Our LINC to a prosperous future

 

 

Linc Energy Ltd (LNC) is involved in development and commercialisation of Coal-to-Liquids (CTL) processes through the combined utilisation of Underground Coal Gasification (UCG) and Gas to Liquids (GTL), using clean coal technology. LNC’s operations are located in four principal locations: Australia (QLD and SA), North America (Colorado, Wyoming, Montana and Alaska), Europe (London) and Asia (Uzbekistan). The operations consist of three key divisions namely coal, clean energy and oil & gas.

On 23 January 2013, Linc Energy announced the discovery of tight oil resource surrounding Coober Pedy estimated at between 3.5 and 223 billion barrels of oil.

Today the price has gone up almost 16% to $2.70. Too late to buy in?

Click on chart to enlarge

 

The problem is NOT how they got in there....

 

It's how do you get them out!

It won't be long now!

 

Click on image to enlarge

If it's Tuesday, it must be Ulladulla

 

Another weekly visit to Ulladulla, to the local pool, and lunch, this time at the historic Marlin Hotel. Then a quick visit to our favourite op-shop where I found this:

Part mariner's log and part detective story, this book evokes the Far East of Conrad's novels. When Gavin Young writes in his introduction to this book, "My obsession with Joseph Conrad got into its stride ... after I read a passage from the story Youth - a story that said in so many words, 'Catch life on a wing - but hurry!'", he takes the words right out of my mouth.

"I need not tell you what it is to be knocking about in an open boat. I remember nights and days of calm when we pulled, we pulled, and the boat seemed to stand still, as if bewitched within the circle of the sea horizon. I remember the heat, the deluge of rain-squalls that kept us baling for dear life (but filled our water-cask), and I remember sixteen hours on end with a mouth dry as a cinder and a steering-oar over the stern to keep my first command head on to a breaking sea. I did not know how good a man I was till then. I remember the drawn faces, the dejected figures of my two men, and I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more—the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort—to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires—and expires, too soon—before life itself."    Extract from Joseph Conrad's YOUTH

This book is a pilgrimage - a search for scenes and ghosts known to that heavily accented foreigner from Eastern Europe, whose English shipmates nicknamed him 'Polish Joe' and who became one of the greatest novelists in the English language. It's a great read!

 

My wife said if I didn't stop being obsessed with my blog, she'd leave me. I'm really going to miss her.

A message to Julia Gillard for the last few months while she is still Australia's pretend-PM

 

Julia Has-Bean

The love child of Mr Bean and an
unnamed Australian politician

 

British newspapers are awash with this breaking story. It is alleged Mr Bean has a "love child" from an Australian politician. The Murdoch press is going all out on this one!

It sure beats the other headlines:

 

Talking about flogging a dead horse ...

 

In the UK, some supermarkets, including Tesco, have admitted that there is horse meat in their home-cook burgers. Even places like Burger King have had to admit that there are “small amounts” of horse meat in their burgers. Within hours of the news that Tesco's 'all beef hamburgers' contained 30% horse meat, these quips hit the internet:

“I'm so hungry, I could eat a horse....." I guess Tesco just listened.

Anyone want a burger from Tesco? Yay or neigh?

Not entirely sure how Tesco are going to get over this hurdle.

Waitress in Tesco asked if I wanted anything on my Burger. So I had £5 each way!

Had some burgers from Tesco for my tea last night ... I still have a bit between my teeth.

A woman has been taken into hospital after eating horse meat burgers from Tesco. Her condition is said to be stable.

Tesco are now testing all their vegetarian burgers for traces of unicorn

"I've just checked the Tesco burgers in my freezer ... AND THEY'RE OFF"

Tesco now forced to deny presence of zebra in burgers, as shoppers confuse barcodes for serving suggestions.

Said to the missus, “These Tesco burgers given me terrible trots”.

“To beef or not to beef. That is equestrian.”

A cow walks into a bar. Barman says, “Why the long face?”
Cow says, “Illegal ingredients, coming over here stealing our jobs!”

I hear the smaller version of those Tesco burgers make great horse d'oeuvres.

 

P.S. Forget the horse meat; this is a lot more worrying!

Sunday morning at Nelligen

 

If I told you that I thought there was a diamond the size of a refrigerator buried in my backyard, and that this belief gives my life meaning and I draw a lot of joy from digging for this diamond every Sunday, I would sound like a lunatic to you, wouldn't I?

It's early Sunday morning at "Riverbend" and I can just hear the faint, and mercifully short, ringing of the church bell from the village church across the river. The same people who would have me certified for believing that there is a diamond buried in my backyard and that digging for it gives my life meaning, think nothing strange about their own belief in prayer for their salvation and eternal life.

At my age, when things begin to wear out, fall out and spread out, I could do with a spiritual dimension to my life. However, while religion is a broad concept, it is trapped in narrow minds, and organised religion has far too much on its conscience to be acceptable to me.

I keep digging for that diamond in my backyard!

 

"Will you still love me when I become old and grey?" my wife asked me. "Not only will I love you", I told her, "I'll write to you."

