'Honey, I'm going to be late tonight'. See Dick's Toolbox

Mike's Pith & Wind - The terrorist
I flew back from Auckland on Air NZ. The flight was delayed by nearly an hour and I managed to make an idiot of myself trying to use Smartgate with my new passport with the chip in it, (third time lucky I told myself), but otherwise I felt pretty together. Then the customs’ woman confiscated my container of Sorbolene, (‘that’s 750 milligrams sir’, she scolded me), but by then I was past caring. My excuse is that I’m an old idiot, what’s yours?
I had a seat near the back of the plane with the other cheapskates. The bloke next to me didn’t have an in-flight magazine, so I lent him my copy of Rolling Stone. I only ever get Rolling Stone at airports. The cover featured David Bowie as the androgynous Ziggy Stardust. It embarrassed me slightly so I carried it rolled up. Times have changed.
Now I didn’t have anything to read myself, but it didn’t worry me. I’m pretty comfortable with my own thoughts, but I noticed that everybody else was very busy distracting themselves with headphones and movies etc. I thought back to the days when Richard and I used to fly from Christchurch to Auckland on an NAC DC3. It probably took almost as long as the flight I was now on and if there was a head wind it used to feel like we were hovering – except for the air pockets, which were exceptionally pronounced, (pronounced a-i-r p-o-c-k-e-t-s), compared with the modest shudders you get on the modern-day airliners. (God, I’m OLD). read more

You wanna learn guitar or buy a classic piece of equipment? Check the classifieds

Dick's Toolbox - Town planning
Of the fifteen thousand rail deaths in India each year, six thousand occur on Mumbai’s suburban rail system. This is about one hundred and fifteen per week and is attributed primarily to trespassing on the tracks – basically crossing over the lines instead of using an overhead bridge. Boarding or alighting from running trains, trespassing, leaning from carriages , and ‘pulling stunts' are added ways of diminishing the Mumbian lifespan as well.
This is a lot of people and made me wonder how that would translate to a city like Melbourne, which is nothing like Mumbai except that it allegedly has a railway system. But not as many Indians.
As an approximation, Melbourne has a population of a fraction over four million. Mumbai has either twelve and a half million or twenty million depending on what you reference. If we could eliminate Melbournians on the tracks with the evident enthusiasm of Mumbai we would.. read more