Posts filed under 'Samuel’s Dreams'

When actors get the blueberries in Go-Lo, there will be indoor skiing

The other day during my sleep I had a dream that I had taken a job as an actor. I was supposed to play a doctor in a rural town and the filming was to take place in a town about ten hours drive from Canberra. Of course, I am not an actor, so I was hoping that the people in charge didn’t notice my distinct lack of acting skills.

I drove to this remote town with one of the other actors and they spent most of the trip reading their lines from a very small notebook. After we arrived in the town there was a meeting of everyone involved in the filming, and I read through a larger notebook containing my lines, but paid no attention to the meeting so I missed all of the details about the filming schedule.

I then went to the only store in town, which was a very large version of a Go-Lo store (which used to be a discount store with many hundreds of outlets across Australia) which had floor tiles which looked like an Aldi store. There was a wall of discount blueberries, half in small size and the other half in large size. They were very tasty so I decided to buy some, however as the store was very large, it was recommended that customers wear skis so they could travel through the store more quickly. I started skiing towards the checkouts however ended up at the other end of the store in the high speed aisle and found myself doing laps of the store at 80km/h while all the paths to the checkouts were blocked so I was required to just continue circling the store on skis while eating blueberries!

Samuel

2 comments March 18th, 2024 at 11:02pm

Radio for the opposite of an insomniac

Going back through some of my notes, I came across this dream I had in 2018 about a rather unusual concept in radio programming.

There was a show called “Snoring away the snooze-o-grams”. The show consisted almost entirely of people snoring with only occasional interruptions for commercial breaks. The show was said to be very popular with advertisers as they saw it as a way around the laws against subliminal advertising!

Samuel

1 comment March 15th, 2024 at 03:45am

John Kerr’s steam-powered turntables

John Kerr, the long-time overnight talk radio host who retired from that life 11 years ago and has been playing country music on Gold Coast community station 94.1FM almost ever since, is someone who long-time readers of this blog will know I enjoy listening to. It was a sad day when he retired from his overnight show and a very exciting day when he resurfaced a few months later with his country music show.

I quite enjoy John’s country music show however I rarely get a chance to hear it live and usually record it to hear later on. On my little internal home radio station the show actually airs in part of one of John’s old timeslots from 12am-3am Sunday. I’m not a big fan of newer country music but some of it is OK. Thankfully John plays a good mix of both the old and new so it is an enjoyable show.

John and his show appeared in one of my strange dreams yesterday. In the dream, John’s show had been networked to other community radio stations around the country and John was touring his show to some of the towns which could now hear it. On this particular week he was going to Tumut, which isn’t far from Canberra (and has a fondness for me as back when I used to present news bulletins for AIR News on a weekend, the community station there, Sounds Of The Mountains aired those bulletins and had a working webstream, so I had an opportunity to hear how it sounded on the air, and an opportunity or two to drop in to the station where manager David Eisenhower was always a pleasure to see) and his show was to broadcast live from a local community hall in front of an audience.

John was all set up to go. He sat at a table up on stage with a big microphone and what appeared to be some sort of glowing antenna behind him to send the signal back to the Gold Coast. John plugged everything in but none of the CD players would work. John’s show had started to go to air so he started telling the audience how technology had let him down once again and he started interviewing the mayor of Tumut who made the startling announcement “oh no, of course those won’t work, we don’t allow electricity in the hall as it’s a very terrible health and safety risk, and I was wondering why you were plugging them in when there’s no power in here”.

John was beside himself. “What?? You’re joking aren’t you?” he excitedly exclaimed at the mayor.
“No, I won the election on the banning of electricity from the hall” came the stern reply.
“Well, do you allow fire?” John asked
“Ahhh, Yes” the mayor replied sheepishly, not knowing what John might be proposing to do.
“Good, well I have a plan” announced John “but it will take a few minutes so you must fill in briefly”.

John disappeared out the back for a few minutes and the mayor started singing. A few moments later there was smoke everywhere. John had setup a boiler at the back of the stage and was shoveling coal into it, with a big fire. He then put three large turntables on the desk of the stage and hooked up a pipe from the boiler to the back of each one and started playing records. They took a few moments to get up to speed but it worked, steam powered turntables!

Unfortunately it was so hot and with so much smoke, that nobody could see much of anything and everyone gathered at the radio station to listen instead, and admire the smoke billowing out of the community hall from a distance.

Samuel

2 comments March 3rd, 2024 at 05:15pm

You are hereby sentenced to greet the alien invasion!

