Motorbike accidents in the media - Part 14

No, I don't know of any 14-cylinder motorbikes, either.


Also: Yes, I know the formatting is a little strange. I don't know why, it's Blogger's fault.


Something strange happened.


Stories dried up.


I'm not sure if I just missed a lot, or if there really was a late-winter lull, or if suddenly they weren't being reported, but August was a barren month for motorbike crash stories.


Then, suddenly, they appeared again.


So hear we go. Again.


I shall begin with a story from the Courier Mail, way back on July 26.


It is called, wait for it:

Motorbike rider killed after hitting 170km/h before slamming into car and crashing through sound barrier on M1 at Ormeau

I have mentioned the CM habit of excessive headlines before, but this is just a joke.

Also: sound barrier? I'm guessing they mean a concrete barrier to prevent houses near the motorway getting all the noise, but the term does have one other meaning. Ambiguous is not good.

The opening paragraph is:

AN allegedly speeding motorcyclist has paid the ultimate price, after slamming into a car then catapulting into sound barriers on the Pacific Motorway at Ormeau last night.

Is this news, or editorialising? Or script-writing perhaps?

Spot the distinction between the headline's "hitting 170km/h" and the opening paragraph's "allegedly speeding". Spot the useless euphemism of "ultimate price". Spot the equally useless verb forms "slamming" and "catapulting".

Rewrite: AN allegedly speeding motorcyclist has died after hitting a car and sound barriers on the Pacific Motorway at Ormeau last night.

See? Says just as much but doesn't waste time, space or punctuation.

Second paragraph: informative and brief.

Third paragraph:

His large high-powered road bike was spotted prior to the crash travelling northbound on the M1 at estimated speeds of between 160 and 170km/h.

This is trash journalism, it really is. If you know what the bike is - put it in. If you don't - leave it out. Saying "large high-powered" not only begs for an "and" or a comma - both of which should be telling you to consider rewriting a news sentence - but is meaningless. A Honda Goldwing is "large high-powered". A BMW K1200LT is "large high-powered". They are also both luxury tourers ridden by wealthy retirees. Come to that, a Range Rover is "large high-powered".

Not only but also, it is possible to hit speeds in excess of 170km/h on bikes that are "small" and, comparatively speaking, "modest powered". In fact, it's more likely on a small bike. Superbikes these days are the size of yesterday's supersports.

My bike is heavier than a sports bike and wasn't super powerful in 1982 when it was launched, but it still has a listed top speed of greater than 200km/h.

Next point: Estimated by whom? Police, who at least have some training, or other motorists, who can't be relied upon to spot bikes at all unless they're speeding, and generally can't judge their own speed let alone someone else's?

That entire sentence can be usefully distilled down to: Other motorists said he was speeding as he headed northbound on the M1.

The final five paragraphs, three of them about the accident and two about the road toll, are brief and to the point. Only the paragraphs dealing with the motorbike are poorly written and should never have been delivered by a competent journalist, let alone passed by a halfway decent editor.

I don't often say this, but that article was rubbish.

Okay. We can trust the ABC not to do that, can't we?

From August 3 comes "Woman crushed after motorbike hits cow."

Now if that doesn't grab your attention, I don't know what will.

The gist is that it was off-road, on a farm, and she ran into a cow. The bike and the cow then fell on her and she is alive and being treated for serious head and back injuries.

The first point to make here is that there is no way to write about a cow falling on someone without suppressed laughter. It's just an inherently funny thing to happen, unless it's you or someone you know.

Getting that out of the way: "four-wheel bike". Pedant hat on for a second: A "bike" is from "bicycle" which is from "bi-cycle" which translates as "two wheeled". It's a "quadcycle". Repeat after me: "Quad. Cycle. Quadcycle."

Right.

Getting that out of the way, there's nothing I can say to fault this. Not sure how she managed to have a quadcycle fall on her unless she ran up the side of the cow and it flipped, and not sure how she managed to hit it unless she was, to use a technical term, "larking about". 

But the article was brief, to the point, and clear.

Finally, we have one article from the CM again, from August 18:

Motorbike rider dies after losing arm and leg in Bundaberg crash

Strangely, this appeared in the RSS feeds twice, under different headlines. They've done this sort of thing before. Not sure if it's because article publish automatically and somebody then changes the headline, or what the story is.

Unfortunately, the opening paragraph adds exactly two pieces of information and one adverb: "horrific", "died in hospital" and "overnight".

