The thing I love about living in Ocean Grove is the quality of life in this seaside town and especially the quality and intelligence of it’s residents.

Could have done us a favour and improved the quality of the gene pool by removing himself from it.

We watched a show last night called “Around the World in 90 Minutes”.  It showed the International Space Station doing one complete circuit of our planet and highlighted what was going on in countries below and what happens on the planet in those 90 minutes.

Whether it’s trees cut down, carbon dumped into the atmosphere, increase in population, plastic dumped into the sea all of it makes for very depressing viewing.  What was more depressing was the assumption that the world is a great place and nature will fix these problems and everything will be hunky dory.  You can bet your bottom dollar that nature will fix these problems in due course but expect half the people on the planet to disappear in a major spring clean.

I could rant on for ages about how stuffed our planet is but you’ve heard it all before.  If you need me, I’ll be out the back banging my head against the garage wall or down at the beach. 

I’ll be easy to pick out.

Don’t read on if you want to avoid a vicious Dogbait rant.

What is it with me and people.  I must have a face that reads, “Use and abuse me”.  I have a few computer skills which attracts calls from friends, friends of friends six times removed and even strangers (they’re 7 times removed) who are on the blower requesting that I fix their computer problems. 

I spend hours driving to their house, fixing their computer, giving lessons and sometimes can barely crack it for a thank you or a coffee.  I don’t charge nor do I ask for payment and leave it up to the goodwill of the person.  If they ask, I profess a fondness for fruit cake for a small job or movie tickets for something more than plugging the power cable back in.  For bigger jobs like building a computer, reformatting and reloading all the software or long sessions of tuition, lounging in the Gold Class cinema is appealing.  I’d like to inform you that I’m not getting fat.

If I tell you about the latest effort I’ll end up in an apoplectic fit and Dogbait frothing at the mouth isn’t a pleasant sight.  If you really want to send me into a maniacal rage, ask me about the former good friend, who for no reason, no longer wants to know us.  I know, that’s one no, no, know, too many.

I’m so pissed off with people at the moment that I’m even starting to feel sorry for the next person who rings me wanting something.

Thanks, doctor, I’m feeling better already.

That’s what I call the period between 3pm and 4pm.  It’s a time I refuse to be on the roads, either running or bike riding, without a serious death wish.  It’s the time when mother’s scurry to schools in the area to pick up their little treasures.  

Like most kids of my era, we walked to school, usually with friends, and we thought nothing of the 6k return trip each day.  The dangers lurking around were prevalent in those days too yet it seems mandatory for children to be driven to school these days, usually in massive 4WD’s with matching chrome bullbars.

While most parents are responsible and cautious on the road, you have a minority who use it as a race track, or worse, doing it while on a mobile phone even though the penalty for this is quite severe.  Even worse are those who nibble the bottle through the day and then head off to pick up their kids and this isn’t an isolated case either. 

A couple of days ago, I made the mistake of running on a quiet, back road during Death Hour and was confronted by a Ford Explorer being driven towards me by a woman on a mobile phone totally oblivious to my existence. Since there are few footpaths in OG, you run towards the traffic and cars usually give you plenty of room when passing but this cretin drove straight at me and I had to dive into the bushes to avoid two tonnes of rampaging metal.  She at least had the grace to stop after I gave he a verbal volley and a waving fist and got out of the vehicle and said,”Sorry, I didn’t see you”.  I told her to tell that to coroner when she kills the next person.

Going west for the weekend to ride the Port Fairy to Warrnambool Rail Trail which we’ve been told has just been completed. 

Probably get run down by a drunken Thomas the Tank Engine!

Our thoughts go out to our friends in the UK who have suffered another senseless mass murder.  Of course, we are quick to criticise the Americans for their lax gun laws when they have their spate of shootings, but remember, the UK and Oz have some of the toughest gun laws around and yet we have had some of the worst massacres in history.

The Independent writes a good article trying to rationalise these paranoid people with their low self-esteem and a petty grudge who want to take their shitty little lives to the grave along with as many innocent people as possible.  While we live on such a violent and screwed up planet, it won’t be the last.

To top off a depressive week, we have the Israelis going about what they are best at; the suppression, violence, subjugation and the annexation of the Palestinian people.  So what’s new.  It’s been going on for 62 years with complete impunity from the West and they will continue to do what they please when they please.

I know I should steer clear of politics, religion and sex but I can’t help myself today.

As you may know, I do regular volunteer sessions at our local Neighbourhood Centre where people can drop in with their computer problems and hopefully I can assist them. 

A few months back, an old codger (a bit older than me) with a thick Irish accent, wanted help formatting a letter he was composing and then harped on about problems he was having with his computer at home.  So being the helpful fellow I always am, I went around to his place and got things working again.

While doing the formatting of his letter, I couldn’t avoid reading some of it and realised that he was a “retired” catholic priest requesting of his masters to be readmitted to the fold.  Now my regular readers will have deduced my opinions of the catholic church from previous posts about my catholic upbringing so I’m won’t expound on them further. 

Needless to say, reading about the same guy in the second paragraph of this article didn’t do much for my stomach at all but the church can take a lot of the blame with their bizarre celibacy rules.

PLEASURE: Speeding downhill for 30 kilometres on your bike with a 30 kph tailwind.

PAIN: Getting to the turnaround point.

It’s been a week of disasters so I haven’t felt like blogging.  One thing after another and then the blog host stuffed up my files and I had to fix that too so you may have seen the blog disappear for a bit.  No, I hadn’t gone off and sold the blog name although I don’t think dogbait.net would fetch as much as google.com.

I’ll get back into the swing of things as soon as I have my mind in gear again.  Next Sunday might be a good time for a resurrection. 

In the mean time, some good news spreading down from the north.

Can’t get any motivation for blogging.  No wind left in the sails.

As that wise and noble politician (is that an oxymoron?) Marcus Antonius once said, friends are like roses…you just have to look out for the pricks. Or was it Confucius?

One of my bloggers said recently that when the balance of what you put into a friendship against what you get out of it tips the scales, then it’s doomed to failure.  Unfortunately, we have had our share of scale tippers and roses over the years, where, for no reason, we have turned into shit on their shoes.  Dems da breaks.

However, Confucius did say, friends who behaves like an ass will be the butt of those who crack jokes. 

A good friend came and stayed for the weekend.  She brought goodies including some chocolates and nougat. 

When we were in Nepal in 2008, I pulled out a tooth filling chewing some nougat and I swore I’d never eat another one. 

When I told MP she said, “Goody, I can finish yours”

She nearly got the lot today as I took a tumble on the roof of the house and nearly fell off.

Damn this getting old.  I’m coming apart at the seams.

Did you like my Christmas theme?  I was going to keep it until the 12th day and all that but I have a limited Christmas spirit attention span.

So it’s Bah Humbug for another year and back to normal programming.  The theme was scraped up at short notice by someone and was buggy as Santa’s sleigh and was missing a few important functions.

There are about 1100 themes in WordPress and I should change mine to suit my moods.  If I did that, it would be a black theme until the end of January.

People think I’m a real Scrooge when it comes to Christmas and they’re right.

However, for those of you out there who think Christmas is all about Santa and reindeer, then this is for you.