Shuff's General Chat Thread ... #73 - Talk about anything and everything...  

The one in Feb is for Jap cars 25 yrs or older. The one in June is for all Jap cars.

i don't think that the organisers would be too worried if you were to turn up in something slightly newer that's tastefully modified, if you were to want to put it on the oval. and yes, i did see a few of the vehicles that you're talking about last year. it's all for a good cause, however you may be asked to park outside if you don't meet the criteria / obviously they're targeting 'older' vehicles, otherwise it'd basically be two car shows of the same thing, given that as mark has said, there's another show later in the year for 'all' Japanese vehicles.

what year is the fd? they're getting pretty long in the tooth now. you could probably get it in. series 6 came out 1991, and they're all basically the same body shape.

FD ? 1991, which is 24 years at the moment, came out the year i came out

National screening times for the SUMMERNATS 28 TV premiere THIS SUNDAY on 7mate!
Sydney, Melbourne and time warp Tassie 11:00 -13:00
Backwards Brisbane 10:00 - 12:00
Radelaide and Red Centre NATS zone 10:30 - 12:30
Gina Rinehart zone, Perth 12:00 -14:00
Check your local guides, just to be sure. Spread the word and share this teaser! Enjoy.

The best food in Japan is not Japanese... It's everything else!

The best of whatever kind of food you like is in Japan.

Ask any Chef... They will all tell you Japan has the highest restaurant standards in the world... Even if what you like is bbq and greasy slop,

like me!

Apple reported a record $18 billion in quarterly profit on Wednesday, one of the biggest in corporate history, fueled by holiday sales of larger-screened iPhones.

haters gunna hate. :mamoru:

full story here (its not much of a story, moreso a comparison to other companies etc).

https://au.pfinance.yahoo.com/fame-and-fort...ofit-stacks-up/

Thorn Birds author Colleen McCullough dies aged 77

Famed Australian author Colleen McCullough - author of The Thorn Birds and 25 other books - has died on Norfolk Island.

McCullough died in hospital aged 77.

She worked as a neuroscientist in the US before turning to writing full time.

The Thorn Birds, a romance saga spanning generations of a family living in the Australian outback, was published in 1977 and became a worldwide bestseller.

McCullough spent most of the past 40 years living on Norfolk Island. She died there this afternoon.

For much of that time, McCullough was one of Australia's top-selling novelists.

The literary establishment may have been sniffy about her work, but McCullough laughed all the way to the bank as her tales of forbidden love, her historical series covering the fall of republican Rome and her body-filled police procedurals made her a wealthy woman.

Germaine Greer once said her early and fabulously successful work, The Thorn Birds, was the best bad book she'd ever read and compared it to Barbara Cartland's bodice-rippers.

McCullough was born in Wellington in the central west of NSW, on June 1 1937. As a child she buried herself in books to try to escape her "jockstrap" family.

A bright girl, she topped the NSW Leaving Certificate in English and would have been a doctor if she hadn't been allergic to the antiseptic soap that surgeons used to scrub.

She turned to neuroscience, working in the Royal North Shore Hospital and the Great Ormond Street Hospital in London before moving to the United States as a teacher and researcher in neurology at the Yale Medical School.

Towards the end of her 10 years at Yale she wrote her first two novels.

The first, Tim (1974), about a middle-aged women's romance with a good-looking, intellectually disabled handyman, did well and was made into a film starring Piper Laurie and Mel Gibson.

The second, The Thorn Birds (1977), about a priest's agonising choice of church career over love, enabled her to live where she wanted and to write full-time.

Its American paperback rights alone were worth $1.9 million and it was made into a miniseries with Richard Chamberlain, Bryan Brown and Rachel Ward.

She lived for a time in the US and London before settling on Norfolk Island, the former penal colony. In 1983, aged 46, she married Ric Robinson, a 33-year-old islander and descendant of a Bounty mutineer.

During the 1980s she wrote love stories like An Indecent Obsession and The Ladies of Missalonghi, with the latter owing a great debt to The Blue Castle by L.M. Montgomery of Anne of Green Gables fame.

In a genre change, she also wrote the post-apocalyptic A Creed for the Third Millennium.

McCullough's 1990s output was dominated by her seven-novel Masters of Rome series, published between 1990 and 2007.

The series starts with The First Man in Rome, an account of the developing rivalry between the two giants of the Roman republic, Marius and Sulla; and ends with Antony and Cleopatra, which charts the final, tumultuous battles for the new Roman empire.

She's said she's always loved Rome and chose the republic because it was a period that novelists had largely left alone.

"I love to break new ground," she said in a 2007 ABC TV interview - and that she killed off everybody in The Thorn Birds so there couldn't be a sequel.

Nevertheless, so was always being pressed to return to her outback blockbuster.

McCullough continued to jump genres.

The Song of Troy (1998) reimagined Homer's Iliad, Morgan's Run (2000) was set in convict Sydney and Norfolk Island, The Touch (2003) involved loveless marriage and forbidden love in late 19th century NSW, and Angel Puss (2004) had a young woman learning of love in 1960s Kings Cross.

Her 2008 reworking of Pride and Prejudice, the Independence of Miss Mary Bennett, upset Austen purists.

President of the Jane Austen Society of Australia Susannah Fullerton said she shuddered that Elizabeth Bennett was rewritten as weak and Darcy as savage.

McCullough's literary versatility seemed endless.

It included a biography of Roden Cutler, the war hero, diplomat and NSW governor; and five stories featuring Carmine Delmonico, an American small town detective.

McCullough suffered health problems most of her life.

At 32 she was found to have hypothyroidism, which caused depression and weight gain.