The actual information is in the second paragraph, which gives us where and how, but also gives the bike credit for causing the crash of its own free will.

The rest of the article isn't too bad, with reasonably succinct sentences and a logical flow, although I have issue with this: 

A Department of Community Safety spokesman said the man suffered "traumatic injuries" that included the amputation of an arm and a leg.

If the injuries really did include amputation, the journalist should have rewritten .

I'm intrigued by the comment that speed hasn't been ruled out as a factor but there were "inconsistencies" with that theory, but if it was still under investigation there probably wasn't any more information available at the time.

It's actually a reasonably complete article, and not bad.

At this point in the year the main factors uniting all stories so far have been sloppy or incomplete reporting, and euphemisms. Things like "his bike clipped a guard rail" can be forgiven as standard practice, but "paid the ultimate price" should have been repaid with corporal punishment.

If you want to write like that, go and work for a tabloid.

If you want to comment on the Courier Mail, keep it to yourself.

Nokia N97 mini: Pity they stopped before finishing it

After two years and no little agonising (look back over this blog's archives if you really want to know) I ended up, thanks to a ridiculously cheap contract which is technically cheaper than buying it outright, but amortised over two years, I have a Nokia N97 mini (Nokia site).


The main reasons for buying, apart from the price, being that it has a good camera, OK speakers, mature OS that I already know, the almost certainty of regular firmware upgrades into the next year, and doesn't actually fall down on any criteria, whereas all other contenders fell down badly on at least one or two criteria. 


Not great, but pretty good everywhere.


And that's how it presents: Not the smoothest, fastest or prettiest, but consistently powerful and has so much functionality built in it's almost complete out of the box. 


But, me being me, I just have to start picking holes the moment I pick it up and turn it on, and have to keep finding holes the longer I use it. See my "Notes from the N95" series if you doubt my nit-picking tendencies.


I shall, for the moment, draw a veil over the time taken to refresh each screen or to change between portrait and landscape and back, because if I start mentioning that I may start crying, and I want to finish this.


Some of the Mini's problems are obvious, like not having a sunlight friendly transflective layer on the screen. But would you really expect charging to be a problem?


It is.

I have a powermonkey, a rubberised little beast of an external power source which made my infamously small-batteried N95 approximately twice as useful and became indispensable to me.

It doesn't work with the mini.

I was to discover that both the N97s are "notorious" for being "picky" with chargers, some people having trouble with genuine Nokia accessory chargers.

This does me not a happy bunny make.

 Powermonkey, however, are brilliant. I sent them an email saying "Got one, love it, doesn't work with my new mini, is this a known problem?" they sent an email back asking for my address so they could send me a new microUSB tip, in case that's the problem. No demand for proof of purchase, just "here, have a new tip, see if that works." Customer service win.

It's long postage from the UK to Australia, so I haven't received it yet.

I shall now mention the stereo ear buds that came in the box. They are, in all but one crucial respect, rather nice. In fact, much nicer than the set that came with my N95.

They have little rubber cups over them that fit really well in your ears and effectively isolate you from the outside world ( although my God does eating toast echo in your head), the cords seem stronger and the control is a very attractive unit, as opposed to the ugly chunk of the N95's unit. And when I plugged it in, I got a message saying to use the phone microphone. Not an actual full hands free, then?

Specific moments of fail (or, on twitter, #fail):

• system settings and email settings both appear as an application called " settings", which makes life interesting when you're trying to assign a shortcut and you have to choose from a text only list;
• in old S60 3rd Ed, settings dialogues that had multiple pages had visible tabs. In 5th, there are tiny little arrows instead, very easy to miss. Fail;
• this is more a design thing: when you select a text field to edit with the soft keyboard, what you get is the keyboard replacing the application you're in with its own sort of scratch buffer, instead of just popping up and resizing the application. You get the full amount of existing text and I suppose it neatly deals with the problem of badly designed applications, but it looks incredibly amateurish;
• The screen lock switch. Easy to use, but the cheapest and tackiest piece of design and manufacturing on the whole device. It actually rattles;
• it gives you a message to "unplug charger from wall to save power" whenever you unplug phone from charger. Annoying enough. But, it gives you the same message when you unplug a USB cable. Can't it check, and realise that would be a stupid message to give?
• there is no transflective layer on the screen, making it all but invisible in bright sunlight. News flash, Finns: some of us live in countries with bright sunlight, and would like to be able to use your phones outdoors. Particularly the rather excellent camera you provided, which can't be properly aimed if we can't see the screen;
• I think I have just diagnosed one of the worst offenders of lingering-even-after-dead RAM hogging. Nokia's own Podcaster. The one they declined to donate to Symbian. I wonder if I've now found out why? I was having hideous problems with running out of RAM to the point where the only way to get the image gallery to load was to reboot. And everything has improved suddenly, and the only change I can identify is that I switched to the development, official Symbian Podcatcher, which is also better designed and nicer to use;
• The home screen keeps crashing, and needing to reload. Please note, it has received two firmware updates since release, already, and it's still happening.

