A photoblog and other things

Part 1: The flashing traffic lights.

This has really been getting to me recently and in a lot of cases is making driving more dangerous than just after Wilma when we had virtually no working traffic lights. Some lights at intersections are still not working properly and as such the lights flash yellow for one flow of traffic (eg northbound/southbound) and flash red for another flow (eg eastbound/westbound). If you are travelling and encounter a YELLOW FLASHING traffic light you may proceed with caution. If you are travelling and encounter a RED FLASHING traffic light you must treat it as a stop sign, hence, you must ALWAYS give way to those drivers who are encountering a YELLOW FLASHING traffic light, who by the way should be travelling through the intersection with caution.

What have I seen so far? Drivers have been stopping at the YELLOW FLASHING traffic lights and allowing the people who have RED FLASHING traffic lights to pass on through. However, there have been drivers in other lanes passing through a YELLOW FLASHING light who continue through and nearly hit a driver who shouldn’t be in the intersection. Then again, they should be driving with caution anyway.

To sum up: people are treating the flashing traffic lights as a 4-way stop sign when they should not be. You only do that when they are not operating at all.

Part 2: People not wearing seatbelts.

It really pisses me off as a driver when people do not buckle up. Put your god damn seatbelt on and don’t complain if I tell you to. Contrary to your own beliefs, you’re not invincible. Your chances of proving that you’re invincible pretty much fall to zero when you fly through the front windscreen.

Part 3: People not using their indicators.

I like to know what you’re doing, fellow driver, so I can work out what action to take should something weird happen. You may think you own the roads but in fact you don’t. Shock! Horror! Actually you only “own” a small fraction of the road and I’m pretty sure we passed that a while back.

Part 4: People on bicycles riding against the traffic.

ARE YOU FREAKING MORONS? Ride with the traffic you idiots.

Yes, it’s Monday.

I was browsing through my computer and found some pictures from what seems like another lifetime. Ok, it’s actually only a couple of years ago and these pics are from one of the infamous social club nights my company had. This one had a blues brother theme and stars the Chief and CJB as my fellow fro-bros, da Boss, and Nav. I’ve only got a few pics and they are here.

CJB-1000 was created from one of these pics.

I have an apology to post to this blog. It has been brought to my attention that I’ve been using “cell phone” instead of the correct term “mobile phone”. I’m sorry.

I would like to point out though that I still like the letter U and I use it whenever possible to honoUr my upbringing in the proper spelling of words in English. I would like to apologiSe if I have accidentally left that little bugger out.

I would also like to point out that I still think it’s a 350 ZED and not 350 Zeeee as is so often pronounced around here. It’s just not catchy pronounced as the latter.

Furthermore, I still don’t like how Nissan is pronounced (Nee-sahn), nor Mazda (Mars-da), nor Mitsubishi (Meet-su-bishi) nor Hyundai (Hunday). Maybe that’s their proper pronounciation (although I’m pretty sure it’s all day, every day, he-yun-dai at the very least). But anyway, whatever.

So that should wrap that up. When I come back to Australia next (more about that soon), if anyone points out from now on that I have misused and abused the English language (not by simple grammatical and sentence structure errors, which I’m sure are rife throughout this blog, but by using the Yank equivalent) I will buy them a pint of their choice of Cooper’s beer. This offer is a once only per mistake thing so first in best dressed and most drunk. I may even put some intentional errors in just to check who’s still reading this site. Jajajajaja. (that’s Spanish and I count it as legit).

This is what I was able to do during Wilma, and this was one of the conversations I had.

(I’m babbling to my flatmate about something)
Neighbour: Hi! Where are you from?
Me: Australia.
Neighbour: Where in Australia?
Me: South Australia
Neighbour: Where in South Australia?
(I’m starting to raise my left eyebrow at this point)
Me: Adelaide.
Neighbour: Adelaide? Really? I used to work there on the railway lines.
Me: What? You’re kidding me!
Neighbour: I used to work there back in the 60’s for a little while. I’m from England originally and moved to Australia for a while and then back home to England. I wanted to move back to Australia but they wouldn’t let me back in so I moved here instead. I really want to go back there.
Me: Wow. I didn’t think I’d be living next to anyone who knew where Adelaide was.
Neighbour: Yeah, yeah. Lleyton Hewitt comes from there, right? Tennis player?
Me: Yeah, that’s right.
Neighbour: I also did some work for the railways out in the bush.
Me: Oh really? Where abouts?
Neighbour: I used to work in a town called Barmera. Lake Bonney.
Me: WHAT? You know about Barmera? My Grandma lives there.
(Barmera has a population of around 4000 people. It’s not huge, so I’m amazed at this point this guy knows about Barmera).
Neighbour: I also used to work in this little town on the way to Barmera coming from Adelaide. You had to go past Kingston and then you had to turn off not far from there.
Me: You mean Moorook?!?
Neighbour: Yeah, that’s it, Moorook.

It’s at this point of the conversation I started to feel a little light headed. Moorook at most has a population of a couple of hundred people. People in Moorook who had to go to highschool went to the same one as I, Loxton High. What the hell were the chances that on the other side of the world I would meet someone who had lived/worked in Moorook? Diddly squat.