Australia Marks The Death Of Its Automobile Manufacturing Industry -- Blame It On High Wages -- October 19, 2017

Some readers think the demise of the manufacturing industry in Australia can be traced back to the country's shift to renewable energy and the high price of energy in an energy-rich country. From Bloomberg:

As thousands of people attended an automobile rally in Australia’s blue-collar heartland on Sunday, many knew it was also a funeral procession for the nation’s car industry.

General Motors Co. will close its Holden factory in the South Australian suburb of Elizabeth on Friday, ending more than a century of car manufacturing in the country. Hundreds of workers will be left jobless, just weeks after Toyota Motor Corp. shut its plant in neighboring Victoria state, where Ford Motor Co. closed two sites last year.

The closures mark the end of home-grown icons such as the Holden Commodore and the Ford Falcon driven by Mel Gibson in the original “Mad Max” movie. But they also strike an economic blow, especially in the rust belt state of South Australia, where recent signs of recovery haven’t been enough to stop people leaving in droves.

If folks recall, it was South Australia that was most affected by the renewable energy push. The chickens are coming home to roost. 

And with that story, a new tag.

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The Recipe Page

Chef Trevor's vodka-lime-shrimp fettuccine.

From a reader. His note also included a link to an interest site, "The Crude Life Media Network."

From the reader:

According to its homepage, the founder of "The Crude Life",  Jason Spiess, a grad of ND State University, started at the bottom [and, you might presume from the name, stayed there], delivering the Fargo Forum. ( Can children still do that?  If so, does the job have a minimum wage requirement?) 

After the degree, his new news business grew from 9 months of work out of his RV.  (Then the ND winter must have really set in.)  Haven't heard his voice, yet. 

But, it would really be fun if it served as a genetic marker, affording me voice recognition of Maynard Spiess, one of the beloved and hilarious Minneapolis morning  WCCO radio personalities, from my decade of the 60's in Minnesota, that made it so much fun to jump out of bed in the morning.  Could a son or grandson be carrying on a family's media legacy, in "The Crude Life"?

But what was the spark from the subject line of this story that I wanted you to feel? 

Oh, yes.  It was just an observation with a possible connection to North Dakota winters:  

The Italians must have almost as many recipes and words for pasta as the indigenous people of the Arctic have for snow.  (That would be funny if I could recall the actual number of words the Laplanders have for "snow."  Where is a smart phone, when you need to ask it something?)

I have to laugh. When I go shopping for pasta, I look at all the names of the different types of pasta, and from my perspective, all pasta looks almost the same, with very, very subtle differences.

And to think that Norwegians have just one name for "leftse" and one word for "lutefisk." As far as I know.