Letter to the Editor

 

I'm sure good ol' Chris Hill of Albury is also a LABOR voter! Yes, they walk amongst us every day!

(... and now you know why democracy doesn't work!)

 

This is truly amazing and worth the effort

 

This ia a math quiz to reveal your favourite movie. I did it in my head, then on paper, and finally on a calculator just to confirm my numerical capabilities. Each time I got the same answer, and sure enough it is my very favourite movie!

Do not cheat and scroll down to the movies. Do your maths, then compare the results to the list of movies at the bottom.

You will be amazed at how scarily true and accurate this test is.

1. Pick a number from 1 to 9;
2. Multiply that number by 3;
3. Add 3;
4. Multiply that number by 3 again;
5. Your total will be a two digit number;
6. Add the first and second digits together;
7. Look up the number in the Movie List below.

Movie List:

1. Gone With the Wind
2. E.T.
3. Top Gun
4. Star Wars
5. Forrest Gump
6. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
7. Jaws
8. Hang 'em High
9. The Gillard Farewell Speech of 2013
10. The Manchurian Candidate
11. The Pretender
12. Shrek
13. The War Wagon
14. Titanic
15. Raiders of the Lost Ark
16. Home Alone
17. The Sands Of Iwo Jima

Now, isn't that something?

 

My wife and I decided never to go to sleep until we'd resolved an argument. One night we stayed awake for six months.

Boy on a Dolphin

 

Out on a walk on the Greek island of Hydra, a foreign tourist comes upon an old Greek man sitting on a rock, sipping a glass of ouzo, and lazily staring at the sun setting into the sea. The tourist notices there are olive trees growing on the hills behind the old Greek but that they are untended, with olives just dropping here and there onto the ground. He asks the old Greek who owns the trees.

"They're mine", the Greek replies.

"Don't you gather the olives?" the tourist asks.

"I just pick one when I want one", the old man says.

"But don't you realise that if you pruned the trees and picked the olives at their peak, you could sell them? Where I come from everyone is crazy about virgin olive oil, and they pay a good price for it."

"What would I do with the money?" the old Greek asks.

"Why, you could build yourself a big house and hire servants to do everything for you."

"And then what would I do?"

"You could do anything you want!"

"You mean, like sit outside and sip ouzo at sunset?"

This pretty much sums up Greece and how I remember my eighteen months there from late 1983 to early 1985 which included trips to several islands, one of which was legendary Hydra where the Australian writers George Johnston and Charmian Clift, along with their children, lived from 1955 until 1964.

The movie Boy on a Dolphin was filmed on the island in 1956. If you can take your eyes off Sophia Loren's physique long enough while watching this movie, you'll see Hydra as it was in the 1950s. A time before tourism became its chief industry; when fishing and sponge-diving were the mainstay of its economic stability (although it's hard to believe that a woman would have had a sponge-diving job in the Greek male-oriented society back then).

The movie is not easy to come by but I have just been able to buy a copy through - you guessed it! - ebay. Although today the movie comes across as an outdated and very unsophisticated drama, it is a historic record, of sorts, of the old Hydra.

And it reminds me very much of the Greece I knew and loved!

 

Happy Valentine's Day

 

Even our favourite op-shop Vinnies has got into the spirit of things with a bit of a risqué display of what to wear on Valentine's Day.

I've just booked a table for Valentine's Day for me and the wife but it's bound to end in tears as she isn't much of a snooker player.

 

What's the difference between lying to the taxman and lying to your wife? If you get caught, the taxman still wants to screw you.

Quartet

 

Just after we've had the old fogey comedy, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, we now have the Quartet story of a bunch of retired opera singers. I'm now waiting for an old fogey comedy involving a bunch of retired accountants. I mean, accountants aren't really boring people. They just get excited over boring things.

 

"Why don't we try changing positions tonight?" I asked my wife one night. "Good idea!" she said. "You stand at the kitchen sink and I'll sit on the sofa and fart."

Flashback

 

Another day at Ulladulla (or, as our German friends there like to call it, Oolladoolla) for lunch at the bowling club and a few laps in the heated pool.

Pulling into the Bunnings carpark to buy some hardware, I spotted this little beauty: a FIAT 500 Bambino, Italy's answer to the Mini, original right down to its 499cc two-cylinder engine.

As a teenager in Germany, just after I had successfully completed my articles and chucked a promising but ill-paid actuarial career in the insurance industry and joined the large highway construction company Sager & Woerner (SAWOE) as their payroll clerk, I had bought myself a second-hand FIAT 500 Bambino so as to follow every few months the "Autobahn" under construction from Walsrode to Verden-an-der-Aller to Bremen.

My little Bambino not only carried me to and from work, it also brought me (and sometimes up to four friends, one in the passenger seat, three squeezed into the tiny backseat) safely home after a night of carousing.

Until that one fateful day when it had had enough which, happily, coincided with my also having had enough of the 'Vaterland'. So, without a car and a care in the world and still a teenager (a word, incidentally, which we used to pronounce the German way to make us, literally, 'tea gnawers'), I boarded the Italian passenger ship FLAVIA on the last day of June in the year 1965 and sailed for Australia.

Ciao, Bambino!