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Thoraiya Dyer

Newcastle, New South Wales, AUSTRALIA


Joined April 10th 2008

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Spend Precious Time With The Grandchildren – Only, Kids Aren’t Allowed.

July 9th 2008 23:40
Over-55 living. Is it really all it’s cracked up to be? Leafing through the local paper, I couldn’t help but notice the children featuring prominently in ads for Greenleaf Retirement Resort, Ashton Gardens.

Why pictures of laughing children? Most over 55’s villages have restrictions on kids.

Yet the ad clearly states, “enjoy life’s simple pleasures, such as spending precious time with the grandchildren.”



Bizarre. What’s the deal?

At Greenleaf’s website ( Really Long Link ), you can do a “virtual tour” of the “resort”, which includes images like this:



(Note previously mentioned grandchild, right there in the stroller)

At the same time, the logo on the bus leaves us in no doubt as to which age group is welcome at Greenleaf:



If you check the FAQ, they are rather vague about the exact regulations:

“Can I have family and friends come and stay?
Absolutely. Just as you would where you are now.”

Just as you would where you are now? So, if you wanted the kids to stay for a year, that would be OK?

I’m guessing not, but they wouldn’t want to scare you away by putting something as ugly as that in the bold print. No doubt, you’ll find it hidden in a lengthy contract right before you sign up.

AVEO, Australia’s “leading provider of retirement lifestyles”, has a similar reassurance in the FAQ on its website ( Really Long Link ):

“Q: Am I able to have family and friends come and visit and stay with me?
A: Yes, most certainly. Most retirement villages have visitor car parking, BBQ facilities, private dining rooms, etc for you to entertain family and friends – just as you would in your own home. Please contact an Aveo Consultant about the facilities available to you and your family and friends.”

Again, they reckon it’s just the same as “in your own home.”

Ararat Hills Estate ( Really Long Link ) is a little more upfront about the situation:

“Q: Can I move into the Estate if I still have kids living with me?
A: Intentionally and by design, the development caters for residents who are 55 years of age and over.”

In other words: NO, You Idiot!

According to the NSW Department of housing, however ( Really Long Link ), to qualify for Seniors Living you must EITHER be:

“ a) over 55 years of age
b) receive a disability support pension (regardless of age), or
c) have a partner (married or de facto) aged over 55 years or receiving a disability support pension”

Furthermore:

“The child/children are considered to be part of the household if the client has shared custody of children for 3 days per week or more.”

And we know that children are not allowed to be part of the household in over 55’s communities.

So, no, the children are not allowed to stay for a year.

They’re not even allowed to stay for a consecutive week.

Which is just as well. Isn’t that why the old folks are moving to these places? They don’t want to chase brats on pink and blue bicycles out of their driveways, or have to scream at them to pipe down when Wheel of Fortune is on.

But is the noise that kids make the real reason there are restrictions? Or is it a deeper-seated dread of the next generation?

The ads might show fit, active seniors carrying children on their shoulders, but in reality, that’s not going to be the prevailing activity in a retirement village.

The Age ( Really Long Link ) in a March 2007 article points out that:

“Despite the glossy brochures showing fit couples in their late 50s enjoying a bike ride, the average age to move in to a retirement village is about 73, according to Hammond, and the average age of residents is 81 in Victoria and 79 in NSW.”

And we all know that older people feel more vulnerable when it comes to young people. In one 2004 Western Australian survery of seniors ( Really Long Link ), “half (51%) of the respondents felt either “very” or “fairly” safe going out after dark, while one fifth (20%) felt unsafe. Men were significantly more likely to feel safe in this situation, as were those aged 60 to 74 years. In addition 22% of all respondents specified they would “never go out after dark”. A significantly larger proportion of women and those aged 70 years and over indicated they “never go out after dark”.”

Is this fear justified?

According to Chief Inspector Des Hunter of the Western Australia Police ( Really Long Link ):

“It is generally accepted that although the elderly are victims of the same kinds of crime as the general population they are thankfully 'under victimised' in violent offences and theft, but are over victimised in fraud related offences.

Though recent studies of victims of crime in Australia have shown that senior citizens represent only 4 per cent of victims of crime there is continuing evidence that elderly people feel particularly vulnerable to crime and this impacts on their quality of life.”

This phobia of younger generations is subtly marketed by the retirement villages as “safety and security,” but really, what it means is We Have Big Gates With Razor Wire To Keep Out Young Hooligans.

