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.
The amazingly amusing statements coming out of the Chinese media are just too good to resist:
The People’s Daily, a newspaper controlled by the ruling communist party, has made the rather bold declarations that last night’s opening ceremony is a “potential turning point in world history” and “will become an important page in the history of world civilisation”.
Meanwhile The China Daily (with information courtesy of official Chinese news agency Xinhua) reports that:
Beijing fired over 1,000 rain dispersal rockets on Friday evening to blow away rain clouds for the smooth opening ceremony of the 29th Olympic Games at the National Stadium, confirmed the local observatory on Saturday morning.
It was the largest rain dispersal operation in China, and the first time that such technology has been used to ensure the weather condition for Olympic opening, said Chinese meteorologists.
“We fired a total of 1,104 rain dispersal rockets from 21 sites in the city between 4:00 p.m. and 11:39 pm on Friday, which successfully intercepted a stretch of rain belt from moving towards the stadium,” said Guo Hu, head of the Beijing Municipal Meteorological Bureau
Apparently the weather bureau had forecasted rain which leads me to wonder why, if they were so confident of their technological achievements, they didn’t issue a forecast of “it would rain, but we’ll make sure it doesn’t”, and why we have only been told about the 1,104 rain dispersal rockets after the event.
Perhaps this perplexing sentence explains it:
“Under such a weather condition, a small bubble in the rain cloud would have triggered rainfall, let alone a lightening,” said Guo, whose team had monitored the movement of the rain cloud heading for Beijing from 7:20 am Friday.
With English skills as excellent as those, a forecast of “rain avoided due to rain dispersal rockets” would probably have come out as “fire of rockets raining away” which could very easily have alarmed the international media who had already reported on a terrorist threat against the opening ceremony.
As much as I really don’t care about the actual sporting events of the Olympics, I have to admit that the reporting of it and the bizarre stories being produced by China’s bizarre media are most enthralling.
If first impressions count, then what’s the first thing that this job advertisement says to you?
The headline seems to invite me to apply to become insolvent, whilst the body text seems to invite insolvent people to discover “what else it out there”. Some sort of swap arrangement (”I’ll become insolvent so that you can have money”) perhaps?
Maybe I should just stop trying to read too much in to poorly written titles…but it’s too much fun. What a bind I find myself in.
For some reason there seems to be at least one internationally noticed news story each year about a human biting a dog. Last year it involved a 65 year old man named Pappan in the Quilon district of India (who wants to pronounce the name of the state capital “Thiruvananthapuram”?) who bit a dog after it attacked his duck…this year the story is less bizarre:
An 11-year-old boy is enjoying a flash of fame in Brazil after biting a pitbull that attacked him as he played in his uncle’s back yard, local media reported on Thursday.
Gabriel Almeida, who lives on the outskirts of Belo Horizonte in the state of Minas Gerais, broke a canine tooth when he bit into the dog’s neck to fend off an attack. Since then, he has been pampered in the studios of several TV stations, where he has been recounting his ordeal.
However unlike last year where the villagers only took over after both the man and dog were exhausted, the boy at the centre of this year’s story was rescued by bystanders. Unfortunately Reuters make it sound like the bystanders rescued him because he reached a four stitches threshold:
He was freed when bystanders pulled the dog off him and needed four stitches in his arm.
I have a rather amusing recording of Clive Robertson talking about last year’s story and another story about a dog eating all of the pies in a pie-eating contest after a “Mr. Williams” left the pies unattended for ten minutes. I had to listen to it again after reading this year’s story.
Well I’m struggling to make any sense of something I wrote in February. I’m currently clearing out a bunch of old useless files from my laptop and I cam across a list of topics I was going to write editorials about. Most of them make sense to me, but I can’t figure this one out for the life of me:
China’s olympic censorship (athletes and horror movies)
I almost remember the point I was trying to make about China’s approach to Olympic Games publicity, but “athletes and horror movies”? Anybody want to try and make sense of that?
KFC have me concerned with their latest television advertisement (mirrored locally here for archival purposes as I’m sure KFC will remove it from their site in a matter of weeks).
