mike carey

You mean he'll have to pay himself for those as well?

Here, the Red Cross runs the blood donation program and sets the rules about who can donate. If you meet the rules you can give blood, no other agencies have any say in it. I haven't tried, although my last 'illicit' contact was in January. I make no comment about TB.

Maus, I suspect you're not the only one, good luck with whatever you chose to do. I hope we will all be back to 'normal' soon. I really look forward to meeting guys like you when that all becomes possible.

Well, I'm in love with one rooster, @Benjamin_Nicholas, but I can control that urge.

I made a meatloaf last week for the first time in years. It didn't go all that well, nice enough but could have been better. The previous one I made had pistachios and cranberries in it (I forget what sort of meat, pork and veal I think) and that was great. I must try to find the recipe again! Although the mixture as a whole on this latest one wasn't the best, one part I will repeat is using rolled oats as the filler. Lining the loaf tin with streaky bacon with the ends of the rashers on top of the meatloaf would appear to be essential.

Have you accepted the 'gold fish 1.5 seconds memory' idea? If so this conversation will derail that impression. I often tune out of these daily one-hour conversations but didn't today. Here, in a 50 minute podcast a marine biologist talks about fish and their intelligence. https://www.abc.net.au/radio/programs/conversations/culum-brown/12236632 Among other things he talks about fish that learnt how to evade an obstacle over a short period (they took a while to get it) but when presented with the same obstacle months later remembered how to evade it, fish that when presented with a mirror realised that what they saw was a reflection of themselves, not another fish, and manta rays that knew that on weekends recreational fishers would clean the fish they had caught at boat launching ramps so they would turn up to eat the fish guts and scraps that the fishers were throwing away. A Port Jackson shark latching onto a research student's head for 30 minutes has to be a highlight.

No, cornflour, at least in Australia. You can also buy 'wheaten cornflour' which is a wheat derived flour that has the smoother thickening characteristics of actual cornflour. (But the real thing is better.) On whether to use a fresh wipe for each grocery item (I hope they wiped the package of wipes), most items on shelves seem to be in the cut-open boxes they were shipped in, so more often than not you will be the only person to have touched your items. Guaranteed? Certainly not, a shelf stacker may have rearranged some items, and another shopper may have picked them up to read the label. Reason for caution, but not for paranoia. Hand hygiene and not touching your face is probably enough, but 'an abundance of caution' has become a catchphrase in this pandemic.

More an aviation geek story (as the author notes) is this one from the dying days of international aviation (yes, hyperbole). The last few QF SYD-LHR flights, which were usually routed through Singapore had to be changed due to a change in Singapore government policy. So Qantas for a couple of days had non-stop A380 flights from Australia to London when it operated with a technical stop in Darwin rather than a standard stop in Singapore. https://onemileatatime.com/qantas-a380-australia-london/

Yes, it used to be a green top-left corner of the avatar.

Today, the weekly rural affairs [for city viewers] program did a summary of the situation for grain and pulse growers (partly to contextualise the Chinese imposition of 85% tariffs on Australian barley exports on [ahem] anti-dumping grounds). It's sowing time for winter grain crops right now and it's been a good autumn for rain. Most Western Australian farmers are substituting another crop for their planned barley. The one striking note from the story was retail demand for flour. It covered a smaller organic miller that had seen a 300% increase in demand and had to employ extra staff and run double the number of shifts, and the biggest miller in NSW that had seen a 70% increase and had to go to 24/7 operations. I didn't look for flour last time I was at the shops, but last time I looked there was no bread flour, only the lower protein all purpose (and store brand) types.

Not something that the good people of this forum would do, of course ... [MEDIA=twitter]1261440564173520897[/MEDIA]

Guys I think I might want to hire at some stage, that was why I started doing it. The benefits to me have been that I can see their recent activity (pics, travel, 'available now'), and unanticipated benefits, if they change their handle you keep track of them, and if they reopen their account after having closed it, they reappear in your buddies list.

I would love to take credit for it, but sadly I did not.

When I went to Aldi today, the barber's shop in the shopping centre was open for the first time in a while, but I need to wash my hair before I go there! (And I could safely wait a bit longer.) On a separate note, I hadn't been looking for masks, but Aldi had a big stack of them, boxes of 50 for $69.90. I didn't buy any but may go back and see if they're still there.

I have noted the path of the Australian flu season elsewhere, but the advent of Covid-19, although it is cutting a swathe through our society, has not been without effects that could be to our benefit. Although the flu season isn't fully under way, the incidence of flu cases has reportedly been running at 10% of the level last year. In parallel, the uptake of the influenza vaccine has been double the level last year. Both of those point to a lower level of influenza this year. In addition, social distancing directed at minimising the spread of Covid-19 is likely to have the effect of reducing other respiratory infections that are spread by similar vectors. There will be debates about whether that sort of anecdata can be relied on without peer reviewed reporting, or whether any link is causal or simply correlation. If the incidence of other diseases is lower this year, the balance of probabilities is that the Covid-19 restrictions were what caused it. (Anecdote: Interviewing a NZ family that had been locked down for four weeks, on the TV news here, they reported that the usual sequence of colds and sniffles suffered by the children had been absent this year.) In the likely event that there is no vaccine next winter (yours from December and ours from June 2021) the continued application of Covid-19 precautions is likely to similarly lower the levels of other disease.

That remains to be seen, I'm not getting good vibes that our government will be permitting overseas travel by then, and the current trajectory of the pandemic in the US doesn't increase my confidence that the US would be on a limited list of permitted destinations.

Everyone needs to see a little puggle. [MEDIA=twitter]1260193530733002754[/MEDIA]

That looks sooo much like a Canberra scene!

Serendipitously, Nigella Lawson's recipe for salt and vinegar potatoes turned up in my Twitter timeline as this was being discussed here! I have to try it. https://www.nigella.com/recipes/salt-and-vinegar-potatoes

Thanks for posting this. I heard about the arrest on the radio this morning and was about to post an update to this thread. I hope that the police can secure a conviction, that would vindicate the time and money Scott's brother devoted to having the original coroner's finding overturned. It's also fitting that the police commissioner personally rang Steve Johnson to convey the news of the arrest.

A Magnum is a chocolate coated ice-cream in Australia. Happy with that comparison as well. (Adds item to shopping list.)

Ain't that the truth!

At least two of them were carriers.