Rob Masters

OK, so here in OZ we have instituted a regular get-together of state and federal heads to discuss issues around The 19, and how to deal with it. Officially it is called The National Cabinet.  Enter the ABC Coronavirus Live Blog - an informal stream run by the ABC Newsroom to allow readers to ask questions and get clarifications about the various restrictions, lockdowns, vaccine rollouts, and so on. It has developed into quite the tight-knit community, with their own in-jokes (Hi Barbara - how's the pool-boy doing?) and their own slang. One of the central pieces of which is the nick-name for the National Cabinet - forever known as the NashyCab. Which resulted in extensive speculation about just what that was. Over the past couple of weeks, we have entered Nashi season here, and my chance to strike has arrived. I now present, for the first time in public, The NashiCab. The Ingredients For the Nut Crumble 200g Almonds (or Macadamias) 60g Butter 50g Brown Sugar 50g Raw Sugar For the Cr...

 

What follows is a discussion of mental health and stress from someone who is, overall, in a good place. None of this is advice of any sort, but is just some personal observations, and some interesting research. Unless you have somehow managed to live under several miles of rock for the past six months, you know that we are living in very strange world today. The personal impacts of a global pandemic are many and varied, from the physical isolation, to the impacts on work, loss of jobs, the fear of illness - the list goes on. Any of these can cause stress, and the combination of all, or even just some, of them creates even more stress. The idea of the stress that these can cause, will, in itself, cause stress. So what to do about it? We are seeing many families start down a self-sufficiency kick to try and gain some stability in food supply (something, incidentally, that we saw in the Great Depression of the 1930s), an increase in interest in exercise (not seen in the 1930s, but...

It could be argued that the least popular minister in Australia is our Minister for Home Affairs, the Honourable Peter Dutton. So when the word broke yesterday that he had tested positive for NCovid-19, it was inevitable that there would be some sort of fallout. Sure enough, minutes later, a co-worker of mine (a recent immigrant) visited Wikipedia to read up on him, and encountered the following. Now it was reverted within 2-3 minutes, but he managed to grab a screenshot at my request.