Unbelievable but true. People in the UK are stealing each other's vegetables!

Things must be getting tough...

Read this story in the Telegraph.

We know all too well that we have a problem with the Murray River in Australia. The problem is: not enough water coming down the river and too many irrigators taking water out.

Look at this report on US ecosystems - just one small quote tells the story:

For the most part the public doesn't see this stuff. And they should because the message is, as Nelson Mandela so aptly put it at his birthday bash: "The future is in your hands"

Saw the last couple of hours of the Nelson Mandela birthday concert last night. Wow. And if you missed it, here is the absolutely fantastic Amy Winehouse!

The Golden Stave lunch was tremendous this year. They raised a huge amount of money for a variety of charities that focus very specifically on children and young people - as usual. There were the predictable auctions, raffles, and Chuggie berating the crowd as is his wont. And there was some super entertainment.

One piece of entertainment that was very special was to see Jack Thompson, the actor, playing harmonica. Here is is with John Lyons (I think that is his name) playing fiddle.

According to James Hansen, the renowned American climatologist, we are very close to the tipping point for the planet.

And in the mean time politicians are opening shopping centres and getting given bottles of Grange. Really quite tragic. Because the people just sit there like dumb animals and continue to consume flat panel TV's. Was it Karl Marx that said that religion was the opiate of the masses? He was wrong - it is media that provides the soporific environment for people to sit snugly and consume while the planet goes to hell in a handbasket.

Wake up, people!

I am going up to Sydney today (for the third time this week) to the Golden Stave lunch. It has been going for 30 years!

Amazing...

It started when I was managing The Saints in the UK and Neil Warnock the Chairman of The Agency invited me to a music business charity lunch in London.

I had already decided to return to Australia and had accepted a position as Managing Director of ATV Northern Songs - which owned all the Beatles copyrights - great catalogue!

After going to the lunch in the UK, I thought, "wouldn't it be great to do something similar in Australia?" Part of the rationale was that in Australia the music publishers and the record companies could not have a decent conversation between them about the issues that faced the industry as a whole. All they could do was fight over the crumbs of what the statutory rate for a mechanical license should be. It was tragic.

I thought, if you could get all the parties focuses on an exterior issue, perhaps they could learn that being in the same room at the same time was not that difficult.

So one of the first things that I did when I got back to Sydney was to have a chat with Kent Atkinson, who was in the advertising business, and a close friend, and incidentally also on the board of Paraquad. He was the only person that I knew that was involved with a charity. I told him the idea of running a charity lunch and asked if Paraquad would be interested in being the recipients of whatever money we could raise. He thought it was a great idea.

Then I called up a few people in the music business and asked if they would be interested in putting together a committee. I think that the first committee comprised of Peter Hebbes, Jack Argent and Ross Barlow. I am not sure whether Kent was on the committee or was an observer from Paraquad. Ross was the token record biz guy.

Anyway, we put together an event, held it at the Sebel Town House, got John Singleton to be the guest speaker (he was great), and after taking out the costs of the food we had about $2,500 left over - which went to Paraquad.

Paraquad was delighted. They had never had someone raise money and give it to them without taking a percentage of the funds raised before. And the music industry was, I think, a little bit shocked, that it could get together and do something that was truly charitable and selfless.

Now thirty years have gone by and the Golden Stave Foundation raises every year somewhere in the region of $800,000 net which is distributed to charities that focus on the needs of children.

I resigned from the board of the organization some years ago. I am not an administrator of things. I am an ideas guy.  But I take great pride that I was the instigator of the Golden Stave, along with Ross, Jack, Peter and not to forget some of the other people who got on board very early on and added their energies to the concept. People like Barry Chapman, Michael Chugg, Brian Harris, Graham Fear and a lot of others...

On the way home tonight from buying a new battery for my laptop from the Apple store in Woolongong I got caught in a traffic jam. It was at the end of Agar's Lane - about 2 or 3 k's from my house. I found out that the local pre-school teacher had come too fast into a corner where the council are doing some road work, and lost control of the car. The car skidded, hit an embankment and rolled. Fortunately the driver was ok.

