Monday, 13 April 2009

Easter on the Swan River, Western Australia

Howdy whoever you are and however you got here. This entry is just going to be a couple of happy snaps taken by numba1son, LSCP ("LifeStyleChoicesPartner" for those who've come in late, or in this case "Lovely Skipper Cute'n'Pretty"), and yours truly.
The context is that we decided NOT to join the crazy and mad annual Easter migration out of Perth to Down South to do some camping, and hung out on the river for days on end instead.
Our first overnighter was in front of/below Christchurch diagonally opposite from Point Walter (near the very view LSCP has from her office and dance studio), then around to Matilda Bay for a day of frolicing in the shallows with family and the consumption of numerous cold beers, then our regular spot at Herrison Island lagoon near the WACA, then all the way up to Guildford, and then as far as it was safe to actually take the boat which turned out to be past Caversham House and Sandleford wineries and up near Bandiup prison.
Which all will mean absolutely nothing to most folk not from Perth. So, enough waffle, here are some pics:
LSCP enjoying the Day Bed below Christchurch
numba1son learning The Cube
derspatz being derspatz (ie, smug and good looking. heh)
the view from below Christchurch over to Point Walter. LSCP impressed me the next morning by paddling the wave-ski all the way from there to Matilda Bay, a self-powered distance of 8.7 kilometres of the total 82.3 kilometres travelled over the 3 days and nights on the water.
(big gap in picture taking due to socialising and drinking)
2 nights later.
cruising past a nice old cruiser way up the river at Caversham House

numba1son gameboying. Heh at the title of the book under the scrabble. It reads: "Don't Sweat The Small Stuff ... and it is ALL small stuff !"
Lovely Skipper Cute'n'Pretty (LSCP) getting us home (just gone past Garrett Road Bridge in Bayswater ... a bit tricky with the extra vessels in tow.)
Anyway, here is to hoping your Easter Break was as wet and liquid as ours ... and you remembered to offer suitable thanks and appreciation to The One who continues to make it all possible, year, after year, after year.

regarDS

Tuesday, 27 January 2009

Oz day on the Swan River in Perth, Western Australia

Just got back to land from two great days and evenings relaxing on the Swan River in front of the beautiful city of Perth. I've been wanting to take my own boat out for Oz/Invasion day for years but I usually had to be on shift ... but not this year. Yay !
So, numba1son, LSCP, and I, put in at the boat ramp down the street from us at around 7pm on Sunday night (the night before Oz day) and he and I putted around to pick LSCP up from an even closer spot to home after she took the boat and trailer back for safe-keeping. Then it was time to cruise downstream for but a couple of kms and hook/raft up with a mate who was already busy "relaxing" with his own LSCP on this nice little toy:

A few snags and ales later it was time for us to give the love birds some peace and quiet and to motor back upstream for about half a click (if that) and pull in for the night at "The Lagoon" at Herrison Island. We had it all to ourselves and all was calm with much high pitch whining in the air. Bloody mosquitoes ! Ah well, the price of taking shelter from the wind ... and nothing a bit of roll-on repellent didn't fix.

About 10am we managed to raise enough energy to motor back out into the river and so we headed off and found a great position next to the skyshow perimeter looking back at the city from South-Eastish Perth. A bit of a battle getting to it mind you. It was low tide so I had to pull up the 135hp outboard and drop down the 8hp kicker instead - and even THAT had to be kept with prop about level with the bottom of the keel in order to avoid kicking up mud and crap !

Not a place to be diving off boats. Anyway, here we are in the afternoon chop which fortunately did settle down in the early evening and by midnight had become dead calm for the rest of the night. Oh, and not only did we have the Biggest Flag in those parts of the river, but I only saw one other Red Ensign anyway. The Channel 10 news chopper made a point of hovering low nearby and filming towards LSCP and I cuddling on the bow with that Big Flag flying over behind us. Her cover is well and truly blown now ! Heh.

