Banana helps Sleep Apnea Patients (keyboard damage alert)

[dsm]

NY Times book review that captures the spirit of my points above

http://www.times.com/books/98/12/06/spe ... fatal.html

DSM

#2 - I see they require a login (the rogues, they'd make good Aussies) Here is an excerpt

ROGUES' CONTINENT
Date: January 25, 1987, Sunday, Late City Final Edition Section 7; Page 1, Column 2; Book Review Desk
Byline: By Thomas Keneally: Thomas Keneally is an Australian whose novels include ''A Family Madness'' and ''The Playmaker,'' which will be published in the fall.
Lead: LEAD: THE FATAL SHORE By Robert Hughes. Illustrated. 688 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $24.95.
Text:

THE FATAL SHORE By Robert Hughes. Illustrated. 688 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $24.95.

IT is common for Americans to say of Australians - if they say anything about them at all -that they are people of a frontier experience similar to their own and therefore, at the least, cousins. The Australians themselves know that the kinship and the difference are more subtle than that, but generally keep their counsel.

The largest difference between both nations, as conveyed by Robert Hughes in ''The Fatal Shore,'' an authoritative and engrossing record, is that in America the European Adam and Eve arrived by choice. They were redeemed by their arrival and their tread sanctified the earth. In the Australian case, however, the choice of landfall had been made by the Home Secretary of Britain. Adam and Eve arrived involuntarily and in chains. Their crimes were written on their faces, and they cursed the fatal shore.

There was a time, partly encompassing Mr. Hughes's Australian childhood, when Australians desiring respectability denied that the convict system had in any ultimate way marked the complicated nation Australia eventually became. But Mr. Hughes argues that 80 years of convictism was too large a historic fact not to have left, both in society and in the soul of the individual, a range of peculiar strengths, fallibilities and crotchets. Mr. Hughes concludes that the convict system in Continued on page 24 Australia was a massive but botched act of British sublimation. As for Australians, ''The 'convict past,' '' he writes, ''made [ them ] cynical about Authority; or else it made them conformists. As so many Australians are conformist skeptics, the 'convict legacy' is seen to be all the more pervasive.''

The first small convict flotilla of 11 ships found its way into Sydney Harbor in the humid summer (January in those parts) of 1788. America had had an oblique hand both in this first tenuous settlement and in the development of all the other vast Australian outdoor gulags. For the American colonies, which had once taken Britain's prisoners, often assigning them to farmers along the Eastern seaboard, were now independent and refused to receive Britain's exported criminality.

In the British Isles, the 1780's were as subject as the 1980's to the shock of the new. ''For the first time in human history,'' Mr. Hughes writes, ''the machine dictates the term of organic existence to its servants; the body becomes an inferior machine.'' And in the new industrial mills of Britain it was so treated. At Lytton in Derbyshire, one 4-year-old infant laborer worked with ''two hand-vices of a pound weight each, more or less, . . . screwed to [ his ] ears.'' Traditional trades had been obliterated by the machines. Child prostitution, addiction to gin and epidemic crime characterized the rookeries of Soho and Tottenham Court Road. Displaced country folk mugged travelers along the rural lanes of Devon and Cornwall. THE British Government defended society with stringent criminal legislation. For the stealing of lead from church roofs, sundry acts of poaching, as for more than 60 other crimes, death was the statutory penalty. The gallows dominated the penal landscape. Many death sentences were, however, transmuted to ''transportation,'' or forced exile, for life. Since the Home Office and the Admiralty no longer had a definite place to transport criminals to, the jails overflowed with habitual and small-time criminals - all the pals and molls of the so-called criminal classes. The excess went to the hulks, disused naval vessels moored in all the major ports of Britain and filled up with convicts. The ships served as tiny offshore penal settlements but were not offshore enough to satisfy the Government. The option of sending some of the felonry to New South Wales, the Georgian equivalent of deep space, began to exercise an attraction.