The local fire brigade was at the scene doing traffic control while a tow truck manoeuvred to get the car right side up in order to tow it.

I got all this from one of the fire men as I was waiting.

We started to chat.

He told me that unknown to most of the people in NSW -  the state government changed the regulations a couple of years ago and that now the NSW Fire Brigade is not allowed to attend motor accidents that are outside of towns. They have deemed that the Bush Fire Brigade is to attend accidents on the highway outside of Berry, for instance, rather than the NSW Fire Brigade.

What this means is that if a car has an accident on the highway at say, Foxground, about 10k's outside Berry, it falls under the jurisdiction of the Bushies.

The problem is that the Bush Fire Brigade typically takes longer to get to the scene of a fire than the NSW Brigade because they have different performance criteria. They also have different equipment, and often have to call the NSW guys in after they have arrived. Bottom line is that the NSW guys have more equipment. And they also get paid. Clearly the NSW Government is penny pinching on costs and it is putting you and I at risk.

They are both volunteer organizations, but in the case of the NSW Fire Brigade, the guys get paid an hourly rate for their community service rather than being total volunteers.

A couple of years ago when there was an accident on the highway outside of Berry and the driver was incinerated. He died. There was a truck driver who called in the accident to the emergency phone line. The local NSW guys were ready to go within 8 minutes but couldn't attend. The Bush fire guys took over 20 minutes to get to the accident.

This is not to in any way put down the Bush Fire Brigade. They do a marvellous job. But according to the guy I was talking to the point is that all the NSW guys have to live within one k of the Fire Station, and the Bush guys don't. And they have the specialist equipment that is required for some of the more critical accidents.

This seems to be another case of the Iemma government trying to scrimp on costs and putting the public at risk.

I walk pretty much every morning through the woodland trail that goes up Moeyan Hill and along the next street along - its about a 40 minute walk - and is pretty aerobic.

Along a section of Borrowdale Close there are some quite large pine trees and there are certain mushrooms that really like that environment. One of them is the quite famous fly agaric. I wanted to check the spelling of 'fly agaric' yesterday and found a web site that has a whole lot of really interesting information about them. I had always understood that this kind of mushroom was deadly if ingested. Now I find that there is poison in the mushroom but the mushroom has psychedelic qualities but there is a rigorous cleansing that has to take place ahead of use of the shroom.

Apparently you can also dry the mushroom and then smoke it.

The conditions must be just right at the moment for the fly agaric, because they are sprouting everywhere at the moment.



Up on the trail I came across another fungus that looks like it would also be fairly noxious - it has a brown/gold colouring - unfortunately not really in focus in this picture taken with my Nokia phone....

I am due to be on a panel on Commercializing Video on the Web tomorrow.

It occurs to me that the real thing that is different about what the web has done is to ensure that there are no rules about business models anymore. The reality is that you make up the rules as you go along, and if it works then you are in business, so to speak.

Look at The Real News Network. They use YouTube as the hosting site, get content produced by people who are activists by and large, who believe in stuff passionately. And then top and tail the content with the Real News logo. And they build out the viewership by email. And they rely on donations for their revenue. Not sure how well that part is going but I would bet that the longer they keep going the more they will attract big donations from rich philanthropists.

Here is something that I looked at this morning - a piece about Monsanto. And they give you the ability to customize the player window that you present the material in - pretty interesting idea.

Apparently we are going through a period where there is virtually no sunspot activity. Here is the article.

The last time there was an extended period of zero sunspot activity coincided with the Younger Dryas, mini ice-age. We also had global cooling over the year Jan 2007 - Jan 2008 of .7 degrees Celsius, which is said to be the fastest atmospheric cooling in history.

Interesting that while on the one hand we are seeing the breaking up of the big ice shelfs in both the Arctic and Antarctic, we are also seeing this kind of cooling off. Scientists have been saying that the change in salinity from the ice melts can bring on an interruption to the thermohaline escalator and that it is already measurably slower than normal. Could it be that we will experience a sudden mini ice age?