I have a delicious feeling of schadenfreude as I read about the Liberal Party’s lurk merchants being caught out by ICAC at the moment – and it is purely personal. It goes back fifty years or so to a time when my father was trying to be a land developer in a pioneering unit project in an abandoned quarry. In fact I named the project. I am being deliberately vague as the project – still with the name I gave it – is now a Sydney suburb. The upshot is that the whole thing sent my father broke and crushed him so that he never really recovered. I left university for a year and became for a time the family breadwinner. The project had been bankrolled, in addition to my father’s small equity, by lurk merchants in the Liberal Party – except that my father didn’t realise what they were until he pinged a piece of gross dishonesty in the prospectus they had published for the project. My father then fell on his sword rather than be involved in lurk merchantry – which he despised.

My point is that corruption and dishonesty are not new in the Liberal Party. Of course one only has to say Askin to recall the more spectacular lurk merchantry of a time not long after my father’s devastating experience.

On another aspect of that side of politics, and then I promise to leave it alone. I really did savour this: it is linked to the story, which is about terminal idiocy rather than corruption:

Here is Hawkeye:

The same model as they have at Wollongong Hospital. Fortunately it finished with me by about 1pm, so I hotfooted – or rather hotbussed— to the Diggers Club for bangers and mash, which somehow seems appropriate after a heart scan.

And very tasty it was too!

I don’t get the test results until Friday, mind. But the signs appear good so far.

Meanwhile on the blog

April endeth today! It has been one of the better months on this blog – maybe the best so far if the current daily average holds for a few more hours!

People have been visiting:

1. Home page / Archives 790 views in April 2014
2. Cigarettes $1 EACH! 43
3. Noah again last night 29
4. Family history–some news on the Whitfield front 24
5. All my posts 23
6. Last time Thor, this time Noah… 22
7. Shellharbour 20
8. Spent the night in hospital 19
9. Gender non-specific – knowing norrie 17
10. About 16
11. Lost Wollongong 12
12. #qanda in Shanghai and other tv 11
13. Tom Thumb Lagoon 10
14. More on Anzac Day, and other TV 10
15. Kiama in the early 50s, and memories of car sounds… 9

Update 1 May

The blog finished April with a daily average of 45 visits, equal best with November 2013. Sitemeter shows pretty much the usual for the Floating Life blogs as a group – 4,661 page views from 3,542 visits in April 2014.