How do you like the new look to my blog? Veronicaspent all day working on my new theme yesterday and I am really pleased with it. There are just a few minor tweaks that need to be done, like soften the white background to more of an ivory colour and then frog ponds rock is ready to roll into the year of the tiger. Yay.
It is nearly time to send the pigs off to be killed. This is the first time that we have ever sent animals off the property to be slaughtered and I don’t really like it. So I have been procrastinating about ringing up the slaughterman and the girls just keep on growing.
We could kill the girls here but we dont have anywhere to hang them after they are done. So I have made the hard decision to have a professional slaughterman do the job. I have no idea how we are going to get them into the trailer to transport them there but The Spouse is working on a plan.
I felt a bit foolish asking the slaughterman how he would kill the girls but it was very important for me to know the details, as some people just cut the pigs throats and let them bleed out, in order to collect the blood to make black pudding. He shoots them first and then cuts their throats once they are dead, so I was very relieved. I am still a bit worried that they will be in a pen together when they are killed and I will have to ask if they can be separated. The Spouse thinks I am being silly and says the girls will become more stressed if they are separated.
Ack! It is hard being a carnivore.
Duck season has opened and I am always reminded of the scene in a Bugs Bunny cartoon where Daffy and Bugs are arguing about whether it is duck or rabbit season and Elmer just blasts Daffy anyway.
This long weekend hunters have headed off to shoot ducks and protesters have headed off to protest and disrupt the hunt. A protestor has already been injured.
Police say the rescue helicopter was called about 9:00am (AEST) to retrieve a 35-year-old woman who was part of a campaign to disrupt the hunt at Moulting Lagoon.
The woman, from Battery Point, was thought to have been bitten by a snake but it was later diagnosed as a suspected marine sting to her foot.
I find it interesting that the woman was from an inner city suburb and then I wonder what sort of shoes she was wearing. And all I can think of is ’silly girl’ and shake my head.
The problem with these sort of emotive issues is that everyone gets all het up about eating poor cute little duckies and furry little wallabies. They ponce about the place waving placards and blowing whistles and then on the way home they go to the supermarket and buy a package of perfectly wrapped and presented pork chops, or skinless chicken breasts. They congratulate themselves on a job well done and don’t even give a thought to how the majority of our food is produced.
Where are the protestors with their placards at the top flight restaurants that serve wagyu beef. I dont see them being all disruptive in the deli section of woolworths protesting the hideous conditions pigs are kept in, to give us cheap bacon. The hypocrisy of it all does my head in.
Now to totally change the subject before I really get worked up. I used the contact form on the bloggies page and got the breakdown of the votes for the Best Australian/ New Zealand category. God had already sent me the breakdown (thanks God) but I went ahead and asked for my own anyway as I have always been a tad suspicious of direct messages from God.
So Dominos Pizza has jumped on the gluten free bandwagon and is offereing a gluten free pizza. Fantastic, until you read the small print that says your meal may contain traces of gluten. Now I find this disclaimer to be very confusing. Does the gluten free base contain traces of gluten? Or will only the toppings have gluten? Is a trace amount of gluten supposed to be ok? Possibly gluten free, certainly doesn’t sound as enticing as gluten free.
@frogpondsrock@Pizza_Dominos is doing the best they can in providing meal options 4 a variety of target groups.
My grand daughter isn’t a target group. She is a little girl with Coeliacs. Gluten damages her intestines, it gives her stomach pain and diarrhoea.The damage to her intestine takes three weeks to heal during which time she cannot absorb any nutrients from her food at all. Can you imagine not being able to eat for three weeks? How ill you would become? How much weight you would lose? A target group bah.
Then there was this @ reply that I only saw by chance.
Ok? How exactly will they be in touch with me to discuss? I dont have an email address listed on my twitter account. Will @Pizza_Dominostweet at me once or twice and think that is enough? Will they hope that because I don’t respond to their tweets that I have forgotten, or that I am busily ordering takeaway poison for my grand daughter right this minute.
Gluten free means gluten free. It doesn’t mean sort of gluten free-ish, or we would like it to be gluten fee so we can capture a niche market. I smell a marketing ploy that hasn’t been properly thought out.
Talk to me Dominos and we will see what comes of this. Explain your position and I will publish it here. My teenage son loves your pizzas but as I am the one that pays for them, I think he will be going through a bit of a Dominos free stage.
*edited, it has been brought to my attention that Dominos wasn’t responsible for the tweet referring to target groups. It was Andrew sticking up for Dominos and he would like me to get my facts straight.Or my tweets straight in this case.
In the Greek mythology, Sisyphus was a king who was cursed to roll a huge boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, and to repeat this throughout eternity.
A beach cleanup on Midway Atoll made us feel just like Sisyphus.
There are millions of tons of plastics present in our oceans, and these are constantly fragmenting into smaller and smaller pieces which are scattered throughout the water column and present, in different densities, throughout all the worlds oceans.
Contrary to what many people believe, there are no visible islands of trash anywhere –even if some areas, the gyres, accumulate higher densities of plastic pollution. In actuality, what is happening is much more complex and scary: our oceans are becoming a planetary soup laced with plastic.
