304 thoughts on “HALLELUJAH”

  1. My contribution to ANZAC Day

    “Lest we forget” is not about the dead: it’s about the futility of war. Lest we forget!

  2. We will see where this goes. Some one had an advert on a free advert page. looking for people to do builders cleaning. That means going into a house, or unit after they finish the place but before any floor coverings etc are fitted and vacuuming up the dust and wiping everything down. I thought I will give it a go and called. After explaining the work, the woman asked if I was prepared to do a four hour unpaid trial shift. I had to make an instant decision.

    Now 25 years ago, I have said, ‘no thanks’ and hung up. But 25 years ago would not have been replying to a cleaning advert. Twenty five years I was not on the scrap heap just because I passed 50.

    So, against my better instincts, I said yes.

    I worked unpaid nearly five hours today, a Sunday, and at the end I was told I would get a call later in the week.

    And people are going to be required to find work at the age of sixty-nine, according to He Who Has Never Done a Day’s Real Work in His Life.

  3. Puffy,

    Keep all the details. Names, phone numbers etc. Company name or business name if used.

    Just in case.

  4. puffy – oh dear!

    My advice – if someone asks you to do an unpaid trial then run away.

    There’s a restaurant in Port Macquarie (I won’t mention the name, but stay away from anything that has to do with whales) that has been doing this for years – years and years – and I don’t know how they keep getting away with it. No 2 son was looking for work years ago and was sent to this place by Centrelink. They seemed nice, talked about their love of surfing – it was easy back then to see my son loved surfing, he was blond, tanned and had longish hair – and totally sucked him in. He did his night on unpaid trial in the kitchen, even buying a new white T-shirt as requested to wear. He worked his guts out until the early hours of the morning and was sent home with a ‘That was great, mate, we’ll ring you.’. They never rang.

    I had been to this restaurant when the original owners still ran it, and it was fantastic. But – the owners sold up and retired. This family and those we know well do not patronise that place now, even though it has won a few tourism awards. We don’t approve of slave labour or the owner’s business ethics. The same owners that ripped off my son are still there. they talk big about their ‘wonderful staff’ but we know the truth, as do others who fell for their spin. But this is a tourist town and there are always more newcomers willing to pay for seafood that is imported frozen and thawed in the kitchen. and to pay for service given by young workers on unpaid trials. They do not need the support of locals.

    If someone wants you to put in a few hours work then they pay you or it’s not on.

  5. Too good to wait until tomorrow morning – sorry, BK, for gazumping.

    Andrew P Street –
    View from the Street: Vote for Sophie Mirabella, Indi, or the hospital gets it
    And who’s sulking most about how persecuted they are at the ACL conference? Your news of the weekend, reduced to a snarky rant.
    http://www.smh.com.au/comment/view-from-the-street/view-from-the-street-vote-for-sophie-mirabella-indi-or-the-hospital-gets-it-20160424-godsqc.html#ixzz46jeDMwOk

    • Go for it, Damian!

      Let’s see how you go.

      Someone should tell him about where exactly acupuncture point are. A hint: they do not include cartilage.

  7. Saw this last night. From 2004, but still one of the best ever. It was a tribute to Geoge Harrison, now it’s a tribute to Prince as well.

  8. Just an observation. The views wwe Pubsters get of the blog are bit like the Theory of Relativity.

    What you see as current comments are not necessarily what t’other sees. Depends on your browser, among other things. So your “older comments” may be my “newer comments”.

    My keyboard has decided that a “w” is so good it has to be sent twice. I know, life’s a bitch!

  9. I knoww zero about Prince. I thought he was another Michael Jackson. Seems he was a creative genius.

  10. Sprout’s defences must have slipped. Who and how got this?

    A Manus Island asylum seeker who has been slated for release in Papua New Guinea as a processed refugee climbed a tree on Sunday to prevent guards from moving him to a crowded pre-release centre.

