Standing up for a fair shake of the sauce bottle

Julia the PM (at time of writing anyway) was asked by a reporter in Townsville yesterday "Should tomato sauce be free with a meat pie".

Now, for some perverse reason that has become a source (excuse the pun) for much mirth in the media, but I think it needs a little deconstruction.

As this blog is all about the little things in life that bug me, it is perhaps an appropriate conundrum to investigate.

So, harking back to my youth, until these little bits of packaging came on to the scene tomato sauce was free. it came in a bottle on the counter at your local shop or a squeeze bottle at the condiments area of the footy canteen.

Now in those days you were buying a pie, not the condiments. You did not have to pay for the sauce on your pie. You did not have to pay for the salt on your chips. And you did not have to pay for the sugar in your tea or coffee. (Yes, dear reader, in my youth they sold just as much teas as coffee at the footy!) Condiments were free.

Then came packaged servings of tomato sauce in the era of economic rationalism.

Now, I like some aspects of the "user pays" system, but these goals should not be at the expense of the "server your customers well" idea.

To me, supplying condiments is a "cost of doing business" rather than a "profit centre" issue. Good business people who care about their customers and not charging a petty 10c for a little disposable packet of sauce always get my patronage. So bring back the condiments counter and the sauce squeezer please and get rid of portion control - that is what your customers want! And another thing, about those bloody disposable sauce sachets...

er, see ya at half past...

Now I'm really pissed off...

The Wilderness Society is having a go at the "missing in action" pollies on climate change and the environmental front.

Greg Hunt and Peter Garret have been AWOL since the campaign started; well it is a junior ministry! Don't even get me started with Penny 'Puppet' Wong.

I know there are many issues that we need to take into account to help the country develop, help people live safe lives and keep the world in peace.

However the single most important over-riding issue is our living environment. Without the clean earth that we live on, life cannot go on. Without clean air, we will slowly get sick. Without a way past the short-sighted rent-seekers in industries who pollute, we will loose hope.

Our grasping for every new technology has put a barrier between us and the world around us. We have become like monarchs in our castle who don't actually know what is going on really deep down in the kingdom below them. The powers that be seem only to listen to the shrillest voice - pushing short-term self interest over the interests of the planet - yet they are also locked in the castle and equally clueless.

Pollies, just listen to the people. The voters who have their say but once every three years. Just bloody fix it, get it over and done with just like the vast majority of the scientific community say it needs to be done. Don't wait until it is too late. Don't be the ones in the history books blamed for mass extinction of species.

Or are you all just too gutless?

(sigh... er, see ya at half past...)

Is today's world what Lincoln really meant?

With a Federal Election awkwardly loping up to us here in Australia, like some giant malformed directionless jellyfish, my frustration at what has been promised in the past and what has actually been delivered to us is causing a lot of us here in Canberra to question where public life is going.

Abraham Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg address of only 272 words in 1863 after a Civil War schism that defined Americas' position in history. It called for a road forward that would reunite that country.

Here is my revision (humbly) submitted to the blogosphere ;-)

er, see ya at half past...

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Well more than the four score and seven of Lincoln's time has past. On reflection, it seems to us today that the plans of our forefathers have become a corrupted shadow of their original noble dreams.

Surely they had no plans for the wide-spread human rights abuses and corporate corruption in a world that now values possession over humility, self-promotion over selflessness and expediency over honour.

Nor would our forefathers have planned to bring our fragile world to the brink of extinction by producing weapons with the capability to destroy our planet many times over.

These are not the dreams of our forefathers but the nightmares of tomorrow being peddled by the soulless puppets of greed that claim to represent us.

So we have the world as it is today.

We must now ask what is the great task remaining before us?

The peaceful life-affirming tenets of the world’s great religions and progressive philosophical thought must be promoted to starve the light from those who twist the symbols of peace and unity to promote fracture.

Government must realize that they are still of the people; their responsibilities to the people never diminishes.

Corporations must use their knowledge and potential to create the life we aspire to, without destroying the foundation of that life, our planet.

We, as peoples of the world, must join today and pledge to know and support our neighbours, realize our inter-dependency on each other for our very survival and support this common purpose to keep the world alive, peaceful and free.

Let the hopes and dreams of the many prevail, so that unjust power be rendered to dust.

Another 50 to come...

Travelled south of the border on the weekend to help my partner Y's brother celebrate his 50th birthday.

I'm in the middle of 50ths I think as only half my friends and acquaintances have past the half way mark to their own personal centenaries.

Y is happily past hers and her brother is a middle child, so one more to go on her family's side, and I've got one left of my siblings to go.

K, my younger sister has discovered the concept of fitness and now runs half marathons, is a personal trainer and makes her siblings both proud and sad - proud that she has achieved so much and sad that the rest of us have already started a decline from general fitness that is perhaps to be expected at the age of 50!

K is winning in her challenge but we all await her 50th in a couple of years to see if it is all too good to be true. On present form I'm sure she'll win :-)

er, see ya at half past...