Thread: The book, An introduction

Im not sure If I was trying to keep this thing PG or not I mean I suppose I should this is a family accessable website but some things just need the blunt punctuation of a swear word to convey the effect of the situation or to make mention of a persons joy departments "in the common vernacular" as it were.

Now I dont know what you think this bits going to be about having been given that warning and what some of the other bits have been about so I'll give you the AKA.. At this point if I were making this as a documentary Id insert some moving music rising to a slight crescendo as the screen faded out to black and then with a symphonic clash of instruments the screen would flash white and fade out leaving just the wording in stark white on the screen as the background faded to black... Its called a striking effect...

Im not making a documentary and thats a very hard effect to achieve on a basic web based forum and nigh on impossible in print (which is were this might wind up) so I cant do that.

The AKA.
"Quotable quotes"

also starring, My penultimate business plan
with a cameo appearance of "my future funeral"

just doesnt have the "slap you in the eyeballs with a squirt from a slice of lemon followed up with a syringe of hydrocloric acid" punch of a good visual delivery does it....

You know those days when your on fire, when you can slice anyone down from any height with one quip and have them just look up at you well and truly trounced with nowhere to go but surrender to your superior linguistical assault. I had one of those days while setting some stuff up and for some reason It made me think of a single conversation with a handfull of firsts for me..

It was the first night I spent with a mate in a hotel I was maybe 10 or 11 years old in a primary school and we had a sleep over planned but because of circumstances with his house we had to have it in a hotel so my first night in a hotel...

It was the first time I got to see a movie that was higher than PG rated without my parents knowing about it.

It was the first time I remember seeing boobs in a movie.

The movie was lethal weapon and the scene was the opening scene when the hooker takes a dirt dive off of the balcony, in her sexy outfit fluttering in the breeze showing panties, garter and stockings then a flash of nipple and boob. Me and my mate were estatic.

the conversation I remember vaguely but well started.

"Aww man, she jumped"
"Reckon we'll get to see boobs again in the movie"
"maybe"
"look there they are."

Then she jumped and we got to see them again in short order but hed gone for a slash

"Hey look, shes dead"
"who"
"The boobs girl"
"oh, see anything"
"yeah, corpseboob"
"thats gross dave"
"yeah, but they look nice"
"yeah".

now thats not a shining example of a quotable quote but it did lead to an interesting game over the next few years that he and I remained friends, when we got out a video or went to a movie wed sort of run a tally to work out weather or not movies featured more boobs on dead chicks or live ones.....

Its going to be hard to give you some shining examples of quoteable quotes that I lie to use as Id normally do it by a clickable link to a page with the quote on it and let you read it in context. But as previously mentioned its very hard to do that sort of thing on something thats ment to be going to dead tree edition.

speaking of dead trees and corpses (thats a segway, yes I know its spelt wrong, Id hate to be the guy who gets to proof read this and fix all my typos, spelling mistakes and poor use of punctuation. a segway is a useful media tool for getting from one topic to another that sort of works in written form but I find its easier to just start a new paragraph or force the reader to loose track of the original topic by presenting them with a big bracketed paragraph that is pretty much immaterial to the context of the topic but holds another point of varying relevance like this one) when I die long after Ive retired from my semi comunal business venture Im going to have 2 places you can mourn my ashes and that wont happen till every usable cell of my body has been stripped from it and put in someone else.

The first place will be a simple tombstone in the dead center of busselton which will do the basic Farey, 280177-?????? His ashes lie underwater at the end of the jetty. and somewhere under the waters of the busselton jetty will be a stainless steel vessel in which the ashes of the remains of my remains will lie.

After I die, assuming I die in a way that doesnt fit the catagory of my second preferred method of death, I want my body on life support and then given the same treatment that you would a wrecked landy, you look at it work out whats salvagable, repairable and how many other landies you can get back on the road from its carcass, then you strip it and crush the few remnants and use the parts to put those back on the road. I even want the blood gone, IF it takes a month or so of life support to workout the best way of getting the maximum yield out of my corpse then I want the red cross at my veins every other day leeching the blood out of me, Im not going to need it and I'll be too busy being dead to notice anyway.

