We now have four working air puffers

On Tuesday I caught a cold and on Wednesday I felt really bad. I was so crook I couldn’t eat and had a drover’s breakfast instead.

It has been really cold in the apartment lately – mainly because our air conditioning doesn’t work – and never has – despite numerous visits by men with screwdrivers. I know this doesn’t give you a cold but it doesn’t help much.

I asked Rozalin for help and she rang the building people and asked them to send someone straight away. I think she might have been a bit terse with them because she is as sick of our air conditioning as we are. She may have mentioned the pieces of cardboard which were inserted eons ago – and said that they had stopped working.

I was prompted to act by the fact that of the four air conditioners in the lounge room – only one works by grudgingly squeezing out tepid air – and it has started to make gruesome screeching and grinding noises. I thought to myself – if that one goes it’s all over – we will all have to sit on the heated bathroom floors with the cats. Fortunately there are three bathrooms so there is no danger of overcrowding.

The four air conditioners in the lounge room are gigantic. Each one is the size of a Volkswagen Golf (but squarer and longer) and are mostly ineffective. They are useful only for standing ornaments on and we use them at Christmas to display our numerous Owls and Polar Bears. We also keep books and vases on them – or used too until Sissi broke all the vases.

The man with the screwdriver (MWS) who came to fix the air-conditioning was the same man who came to not fix the air conditioning last time. What he did last time was take some bits away and say that he would order new parts and be back one day (Yeh right!). I have heard that before from with the men with the cardboard.

He is a lovely young man who speaks very good English – but doesn’t – and insists on explaining the technicalities of air conditioning problems to me in German. I nod wisely and ask questions like ‘wann?’ and ‘wie langer?’

Anyway – I had prayed last night to the Blessed Mary MacKillop (I have heard about the good work she has done so thought I would give it a try) and - Stiffen the Lizards – WMS fixed it. Now all four air conditioners puff (blow is too strong a word) out tepid (warm is too strong a word) air.

This is a major advance from having them puff out cold air. I could ask why it has taken six visits to achieve this but it would be churlish of me to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Now the screeching, grinding air conditioner is heading towards a major collapse but that leaves us with three puffers which may get us through winter. The problem will be of course that – having now been set on warm puff – the units will be impossible to get off warm puff in summer and we will need to get them changed to cold puff.

For the time being we are basking in the warmth and planning a celebration.

MWS said that one of the units has some serious problems and will have to be completely overhauled. He will order new parts (cardboard?) and call me when they arrive. (Yeh right!).

Can we find 1,000,000 nitwits - You Betcha!

I think Kristin would like me to say something nice about the USA. Here it is – they have nice linen. Some of the best sheets and towels I have ever seen come from the USA. And great shops – I love shopping in New York. And steaks – fabulous! And no smoking – love it! They also have a political system that is so much fun to watch that it makes my ears water. I love America and (almost) all who sail in her.

Now that is out of the way my attention has been drawn to a Facebook site that is looking to sign up 1,000,000 people who don’t believe in evolution. Can they do this? You Betcha!

You Betcha!

Any country that boasts millions of people who have been kidnapped by aliens and genitally probed can certainly rustle up 1,000,000 people who don’t believe in a proven scientific fact.

This is too easy. They should try something harder. But in America it’s hard to come up with something whacky enough. The figures on the percentages of people who believe stuff are roughly as follows:

70% God is real
51% God created the heavens and the earth
88% Heaven is real (wow!)
71% Hell is real
12% President Obama is a Muslim
4% President Obama was not born in the USA
2% Aliens kidnapped me and examined my genitals
5% The new health care legislation provides for Death Panels
3% Americans did not land on the moon
2% The earth will end with the Rapture in 2012
0.1% President Obama killed and ate Jimmy Hoffa

Now - even 1% represents more than one million reasonably sentient beings – although not all of these will be able to use a computer (or even write) so you might be struggling with the rapture and aliens. But you would romp home with any other category. OK - so not Jimmy Hoffa - unless it was plugged on Fox - that would get us home!

I received a letter from my financial adviser in Sydney. He is retiring. Obviously he didn’t use the services of his own company for his retirement funds otherwise he would be working for another 200 years.

He has also changed the logo his company uses. Instead of a Phoenix rising from the ashes it is now a Buzzard perched on the carcass of his clients’ investments.

To celebrate my financial advisers retirement - and of course Cate’s special birthday - we are going to Copenhagen for a long weekend on 25 February.

The Square

The hotel says its ‘unique breakfast restaurant noted for its crafty use of daylight’. I think this means they have windows – and so they should – they say it is Copenhagen’s most exclusive design hotel – and who has heard of a design hotel without windows – but I will check and let you know.

Have you ever heard of a hotel without windows? Well - I stayed in one in London in the early 1980s. I was in what may have been the basement but could have been the elevator motor room. It was very noisy and oily. I was next to the kitchen. Whenever they turned on the dishwasher hordes of cockroaches stampeded across my floor. After that I made my own bookings and only stayed at the Savoy.

We have booked the tickets and the hotel. I got a special deal on the hotel but to do this I had to pay in advance and it cannot be cancelled. I have checked many times and yes it is in Copenhagen in Denmark – not Copenhagen anywhere else. I have learned my lesson and now book with the aid of Google Maps.

I now await with interest to see the nature of the catastrophe that will prevent us from taking the trip. I am betting on a lion eating a member of Cate’s staff while they are in the middle of negotiating the most crucial contract of the year. She will have to take over, retrieve the contract from the mouth of the lion - and complete the deal.