Are the rest of us really so bad that the elderly would rather imprison themselves in an over-hyped, over-sanitized, over-55s complex than live out here in the real world?

Well, anyway, I don’t think much of Greenleaf’s advertising strategy, including the bullshit line about visitors being treated “just as you would where you are now.”

Where you are now, you might have the family up for the school holidays. You might conceivably play cricket with them on the beach (online depiction) or fly wooden airplanes with them amongst shady trees (newspaper depiction).

But in an over-55’s community, such things are discouraged. Visitors must park outside the gates and wait for the elderly resident to meet them with an electronic access tag.

If you try to get around the rules, your “friendly neighbours” often have nothing better to do than gossip about “those dreadful children,” and will dob you in to the management.

If you want to spend time with your grandchildren, and yet you love the idea of group minibus trips to the bowling club, or you seriously need medical or other care provided by such a facility, you’re better off visiting the family in THEIR house, not yours.

I hope the day never comes when I consider a “fully fenced, secure village” with “security screens on all doors and windows” ( Really Long Link ) to be more important than experiencing the wider community.

Whether I have grandchildren or not, I REALLY hope I never consider a “range of shops to choose from including Big W” to be one of Life’s Simple Pleasures.
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Frankenstein Bacteria: Anti-Vaccination Folks Think Dead Whooping Cough Can Come Back To Life?

July 7th 2008 01:42
Some diseases out there are nasty enough that it’s well worth taking a minuscule side-effect risk to vaccinate against.

Whooping cough, or pertussis, starts off as an ordinary cold, but it ends up causing uncontrollable bouts of coughing, followed by a “whooping” sound as children struggle to draw breath.

Pertussis sufferers can choke on their own mucus, vomit, and turn red or blue; they can stop breathing, and they can develop pneumonia or middle ear infections to go with the cough.

Statistically (vaccination.org.au), 1 in 1000 pertussis cases will die from pneumonia or brain damage (1 in 200 infant cases), 1 in 3 will end up in hospital (3 in 5 infants), 1 in 50 will suffer from seizures and 1 in 30-40 will end up with pneumonia (17 in 100 infants).

Who wants whooping cough?

baby whooping cough
Image from NHSborders.org.uk


Not me!

Vaccination is the best weapon we have. The disease is caused by a bacteria, Bordetella pertussis. The current whooping cough vaccine, acellular pertussis, is part of the Infanrix vaccine, which also contains diptheria and tetanus. In Feb 1999, acellular replaced whole cell pertussis vaccines.

Instead of putting whole bacterial cells into the vaccine, only those parts of the bacteria thought to be important for immunity are measured into the mix.

Yet, on the anti-vaccination website ThinkTwice.com, we are told matter-of-factly that,

“Actually, it's the vaccinated children who spread disease. Many of the disease outbreaks that we are warned about today, are caused by, and occur in, recently vaccinated children.”

I’m intrigued.

Somehow, those little chopped-up pieces of bacteria are going to reassemble themselves, come back to life, and start spreading through the populace?

It’s FRANKENBACTERIA!

It’s aliiive….IT’S AAAAALLIIIIVVE!!

Well, easy for me to make fun of people, when what I should be doing is trying to understand and help them.

What makes a person decide not to vaccinate their child?

“In 1987 Holden et al calculated the benefit : harm ratios for each of the major vaccines, and found the overall a “typical program” of immunisation in a developing country could prevent 45 deaths and 12 serious handicaps per month, while causing 1 death every 22 years and 1 serious handicap every 7.5 years,” says Dr Sue Page, who, it seems, got a bit of a shock when she first moved to the Far North Coast.

“When I first moved to the Far North NSW Coast, I did not realise I was moving to the home of Australia’s anti-vaccination organisation. We had one-tenth the total population of NSW, but the lowest rate of vaccination. Consequently, we had the highest rate of vaccine-preventable disease, with one-third to one-half the NSW total cases occurring in our region alone.”

But maybe that’s just because hippies don’t wash? Sue has an answer to that one:

“In case you think this reflects poor hygiene in Nimbin-style communes, we only had one-tenth of the gastroenteritis and salmonella cases, or our fair share.”

”In the University of Sydney study published in ANZ Journal of Public Health, 1998, Professor Simon Chapman found people who oppose immunisation usually do so because of their views of the way doctors and drug companies operate, rather than an assessment of the facts. I agree, and discovered early on that non-vaccinators can be considered as two distinct groups of parents.

