Haematuria. That’s a polite way of saying there’s blood in me piss. A lot. This is the third day. This happened a couple of years ago and the GP seemed unconcerned. Sure enough, it stopped after a couple of days. Could I have a kidney stone and not be aware of it? Time will tell.

Meanwhile, it’s too bloody cold for me. My tiny fingers are frozen. Crumbs, it’s only 17C, a balmy summer day in northern hemisphere climates, but it’s too cold for me.

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I’m not a touch-typist and I need to look at the keyboard as I type. But I do make mistakes and I find I instinctively know it when I do. Something just feels wrong and I know I have to look up and correct it. It’s like editing in my head. In addition, I always read my typing back. It’s obvious to me that most Facebook people don’t bother to read what they’ve typed. The errors are so glaring that they can’t possibly have read it back. So careless, so lazy, so slapdash. It’s typical of lazy Australian people, I think.

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I’m not very proud of us as a nation. We do produce some outstanding people in innovation, sport, science and so on, but the laziness, the “near enough’s good enough” attitudes, the slapdash workmanship, the racism, the crudeness, the lack of manners … I could go on.

I remember years ago that a guy in WA was making small ornaments out of welded railway spikes, with bits of rod and nuts and washers welded together, set on a wooden base. They were crude junk, but they sold. I was friendly with a Japanese lady at the time and I remember feeling embarrassed that she would see them. I didn’t want her to think that it was all we could do.

I compared them to the beautiful craftsmanship of Japanese artisans in their wood carvings, lacquer work, masks, calligraphy, costumes, dolls, swords and knives and so on. A Japanese craftsman would laugh at those rough, crude junky ornaments being produced in WA. Actually, he absolutely would not laugh, Japanese are too polite to do that.

This is a metaphor for much of the work we produce in Australia. Yes, there are shining examples of top level work, but most of the “stuff” we produce is just that – stuff, rubbish.

It’s very noticeable to me that most of the examples of outstanding work here, in whatever field, art, sculpture, architecture and so on, are done by immigrants. People from Britain, Italy, Scandinavia, other parts of Europe. They might live in WA or elsewhere in Australia, but their talent comes from their countries of origin, not from Australia.

I’m also pretty tired of programs about what a great nation of inventors we are, with the old saws about the stump jump plow and the Hills Hoist. I will give credit to a few innovations like the polymer bank notes and the Cochlear implants, but show me something on the scale of the Boeing 747 or the Concord or the F-22 fighter aircraft, or a thousand other British, American or Japanese inventions. We don’t work on the same level.

This will be controversial.

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I notice the next financial debacle is developing, courtesy of Malcolm Turnbull, “The man who trashed Australia’s broadband fibre-optic network”.

This is the man who, as minister for communications and the man who thinks he understands technology, had to change things about the NBN when the Liberals got into power in 2014 just so he had a point of difference from the previous Labor government, the visionary innovators of the scheme.

Yes, it was going to be expensive and it was taking a long time to develop, but Turnbull wanted it done faster and cheaper. So he made major changes that have rendered it to be a sub-standard network, compared to the rest of the world. New Zealand had gigabit (1,000Mb/s) fibre, country wide, years ago. We still don’t have it! Australia ranks something like 37th in the world in internet speed rates.

Anyway, his other big idea was Snowy pumped hydro. Build (dig) tunnels through the Snowy Mountains linking high and lower level existing dams, and pump water up to the top level dams in the day time using solar power, letting it speed down these new tunnels at night to drive the turbines lower down.

In theory, it works. But as usual, the costings and the time scales were way off the mark. I think the initial cost estimate was around $2 billion, with completion around 2026, and five years later the cost has already blown out to around $10bn with completion maybe 2030.

The project is currently stalled, with one of the tunnel boring machines stuck in a tunnel only about 100m in. It seems no-one realised there was a soft sandy deposit above, which collpased on the machine. now they’re trying to dig it out. What an embarrassment.

I’ve also read that the financials just don’t add up. The initial costings didn’t include the cost of the new transmission lines to get the extra power from the Snowy Mountains to Sydney and Melbourne.

As I said, it’s just another debacle to the credit of egomaniac politicians.

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One Aussie thing I will take my hat off to is Utopia, the ABC-TV program at 8pm on Wednesday nights, made by Working Dog Productions and starring Rob Sitch.

What a fabulous program! If you haven’t seen it, it’s a send up (but without a laugh track) of a fictitious government department, the Nation Building Authority (NBA). It’s filled with characters based on observations of the way real government departments operate. Only a few of the characters have any ability – the rest just get by, or their blunders are not noticed. Rob Sitch plays the head of the authority, constantly battling to inject rationality into the crazy ideas of politicians and other wannabe power trippers. It’s brilliant!

Many people who have worked in government comment that it’s like an operations manual, an eye-in-the-sky for the real life in government departments. One or two competent people constantly battling the hangers-on, the egomaniacs, the time servers and wasters. Sigh.

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I’ve just finished watching a Netflix series called The Days. It’s Japanese made with dubbed dialogue, about “the days” after the 2011 Fukushima earthquake and subsequent nuclear power station meltdowns. It’s a true story and it’s still going on. It’s not over, by a long shot.

There are eight 1hr episodes and it’s a drag to watch. It’s very well made, showing the devastation that the earthquake produced in the power plants, but it’s so s-l-o-w. I thought about giving up a few times, but I watched it all.

What it showed is the incompetence of many of the politicians, heads of government departments and engineers. Many of them didn’t know the answers when asked questions and just sat there with their mouths open.

But what made it especially slow was the long silences between speakers. Sometimes the characters took 10, 15, 20 seconds of slack jawed silence in the dialogue. Was this real? Is this the way Japanese speak? It got very tiresome.

The thing is, this is real, this is ongoing even now in 2023. The fuel rods in the reactors really were exposed when the cooling water pumps failed due to loss of electrical power and started to melt through the concrete containment vessels. No kidding. The only way they can keep it cool even now, 12 years later, is to use sea water to cool them. The result is that the sea water becomes contaminated with radioactivity and has to be stored in giant tanks.

The problem now is that they’ve run out of storage. They don’t have room for more tanks, so they are going to have to release huge amounts of this radioactive water into the sea again.

Naturally, this is causing huge controversy, but what choice do they have? There is no other way. They are banking on the dilution of the ocean to solve the problem. It may be OK, but I wouldn’t be buying any fish caught off the NE coast of Japan for the next few decades.

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I’ve just read an item in last weekend’s newspaper that set me back on my heels. Like many people I’ve stopped using cash, coins and notes, in my everyday life. I haven’t used an ATM in several years, I couldn’t pay the lawn mowing man last week because I don’t have any notes/change.

But something I hadn’t thought of is that this is killing busking. You know, street performers who ask for donations ino their “hat” as they make music or dance or whatever on the footpath outside shops. The trouble is, people don’t have coins or cash any more to donate. Wow, I hadn’t thought of that.