Oh the 2 methods of death... the first leads to a headline newspaper story that reads "Medical advisors state that it was unwise for a man that old to take that much viagra and then go an seek the company of that many nymphomatic women at the same time. We pity the people who have to prepare the body for the final viewing as its going to take them a month to get the smile from his face. The second I can only describe as a part of a scene from lethal weapon 2, the part when glover and gibson are about to go an tackle the house on stilts gibson leads in with
"wait for the signal."
"whats the signal?"
"you'll know it when it happens........."


But thats a long long way off anyway as so far I think Im doing very well at becoming the first immortal, 31 years down, infinity to go but as the japs say a journy of a thousand miles starts with a single step. So before I try testing the waters of my desired immortality Ive always wanted to start a business community based around mine and SWMBO's jobs then chuck the lot onto some picture postcard perfect chunk of land near the ocean. The whole deal would be fairly well integrated with the benefits of each employee being the recourses provided by the branches that they support.

for example the mechanic whose child is in the company daycare center would do the work as required on the daycare center staffs cars and the use of the company daycare center would be provided for as part of his benefits package. Of course both places (the workshop where the mechanic works and the daycare center) would not be soley there for the existance of the people they support from within the company but would be setup to take in paid work from the community so a mum who works at the servo next door pumping gas can still use the daycare center to mind her children while she works. Thats where the income for the overall business would come from..

Its a pipe dream I know and If I can get even part of it going before Im gone I'll be surprised But I like thinking that If I can Just get it to start then maybe it'll keep going and setup a new form of business ideals, no more of this how many dollars can I squeeze out of the world, more of a how many lives can I make easier deal....

oh yeah.


My advice to horny young teenage boys who haven't yet worked out how to beat their dads parental control on the internet... If you want to see boob in b grade movies go for the horror flicks or ones where chicks die. The ones where the chicks die have a higher portion of exposed joy department than the ones where they all live happily ever after.

Ok I need to talk about common sense....


Distressingly Ive been growing dimly more aware that Common Sense is well, not all that common from kids that wear dark cloths and kick a soccer ball around on one of the roads that I drive on to get to and from places at night through to people who put unleaded in a car despite it having a sticker on the fuel cap that says "diesel only"

Now over the last 2 weeks or so Ive had my parents over for a visit they came for the Amberly Airshow and some time away from Perth, Why they wanted to spend time away from there I will never work out but thats beside the point. The point is that mum and dad enjoy doing all sorts of brain puzzles like crosswords, find a word, word scrambles and all sorts of word puzzles. Most of these can be found in mags like thats life and take 5, magazines I don't normally go near because they are full of articles like "my cousins aunts dead dog visited me spiritually in a dream and told me where to buy a winning lotto ticket" and with daily helpful tips like "if your bulk box of detergent has no scoop you can use a 1/4 cup measure from the kitchen"

As a bonus when you complete the puzzles you can send them in for the chance to win things. Which I'm cool with but they also have page after page of sms to win games and ring tone advertisments. when you read the fine print on the SMS to win games you find out you have to subscribe to the gaming company for $lots a week/fortnight and if you want to play the game you need to send an initial SMS and then several more to complete the game.. at the same time as mum was exclaiming what a rip off those competitions were there was an expose on one of those "its a boring week news wise lets stir the pot" type current affair type shows on much the same thing but they were running the opposite side of the story about how some people were winning absolute fortunes playing these games and the ones that just about every radio station run.

my favorite one was the one about the scratchies... Did you know that if you buy a $10 scratchie you have a 1 in 3.5 chance of winning? no, nor did I but at the end of the show they had a disclaimer, you need to goto their website for the full info, I did... from there I was given the usual run around to get to the actual pertinant facts. Turns out for your $10 investment you have a 2:7 chance of winning $2.

Common sense principal #1, if it looks too good to be true it probabley is also known as A fool and his money are soon parted.

In the same magazine there was a bit about how a pregnant woman was being thanked for saving someones children from the beach, the end result is that the lady whose children were saved had come in from one end of the beach and seen the swimming danger signs so had walked along the foot path to an entry point where there was no danger signs and then let her kids go swimming she though it was safe enough as there was no danger sign and she knew CPR, pity she didnt know how to swim to get out to where her kids got in trouble.

Common sense principal #2 What can kill you in one place can kill you in another, just because some vandal removed the warning sign the danger is not mitigated.


