mike carey

I'll be there if I can and it's safe to travel to the US. I'm not confident in either of those just yet. There isn't even a target date for opening our borders yet, and the talk is that when they do open, we'll be subject to 14 days' quarantine on return.

Doyle's isn't a three star Michelin restaurant or anything like that, it's just a place that does great seafood. In my days in the military it was the sort of place we would take visiting international military visitors when we needed to host them. As an aside, one time we had some high level US defence officials visiting, and we were told that no official hospitality was appropriate. On the day, it became clear that the advice we had was wrong. We took them to a pub with a blackboard menu, and we bought bottles of wine to go with the meal and they loved it.

A useful caution is that hand washing with soap and water is an alternative to using a sanitiser. Don't fret on whether the hand sanitiser you use is 'safe', practise safer hand hygiene whatever it looks like.

We know about that and for the most part can do our 12x tables, but that doesn't reduce our wonderment at the US health system. My hospital insurance which I'm not convinced is value for money is about $200 (AUD) a month (I could rely on the public hospital system). I know I can go to a doctor and either pay nothing or pay some relatively small amount that they charge over the medicare rate for the service. Specialists may charge a premium over the standard (free to the patient) amount. But on a reasonable, not high income I don't worry about it, and I have no reason to do so.

Yes, that is one, and close by there is an iconic seafood restaurant, Doyles. I remember years ago telling my mother (who had spent time in Sydney in the late 40s) that I had gone to 'a little seafood restaurant' in Watson's Bay and she collapsed (figuratively) in envy, 'Ohhh, Doyles!'. God rest her soul. On the north of the harbour there is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obelisk_Beach .

Air New Zealand, if I understand correctly, may have relieved you of the need to make such a choice, as they don't currently plan to resume flying to LHR.

Can I join you there? (Spoiler: No, I can't at the moment!)

In the meantime, @RealAvalon and I are asking ourselves what this conversation even means.

Is that your choice of sexual partners or of doctors?

Lol, perhaps yes. In the original, 'A comma walks into a bar ' would have worked.

Pfft, an Oxford comma wasn't what was needed, a list comma after 'television' would have been enough. But I digress, great list of grammatical hilarities.

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.)