Get your motors warmed up as Friday Raffle night is about to begin
Make sure you have plenty of fuel
And Lubrication
Even if they are on the soft side.
Beware There are many dangers ahead of us
But keeping a cool head and racing as a team, victory will be made all that easier.
Our race starter CK Watt, will begin the raffles shortly.
Hector wishes you all the luck in the world.
Have a good evening.
THE PUB 
The comments are very unkind to Troy Boy and the Emperor Penguin.
Money isn’t everything. There is thing called influence, patronage – call it what you will. Nevertheless
Naturally, the ABC posts an irrelevancy like this to show how good it is at investigative “journalism”
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-03-16/ncc-orchestrated-spam-campaign-ahead-of-liberal-spill/6323206
It wasn’t key to saving Tone’s bacon, you nitwits.
Stick to showing BBC stuff if that is the best you can do.
Someone point Grunt to this
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/16/vanuatus-president-blames-climate-change-for-extreme-weather
Pie in the sky rubbish from Baird. A desperate attempt to win back votes on the far north coast.
State Election 2015: New and faster XPT fleet trains for country NSW
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/state-election-2015-new-and-faster-xpt-fleet-trains-for-country-nsw/story-fni0cx12-1227262559904
I agree the XPTs are getting old and tired, and have maintenance issues, but the current government has been very unwilling to talk about replacements because of the cost involved. Instead there have been proposals to take the trains out of service and replace them with buses. Yep, buses. Or privatising the service and leaving it to a buyer to replace the trains. The same argument was used for these ideas as Baird is using now – faster and cheaper.
http://www.theherald.com.au/story/377696/countrylink-trains-may-be-sold-or-axed/
I use the north coast CountryLink XPTs a couple of times a year. I can tell you something that every traveler on that line knows – the XPTs, and all the other trains who use the line, can only travel at a speed the track allows. The north coast rail line is not straight, it twists and turns and there are places where a train has to travel very slowly. Sometimes you feel it would be faster to get out and walk.
The line is also in very poor condition, has been for well over a decade now. Bob Carr chose to spend money on the Sydney Olympics instead of on maintaining an essential service and the tracks have been in decline ever since.
The service is essential, but it runs at a loss. How will privatising it make things cheaper? Fares will have to rise substantially, and the current subsidies for people on pensions and benefits will, most likely have to go.
Baird’s ‘promise’ is a lie. If re-elected he will shove this into the too-hard basket and we will be expected to forget all about it.
I have a story about NSW Coalition governments and the north coast XPTs.
Back when Nick Greiner was premier his government decided to do some cost cutting. They decided that money could be saved by taking the sleeper cars off the north coast XPTs. This turned out to be a very bad move, the sleeper cars were popular, they made the long trip between Sydney and the far north coast easier for many passengers. Eventually the government had to bow to pressure from the public and put the cars back.
The sneaky bastards tried to con us country bumpkins into believing the re-installed cars were a brilliant new addition to the trains. Bruce Baird was Minister for Transport at the time, and he attended ceremonies at stations along the line to unveil the new/old carriages. There were bands and flags and ribbon cuttings, the works. No-one was fooled though. It was a brilliant example of people power getting a service restored.
Nick Greiner had been booted out by his own party by then, and the Fahey government continued with the spin though and continued to talk about the ‘introduction of the new sleeper cars to the north coast XPTs’ for quite some time.
NEW THREAD
Comments here close presently (in the Shakespearean sense).