The Cultural Atlas of Australia is a digital map that displays the places and locations that appear in iconic Australian films, novels, and plays. Unsurprisingly, it includes the movie The Boys Are Back, centred at Myponga Beach and including memorable shots of the beautiful road running from the top of the hill down to the beach itself. At its height, at 300 metres above sea level, the top of the road enjoys glorious views for miles around, including of the St Vincent Gulf on one side, and the Myponga Reservoir on the other. It is an area of outstanding natural beauty.
So, what is the council, in concert with the local waste management people, proposing to put at this precise point? The answer, it turns out, is a dirty great rubbish dump! 30 metres of rubbish bins to line the side of the road.
Update 15th November 2021:
After some representations, this proposal has been ditched, thank goodness. In fairness, credit is due to the Executive Officer and the Independent Chairperson for intervening, and overturning a poor decision.
Pretty much everybody knows that “too cold” kills far more people in the world than “too hot”.[1] Everybody, that is, apart from the climate change nutters and their useful idiots.[2] Which makes a bit of a nonsense of claims that a couple of degrees of warming would kill us all.
But not so obvious is the “why” of all this. Unsurprisingly, there are excess winter deaths (EWD) all over the world. In Scandinavia, the EWD are around 5%. More surprising, if you look at warmer countries like Spain and Italy, the EWD are higher, at around 12%. And the EWD are especially high in Africa, where Sub-Saharan Africa, where it does not get that cold at all.
More uniform is the pattern of the healthiest temperature, in any one place. In other words, what is the temperature in any given place when the fewest people die? Unsurprisingly, the answer is at neither extreme: it is the temperature neither during very hot spells nor during cold snaps. But the best temperature always seems to be up towards the hot end of the scale.[3] Everywhere you look.
This fits in, of course, with historical observation: that civilisations typically thrive in warm periods,[4] and do less well in cold periods.[5] And also with modern migation patterns when people move for health reasons, from New York to Florida, from England to Southern Spain, from Melbourne to Queensland, et al.
By his paper Chilling Effects Scott Alexander helpfully sets out some data on all of this, and looks at some candidates by way of explanation. And finds none of them particularly compelling. With a modesty that is as refreshing as it is unusual in this area, he says he does not know quite what the driver is here.
[2] Of whom, of course, there is a very considerable number.
[3] Consistently around 80% of the way up the range.
[4] Particularly, the Minoan period, the Roman period and the Medieval Warm Period.
[5] The big example here, of course, is the last ice age. It was not until that ended that any real civilisation took place, although homo sapiens was around long before the current interglacial (but not getting on especially well until the earth warmed about 10k years ago).
Today has been a very worrying day. The news last night was that the drillers had got down to nearly 200 metres, and had not hit sufficient water. A dry hole is an expensive disappointment, if what one wants is a bore.
But the news this afternoon is that all is going to be well, it seems. At 205 metres, they have got half a litre of second of clean water, which should be ample to keep the holding tank topped up for irrigation purposes.
Hopefully, we will have a nice green garden – and croquet lawn – this summer.
A really helpful response from Shubb Capos in USA this week, when I asked about replacement sleeves for their excellent guitar capos.
I have a number of capos: for steel string guitar, Shubb are the best, for both 6 string and 12 string. Eventually, after quite a while, the rubber sleeves start to perish. These rubber sleeves are a small beer item, costing buttons (a fraction of the whole capo) but the Shubb people were very helpful in identifying the best way to get a few replacements without tedious mailing issues (from Jacaranda Music in Norwood, as it turned out). Otherwise, they would have been willing to do me a special order by way of delivery for the US.
The garden and the lawns (including my croquet lawn) at The Phenelry clearly need quite a bit more water, in the summers. So the chaps from Underdale Drilling are dilling a bore.
It is really quite a dusty process!
Extracting water from aquafers is really quite suspect, from an environmental point of view. But the water we are hoping to find here is more of the run-off variety, derived from rain, and certainly not plutonic water.
I have been asked what I have on Ian Fenwick. This is the content of the current draft (excluding the images):
Major Ian Fenwick (1910 – 1944)
Ian Fenwick was an artist and a soldier. He was born in September 1910 in Malmesbury, Wiltshire, the son of Captain Charles Harry Fenwick of the 60th Rifles, who had married an American socialite called Lilian Everett from Newport, Rhode Island. Ian’s father, who was known as Harry, had achieved fame of a sort by owning Why Not, which won the Grand National at Aintree in 1894[1].
Harry and Lilian had three children: Elma[2], Audrey and Charles.
But then, in 1904, Lilian died in Madeira, Portugal. She was just 30 at the time; Harry was 41. Five years later, Harry married a young Australian girl, Winifred Ryrie, from Cooba, New South Wales. She was 24 years his junior, not much older than his oldest daughter, and the next year, Ian was born.
The family lived at Rutland Gate, just south of Hyde Park in London. The 1911 census shows that they had, living with them in the house, 3 nurses, a butler, a cook, 2 housemands, a lady’s maid, a kitchen maid and a footman[3].
Xi Jinping, the President of China (the biggest emitter of carbon dioxide these days) will not be attending COP26. Nor will the Pope (traditionally the biggest emitter of more old-fashioned hot air). Very wise, on both their parts.
So far, these sorts of conferences have been talk shops, which have led to very little real action. On the whole, climate change porn has so far been quite popular, as long as it is just talk, with very little real action. But I think things might be starting to change now. In the UK, people are starting to see what it means when bonkers policies are actually introduced. The cost of electricity rises. The cost of the last available gas rises even more, and people cannot afford to heat their homes. Grannies start dying. In the overall scheme of things, grannies do die, as they hit old-age, and they sometimes leave a bit of money to their grateful children and grandchildren. But we do not like to see them dying of cold. That is more of a Russian thing.
And so, when these things start to bite, people in the UK will start asking questions:
I watched the news on SBS this evening. It was a profoundly depressing experience, not so much because of what was being covered, but because of the way that it was being covered:
Covid: a lengthy part of the news. About 15% news, and 85% propaganda.
Cop26: about 10% news, and 90% climate change propaganda.
Fuel shortages in the UK: about 50% news, and 50% anti-Brexit propaganda.
Chinese military intimidation of Taiwan: this was much better, being mostly news. But a very worrying story, of course.
Demonstrations in Chile: about 60% news, and 40% a cri de coeur on behalf of the illegal migrants.
Sport: I don’t know. I turned it off. On the basis of past experience, it would have been heavily loaded in favour of women playing football or cricket or rugby, if there were any women’s games to report on.
SBS used to be the best news channel in Australia, and pretty much the only channel which reports on what’s going on in the world, as opposed to more parochial content. Now, propaganda is its game.
I have a nasty feeling that with this level of wall to wall messaging, the world is headed to a bad place. The overreaction to Covid has dramatically accelerated totalitarian control, and the erosions of freedom of movement and freedom of speech. The climate change nonsense is even worse. They have softened up people to the idea of pointless state-imposed economic carnage and loss of freedom with their overreaction to Covid, and I think they are going to capitalise on that with a full-bore drive to world poverty with climate change. Except that it won’t be quite the whole world; China and Russia are having none of this nonsense, although China is diplomatic enough to mouth a few empty platitudes.
phenell 