DIY Accidents Fill Hospitals With More Victims Than Illegal Drugs

In 2010, more than 3400 Australians fell from ladders while cleaning gutters, fixing roofs and attempting to complete other DIY tasks, injuring themselves so severely they needed hospitalisation.

But they were not alone. Adults trying to imitate what they see professionals doing on home renovation TV shows are a bigger drain on Australia's health budget than overdosing junkies or Kronic-afflicted miners.

The rest of the stats from story are mind-boggling :

- 25,000 hospitalised last year from ladder falls, nailgun mishaps, lawnmower accidents and power tool problems

- Sydney Hospital's hand unit sees at least one "serious injury" a week from angle grinders and circular saws

- 1711 were hospitalised with injuries from attempting to use non-powered hand tools - hammers, chisels, screwdrivers, hand saws etc..

- 2803 were hospitalised after injuring themselves with power tools

- More than 5000 Australia were sent to hospital after "contact with machinery."

- 11,000 Australians visited hospital after absorbing "foreign bodies" through their skins or getting them in their eyes.

Are Australians really this accident prone or are ladders and hand tools deliberately attacking and trying to disable humans as part of the first, revolutionary wave of the War On Humans By Robots?

After having been attacked by various drills, grinders and hammers during recent renovation work, I'm going with the second of the above.

There's no way, ahem, I could be so clumsy and accident prone. The contents of my toolbox are clearly plotting against me.

Rick Brewster's Angels, with Dave Gleeson, Annandale Hotel, June 30 :









Great gig. It's been a long time since I've seen so many smiles on so many faces of people leaving a rock show.

More shows to come, I'm told, and probably an album as well.

When The Sydney Morning Herald Says 'Sydney', They Mean The Snowy Mountains

It's almost 1pm, I'm sitting about 10km from the centre of Sydney, the sun is shining, clothes are drying on the line, it's warm enough for some to get about in t-shirts. Then I see this on the Sydney Morning Herald website :



What in all fuck?

The actual warning from the Bureau of Meteorology :

Damaging winds averaging 65 km/h with peak gusts around 100 km/h are forecast for the Metropolitan, Illawarra, Southern Tablelands, Australian Capital Territory, South Coast, Snowy Mountains, Central Tablelands and Hunter forecast districts on Tuesday.

Blizzard conditions are forecast for parts of the Australian Capital Territory and Snowy Mountains forecast districts.

Yeah, that's not really a warning, or an alert, for a blizzard hitting Sydney, is it?

Still, for hundreds of thousands New South Wales residents it sounds like the next few days has the potential to be pretty damn nasty.

My First Zero Budget Music Video

By Darryl Mason

Below is the 'in studio' video clip I shot and edited for Rick Brewster's Angels, the teaming up of Australia's rock legends The Angels and Dave Gleeson from The Screaming Jets. Most of the footage was shot on cell phones over a couple of hours and took about 30 hours to edit on AVS. I wasn't planning to try and cut a clip (I was at the Alberts Studios recordings to get footage for a documentary), so it was very interesting trying to match up guitar solos and Gleeso's vocals to the footage I had.

BTW This isn't the offiical video for Waiting For The Sun, this is just something I put together for fun and to see how hard it is to edit one of those 'in the studio' music clips (pretty fucking hard it turns out). The band liked this enough for me the release it on my YouTube channel. I go into more detail here.



I think I might be doing more of these video clips, it's already generated some interesting e-mails about future work.

Rick Brewster's Angels, featuring Dave Gleeson, play Sydney's Annandale Hotel this Thursday night, June 30, and Adelaide's Norwood Hotel on July 1. I saw the set list for the shows this morning, it's absolutely fucking killer.

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Ha Ha Ha!....Wait, I Don't Get It

Scientists have found Australia's funniest joke? Don't make me laugh :

The LaughLab experiment conducted by psychologist Richard Wiseman, from the University of Hertfordshire, attracted more than 40,000 jokes and almost two million ratings.

Researchers found significant differences between nations in the types of jokes they found funny.

Apparently, Australians, like Brits, the Irish and New Zealanders, prefer jokes involving word play. Here's the winner :

PATIENT: "Doctor, I've got a strawberry stuck up my bum."

DOCTOR: "I've got some cream for that."

That's a bit of a granddad joke, isn't it?

Other results from the survey showed :

- Of the countries rating the highest number of jokes, Germans, perhaps surprisingly, laughed the most. Canadians laughed least.

- If you want to tell a funny animal joke, make it a duck.

