Afghanistan’s first woman military helicopter pilot

I just read this article on ABC News (Australia) and thought I would share it with you.

“My name is Latifa. I am Colonel. I am an active helicopter pilot in the Afghan Air Force.

I wish to become a very good pilot and train other women to become pilots.

I have a five-year-old daughter who has been flying with me since she was two months of age. This is because there is nobody to look after her in the Air Force. I am trying to convince them to have a kindergarten, so women can be calm and do their job very well.

My message to other women in the world is that they should work hard to achieve their goals. They should be ambitious and have confidence in themselves. They should stand by Afghan women and share their experiences with Afghan women.”

The struggles that Latifa and her sister, Laliuma, went through to get the education they wanted, let alone rise to the top of their profession as they did, are astounding.

Read the article, it will make you feel even luckier that you have the life you do.

A burning lake. 2012.

I was really interested to read this story from ABC News. Apparently New South Wales Rural Fire Service has been dealing with an extremely unusual fire at Lake Woytchugga near Wilcannia.

For weeks a fire has been burning under the lake bed. The lake is a seasonal one and is dry at this time of year so we aren’t talking about burning water here, but when the fire teams attended they were baffled to find that the edge of the lake bed was on fire.

They have tried flooding the area using water tankers, and digging up the hot ground, but the fire has managed to resist their efforts and continue burning. Their main concern is that the fire may spread to nearby vegetation and begin spreading above ground.

The fire service is not sure what is actually burning, and are assuming that there is some sort of organic material underground that is continuing to smoulder.*

I wonder what is really going on there? Is there coal under the lake that is fuelling the fire or is there something else going on? What do you think coud be under there?

Is there a volcano down there just waiting to let loose on some unsuspecting christmas campers?

Will there be an adventurous soul drunken yobbo who ventures out on to the lake, cracking the surface and revealing a molten pit of doom?

Of course this redshirt will perish in the process, but every story needs the death of an unknown to get us going, doesn’t it?

The pigeon keeps his secret….

Do you remember the interesting find of the body of a WWII carrier pigeon in a chimney recently, still with its 70 year-old message from Sergeant Stott, intact? (Earlier post here)

I, and probably many others, have been waiting to find out what the code breakers would make of this message in the hopes that there would soon be an amazing secret revealed to the world.

Today the follow-up report caught my eye in the news (ABC news) and I eagerly clicked on the link to see what I had missed…… only to find that I had missed nothing…. bugger.

The code breakers had no luck deciphering it and concluded that the code must have been a one time only code or a specialist code. Aaarrgghhh!

Oh well, perhaps this is a mystery waiting for someone to look through the right files in the right office to find that mislaid code book.

Cutest ways to die.

I never thought I would say this but brace yourself for a fantastically funny and wonderfully cute advert that Metro trains in Melbourne made to tell people to be safer. (ABC news)

Dumb ways to die is the name of the song and I can already tell you that the catchy little bugger (and the funny ways of inviting death) will stay with you for a while.

When I put it on the kids quickly gathered around to laugh, made me replay it, then went back to what they were doing with the occasional shout out regarding a new dumb way to die they had just thought of.

I’m not going to suggest people will be any safer because of this ad but at least idiocy now has a happy theme song 😀

Devils on the run.

This isn’t really a strange newspaper article but I thought it deserves noting. A falling tree bought down the fence around the Tasmanian Devil enclosure at a Perth zoo, allowing three of them to make a break for it. (ABC news) The zoo and the local rangers are doing their best to get them back with extra stinky bait in traps.

Now I really love Tasmanian Devils, they are very cute, but they are not something I would want to find wandering around in my garden if they were lost and in a bad mood. They are generally shy, but when they start growling they sound like a huge monster is about to dash over and rip off some of your extremities.

Koalas also sound terrifying, they just can’t be bothered climbing out of their tree to do anything to you, Tassie Devils are fast and strong and love to bite everything, including their friends.

Here is a clip of some Tassie Devils playing. As you can hear their version of happiness sounds and looks like someone is about to die, can you imagine finding one stomping around in your backyard in a bad mood? Best to just back away quietly and leave him to it.

Hen pecked coppers. ABC News.

I thought that you might like to read this article I found on the ABC news website.

No only does this incident take place in a very funnily named place (we have lots of them in Australia) it shows that many coppers do have a sense of humour.

A disturbance call was received by the Northern Territory Police which they attended, and found all was quiet in Humpty Doo. They called in to the local hotel only to find a hen’s night in full swing.

Naturally those celebrating assumed that the strippers had arrived, I suppose that no hen’s night is complete without them, and welcomed the police with open arms.

The police managed to escape the clutches of the women with their dignity intact and still managed to entertain. Judging by the photo in this article the police found it as amusing as the hens 🙂

Hens peck at police in Humpty Doo dignity test – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation).