18T - Tories
In opposition to popular conception, the word 'tory' does not come from the word 'conservative' or 'conservatory'. The former of those two terms deals with a political position to maintain things the way they are and to change slowly if need be and the latter is to do with a room attached to the back of a house which is full of plants.
The word 'tory' is derived from the Irish 'toraigh' and means 'robbers' or 'thieves'. This sounds like a strange moniker for a political party to add to themselves and truth in point, they did not. The term exists in the wake of annexation of Ireland by the United Kingdom and in a time when there are various but unorganised factions within the House of Commons. Tories, Whigs, and Conservatives all pop up from time to time, as well as specific factions named after specific Prime Ministers, such as 'Peelites' who are named for Sir Robert Peel.
I like the use of the word 'tory' as a descriptor rather than a formal name because invariably, tories have as their grand project, taking away anything and everything that is and was owned in commonwealth and privatising it away their knavish mates. I have lived through a period of intense toryism where just about everything which was in the silverware cabinet has been hocked off to the lowest bidder. The bank, ferries, buses, telephone, electricity, companies that I use, all used to be owned by us the general public in commonwealth and have all been sold off to private tory interests.
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17Q - Queensland Seats
Good luck in actually trying to guess who is going to win the election and form government because this election will be won and lost in Queensland.
Western Australia, South Australia, Tasmania and the two territories account for just 23% of all of the electorates in Australia. This means that the lion's share of 77% of all electorates are in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland. New South Wales and Victoria both have reasonably stable and uniform voting patterns which means that you can apply a uniform swing calculator and get a sensible result. Queensland on the other hand, continues to act like an airliner where everyone wants to sit on one side of the plane or the other and so Queensland lurches one way or the other.
The problem with trying to predict Queensland is that the press is an unreliable narrator. Effectively Queensland has only one newspaper in the Courier-Mail and it never ever changes its position from always backing the LNP. In Queensland state political history, the Liberal Party basically ceased to be and was absorbed by the National Party before the new thing changed its name to the Liberal National Party and became one entity. Queensland state politics lurches between the Labor Party and what used to the be National Party and runs on impossible to see margins. Although you can apply a uniform swing and plug those figures into a spreadsheet, it may as well be meaningless as almost every seat in Queensland has an uncanny ability to snap in either direction.
I think that the likely fallout of the election will be:
ALP - 80
LNP - 65
Oth - 6
but this is still dependent on Queensland being somewhat predictable. It is not. Give up now. Save yourselves!
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9E - Elements
One of the theories that I have read suggests that the maximum size for an atom would be at about element 137. At that point, the electrons would be travelling around the nucleus of the atom at speeds which would exceed the speed of light. That places an upper bound on the number of electron shells that an atom has and the kind of shells that can be created.
What I do not know, is what kind of chemistry could be done with elements that massive. If element 119, which presumably has a lone electron whizzing around in a distant s-block shell, comes in contact with a halogen, would that create an ionic bond and a supermassive salt? If element 119 and 117 were to share an ionic bond, short of metallic bonding, would this be the biggest possible atomic pair ever?
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14S - Stereotypical
It is possible to state that something is stereotypical but is it possible to call something monotypical? Something monotypical would only have one channel of quality; which is nearer in meaning to the cut down impression of the thing which is being conveyed. Reverting to a stereotype imagines the thing and the world less complexly than a multi-channel impression being conveyed in quatravox or Dolby 5.1, 8.1 or 13.1.
If a stereotype reduces everything to just black and white, then we call that monochome. Monochrome monitors from the 1980s which either displayed things in green or even rarer orange, might have had only two states for the individual pixel in question but those two states were either on or off. If a thing is portrayed as a one-dimensional character, then isn't it better off being described as monotypical?
Of course the opposite of a stereotypical character is something that is imagined complexly but we run into another defect of language with the use of the word 'colourful'. A 'colourful character' is the euphemism used for someone who may or may not have a borderline criminal element (allegedly).
