September 2nd, 2024Kyle’s Rant
What sort of skullduggery is this? When a poor struggling billionaire who beat accusations he had built his tech fortune on a fraudulent deal gets towelled over by a waterspout?
Now, I know boats, and as a young curious commercial fisherman I drove a seven metre boat right through a waterspout, but apart from frightening my crew, which was the whole point, not much else happened.
I do however realise climate change is here, and storms are much worse than 30 plus years ago when I had my soiree with the spout.
However, this latest incident was with no ordinary boat. The Bayesian had an overall length of 55.9m, a beam of 11.51m, a draught of 9.73m and a volume of 473 gross tonnes.
Her mast stood 72.27m high above the waterline, just short of the world’s tallest mast. All in all, this boat was unsinkable and being less than 300 metres offshore in terms of a maritime disaster this is up there with the Titanic on how many specific stuff-ups had to line up to cause this.
And if you combine this with a few days beforehand, his co-defendant getting run over by a car while out jogging, it sounds like a load of karma is going on and dealt by the hand of Mother Nature herself.
In other breaking news: A favourite saying of my father’s is “as I am so ye shall be”. He usually lowers his voice to a gravelly Kenny Rogers’ Oh Ruby tone, as he thinks it adds gravitas.
The old bloke had a ripper weekend in New Zealand as he celebrated his 80th birthday a few weeks back. The weekend ended with Donna breaking her wrist around 2am after just one of three evening parties.
I was nowhere to be found as my own family thought it would be a great idea to extend the party back to our motel and they bailed Uncle Kyle into the back of an SUV in a Taken-style abduction.
Now I do have a very particular set of skills but they don’t extend to fumbling around in the dark while more than a little tipsy trying to unlock a car boot. So when Donna finally made it back to the motel broken, beaten and covered in mud, I felt very bad and even turned the music down so I could better hear her mumbling and talking about how I was to blame for the situation.
But Dad has repeated the aforementioned saying a lot, as old folks tend to latch onto things, and I think he thinks it makes him philosophical. I am not sure where he got it from but a quick Google reveals it’s not from the Bible. It is actually from an old Indiana tombstone epitaph.
It says: “Pause, stranger, when you pass me by: As you are now, so once was I. As I am now, so you will be. So, prepare for death and follow me.”
However, an unknown smartarse added these words: “To follow you I’m not content, Until I know which way you went.” Which I must retort to the old bugger the next time he regurgitates his favourite saying.
In further news, in fully woke mode, it seems like it is illegal now to call someone a Ranga, an abbreviation of orangutan, and common when referring to redheads or gingernuts, such as myself.
It looks like Gold Coast Mayor Tom Tait is in all sorts of trouble for calling one of his counterparts a ranga. And then there is old mate the crossing guard at the school crossing down here in Victoria, who got into a world of trouble for high-fiving the students as they crossed the road.
WTF is the world coming to? So, I’m off to the primary school to find a small range child to high five and tell them ‘as I am, so ye shall be’. The world news rant over…