- The most frequently submitted joke, at 300 times, was: "What's brown and sticky? A stick."

Scientists should know better than to be messing around trying to find the world's funniest joke. As the BBC news show Monty Python accurately reported in the late 60s, maximum mirth can not only be dangerous to your health, it can be very, very deadly indeed :



Note : Look, I know this story is from 2002, but I only just found it via @Tzarimas on Twitter, I'd already written most of the story, found the Monty Python video, embedded it, before I realised how old it was, and I'm not going to toss away a perfectly good piece of Saturday afternoon nonsense just because it's nine years old.

They Didn't Know The White Man Was Real, Then They Thought He Was Covered In Ash

This video has been called "the most beautiful video on the internet". It surely, at the very least, is exactly that. And more.

If the music annoys you, turn it off, it's even more extraordinary in silence :



They are the Toulambi. From the film-maker Jean Pierre Dutilleux's site :

For centuries the hill tribes of the Owen Ranmge in Papua, New Guinea have lived in isolation to avoid war. In a landscape of dense tropical rainforests each tribe stays within a well established territory. This explains why some of them have survived into the new millennium without any contact with the outside world.

They are hunters and gatherers. The entire tribe moves in uncanny silence for fear of alerting the game. They know the migration trails of animals and the best time of year to find fish, the growing cycles of the palms, bamboo, wild fruits and the roots they rely on. Always on the move. The rhythm of their lives is that of the jungle. It gives them no time to create complex art, to develop science or conceive profound metaphysical philosophies.

The Toulambi are among the very last witnesses of our distant past. When the last tribe is contacted and moved from the Stone Age into the modern world, from being free and masters of their own destiny to being poor and at the lowest level of our western society, it is a part of ourselves that will vanish forever.

When I worked at the Australians At War Film Archive, I heard the stories of some young Australians who volunteered for World War 2 and found themselves marching through the mountain jungles of New Guinea, only a few weeks after they were working on a building site or in an office in Sydney or Melbourne, who had similar encounters with tribes who had never seen white men before. Amongst all the horrors and madness of their jungle fighting days in New Guinea, it was meetings like this, sometimes only an exchange of stares from a distance, that remained amongst the most vivid in some veterans memories well into old age, and could still light their faces with wonder thinking back.

Many have fought in wars, but how many have had such an experience? The rarest few.

Here's what David Attenborough had to say after his own meeting with a New Guinea tribe who only knew of white men from the legends of other tribes :

"... nobody knows what are in these valleys; it may be that there's gold here. It may be - like a valley less than a hundred miles away - it is rich with copper. If it is, and if the West - European Man - moves in here with all his technology the fate of these people is likely to be very unhappy.

"All we know in the past of people - like this - who come face-to-face with Western technology leads us to suppose that it's very difficult for them to survive that clash.

"And so the only chance of bringing these people to terms with the world outside is a gradual process over years - over tens of years - in which they get to know what happens in the outside world, gradually they get to believe that people like ourselves are their friends and not their enemies. Gradually they have enough confidence in us to allow us to give them medical help, and educational help."

Attenborough quotes from the documentary A Blank On The Map

Via Reddit

A century ago, wild populations of animals like the White Cheeked Gibbon were threatened by public and private zoo collectors, amongst the many who came to their forests and often killed whole families to retrieve one or two babies. Today, with their natural habitats in countries like Laos all but gone, the White Cheeked Gibbon would probably not exist at all without the help of zoos.

The Perth Zoo is one of the world's most successful breeders of these now so very rare gibbons :

More Here

I think I just found the front cover image for my book on Andrew Bolt :

Shocking Police Non-Violence In Queensland

Been in Brisbane. Saw this in the Queen Street mall :



All that work making the police car look pretty didn't help the Queenslanders much in the 2nd State of Origin for 2011.

Former Screaming Jets lead singer Dave Gleeson rips through AC/DC's Riff Raff at the Long Live Bon Scott concert at the Enmore Theatre last weekend :



Gleeson has joined a new line-up of legendary Australian rock band The Angels, now known as Rick Brewster's Angels.

Gleeson has already recorded five songs with RBA at Alberts Studios and the first release from those sessions, Waiting For The Sun, is all over MMMFM right now.

Rick Brewster's Angels will be doing two special pub shows to debut the new line-up : The Annandale Hotel in Sydney on June 30 and the Norwood Hotel in Adelaide on July 1.

These shows are going to absolutely fucking rock. Pub gig of the year. Don't miss out.