But she reckoned that although she'd always looked like the back of a bus, she'd always had boyfriends because "men love a funny woman".

Later she endured severe joint pain and failing eyesight.

"My body is ratshit but at least what's inside my head, knock on wood, isn't," she said in 2007.

It didn't stop her writing.

Her last novel Bittersweet, a 1920-30s saga of two sets of twins and their passions, came out in 2013.

Reviewer Sue Green said Bittersweet was replete with florid prose, unlikely plot twists and stereotyped characters.

But it had an "overriding positive: it's a great read, an enjoyable whole that is greater than its specific deficiencies".

Much the same could have been said for much of her work.

'Doctor Who should never be played by a woman'

Should the next pilot of the TARDIS be a woman? The answer is no, according to one former holder of the keys to the famous blue time machine.

The man who played the Fifth Doctor in the eponymous BBC series Doctor Who, Peter Davison, has again weighed in to the question over whether the role should be played by a man.

Davison is in Australia to play the role of narrator in the Doctor Who Symphonic Spectacular.

The debate over whether the role should be played by a woman has been long running, but in 2014 the show's producer Steven Moffat said there may well be a woman piloting the TARDIS in the future.

During the eighth season, the Doctor's nemesis the Master returned as a woman known as Missy.

But Davison said it was his own personal opinion that the Doctor be kept a male role.

"I speak now as a fan who grew up watching it," he said.

"I have trouble with the idea of a female Doctor, only because I reckon if you're born on Gallifrey a man, you're probably a male Time Lord."

Davison said the key to the success of the modern Doctor Who series was the dynamic between a troubled Doctor and strong female companion.

"It seems to me if you reverse that, if you have an uncertain, fallible female Doctor with a really strong male companion, you've got more of a stereotype than anything else."

But he said the time was right for a new female Time Lord to have a spin-off series, and laughingly suggested his daughter Georgia Moffett might be good for the role.

She has already played the role of a Time Lord descendant, the cloned daughter of the 10th Doctor, in an episode in 2008.

The Doctor Who Symphonic Spectacular is a musical celebrations of the TV series.

It played in Adelaide on January 24, and is touring to Perth, Sydney and Auckland over the next two weeks.

i had a text from Snap Fitness today @ 5pm offering me the opportunity to rejoin, 1 month free, then $9.95 a week forthwith - the catch was that i had to take the deal by 7pm. So i took the text with me, went to Anytime Fitness and got the same deal. just the additional cost of the access card. meh.

i needed the change of atmosphere / scenery, hence the change.

and the bonus now is that i'll be able to interchange anytime i want between Snap / Jetts and Anytime Fitness without it costing the joining fee or card access, which will help my motivation in things not getting stale.

Wait what.

You're a member of 3 gyms?

Glow is a headphone system that looks like something right out of Tron. This Kickstater project already met its goal, which means these headphones will most likely become real. They have several advanced options, but who cares - they freaking glow! No Photoshop trickery or special effects: you can seen from the embedded video that these things not only glow, but are very bright. Finally, these headphones are not cheap - to get a pair, it'll cost you $149.

For more details on project check out Glow's Kickstarter page.

Check out this badass custom-made model of the Super Star Destroyer Eclipse-Class from Dark Horse comics Star Wars: Dark Empire. It was built from scratch by Fabio Delfino last year. It took him 8 months to build, it's 3 feet long, and it is loaded with all kinds of great details and features. Here are the details from the creator, and we also have a video for you to watch showing off its greatness!

Model of Super Star Destroyer Eclipse class (custom made), from "Star Wars: Dark Empire" comic book, it's more than 1 meter long and completely homemade, built with an electrical system of lights and sounds, with more than 3 thousand pieces.
It's NOT a Kit and NO Lego pieces.
It has 1 switch to control the "power on" of the lights, 2 switches to active the "superlaser" led and 1 switch to active the flexible led for the "primary ignition" (they can be controlled remotely by a wifi remote control).
Inside there is a speaker connected in bluetooth to a smartphone for the sound effects by a custom soundboard.
Impressive. Most impressive.

Teen arrested over library porn film

Kendra Sunderland in her viral video. © Supplied / 9News Kendra Sunderland in her viral video.
A former US university student who filmed a porn video in a campus library has been arrested for public indecency.

Kendra Sunderland, 19, became the talk of Oregon State University (OSU) after she uploaded a video to Pornhub that showed her fondling herself for 17 minutes.

The teenager's video became an instant hit, racking up more than 236,000 views in the few days before it was taken down.

Students said the video, titled "Web show in the university library, was shared on Facebook, Twitter and the Yik Yak phone app.

OSU student Clifford Harris it was "the buzz around campus".

"Everyone is talking about it. And I don't think it was a very appropriate thing to do," he said.

Fellow student Rich Rogers said he was shocked after receiving a text from a friend about the video.

"At first I thought it was a joke. And then all of a sudden it was like, oh no, it's real. After I realized it was real, I was more shocked that it happened," he said.

"That kind of stuff you do in private and not in public. Ever."

Sunderland has been arrested on charged of public indecency. She was then cited and released.

OSU spokesman Steve Clark said the university does not condone "this type of behaviour".

"We want our students to feel safe. And we want to encourage anyone on campus – even the public – to contact police immediately if they see anything unusual on campus," he said.

Sunderland's video is not the first university library porn film to spark controversy.

Last year Australian porn star Angela White made headlines when she published a video of herself having sex with a man in the La Trobe University library in Bundoora, Victoria.

let this be a lesson, you bad bad girl.



on an aside, now googling / searching / redtube etc for the Australian mentioned in the story, Angela White