The commercial talks about how all of their chicken is fresh, not frozen, when delivered and cooked on-site. However the fine print about five seconds in contains the disclaimer:
Excludes emergency stock.
It’s probably a very prudent practice to store some frozen chickens for the next time the chickens get visited by Rocky Rhodes and build a giant aeroplane in order to escape from captivity…but seriously, emergency chicken stocks? Maybe it’s perfectly safe, but it just doesn’t sound right…I wonder what the rotation rate is for these frozen chickens (eg. how long do they keep them frozen before discarding them)? And more importantly, I hope that they are discarding of near end-of-life emergency stock and not slipping it in with the daily fresh chicken batch.
I suppose that, ultimately, it’s just as the chefs say: if you knew what happened in the kitchen, you wouldn’t eat there.
Village leaders have passed an ordinance that would levy $US25 ($A25.72) fines against anyone showing three inches (7.62cm) or more of their underwear in public.
Eugene Williams is the mayor of Lynwood. He says young men walk around town half-dressed, keeping major retailers and economic development away.
It’s not the first time such laws have been considered in the US, but this is the first time that I’ve heard anyone try to blame visible underwear for a lack of urban development. Usually such laws are considered either for reasons of personal taste (eg. the mayor or a lobby group don’t like looking at underwear) or “safety” (although I’m not sure how that argument works…and I’m pretty sure it’s a cover for the personal taste reasoning).
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) have trotted out their usual line about the ban having to do with racial profiling and being an attempt to discriminate against young black males (oddly referred to as “young men of colour” by ACLU)…it’s entirely possible that the media contact number for ACLU diverts to an answering service on weekends as their argument doesn’t seem to address the reasoning provided by the Lynwood council and sounds more like a recorded response to “press four if your town has just banned visible underwear”.
I think that 21-year-old Lynwood resident Joe Klomes hit the nail on the head when he suggested that, instead of banning visible underwear, the council should “spend money on making the area look nicer”, an idea which might just spark that urban development which Mayor Williams seems to be so concerned about.
Yesterday I mentioned that I had coffee at a coffee shop a few metres away from the Civic bus interchange. The coffee shop in question was Coffee At Helen’s which seems to have had a minor refurbishment since the last time I was there. Unfortunately the refurbishment seems to have brought with it a rather peculiar drop in the level of service.
Me: Could I get a flat white and a custard tart to have here please?
Shop Attendant (in an almost thick accent): Yes, would you like the cuppy mug please?
Unfortunately my brain, due to the accent of the shop attendant, heard one of the Cs as a P, which meant that what I heard was:
Shop Attendant (in an almost thick accent): Yes, would you like the puppy mug please?
Needless to say, I was perplexed.
Me: I’m sorry, what?
Shop Attendant (in an almost thick accent): Cuppy mug, cuppy mug please?
I thought about it for a moment and decided that the question must be whether I wanted the coffee in a cup or a mug.
Me (with some hesitation): A cup please?
(Awkward pause)
Shop Attendant (in an almost thick accent): Ahhh…..cup?
Me: Yes please.
Shop Attendant (somewhat confused): Yes yes, um OK yes.
(Shop attendant walks over to cash register and battles with it for a few moments)
Shop Attendant (in a not so thick accent): The forty-five please…err zero…um four fifty
Surprisingly after that exchange, the coffee and custard tart were quite good…and I didn’t have to drink out of a cuppy mug, which I can only assume is a dog’s bowl with a handle attached. I was almost expecting to end up with coffee on a plate and a custard tart in a cup, especially when the shop attendant took a plate to the coffee machine.
If you listen to the sound file you will note that my voicemail greeting contains my full name, so why the caller (by the name of Matt) decided that leaving a message on my voicemail would be the best way to ensure that their message got through to “Tony” is beyond me.
When I fist heard the message, my phone cut out during the word “Tony”, so I called Matt to ensure that the call wasn’t actually meant for me, which he confirmed…in fact he seemed to be able to work that out simply from my voice, perhaps he remember leaving the erroneous message on my voicemail, in which case I have to wonder why he didn’t hang up without leaving a message, did he really feel such a strong urge to make the flagfall on the call seem worthwhile?