A regular feature on this blog many years ago was recaps of my very peculiar dreams. In the time that I wasn’t maintaining the blog, my dreams usually ended up on my Facebook page. Facebook’s “memories” feature likes to remind me of them on an annual basis so I see no reason why I shouldn’t entertain you with the back catalogue of the strange goings-ons in my head during the most sleepful hours.

Today we head back to the year 2019.

It was 3am and I decided to visit the Magistrates Court.

When I got there a magistrate and prosecutor greeted me. The magistrate told me I didn’t need to enter a plea, and he found me guilty. I asked what the charges were and the magistrate said “nobody knows…it’s a secret”. He then sentenced me to stand guard outside the railway station until the aliens arrive. At this point the magistrate morphed in to radio host Clyde Lewis, who proceeded to give me a long lecture about the warring alien tribes of Neptune and Mars putting our moon aliens at risk, which would force the moon aliens to take shelter at the railway station.

I then went to the railway station. American political operative Roger Stone appeared with a fax machine and a black jellybean milkshake, and told me President Trump would fax a greeting to the aliens and I had to give it to them. The milkshake was to be my payment. This was a recurring theme in my dreams at this time, that Roger Stone would reward me with black jelly beans for doing things for President Trump.

My lawyer, who had missed everything to this point, stood on top of Telstra Tower and smiled.

Samuel

2 comments March 1st, 2024 at 02:36am

Mary Jo Randle and other actors and stray television show ideas and thoughts

Of late I have been going through some of the older episodes of The Bill which I was too young to really see or appreciate when they first aired and which I haven’t already watched. I’m currently working my way, slowly, through the mid-90s. I am also working my way through Inspector Morse. I’d like to say that I’m rewatching Inspector Morse as I was of the belief that I had seen just about every episode, but the more I watch, the more I realise I haven’t seen most of them (either that, or they’re secretly filming new episodes and adding them to my DVD collection when I’m not looking), so in many ways I am actually watching most episodes of Inspector Morse for the first time.

The episode I watched most recently on the weekend was the 1990 episode “Driven To Distraction” and I was quite delighted when the familiar name of Mary Jo Randle came up in the opening titles. As I tend to do when a familiar name pops up in the opening titles of a detective show, I try to work out what role they will play before they appear on screen in person. In Mary Jo Randle’s case, I was expecting her to either be the mother or sister of the murder victim. But to my surprise and even greater delight, her first appearance in the episode was in a CID briefing listening to Chief Inspector Morse outlining the case, before effectively taking over the briefing. She was playing a Detective Sergeant on secondment from CID Training School.

This was particularly delightful because in the episodes of The Bill I’m currently working through, Mary Jo Randle plays Detective Sergeant Jo Morgan, and quite frankly her appearance in Inspector Morse could almost have been exactly the same character with the same mannerisms, personality traits, and detecting style. DS Morgan on secondment from Sun Hill to Thames Valley!

Mary Jo Randle as DS Jo Morgan in The Bill (image credit: ITV / Fremantle Media)
Mary Jo Randle as DS Jo Morgan in The Bill (image credit: ITV / Fremantle Media)

Of course the timeline doesn’t quite work. This episode of Morse was in 1990 and Jo Morgan was a character in The Bill from 1993 to 1995 until she (do we need a spoiler alert for something which happened 29 years ago?) took a bullet meant for then-WPC June Ackland. So I suppose she really would have preferred to stay in Thames Valley with Morse and Lewis.

I had a dream once that I was working for Chief Superintendent Foyle from Foyle’s War but was under investigation by my high school librarian and so got banished to Detective Inspector Frost’s office in A Touch Of Frost, and Frost told me not to worry about it because the worst they could do to me was transfer me to Sun Hill who were about due for another station explosion, before he demanded another cup of tea!

On the subject of actors playing almost the same character in various shows (and Richard Belzer actually playing the same character in far too many shows to count, doesn’t count), I recently finished re-watching Stargate Universe where Louis Ferreira played Colonel Young, and I have just started watching Motive, a Canadian murder-mystery show where he played Detective Oscar Vega. I have only watched the first episode so far, but it was almost Colonel Young Helps Solve A Murder. I’m sure Detective Vega will develop as a character, but at least for a moment it’s nice to imagine what else Colonel Young might be doing seeing as Stargate Universe was very unfortunately cut short after two seasons, when it deserved at least one more.

I actually have some thoughts on how a Stargate Universe movie could warp up the series, even after all this time, with a tie-in to Stargate Atlantis (which was also cut a season too short and it’s a pity the proposed direct-to-DVD movie to wrap up the loose ends never came to fruition), but I think I’ve prattled on enough for one post here, and that idea can wait for another day. Just like my idea on how to revive The Bill for a short series (hint: Lord Mayor Bob Cryer!).