Now I could go on and fill up the internet with all sorts of common sense things like that but I wont because if I do I wont be able to say what Im going to say after I say this.

Its my opinion that common sense is the thing that stops you from learning that experience is a thing that you don't gain until after you need it most.

having said that I can now lead onto the topic of complimentary skills from the second common sense principal example which is swimming and CPR.

some things in life are supposed to go together pizza and beer, jim beam and coke, ok not good examples as booze goes well with most things except driving but you get the idea and the same principal applies to a lot of things in life.

If you live near a somewhere you can go swimming and go swimming you should know CPR and vice versa if you live near somewhere you can go swimming and know CPR you should learn to swim. Now it might be common sense but some of the others I think that should be hand in hand are.

With the primary skill first and the supporting skill second

Mechanicing (of any kind) and metalurgy go together well for a surprising number of reasons from the thermal expansion of metals causing problems to the dielectric effects of different metals in contact or immersion.

four wheel driving and basic geology match up well as you gain the ability to make educated guesses about whats coming up next and what the ground will do in given circumstances.

have a think I bet anyone reading this can come up with a primary skill that they have that is made easier by something else they have a passing knowledge of and thats all you need. you dont need to be a master at the second skill so long as youve got the basic 101 of the subject matter it will help out.

the final example Im going to give is kind of directed at lots of navies around the world and its saving whales and sinking ships...

now this is a subject thats fairly close to my heart mainly because my one concited effort at saving the planet as far as eco hug a tree stuff goes is looking after the oceans partly because Im a diver and partly because its the single biggest thing on the planet and I reckon that looking after the big stuff generally gets the little stuff looked after on the way.

Since I like looking after the big stuff it shouldnt take a gargantuan mental leap to realise that I think we should be looking after the whales and the japs seem to think otherwise.. Now Im a little against them in the first place mainly because they chose the wrong team in the war arent doing heaps to help out with the current "teritorial dispute" in the sand pit and make toyota... If thats not enough now they decide that they can hunt whales for research purposes... So far about the only benifit of their reaserch appears to be some well fed japs and the oh so scientific opinion that "yep whale meat still tastes good".

Now I might be slightly less jaded about this if they were doing some non leathal research that helps out people or whales (and no, I dont mean 23 beer fat chicks) but since they seem to be killing and processing first and then testing I have some scientific research that I think that the navy could be doing.

I mean how long has it been since someone actually fired a torpedo into a ship and studied the live casualty effects of doing that? no problems lets just crank one into the side of a jap whaler. I mean if they can fire harpoons into whales because "the population can support the loss" whose really going to miss maybe 100 of the 10's of millions of japs? and besides we wouldnt get all 100 of the crew some would survive which is better odds than the targeted whales get and damn it a real live test gives better results than computer simulations and dummy tests. Its information we need to know so we can improve our weapons and crew targeting drills.

now Ive seen the adds on tv and the movies for the whale tail promo and personally I dont think its going to work I think we should apply common sense and apply some mutually supporting skill sets and use them to save the whales.. after all its not only good for training purposes its also going to save the tax payer money, torpedo's have a shelf life and target training ships are expensive. 3 wins with one simple decision personally I think that thats a good thing all the way round.

I know its been a while since I had a rant or told a story and to be honest I havent had that much exciting going on in life and Id been sort of toying with the whole mum and dad paid a visit to the airshow yada yada yada... kind of post, a touchy feely just to prove I can.

But theres been some instances at work recently that just require nay demand that I introduce you all the the awe inspiring incompetence of a certain MD...

now Im not out to character assasinate the whole workshop just this one guy so I'll just characterise the other guys in broad terms and not put names to faces except for MD whom I intend to portray as the most ignorant self centered useless excuse for monkey vomit let alone a human being and trust me on this till you meet and work with him you will never realise that at this point in time there are puddles of fetid cooling syphilitic monkey hurl that are seeking legal advise on how to sue me for slanderous intent just for mentioning them and him in the same sentence well they would be if they could get it together for long enough to work that out and even with that handicap they'll still manage it long before MD can..

so the guys I work with in the workshop well ok I turn up occasionally they work we have...

the butcherous do it the easy way so I can sign it off and get back to bludging or organising work I can dodgily for profit bloke. Now If you need it fixed quickly this is the bloke you want I'll work with him as he knows enough to be usefull but just doesnt have the drive to do it properly himself. Surprisingly Hes actually capable of doing good work when the planets align themselves.