So, after all that, what is the single biggest thing the mini needed to be a truly great phone?

Double the RAM. It really is that simple. The screen is unnecessarily annoying in direct sunlight, the lock switch is a little cheap, it could have done with at least one more firmware generation before being released - possibly three.

But the single biggest issue with it is performance, and we all know that the single best way to improve performance of any computer is - more RAM.

It just runs out too damn easily. It has 128MB, and that is just not good enough. It has about 40MB free after booting, and that drops pretty quickly.

The benefits of the most mature and sophisticated multi-tasking mobile device operating system start to disappear when applications running in the background start closing down every time you run something interesting in the foreground - the HOME SCREEN keeps crashing, and that's just stupid.

If Nokia had given this thing 256MB, it would have made the WORLD of difference.

As it is, it feels like yet another own goal, nearly-there effort. And that bites when you're a customer trying to use it the way it could be used.


Next time: third-party software.

Motorbike accidents in the media, part 13

If there has ever been a 13 cylinder motorbike I really don't want to know about it. (Actually I do, but I hope there hasn't been!)


The Courier Mail are keeping up their habit of long headlines: "Car mounts footpath in rush hour, injures pedestrian and motorcyclst in Fortitude Valley" (July 21).


Three paragraphs, but bad formatting makes it look like two at first. It doesn't say how exactly the two cars, motorbike and pedestrian were involved, which is surely the big question. I mean - what? Surely the police would have some idea what happened if it was during rush hour?


Unless, of course, by the time police got there through rush hour traffic it had been so long that nobody could remember.


Oh yes, and: "motorbike-rider"? Really? That doesn't fit any hyphenation rule I'm familiar with!


Slightly shorter headline from the CM from the same day: "Police seek witnesses after black sedan hits motorcycle in Mackay" (July 21).


The second paragraph desperately needs reworking to get rid of the commas, but the entire piece reads far too much like a mildly reworked police media release.


Mind you, there is a potentially amusing note that the black "SS or SV6" Commodore (and don't tell me you were even slightly surprised by that), "may have panel damage to the front right handside." For bonus points, kick the editor who posted that without fixing it.


There isn't really much I can say about this apart from saying that somebody should have rewritten it so that it wasn't quite so obviously a massaged media release. All it says is what the police are prepared to say, how they are prepared to say it.


From guess who, another long headline: "Harley-Davidson rider killed by Toyota Camry as he turned into driveway at Jimboomba" (July 23).


Okay, they hyphenated it correctly, but once again I am forced to ask: Why are HDs always identified in copy, when other brands very rarely are? Do journalists get a kick-back from HD marketing, or something? And why haven't I been told?


I could also go into the attribution of action to the car not the driver, but I've done that before. It's stupid, and unhelpful.


As an interesting insight: This story first hit the Mail's RSS feeds as "Man dead after motorbike accident", and then again as "Harley rider killed by Camry". Exact same copy. Hmmm...


Eight paragraphs, five about this story and then mentioning another couple of accidents.


I think this one's worth quoting in full: 
POLICE are baffled by a fatal motorcycle crash at Jimboomba, southwest of Brisbane, in which a 64-year-old riding a Harley-Davidson bike was killed.


Now that's weird. They name HD, but find it necessary to add "bike". 


Police said the man was turning into a wide, sweeping driveway on Cusack Lane, when he was struck from behind by a Toyota Camry towing a trailer.


Apart from the extraneous comma, that just screams a driver who was not paying attention. There is simply no excuse for running into the back of someone who has not just slammed their brakes on in an emergency.

The bike rider, Robert Walsh, died at the scene and the 68-year-old male driver of the car was unhurt.


