mike carey

I didn't read @Benjamin_Nicholas' comment that way, although the juxtaposition of the two points could have made it appear so. I assumed he was talking about airlines taking a health-based zero tolerance approach to people making what they see as political stands by refusing to wear a mask

Not strictly a 'funny'. I wish I'd thought of making these.

A nicely written piece from the Guardian about Melbourne in its current state of semi-lockdown, 'Melbourne winters are meant to be shared. We are not designed for this.' https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/30/every-day-melbourne-wakes-and-waits-for-the-news-its-worse-this-time?utm_term=Autofeed&CMP=twt_gu&utm_medium&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1596083002

As Dame Edna once said, Australia is so central, you can hop on a plane and in 24 hours you'll be somewhere interesting. The same can be said for New Zealand. Well, not right now. I'm not rich by any of the western definitions (but living in the west I am on a global scale), but I'm happy living in a small city in Australia and would be happy in New Zealand but it's not 'home'. The hills are a different colour and the sky somehow isn't so big or the same blue. I miss being able to travel as I could six months ago, but I'm looking at where I can travel to now. It may involve more driving or trains than flying.

Confession here, being locked down over the last few months, I have tended not to shower unless I was going out which isn't all that often. In the past I had been able to tell when, ahem, I needed to 'freshen up' and that didn't happen much over these months. I know part of it is not getting out and sweating as much, but I'm sure there's more to it. A few years ago I had, having read articles similar to this one, foregone soap and shampoo when I showered for a couple of years, and the world didn't end. A preference or natural scents seems not to be unusual in these forums. Maybe the good doctor is onto something.

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@peterhung85 is a consummate gentleman, he made this imperfect client feel more than comfortable. I don't think I would have been a bad client for anyone, but for him I certainly was not. I can't wait for our borders to reopen.

It has indeed, in as far as its use for the 737MAX rolling clusterf**k is concerned, but the thread title was less prescient when one notes that it started out in 2009 to discuss difficulties Boeing was then having with the B787.

It has indeed, in as far as its use for the 737MAX rolling clusterf**k is concerned, but the thread title was less prescient when one notes that it started out in 2009 to discuss difficulties Boeing was then having with the B787.

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One of the things that has been conspicuous here has been the central role that the state public health authorities have played, and with that the role of the local area health services in the detail of the administration. Politicians have deferred to the chief health officers in their media conferences. Early in the pandemic the federal government effectively nationalised the private hospital system so the state public health authorities were able to manage the whole system holistically. Here, the state health systems have managed the pandemic with the federal government playing a coordination and back-stop role, including procurement of equipment and PPE. The feds also coordinated the provision of defence force personnel to support the states. That started out with medical personnel, but it has broadened into logistics and boots on the ground to assist in security and checkpoints on state borders and lock-down area perimeters, and most recently personnel to staff teams with state health department people door-knocking in the contact tracing processes. There have also been medical professionals and academic epidemiologists involved in the public debate reinforcing the health system messages, and the ABC has had medical reporters with long experience in health and medical issues providing informed reporting on the way the pandemic is progressing (I have previously posted some of their reporting in these forums). There have been mistakes made, and the current spike in cases and deaths in Victoria is most likely due to just a few errors in hotel quarantine for overseas arrivals in Melbourne. With that, some of the gloss has come off our previously good performance but so far we are still doing pretty well. (Touch wood.)

And one last comment, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jul/22/secrets-of-the-boeing-747-on-board-the-last-qantas-jumbo-jet

And this cute gesture on departure (in the embedded video). https://onemileatatime.com/qantas-draws-kangaroo-final-747-flight/

This is one that won't ever fly again. https://www.qantasnewsroom.com.au/media-releases/qantas-farewells-queen-of-the-skies/ Well, not commercially in QF livery. I didn't realise (or perhaps rather I didn't remember) that Qantas was the first airline to have a business class cabin. With the B747 retirement and the grounding of its A380s, for the moment Qantas doesn't have any first class cabins. (They do have flat-bed business class seats in wide body domestic and the remaining international fleet[ not flying now].)

An alternative approach is to move out of the US, but that's a little difficult at present. And doesn't help if the objects of your desires live in the US!

Bon anniversaire!

Binary numbers are base 2 rather than base 10. Binary numbers only have two options for the digits used, 1 and 0, rather than the ten (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0) that can be used in base 10. In a binary number, from the right, the digits are ones, twos, fours, eights and so on not ones, 10s, 100s and 1000s. The number '10' used in the tweet is a visual pun, because we automatically read it as 'ten'. '10' as a binary number is two. (11 is three, 100 is four, 1000 is eight.) So, the tweet is playing on the ambiguity created by the base of the number not being stated. If you had assumed it was in base 2 rather than base 10 (or any other base) it would have read as, 'There are two types of people ...'

In Australia and Aotearoa alcoholic beverages, whether beer, wine or spirits, are alcoholic beverages and sales rules are the same for all of them. In most of Australia they cannot be sold in grocery shops, and even when, like in the ACT they can, they are usually sold in separate shops. Aldi here is the exception. Often the separate bottle shop, run by the supermarket chain, is inside the same shop but with a separate sales areas and checkouts. In New Zealand, we saw alcohol was for sale in supermarkets.

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No, not necessarily, dialect can be regional or cultural. Swiss German, for example. Not standard doesn't necessarily mean substandard. I wouldn't call that southern usage a dialect variation, just usage and vocabulary. More broadly, I wouldn't call English as spoken in the UK at large, Canada, the US, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand distinct dialects, but rather distinct versions of standard English. (I'm not so sure about some of the UK regional variants, they might qualify.) Aboriginal English, by contrast, includes some grammatical structures from indigenous languages that differ from standard English.