we have the backfiring revmonkey... hes a damn good mechanic but he loves revving engines and backfiring them... hes also our most enthusiastic field guy and loves doing the promo drill stuff. He prefers to work on the smaller stuff like the bikes and honestly I cant blame him...

weve got a couple of greymen, good mechanics good workers and about the most defining thing about them so far as this plot goes is that they want out of the ADF... and when you consider the immenstrosity of the MD that we all get to work with well that in itself is enough of a reason to not be in the ADF.

and finaly we have the guy who I spend most of my time working with, hes a bit of a credit hound but that suits me as it provides a distraction for the heirachy which keeps them of my lacidasical paperwork and hes interested in what we do and what makes most of the stuff we do tick, surprisingly he doesnt want out of the ADF he just wants out of the airforce and he wants out of the airforce for the opposite reasons that Iwanted into the airforce and away from the army... He's young he'll learn.....

now every single person in the workshop shares pretty much the same opinion from the skulker to the rev monkey... WE dont want to work with MD.

Now IF Id never heard the rumour Im about to tell you untill today Id have gone "gee thats no surprise" as it was after having met the incompetent MD a couple of times and hearing it I still went "and that should surprise me why?" heres the rumor and I believe it whole heartedly mainly because well it just smacks of so much truth that even the mythbusters would have trouble proving it wrong If I sat in front of them and invented on the spot and then told it to them.

"another unit put the call out for a volenteer to do some work and the only person that our unit could spare was MD when his name was put forwards through the email system a reply was duely generated the reply read thanks, we'd rather do it without help than work with him"

one of the more common conversations in the workshop when something has gone wrong goes sort of thusly

"how did you break that?"
"I didnt, MD was working on it and he broke it"
"tell the truth."
"I am I saw MD working on......"
"you saw MD working?"
"yeah your right, I got nothing."

in case your still not getting the point on how utterly entirely useless the man (and I use that word in the most vague of ways) is allow me to outlay a series of events that took place this week.

As a part of my job I do servicing and repair work on a thing called the barrier, essentially is a steel cable run across a runway that catches planes that are having problems with controls or brakes. the pilot flies the plane down onto the runway and a hook grabs the cable and the arrestors pull the plane up. just like you see in all the aircraft carrier landings in all the movies. The setup involves the cable itself and 2 rewind motors that are part of the arrestor system. think of them as gigantic inertia reel seatbelts and your surprisingly close to the truth.

anyhow these things have engine, engines have batteries to start them and help keep them running as well as turn on some of the lights in the shed so that if need be at night you can see whats going on in the event of a night arrest. They are also petrol engines so having a battery is kind of important to getting it started somethings got to provide the spark even if we still did have the crank handles that were originally available with the units.

so we went out and did a before flight service (essentially check its all still there then start it up and run it to make sure the donk still works as it should) on monday and all was good I did the western side and he did the east. The usual way this gets done is the same every single time it gets done, the driver of the servicing vehicle drops one of the tradies off on the west side, then drops the inspector off at the cable and heads over to the east side. While all thats happening the west tradie checks and starts up the western arrestor and operates the cable to the up position for inspection then after the inspector has checked the cable in the up position he signals for cable down and checks all the critical check items on the eastern system. Meanwhile the driver has done the checks and cranked the eastern arrestor and once the inspector is satisfied he heads back and checks the cable in the down position and walks into the western hut and checks the work of the tradie there. The guy at east has shut his unit down and then drives the vehicle back to the west side to pick up the inspector and the first tradie and then they head down to the other end of the runway to do the other system (theres a cable at both end).