It's amazing how people inside big metal cages are unhurt when colliding with small vehicles like bikes, isn't it?

His 66-year-old passenger was taken to Logan Hospital suffering shock and chest pains.


Heart problems, I'm betting.


The Forensic Crash Unit is investigating.


I should hope so. Preferably by taking the driver into a small room and asking pointed questions.


Full credit to the Courier Mail for embedding Google Maps links in this story.


This story needed more editing, fewer cliches and a quote from the police explaining the "baffled" part, but hadn't been too badly written to begin with.


I think that'll do for this episode. Three items, one media outlet, three excessively long headlines. 

Thoughts on writing and sleep, written while unable to sleep

I have recently been working to a roster that doesn't even bear a passing resemblance to 9-5 or even daylight hours.

That's not a problem - I don't have any particular attachment to concepts of normalcy, and I work well after dark. It's not even the first time I've worked bizarre hours, although it's a lot less physical than serving food and it's a whole lot more regular than the weird, scattered shifts which characterise the various caring jobs.

That regularity, in fact, has given me a fabulous opportunity to investigate sleep patterns.

For a start, regularity breeds regularity. Anyone who's ever tried to sleep in on the weekend after a week of early rising and woken up anyway has had occasion to curse the force of habit. My sleep cycles appear to slip into habit so easily it's downright depressing, not to mention inconveniently inflexible.

For example, I am currently typing this on my phone at 2am, wondering if I'm going to get or need any sleep at all this night.

If I don't it'll be annoying, because it'll be another 25 hours from now before I get another opportunity, and with all the politics I'm going to have to handle in this election run-up, I'm going to need all the sleep I can get.

Which is another thing - how much do I need, exactly?

On a work night I get home at about 2:30am, give or take. It takes at least another half an hour to be ready for bed (I don't like to rush things) and some of that is winding down time after riding home.

I can't usually expect to be nodding off until 3:30.

This is were it gets interesting:

If I have a glass of wine when I get home, I feel happier, sleepier, find it a lot easier to get to sleep and then wake up on or after midday feeling a bit grumpy until I've had tea, food, tea, coffee and sat in the sun until my bones are warm.

If I just try to get to sleep, I'll wake up soon after sunrise, drift off again, and probably be up by 11.

But if I try to read in bed I will recover some energy, realise the time at 4:30, go to sleep and wake up as above but minus an hour which I don't actually miss.

The fourth option, however, is the most interesting.

If I lie in bed and write on this phone - it doesn't particularly matter what, and most of it gets discarded in the light of hindsight anyway - I lose track of an hour, go to sleep at 4:30 and then wake up at 10:30 far too energetic to stay in bed and feeling more restless than I normally do after any normal night.

This intrigues me greatly. Quite apart from being an interesting management strategy, it suggests that whatever mental state I'm in while writing is replacing sleep, and doesn't that just sound too good to be true?

What it suggests to me is a slightly altered state of consciousness - altered compared to my normal, anyway - analogous to meditation. Which probably explains why I've never been able to still my mind whenever I've attempted any form of meditation, and had random running thoughts/daydreams instead. It's just how I'm wired.

What I want to know is: do other writers notice something similar? The phenomenon of any artist, not just writers, losing complete track and conscious sense of time while being creative is well known. But I don't think I've heard of how it affects their sleep patterns, if at all.

And that intrigues me even more.

It is now half an hour of typing with T9 on a phone keypad later, I'm no more tired than I was when I started and it's beginning to look as though sleep just may not happen tonight. Maybe after the sun's up, just to be contrary.

Motorbike accidents in the media - Part the V12

Knowing that people have put V8 and V10 car engines in motorbikes, it shouldn't surprise you to hear that they've done it with automotive V12s as well. In this case, a BMW V12 in a drag bike, god help us all.

Perhaps the most well-executed monstrosity I have seen for a while, however, is the Millyard V12, a Kawasaki with two Z1300 inline six engines grafted onto a common crankcase to make a 2.6 (or 2.5 with rounding)L V12. Info here, pictures here and video here.

Getting that out of the way, I need to clear a backlog of accident stories again.

Let's see if I can get them in chronological order, this time.

July 2: Motorcyclist loses control, crashes into brick fence at Macgregor (Courier Mail)

What is with the Mail and their headlines? Also, does it seem wrong to you that "Macgregor" is spelt with only the one capital?

28yo rider, residential neighborhood, thankfully didn't die but did receive head injuries so don't celebrate just yet.

