HOW WE SEE IT! - Saturday Snapshot

With Bryan Littlely and Shaun Hollis

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Cartoon by Shaun Hollis

Digging lotto luck for good blokes

Judging by the comments coming through our social media feed, the lucky lotto winning landscape gardener from Mossman is a good, and deserving bloke.

Here’s hoping the $736,000 he picked up doesn’t change him… unlikely given it is only enough to buy one bedroom, one bathroom and the shallow end of the pool of Kyle Sandilands’ recently sold Mowbray getaway (of course it has a shallow end!).

I’ve known a couple lotto winners in my lifetime, and reckon their newfound wealth didn’t change them much, thankfully.

The biggest prize pool was a cool $15 million for a bloke in his late 50s. I went to the gym with him three times a week for two years, backed him up when he queried the personal trainer about his charges for additional sessions, and told him not to bother wasting his money on trips to go watch his beloved Richmond Tigers play… I had no clue he was a multi-millionaire.

But the best case of keeping it cool and not changing with a windfall has to go to ol’ mate Cactus, a former dairy farmer from Back Valley.

Cactus got his nickname not because he was a bit of a prickly character, but because he was given just six weeks to live when diagnosed with cancer, 45 years ago…. He was “cactus”.

He wasn’t having a bar of it and discharged himself and kept up his port drinking, cigarette smoking habits, and buying lotto tickets.

Now his lotto success did come as part of the syndicate at the pub he was the boots man for, so the prize pools were not huge. POOLS! He twice won Division One Lotto…. And at least one chook in every chook raffle at night owls bowls for 20 years.

Cactus died in September of this year. Not bad given his early prognosis.

Digging for gold

 

Dinghy deserves Douglas’s efforts

I’ve been overwhelmed by the efforts and compassion of people in Douglas Shire in the search for missing blue heeler pup, Dinghy over the past week, and to those who helped out Gallagher Harbisher Thompson in the lead up to him getting in touch with Newsport.

We are heeler tragics here at Newsport and when Gallagher was able to get in touch and suggested he was not great with tech or social media, we were only too happy to help him out to get Douglas to help find Dinghy.

While using social media to spread the word, and do a bit of online investigating to try to get Dinghy back in Gallagher’s life, I’ve been only slightly conflicted by the fact that for the past 10 weeks I’ve been using social media in my bid to get some puppies out of my life… 9 of them!

I’m happy to report all of mine - which includes six named after the characters of sitcom Friends - have found their forever families. Hopefully before long we can report the same for Dinghy.

Help find Dinghy, Douglas

 

Facts faster than a road worker

Rome wasn’t built in a day. But it wouldn’t have been built at all if the Romans didn’t make a start on it.

As we all ponder - and maybe take a punt - on when the first day of work to rebuild the Captain Cook Highway will be, here’s a few fast facts on amazing construction projects in places other than Far North Queensland to consume while you’re in another coast road convoy

Best get your passenger to read them… the barflies at Rattle N Hum are convinced those cameras at the roadworks stops are phone detection cameras.

  • Taking nine years to build, The Hong Kong-Zhuahai- Macao Bridge connects the Zhuhai City in Guangdong Province and Macao Special Administrative Region with Hong Kong (SAR). The mega bridge is 55km long, and includes 29.6km of 3-lane carriageway which is part tunnel (6.7 km) and part bridge. It cost $2.3 billion and was completed in January 2018.
  • India holds the record for the fastest construction of a road, 100km in 100 hours. Granted, it was pretty flat and straight.
  • Mini sky city, Changsha, China was built up from the ground by Broad Sustainable Building, a prefab construction company, using a modular system by assembling three floors in a day. The skyscraper touched the clouds with 57 floors in a record time of 19 days.
  • Shelby county habitat for humanity on December 17, 2002 broke the then world record for the fastest house ever built, that is, in 3 hours, 26 minutes and 34 seconds. The house of 12,000 square feet, which included three bedrooms, two bathrooms was completed with electricity and plumbing.

A crook job on the Cook

 

Marlin are too much of a challenge

Hats off to the winning fishermen, and organisers, of the Port Douglas Marlin Challenge. I’ve never been much of a fisherman, although I’ve had a crack.

I’m damn good at yabbying, and have even organised professional yabby racing for charity, but my best fishing catch is likely from the times I’d go down the river running through my farm with a bucket full of cow pellets and a shotgun.

And, no, carp are not a delicacy.

Reeling them in

 

Being vigil-ANT

Life was pretty straightforward growing up. We had black ants, bullants, inch ants and sometimes when I went out bush and got lucky, honey ants…. Oh, and Adam!

These days, though, we’re being kept on our toes and, for the sake of our primary producers and even our comfortable outdoors and active lifestyles, on the lookout for a whole army of little critters, with really wild names.

Electric ants now join yellow crazy ants, fire ants, African big-headed ants, Singapore ants and Argentine ants as real threats to our biosecurity.

And the authorities cANT control them on their own. Take a read of how you can help.

No reason you cANT help

 

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