Usually the inspector doesnt wait around to check that the engine has been shut off properly its a petrol engine you turn the switch off and it stops... Pretty simple stuff idiot proof even but not Mathew Duncan proof... and heres how I know...

the day after he had done the driver duties (which means he did the eastern side) I got to do them.. so alls good right up to the point where I had to start the engine I put my hand on the ignition switch and immediately thought, hello thats in the wrong spot.. nahh cant be must just be the knob rotated on the switch. so I turned it and then it stopped, once I let it go it returned to the same place I found it so I turned it the other way and sure enough it moved to the off position... so Im facing a flat battery.... on a system that has apparently been checked as servicable and ready to go. so new battery and as soon as I plug it in the lights come on.. which is doubly cool cause that means that with all the power draw of the lights the coil and the fuel solenoid on the battery it would have lasted maybe 3 or 4 hours before being too flat to start the engine reliably. given that we do the preflight checks before the planes take off let alone land that potentially wed have been facing a rewind system that we couldnt have used to rewind the barrier system with properly if a plane had had to take the cable.

today when we were doing a fairly major piece of servicing on the system someone asked him about who left the eastern barrier turned on. Before I tell you what youve probably already guessed what would you have said I know Id have given it something along the lines of "I did what? no, your joking, well guessed I fragged that then" youd have said something similar right... his coment. "wasnt me I wouldnt have done that".


But it does raise an interesting question I mean if it was a diesel with a swtich to turn on the fuel pump and then a key to start it with a cable to shut it down I could buy accidentally leaving the pump on after pulling the stop cable.. I can buy leaving the lights on. But how HOW in the name of your diety of choice do you manage to turn off a spark ignition engine at the switch and then turn it back on again without restarting the engine It takes about 3 seconds to wind down to the point where flicking the ignition back on doesnt make it start again (sort of like a bump start) I know I spent 20 minutes today trying to work out that time and the switch isnt even spring loaded that way and the shortest time I could get the engine to stop totally in was 2 and a bit seconds so at some point hes turned the switch off and the turned it back on...

are we starting to get the concept here....

and as of yet I havent even started in on his worse than the idiots I have to deal with on the road on a daily basis driving, or his Ive just finihsed playing sports but I had the squirts yesterday so I might just pop down to medical and get a day off routinge.. His attempts to bluff people into sumbitting and then when he gets called eventually turning the story around and making it seem like no-one wants to fight him or his "wow a girl sat within 10 feet of me she must want me Im so buff"

This ladies and gentlemen is the deadwood that your ADF has to support. Hes not just useless hes worse than useless. Its a good week when we dont have to waste more than 8 manhours a week to sort out his messes and then if he catches someone doing a job that he thinks hes done right even tho the second person has been ordered to do the job he gets argumentative with them and then not only are you wasting time doing his job properly for him hes standing there slowing you down while your doing the job that he should have been able to get right....

you cant even help him Ive tried the "matty, out of curiosity would trying that this way be a bit easier/faster/give a better result" and that doesnt work. I tried "matty theres a better way of doing that, if youd like a hand Id be happy to help you.." and Ive even tried the patented Farey sledgehammer vs the walnut approach of" Thats not the right way to do that... try this way" and "thats the wrong way to do that you do it like this, if you cant wrap your head around that go and get the emeis and have someone read them to you"

I gave up even trying to help him after I saw him rebuilding his own fords engine. Now its common practice to lable things that come out of an engine some times on some components the manufacturer does it for you things like con rods... (a very important engine component and a 6 cylinder ford has 6 of them) Now if you ever see a mechanic putting an engine together and swinging off a torque wrench while hes doing the cap nuts up (the nuts that basically hold the conrod to the crank also important) if you notice that the for some reason he has rod #6 located between rods #2 and #4 and that the #6 marking on the end cap is on the opposite side to the rod marking which is on the other side of the crank to all the numbers on the other rods.. Be somewhere else and take note of who he is and never let him touch anything more complicated than a meccano set and even then have an 8 year old supervise him.... But given that he was working on his own engine youd have thought hed of paid enough attention to get it right.... but no...

which leads to the simple question I asked at a briefing that set him up nicely...

In our jobs as crafties if one of our superiors has to go else where for a prolonged period you can get higher duties allowance(HDA) while your doing their jobs. MD even though hes the oldest and longest RAAF serving LAC in the workshop has never had HDA, someone whose only been in our unit (but has his LAC's and experience in another unit) was recently given HDA and its always been the case MD never gets it and lots of other people do, being a self important git he thinks he should get it as hes oldest and hes been in the section longest...