Also, Fanta in its adertising says that it is for 'colourful people'. This is both amusing and unfortunate when you consider that 'colourful' is the description for someone who we might reasonably assume (but can not prove) is dancing with the edge of law, and all the more shockng when you remember that Fanta is an invention of Coca-Cola in Germany, when they had their syrup supply from America cut off, due to the fact that Germany had a Nazi government.
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30C - How Do You Solve A Problem Like Corolla?
I genuinely think that there are no 'bad' cars on sale in Australia any more. Even the cheapest end of the market with the Chinese-built MG3 has a level of refinement and build quality which leaves some cars as little as 15 years ago in the dust. So to this lady with two kids, who occasionally wants to drive over dirt roads, the choice of which car she should get is obvious - any of them.
Which car she actually wants comes down to a matter of which packaging that she wants to wrap around herself and her two kids. If I was in that situation with two kids, then I would be wildly gesticulating for a Ford Focus hatchback, or a Mazda 3 hatchback, or upon failing both of those choice and Mrs R absolutely wanting an SUV (although I fail to see any kind of net benefit in them and she does not want one anyway), then I'd be after a Ford Puma or a Mazda CX-3.
If you really wanted to pound dirt roads all day long in comfort, then my go to choices would have been the Ford Falcon and the Holden Commodore (VF and before) because both of those two cars were extensively pounded over dirt roads beyond the point of reasonable sensibility. Seeing as neither of those two cars are made anymore, then my choice naturally reverts to something which is smallish, fun to drive, and relatively cool.
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20H - Watching A Hen's Night On The Bus
By the time that I got on the 100 bus from Mosman to the City, the party was in full swing and the contestants in this game of silliness were already well on the way to self-marination. The bride to be wore a tiara, a set of L-plates, and marscara which was already running down her face from when she'd been crying. This ensemble was capped off by a pink Adidas jacket which was a colour only appropriate for the race leader of the Giro d'Italia, hi-vis workers on a building site, or a six year old girl.
I suspect that if you added up the collective IQ of the herd by this stage, you'd still get change from the price of a sole Chuppa Chupp. In the semi darkened rear of the bus, I gave up trying to listen to the politics podcast that I was attempting to follow, as several women who glowed with splotches from the contents of a broken glow-stick, sang along to a mobile phone which was suffering the punishment of having to play "Eternal Flame" by the Bangles, Madonna, Atomic Kitten, or some other starlet. A music theorist would tell you that this song as sung by them, is difficult to analyse as it had no tonal centre and modulated between the Key of S and the Key of N. I am quite sure that there were sharps and flats being sung that were previously unknown to human ears.
I can only assume that the herd did what is known as "pre-loading" of fermented vegetable product; which would explain the herd's rauckousness and their level of happiness. At some point later on in the night, my assumption is that the herd would turn from singing to crying because there is an urban proverb which states that pouring gin into a lady is the same as pouring diesel into a petrol car - they both result in whining before shuddering to a screeching halt.
When the herd got off the bus at Wynyard, they disappeared into the bowels of the station and then off into the night. I walked onwards and upwards to Platforms 3 and 4 where I was met with a silence completely alien to the 20 minutes which had gone on immediately beforehand.
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26C - A Cat's Got Stuff To Do
The thing about cats when they are outside, is that their "don't give a rip" attitude also goes with them. Outside, cats will adopt a sense of self-preservation as per normal but if they want to do something and go somewhere, they have no qualms about doing precisely what they feel like.
I have lived with cats long enough to know that their planning process for any given thing, is about as long as the average collision in the middle of an atomic acceleramoeterbob. A cat's thinking process mostly consists of "I want" phrases and "I don't want" phrases.
When placed into action, cats will just go. If you see a cat walking across the street, at no point will it look like it has no idea where it is going even though the actual plan of what it wants to do might very well be non-existent. It kind of helps that a cat is a being with a directional purpose because their form belies the very real possibility that they might not have any.
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