One group are the true conscientious objectors and their views are not going to be changed by quick debate. Often their own children have had some form of an adverse reaction, and they have manifested a basic distrust of doctors by seeking alternative health care. They are frequently educated and articulate people, and with sufficient time on their hands to read the internet and libraries avidly and to mount strong community campaigns.

Research shows they believe any or all of the following: that the immunisation program is an exercise of the power of medicine and the government authorities in society and they strongly oppose any infringement of civil liberties such as compulsory vaccination through schools; that drug companies are greedy multinationals who pay to have things covered up; that there is a conspiracy between drug companies, doctors, and the government; that even WHO receives funding from pharmaceutical companies, so it can’t be trusted; that the drugs themselves contain poisons and impurities and cause new diseases because they go against nature and are essentially evil; and that safe alternatives exist that are not being researched for financial reasons.”

I have heard those arguments before. I can see it might be difficult to persuade people that vaccines are safe when their child has come home from school with a red, swollen arm like a balloon.

Local reactions as a result of pertussis vaccine are fairly common, with a redness and swelling rate reported on the NCIRS fact sheet of 10-20% in children after their fourth booster, with 1-2% of children getting whole arm swelling.

A fat, swollen, painful arm is scary. Vaccines are not perfect. Their job is to get into a punch-up with your immune system so that when the REAL disease comes along, your white cells are already standing watch for it and know how to destroy it efficiently.

A slightly scarier notion is that if your child happens to contract a brain disease within 7 days of having the vaccination (probability is between 0 and 10 in a million), they are at increased risk of dying.

Zero in a million is not much to worry about. But 10 in a million is significant, I admit.

Not as significant as the following figure from the ABS ( Really Long Link ) that in the year 2000, 5 938 cases of whooping cough were reported. The disease remains all around us.

If vaccinating children is compulsory, then why is the disease all around us?

Two reasons.

One: efficacy of the vaccine is between 80 and 85% (Sydney Uni Fact Sheet on Pertussis Vaccines in Australia by the NCIRS ( Really Long Link )).

So, (borrowing from Dr Sue Page again), if the bacteria is 99% contagious, that means in a whooping cough epidemic, a vaccinated child has a 10-15% chance of contracting the disease while an unvaccinated child has a 99% chance of contracting it.

That answers this argument, from the anti-vaccination team:

“First of all, how could your non-vaccinated child be a danger to the vaccinated child? If the vaccines are effective, then the baby should be protected.”

The vaccine IS effective. Just not 100% effective.

The second reason we keep getting epidemics is not because vaccination rates are dropping, but because the vaccine only lasts 6-10 years, and people over the age of 20 are usually not covered. They give whooping cough to children under 6 months who have not yet been vaccinated, and that’s where the fatalities occur.

Suppose the conscientious objectors had their way, and nobody was vaccinated?

A quarter of a million children were born in the year 2000. If they were vaccinated in 2001 for whooping cough, and the very worst scenario occurred, with ten out of every million suffering neurological damage, that would leave 2.5 children affected.

If NONE of those children were vaccinated, they all got whooping cough and 1 in 200 died, then 1250 children would end up unnecessarily in the morgue.

And that’s why anti-vaccination campaigns are so terrifying.

Says Dr Sue,

“They make emotional appeals that are difficult to oppose because they feed into common parental anxieties and mount strong community campaigns against vaccination. These are the parents for whom the conscientious objectors' ACIR forms were made.”

But there’s light at the end of the tunnel.

According to her, there are a second group of parents who choose not to vaccinate.

“In my experience, the larger group of non-vaccinators are parents who have been influenced by these views without having the time to fully research the information themselves, and this is the group you can help the most time-efficiently by reality checking their beliefs.”

Thank heavens for that. Maybe some of those in the second group will find their way to my blog.

Then again, maybe not. In a March 1998 study from the University of Sydney:

“The message, says Associate Professor Simon Chapman, who was one of those involved, is that doctors and Governments can't afford to be patronising or arrogant in this debate. They need to be much more tuned into peoples' views rather than thinking the facts alone are going to convince parents who are resisting immunising their children.”

I can’t help myself. I like numbers. And I often come across as patronising and arrogant, but that’s just because some people don’t deserve to be taken seriously. When naïve parents send letters like this to ThinkTwice:

“Q. When I told my doctor that I am not going to have my children vaccinated, he (she) became very angry and told me that he will not treat them, and that I am no longer welcome in his office. Do you have a list of doctors in my area who will respect my decision to not vaccinate and still treat my children?”