The critical point here is "just before midnight", in winter. Cold, late. Drinking a bit? Dog ran across the road? Cold-numbed? Dazzled by car headlights? Run off road by car headlights?

Three paragraphs does not for a highly informative article make, but they did get a police comment, as uninformative as it was. The headline is really the only thing wrong, here.

July 3: Man loses leg in motorcycle crash (Queensland Times)

First off: Ouch.

This time, the headline is direct and to the point, and then the lead paragraph brings in "sickening". Oh, well.

The 34-year-old was riding his motorcycle at the intersection of Queen Street and Smiths Road at Goodna when he collided with a Kenworth tip truck.

Why, exactly, is the make of the truck relevant?

First off, he was a local, which may have make him a bit cocky and unobservant. Or, the truck stuffed up.

The intersection in question (Google Maps) is major, and a roundabout. Roundabouts should in theory work really well, provided the roads leading in are of roughly equal value, but they introduce so many horror scenarios it's not funny. I'm extremely familiar with this particular roundabout, and it's not my favourite.

The accident happened about 8.20am. Police said the truck driver was unharmed.

Time is probably relevant - rush hour, maybe somebody was running late. Or, the driver of the truck wasn't paying close enough attention and ran over a bike below his line of sight.

However, I am forced to ask again: How exactly could a collision with a bike harm a truck driver?

Touch of over-writing at the start, but a decent article.

July 3: Motorcyclist dies after hitting ditch in road (ABC News Online)

This is, typical of a lot of the ABC's short items that don't have a journalist's byline attached, very concisely written.

However:

A man has died after being thrown from his motorcycle on Bathurst Street in Sydney's north-west.

The 56-year-old failed to negotiate a bend and hit a ditch in the road.

Question one: "Was thrown" or "came off"? I'm not sure how I feel about anyone other than owners using language which imbues mechanics with intent.

Secondly, the second paragraph fails on two points: "failed to negotiate a bend" is police-ese not journalism-ese, and what was a ditch doing in the road? Did he fail to make the bend and run off into a ditch, or came around the bend, saw a ditch-sized pothole, thought "OH, SHIT" and been unable to avoid it? Should there, in point of fact, have been signs up? Were there?

Post-mortem will try and determine cause of crash. How, exactly? Short of a heart attack, that's probably a job for accident investigators.

Kudos, however, to whoever tried CPR. Give them a medal, they're a very rare breed.

This article, on the other hand, frustrates the hell out of me. It just leaves too many questions unanswered.

July 3: Motorbike rider dies after hitting parked car (ABC News Online)

The entire article is:

A 29-year-old motorbike rider has died after a crash in East Brighton, east of Melbourne.

The man hit a parked car after 1:30pm (AEST) today.

A passenger on the motorbike escaped unharmed.

What happened?

I really do question the value of this. It's not enough to make an interesting story, there's not enough detail to inform friends or relatives who may not have heard yet, there's not enough detail to make people sit and up and wonder if perhaps they should keep a wary eye out when they hit the road later.

It's a nothing vignette, existing only to let people know there had been another road accident, and leaving entirely open the baffling question of why someone would hit a parked car in the first place.

July 8: Officer in motorcycle accident (Queensland Times)

Um... Yes? Officer of what?

A POLICE officer from the State Traffic Task Force was injured in an accident on the Ipswich Motorway yesterday.

Oh, right. Police. Why couldn't you say so?

Okay, in all honesty it was probably a reasonable assumption to make and a reasonable headline.

The officer was conducting highway patrols on a motorcycle, which ran into the back of a Subaru sedan on the Brisbane-bound lanes at Redbank – near the Shell service station – about 12.27pm.

Now I, as a motorcyclist who has been pulled over by the police for doing something technically illegal but safe (riding on the verge past near-stationary traffic), am finding it hard not to giggle at this point, with a touch of schadenfreude.

Police officers are extremely highly trained and have extremely good bikes - BMW, Yamaha and Honda tourers that aren't cheap even before all the police gear gets bolted on. Exactly how did he manage that? I'm guessing that if the car did something extremely wrong somebody, a colleague perhaps, but definitely somebody would have booked the driver then and there.

And the Ipswich Motorway is a horribly inadequate road, but midday is not the really busy time.

He didn't require hospitalisation, so it wasn't even a big shunt.

