I was wading through some of the facebook posts I received after a day or so of doing other stuff, and I came across a meme that stated that the idiotic antivaxxer who is Secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Service, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, has now turned his attention to ‘chemtrails’1.
I specialise in a particular group of fossils which are extremely useful in determining the relative age of rock units in the upper half of the Cambrian System. There are not many of us around, with perhaps about dozen of us globally, with only two of us in Australia, the other one being in Adelaide. I write papers on this topic fairly regularly and submit them to a couple of journals.
Having to deal with recent monumentally stupid management decisions in the organisation where I used to work and, until a few months ago, at which I used to volunteer, made me think about some of the stupidity I encountered from management in the past. One of these happened nearly three decades ago. Because of my particular palaeontological expertise, I was asked to be involved in a project with the Northern Territory Geological Survey (NTGS).
Most people have been appalled or sickened by the images coming from Gaza, of flattened cities, rows of shrouded corpses, dead or dismembered children, mangled babies, emaciated children, lists of journalists and health-workers targeted. In the western world, people have been demonstrating in their many thousands against this genocide in Gaza. So what do governments do?
Quite often online when someone is amazed or annoyed by something (quite often an incidence of MAGA stupidity or bastardry), they will use the exclamation ‘JFC!’, short for ‘Jesus F*****g Christ’. I have been known to use a similar one; ‘JHC!’ or with increased exasperation requiring more emphasis, ‘Jesus H. Christ’, or with a tinge of disgust at my inability, for example, to pot a sitter at our weekly snooker game, ‘Jesus H. Christ on a bike’.
The Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu has been on trial for corruption since May 24, 2020. The trial had been initially prolonged because it was paused due to COVID-19 and more recently, because of Israel’s attack on Gaza following the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas1.
Then Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit announced the indictment of Netanyahu on November 21, 2019.
I bumped into something very strange last night. I was mucking around on Youtube watching a couple of very recent episodes of ‘8 out of 10 cats does countdown’ which I believe is one of the funniest shows on television. While there a couple of videos popped up in the list at the side of the video being played.
In 1992, I went to Russia and Kazakhstan on what was supposed to be an Australia-USSR science agreement exchange program visit (the USSR had ceased to exist at this time, so the Australian government paid for the whole trip). A Russian researcher had come to Australia to work with one of my colleagues and me in 1990. We had moved into a new house a week before I hopped on the plane to Moscow, leaving behind my partner and our two little boys aged 6 and 3.