…they deserve a better answer than this:

“A. Your situation is not uncommon. Many pediatricians refuse to treat children when their parents object to the shots. This is just one tactic doctors employ in an effort to intimidate moms and dads into vaccinating against their will. You should be thankful that this dysfunctional relationship with your health practitioner has been terminated.

I'm sorry, but we do not maintain a directory of "sympathetic" pediatricians, and are unaware of any such list. You might try searching for a naturopathic, homeopathic, or chiropractic doctor in your yellow pages. By the way, why do you need a baby doctor? According to Dr. Robert Mendelsohn, MD, very few childhood conditions truly warrant medical attention.”

OK, so the doctor might have been more sympathetic (although we don’t get the doctor’s side of the story), but how DARE the second degree murderers at ThinkTwice say things like “very few childhood conditions truly warrant medical attention” when the death rates are there for all to see?

How can anyone be so negligent?

All I can do is send out a plea to the universe: Please keep your vaccinations, and your children’s vaccinations up to date.

I’ll leave you with this abstract from a 1998 study in the Lancet:

“To assess the impact of anti-vaccine movements that targeted pertussis whole-cell vaccines, we compared pertussis incidence in countries where high coverage with diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis vaccines (DTP) was maintained (Hungary, the former East Germany, Poland, and the United States) with countries where immunization was disrupted by anti-vaccine movements (Sweden, Japan, the United Kingdom, The Russian Federation, Ireland, Italy, the former West Germany, and Australia).

Pertussis incidence was 10 to 100 times lower in countries where high vaccine coverage was maintained than in countries where immunization programs were compromised by anti-vaccine movements…our study shows that, far from being obsolete, these vaccines continue to have an important role in global immunization.”
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Does Aspartame Give You Alzheimer’s?

July 1st 2008 22:39
Aspartame, like many artificial sweeteners, had an evil reputation when I was growing up. Just like many other well-meaning children, I would hide any cans I found with the Nutra-Sweet brand, and tell my poor mother, who was struggling to lose weight, that she was going to get instant dementia if she kept drinking the stuff.

Was I lying? Or was there a kernel of truth?

A brief blurb on Aspartame from Environmental Health Perspectives reads like this:

“Aspartame (APM) is one of the most widely used artificial sweeteners in the world.

First approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for limited use in solid food in 1981, its authorization was extended to soft drinks in 1983 and then approved as a general sweetener in 1996 (FDA 1981, 1983, 1996).

Likewise, the sweetener was approved for general use in the European Union in 1994 (EC Directive 1994).

APM is now present in > 6,000 consumer packaged goods and in nearly 500 pharmaceutical products, including children’s medicines (Aspartame Information Center 2005).

In the United States, > 70% of aspartame sales are attributed to soft drinks (American Dietetic Association 2004). The acceptable daily intake (ADI) of aspartame is currently 50 mg/kg body weight (bw) in the United States and 40 mg/kg bw in the European Union for both children and adults.”

Thinking about artificial sweeteners makes my teeth hurt (YUCK), but it does seem to help people lose weight. It this at the expense of their mental health?

For every article that condemns aspartame, it seems there is one to refute it. Despite decades of research, it is still exceedingly difficult to draw any definite conclusions.

From the EC’s Scientific Committee on Food 2002 findings ( Really Long Link ) we can pluck out an interesting aspartame timeline:

1972 – Young monkeys fed aspartame for 52 weeks suffered from seizures, even after the aspartame was stopped.

1980 – Young monkeys fed aspartame did not suffer from seizures.

1980s, 1990’s – Giving aspartame to rats altered levels of various neurotrasmitters (chemicals in their brains). In light of the affect on rat’s brains, it was hypothesised that aspartame could affect human behaviour, cognition and physiology.

1989, 1991, 1996, 2000 – scientists unable to establish links between seizures and aspartame in humans.

1990 – Saravis et al - one aspartame drink a day for two weeks does not affect adults with depression, ADD, Parkinson’s or epilepsy. In 1994, Shaywitz et al found aspartame also had no effects in children with those disorders.

1992 – Camfield et al demonstrated that aspartame could increase the duration of some types of seizures in epileptic children.

1993 – Walton et al conducted an experiment with 13 depression sufferers and found that aspartame increased the frequency and severity of adverse experiences – they concluded that aspartame should be avoided in those with mood disorders.

