Tom's Blog on Life and Livingness
If you dial 112, it will use whatever signal available from ANY cell tower it detects signal from & in Australia, redirect the call to Emergency Triple-Zero (000).
This is important to remember if your carrier has an outage, as Optus did today (at the time of writing this.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/112_(emergency_telephone_number)
This is one of my favourite poems – it reminds me of simpler times. The subjects in the artwork are my great-grandfather and great-uncle in the 1920’s, Capel, Western Australia, (the dog is no known relation). Enjoy the poem.
“BACKYARD CRICKET”
Remember back to younger days when sport was played for fun.
We’d play the game with pure delight beneath the summer sun.
When a bat could be a tree branch, a can could be a wicket.
The fences marked the boundaries; the rules were backyard cricket.
We would play the game for hours and all would get a turn.
We’d bowl slowly for the small kids; they’d need a chance to learn.
But when a dad or uncle would go up to the crease,
We’d bowl as fast as lightning; all mercy bowls would cease.
And when it came our turn to bat, we prayed to lady luck,
‘Please let me get at least a run, not bowled out for a duck!’
But soon we came to learn the fact that losing was no shame,
It’s all about good sportsmanship and how we played the game.
For winning is an empty thing, if everyone is cross.
For all the good it did for you, you may as well have lost.
The greatest match you’ll ever play is not for fame or rates.
It’s in the backyard of your home with family, pets and mates.
Poem and artwork by Ian Coate
https://iancoate.com/
Katharine Hepburn’s childhood, in her own words.
“Once when I was a teenager, my father and I were standing in line to buy tickets for the circus.
Finally, there was only one other family between us and the ticket counter. This family made a big impression on me.
There were eight children, all probably under the age of 12. The way they were dressed, you could tell they didn’t have a lot of money, but their clothes were neat and clean.
The children were well-behaved, all of them standing in line, two-by-two behind their parents, holding hands. They were excitedly jabbering about the clowns, animals, and all the acts they would be seeing that night. By their excitement you could sense they had never been to the circus before. It would be a highlight of their lives.
The father and mother were at the head of the pack standing proud as could be. The mother was holding her husband’s hand, looking up at him as if to say, “You’re my knight in shining armour.” He was smiling and enjoying seeing his family happy.
The ticket lady asked the man how many tickets he wanted? He proudly responded, “I’d like to buy eight children’s tickets and two adult tickets, so I can take my family to the circus.” The ticket lady stated the price.
The man’s wife let go of his hand, her head dropped, the man’s lip began to quiver. Then he leaned a little closer and asked, “How much did you say?”
The ticket lady again stated the price.
The man didn’t have enough money. How was he supposed to turn and tell his eight kids that he didn’t have enough money to take them to the circus?
Seeing what was going on, my dad reached into his pocket, pulled out a $20 bill, and then dropped it on the ground. (We were not wealthy in any sense of the word!) My father bent down, picked up the $20 bill, tapped the man on the shoulder and said, “Excuse me, sir, this fell out of your pocket.”
The man understood what was going on. He wasn’t begging for a handout but certainly appreciated the help in a desperate, heartbreaking and embarrassing situation.
He looked straight into my dad’s eyes, took my dad’s hand in both of his, squeezed tightly onto the $20 bill, and with his lip quivering and a tear streaming down his cheek, he replied; “Thank you, thank you, sir. This really means a lot to me and my family.”
My father and I went back to our car and drove home. The $20 that my dad gave away is what we were going to buy our own tickets with.
Although we didn’t get to see the circus that night, we both felt a joy inside us that was far greater than seeing the circus could ever provide.
That day I learnt the value to Give.
The Giver is bigger than the Receiver. If you want to be large, larger than life, learn to Give. Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get – only with what you are expecting to give – which is everything.
The importance of giving, blessing others can never be over emphasised because there’s always joy in giving. Learn to make someone happy by acts of giving.”
~ Katharine Hepburn
Said nobody ever who wished you well.
A 2015 Harvard study found nicotine is not addictive. The tobacco companies add a chemical called pyrazines to nicotine to make tobacco addictive.
https://www.facebook.com/chelle.rochester.3/posts/1633660127162089/
HELL NO! As soon as you say ‘unknowable’ you stop looking for yourself or reading to find if others have already solved the mystery.
KNOW is at the top of the scale.
MYSTERY is at the bottom of the scale.
The author of this was probably in apathy, content to consign all to MYSTERY at the bottom of the scale.
That is NOT the path to greater awareness and competence.
The first dataset was published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in late 2021 and covered deaths by vaccination status between 1st January and 31st July 2021. Since then, there have been a further 8 reports produced with the final report covering deaths by COVID-19 vaccination status between 1st April 2021 and 31st May 2023.
Each subsequent report has included less and less data, almost as if the UK Government had something to hide.
For instance, the report published by the Office for National Statistics on 20th Dec 21 inadvertently revealed that COVID-19-vaccinated children were up to 52 times more likely to die of any cause than unvaccinated children.
Here are the calculated mortality rates by vaccination status among 10-14-year-olds based on the ONS calculated person-years contained in the report published 20th Dec 21.
https://expose-news.com/2023/11/07/secret-uk-gov-to-stop-publishing-deaths-by-vccine-status/
(Tom: This article was published a year ago but worth reading. That is, if you like your truth unadulterated.)
Last week, The Intercept published a set of leaks that drew broad interest in perhaps the most undercovered scandal inside the US government today: the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) quiet move to establish, for the first time in US history, an explicitly inward-facing domestic censorship bureau.What The Intercept glimpsed, however, is just the tip of a much larger iceberg.The size, scale and speed of DHS’s censorship operation are vastly larger have been reported. Based on our investigation, below are seven bottom-line figures summarizing the scope of censorship carried out by DHS speech control partners, as compiled from their own reports and videos:
22 Million tweets labeled “misinformation” on Twitter;
859 Million tweets collected in databases for “misinformation” analysis;
120 analysts monitoring social media “misinformation” in up to 20-hour shifts;
15 tech platforms monitored for “misinformation” often in real-time;
<1 hour average response time between government partners and tech platforms;
Dozens of “misinformation narratives” targeted for platform-wide throttling; and
Hundreds of millions of individual Facebook posts, YouTube videos, TikToks, and tweets impacted, due to “misinformation” Terms of Service policy changes that DHS partners openly plotted and bragged tech companies would never have done without DHS partner insistence and “huge regulatory pressure” from government.
The citations above are from just the DHS censorship network’s impact on the 2020 election cycle alone. That was two years ago, when the narrative management machine referenced by The Intercept was first getting formed. Even the above figures, however, just scratch the surface of the full story.