This regular feature is back on line. The idea is that, over the weekend, you should post your thoughts in a more leisurely fashion than in ordinary comments or the Monday Message Board.
Please post your thoughts on any topic, at whatever length seems appropriate to you. Civilised discussion and no coarse language, please.
John Quiggin 
With MrsO away for a couple of days the observa was falling back on the ever reliable omelette for tea again, which got me thinking about old appliances that still keep on keeping on. I was cooking the googs in mum’s old 1956 Sunbeam 10″ aluminium electric frypan, which she was happy to see the back of along with yours truly, when I flew the nest in the early seventies. This was one with the thermostat in the integral handle that you couldn’t immerse in water. (Later ones had a removable plug in thermostat to avoid this problem) It only has the high top aluminium lid nowadays(the little steam vent adjuster is long gone) as I think the additional pyrex glass lid was broken long before I inherited it. The aluminium is that well seasoned with oil infusion that it beats the hell out of teflon impostors for cooking pancakes too.
So! Any of you lot got some old faithful appliances about that you just can’t seem to part with cos they just don’t make em like they used to?
Good one observa, I have fond memories of the 1956 electric frypan and recall the emphatic advice to keep the handle out of the water when washing. I seem to recall it was so versatile that it was practically a portable kitchen!
PS When did you last hear anyone say ‘googs’ out loud!?
Recently at the end of a long day in the office I said “And they went home, tired but happy” and a workmate said his grandfather was the only person he had ever heard say that. It used to be a kind of standard ending for children’s stories about picnics and cognate events.
Not much to comment on now everyone’s historical delusions are over.
I was searching for something unrelated when I stumbled across Prof Quiggin’s take on the 96 election
Some of which is still relevant today
I thought John Q might have commented on Trevor Sykes’ piece “Staring down the barrel of a crisis’ in today’s AFR. With customary brevity Sykes nails some definite implications of the current oil market situation.
A European group ASPO (Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas) forecast that world oil production will soon peak — around 2008. Thus oil prices will remain high and uranium the fuel for the future. (A fact of relevance in considering current bid for WMC Resources).
The claim (that I’ve always believed) was that countries like Saudi Arabia have so much cheap oil they can’t be bothered proving up more reserves is disputed. In fact it is claimed they are trying hard — but unsuccessfully — to prove up major new fields.
Iraq has the best prospects of uncovering a major new oil field but problems there.
Sykes skates over the issues of nonconventional oil alternatives a bit. Tar sands and shale might have the reserves of conventional oil fields though at higher extraction costs. (I still believe the gutless sellout to American interests of the Central Pacific shale oil deposits in Queensland for a pittance, in the ansence of a bid from BHP-Billiton or Santos) was a national tragedy and an indication of hopelessly inept and myopic Australian mining investors.
All-in-all the recurring degate over oil prices that in the past has dissipated whenever OPEC cartel discipline petered out, might stick around this ctime.
I’m not posting this on your sponsorship post for the very reason that I do not think that donating via the Red Cross is a good idea. Please remember that in my personal experience they have been captured by an oppressive managerialist clique. I have posted about my sufferings at their hands before, but I do want to emphasise that this is no mere isolated disgruntled ex-employee speaking. I began to be attacked after I began to enquire about certain things (i.e. my concerns were not prompted by the persecution but the other way around), and other staff there have gone silent even though they too have noticed the same things going on that I enquired about. Maybe one day I’ll tell how the AIRC wilfully ignored the
For what it’s worth, World Vision impresses me the most, from the little contact I’ve had with people there. I’d say boycott the Red Cross but don’t make that a way to resist good will – send it to World Vision instead.
It appears that the browser couldn’t hold a whole paragraph, and chopped out a bit about “…ignored cricial dates that showed the ARCBS was running a kangaroo court”, or something to that effect. Like I said, one day I’ll tell all. I hope to get it in the media as and when the ARCBS’s problems come home to roost, because it will be newsworthy then and I’ll be able to hitch a ride on someone else’s wave. And I didn’t sign off on the offered waiver indemnifying the managers but letting them keep slanging me, either. Not for a settlement offer that wouldn’t let me rebuild my career I wouldn’t, especially not with quiet phone calls being made against me. Bloody agency costs that only protected me from a neutral organisation that wasn’t
PML, I remember your post about your tribulations, but I’d forgotten, or not realised, that the Red Cross was the employer concerned. I picked them in part because I wanted to avoid controversy about religious/political objectives, but it seems there’s always a problem. It’s too late to change now, but I’ll take this into account next time I run an appeal like this.
ARCBS = Australian Red Cross Blood Service. I believe the same corporate culture obtains in the parent organisation.
And there is much angst about it in Israel too, since the Red Cross refuses to accomodate the Magen David variant but has accepted the Red Crescent. It wasn’t a way to avoid contentiousness.