today we had a quick briefing and at the end after the obligatory "anyone got any questions" I asked if there was any truth to the rumor that either me or the other bloke (his name is close to mine in length, starts with an F and has an R and an A in it) were likely to get HDA when all the ranks temporarily bumped up one rank to take up the positions that were being left open by the end of year postings?" What the incompetent one didnt know was that I'd teed up the question and made sure that the sarge (who was giving the briefing) was on net with the fact that the question was going to be asked. Now I knew exactly the response that that was going to get and had jagged to position myself so that the git couldnt see me because someone else was in the way. This was a good thing as while I could deliver the lines in a deadpan voice I couldnt keep a strait face.

on the sarges side tho he was deadpan, he could have held a poker face competition with a slab of granite and won it and he delivered an answer that made even the other bloke who Id said was in the running think that the rumor was true (he asked me later) While the MD was upstairs bleating about how unfair it was we were all down on the floor going over the end of the conversation...

what they dont know is that Im still churning an idea on how to prolong his agony and to start with when he asks me about it saying that the sarge is telling him that the rumor is a lie Im going to drop something along the lines of "dont you think that with your carrying on hes just said what you want to hear to make you shut the hell up and go away, I know I would and in the next 3 seconds probably will"

Then when hes done as the time comes up for the time period that the HDA was available for I'll have a doctor'd pay slip showing that Im acutaly in reciept of HDA......

Hey did I ever tell you I like messing with idiots....


now some people might be thinking "what if he reads this" allow me to point out why thats not a huge concern...

First of all hes got less intelligence than a single celled amoeba thats been washed with sulphuric acid.

assuming he gets past that little hurdle he'd have to be able to read.

if he gets past that dilemma some of the words have more than 4 letters in them and they arent written in crayon on the large kiddie water and chew proof cardboard.

Lets say he had a friend, actually...

if he was interested enough to want to know what was written hed need a friend to read it to him and explain the words... he doesnt have friends.

so now lets say he paid someone enough to pretend to be his friend AND read this to him AND explain it to him AND not lead him astray by lying to him about the contents IT still wouldnt matter as hes got the attention span of a goldfish thats been run over by a tank that was simutaneously exploding a Landmine and an IED while being shelled by artillery in the middle of some godforsaken desolate sand pit right after it had gargled napalm while being injected with anthrax.

If he got past all of that... then maybe, just maybe he wouldnt be such a complete toss pot and this rant wouldnt exist.


Of course I was going to write this post up as

A post regarding Matthew Duncan

my mother told me if you couldn't say something nice about a person dont say anything

but then what would you have done for the last 20 minutes and what would I have done with the 90 minutes its taken me to type this up?

No, I'm not talking about sex, I'm married, its a given I'm not getting that....

I'm not getting society.

I'm just a guy doing what I think needs to be done and I don't get why other people cant do it. I'ts not like Im someone special I dont have superpowers hell Im not even all that observent. Yet a lot of the time when Im doing what just seems to be the perfectly normal thing for me to be doing I attract comments of "wow your a nice guy to do that, I wouldnt" and thats a part that I dont get along with the rest of what I don't get... a lot of the things I do you dont need to be a rocket surgeon to do you just need to want to get out there and do them.

I dont get why you wouldnt do what I do when you say things like "wow your a nice Guy for doing that, I wouldnt."

Why on earth do we need reality shows that depict a bunch of near on survival clueless people poncing around snitching at each other and stabbing each other in the back to get some pretentious reward which they then turn around to profess their love for thier fellow competitors and then once thats done whine about how hard it is for them to be what theyve become? I dont get that, you entered a competition, you fought your way to the top to get a reward and now your going to whinge about it now youve got it... Great role model for society dimwit....

I dont get why some people make it their lifes work to destroy things that belong to people who have less than what they have. IT serves no purpose, I mean I could just about understand the poor destroying the rich's stuff it levels the playing field on a primevil if I cant have it you cant have it level it sort of works. When you have more than the persons gear who your destroying wheres the gain?


I get that some people just aren't all there or they've bitten off more than they can chew Ive been guilty of it and feel the intimidation of that everytime I type a title for another bit of this thing. I dont get why when someone asks for help if theyve gotten themselves stuck in why people who think they're better than them cant help out. I get the whole teach a man to fish side of it I've put that down to writing already but I dont get the whole snubbing the person and letting them drown in their own quagmire.

I know I dont get a lot of societies rules and castes but I just cant get around it being so bad that people turn to drugs to try and make it bearable in the same way that I dont get the keeping up with the joneses concept young people who try to out acquire their older neighbours or their weathier friends getting themselves further into debt and more stress.

