o sung wu,
Nothing was further from my mind than to infer that you were wrong in investing in a bell & whistles car. If I were to live in so-called civilisation I'd probably have one also because & let's face it, they are fantastic, in fact almost unbeliveable now. However as I hang around swamps & gulleys & creeks I could not handle one of the new ones, way too difficult to deal with. I recall seeing a Unimog once stuck in the river crossing & a battered old Nissan Patrol had to pull him out & 40 miles down the road to a shipping agent & transport it back to Cairns from Cape York because no-one could fix. For the cost of shipping the Unimog you could have purchased a couple of very good 4x4's.
I'm longing for the day when they bring out a car that refuses to start when a drunk or poor mentality person gets into the driver's seat. The public transport system would need to be upgraded quick-smart.

Hi there SUSEONLINE...

Thinking back to what you said apropos taking two days to read your new car manual - Similarly, the only book that has more pages than our new car manual is the Encyclopedia Britannica ! To be very fair though, despite it's immense size, it is quite easy to understand with the various diagrams appropriately highlighted etc. Unlike our Dyson 'mickey mouse' vacuum cleaner, no descriptive assistance provided only diagrams, go figure ? Perhaps the Dyson organisation has this absurd belief that we Aussies can't read, how puerile ?

G'day there INDIVIDUAL...

By the description of where you live old boy, perhaps your moniker should be 'Crocodile Dundee' ? Hanging around, swamps and gullies and swollen creeks, I hope you're well armed in that sort of topography LOL ! I have this security blanket of concrete, bitumen, and asphalt and high rise buildings, the closest thing I get to the wild is our Labrador and Kelpie dogs ! I was attached to Queanbeyan for awhile, and being only 15kms from Canberra, I still thought we should patrol in 4x4's ? I'm very much a city person even though I was in the Army, it's the city for me I'm afraid. Though I must admit country life is much healthier for you I reckon, I'm pretty sure you'd agree with me eh INDIVIDUAL ?

And I fully understand where you're coming from when you articulated your own choice in M/V's, INDIVIDUAL. The days when we Aussie blokes would spend a Saturday 'arvo' working on our cars, are rapidly fading I'm afraid, with all the advanced technology fitted into the newer models.

** BELLY, PLEASE RETURN TO OLO, WE ALL MISS YOU **

Yes I can agree o sung, these owners manuals are getting ridiculous these days. 25 pages of how operate the car & it's controls, & 150 of safety warnings.

I am still to read a couple of mine, but the one with the mower is not much better. They are so badly written that I am never likely to finish them. This is unlike that other book[s] you mention, the Encyclopedia Britannica.

We had a lot of garage sales in the islands. People who had finished their 2 year contract, or a couple of repeats of that, usually had gathered too much stuff to take it all "home" with them when they left. I found a complete 1972 set of Britannica in Honiara [Solomons] at such a sale, on one of my visits.

All 19 volumes, & a few extras were a bit hard to store on the yacht, so I took just a few, storing the rest in a locker at the yacht club, picking up a few each visit. I found glancing through them was messy, so I started at Aalto, Alvar, the first entry, & read to the last. It took a year or 2, when I often had not much entertainment on offer at night, & I thoroughly enjoyed most of it.

I was like a walking Readers Digest, full of mostly useless trivia. I'll bet not many others have read an Encyclopedia cover to cover. Of course there was quite a lot less knowledge even as recently as 1972. Imagine trying to read everything on the net.

I hated disposing of them, but they rather filled the boat. No one wanted them, I could not even give them away, & they are useless on a barbeque, they just don't burn well. AS I finished then I'm afraid I consigned them to the deep, [they do sink you know], mostly in the Solomon sea.

I felt dreadful doing it, they were such good quality, but needs must.

I wonder if they are still printed, or has the net destroyed them?

G'day there HASBEEN...

That is a real shame, consigning a full set of E.Britannica to the deep ? Still, there'll be a vast number of very knowledgeable sea creatures, swimming around with a much greater appreciation of the world as a whole.

As I've said on previous occasions, you've led an amazing life there HASBEEN ? Sailing your own craft on unchartered seas, without the aid of any other individual to keep you straight and on course ! Truly astonishing in my opinion ?

On cars where engines stop when the car stops; this was common practice over 100 years ago, nice to see that some manufacturers are catching up!!

Hi there IS MISE...

I wasn't aware of that, at a time when the internal combustion engine was still in it's infancy ? If turning the engine off on each occasion the vehicle needed to stop, was a concept introduced way back then. I wonder therefore if they'll re-introduce that other quaint practice of a man with a red flag walking in front of the car whenever it needs to proceed ?

It's my understanding IS MISE, that this practice was introduced by the City Father's to ensure Society ladies of impeccable breeding, together with children and of course horses, were not unnecessarily alarmed by the presence of this noisy, smoke belching, new fangled automobile ?

Perhaps there may well be an unintended benefit of having someone waving a red flag whilst leading a string of cars ? At least it'll calm and slow the traffic a bit ?