phik

Sometime between 22:30 Friday night and noon Saturday, my — I say my, but in fact I was borrowing it — 50cc scooter was stolen. From off-street, underground parking!

This would not have been completely trivial. It has a steering lock that keeps it held in a steady left turn, as well as one of those D-shaped bike locks through the back wheel. We reckon a handful of burly guys just picked it up and put it on a ute, to deal with the lock via an angle grinder someplace where the noise wouldn’t be noticed.

I’ll find out on Tuesday if the apartment building’s public liability insurance will cover it. Either way, I guess I’m going scooter shopping this week, but I have no idea how to store it more securely than last time.

To my surprise, the woman who took the police report said that if it’s found, I might not get it back right away if they need to go over it for forensic evidence. Either there’s so little crime in WA that they’re desperate for practice, or they like to make people feel unrealistically optimistic about the odds that these crimes are ever solved. And they’ve never seen The Big Lebowski.

At least there were no contents to steal this time.

I’ve been growing steadily more ill the last two days. It is safe to say that this is shaping up to be the worst weekend of 2008.

Well, another summer of international cricket has ended in a close and exciting, but ultimately disappointing, fashion. Just like last year they couldn’t get the job done when it mattered, but this time it was fairly predictable. The batting hasn’t been in form since the middle of the Test series, and having lost six veterans to retirement in 14 months, it will be a very different side that takes the wicket in the West Indies in May.

Not that there wasn’t enthusiasm. That picture doesn’t really make clear the knock that guy took; Symonds is built like a brick shit house.

I was going to write about it yesterday, but I’m glad I waited, because two people got the job started for me.

As seems to be typical with aviation news, the coverage of this story has been idiotic. One of Perth’s local news stations even drummed up a Qantas A320 captain to give a sound bite about how great their airmanship was. If that is what passes for superior judgment at Qantas, their world-best safety record may be in for some rough times.

Elevating the crew to hero status overlooks the fact that they put the plane and passengers into that awful situation in the first place. This wasn’t a sudden and unforeseeable loss of power on short final, as happened at Heathrow in January. This was a string of poor decisions, probably hours long, that almost killed 131 people.

The crew decided to leave Munich knowing that a hurricane was blowing through Hamburg; they decided not to divert once they arrived and conditions hadn’t improved; they decided to use runway 23 instead of 33, and accept a 50% stronger crosswind (wind from 290); they decided to attempt a landing after an unstabilised approach. The pilot’s skill, and probably a bit of luck, saved them from disaster.

It is often suggested that the prudent pilot will ask himself how confident he would feel explaining his decision-making process to a judge, or how it would read in an NTSB report. I think the final report on this one will not be nearly as kind as the pundits’ sound bites.

I like the idea of using metal beads to clean your decanter — that’s clever. Cleaning a decanter is a pain in the tuchus.

Even more clever? Figuring out that someone (else) will pay $20 for fifty ball-bearings, if sold in the wine department.

See also: four nails for $5. I especially like that there are six nails in the photo.

I am shocked — shocked! — to learn that, as Bostonist put it, more people than expected chose Massachusetts’s subsidized health insurance, and now the commonwealth is wondering how to pay for it all.

Even without rehashing my two-years-ago commentary about how The Massachusetts Solution does nothing to address the fundamental unaffordability of health care, imagine the surprise it must have been when they subsidized something and got more of it.

I bet none of the fat cats on Beacon Hill saw that coming.

Fortunately, they have Ted Kennedy to do his usual trick, and try to get the rest of the country to foot the bill. You’re welcome.