I seriously dont get why youd want to take advantage of someone in that situation and loan them money in the first place at an interest rate so high that you know it will cripple them, Do you really need that much money and that many reposessed items? Seriously...


I dont get this whole not my responsability attitude, If you cant get yourself sorted on your own responsabilities how are you going to take responsability for you fellow man....?


I dont get why people abandon children ,an abortion before birth Im down with but after... no. its just a case of asking for help theres people out there to help you just have to ask...

I dont get why people just cant ask for help.

I dont get why some people have to ponder about why they dont have the latest designer label whatever at some phenomenal cost when theres more functional things that can do the job.

of all the things.....

I dont get why I started this or that I thought it'd be easy.

I've never gotten the reason why some days I feel like a tiny island facing up against a tsunami.

Ok this ones about safety....

seatbelts are imortant, wear em ok....

the one in fozzy averted what could have been a disasterous situation namely me getting out of him while he was doing 40+...

yes I know you dont normally try to get out of the car but there was a spider involved.. I probabley ought to mention that I am afraid of spiders not just afraid like you might be afraid of a dark ally on a dark night after watching a scary movie but totally and utterly irrationally afraid of spiders and this was a big spider and it was black hairy and alive the worst kind.. If you think of the scene from red dwarf where the cat and dave are sitting at a computer terminal typing about the spider thats setting up home in his joy department and cat writes "Im scared" dave responds "YOU'RE SCARED?" the cat keys back "you haven't SEEN it". I saw it and at the exact instance that the sane part of my scared brain said "I dont want to alarm you..." the irrational scared part of my brain came up with "WE are Gone......." I had the door open and I was trying to climb out....

OH I should probably explain how I process fear... My brain neatly cleaves into 3 sections...

theres the logical section that comes up with the sane sensible stuff "dave its a spider, its ok it cant jump, its 20+ inches away and your in full length clothing, even if it got on you you can still brush it down to the floor plates and step on it with the steel caps.

theres the warning section it comes in with the useful warnings that I like to pay attention to and I always imagine that it speaks in walshs lilting tones from fire fly "I dont mean to alarhm you.........."

and then theres the primeval all stations panic fight or flee part of my brain it does 2 thing and does them very very well it gets things that threaten me either dead or out of my way OR it gets me out of their way. When spiders are concerned there is no negotiating with it I simply cease to exist where I was and magically reappear elsewhere...

here is a semi feasable transcript of a potential radio conversation near where I work...

"Amberly Tactical Air Control this is F111 Flight Convenient plot device weve just had something scream past us as angels 10 with a metalic debry trail, Are the guys in experimenal weapons doing something we should know about?"

"Flight convenient plot device this is ATAC, Negative ExWep Is cold, but we have just had confirmation that Farey has had an encounter with a spider, we are unsure of what type or size so cannot predict his ballistic flight profile or time. Suggest you expedite to angels 1 to maximise your time to observe his re-entry and take appropriate evasive manouvers"


theres only 4 things wrong with that little scenario.

1. We dont have ATAC at amberly
2. We also dont have an experimental weapons section
3. the F111 is retired
4. if it wasnt there would never be a flight called convenient plot device.



so that said heres how the conversation went in my head...

" I dont mean to alarhm you......"
"Its ok the spi...."
"spider spider spider RUN RUN RUN RUN RUN RUN be somewhere else open the god damnd door already CMON SPIDER RUN..."
"I need enough control to change hands on the steering wheel to operate the door handle... relax"
"I got it I got it the doors open"
"I dont think we shou...
"shut up we're getting out leave the rover go move... were out... hang on why arent we moving ARGHGHGHG spider spider spider run get out move be somewhere else.....
"I think the seat belt might be slowing us down"
"undo it"
"thats not feasable we need to change hands again and the spider is getting nearer the steering wheel
"kill kill kill kill kill the spider wheres the wd40 and the lighter"
" I dont mean to alarm you but flamethrowering the windshield might not be a cool idea plus the lighter is in the back of the car, we cant get to it."
"Mwarghyyyhhh do something"
"we could use the hat and mush it"
CRASHHHH tinkle.....
"well done thats a nice fist shaped star in the drivers side windshield
"dont care, we got it is it dead no... its on the floor and moving quickkk crush it....."
"The left leg cant reach"
"you cant have the right, its braking for the turn.
"straighten up over shoot the turn and kill kill killl...
and ensue the hot shoe floor bending stompdance that reduced the 8 legged thingy to something less than a single micron thick and proved that yes with enough stomping you can force one object through another solid object.
" ok the spiders dead, we now return you to your normal sane co-ordinated thought progression"