    Behrouz Bouchani, a Kurdish journalist and writer who fled Iran to seek asylum in Australia in 2013, told Guardian Australia that he was to be moved from one of the regional processing centre’s three main compounds, Foxtrot, to another compound, Oscar, because the PNG government had determined he was a genuine refugee.

    http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/apr/24/manus-asylum-seeker-deemed-refugee-climbs-tree-to-protest-settlement-in-png

    I suspect he is not quite ready for a neww phone

  17. I don’t usually make snarky comments about “over the road”. In fact this is my first (I think) in three years.

    But really, the angst, weeping, garment renting and gnashing of teeth at Poll Bludger over the fact that the “gerbils” haven’t jumped to it and gotten the site functioning perfectly within a couple of days of an obvious major meltdown in the service, is a sight to contemplate.

    The Regulars – I should note, not all – are behaving like babies that have had their dummies taken away.

    Musrum (surely a very experienced, talented and patient programmer) has been through (I think) 10 versions of his script to accommodate the changes that come unannounced by the site proprietor.

    Bemused is his champion, challenging anyone who dares to say “Meh… so what?” to a duel on the bloodied floor of his own ego.

    Old, retired programmers chime in with their own observations: one says it’s a scandal, another opines that in HIS day this would never be allowed.

    Ancient grudges have resurfaced from three or four years ago. Quotes have been retrieved from the archives to prove that so-and-so has always been an {insert epithetical nasty character slur here}.

    Minor annoyances like the comment box being at the top of the page excite threads dozens of comments long. High dudgeon is rife. Although most of the Bludgers don’t pay a cent for the service, the sense of entitlement is supreme: “We decide the fate of nations here. We DEMAND to be heard unfettered!” Can “We warn the Tsar!” be far behind?

    You’d think, from reading the disgusted comments, that nations were about to fail, institutions were set to decay and great men would be rendered mere ciphers in some grand, all-encompassing machine, devilishly constructed by the Forces Of Darkness, if avatars didn’t instantly appear, emojis were not enabled post haste and refreshing to the previous page after commenting was not repaired immediately (or sooner if possible).

    Protests that it’s only a beta version, and they’re lucky to fucking get anything at all, are met with accusations that those comments can only come from someone who obviously eats only vanilla ice cream (I am not joking). Without the chocolate topping, I suppose.

    Poor William, to his great credit (and I am in awe of his patience), is trying to keep them happy, but when Bemused takes over a thread and is in full aggressive self-justifying cry, you just can’t shut him up.

    I have never seen so much whingeing about a *free service* that is patently having problems, in my life. You’d really think the world was about to end.

  18. I’ve been lurking on Pollbludger for the past 3 years now since I moved here for most Auspol discussions, but, with this latest change with the enforced beta, I haven’t been visiting it at all other than to take a look at the latest polling track and news regarding that.

    It’s good to see I haven’t been missing out on much.

    For the record, I have never been very approving of sites that change their layout to an extent that it exclusively suits users of phones over those that still use desktop PC’s or laptops. I might be of a younger generation but I dislike this move to ‘apps’ for everything and all I want out of a website is something easy to read and interact with. Phones and androids and the like, I have never enjoyed using them in comparison to a keyboard.

  19. A fascinating article (illustrated) on life in the Chernobyl exclusion zone after the meltdown…

    “When the people left, nature returned,” Denys Vyshnevskiy, a biologist in the exclusion zone, told AFP during a visit, while nearby a herd of wild horses nosed around for food.

    He says while today’s animals in the exclusion area have shorter lifespans and produce fewer offspring, their numbers and varieties are growing at rates unseen since long before the Soviet Union’s 1991 collapse.

    “Radiation is always here and it has its negative impact,” he said.

    “But it is not as significant as the absence of human intervention.”

    http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-04-23/living-in-the-shadows-of-chernobyl/7342368

Comments are closed.