All of the swimming in Beijing has reminded me of the day that I came to the conclusion that swimming just wasn’t for me.
I was in primary school and was reluctantly taking part in the weekly school swimming trip to the AIS pool in Bruce. For one reason or another I was relegated to the half-length pool and the supervising teacher encouraged me to swim from one end to the other and back again. I’m not entirely sure why, but I decided to try to swim that distance as quickly as possible…perhaps I thought that the quicker I did that, the sooner the torment would be over.
Anyway, swimming as fast as I could, I managed to swim the entire 50 metres in just over five minutes, which means that I had reached the incredible speed of just under 10 metres per minute. It may have only been five and a bit minutes, but it felt like half an hour.
Not surprisingly, the teacher also agreed that swimming wasn’t my forte. I still had to go on the weekly swimming trips, but I didn’t have to enter a pool again.
Incidentally, whilst reading that, did you read “forte” as “for-tay” or “fort”? You may be interested to learn that technically, the correct pronunciation is “fort”. Answers.com explains with help from the American Heritage Dictionary:
USAGE NOTE: The word forte, coming from French fort, should properly be pronounced with one syllable, like the English word fort. Common usage, however, prefers the two-syllable pronunciation, (fôr’tā’), which has been influenced possibly by the music term forte borrowed from Italian. In a recent survey a strong majority of the Usage Panel, 74 percent, preferred the two-syllable pronunciation. The result is a delicate situation; speakers who are aware of the origin of the word may wish to continue to pronounce it as one syllable but at an increasing risk of puzzling their listeners.
I’m confused and I have been for some time. Endeavour carpets in Fyshwick have a radio advertisement featuring a jingle for “Independent Carpets”.
What I can’t work out is why Endeavour Carpets would want to pay for an advertisement claiming that “Independent Carpets is the only place to go”. The only possibilities that springs to mind are:
1. Nobody noticed the error
2. It’s a deliberate tactic to confuse the listener and get the store’s name firmly implanted in the listener’s head.
Today is not a good day for me to have a headache which is gradually getting worse, and what feels like the start of a cold. If anybody wants to buy them from me, let me know…you can have them.
“Buy” might be the wrong word as I don’t intend on charging the recipient.
It says something about the travel habits of Kevin Rudd when radio news stories can start with the line “The Prime Minister’s been in Canberra today”. On this occasion he was doing something noteworthy in Canberra, but it’s only a matter of time until him spending time in Canberra is newsworthy on its own.
I didn’t catch the full details in 2CC’s 3pm news as I was distracted, but there has been a motor vehicle accident at the corner of Gladstone Street and another street (Update: the other street is Wollongong Street, and traffic is blocked in both directions) in Fyshwick. A vehicle has crashed in to a power pole, causing a power outage in the area.
Further update 3:30pm: Apparently it’s a truck which has run off the road, and it has hit a building. End Update
4pm Update: The truck has damaged a store and spilled a large amount of fuel in the process. According to 2CC, ActewAGL claim that power has been restored to most businesses, but 20 or so businesses will need to wait until the power pole is repaired this evening. I had a look on Google Street View and it would appear that the power poles on that corner carry a lot of power lines, so I’m not surprised that so many businesses were affected by the crash. 1WAY FM are running scheduled programming, so I can only assume that they have power.End Update
Correction 4:14pm: 1WAY FM’s part of Fyshwick was not affected by the power outage. They’re just having Internet connection issues. Apologies for any confusion. End Correction.
A few months back, Mike Frame left 2CC to host the Queensland version of Southern Cross Ten’s State Focus programme. Mike does this from the Southern Cross Ten studios in Watson which is interesting not only because the regional program doesn’t have to be filmed in the region, but also because Mike didn’t have to leave Canberra and was therefore able to appear in the social pages of The Chronicle last week, attending a function at Thoroughbred Park.
That photo reminded me that I’ve been meaning to check for a video of Framey on State Focus for a while, and this morning I spotted the following extract which originally aired on the 6th of July.
It looks like Mike is enjoying hosting State Focus, but he doesn’t look comfortable reading the autocue. Firing question off with some degree of ad-libbing makes Framey look more “at home”, hopefully the autocue part of his job will become more natural as time goes by.
Whilst on the subject of Framey, apparently he filled in for Graham Robinson on a Sunday on 2CC a few weeks ago. I missed it as I was sleeping at the time, I would have called in otherwise. As for the question of why I haven’t called Graham on the weekend yet…well I’m rarely able to call on a Saturday during the Weekend Magazine, and I don’t really have much to contribute to the gardening show or The Tradies Post…I do listen though.
The Australian is reporting on a rather peculiar statement from Macquarie Radio (Sydney’s 2GB and 2CH) chief executive Angela Clark.
Ms. Clark claims that Deborah Cameron’s success this year on ABC 702 Sydney’s morning show is “a survey glitch”. She is referring to the latest survey in particular where Ms. Cameron had the attention of 10.1% of the Sydney audience, putting her in second place behind 2GB’s Ray Hadley who was in the ear of 13.7% of Sydney listeners.
Ms. Cameron is relatively new to the airwaves, having taken over the morning show at the beginning of this year as a replacement for Virginia Trioli, leaving her newspaper journalism role to do so. It has been widely noted that Ms. Cameron doesn’t come across as a “polished” radio presenter, and perhaps that is part of her charm and part of the reason for her success. In many ways I think talk radio presenters sound more credible when they sound like they are ad-libbing rather than reading a piece of paper.
Anyway, back to my point. Angela Clark claims that the latest survey is a glitch, but I would like to know what she makes of the trend.
