mike carey

Sense when would anyone be their own grammer (sic) Nazi?

TL;DR, don't praise his blog, it'll only encourage him. Joking, I look forward to @Benjamin_Nicholas' all-too-infrequent blog posts. They are so evocative and well written, I feel like I am there. (Well, apart from the feeling of his ... No need for that level of detail.)

A footnote to my cancelled ticket. Qantas has extended the validity of all vouchers for cancelled tickets in the current situation from 12 months after the original ticket purchase to 31 Dec 21. So I have the cash for my ticket for next year's gathering there, and don't have to use it by February, although I expect it will be more expensive by then. That assumes that we'll be flying again by then, of course, and that they haven't gone broke.

I haven't been out and seen a service station for about a week and then it was in a rural area and in Canberra. Canberra is often more expensive than even rural towns. I mainly notice the price of diesel. I've seen reports that regular or E10 is getting close to $1/litre in some places, but not widely, usually in the $1.30 range. Diesel I've seen for $1.30 too. (AUD1 = about USD0.60 atm and we have a federal excise of AUD0.423/litre on both petrol and diesel, and 10% GST on the total price, including the excise part. In Australia the price on the sign at the service station by law has to be the total price, so the taxes are included in the pump price.)

@Rod Hagen, ain't nobody gonna tell me the CNN subeditor didn't know exactly what they were doing with that headline. I wouldn't say the story is boring though, except in comparison with the easy inference drawn from the headline. It offers a useful commentary on the way the current situation affects the way people do things. It reminds me of the accidental (staged?) photos of newsreaders wearing a suit jacket, shirt and tie ... and boxers.

This is a nice thing to have happen to you. [MEDIA=twitter]1243084390285979648[/MEDIA]

Benjamin! Be nice.

From what I've read, soap and water also removes a film of fat on the skin that helps viruses to adhere to it.

Thanks ArVaGuy, I hadn't seen that in my inbox, but checking just now, I have received it too. Qantas has cancelled my flight and left me with a credit that I can use with no change fees but I have to pay whatever the going price is for the new ticket I buy. And I have to spend it all on one RT itinerary. I hadn't tried to cancel up till now, hoping that a closure like this would force their hand on full refunds or credits. Early December sounds good for PS, @easygoingpal but I'm not sure that I want to travel elsewhere in the US in December, particularly the North East.

I'm not sure which phase I saw, but having done so, for me the 'very sweet guy' part would trump whatever the current body aesthetic was.

A deconstructed version of the Rotterdam Philharmonic.

Saw this on the TV this evening, and found the guy's twitter feed, it's worth having a look at, he's posted several videos. Nick Heath is a British rugby commentator and journalist, and with no sport on which to comment he's taken to doing commentary on daily life. Here. it's on two dogs (hence in this thread) chasing each other around a park. I saw another on two guys kicking a football in a park. [MEDIA=twitter]1241417950579634177[/MEDIA]

I have no idea, it's just standard British slang, and we share a lot of slang idiom with them.

To reinforce something I posted earlier, this is a thing. Plumbers here in Canberra are reporting an increase in blocked drains where people had flushed things like paper towels down the toilet. The only paper that is safe to flush is toilet paper. No tissues or paper towels. No 'flushable' wipes. Not even squares of Murdoch newspaper. (You might recall the line in the 'Honest Government' video posted in the forum, 'If you run short, Murdoch provides a range of bog roll replacement world-wide'.)

Transport for NSW reduces the things you have to touch.

There's one word in there that offers a clue as to why. It starts with C. Similarly in this country, you only hear the term when it's about one individual using it and his possibly self-serving motives. I had read a feature article about the CEO some years ago. His view is that if you don't pay people a decent wage they won't be able to buy stuff from the store. Not rocket science. Like @poolboy48220 the quantities they sell are too much for me. One of the few things I've bought in bulk (if you don't count a 10kg bag of rice) is canned tomatoes, and that from the outlet store for a cannery about 50km out of my way when I drive to Melbourne (they also sell other stuff that they don't produce, like bottles of pasta and curry sauces). That sort of driving is off the table right now. What you say is broadly true, and sometimes the restrictions that they apply have some effect if they reduce the prevalence of what they ban even if they don't eliminate it. The effect it might have on re-election differs between political systems. Here, the people out of government are on a unity ticket with the government on what is being done. Unlike the US, the political opposition here (and in Canada) is an organised group in Parliament not separate players from the opposition party jostling for attention or for votes for themselves. The oppostion here has individuals who shadow government ministers (it's called the shadow cabinet), and they aim to present a united and coherent alternative government. So far, they have quibbled about the details, and sought (and achieved) some changes to them, but have voted the legislation through Parliament. That has been the case at state level as well, with state governments from both sides of politics.

Thank you, I try. But I can't claim credit for the hashtag, Nigella Lawson used it in a tweet about eating more chocolate (which I posted elsewhere in the forum).

#fattenthecurve strikes again!

@stevenkesslar I wasn't suggesting that the age distribution of cases was changing, just that as the total number of infections increases, even a very small percentage of young people with the disease will become a large number of cases. 0.01% of 100 people is no-one. 0.01% of a million is 100. My purpose in saying this is to suggest that rather than it indicating that the virus may have mutated, it could be that the sample size is now large enough for cases of young people with serious disease to emerge.. Or put another way, the larger number of cases is improving scientists' understanding of the disease. Of course, that doesn't rule out the possibility that the virus is mutating,

I have no evidence, but I suspect that a proportion of younger people was always going to have severe disease, and that as the total number of cases increases, the number of seriously ill young people is becoming clear.

Follow up to a comment I made in another thread yesterday, at the liquor store in my local shopping centre they now have crosses on the floor 1.5m apart as a guide for the queue at the cashier. And they are across the front of the shop rather than down one of the aisles where customers usually queue (so people can browse in the aisle and not come too close to people waiting to pay).

[MEDIA=twitter]1241954251082838018[/MEDIA]

This is a stark reminder, or if you weren't aware, a stark summary of what is at stake with any reluctance to adopt social distancing. [MEDIA=twitter]1241955870398771200[/MEDIA]

Amen to that, canned asparagus is disgusting. I have, however, had some half-way decent bottled asparagus: it's more like a pickled vegetable. That said, I wouldn't have noticed if it were sold out in the shops.