[grandmma]

DSM said
Leave anything laying around for too long in Sydney (including the clothes on your line) & they disappear - cars, bikes, clothes, tools, bags, children !!!
We had to stop using clothes lines & switch to tumble dryers & even they have to be in a secure room

How true! But then on the upside leave anything you don't want on the kerb, and it's gone in 10 minutes! No need for paying rubbish removal guys, trips to the local dump, storage costs! Not true re kids - my daughter's left hers out many times, always returned, if not left there! SOME things you just can't give away!

[-SWS]

Sounds like Chicago without all the violin cases...

[Babette]

For the North Americans:

"It's a practice which involves making a stolen vehicle appear legitimate by using the identification number from another vehicle."

http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/stories/s126387.htm

Whew! I was envisioning something far more gross.
B.

[dsm]

Sounds like Chicago without all the violin cases...

In Australia - well in Sydney, the toughest crims ended up in the Police. Police corruption is endemic & just can't be stamped out ...
http://www.smuggled.com/nswpol1.htm

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_q ... n14436555/ Lots of very good people have tried to clean up the police - just keep failing.


On my mothers side of the family are a line of police & the stories we used to hear make it plain that the old 'Rum Corps' (a rough tough group of soldiers who helped keep the peace & were paid in rum) became today's NSW police.

DSM

[Babette]

Yet one more reason to avoid the 708 hour plane trip to Australia.

Okay, maybe I exagerate, but I'm claustrophobic. The 4 hour trip to Atlanta gives me the heeby-jeebies.

Interesting take about the legacy of convict culture. I think more needs to be done to bring to light the convict history of the US, and it's legacy today. I have lots of theories. Maybe I should write a book.

I think it's no coincidence that the Southern colonies of the US were penal colonies, and their descendants were the rebels who chose to secede. And their descendants today are still rebels proudly bucking the trends of mainstream America.

Don't shoot. I'm ethnically Southern!!!! I've got the lineage to be a Daughter of the Confederacy!!! BTW, same line farther back makes me DAR...

Cheers,
B.

[dsm]

Babs

What really brought it hope to me was growing up in 3 countries - NZ, Aust & Southern UK. Was born in NZ of NZ dada & Aust mum. Went to Aust as a toddler, then back to NZ then to Aust, then to UK then to Aust then to UK then to Aust (all by age 16), then back to NZ then to other places incl Asia & US.

It struck me as to how different Aust was & the mindset esp about property. In NZ the country was free settled & the Europeans had to negotiate with the very clever & tough Maori inhabitants to buy land (later the Europeans used force & trickery to get swathes of land, but have recently begun correcting what were very blatant acts of confiscation & triggering wars knowing they would lead to confiscations).

Southern England was sooo different & traditional & in may ways genteel when there in the 1950s & 1960s. The Aussie character is such a standout & really is a blend of convict origins + Irish rebelliousness + frontier toughness. In the US you had loads of Irish free settlers (NY & Boston & Chicago) but in Aust the Irish were mainly both convicts and fenians. Aust also had a big number of Londoners transported & the Aust way of speaking shows a blend of Londoner & Irish. In NZ it is very much a blend of English & Scottish. Each country delights is sending up how the others speak. I suppose a bit like Canadians & Americans but here it is a national sport for one country to tease the others way of speaking.

DSM

[grandmma]

And DSM, in the spirit of that gentle teasing ..... (and yes, I know you know where I live, but I'm literally moving today...)

How do you describe / explain Tasmania? Proof that Kiwis can swim!

[dsm]

And DSM, in the spirit of that gentle teasing ..... (and yes, I know you know where I live, but I'm literally moving today...)

How do you describe / explain Tasmania? Proof that Kiwis can swim!

Geee, Tassie ! Hmmm, Haven't been there yet but am planning to go there as part of a car rally next year.
From what I gather they really are like Kiwis who speak with more of an Aussie accent. But, lack the Polynesian influence so prevalent in NZ.

Tasmania may be Australia's best kept secret ?

DSM

[grandmma]

DSM I agree, absolutely our best kept secret. For multiple reasons.

For those of you not aware, Aussies liken Tasmanians to what I believe you yanks think of with your backwoods folk - overly friendly with each other, to put it nicely, and a few sangers (sandwiches) short of a picnic

And yes, Tasmania is apparently beautiful, very like NZ's south island in countryside. Seen NZ south island, but not Tassie - it's on the list.

