I’d had a coffee brewing machine at home for about a year before realising the increasingly brackish taste was due to a long overdue need to purge the machine of accumulated mineral deposits. Along the way I also learned that it is a good idea to clean the milk frothing wand after every cappuccino. A barista at our local café looked over her spectacles when I told her I’d just de-scaled our machine for the…
Deck the halls and all that, it’s the lead-up to the silly season, tainted as it is by relentless media reports about bombings, terrorist attacks and can-it-happen-here scenarios. Despite the disproportionate Australian media coverage of the Paris attacks that left at least 129 dead, pretty soon it will dawn on Australians that there are just 33 shopping days to Christmas. You already missed surface mail by two months. Cards need to be sent soon, especially…
Some of you might want to wash your hands after reading this. I do some of my best thinking in the toilet. The lavatory is definitely the smallest room in the house, unless of course you have a wine cellar, and even then, you don’t go to the wine cellar to think, do you? Ensconced in the loo with the door shut, one can sit and contemplate, for as long as one likes, really. Someone…
Four hundred million dollars is a useful amount of money. In the hands of people who know how to distribute money for a good purpose, it could be dispersed in a myriad of ways. They might take up to 20 percent off the top to administer their charities, but that’s a subject for another time. For example, $400m, equivalent to about a 20% of the Australian Government’s public housing budget, could be used to alleviate…