These were some of our closest boating neighbours. Really nice folk in "Fuzzy Duck" (far right) and a bunch of Really Big ski-boats rafted next to them ... apparently all friends of their son. They all spent most of the day floating around in arm-chair thingies. I'd hate to think of how their skin looked when they finally got out ... not just because of the "pruning" affect, but also because of the 2stroke oil, etc, that ends up spread through the top 10cm or so of water from all the dirty outboards (guilty, your honour).

Anyway, ya can't spend a day or two on the river and NOT get in ... so here is yours truly running the gauntlet on the "Swan River Whalers" (that's "Bull Sharks" anywhere else in the world ... nasty buggers and they are making a comeback in our waters apparently). Numba1son and I also got into some water fights with lotsa kids and dads on other boats. I put the 8hp on my inflatable/tender which gave me a speed advantage, but I tell you what, they were pretty cunning with the outflanking and balloon artillery. All I had was speed and a bucket ... which was also pretty good for catching what was squirted or flung at ya. Heh. It made things pretty hairy for any to-ing and fro-ing from our pozzie on the river to where the "Big Toy" mentioned earlier was moored, so we had to give up on that particular trip as the day progressed - kinda hard to transport cameras and guitars and keep an LSCP's hair-dry when there are gangs of kids armed with super-soakers, balloon water-bombs, and buckets just waiting for you to take a step off your craft.

Yeah, the unwritten rule of the river that day was if you left your main boat, you were fair game for a soaking. Great Stuff. Good clean harmless fun ... well, as clean as it can be in a muddy 2stroke soaked river. I should mention that the only water delivery device numba1son had at his disposal was a silly little trigger squirt atomiser used to keep one cool. Sure, it could manage a straight squirt if you twisted the stupid little top on it, but we are talking about a pinhole stream against massive water-guns that could suck up litres of river in one move and eject it 5 metres with another. His comment ? "How emasculating". His battle cry was "I'm a man" as he squeezed the trigger to let fly with his feeble dribble that only managed to wet his own feet. LOL. Never a truer word spoken.

Here is a view of our front row vantage, taken from the tender. Pretty choppy still. Note the plane doing acrobatics to the right. There was A Lot of that stuff going on all afternoon. Everything from squadrons of Bi-planes (pics coming up) to cowboys flying choppers backwards or pin-wheeling across the sky, to water bomber planes and choppers, to sea-planes landing and taking off on the river, to military jets doing the "shock and awe" thing at noisy low altitude. Top Stuff, all of it !

Here are but a couple of pics of the Air Stuff on display. No, don't expect any photos of the fireworks ... we were all too busy enjoying the 30min display of some 20,000 shells being ejected into the sky in pleasing arrangements of colour and noise to worry about photographing it.




Okay, there WAS one flag bigger than ours. :) ... but I had something prettier, closer to mine - and I'm not just talking about that beautiful wooden craft to the left/behind ours. Heh.

Anyway, to any Oz readers, I hope your Oz day was a True Blue and "Ridgy-Didge" as ours was.

... and as the Oz flag flew off into the sunset, numba1son sat quietly contemplating the fact that in but a few days it is "Back to School again". Heh++

regarDS

Friday, 19 December 2008

Out and About in the Real World

Howdy folks ... notice how quiet I've been lately in all the usual places ? Hasn't it been wunderbar ? Heh.

Here is why. I'm currently typing this from an Internet Cafe in cold but most interesting city of Edinburgh while LSCP is out shopping for tartan ... or tartin out and about at the shops or something like that.

We've been doing the Planes, Trains and Automobiles thing for the last week, plus a bit of shipping. Started in London, then up to Newcastle on the train a few days later, then over to Cologne Germany for a couple of nights via the Channel and Holland, all just so we could slosh down litres of Glühwein and let me make an eisel of myself with my poor Deutsches language skills. Then it was back to Newcastle and a train up to where we are now.


Anyway, enough waffle, so here are some pix instead.


Business class. Only way to travel.

Cheeky fellas at Buckingham Palace. :)

LSCP "eyeing" out London ... Gettit ?