What interests me, however, is that the police have launched a departmental inquiry, not "forensic accident investigators will examine the scene."

Okay, one more:

July 14: Man injured in motorbike crash (ABC News Online)

Ummm... Yes? That's generally what happens.

This story has a byline, and that means we can assume a slightly looser, flowing style of writing, and that's what we get.

This may well be the first article that I really can't fault.

Man lost control in a jump while riding a dirt bike and training for a race, hit a tree, suffered spinal injuries, was taken to hospital. As an added bonus, the helicopter service provided two pictures, although they really don't add all that much except atmosphere.

There aren't any really unanswered questions here. I'm not sure it's of any interest at all outside the circle of locals and dirt bike riders, but it's not a bad little item.

Motorbike accidents in the media, part 11.

Has there been an eleven cylinder motorbike? Possibly, but I can't find it, and for that I am profoundly glad.

This is really getting away from me. I have several stories open in Firefox tabs, several more waiting to be opened, and there's almost a complete row of tabs. At this point, I'm not sure if this represents an increase in accidents or an increase in reporting.

From the Courier Mail, May 31: Two injured after a motorcycle and a car collide in Townsville.

That is a slightly odd headline. Using the indefinite article twice looks like a slightly clumsy attempt at correct grammar, and one which headlines usually ignore in favour of brevity. The headline also doesn't say who was injured, leaving the reader to assume it may have been the driver and the rider.

Actually, no: Two young men on the bike, aged 25 and 20, both received compound fractures.

The five paragraphs in this story contain enough information for three solid paragraphs, and any mention of circumstances, or even the apparently usual "The driver of the car was unhurt", is not included.

There was an odd formatting error in the web page, however.

It feels rushed, both in writing and posting.

Next up, also from the Courier Mail, is Woman killed in Townsville crash between motorbike and truck (June 01).

Interestingly, not only is this article better written, but includes an inline link to the approximate address on Google Maps. Which is, unsurprisingly, a major intersection, although there is no information given about what each vehicle may have been doing.

The interesting thing about this collision is that it was at 11am - everybody should have been awake, and it was no longer rush hour.

In contrast to a great many stories I've covered in this series, this one didn't contain any more information but was better written and presented.

Still from the Courier Mail, Man dies in motorcycle crash in Toowoomba, from June 14.

Seven paragraphs here, and surprisingly they're not all wasted - largely because only five of them are dealing with the accident.

6pm - dark, rush hour - a ute was waiting to turn right across traffic from a multi-lane road.

Traffic behind the vehicle was merging into the left lane but the motorcycle failed to merge and crashed into the back of the ute.

I can't really fault this article beyond putting "slamming into" in the opening paragraph.

I do have to question whether the ute had its lights on, and how the rider had a big enough lapse in concentration to crash into the back of it.

Since he was DOA at the hospital, we'll never know.

The last two paragraphs of the story are:

The fatality takes Queensland's 2010 road toll to 107 lives lost, including 20 motorcyclists.

At the same time last year 166 people had died on Queensland roads, 36 of them motorcyclists.

My personal wish is that any politician who gets up and says "This proves that being tougher on speeding saves lives" gets forced to write out "Correlation does not prove causation", 10,000 times or until they cry for mercy.

And if anybody has done an in-depth analysis of all the road-safety factors in recent years, I would love to know about it.

I'll finish with one more article, from the Ipswich-based Queensland Times: Motorcyclist airlifted to hospital, June 28, a headline so terse it's frustrating.

Five paragraphs, the last of which is "A spokesman for RACQ CareFlight said she was in a stable condition."

Essentially, a woman was riding a motorbike by herself at 9.45am on a Saturday morning when she "fell off her motorbike going around a corner."

Near the Maroon Dam probably means the Boonah Rathdowney Rd, which looks rather interesting and is immediately on my list of places to visit one of these days. From the look of the road, I'd say the usual suspects apply: oil, leaves, gravel, running out of talent.

Thankfully she's not dead, but suspected spinal injuries is nothing to be grateful for. I'm wondering why she was taken to the Toowoomba Base Hospital, not Ipswich or even Gold Coast - prevailing winds may have decided the pilot, for all I know.

For a nice change, this article is written in a very readable style instead of over-terse news-ese, and couldn't really include more information without actually talking to the woman, who was probably highly sedated at the time.

Four stories, none of them saying enough but, on the other hand, none of them really getting anything majorly wrong, either.