How could a lion possibly eat a member of Cate’s staff? – you will be amazed.

They couldn’t train a choko vine over a country dunny!

In Australia we have an annual Clean Up Australia Day.

It’s a strange concept but just bear with me. I know you are thinking ‘why would they have an annual day to do what people should do every day?’ Well, you see - people don’t.

Now I am not talking about people like you and me – I am talking about the types of people who – for example – throw old beds into ponds, dump their household rubbish and old car tires into rivers, hack their lovers to death with axes and bury them in forests, throw rubbish from their cars as they drive along roads and highways and, when they have an old car, dump and burn it in the nearest forest.

Now you are asking ‘what types of people would do this?’ and I really cannot answer that question because I don’t think I have ever met one who confessed to doing it – and I don’t think they have them in Austria.

In Australia we have whole hordes of people who – for example – buy fast food and simply drop the rubbish where they happen to be where they are eating. This could be on the beach, in a park or driving along the road.

When Cate and I went to Sydney last July we drove into the city from the airport early on a Sunday morning. I have never seen it so dirty, it looked like 1,000 garbage trucks had exploded high over Sydney and scattered their contents across the city.

Maybe it was always like that and we did not notice until we came to somewhere like Vienna where people take some pride in what their city looks like – and they have street cleaners.

Austrians are – or course – undisputed world champions at polluting their cities with cigarette butts and dog poo – so are not entirely blameless in the litter stakes.

Anyway, when we have our clean up day, one of the things that the clean up people find absolutely everywhere – is shopping trolleys. They find hundreds of them – abandoned everywhere – particularly in creeks and rivers but also in the bush and even in Sydney Harbour.

This is a phenomenon in Sydney in particular and everywhere you go you can see trolleys abandoned in the streets or in parks. There are of course millions that have actually been stolen and are used in backyards to hold plants, garden tools, bodies waiting to be taken to the forest, barbecue bits and pieces, rubbish, compost and anything else you can think of.

It would never occur to me to push a trolley laden with groceries to my car – parked say 200 metres away – and then abandon the trolley in the street. It would never occur to me to steal a trolley. But then it would never occur to me to throw a wrapping from a Big Mac, together with a fries packet, a strawberry shake holder and the whippee whoppee whappee packet and all the associated wrappings – out of the car window when I was driving along the street. It occurs in Australia to many thousands of people every day.I am obviously different to the people who do this.

But I have never seen an abandoned trolley in Austria. It might be because they want deposits here. In most major supermarkets in Australia they do not have a deposit system where you insert money to get a trolley and get a refund when you take it back. This guarantees that most will be returned, if not by the patrons, then by small armies of people who will return them to get the deposit.

Here almost everyone has this system and where they don’t, as in BIPA, the trolleys are too small to be of use to anyone at all so I can’t imagine there ever having been one stolen. The BIPA trolleys are so small I could not take Muffin to the vet in one.

The other day I was talking about dangerous occupations and discussed Coal Miners in China and Crab Fishermen in Alaska. There is a place much more dangerous than this. It is the NSW Hospital System.

A succession of incompetent governments (the only type we elect) has so effectively destroyed the hospital system that it barely functions. There are daily stories of women having babies in toilets in Emergency sections, people with serious injuries being sent home to die, 12 hour waits unattended in emergency wards, dreadful doctors, banned in other countries – doing dreadful things, hordes of people contracting fatal infections etc.

Pensioners in ambulances being taken to hospital are given the option of cutting out the middle man and being taken straight to the morgue.

Every crisis prompts another inquiry. Each inquiry brings forth a long list of shortcomings. The government apologizes, sacks some staff, adds another layer of administration in the health department and carries on in its customary stumblebum fashion as usual. It is as effective as Amy Winehouse at 3:00 AM any morning.

The hard working doctors and nurses are always blamed and whistle-blowers are hunted down mercilessly and destroyed. Somehow additional funding at the coalface is always overtaken by something more pressing, a car racing track or new gold taps for the Premier’s Office Spa.

So - now for one of the finest pieces of Polispeak I have ever seen. A report in the Sydney Morning Herald:

“Public hospitals in NSW are the worst performing in the country when it comes to causing death and serious injuries to patients.

New Productivity Commission figures on ''sentinel events'' - severely harmful incidents that occur due to a failure of hospital systems - showed 59 cases in NSW, compared with 28 in Victoria, the next worst-performing state, and 147 nationwide.

Even accounting for NSW having the largest population and the largest number of hospital admissions, the figures still show the state performing worse than the rest of the country, with 40 per cent of sentinel events but only 30 per cent of public hospital admissions.

The figures, from 2007-08, represent a significant deterioration from a year earlier, when NSW was one of the best states, recording only 32 events”

Now for the classic response from the government. So eye-poppingly fatuous that it wins - hands down –the February 2010 Polispeak award – and it’s only the 2nd.

“A spokesman for the NSW Health Minister, Carmel Tebbutt, said the state's performance reflected the fact the state had better systems for collecting and reporting incident data than other parts of Australia”.

Get that! We are not killing any more of you than anyone else – we are just killing you at the same rate - and recording it more accurately.

And we are so accustomed to this rubbish from our elected nincompoops that no one even questioned the response!

Jeez I’m dark. They couldn’t train a choko vine over a country dunny!