Fremantlebiz - Paul's Letter from Australia

The year of the rat marches on

Well, it's the end of March already. It seems to have been a fast month. Lots of unwelcome bills in the letterbox. It's lucky we are careful shoppers in the food department. There's no butter mountain in this country.

I see that the Australian prime minister Mr Rudd is swanning about overseas on a 17 day excursion telling foreign governments that he can help them run their affairs better. The message I actually get is that he can go away for seventeen days and his absence here makes no difference at all. Inflation is still rife, the crime rate is soaring and Australian youngsters still can't afford to buy a house.

He may as well stay overseas with his corporeal-zillionaire wife and continue mixing it with the rich and famous. Hell, why not extend the trip for a couple more weeks? Who gives a rat's arse? He won't be missed here. He's become something of an irrelevancy. I wouldn't be surprised if he sucks his wife's toes?

During the past weekend a lot of Australians were sucked into "Earth Hour." The organisers wanted the good citizens of this nation to turn their house lights off for an hour and feel good about saving the environment, or oil, or something. The most annoying part of the exercise was afterwards when Peter Garrett the federal Labor minister for screaming skulls, plastic bags and Tasmanian wood pulp mills, announced on TV that it had been a great success. Now that it's over, all the lights are back on again.

With April almost upon us, the next face saver for governments will probably be Anzac Day - 25 April. Already the newspapers are stepping up their rehashing of war stories. The number of WW2 veterans are starting to dwindle and so those who remain are receiving more attention than they've been used to. There's even a front page photo in The West Australian today of a 96 year old woman who served cups of tea to the troops in the early 1940s.

My wife and I called into JB Hi-Fi on Saturday. A few weeks ago she bought a newly released boxed set of nine DVDs titled The Young Indiana Jones (Volume 1). I feel a duty to say that these several beautifully crafted 2 hour movies by Lucas Films have been pretty darned good entertainment for the entire family. But there is also some 30 hours of documentaries to provide authentic background information of the historical plots which young Indie encountered in the movies. All in all, the set seemed pretty good value, even to a tightwad like me..

Volume 2 was released a couple of weeks ago. That was the purpose of our visit to JB's on Saturday. My wife had a mission to part with another eighty bucks. She feared that the edition was going to be a sell out, and she may be correct. Volume 1 was no longer on display and Volume 2 was going fast.

There's a Volume 3 yet to come. I expect it'll be soon, because there's a new Indiana Jones movie being released in the not too distant future.

The local JB Hi-Fi store has a very large display of LCD HD TVs - all the big brands. The price is dropping fast on these items and JBs have a ruthless price-cutting policy to beat any competitor.

The days of set-top digital-conversion boxes are pretty well over, as are the days of cathode ray tube TVs. If anyone would like a large colour CRT set in perfect working order for free, please contact me. It belonged to one of my sons and he made the HD upgrade a while ago. But I feel pretty sure we'll be upgrading soon as well, so I'd be quite happy to give away our old TV too. It's also in perfect working order. While I'm at it, I have a licensed 1982 diesel Toyota Hilux in the driveway with no major faults. I'd part with it for $2,100 or near offer.

But back to the TV business. I suppose there'll be a surge of sales with the Beijing Olympics. However, the trouble with any Australian coverage of Olympic Games is that an inordinate amount of air time is devoted to swimming, which I reckon is one of the most boring of all sports. Already the TV stations are working themselves into a lather with coverage of pre-games swimming championship trials. I say, "Boring! Boring! Boring!" with capital Bs, even though the commentators try to convince us otherwise.

It seems it may rain here on the last day of March. No change that, it is raining. Looking out the front window the sky is overcast. The remnants of a cyclone are drifting down from the north. I just checked the online radar. Yep, it's definitely going to rain plenty. Like in the sense of being a major deluge. From the look of the radar picture at 6:30am this might turn out to be one of the wettest days on record. It'll be good for the burnt out bushland at Wireless Hill.

© MMVIII Paul R. Weaver.

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Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write at least couple of million words. Zzzzzzzz!