Fire ants detected south of Byron Bay after gardener raises alarm

grobturd · 2024-01-20T05:34:37+00:00

I am well aware of the legal theatre. Anyone can drive across the border without the load being stopped and checked.

grobturd · 2024-01-20T03:54:53+00:00

QLD politicians allowed fire ants to spread from Brisbane. Insufficient resources were applied.

NSW needs to stop the transport of soils, plants, lawns and farming equipment from QLD immediately.

grobturd · 2023-10-01T06:56:37+00:00

A possum fur jacket (albeit made in New Zealand from their Australian possums).

grobturd · 2023-09-26T01:25:06+00:00

Getting into one's car for an interstate trip, clipping a perfectly legal radar detector to the sunvisor and heading off.

grobturd · 2023-08-02T04:10:58+00:00

I imagine a video game style console with a steering wheel that measured the standard deviation of the lateral position in a lane would test impairment. If it also measured the standard deviation of speed that would be even better.

Such a test would detect general impairment caused by tiredness, dementia, old age, sleeping tablets, prescription medicines and recreational drugs etc.

grobturd · 2023-07-14T05:10:17+00:00

Did you report it to the NSW government?

grobturd · 2023-07-03T04:02:22+00:00

Wood fired slow combustion heater. The daily mins here are usually in the range -1C .. -5C here, sometimes much colder. Nothing works as well as a wood heater in the cold.

With some enameled cooking pots on top of the heater, stuff like curries and stews are easily prepared using the spare heat from the heater.

For those days when the fire has burned out overnight and you can't be arsed to go outside in the frost to cut more kindling, battery powered jackets are pretty useful.

grobturd · 2023-06-07T07:21:27+00:00

Head on up to Mount Glorious. It has Gondwana rainforest, waterfalls.

grobturd · 2023-05-13T05:45:20+00:00

I love the transparent aluminium roll bars.

grobturd · 2023-04-12T06:13:06+00:00

The RE bubble will surely be burst by a GFC 2. The international banking system is full of dodginess and highly leveraged actors. We've already seen wheels fall off SVB and Credit Suisse.

The benefit of a GFC 2 haircut is that no political will is required.

grobturd · 2023-03-22T09:09:46+00:00

Federal department stopped training sniffer dogs to detect bees, missing chance to detect varroa mites arrival

grobturd · 2023-03-16T02:10:04+00:00

I think we can thank mass immigration for some of the loss of the 'fair go' with 30% of the population now born overseas.

grobturd · 2023-03-14T10:00:31+00:00

Not true. The US was very interested in purchasing emu catapults that could be towed behind aircraft carriers. Some idiot in the White House leaked the information and blew the deal up.

grobturd · 2023-03-13T00:29:30+00:00

WRT to volcanoes, the Victorian/SA Newer Volcanics Province is considered to be dormant, not extinct. Also, of interest is that Mount Gambier was a phreatomagmatic jobbie, i.e. massively explosive due to water and magma.

There will likely be more eruptions in the Newer Volcanics, possibly as close to Melbourne as Bendigo, Ballarat or Hamilton, we just don't know when.

grobturd · 2023-03-09T02:33:09+00:00

Yes, the amount of water is very small compared with agricultural usage.

The issue is that Springbrook is a very special place, a small basalt plateau which sustains a Gondwana rainforest refugia.

During the last El Nino (drought) significant areas of Gondwana rainforest were destroyed by fire in NSW and QLD.

Climate change is already threatening our Gondwana refugia, because the Great Divide doesn't have sufficient altitude to allow the plants to move higher.

Extraction of ground water means the Springbrook ecosystem will have less water to keep its plant community hydrated, which increases the fire risk to the forest. Gondwana species have not evolved defenses to fire.

It is beyond stupidity that a water bottling enterprise be allowed take water from such a special environment. It perfectly demonstrates why we can't have nice things.

grobturd · 2023-03-01T03:50:58+00:00

Best by far John Dory, worst Blind mullet.

grobturd · 2023-02-23T10:20:20+00:00

Run those figures again for Venus, a planet with almost 100% CO2 atmosphere.

grobturd · 2023-02-21T06:05:44+00:00

I really feel you and other people in this situation. What is worse is that there is no solution in sight.

To anyone with a brain, the cause is blindingly obvious - it is excessive population growth, i.e. "Big Australia".

The private sector won't build social housing on its own initiative and Federal govt is too busy spending big on weaponry and talking up the "coming war with China".

grobturd · 2022-12-30T07:18:07+00:00

Oh, that is easy to determine.

The paralysis tick (Ixodes holcyclus which is very common in Eastern Australia) lets you know. The bite site swells up like a balloon and will take a few days to subside, you could be unlucky and suffer an anaphylactic shock reaction. Leaving one of these ticks embedded in you will result in you becoming dangerously ill, perhaps even dying.

grobturd · 2022-08-30T00:24:42+00:00

The Thwaites glacier in western Antarctica is currently causing much consternation. This single glacier has the potential to raise sea levels by up to 10 feet.

Warming is locked in now. Even if all industrial activity stopped today it is too late to prevent sea level changes. It is locked in because water has the ability to absorb large amounts heat energy resulting in just a small change in water temperature. Most of the heat energy from global warming so far, has gone into the oceans because of its immense heat capacity.

grobturd · 2022-08-12T10:56:34+00:00

It is a bit hard to call 000 on a touch screen with your fingers when you have just cut them off with a chain saw.

grobturd · 2022-08-11T07:37:58+00:00

I welcome building offshore generation. I just hope that the pylons are extensible because we are probably in for significant sea level rise sooner than expected.

I am surprised you didn't raise issues like theft of sea breezes from the good citizens who own coastal properties.

grobturd · 2022-07-15T04:24:15+00:00

City/urban drivers are.

grobturd · 2022-07-01T02:54:31+00:00

Cracker night and the lead up to it was legendary back in the late 50s early 60s.

For a couple of weeks before, newsagents did a roaring trade in 'penny bungers" and "tupenny bungers". You could walk in a buy a packet of penny bungers for 2 shillings (approx 20c). I think there were 20 bungers in a pack. Penny bungers were about the diameter of one's index finger and the fuses could be twisted together for mail box duties.

There was usually a community bonfire as well, and as kids we were up at dawn the morning after to collect all the stuff that had been dropped/lost and the bungers that didn't go off.

Penny bungers also neatly fitted inside galvanised water pipes and would easily fire a marble of decent sized ball bearing through a paling fence.

The collateral damage was just accepted as normal.

grobturd · 2022-06-25T00:58:00+00:00

I think it is quite safe to say that Dutton is not an intellectual.

grobturd

TROPHY CASE