[dsm]

Yup
I have heard that in some of the back blocks of Tassie, on a cool evening, along some of the rivers, the sound of dueling banjos & guitars can be heard

DSM

[-SWS]

The human reality of our backwoods subculture is pretty much the full-spectrum of human qualities---both good and bad. For the most part, a very charming and accommodating subculture. Wonderful people!

But literature, film, and television have portrayed our backwoods folks in a variety of sensational ways. DSM just pointed out a grim backwoods portrait from the movie Deliverance. That stereotype of the grim and dangerous type still occurs:

Kinda makes you just wanna run yonder up
the road a piece... where it's safe!




However, there's a more humorous backwoods stereotype, a bit closer to what grandmma described. That would be the likes of three hilarious backwoods characters from the old Bob Newhart Show. Those bizarre and comical backwoods characters were three bothers named Larry, Darryl, and their other brother also named Darryl.


Above: Darryl, Larry, and Darryl; then Larry, Darryl, and Darryl;
followed by Larry, Darryl, and Darryl

The two Darryl brothers served as an obvious and implied humorous testimony, to their backwoods parents' lack of mental wherewithal---at thinking up a third and unique name for their final offspring! Those three brothers were Vermont backwoods folks, and the final Darryl never spoke a single line.

[feeling_better]

OK, getting back to the original Banana topic. Seriously, is the purported banana benefit as a result of the surface contact with the throat area, or is it from the digestion of bananas? It is not clear from the post. If the former, then a banana juice gargle (a la tea gargle) might get you the benefit without the extra calories?

Sorry, to those who hate bananas: this question is not for you Seriously, does anybody read any related orginal research articles?

[kopoloff]

Geez, you make a post,then go to sleep, wake and go to work, return home and sneak a look at cpaptalk, and look what happens.

Okay, I'll bite. Why is Sydney worse then Melbourne

Let's forget all the hyperbole and xenophobia. The simple, unadorned facts are as follows

sydney has a beautiful harbour. And that's where the beauty stops. The rest is a sprawling sea of humanity, primarily barbarians (thankfully there's a minority community of immigrants from all parts of the world, who provide a semblance of culture and civility) It has no culture, poor commerce, crowded twisting roads, a railway station blocking the city's view of the harbour, manic taxi drivers, a grey rusting bridge, expensive restaurants, humid windy and wet weather, beaches of diluted sewage, industrial wastelands, and a ridiculously small cricket ground.
It's residents are hurried, harried and horrible, without culture, manners and time. Planes fly at treetop height over the suburbs to land at the airport whose runway is an extension of main street of the city.

By comparison, Melbourne is a beautiful Victorian city, full of gracious architecture, superb gourmet restaurants, many world renowned shopping strips, wide straight roads that are well signposted and well planned, uniformed and courteous taxi drivers, theatres, galleries and parks, one of the worlds largest sporting stadiums, which is home to a magnificent code of football, wide avenues the like of Montreal's Rue St Catherine and Paris' Boulevard San Michel, an array of bay and surf beaches unparalleled anywhere else in Australia. The airport is located out of the city so that people can walk in the street without earplugs. Melburnians are educated, urbane, civilised and cultured. They have a broad range of cultural and ethnic backgrounds, and mix and intermingle with no hint of rancor.

There is not, despite dsm's protestations, a Melbourne-sydney rivalry. To put it bluntly, those sydneysiders (note the lower case 's') simply envy the residents of Melbourne, the jewel of the south. And there's a reason Sydney is modest. It needs to be, there's lots to be modest about

By the way, it is true that sydney was a penal colony, and so was Tasmania. But the British decided to keep one outpost of civilisation in the Southern hemisphere, so they never sent convicts to Melbourne.


Sorry dsm, but the facts had to be stated.

K

[kopoloff]

Oh grandmma

Melbourne is the little sister with a superiority complex - do I need to explain any further

It is a superiority complex, and that's because Sydney has a lot to be modest about.

K