Stories like this one make me about as sure as I can be that I don’t ever want to work in a petrol station or convenience store, especially overnight.
Police are searching for a man who robbed a Brisbane service station armed with a fluorescent light bulb.
The offender, who’s been described as chubby, walked into the Shell service station at Breakfast Creek in Brisbane’s north about 4.45am (AEST) today [Monday] and demanded money, police said.
He used the fluorescent light tube to threaten a female worker, before fleeing the scene on foot with a sum of cash.
He is described by police as caucasian, about 180cm tall with a chubby build and blue eyes.
He was wearing a singlet with white stripes down the sides, shorts, white sports shoes and a dark balaclava at the time of the robbery.
I would imagine that getting whacked over the head with a fluorescent lightbulb would be quite painful and I can see why it would be an effective “scary weapon” for use in an armed robbery…but it really leads to the question of what can’t be used for that purpose?
If I was working in a petrol station overnight, I think I’d have a nervous breakdown within a week as I would end up looking at everyone who entered the store with some suspicion…not just because the bag that they’re carrying might be filled with lead and could be used to injure me, but because they might be concealing almost anything potentially painful under their clothing.
Of course, they don’t even have to conceal a weapon, let alone have one:
Police are appealing for public assistance in relation to an armed robbery at Campsie overnight.
About 7pm the victim, a 26-year-old Campsie man was walking along South Parade talking on his mobile phone when he was approached from behind by two youths.
One of the youths punched the victim to the head area and he dropped his phone and a sum of cash which one of the youths picked up.
Perhaps I’m just naturally paranoid…a number of people have told me so over the years. All I can say is that with lunatics roaming the streets wielding fluorescent lightbulbs and sums of money from petrol stations, and more lunatics punching people in the head, why wouldn’t you be paranoid?
I don’t know if any of you remember PodZinger as it came and went from the public spotlight very very quickly a few years ago, but basically it was a semi-promising new search engine which aimed to automatically index and transcribe podcasts. If it worked, it would have been a good way to find information in what is otherwise an awful medium to search.
But of course, it was doomed from the beginning as anybody who has ever used voice recognition software would have known. To get a computer to recognise a voice with any amount of accuracy, you have to train it. Usually this involves two steps, the initial preset “read these sentences” training exercises where the computer gets to hear you say things that is asks you to say, and then the ongoing “no, I said “cat” not “hat”, the hat is not in the hat, the cat is in the hat…no, the cat is not in the cat either” intermittent corrections which also help the computer to learn how to understand your voice.
The reason we need to teach the computer how to do recognise an individual’s voice is that everyone has a slightly different voice and a slightly different speech pattern…and if humans who are predisposed to understanding the speech of other humans have difficulty understanding people with accents, what hope does an untrained computer have?
As far as I can tell, PodZinger had no form of quality control…the robot listened to the audio, produced a mangled transcript of it, and nobody bothered to check the accuracy of it. A system where corrections could be submitted by listeners could have worked better, but I don’t think PodZinger were ever interested in having masses of voice samples floating around in their system, nor do I think that having masses of voice samples from different people would have helped with individual transcriptions.
So, why am I babbling about an ultimately failed search engine of little-to-know consequence? Because they’re still around under a different name (EveryZing) doing much the same thing, albeit with expansions in to the more profitable and sane market of search engine optimisation, and expecting people to pay them for it. Maybe the transcription software is better today than it was in 2007, but I wouldn’t be willing to pay them in order to test the theory.
I noticed that they are still around on the weekend when I was wondering if they are still around and was shocked to find that they are. They also have all of their old archives…and if you search for my name, you can be informed about my Chinese communist leanings by their transcription robot.
It has transcribed the Feedback segment from Samuel’s Persiflage #13, specifically the section from 47 minutes and 58 seconds. According to their robot, in that segment I said:
can go to get sort of course if you concentrate back podcasted Samuel Gordon Stewart — Communists the email address or you can leave comments in the China nights or irritants Samuels who supplies were sought to
Maybe the robot’s ears are blocked, because when I listen to that segment, I hear:
feedback to get through and of course if you’ve got some feedback, podcast@samuelgordonstewart.com is the email address or you could uh leave the comments in the show notes or go to the samuel’s persiflage website and
That said, I have been (jokingly) accused of encoding secret messages in Samuel’s Persiflage…maybe they were on to something…I would have to be among the last people on Earth that anybody would consider as a possible communist, so I would have to be the perfect vessel for hiding and broadcasting such messages.