Some people hate the ultra-slow motion that so often features in today's movies, video games and TV shows and ads. I'm not one of those people, and this is probably the greatest Australian beer ad since the 1970s :

This is a post for those who've seen the name Austen Tayshus in Twitter's trending topics after tonight's Q & A on ABC and are wondering who the hell he is.

This is who Austen Tayshus is :



This is Austen Tayshus' massive 1983 spoken word hit single, Australiana, specially decoded for the tourists :



Putting shit on Americans, in America :



Slightly closer to the real Sandy Gutman, the man behind Austen Tayshus :



Mr Denmore on Twitter sums up :

Austen Tayshus reminds me of Joe Pesci in Goodfellas; a malevolent bully who demands you laugh at his jokes & dictates the borders of humour

Vivid 2011, Circular Quay, Sydney :

Angry Anderson, in silhouette, prepares to take the stage at the Long Live Bon Scott concert, Enmore Theatre, June 4 :

Screaming Angels

Dave Gleeson with Chris Bailey and John and Rick Brewster from The Angels, at Alberts Studios, May, 2011 :



Former Screaming Jets singer Dave Gleeson is now confirmed to join The Angels for live shows in Sydney and Adelaide, in late June and early July, and a charity concert in Japan. More details soon.

In case you missed it yesterday, spectacular water spout 'tornadoes' off Sydney :

Bon Scott On AC/DC : "The Beatles, The Rolling Stones....We're Better. Who Needs Them? They're Last Year's Model"



By Darryl Mason

The 'Long Live Bon Scott' concert hitting Sydney this week - Panthers on June 3, Enmore Theatre on June 4, reminded me of a bunch of Bon videos and recordings from YouTube I've had bookmarked.

So here's a quick history of Bon Scott through two decades. and a few different looks.

1965 : Bon Scott singing Gloria with the Spektors

1968, with The Valentines :



1971, with Fraternity :



1975, TV debut of Bon Scott with ADC/DC



Late 1975 :



July, 1976 : Great clip of Bon Scott and Angus Young being interviewed in a London street, where Bon declares AC/DC better than The Rolling Stones and The Beatles.

1977 :



1978 :



These interviews with Bon Scott, from the soon to be re-released AC/DC Let There Be Rock live concert film, were recorded a few months before his February, 1980 death from acute alcohol poisoning. "I'm a special drunkard. I drink too much."



Ten days before Bon Scott's death, AC/DC mimed Highway To Hell for a German TV show. Bon Scott stands nearly motionless, in deep shadow, away from the rest of the band, who appear in many shots to have aready lost their lead singer.



A few days before his death Bon Scott jammed a version of Ride On in London with the band Trust. This was the voice Bon Scott was taking into the recording studio for the new AC/DC album sessions, scheduled to begin in the last week of February, 1980.

Angus Young on the death of Bon Scott.

Australia Has Been Hit By More Than 50 Tsunamis

August 15, 1868 :

High tide had been at 5am that day, and by 8am sea levels in Sydney Harbour were dropping. Suddenly, "the waters, as if impelled by some extraordinary influence, returned up the harbour with great force", The Sydney Morning Herald reported.

Further down the coast, at Jervis Bay, the ocean was surging into Currambene Creek. "It raced back in a similar manner, sweeping away a large portion of sand that impeded navigation," the paper noted.

The tsunami that struck the New South Wales coast that day was caused by a massive earthquake strike in Chile.

In total, some 37 tsunamis have been reported along the NSW coastline over the past 150 years.

From the Sydney Morning Herald :

A Macquarie University researcher, Dale Dominey-Howes, said Australia had a reputation as a region where few tsunami hit, but there have been at least 57 reported. "Relatively speaking, this is a much higher rate of occurrence than many other regions of the globe," he said.

He was surprised to find the Australian tsunami record went back 3.5 billion years, to when an asteroid hit waters in what is now central Australian desert. Rocks and debris it ripped up from the shallow sea have been identified by Australian geologists.

The Full Story Is Here

For those who missed it, this was what happened the day Greens leader Bob Brown dared to criticise a handful of Canberra press gallery journalists for their endless negativity on anything and everything the Greens have to say.

Note the only hysterical voice in this clip is that of a journalist :

Bill Hunter, 1940 - 2011



Bill Hunter acted in more than 70 movies, and hundreds of hours of definitive Australian TV cop shows like Division Four and Homicide.

Legend.

If you're compelled to watch a Bill Hunter movie today, you can't go past CrackerJack, one of his happiest and most beautiful roles.