brainsnorkel.com

Vale John Kenneth Galbraith.

No, not Rugby League football. Last weekend I attended the Annual State of Origin Ploughing Competition in my old home town of Armidale.

Competitors from NSW and Queensland were battling it out for the title with draught horses and old-style shiny ploughs. Literally tens of people had turned out to spectate. There was even a display of Stump-Jump Ploughs. I finally figured out why they’re called that and why they’re considered innovative — the plough shares are each on a spring-loaded arm, so they can “jump” any stumps that you plough over. Sweet!

The kids enjoyed it. The horses were nice. The competition was… slow.

I wondered whether the ploughing competition was more or less interesting than watching grass grow?

Conveniently, there was a turf farm right next to the ploughing competition.

A farmer was unrolling green fabric over his freshly tilled paddock from the back of his big red tractor. The fabric was a flexible film of water-soluble nutrients inset with grass-seed — perfect for germinating the grass seeds before birds eat them.

It turns out grass growing is pretty interesting.

Wines bottled with screw caps don’t suffer the scourge of cork taint, which means the public should experience many fewer bad bottles of wine than before. Cork taint affects around 10% of all cork-bottled wine. Apart from the scarcity of non-Portuguese cork trees, the screw-top’s advantages include upright cellaring, and they’re very convenient if you find yourself at a housewarming with a nice bottle and no corkscrew.

Old-school wine enthusiasts claim that real cork usually adds good characteristics to wine flavours that screw caps don’t. A recent SMH lifestyle special ran a tasting on pairs of wines where the only difference was that one had been bottled with a screw cap and the other with a cork. They came out slightly in favour of screw caps.

At this point, I’d like to introduce some circumstantial evidence: A lot of liquor stores put video surveillance cameras in their cool rooms.

It is common practice in liquor stores that do not have video surveillance in their cool rooms, for people — generally the youth demographic — to let themselves into the cool room. Once inside, their objective is to drink as much beer as they can, as quickly as they can, and then walk out of the liquor store without raising suspicion leaving the empties behind. Hiding behind boxes of beer is common when there is a surveillance camera present. Innovative cool room hermits have been known to create “beer igloos” to evade detection.

An ex-employee of a liquor store told me (apocryphally) that secretly bringing your empty beer cans from a weekend BBQ and dumping them in a liquor store cool room while someone you don’t like is working their shift is an effective method of increasing the unemployment rate. But back to the story.

Last night I brought home a bottle of white wine from a reputable local bottle shop and discovered that its ullage was suspicious, and the screw cap no longer had a seal.

O brave new world that has such people in’t!

I’m a supporter of screw-caps, but I’d never considered them from the perspective of convenience being the enemy of security. I wonder how long it will be before I get out of the habit of assuming wine bottles are sufficiently tamper-proof?

Memo to self: The next time Word 2003 offers to update something for me “automatically” – say no!

Never turn on that bottom right checkbox in the style dialog. Never!

After days of having my entire document change its formatting automatically whenever I ventured into italics or bold, and forcing me to undo my way back to sanity, I finally found my nemesis: “Automatically update.”

That still doesn’t explain why paragraphs seem to add themselves to my document header on their own.

Creeping senility I guess. I just need to figure out if it’s me or Word that is senile.

Over the weekend I returned to my ancestral home and searched the old bookshelves to see what nostalgia I could summon up. One of the books I used to leaf through and get ideas for little projects from was a book that my grandfather gave me called “Make it Yourself” which was a publication of Popular Mechanics in 1927. It’s a compendium of helpful hints and 900 things to make and do.

Hand-drawn at the back of the book are some of my grandfather’s schematics for his own wireless crystal radio designs.

Anyway, it reminded me that Make Magazine, that I subscribe to, is but a pale imitation of the once great Popular Mechanics! Popular Mechanics, of course, is still around and aimed at a wider demographic. Neither publication are likely to offer advice like my 1927 masterpiece does. Troublesome ants? Pour a pint of mercury bi-chloride down their hole.

I will be scanning more pages and putting them on Flickr as I get time. They vary from the strange, like the attractive duck hunting garb, to the quaint, dangerous and esoteric.

Here’s a page of helpful hints by way of introduction (view the full-sized version).

Today, I saw someone had hung this disco ball right next to the ficus, so I took a photo. It looks a lot like someone has taken a butterfly pupae 3D model, applied mirrored surfaces, and rendered it into reality on our front steps.

Does anyone have any idea what kind of butterfly (or moth?) starts out with such glamorous pupal accommodation?