It leaves me pondering the question: “Why am I giving the conspiracy nuts something to work with?”
Nick sent in a picture of this morning’s rather unusual discount at the Caltex Woolworths pertol station in Weston Creek:
Maybe they forgot to change one side of a sign…
Nope, looks like we can rule out that theory.
So, if the normal price is 165.9 cents per litre and a four cents per litre discount brings the price down to 163.9 cents per litre, that probably makes for one very happy accountant. It would certainly help with that profit outlook Caltex were so worried about yesterday.
I wonder if the “half of the discount is to be paid for by the purchaser” clause is in those “in-store terms and conditions” that the big green sign mentions?
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According to answers.com, “receptionist” is a noun meaning “An office worker employed chiefly to receive visitors and answer the telephone.”
It could just be me, but I don’t think having a receptionist greeting guests via video link is going to look very professional. Perhaps they will have a budget non-video-link version where they put a phone at reception with a sign pointing to it saying “To talk to receptionist, lift handset”.
I suppose it could be worse, they could have all of their “receptionists” in an Indian call centre: “Welcome and pleased be us for calling office the Mr. Andrew. Do having tell of what for you call and hold?”
Such strange offers make their way around the planet in spam emails.
If, in the list of charges, the following appeared, what would you think was the person’s original (alleged) offence?
The man was arrested and taken to Liverpool Police Station where he has been charged with [..] assault police, resist arrest, fail to supply details to police, give false details to police and [..].
You would probably expect that sort of thing to appear in the list of charges for somebody who was drunk and got in to a fight, or perhaps somebody who was on drugs and was caught trying to rob a chemist. So, did the person in this case fit those or any similar categories? The New South Wales police don’t think so:
About 12:40am, a police vehicle patrolling as part of ‘Operation Taipan’ allegedly detected the man’s Toyota Corolla hatchback travelling west at 133km/h as it passed through a 70km/h zone at the toll point on the M5.
The Corolla was intercepted in Heathcote Road at Moorebank, where police discovered the 30-year-old driver had two passengers, a 7-year-old boy and a 4-year-old girl who was apparently not properly restrained.
It’s a perfect alleged example of “how to make things much worse for yourself”. Adding assault police, resist arrest, fail to supply details to police and give false details to police to a rap sheet which already contained exceeding the speed limit by more than 45km/h and having a passenger under the age of 16 not properly restrained is definitely not the way to, should you happen to be found guilty, successfully request a reduced sentence…it certainly didn’t help this person to get bail.
I usually take a look through the press releases from the New South Wales Police and the Australian Federal Police’s ACT division every day or two as they often make for interesting reading, and I usually get at least one “there are some really dumb people on this planet” story in the mix…but for all of the strange antics I get to read about, I’m often more bewildered by the names given to the various taskforces and operations. Names like “Operation Southroads” are perfectly understandable and even manage to convey the purpose of the operation…sadly the taskforce named in this press release from yesterday afternoon does not make as much sense:
Windsor shooting – Strike Force Tracksuit
Wednesday, 18 Jun 2008 01:15pm
Police are appealing for information from the public following a shooting at Windsor on Monday.
About 5:40pm a 31-year-old man became involved in an argument with another man outside a tattoo parlour in George Street.
A firearm was produced and the 31-year-old was shot in the leg.
The victim was taken to Hawkesbury Hospital where he remains in a stable condition.
Strike Force Tracksuit, comprising of detectives from the Hawkesbury Local Area Command and State Crime Command’s Gangs Squad, are investigating the shooting.
Police are investigating whether the incident may be related to internal tensions involving an outlaw motorcycle gang or external tensions involving a rival gang.
Anyone with information that can assist investigators is urged to contact Windsor detectives on 4560 6999 or Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000.
Why do I get the feeling that somebody wearing a blindfold picked this name out of a dictionary?