First London Pub Lunch ... which wouldn't be complete without Pints !

Spam, lovely spam ...

Here we are , from "Station to Station"

To the Tower with her !

"The whole world is a stage" ... especially at Shakespear's Globe

Glühwein mit Ameretto. That's "mulled wine with extra illcohol" ... compulsory street trinken !

My xmas present !

Something to do on the Channel Crossing ? :)

okay, I dunno when I'll get the chance to drop another line so deem Mery Bah Humbugs still included.

regarDS

Saturday, 6 December 2008

Songs of the Labyrinth

"Last night" LSCP and I went to the Perth Concert hall to watch Feyd-Rautha looking like Duke Leto Atreides singing "Massage in a Brothel" whilst playing the Lute with an extremely talented Bosnian mate named Edin Karamazov.

Okay okay, it was really "Songs from the Labyrinth" of which you can read all about here: http://classicalmusic.suite101.com/a..._the_labyrinth and here for Edin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edin_Karamazov

We were in the stalls literally the back row for the support act and unfortunately for everyone around (and the poor soul it happened to) the colostomy bag for someone in a wheelchair near us broke/leaked about the same time the lights went down.

Real eye-stinging stuff. Sympathies to the poor person it happened to; sh!t happens ... but please pardon us for not being able to handle it.

Think of being trapped inside a tipped-over porta-potty towards the end of a "Big Day Out" festival, and not being able to scream out for help.

So, come interval we went down to the front desk and explained the predicament (at that stage we didn't realize it was the issue just described - we thought it was something wrong with the Concert Hall loos wafting in through the exit) and asked with eyes streaming from acid burns, to be moved anywhere else, please, for the love of Loki & Thor, anywhere !

Apologies were issued along with two new tickets to anywhere else.

The anywhere else turned out to be middle seats 5 rows back from the stage, barely 8m away from Gordon Matthew Sumner out of his comfort zone. Twas great to see his humbleness, serious efforts, and sweat upon the brow as opposed to the distant blurr we witnessed early this year at Members Equity Stadium when he was touring with "The Police".

On ya to the team on stage, but big boos to the purile young things sitting to our left and in front of us to our left who insisted on heaping giggles upon noisy giggles (much to the embarrasement of all around and probably even Sting onstage) while watching Erin doing some amazing/incredible/frantic lute playing in a quieter balladic piece (they thought he looked amusing whilst playing the instrument the way it traditionally is supposed to be played, apparently.)

The burst colostomy bag was far less offensive than that Stye of Giggle-Gutses. Such effing Ozzie audiences don't deserve to be exposed to quality ... talk about casting pearls before swine !

Anyway, cheers once again to the Perth Concert Hall Staff who looked after us and who explained the full situation when we went back to thank them after the concert.

Cheers to Sting and his crew. Great show and thanks for coming back to Western Australia again. Glad you didn't get blown up when you took a wrong turn East off the beach just North of Swanbourne* earlier that day.

Okay, rant out ... back to Lurk/Away mode. If you really miss me, I may be updating my blogs via email from time to time over the next month. See: http://derspatz.blogspot.com and http://derblatz.blogspot.com , oh, and even http://www.flickr.com/photos/derspatz/

Oh, and in case I don't pop back in before, deem "Bah Humbug" and "Happy Saturnalia" included for later this month.

regarDS
* Nudist Beach ... Sting had accidentally walked through the middle of it when on a stroll up from Cottesloe Beach, so he apparently went left to avoid coming back down through it again.

Left of the beach is the Military Firing range, with potentially unexploded ordinance a-lurking here and there.

Giant Steps is what you take, walking on a bomb !

Thursday, 4 December 2008

Get Up Stand Up, GetUp! for your Lefts ...

Just when I thought I could put the circle-jerking Fanatical Religious Zealots over at Whirlpool's "ILCF" (ISP Level Content Filtering) forum thread in a blog thread all but itself (see the "derblatz" link) and leave it out of this one, they go and bring a whole new level of scary and disturbed comedy to the stage ... stuff so internutty that I can deem it worthy of a rant in here.

