5 January 2009

Summernats ends badly (well for us at lest)

| johnnycash
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Well, Summernats has come and gone. As a resident of a suburb very close by I must say that it was all going rather swimmingly, that is until the early hours of Sunday morning.

Not content with staggering down the middle of the road yelling “Summernats” at the top of their voices, a group of males decided that we really didn’t need a tree at the front of our house. And thus they smashed it up. That can go with the two that were destroyed in a similar manner during Summernats 2006.

I’m guessing that if significant damage happened to a car at Summernats then there would be action. Trees and locals just don’t seem to count.

The Summernats office were contacted. They didn’t care and told us that it was Canberra Connect’s job to sort out damage caused by Summernats. Canberra Connect (who are always awesome when we have used them) were happy to come and take out the tree but we can do that ourselves. ACT Police were only interested if we could identify the people involved – great. They also told us that no crime statistics relating to Summernats are collected and passed on to the organisers.

What would we like? Well, Mr Henry could spend the money he saved on his speeding fine and get us a new tree but I fear that it would meet the same fate when Summernats rolls around again.

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neanderthalsis10:03 am 07 Jan 09

Pandy said :

Lots of black smoke from oilers are also defectable.

Depends whether it is prolonged smoking or just the bursts you get from gear changes and acceleration from an oil burner. Even new little Euro-Diesels like the Golf tend to belch smoke when accelerating.

Xbikee said :

Dear Damo … sounds like you are trying to fit in on the RA site by being beligerant [spelt so you can pro-nounce it], insulting and just plain rude. BerraBoy was just informing us of an event that happened in front of his eyes – with which he saw the Summernats entry sticker on the offending vehicle. He was not comparing city’s drivers; that issue has been flogged and gone on RA. Your comment is irrelevant.

Thanks Xbikee. I was going to reply to Damo but in the end just couldn’t really be bothered.

Lots of black smoke from oilers are also defectable.

Dear Damo … sounds like you are trying to fit in on the RA site by being beligerant [spelt so you can pro-nounce it], insulting and just plain rude. BerraBoy was just informing us of an event that happened in front of his eyes – with which he saw the Summernats entry sticker on the offending vehicle. He was not comparing city’s drivers; that issue has been flogged and gone on RA. Your comment is irrelevant.

CoffinRX2 said :

Stolen Car: how can you assume that your car is due to summernats? …. I’m really sure all the thousands of people who drove to summernats, just decided to steal your car for shits and giggles!

…. easy, a couple of reasons lead me to think this….

1) it’s actually a difficult car to steal with a level of inbuilt security system. While I am sure the ACT has plenty of homegrown “talent”, the summernats represents probably Australia’s biggest concentration of automotive expertise over a three day period. Cars go missing in this period. Cars that don’t go missing the rest of the year. Cars that are difficult to boost.

2) ” steal for shits and giggles ” ?

I assume you mean stealing cars to annoy people for the fun of it or similar ???
Well lets imagine a typical summernats attendee – ie owning / driving a car with thousands of dollars of parts and time in it, you are also mostly under 25 so probably aren’t yet on really high employment earnings, what you do have you are spending on the car, alcohol, summernats etc………sooooo how do you pay for it all ????
yep “supplementary income sources”

yeah yeah yeah , tell me this isn’t proof , of course it isn’t.

Then again it’s not just an unfounded assumption either, how about a conclusion based upon several observed facts.

as they say…if it looks like a duck ……probably is one

Stolen Car: how can you assume that your car is due to summernats? …. I’m really sure all the thousands of people who drove to summernats, just decided to steal your car for shits and giggles!

Pandy: so you “dob in” old diesel cars because they belch black smoke? … Black smoke is generally a fuelling issue, …. blue smoke is burning oil

Or ripping up trees!

Oops! I was OT on the wrong T! Scratch that ghost reference.

I really do despair at how the Nats crowd trash the EPIC site. Folkies aren’t saints but they have good garbologists to take care of things as we go, and folkies generally aren’t trashing the facilities and fixtures.

Pandy said :

Woodford bigger than the National? Hard to believe.

Easily, my friend, easily. 25,000 there at Woodford on New Year’s Eve. Much, much bigger in numbers and geographical size. Woodford owns its own site and could just about justify its own postcode. http://www.woodfordfolkfestival.com — tune in this Friday on Artsound FM 92.7FM from 5-7pm for musical highlights.

But enough OT; back to the ghosts, goblins and things that go WTF? in the night.

I’m in, Thumper, subject to availability.

Woodford bigger than the National? Hard to believe.

