What's happening?

Was it a USB port or a HDMI port? You’ve been busted, cyborg!

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Air raid sirens…

I forgot that they were testing them today.

Still puts the willies up me.

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Thanks mate. I had to check Wikipedia to make sense of the results since I don’t know Norwegian. It seems center, and left lost lots of votes and the right was the beneficiary.

Who will be the coalition partners of Labor?

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It has been dubbed drum rollmore drum rolls
drums are still going strongcrescendo! The Tutti Frutti coalition by the Norwegian media, which caught on. Prime Minister Garh Støre hates it. But…

Anyway, so called because it’s an interesting bunch of parties to have to please. Raudt (Red, do I have to explain that these are Democratic Socialists that used to be Marxist-Leninsts in the past ?), SV (Socialist Left Party), The Centre Party (which loathes Red, haha) and MDG (the Greens).

Negotiations have started. But because having all of these parties in the same government would be kind of crazy (labour have governed with SV and the Centre party in the last government), what they are going to negotiate about is Labour’s bugdet. These will be the support parties of a minority Labour government. The State Budget they will create with these parties in negotiations, but in individual cases, Labour will of course be free to get the rely on conservative MPs votes, instead of say, Red. Which is why they want to govern alone and not include the entire Tutti Frutti cabal.

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When I had just finished as a conscript many years ago, I went to Kuala Lumpur. And walking around in the city there, I almost embarassingly took cover by instinct but caught myself before I did something very visibly silly; when 2 low overflying F-16 roared over my head. You see, I was an air force ranger and we trained all the time with, usually, F-16s flying low. But walking around in a massive populous city, the idea that F-16s would fly THAT low over the city if it was not some sort of attack didn’t cross my mind. Of course, it was just the Malay president’s birthday. So I felt silly, hehe. I was a young man, not very used to countries where they use fighter jets to celebrate their president’s birthday :rofl:

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Yeah your green party sound like the Australian Nationals (albeit without the climate change minimising/coal fetishism)

The Centre Party has no coal fetish. We don’t do any coal mining anymore. They also don’t minimise Climate Change like many others. They just don’t want to sacrifice the interests of fishermen and farmers etc. The Centre party is hardly a Right Wing party at all, which wiki tells me your example is. So not the best comparison at all.
Norway is fairly unique in that our Agrarian party is not at all linked to the Far Right. Usually, Agrarian parties in the West are. But the Centre Part absolutely isn’t. Not since before World War 2. If you go back in time, it was from parts of the Agrarian movement along with the conservatives that Nasjonal Samling (NS) arose before the war and Vidkun Quisling was a minister for the precursor to the Centre Party before he joined NS.

But the Centre Party is far from right wing today. But yes, more inclined to culture essensialism and less social liberal than many. But they are still in the political centre of Norwegian politics for sure.

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I’m enjoying a nice walk today in the Sydney sunshine after a prolonged rain spell. Naturally I’m wearing my LFC cap.

Some dude is walking toward me shirtless tattooed and with his wife and baby. As we cross paths he says in a thick pommy accent “hey we are coming to get you this year”

I said you must be an Everton supporter. He said fucken oath we are lookin good.

I said you guys say that every year.

A bit of a laugh. Life’s good.

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You may need to be more specific :rofl:

Ah well that lasted long.

Mrs ROTW helps to manage a charity here. It’s in a space where there is little to no public funding, but there is a big need. They bought a big residential home to house homeless, pregnant women, or homeless women with young kids under five. It’s heart breaking to know that they are couch surfing from bad place to bad place, and/or living in their car if they have a vehicle.

The charity supports them to make sure they finish high school, or equivalent, if that is an issue, and then they help them all to get jobs and get on their feet, and save money to make a go of it when they go out on their own.

Occasionally you see a nasty underbelly, such as this morning.

Usually the circumstances of the young women is such that the father is not part of the picture, but today the father of one of the babies came to the home - the whole thing is on the down low, the address is not published and this is not supposed to happen, but infrequently it happens.

The fella who came today was pretty agitated, don’t know if he was high or whatever, but the disturbing thing is that he threatened to shoot everyone there. Mrs ROTW called the police and they came very quickly and expertly calmed him down and then quietly arrested him. Often you hear about the bad policing over here, and that is justified given the high profile examples we have seen, but today they were excellent.

The fella had no license, no insurance, and crucially he did have a gun :flushed_face:

On police advice, while this incident blows over, the residents are to stay elsewhere for the night while the police make sure everything is fine. Mrs ROTW is currently making arrangements for everyone and will be the last to leave once they are all situated.

It hasn’t been the low key, sleepy Saturday we expected.

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Good luck Red. It sounds like your wife is doing some vital work. This story is shocking, but, no doubt, not unusual over there.

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thick pommy accent
Yeah, so was the accent thick, or the pom himself?

He was an Evertonian, so obviously it was the pom himself that was thick :wink:

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But he said ‘fucken oath’, which is fucken Aussie.

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All good here, per incident above. Mrs ROTW is safe, and home now, enjoying a well deserved g&t. Sort of a shitty situation that could have spiraled but seems to have been handled well. She is running a 5k tomorrow morning in a fundraiser for the charity where she works. Onwards and upwards.

One of the outcomes of this, unfortunately, is that they will now have to hire private security for the home. She had a meeting with a couple board members and while it was something that was in the back of the mind for a while, today’s incident has moved it up the agenda.

My mind is whirring on various levels - this is a good thing, helping people, and with the successes they have had they have changed it for some people, for generations, and fought hard against the poverty cycle… and now they will have to raise more money for the charity to cover private security for the house, so knob heads can’t come and shoot the place up.

Doing the right thing is sometimes hard, but I couldn’t be more proud of Mrs ROTW. In a couple of weeks we are going to a high school football game. American football. It’s a huge high school with a tip-top sports program. One of the players on the team was living in a car with his mum, years ago, when Mrs ROTW first started volunteering at this charity. They took them in, got them stabilized, helped her find work, child care and all the rest of it. She has done so well. He will likely go to college on a D1 scholarship.

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Was the guy charged with anything ?

Yes he was. I’m not fully up on the charges, but it was 2-3 things apparently, including intimidation/making threats, whatever the charge is called that covers that.

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Last night as usual I was listening to the news (France 24 in English) while dropping off to sleep. Before going upstairs I had seen the reports of Charlie Kirk’s missus and the video she had made and had been pondering the violence of the language she had used and who precisely , if not the shooter , who the remarks were aimed at ; " You have no idea the fire that you have ignited.’

The same clip was running upstairs and she also sought to blame ‘evildoers’. Just then I heard someone say ; "Who are you talking about , it was just one guy wasn’t it ?’

I looked at the tv and she was still speaking. I was well confused for a minute ; Had I been listening to my own voice inside my head as I was drifting into sleep ?!

Turns out it was nothing that mysterious when I realised it was the presenter who had uttered the words and it had been picked up a hot mic ! :rofl:

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Or NZ