Hang on to your noses coz this is gonna get a little more offensive than usual. :)

As you may have realised, I've found the "waa, waa, waa"ing going on among the aforementioned quite fascinating. I mean, who couldn't help but be amused by a whole bunch of folk going "Teh Governet is out to enslave the nation and take away free speech, it is Hitler and Stalin and Mao all over again" (always funny to hear Gen-XYZers say that !) when at best the unlikely reality is that all of a sudden they may have to start paying instead of saying "Thank you for the music, the songs I'm stealing" or the movies they are "pirating", as well as face the prospect of having to get through a few more layers of conscience in order to click one handed through the kind of online material that their Grandmas, Mothers, Wives, Girlfriends, Sisters and Daughters would probably most wish did not even exist in the first place, let alone that their grandkids, dads, husbands, boyfriends and brothers were encouraging its continued development and proliferation along with all the heartache, degradation, disrespect and even slavery it brings !

Ok, I exaggerated. I realise the Gen-XYZers aren't necessarily big on "thank you"s ...

Anyway, these forever plugged in lifeless worshippers of "The Internut" who deem it to be the sacred cow of our age as well as unimaginatively consider it "the last bastion of free speech" want the likes of you and I to think that they have our best interests at heart by trying to PREVENT suitable and justifiable national rating and control of internut/online content as it is done in The Real World where all the Real Living is done.

Yeah right ... get your sticky hands off it - we all know who you really are thinking of; you're not fooling anyone other than yourselves if you really believe that.

So what are these fanatical virtual anarchists up to now ? Well it seems that there is no loathsome low to go to when it comes to the situation of maintaining the link between The Addict and The Supply/Poison. They've now reached the stage where they are haplessly handing over cash to an Oz organization that is so Radically-Extreme-Yet-Carefully-Camouflaged-Left that they make the Evil Lefty Greens look like die Hitler-Jugend !

But Of Course I am referring to "GetUp!". If you've not heard of them before, the "GetUp!" stands for "Greenie Environmentalist Terrorists Undermining Peace!" though they would never tell you it stands for that ... but Der Apfel fällt nicht weit vom Baum, ja?

This gaily painted sinister lobbying group casts the combined shadow of every Lefty political party you could imagine, including those yet to be spawned from whatever Bog of Eternal Stench it is that continually manages to foist such wrongness upon common humanity.

Think of every issue and controversy that divides Oz and you will find the GetUp! crowd busy lobbying in favour of those on the WRONG side of the division and working towards making things even WORSE for Oz than it already is.

This unsavoury mob not only worked hard spending conned, uh, donated coin to put Kevin747 into Government at the last Federal Election, but also had the favour gratefully returned by being allocated no less than an alleged ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTEEN SEATS in KRudds own little circle-jerk involving the ridiculous and highly unrepresentative "Summit of 1000 Best And Brightest Brains".

HA and BAH !

With so much "Left" on the collection of 1000 chattering useless clueless noses in the publicly funded trough, nongs, it is no wonder our nation is rapidly being reduced to going around in circles ... having one leg shorter than the other tends to do that, but I digress.

So what are the ingredients of this cake half baked ?

On one hand we have a bunch of internut worshipping freeloaders worried about having to pay for supply and Do The Right Thing for a change, and on the other we have a shady organization with the typical Loony Lefty Left agendas always pragmatically happy to relieve the naive of their coin and raise their lobbying profile at the same time by associating themselves with popular faddish causes likely to get media attention.

Real "Cake and Eat it too" stuff ... and history tells us what usually happens to THOSE types.

Oh, I should mention that because they are a political lobbying group, thankfully the coin fleeced from the seduced desperate special interest groups that sustain and sponsor their true evil causes, is not tax deductible - so it isn't ALL bad.

