiting for a flight, what else am I to do? (No, I'm not going in there to do that!)

Lest the lack of context cause any preliminary concern, Chester is he rector's dog. https://twitter.com/RevDaniel/status/1602335706201948160?s=20&t=woxQIae-tie5c6-SBdXyrg

Yes, I have been to a drag show. The one I most remember was called 'Let's Talk About Sex' and started with 'Fetish of the Day'. Of course that was sexual, that was the whole point of that performance. I have also seen a drag performer, Courtney Act, on a panel discussion show and be the host on a mainstream interview program. Neither of those situations was a 'drag show act'. She was a normal panelist or interviewer who happened to be able to talk about the lived experience of having seen the difference between how she was treated when presenting as male and when presenting as female. Unsurprisingly she had opinions on a range of social, cultural and other matters, as most gay men do. Drag performers can and do perform sexually explicit stage shows, but it is what they say and do that makes the shows sexual not what they are wearing. Story time is one of the times where the story-teller is simply a person in a dress, if clothed somewhat more flamboyantly than the average person so attired.

No harm, the joke is in the execution, being factual runs a distant second! If it were using photoshop to make fun of someone for something they hadn't done, then it would have been more important.

Following the RBA's Tuesday increase of the cash rate by 25 basis points to 3.1%, my bank has increased the rate it's paying on its transaction and savings accounts to 3.7% from mid-December. That's about as much as it's possible to earn on a bank term deposit here, and we have no tax-advantaged government bonds or the like and no simple methods of investing in those that are available, such as those in the US discussed in other threads here. (And in a nod to the thread about credit cards, and the discussion there about cash-back cards, this bank sells gift cards at a discount to their face value with, for example, those for our two biggest supermarket chains selling at discounts of 3% for one and 4% for the other. This compares to an effective return of 1% if I use my credit card and redeem the reward points for gift cards, the only option apart from redeeming them for cash into my bank account which returns less.)

And so far the thread has stayed clear of politics. It can be done!

It's really just Aceh.