To make thing worse, these tiny pieces of plastic are extremelypowerful chemical accumulators for organic persistent pollutants present in ambient sea water such as DDE’s and PCB’s. The whole food chain, invertebrates, fish, sea turtles… are eating plastic and /or other animals who have plastic in them. This means that we are. Like the albatrosses on Midway, we carry the garbage patch inside of us.
Cleaning up this mess is not feasible, technically or economically. Even if all the boats in the world were put to the task somehow, the cleanup would not only remove the plastics but also theplankton, which is the base of the food chain, and is responsible for capturing half of the CO2 of our atmosphere and generating half of the oxygen we need to breathe.
But even if this problem was solved too somehow, the amount of plastic that we could capture, at an immense cost, would be a drop in the bucket as compared to the amount that flows into the ocean every day.
No matter how hard we push, in terms of technology or money, the boulder will be rolling back down the hill, throughout eternity, unless we stop putting more plastics into our environment.
The good news is that we can do this. We can do this now. We need to start a social movement that spreads virally and creates a critical mass of concerned citizens who pledge to move away from our disposable habits, and who raise their voice to reject and reverse a throwaway culture that might be profitable, but whose consequences are intolerable.
Click here to see a satellite image of the exact location of this video (click on ‘view map’ and zoom all the way in.)
I have received permission to reproduce this article, here on my blog with the following conditions.
Hello! You are free to repost the text as long as you give attribution, do not alter the original text, mention where it was originally published, and include a link to the original post. You must also allow others to do the same (you cannot claim a copyright of the reposting). You are also free to quote, extract, mention, etc.
You are also more that welcome to embed the video. Thank you for asking, and thank you so much for helping us spread this message!
You my dear readers may do the same. Please lets see if we can get this message out to as many people as we possibly can. I know that I can’t stop the polar ice caps from melting but I can drastically reduce the amount of plastic that I and my family use.
What a crock of shit! The nanny state is about to strike again. All internet in Australia will be filtered at the ISP level so that little Johnny doesn’t stumble across some porn or get pounced on by some internet predator.
AAArggghhh! This makes me so angry.
This parent is standing up and loudly telling the government to just bloody well hang on a minute, I am more than capable of protecting my children from the perils of the internet.
I worry more about my teenage son accidentally clicking onto a sparkly link that will infect my computer with a virus than I do about him accessing porn on the net.
Why? I hear you ask is that?
Because I talk to and with my children. Internet safety has been drummed into his head. The computer is in a high traffic area of the house and he has to ask my permission to use my computer.
And…
He sees more porn in the school yard than he could ever possibly access here on my computer. Some of the images our kids have on their mobile phones are very very explicit. They aren’t texting they are sexting.
But the clean feed isn’t about pornography and pedophiles that is just the catch cry to distract us from the deeper insidious implications of this horrid legislation.
This legislation is all about control of information. Politicians and their media magnate buddies are scared shitless of twitter and other social media because a: they dont know how to use it properly and b: it keeps them accountable.
Cut off our access to information and you effectively cut off our voices. Australians are an apathetic bunch anyway and I think that is one of the reasons that we are being used as a test case. As well as the fact that we are a smallish island population, not too many telecommunications companies to contend with etc etc.
So lets gag Australia and see what happens. If the politicians get away with it here my friends YOU will be next.
So what can you do? You can use your voice. Loudly. We can nag the hell out of our local and federal members and loudly voice our displeasure.
Your local Member of Parliament is your representative and wants to hear about your concerns. Let your member know that you are unhappy with this policy.
How about a phonecall to Stephen Conroy you can call the minister’s office on
(03) 9650 1188
Or write to him
Senator Stephen Conroy
Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy
Level 4, 4 Treasury Place
Melbourne Vic 3002
You can followKevinRuddPM on twitter and bombard him with @replies letting him know personally just how cranky you are. Just make sure that you have the capital letters in the right place and that it is the verified twitter account of Kev or you will be tweeting away at a fake.
You can copy this post or parts of it and publish it on your blog as long as you give me credit.
You could also tweet this post and/or stumble it as well.
If you want other options just click on the NO CLEAN FEED button on my sidebar. Now lets get to it Australia.
In laymens terms, this means that come next August, MANDATORY ISP filtering will occur on all internet.
It’s not up to the Government to say what I can and can’t look at on the internet. I am an adult and so long as my activity isn’t illegal (ch*ld porn) then the Government should have NO RIGHT to filter my internet.
It is up to me to keep my children safe on the net. Not the Government.
See NoCleanFeed for more details and if you agree with me, sign the petition.
As a web publisher, this scares me senseless. Officials have admitted that the filtering, while effective against the kind of sites they are wanting to filter (a blacklist, if you will. who knows what exactly they will be deeming ‘not suitable’) there are also plenty of false positives, ie: sites blocked that shouldn’t have been.
Does that mean I could ‘accidentally’ have Frog Ponds Rock blocked? Or what about you. What happens if your website gets blocked?
I don’t agree with it. It is censorship plain and simple.
