March 30, 2006

Not in The Burbs

I heard a funny thing on the AM breakfast radio this morning. A Bangladeshi man that suffers severe mental illness and diabetes has been kept in an Australian immigration detention centre for over 6 years. Medical opinion is that his mental illness results partly from the 6 years of detention and that he should be released so he can get the medical help he requires. If medical opinion is anything like my opinion, I suspect they also believe the man should be released because 6 years is too damn long.

When asked about the fate of this man, the Minister for Immigration, Amanda Vanstone, said that she will ‘make a decision on the case soon’.

Soon?

The man has been held captive in the detention centre for over 6 years by the Australian Government and the Minister responsible says she will make a decision on the case 'soon'.

Nice one, Mandy.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200603/s1604415.htm

March 29, 2006

Tomatoes

Late in 2005, I planted a number of tomato plants. I had grown tomatoes before. When I lived on a small Island of the coast of France (NB: exotic place) I bought some plants off a secretary at work. They came bagged and staked. I don’t think I ever got the plants out of the plastic bags. Still, tomatoes are resilient plants, and they survived this mistreatment to render approximately 5 tomatoes. It was not all my fault. The weather on the Island was crap.

I have moved on from this. In my present foray into agriculture, I invested in 4 punnets of eight tomato plants. And two trailer loads of mushroom potting mix. That’s what the bloke told me it was. I also bought a load of stakes, but only after this become the obvious and only thing to do as the 32 seedlings I had planted were mysteriously replaced overnight by 32 giant vines bearing hundreds of small red fruit.

It is possible that I have overdone it. I bought the 32 seedlings on the basis of my likelihood to fail. I overestimated my incompetence in relation to growing tomatoes but, on the bright side, overestimating one’s own incompetence in any field of endeavour is a most pleasant surprise.

Now the tomato vines are a faded shadow of the wonder that was there before. Only this morning I had to beg my mother to come over and pick the remaining tomatoes as I could no longer face going into the vegetable patch. Tomato overload. There is still a bowl and a colander full of the things in my fridge.

I couldn’t stand to post a picture of the sad tomato vines but I do have a picture here of my fridge. How good is it? I can tell you it was a bright new day in our household when that monster arrived.
You can see that the dogs love it.