So what is going to be the likely outcome of all this ILCF hoohaa ?
What is going to be the likely result of the GetUp! marriage to the ugly useless bride once the dowry runs out ? A dowry that could be much better spent in so many other ways and places ?
(ah, but this ain't about charity or taking care of the needy - this is about maintaining a mainline connection to The Drug !)
Oh, who cares ... fools and their money are always soon parted and there are a million and one more interesting things to be involved in out there.
Some even via the Internut here and there ...

Anyway, to paraphrase one Captain Oates, a truly noble and brave soul (as opposed to moi), "I am just going offline and may be some time".

All this online madness is prompting me for some overdue DownTime along with a Reality Check, so I'm out to explore life offline for a while.

Oh yeah, just in case I don't pop back in here before next year, deem a Merry Bah Humbug and Happy Saturnalia to you too. :)

Keep it Real and if not, don't be too internutty ...

regarDS

Wednesday, 26 November 2008

Blog Clog and Circumventing Filterers

I've decided to head off the blog clog that has been beginning to form in here as a result of my recent fascination with the funny fanatical folk at whirlpool forums busy worrying about their sacred cow; the internut.
How am I addressing the blog clog ? By creating a secondary blog, that's how.
Just like this one, there is no "sitemeter" nor any kind of tracking to let me know who has been visiting, and just like this one, there is no comment roll nor private messaging enabled.
What you will find at http://derblatz.blogspot.com/ are all the messages I've written at the whirlpool forums, including the ones that various questionable and amusing forms of moderating have tried to remove from public record with lazy/unrelated/slack/and even corrupt excuses such as "trolling", etc.
Click on the labels up at the right on the "derblatz" blog and see exactly what I mean.
Ah, but it is a tough and thankless job being a Mod so it isn't surprising when they favour the majority points of view over the contrary minority view ... tis much easier to keep the peace that way after all. As a pragmatist I can well understand and appreciate that, so no hard feelings, kids ...
As for this blog ... it's back to normal programming should I have anything particularly interesting or particularly banal or particularly offensive to share.
Maybe next week ...
regarDS

Wednesday, 19 November 2008

Let's do a time-warp again ...

"Today I ..." spent some of my day-light savings by sitting out in the sun and taking a time-warp back to my childhood by making the effort to give my beaten up old Blundies* a well over-due polish.
Earlier today I resisted the urge to cheat and take the easy way out by buying that sponge delivered "scuff stuff", and instead opted for a tin of Dark Tan Kiwi, a tin of neutral Dubbin (for waterpoofing after the polish), a $1 soft-cloth, and a $1 Brush ... all made for the job.
My after school duties (to earn my 20c a week pocket money) when I was a kid was to chop the wood, light the scary Bremair Hotwater system, and polish my Barters (with the compass in one of the heels) whether I had actually worn them that day or not ... they usually came off my feet the moment I was out of sight of the house and I spent the day at school as barefoot as possible.
I mostly hated all of those jobs - as one would when having to do them day after day, year after year. Today was different.
I popped the lid on the 38g Kiwi polish and The Smell of it began the count-down to the time-warp. Putting one of the Blundy Boots on my left hand and plunging the cloth into the polish to wipe up a big mess of it prepared the way further and by the time I had smeared the first of the boots all over with the wonderfully smelly finger staining polish, I was grinning my head off and well and truly in my past some 35 years ago and wondering why I used to hate doing this so much.
Talk about being a relaxing and an instantly satisfying task. Scuffy/chipped/faded/grotty/riff-raffy looking boots soon transformed into dark and clean and healthy looking leather. I smeared, I wiped, I brushed and brushed, and allowed the smells and sounds of it all along with the sun warming my body to remind me of simpler and slower days and ways.
Sadly, it was all over too fast, but I know that tomorrow at work, when ever I look down at my stained fingers or catch a pleasant wiff of my traditionally polished boots wafting up from under the desk, I'll remember and I'll smile and I'll look forward to when I might choose to take that particular time-warp again.
Tis but a step to the right ...
regarDS

Sunday, 16 November 2008

The "internut" by any other name ...