Clarification: the festival I was returning from was Woodford. http://picasaweb.google.com/OverheardProductions/200809WFF#

The track I played is called ‘The Road to Port Fairy’. Never been to the latter so can’t comment.

It’s a pity iris recognition technology isn’t cheap and readily available. Scumbags who cause trouble could have their irises recorded on a database so that they’re banned from other exhibitions, shows, etc all around the country. Maybe one day it will happen.

Port Fairy is bigger than the National? Hard to believe.

As a rusted on folkie, yesterday I made my now annual tradition of driving back into Canberra and through the EPIC grounds on the Monday after to see just how much devastation had been wrought, three months before the National Folk Festival. The place looked like a ****ing tip, and the flouro-wearing clean-up crew were more interested in playing football than tending to the mammoth job of rubbish removal. (We do this crazy thing at the National and actually clean up DURING the festival. Having said that, the session bar on any given morning at about 7am can resemble a metropolitan city’s landfill.)

Being on the road back from Australia’s largest festival, I only had about a hundred folk CDs on me, so I grabbed a favourite and conducted a cleansing ceremony: driving slowly through the grounds with ‘The Road to Port Fairy’ by Trouble in the Kitchen cranked up to 11. The looks on the faces of the clean-up brigade were priceless.

I’m mostly in favour of the Nats being in town, and speaking to a number of retailers in Dickson last night, they didn’t suffer much except for having to employ extra security. But reports like johnnycash’s of mindless acts by punters just sicken me.

I often report cars that are belching black smoke.

Yeah summernats ….f***n fantastic

my car was stolen that weekend….coincidence ? I don’t think so.

Her’s some stats on vehicle theft in ACT from The National Motor Vehicle Theft Reduction Council
http://ncars.on.net/docs/quick/ACT_summary_finyr.pdf
homepage is at http://www.carsafe.com.au/t_01.html

but I couldn’t find any specifically related to car theft and other incidents ( property damage, assault etc )in the Summernats week ( how convenient )

ACT taxpayers support the event, wear the consequences and get to wear the crap

ChrisinTurner said :

Report the idiot to ACT Traffic Intelligence

The mind boggles as to what they do in Traffic Intelligence!

Another possibility is to report his obviously defective vehicle (indicators not working) to http://www.rego.act.gov.au/registrations/regodefective.htm and get him shortlisted for a compulsory rego inspection.

BerraBoy68 said :

My bad SummerNats experience occured while coming to work this AM. I driver in a poor excuse for a hotted up ute sat on my tail down the parkway. Apparently the 100km/h I was doing wasn’t fast enough. I was in the right hand lane as I was about to turn off at Glenloch to come into the city. When he could he overtook me and sat in front of me for staggering 2 seconds before crossing over tall other lanes to go to Belconnen. In doing this he squeezed between several other cars failing to slow down to find an appropriate gap, making those behind him hit their brakes to avoid an accident. His indicator also failed to work as he never used it in any of the lane changes he made.

There was a SummerNats entrants sticker on the back window and I can only wonder how much the other attendees laughed at this tryhard clown as his car was a pretty crap flat-bed ute with a red cab. It looked like S**t. The driver was an overweight 20+ year old bogan. As he went past me I gave him the mandatory finger salute.

He then spent quite a bit of time laughing at his stirling abilty to P**s off the other drivers around him, safe in the knowledge I couldn’t follow him as we were in different lanes heading to different places. I know his rego and what his car looks like. I really, really hope I see him again.

Seriously sounds no different from tha standard Canberra Driver TBH! .. I’ve driven in every Major city in Australia, and Canberrans are by far the worst!

Adza, if I had a party at my place that made a profit of a couple of million dollars then I reckon I might want to be the best corporate citizen that I could be.

However, if one of my neighbours complained that one of my guests had damaged their property then, yes, I would want to do something about it.

On another note, I have had a go at tree surgery today, fingers crossed it can be saved.

You can’t blame the summernats for the tree… why not blame the people that did it?

Gee if you had a party, and your guests got drunk and walked home… on the way they ripped out a tree… is that your fault?

Voting For and Against Summernats on the CT website is 50/50.

What happened Danman?

Report the idiot to ACT Traffic Intelligence https://www.afp.gov.au/email_forms/act_traffic_info.html

Worked for me !

ChrisinTurner12:03 pm 05 Jan 09

Report the idiot to ACT Traffic Intelligence https://www.afp.gov.au/email_forms/act_traffic_info.html

My grandmother in law bought some small plants and planted them near the front of her property. Later the same day she spotted her neighbour in her front yard carefully digging them up and putting them into her wheelbarrow. To make things worse when she was confronted she denied she was stealing them and said that she had just bought them.