Samuel

Add comment February 22nd, 2024 at 04:24pm

It’s difficult to write with liquorice while skydiving

I had a rather odd dream yesterday that I decided to go skydiving before work. Skydiving in this instance could be done from a private airstrip in Fyshwick, but because I was a bit short on time I decided to park in Woden and walk to Fyshwick (how this is quick in any way is beyond me) as the wind was blowing in that direction and if I was to start a skydive over Fyshwick I would land in Woden.

After parking I came across a mobile phone on the ground. Upon examination it turned out to be the phone which was stolen from me in 2009 and I decided to take it to the police station for forensic examination, but due to time constraints decided to do so after my skydive.

Due to a quirk in dream geography, I merely had to walk through a park to get to Fyshwick. Before long I was airborne but the whole process of returning to land was taking too long. Due to the wind rushing past I could not vocally advise people that I needed to return to land faster, so I reached in to my pocket and got out some liquorice sticks and started to spell out “I have to go to work”, but the wind prevented any of the liquorice from staying still. One of the supervisors of the skydiving misunderstood my message and put me parachute in reverse, which caused me to start ascending. Before I knew it, I was over Hobart (which looked suspiciously like Mount Ainslie with buildings on it) which was OK as I knew of a shortcut tunnel in Hobart which would get me back to Canberra with a five minute stroll…the only problem was that I couldn’t figure out how to land and continued to ascend.

The dream ended there, so I’m not sure if I ever did manage to land or get to work. The way things were going though, I wouldn’t be surprised if I ended up flying all the way around the world before getting to work.

Samuel

2 comments January 22nd, 2014 at 06:22am

The legal abduction and the protective dingo

I had a dream that a man stormed in to my house to announce that he was starting a convoluted legal process to abduct me. I wasn’t happy about it, but went along with it at first as I thought he was the same man that had abducted a work colleague, and this was a chance to save them.

As part of the legal process, I was evicted from my house, without any of my property except clothing, for 24 hours. I informed the man that he had to record weather updates for my hobby radio station in my absence, and then left. It was nearly 5pm and I realised that work would be expecting me at any moment, but without my phone I could not inform them that I would not be coming in as I was being abducted.

The next thing I knew, I was hiding in a cupboard so that the court-appointed pre-abduction psychiatrist couldn’t find me. Unfortunately the cupboard did not have a door, but only a curtain, which the psychiatrist stuck her nose through.

Suddenly I realised I was sharing the cupboard with a dingo. The dingo scared the psychiatrist away and then kept me company. I gave the nice dingo a pat. The dingo seemed to enjoy this.

A short time later, one of the dingo’s army friends came over and told me he could help me with my abduction problem. The dingo trusted him, and that was good enough for me.

Alas I was then woken up by a phone call and did not find out how the dream ended, but based on the fact that I was feeling safe for the first time in the dream in the presence of the dingo and his army friend, I suspect the dream may have ended well. Either that, or it would have cut away to another semi-related scene without any sort of resolution.

Samuel

July 30th, 2013 at 01:51am

Processing insurance claims under enclosed above-ground train tunnels

One of the things I have noticed lately is that if I leave my electric blanket on while I’m sleeping, I have more vivid dreams than I do when the electric blanket is not on. I suspect this may have something to do with my body temperature being higher with the electric blanket.

This morning was no exception.

The dream started with me driving home down a steep hill. A warning light appeared and then the car completely died…the steering didn’t work and the brakes only partially worked. I slid down the hill and eventually came to a halt in the ambulance parking space of a hospital’s emergency department.

I didn’t believe I was injured, but the hospital people came out and made a fuss. They picked me up and wrapped me in various bandages and wools, and then had their on-site insurance assessor do much the same with my car.

Once the hospital people had finished with me, they took me to see the insurance assessor. He was attempting to refill a pen by putting it in a pencil sharpener when I walked in to his office. When this didn’t work he got a large stick out of his desk and started waving it about angrily, and told me that even though I didn’t do anything wrong, the insurance company would only pay to repair my car if I agreed to tell the police that I was trying to reverse down the hill. He then rather sharply said “good night” and ran behind a green wall.

I wasn’t going to comply with his request so I decided to visit an old friend who was a more important person within the insurance company than the man with the big stick, but was also regarded as “rather odd” as he had paid the Western Australian government a large sum of money to build a train tunnel a couple metres above ground level so that he could put matching train tracks under the tunnel and also build his office there.

I caught a train to Western Australia and jumped out of the carriage at the appropriate point in the tunnel. I then proceeded to the tunnel’s exit and climbed down in to the dark areas under the tunnel which comprised mostly of wet grass, partial tree trunks, and fragments of train tracks. The area under the tunnel was also a bit of a maze and so when I saw the person I was looking for around a bend, I knew that it was going to take longer than I expected to reach him.