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=internut
internut - an individual who spends at least 15 hours/day online in a leaky sub-basement. "when we severed the wifi conection, strange sounds emitted from the sub-basement which we thought was uninhabited; upon investigation, we learned that it was the domain of the internut."
**** Selah ****
Recently I happened upon a serious and snarly little collective of apparently long-regular web forum inhabitants and was quite shocked that not only were many of them somewhat ignorant of the titled ancient noun/adjective/verb (how far do you think it could reasonably be stretched without totally murdering common understanding of what constitutes the English Language ?) that soon became the more applicable word to use instead of "internet", but also seemed to be somewhat offended by both its existance and use ... well, at least in their sheltered little web world.
It was very surprising to discover a collective of vocal McWeb consumers who took things "internet" so seriously that they could barely abide the thought, let alone the presence, of anyone who didn't take it as seriously as they. Especially anyone who might happen to observe and remark that their level of interest/support/defence of it was bordering on ridiculous and somewhat unhealthy ... and even (dare I say ?) "idolatrous".
Now, anyone who has bothered to wade through my more opinionated blog pages of cynical and arrogant self-righteous waffle (interspaced with tales of motor-cycle Rattery and stuff less likely to offend too many too much in one go), would quickly recognise that I just luurv to find and expose and sometimes even ridicule examples of Fanatical Religious Zealotry that don't involve the Usual Suspects related to more traditional religions and religious behaviour.

Thus far, I've drawn attention to the likes of "Environtologists and the Church of Environtology" in relation to the FRZeds (Fanatical Religious Zealots) getting all hot and bothered about Yet Another period of ice-melts in our solar-system, and then there is the "Cult of Darwin and Dawkins" and their nonsense "evolution of species" flim-flam show that continues to fail every test of evidence possible let alone make it out of base-camp on the way to falling off the cliff-face when trying to climb "Mount Improbable."

Oh, and don't get me going on so called "Sports" and "Sports Teams" and their "Fans", nor the "Cult of Celebrity" ... yup, I'm seeing religions and religious behaviour all over the place; everyone seems to have a favorite "Sacred Cow" or two, and usually at least one they just luurv to get all Fanatically Religiously Zealous about at that.

I feel that it is now time to add the very "internet" to that list of Sacred Cows folk can get FRZ about. Warning, don't mention in a favorable manner things like "filtering" or "clean stream" or ILCF (ISP Level Content Filtering) or "Senator Conroy" in the midst of the kinds of FRZeds who hold the internut to be sacred ... not unless you've got some of the following to hand over !


They won't turn you into an "internewt"; they'll help you get better. :)
**** Selah ****
[Overly Offensive Mode]
"There is nothing more offensive than the brutal truth delivered brutally to those who don't want to hear it ... except for willfully ignorant brutes who prefer and promote a lie.". - derspatz
Yeah, I don't even mind quoting myself. :)
Continuing on the topic of "content filtering" and "clean stream" etc, you've now arrived at the reason I don't bother to have "comments" turned on for his blog. I'm not interested in providing Yet Another online space for the cowardly anonymous to try and advertise their crass banalities in and nor do I have either the energy or time to filter through all the usually resulting dross and abuse in the hope of spotting a gem worth keeping. I'm already disillusioned enough with much of the more recent generations of so called "humanity" as it is thank you and thus far from keen to have it try and crap in my little Web-Nest.
I've already got THAT angle covered, cheers.
I'm so disinterested in what folk might have to say about my twitterings here that I don't even run any kind "who has visited" type auto-magic metering/logging software ... and if I don't care about who may be visiting then how much less do you think I might care about giving a voice to any who should visit ?
Got something to say ? Go join a forum or publish your own blog and maybe I'll accidentally happen upon it one day. Or better still, DON'T ! :)
So, that's a big "No" to "comment enabling" from me. Deem yourselves pro-actively filtered and think of all the time and energy we've saved each other ... and children we have protected from yet more repetitions of the more foul and offensive forms of internuttery that can be demonstrated by internuts on this here our internut. :)
[/Overly Offensive Mode]
regarDS