so again I find out that one of the reasons I love series rovers is they are easy to work on... name one other vehicle that in less of than an hour you can reverse the post apocolyptic spider Vs a trapped me damage that gets delt out in the form of a bent floor plate and a smashed windshield then drive it again without having to worry about goops.

so anyway, wear your seatbelts. its a good idea.

ok so I got the shake down trip done..... Happy didnt break anything other than a couple of tubes and one of them was preholed for me.... untill monday...


driving to work and bang crunch screeeeeeeee... yay 4 wheel lockup.... fortunately I was running early so wondering what the hell went wrong and guessing that anything I did wasnt going to make it any worse ripped it back into low range and tortured it back onto the road.... wooo hooo fozzys spat the tcase but the noise is subsiding and IVe got momentum on my sides sooooo double shuffle low hi snap first and ohhh thats bad noise but we're picking up speed..

into the boom gates...stop. and stall, start and rev and stall... select low, start and riiiiiide the clutch and bang and grind and put it back in low and we're off. pop high and turn the corner and yank yank yank the traditional series warning that youve left the front axle hooked up when you turn a corner on black top...

usual days crap later and fozzys up on the hoist. work out that IVe now got permanant 4x4 regardless of what I want so drop the front propshaft and just for the hell of it the tcase oil... which apart from a few drips doesnt drain eyeball the drain plug and its got some swarf on it which is odd as its a brass non magnetic plug. poke finger in hole, disturb the delicate crust of swarf and shavings and curse as about 2l of warmish 80/90 drains down my wrist and into my sleeve.

That might warrent more look see-ery so drop the access plate and the nhose out the bearings from the walls of the case, eyeball the gears.

so 2 days later, new tcase on and Im driving down to get my son from kindy, not a thing is going wrong till i get into the drive way and bang. clacky clacky clacky.......

leaver shuffling and clutch pressing combined with some brake actions and engine revving identifies me a failed bearing or damage to the 3rd gear of the main box.....

couldnt have happened before could it... or the other way around... at least if the main trans had gone first I would have done the tcase as a matter of course.....

and now to add insult to injury the parts wash that I left all the dead parts in has been cleaned out and the only thing I have left to show for it all is a scored hand brake drum and a handbrake assembly sans brake lining..

but it could have been worse.... at least its still driveable but its noisey as hell it could have also been the day before the actual trip and it could have been a show stopper, now all I have to do is find a new friction plate and pressure plate for a 2.25 SIIa, strip check and rebearing one of my spare boxes then install all of that and then put in the tcase I just attached to my now dying gearbox on the back and wait for the next bit to let go....

but the best bit... the bit that makes me sooo happy that I drive landrovers.... a bloke whose been bagging out my broken landy... just broke his non landrover and its going to take him twice as much work and twice as much money to fix. The icing is... his isnt drivable.

even when they're broken they're working.

oh god...... how did i miss those last couple of updates! loving your work Dave!

and yes, i know what you mean about an irrational fear of spiders, though i do my damndest to kill them.....

when i was living in the UK i had a huntsman crawl down the wall across the room from me as i was laying in bed reading late one night..... wtf? how DARE he! *load .22 air pistol with a wad of chewed up paper, and reduce spidey to 8 legs glued to the wall with a brown smear in the middle :-D

dad was *not* happy about being woken up by it

Originally Posted by Blknight.aus

"Amberly Tactical Air Control this is F111 Flight Convenient plot device weve just had something scream past us as angels 10 with a metalic debry trail, Are the guys in experimenal weapons doing something we should know about?"

"Flight convenient plot device this is ATAC, Negative ExWep Is cold, but we have just had confirmation that Farey has had an encounter with a spider, we are unsure of what type or size so cannot predict his ballistic flight profile or time. Suggest you expedite to angels 1 to maximise your time to observe his re-entry and take appropriate evasive manouvers"