The Weekly World News rules.
Original story at:
http://www.weeklyworldnews.com/top_story/46

When all your kids leave home (as a great grandmother, the kids have definitely all left home), you start to think about downsizing. Indigo shows off her new house as an option for her great grandmother.

The lack of a bathroom or bed was a bit of a negative for grandma.

This guy sleeps 22 hours a day, the opposite of a mum with a new born. Here he is, rubbing it in at Taronga Zoo.

If the government won't give us more money in the federal budget, then lets shrink the vans and get kids to drive them for $1 an hour. Indi tests a prototype.

and that means group meetings at work.

Miller is doing very well and outperforming the baby index. He is nice and heavy, just like his parents at the moment.

When we asked two girls to take a photo of us during a walk at Long Reef, we wondered why they were laughing as they walked away.

Someone's finger points to the answer...

hey miller 'we can make it if we try'

Taronga Zoo - Sunday. The monkeys were cool.

Indi is really into Thomas at the moment and Grandpa got her a Thomas the Tank Engine fold out sofa.

This is a pic of Miller taking a leaf out of his parent's book and catching some z's on the couch.

Indigo's first trip to Max Brenner's. A pot of liquid chocolate shared with her Uncle and Aunty. She loved it.

I went to the gym ONCE with Cam and said I would never go again with him because he asked me to "spot" him on some mega heavy "man" weights and I really didn't like the facial expressions he pulled, they frightened me.....so imagine my shock when Miller was doing his work out on his tummy the other day and pulled the same expressions!!!

Some good friends of the Excitables, Dave and Jo, tied the knot a few months ago in Moree. Due to some pregnancy worries we had to cancel our attendance at what looks the wedding of the year from the quality of the photos. Sorry we couldn't make it, but thanks for the photos - they are great. Congratulations!

From ABC's Media Report today.

John Simpson is one of the BBC's most recognisable correspondents. For more than 30 years he's reported on wars and violent upheavals. But recently, he's found that his attitude to covering stories of violence and suffering, has changed. Here's his reflections on why, after so many years as a correspondent, he now sees the world differently.

John Simpson: The explosion was just close by. The windows of my hotel billowed inwards like sails in a storm, and the walls shuddered. A pause, then the alarms and sirens started up all round. My camera team and I got there quickly. The stench of high explosives still hung over everything. The screaming had mostly stopped and the rescue workers were dealing with the still living, and collecting up bits of bodies. The police were starting to take out their frustration and anger on the photographers.

This was in Kabul, just the other day, but I've seen these things dozens and dozens of times during my career. I've never been a great one for the kind of reporting that tells you how the journalist feels when something terrible happens. It seems to me that we need news reporters to be crisp and accurate, and unexcitable, like ambulance crews. And you certainly don't want an ambulance man leaning over you and telling you how he feels about your injuries; you just want him to say they'll get you sorted out in no time flat.

But in Kabul the other day, and in Baghdad a couple of weeks earlier, I couldn't help noticing a change within myself. I tried to find out dispassionately what had happened, of course, but when I looked at the bodies on their stretchers, and the injured moaning in pain, I felt a new kind of anger. I knew immediately what it was all about.

Last year, after four miscarriages over a period of some years, and virtually giving up all hope of having a baby, my wife and I had a son, a healthy, active, jolly little boy we've named Rafe, short for Ranalf. With 6-billion people on earth, having a child is scarcely a rarity, but in our case it was so unexpected, so gratifying, that Rafe seems to us like a miracle. I already had two daughters by my first marriage and have always, fortunately, been close to them, even more so now that we all weirdly have children of the same sort of age. But I confess that when my daughters were young, I wasn't so aware of their uniqueness. Everyone of my age seems to have children then. I understand things better now.

And to see the spectacle of other people's lives snuffed out wantonly on the streets of Baghdad or Kabul, or London for that matter, for some scarcely-understood political or religious motive, seems to me nothing short of blasphemy. I don't just loathe the stench of high explosive, I've come to loathe the attitudes of people who use high explosive for their own purposes: insurgents, terrorists, the intelligence services of a dozen countries, governments which target towns and cities and always have a ready apology when they kill the wrong people. High explosive means hospitals with blood on the walls and corridors, and ordinary people like you and me lying on the floor, or on a gurney, ears ringing with the noise of the explosion, nostrils filled with the stench of it still. The screams of others who are worse hurt than us. The fear and despair of the small number of doctors who have to deal with so many life or death cases, and know that they're condemning many of them to a slow, painful death.

'The armed struggle', said an African resistance song from the 1980s, 'is an act of love'. Try explaining that to the people lying in the hospital corridors.

The idea that some civilians are decent and righteous, while other deserve everything they get, or else shouldn't have been in the way, seems to me to be intolerable. I hope I never did think that attacks on civilians, any civilians, were justified, but now I know for certain they aren't. Having been through the first and second Gulf wars, and watched the wars in the former Yugoslavia, and the NATO bombing of Belgrade in 1999, I don't really care any longer what the cause is. It's the civilians on the receiving end who matter.

I'm sorry if this sounds pious or sentimental, I don't mean it to be, but I have finally understood something, through the blessing of having another child, late on, it's that life itself is immensely valuable. Not just the lives of people who think and look and maybe worship like you and me, people who are nice-looking, or well-educated or rich, people who are the right type of Christian or the right type of Muslim, all the lives. I realise this is terribly sententious, the moral equivalent of a motto from a Christmas cracker, still, just because something is obvious doesn't automatically mean it's totally lacking in value.

I'm certainly not going to stop going to the kind of places where these things happen, but at the grand old age of 62, my reaction to them has changed. The fact is, my time reporting on violence and bombings in places like Baghdad, and Kabul, has shown me one essential thing: that the lives of the poor, the stupid, the old, the ugly, are no less precious to them and to the people around them, than the life of my little son Rafe is precious to me.

from news.com.au

A JAPANESE biker failed to notice his leg had been severed below the knee when he hit a safety barrier, and rode on for 2km, leaving a friend to pick up the limb.
The 54-year-old office worker was out on his motorcycle with a group of friends in the city of Hamamatsu, west of Tokyo, yesterday, when he was unable to negotiate a curve in the road and bumped into the central barrier, the Mainichi Shimbun said.

He felt excruciating pain, but did not notice that his right leg was missing until he stopped at the next junction, the paper quoted local police as saying.

The man and his leg were taken to hospital, but the limb had been crushed in the collision, the paper said.

A fight is raging in the Book Industry. After being purchased by Venture Capital, Angus and Robertson's managers and PEP look pretty silly for imagining this money grab would work. The response from Tower Books MD is spot on.

Article is here

We don't know how, but Indi went to Dad's office today, found some tape on a box of books in the corner and managed to turn around to make a very serious statement about Free Speech.

Saturday night is funny video night in our household. We know. Lame.

Indi loves it and always mutters an 'uh-oh' when someone falls over.

However, toni pearon has one of the toughest jobs on tv. her joke writers are so bad we cringe more about the jokes than the kids falling from bikes or the grooms fainting at weddings. watch it and feel the pain.