1996 – Aspartame accused of being responsible for increasing incidence of brain tumours in the USA. No way of proving whether there was cause and effect or whether the correlation was pure coincidence.

1981, 2002 – Aspartame does not cause cancer in rats.

AFFSA (2002) – NOT enough evidence to prove a link between aspartame and epilepsy.

Yikes. No mention of Alzheimer’s Disease at all. All those years of hiding mum’s Diet Coke, berating her for drinking it, making jokes about her memory…I feel, if not ashamed, then at least very slightly abashed.

But is there more recent evidence we could be looking at?

Oh, yes.

John Briffa, general practitioner, had the following concerns in a 2005 article:

“Lean and Hankey's editorial on the effects of aspartame and health gives this artificial sweetener a clean bill of health.1 However, it seems they have ignored or dismissed a wealth of evidence, which shows that aspartame can provoke a wide range of symptoms including depression2 and headaches.3,4 Other studies (a total of 91) that attest to aspartame's potential for harm can be found in an online review of peer reviewed literature.5

This review is particularly worrying as it shows that, although 100% of industry funded (either whole or in part) studies conclude that aspartame is safe, 92% of independently funded studies have found that aspartame has the potential for adverse effects.”

In the 2007 Environmental Health Perspectives article “Life-Span Exposure to Low Doses of Aspartame Beginning during Prenatal Life Increases Cancer Effects in Rats”, Soffriti et al followed up on an initial experiment that “demonstrated for the first time that aspartame (APM) is a multipotent carcinogenic agent when various doses are administered with feed to Sprague-Dawley rats from 8 weeks of age throughout the life span.”

In other words, that aspartame DOES cause cancer in rats, especially when they are exposed to it prior to birth.

Soffriti and his colleagues criticised earlier studies for using only small numbers of rats, and for only watching the rats up until 110 weeks of age, instead of until they died.

In contrast, “we designed and performed a mega-experiment using seven groups of Sprague-Dawley rats (100–150 per sex per group) treated with APM in feed at various dose levels (including one very close to the ADI [Acceptable Daily Intake - TD] for humans), from 8 weeks of age until natural death.”

“APM is a multipotential carcinogenic agent, capable of inducing, in our experimental conditions a) a significant, dose-related increased incidence of malignant tumor–bearing animals in males and in females …b) a significant dose-related increase in lymphomas/leukemias in both males and females … c) a significant, dose-related increased incidence of transitional cell carcinomas of the renal pelvis and ureter and their precursors (dysplasias) in females … d ) a significant, dose-related increased incidence of malignant schwannomas of peripheral nerves in males.”

Wow, just look at that goodie bag of tumours!

The article was slammed by another scientist, who accused them of using test rats that were sick anyway, but I wasn’t really interested in what Mr Abegaz had to say after I noticed this little tidbit:

“The author is employed by Ajinomoto USA, which sells aspartame.”

Looks like Dr Briffa was right. The people that sell it have no qualms with it. The people that don’t sell it are worried about it, particularly in regards to epilepsy and cancer.

So, Mum, I was wrong when I hid your Diet Coke to stop you from getting Alzheimer’s Disease.

But I might have stopped you from getting leukaemia!

So…we’re OK now??

Drink water instead.

diet coke Natalie Dee
Taken from NatalieDee.com


http://www.nataliedee.com/
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Why you CAN’T Convert Your Car To Run On Water

June 29th 2008 21:53
Had enough of skyrocketing petrol prices? Desperate for a way out of this fossil fuel hole we’ve dug for ourselves? Everyone’s heard about this or that conspiracy theory where the oil companies have stifled new technologies that are easier, cleaner and cheaper. Wouldn’t we all love to convert our cars to run on water?

Do I think oil companies have stifled new technologies? Absolutely


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Underachiever? You Should Have Started Earlier: Prenatal Education Part 2 (BabyPlus)

June 26th 2008 01:52
If you didn’t get the marks you wanted in your final high school exams, maybe you should sue your mother for not using BabyPlus when she was pregnant with you.

BabyPlus calls itself on its website ( Really Long Link
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Underachiever? You Should Have Started Earlier: Prenatal Education Part 1

June 25th 2008 01:40
Austega ( Really Long Link ) defines gifted children as:

“…those children who possess an untrained and spontaneously expressed natural ability in at least one ability domain significantly beyond that typically seen in children of the same age


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Eating Liver and Kidney: Would you eat a sink strainer or the air filter from your car?

