Highlights IMO are an amusingly ironic bit of tram signage at 7:20 and a very well timed song at 29:40.

Disappointingly I only saw two clips from Canberra but luckily both involved roundabouts (or faux-abouts) so at least the reputation of the city is intact.

I can see why they didn’t think to have measures specifically against something like this given it’s a pretty low probability occurrence. You’d have to be unlucky enough to have both applied hand sanitiser just before touching the globe and then get a spark off the globe to ignite it, and I don’t recall ever getting a spark off plasma globes when I’ve touched them before.

It’ll be interesting to see if this getting into the news means companies/departments will scramble to get rid of alcohol based hand sanitiser in their buildings, ignition is after all technically possible with static shocks etc so there will be people worried about liability.

Includes a video with a selection of the latest examples of people not seeing the giant red thing that can be found in predictable locations…

it seems that the smaller the town, the higher the military worship. They may not even have a public toilet, but they will have a military worship statue that seemed to have cost more than all the town to build.

That’s because the vast majority of our towns pre date WW2, and basically every area lost enough people in WW1/WW2 to affect multiple families and the broader local community. For example I grew up in a country village of a couple of hundred people (with several hundred more in the locality and upriver) and it has a war memorial listing what would have been ~50 people killed in WW2 and at least that again in WW1. I think it is understandable that towns (particularly smaller or more closely knit communities) would be in general support of the families and friends wanting a memorial to their dead given that level of losses.

I haven’t seen anywhere near the number of memorials for other conflicts, they definitely exist but are significantly less common. If you want to avoid war related stuff your best bet would be towns/suburbs built well after WW2, but these tend to be suburbs of existing centres (which are likely to have a war memorial) instead of completely new towns.

Edit: Also consider that many of our country towns/villages have either not grown significantly or have even shrunk in population in the last half century or so, so historical memorials are more likely to retain the prominence they were originally intended to have instead of being surrounded or crowded out by new development.

It would’ve been completely unsafe to drive at 80

That’s why it’s called a speed limit, emphasis on limit. I believe limits should be set at a point such as you describe - a speed which reasonable people would consider clearly unsafe for a road. Drivers should then use their judgement of the corners/visibility, the current conditions, and their vehicle to choose a speed safe for their particular circumstances - this will obviously vary widely for different parts of the road, different conditions, and different vehicles. Setting speed limits to a point where you can safely drive the slowest sections of the road in poor conditions makes them effectively recommended speeds rather than limits, and I believe this trend has (and will continue to have) a negative effect on driver skill levels.

Thanks :)

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It was pretty busy up there, plenty of 4wds out and about heading to Mt Coree and up Mt Franklin road to either Bulls Head or where the road was closed at the Snow Gum gate. Luckily not at a traffic jam sort of level though - the dirt roads tend to dissuade a lot of people.

I can imagine Corin road would indeed have been a mess today, it can be bad enough on a regular weekend let alone a snow day where you have considerably more traffic and even more chance of people driving super slowly or trying to pull over for photos.

In the areas of the Brindies you can drive to in winter the normal snow you get is basically in the looking nice category - a few cm deep if that and melts within the next day or so. It does indeed look nice though and makes the bush appear distinctly different.

Up in the highest points of the Brindies (e.g. up near Mt Ginini/Gingera/Bimberi heights) this sort of forecast is likely to make enough snow to do actual snow sports like skiiing for a short period (depending on the weather possibly a week if not topped up). There’s no ski lifts up there or winter car access though so skiing in the Brindies would be more of the hike up and then cross country ski sort of thing. Historically there was a short ski run at Mt Franklin but it’s now overgrown and the DIY style rope lift is long gone.

If you head down to the Snowies though the ski resorts will be very happy to get a decent amount of natural snow for their snow sports, it’ll definitely help them since we haven’t had much in the way of snow weather this year.

It’s definitely a lot lower than I would want if someone decided they could walk in when I was asleep.

Another thing to try for windows is to make a second layer for the window frame out of flyscreen moulding and some clear plastic. It’s a more expensive method than bubble wrap but looks better and has the benefit of being able to see through it easily. I haven’t really quantified how much of an effect this makes but with the windows I did this for there was a noticeable decrease in condensation on the glass so there is definitely some reduction in thermal transfer.

You can buy the aluminium profile, corner joiners, and matching rubber stripping used for making flyscreens in a hardware shop, as well as clear plastic in rolls (or lengths thereof). With this you make a frame that snugly fits into the window surround - ideally placing the plastic within a cm or so of the glass. You’ll need a hacksaw or something else to cut the aluminium, ideally a combination square to help with marking 45 degree angles, and I did find the little roller tool sold to help insert the stripping was useful.

Must have been pretty chilly - I’m out of town at the moment but I was looking at the forecast the other day and thinking it was looking like good weather for snow in the Brindies.

I don’t really care about the cafe, shop, or cultural displays but it’d be good to have the observation deck again (ideally free this time, but I don’t like my chances).

Doubleplusgood news!

Seriously though, alight and terminates are not hard words to understand - particularly when given context and used in repeated announcements. It doesn’t reflect well on our literacy levels if these words are now considered too difficult for the general population.

Ah yes, but it was not just the request to speak English - the Australian oriented group also used an outline of Australia as the group icon. Now that’s how you know someone is truly a prominent racist/white supremacist and you should write a bunch of blog posts about how horrible they are…

I’ll wait a little bit for a manned register, particularly if I’ve got a lot of stuff or items that will give me grief at the self checkout (e.g. really light things). I’m not going to hang around for ages but I’ll take the inconvenience of losing a couple of minutes over the inconvenience of dealing with a self serve checkout.