The clear trend here is upwards, and if there was a “glitch” in the data used in survey four, then I would have expected survey five to deliver a lower percentage, not a higher one. To explain, the metro markets such as Sydney generally use two reporting periods per survey. Survey one only has one reporting period, but that is shared with survey two which uses reporting periods one and two, survey three uses reporting periods two and three, survey four uses reporting period three and four, and so on. If reporting period four was abnormally high, then it should have been balanced out by reporting period five, but it wasn’t, so the trend is an upward one.
This all makes me wonder what Ms. Clark expects me to make of 2CH’s unexpected success this year, especially considering that Macquarie have publicly expressed their pleasure with 2CH’s results:
Survey 1: 5.6% (9th)
Survey 2: 5.4% (9th)
Survey 3: 6.7% (7th)
Survey 4: 7.3% (6th)
Survey 5: 7.1% (6th)
The trend here is an upward one, and for a station which works with a minimal budget and virtually no promotion, it’s an impressive jump, especially considering that they are now ahead of six of the eight other music stations.
That said though, if 2CH’s trend isn’t as strong as Deborah Cameron’s trend, and Ms. Cameron’s trend can be written off as a glitch by Ms. Clark, surely Macquarie should be wary about praising 2CH’s wonderful upward glitch. Or does the goose live under separate conditions to the gander?
As tempted as I am to run a guaranteed vote-grabber poll along the lines of “How interested are you in the Olympic Games”, I will restrain myself and run a more interesting poll.
In the last few days I’ve been wondering whether I am alone in my quest to use proper English in text messages and instant messaging. With a few minor exceptions, I tend to use full sentences and words, plus punctuation, in text messages and instant messaging. I’m fairly certain that, in doing so, I’m placing myself in a very small minority, but I’d be interested to see whether this is true. As such, the poll for this week:
I can’t be bothered going through the logs to check, but I’d say that it’s a fairly good bet that somebody was having a bit too much fun finding ways to vote multiple times in that poll.
Results of previous polls can be seen by clicking here.
It has been a few weeks since I last did this, and I’ve decided not to bother with catching up on the missing weeks. I will, however, pick up where I left off, and as promised purposefully pick a song from the ever-growing list rather than allow the random number generator to choose for me.
As I said a few weeks ago, Michael Thompson left 2CC for 2GB and he has been intermittently bugging me to give the award to The Bee Gees. As you wish Michael.
The feature song is First Of May.
When I was small, and christmas trees were tall,
We used to love while others used to play.
Don’t ask me why, but time has passed us by,
Some one else moved in from far away.
Now we are tall, and christmas trees are small,
And you don’t ask the time of day.
But you and I, our love will never die,
But guess we’ll cry come first of May.
The apple tree that grew for you and me,
I watched the apples falling one by one.
And I recall the moment of them all,
The day I kissed your cheek and you were mine.
Now we are tall, and christmas trees are small,
And you don’t ask the time of day.
But you and I, our love will never die,
But guess we’ll cry come first of May.
When I was small, and christmas trees were tall,
Do do do do do do do do do…
Don’t ask me why, but time has passed us by,
Some one else moved in from far away.
The offer by Pakistan to give each and every one of our cricket players a "presidential style security team" is very generous, but it doesn't change the fact that DFAT considers it to be a dangerous country.
I don't think that Cricket Australia have any right to decide whether the team go or not. It should be up to each individual player to decide whether they want to go in to a dangerous situation in which they have a decent chance of not coming home in one piece.
It's either that, or add a clause to the players' contracts which says something along the lines of "Thou shalt go wherever the chaiman of Cricket Australia decrees".
I managed to stump Jim Ball with this around 5am and I was going to post it here at that time, but decided to get some sleep instead. Probably not a bad idea after being awake for 33 hours.
So, today is the 13th of August, and it is a most wonderous day in the history of radio. Without cheating and going to wikipedia for the answer, would anybody like to guess?
If you need a clue, it happened in 1954.
There’s no prize on offer…to see the answer, simply highlight from here
Answer: On August 13 1954, for the first time ever, the Pakistani national anthem was broadcast by Radio Pakistan, Pakistan’s official broadcaster. The next day, they celebrated their seventh birthday.
If this year was 2004 and we were celebrating the 50th anniversary of that amazingly wonderful day, I might consider playing the Pakistani national anthem myself. Can somebody remind me to do that in 2054?
to here.
You didn’t know the answer? Well, you should have been listening to Jim Ball’s show this morning. Tsk tsk.
A few moments ago I walked downstairs muttering to myself, only to find Nattie peering out of her bed at me and giving me the “I’m trying to sleep here” look.
I then said to her “Don’t mind me, I’m just telling myself off for going completely cuckoo.”
Could this be a sign that I have finally lost it? (On the assumption that I had “it” to begin with).
Seeing as it's Mark Knopfler's birthday, do you think there is any chance of you playing Going Home, the theme of the Local Hero (John Stanley's theme music)?
I'd be ever so appreciative if you could, it's a great piece of music.
Regards, Samuel Gordon-Stewart Canberra
For those of you who are wondering what I’m going on about, here’s the best version of the music that I can find on YouTube.
19 countries in nine months? No wonder the solution to everything is a website with a list of prices…the Internet's the only way Kevin 07 can keep up with the latest news in the country he's supposedly running.
I wonder if anybody's told him that there's an entire department of diplomats and he doesn't have to be the ambassador to everything? And um, when do I get my share of the frequent flyer points from all of these trips that I'm helping to pay for?