buter's BABY blog

You ever have one of those days where it seems you didn't sleep right, and you end up all fuzzy through the day?

Yeah, I had one of those yesterday.

I've decided therefore, that 5 days weeks are bad, we should have 4 day weeks for the main part, with the bonus that public holidays mean that we get a 3 day week every now and again.

This would solve so many problems!! There's the problem of long weekend traffic on the not-so-common 3-day weekends - Friday night traffic out of the CBD is utterly crapola and so if there was a 3 day weekend every week it wouldn't be so bad, since you wouldn't have 250,000 extra people all driving up to the Central Coast on that one long weekend, instead some of those people would drive up next weekend. Because they can. Of course you could say instead that every weekend the traffic will be utterly crapola, but I think that wouldn't happen. After all, we don't all drive up the coast every weekend already, why would we do it when we have a 3-day weekend every week? I'm sure it's only the specialness of the 3-day weekend that makes the traffic crapola.

Another problem solved would be the midweek hump day, commonly known as Wednesday, when weekends seem so far away in either direction. If you only have a 4-day week, no hump day, since on Tuesday the weekend was only a day or so ago, and on Wednesday, the weekend is only a day or so away! No hump day makes for no boring Wednesday-itis where all your coworkers look depressed because the weekend is so far away in both directions.

And here's a thing - having a 4-day week would help out all those Soccer mums - instead of losing a quarter to half of the weekend ferrying kids to and from school sports on a Saturday morning, and thus having less time to do grocery shopping, household cleaning and all that boring stuff, there would be the option to carry out the sport thing more spread out (no more 7am starts in winter...) or get it over with all on the one day and then *still* have a whole 2 days to do all the family catch-up stuff.

As for economic sense - since it seems most salaried workers in Australia work at least 10 hours a day anyway, but only get paid for 8, why not keep pay rates the same (i.e. paid for 40 hours) even though we're only working 4 days - that way we actually get paid for the hours we work, rather than the hours we are nominally employed for. Doesn't that sound fair? And maybe it would make the workplace more efficient too.

Look, to be fair, I think it would even work if we didn't all take the same 3rd day - some people take Friday and some Monday - the Sat/Sun common days are enough for sport, social events and all that, and meanwhile we all get our extra day.

Hey. I heard the public service can sort-of do this already with flexi time. Why isn't that standard for the rest of us?

now watch me disappear in a puff of ill-humoured smoke ..... grummble rummble grumf ..

So, Premmia Iemma has sacked a minister for reasons which might be related to him being a man or might be related to domestic violence against women - "Australia says no" and all that. But Iemma denies the second reason, saying it's solely to replace a woman who left with a woman. (Isn't that positive discrimination anyway???)

The Liberal (and media) stance is that it's all about the domestic violence thing and that the press conference was a farce. Barry O'Farrell's comment though, is pure gold.

The Opposition Leader, Barry O'Farrell, said Mr Iemma's statement that the decision had nothing to do with the violence allegations was "like saying the Easter bunny's got nothing to do with Easter".

I guess Bazza O'Fazza hasn't heard of Jesus? Or maybe he was just emphasising that he actually agrees with ol' Morrie.

Either way, my opinion on the outcome of the last NSW state election is reinforced. It's just too too depressing. I'm in the 126% of people in NSW who don't like either party (from disapproval ratings of 59% for the incumbent and 67% for the opposition).

I read the news today, oh boy ...
about a lucky man who made the grade
and though the news was about spam
Well I just had to gasp
I really could not grasp ...
John Howard's had a heart attack
He didn't know it but his use has changed
A crowd of newbies got trojans
We'd seen his face before
Nobody is really sure if Norton filters out pollies....*

If you're wondering what that cryptic message is about, well apparently there is a spam floating round in this electioneering year saying that PM John Howard has had a heart attack, and has a link to The Australian's website. Unfortunately for the n00bs out there, the link is actually not to The Australian but to a 404 not found page which attempts to look like the Aust's website, but is in fact a bad place which downloads a trojan to your machine. This then attempts to steal all your money. Kind of like the government, really.

What got me going about this though was the comment in the SMH coverage, "Political and religious emails are not subject to the scrutiny of the Spam Act" ... so ... we can't even complain about emails that we don't want and won't read and that clutter our inboxes if they appear to contain political or religious matters. I can see it now ...

Subject: Jesus saves...
Message: all the money that we Nigerians can send him. Give us your bank details and your Bible bar code so we can spread the largesse.

Subject: John Howard for your PM..
Message: You need a personal masseur don't you, well our hosts are well trained and all named after prominent political figures.

Sheesh.

*apologies to the Beatles ...

The other night, $1.2million was the winning bid at an auction for a Victoria Cross and assorted other medals of an Aussie soldier killed in WWI. Or was he a kiwi. Anyway, a big deal is being made of this record amount being paid. And a bigger deal is being made of the anonymous patron who is going to generously loan the medals to the Australian War Memorial in Canberra for permanent display.

What I want to know is, who was the previous owner. The person who put the medals *up* for auction. They get $1.2million and they laugh all the way to the bank. Wouldn't it have been better all round if they'd loaned the medals to the War Memorial in the first place?

Then the mysterious War Memorial patron could spend his $1.2million (or perhaps a wee bit more) to upgrade Caves House and preserve some 340-million-year-old Australian heritage instead of this paltry 90-odd year stuff.

Seriously though folks, if you're looking for somewhere to spend your $1.2million you can't go past this place. It's not a shopping blog, and frankly, it's shall-I-say awesome. D™ reckons he can hear my voice when he goes there, either because they write in a style not dissimilar to my own, or because I'm usually talking to him while he's surfing.

Hmmm.

edit: I posted this using writely and it garbled my $ symbols into a very long weird looking string of characters. Remind me again to stop using beta software.