You paid *how* much for that bottle? You twit.

The concept of "value" is rather an amusing one.

It should mean what something's worth but it doesn't, or we wouldn't have old sayings like "he knows the worth of everything, but the value of nothing."

What it means is what something's worth, and right there we have the main reason why sticklers for language can't get along with normal people and why the phrase "that's not what I meant" has any legs at all.

Value, then, steps outside of purely commercial, monetary, supply-and-demand, free-market considerations. It's a bit more personal. Or at least, it's a bit more than point-of-sale.

Value, for example, is when that $26,000 BMW motorbike lasts you ten years, three times around Australia and weekly usage.

Value is, to nick an example from Terry Pratchett (bonus points for identifying the character), when a pair of boots that costs you $300 lasts you ten years, and a pair that costs $100, lasts you two years.

But what I really want to talk about, and why I started this otherwise fairly pointless post, is wine.

Immediately there will be people (assuming anybody's reading this), who will be rolling their eyes and calling me a philistine and going off in a flounce, which is like a huff but for people who drink wine without caring about the cost.

You see, wine is one area that, more than most, defies rational discussion. And I don't just mean because it has a history of causing otherwise sane men and women to say things like "creamy mouth-feel" in public and get away with it.

No, it's because of this: One 5L cask of plonk can cost $10, and a bottle of Penfold's Grange Hermitage (or whatever it's called now, since grape names became copywrit) costs upwards of $400 $500 600.

And before you say that it's worth it: No, it isn't. It is worth it only for two very clear reasons: So you can drink the world's highest-regarded red wine, and so that other people can know you're doing it. Sharing with them may also give you a feeling of smugness or even, let's be charitable, genuine sharing pleasure.

But how much better is it, exactly?

Take the catalogue that fell out of today's paper, from a large-scale franchised distributor of retail alcohol.

It helpfully includes ratings for each wine, out of the standard agreed 100.

There is a 1986 Grange, given 99/100. For $699 (breath! It's only numbers!)

Right next to it on the page, something French from 2006 is 96/100 and $899.

Wait, what?

How does that work? On the same "Something rare" page, a 98 is $499, but a 94 is $59.90 (when prices hit three figures, they stop bothering to put cents on).

At the start of the catalogue, on the very first two-page spread, the cheapest bottle is $9.40 and 94. There are 7 bottles more expensive and lower-rated, and one bottle for $119 is 96. Frankly, I know which one I would be buying.

Turn the page and there's an 88 for 11.90 and a 91 for 44.90.

The catalogue continues in much the same vein until we get to my favourite section, the Fortifieds (yes, I'm a Port man from way back).

At this point, we meet the first perfect score, attached to a 100 year-old Tawny for, wait for it and possibly sit down as if you weren't already, $1,000 for a 375ml bottle.

On the same page, a Tokay receives 93 and is $14.90 for 750ml.

Again, I know which one I'd be buying.

There is, in case you were wondering, one more perfect score - a Muscat which goes for $106.90/375ml bottle.

That's little more than 1/10th the price for the same volume of liquid which is, according to the critics, perfect.

At this point may I suggest that some people are, perhaps, getting ripped off?

Normally I would be quite happy to see anybody who can afford to pay $1,000 for a Port or $699 for a Shiraz, do so. I like wine-makers and want them to do well, preferably at the expense of people who can afford it (i.e.: not me).

But this just baffles me.

Beyond a certain point, your taste (and I will admit that everybody reaches this point at a different, um, point) can't tell the difference between one wine and another, higher-rated, wine. People have even done experiments showing that when subjects think they are drinking expensive wines, they rate it higher even if it's exactly the same as the wine they were told was cheap.

That point may mean that someone genuinely can't tolerate a wine of 94 or below, and I feel genuinely (well, sort of) sad for them.

This isn't even a case of "Oh, you obviously can't appreciate the better wines. No. Honestly, there's something wrong with the rating system when $10 bottles score higher than 90 and there is no nicely usable, real-world correlation between rating and price. Caveat emptor and all that, but shouldn't there be some connection between quality and price? Actually, there's something wrong with the rating system when the lowest score on sale in 88.

Plus: If a 95 bottle can be easily had for $20, that means it takes anywhere up to $200 to add each extra rating point. Except, oh look: here's a Sherry which scores 97 and costs $36.90. 

People, you are being conned.

I'm not sure who by, exactly, but you are definitely being conned.