June 23rd 2008 02:30
Bricklayers eat steak and kidney pie. Lamb’s fry (liver) is listed as a traditional Australian recipe by Women’s Weekly.

In third world countries, people have to eat offal because they have no choice


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Little Miss Muffet Eats Curds and Whey, Gets ULTRA RIPPED

June 19th 2008 01:50
Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet, eating her curds and whey. Pretty soon, she was feeling trim and buff. In fact, she realised she had the ultimate lean, ripped body, and when the spider came along, she started doing poses like this:

Sheila Bleck
Sheila Bleck

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Choosing the Spa Capsule That’s Right For You

June 17th 2008 00:34
When I saw the ad in the paper for a Time Capsule Treatment, I got excited for a minute.

See, I’m currently reading a science fiction book called “Hyperion”, by Dan Simmons, in which wealthy citizens of a future, galaxy-spanning human civilisation can extend their lives using something called “Poulsen Treatments


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Fucoslim and Hoodia XPF; the Miracle Of Interchangeable Do-Nothing Diet Pills

June 16th 2008 02:01
Hands up who thinks that Japanese Miracle Sheds Belly Fat.

Nobody? Not even one


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Recent Comments

Comment by Thoraiya Dyer
on Australian car sales at an all-time high

July 7th 2008 02:49


Demented World
Medium-sized SUVs and utes, really?? I was expecting the small cars, but not those.

I guess, in a time of economic uncertainty, it's also important to get as much tax back as you possibly can.. maybe that's contributed to the June surge.

And any new ute or SUV is going to be more fuel efficient than an old one.

Still. Surprising news

Comment by Thoraiya Dyer
on Xtreme Ironing

July 7th 2008 02:34


Demented World
Hahaha that is awesome

Comment by Thoraiya Dyer
on Is high consumption of Tofu, hurting your memory?

July 7th 2008 02:25


Demented World
That's very interesting.

What I find most curious is that something that's really good for you at one stage of life can be potentially harmful at another stage of life...so that you can't dole out simplistic advice like, "don't eat this" or "do eat that"... instead you have to tailor your advice to the individual.

Which can only be good

Comment by Thoraiya Dyer
on Does Aspartame Give You Alzheimer’s?

July 7th 2008 01:46


Demented World
Hi Katyzzz, thanks for your comment

Comment by Thoraiya Dyer
on Lady in Red - top billing.

July 2nd 2008 00:02


Demented World
Nice analysis of exactly why it works so well

Comment by Thoraiya Dyer
on 22 tubs of yoghurt or one capsule?

July 1st 2008 23:59


Demented World
Glad you came to the same conclusion as me

Really Long Link

Though 22 tubs of yoghurt still sounds better than a hundred bottles of yakult

Comment by Thoraiya Dyer
on Gay Catholic Youth Forum in Sydney

July 1st 2008 23:56


Demented World
They will probably have to get that rainbow crucifix approved by the police before hand...and not say the word "condom" out loud

Know what annoys me? Those multi-million dollar electronic road signs being used to advertise World Youth Day. The RTA is Government funded. Those signs are paid for by me. According to the Use of Variable Message Signs Policy ( Really Long Link ), they're supposed to be for warning me about changes in traffic conditions like accidents and road work.

As far as I know, I am obliged to read them, just like I'm obliged to read all other road signs.

And that makes me absolutely fume.


Comment by Thoraiya Dyer
on Come on, kids! It's better than Disney World.......it's the Creation Museum!

July 1st 2008 23:39


Demented World
Great post Winston

(It's either laugh or cry...today I'm choosing to laugh...and the sarcastic comments help, ha ha)

Triple B: Well spotted...not much hope for continuing research, then?

Let's hope more of these don't spring up everywhere, diluting the integrity of real museums.

Comment by Thoraiya Dyer
on Why you CAN’T Convert Your Car To Run On Water

July 1st 2008 00:25


Demented World
Hello Cib, thanks for visitin'

I don't know how many have tried, but even fake journalist shows like current affair and today tonight are running stories on saving petrol using water. They show a range of people with unsealed salsa dip jars full of water and electrodes strapped under the bonnet and make no comment on the mechanism or anything evidence-based.

Sigh.

Comment by Thoraiya Dyer
on The Old Windmill

June 29th 2008 14:09


Demented World
That is a cool windmill. Have to make sure to hunt it down and stare at it next time I go to Brisbane