I live near some guys who have cowboy hats, cowboy boots, utes, country music on the radio, but i am damn certain that they have never seen a cow… this fella comes over from time to time.

*LOL*

“Put in the boot!” I sez. “Put in the boot!”

If it is, prehaps you could “fix” his indicators for him?

might not be the same guy, but sounds like it….

Mmmm, Thanks Peterh, I might go for a drive down there after work.

please ignore the bad spelling on my previous post. I suck.

BerraBoy68 said :

My bad SummerNats experience occured while coming to work this AM. I driver in a poor excuse for a hotted up ute sat on my tail down the parkway. Apparently the 100km/h I was doing wasn’t fast enough. I was in the right hand lane as I was about to turn off at Glenloch to come into the city. When he could he overtook me and sat in front of me for staggering 2 seconds before crossing over tall other lanes to go to Belconnen. In doing this he squeezed between several other cars failing to slow down to find an appropriate gap, making those behind him hit their brakes to avoid an accident. His indicator also failed to work as he never used it in any of the lane changes he made.

There was a SummerNats entrants sticker on the back window and I can only wonder how much the other attendees laughed at this tryhard clown as his car was a pretty crap flat-bed ute with a red cab. It looked like S**t. The driver was an overweight 20+ year old bogan. As he went past me I gave him the mandatory finger salute.

He then spent quite a bit of time laughing at his stirling abilty to P**s off the other drivers around him, safe in the knowledge I couldn’t follow him as we were in different lanes heading to different places. I know his rego and what his car looks like. I really, really hope I see him again.

he probaby lives nearby, on marconi, perhaps?

My bad SummerNats experience occured while coming to work this AM. I driver in a poor excuse for a hotted up ute sat on my tail down the parkway. Apparently the 100km/h I was doing wasn’t fast enough. I was in the right hand lane as I was about to turn off at Glenloch to come into the city. When he could he overtook me and sat in front of me for staggering 2 seconds before crossing over tall other lanes to go to Belconnen. In doing this he squeezed between several other cars failing to slow down to find an appropriate gap, making those behind him hit their brakes to avoid an accident. His indicator also failed to work as he never used it in any of the lane changes he made.

There was a SummerNats entrants sticker on the back window and I can only wonder how much the other attendees laughed at this tryhard clown as his car was a pretty crap flat-bed ute with a red cab. It looked like S**t. The driver was an overweight 20+ year old bogan. As he went past me I gave him the mandatory finger salute. He then spent quite a bit of time laughing at his stirling abilty to P**s off the other drivers around him, safe in the knowledge I couldn’t follow him as we were in different lanes heading to different places. I know his rego and what his car looks like. I really, really hope I see him again.

Part of the problem is that you actally need proof that it was people from the summernats that did it. We all know it was but unles you have a video of them, with their summernats wrist bands on, Chic Henry can deny responsibility.

This is part of the economic benefit that the Summernats brings to the ACT – even plant nurseries benefit.

Holden Caulfield9:47 am 05 Jan 09

If it’s any consolation we had a couple of small eucalypts knocked off from our front yard over the Christmas break. As far as we can work out this happened in broad daylight too. This is in addition to two hedging plants that were stolen about 3 months ago.

The two trees that were stolen had previously been uprooted in the past, along with several agapanthus. Presumably the thieves got interrupted on that occasion as they were all just left on the ground. Odd, frustrating and bloody annoying.

While we do live in the inner north too, we’re far enough away from the Nats to attribute these thefts to their patrons.

I thought that there were stats taken from that event. I am sure that years ago i was told about the number of cars stolen from the event and how many rapes there were, however i could be wrong. Chic Henry should have a better liability for damages caused by his event.

Destructive scum. I wonder what else they wrecked? Trees of any size are really expensive, and you won’t be able to plant another one until the end of summer when it cools down.

Next year stake your tree with a star-picket. And attach 240 volts to the star-picket. And film it.

Dob them into Environment ACT. I’m sure the provisions of the Tree Protection Act 2005 will see you right. [/irony]

Can you blame them? Really?

Petrolheads… ripping out CO2 converting trees… it’s all a part of the Great Global Warming Swindle of Boganites.

Really though, that is more than annoying. Buying plants/trees is expensive and don’t grow overnight (well significantly anyway).

fully sick?

Woody Mann-Caruso9:11 am 05 Jan 09

Maaaate, ya caahn’t go bashin Nats. ‘Ave ya soin the detail that goes inna them cars? Bloody byeeeewdiful. It, loik, fully makes up for everythin’ else. Mate.

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