I walked around a few tree trunks and was then attacked from behind. A small altercation followed in which neither side fared particularly well, and then I realised that my attacker was the person I had been looking for, and he also recognised me.

We walked over to a nearby shopping centre through a field which looked like a dry version of the field between Henry Melville Crescent and the Monaro Highway in Gilmore, and ended up at a shopping centre which looked like Kippax Fair.

In a takeaway store we ordered coffee, and while we waited, a Western Australian local news update appeared on the TV. It pixelated a bit and the audio cut out while the newsreader was pronouncing the name of a small and remote town, but then something interesting happened in the update…the newsreader announced that my insurance claim had been unconditionally approved and the car’s electrics would be replaced with modern and reliable steam technology, and lighting would be installed in some sections under the railway tunnel.

We then walked back to my friend’s office under the tunnel, walking past the newly-installed lighting in the process, and found my car was ready to go, and the angry man with the pointing stick was standing there pointing at the car with his pointing stick. He said “good night”, and then I woke up realising that I had overslept a bit and had to rush off to work.

Samuel

June 3rd, 2013 at 05:12pm

ABBA’s crowd control

Last night I had a dream which was probably inspired by last night’s The Seekers concert.

The dream took place just after the concert while everyone was leaving. The crowd seemed to be meandering aimlessly and was not really moving towards an exit. Suddenly a lady standing on a platform rose above the crowd and started singing. As I looked around I saw a few other platforms on which singers were singing and realised that the singers were in fact ABBA.

The crowd was entranced by the performance of Fernando (which seemed to be interspersed with lines from Waterloo) and had completely stopped moving. The platforms then started to slowly move with the singers on them, and the crowd followed. In a corner of the room I spotted a security guard with a remote control similar to one which would be used for a remote control car and it became apparent to me that ABBA’s performance was set up as a form of crowd control and seemed to be very effective in leading the crowd off the premises in a controlled and calm manner.

Samuel

6 comments May 4th, 2013 at 01:12pm

The aliens and the frozen lightning

There were three loud explosions outside. This is what caught my attention when I was in my lounge room stacking Lego blocks. When I went outside to investigate, I found myself out the front of my primary school, staring at a very strange sight in the middle of the road.

A strange green squiggly line which had a few small gaps in it was floating perfectly still about a metre above the road for a distance of about fifty metres. In the middle of the line, a large mass of the green line seemed to be tangled in a knot about two metres tall.

Recognising how unusual this thing was, I got out my phone and went to take a photo of it, but my phone didn’t seem to work properly. The screen was flickering and the phone was starting to display strange error messages, and eventually shut off. When I got a bit closer to the green thing, I worked out why my phone was having trouble as I could feel the electricity coming from it.

The strange green object was frozen lightning.

I decided at this time to turn the radio on (which seemed to work despite the electromagnetic interference) to see if there were any other reports of this object as I thought the one I saw was responsible for one of the loud bangs I had heard, and there had to be two more objects to account for the other two bangs. When I turned the radio on, there was a breaking news bulletin about the arrival of aliens, and I thought it was a re-run of The War Of The Worlds so I walked home.

When I got home, the news of the alien arrival was still on the radio, so I turned the TV on and saw that the story was also getting a run there, so I muted the TV and synchronised the radio coverage with the TV. The aliens were just starting to address the world and announced that they had arrived to solve the frozen lightning problem. Without giving it much thought I came to the conclusion this was very kind of them and went back to stacking Lego while keeping the TV and radio on.

A little while later, at 5pm, the breaking news coverage was cut off on the radio by the scheduled airing of US radio show Coast To Coast AM, which specialises in conspiracy theories and aliens. An expert in alien technology was being interviewed about the arrival of the aliens and seemed very concerned as he believed the frozen lightning was a weapon which had been tested by a secret new world government, and rather than fixing it, the aliens had arrived to steal it and obliterate the earth.

I gave it a few moments of thought and considered that it might be possible, and continued to stack the Lego.

At this point I awoke from the dream…I fear that I may never find out if the aliens were really here to help us or wipe us out.

Samuel

1 comment April 26th, 2013 at 11:55am

100 marching bands for Canberra’s centenary

I had a dream this morning which, as a shift worker, I hope never becomes reality.

It started at 5:42am with me sleeping. All of a sudden I was woken by a large cacophony of noise. I looked out the window and saw a large marching band with the number “100” plastered all over their clothing and instruments. I couldn’t quite see how many people were out there in this marching band, so I put my glasses on and noticed 100 of them including their leader and conductor, Simon Corbell.

At first I thought this was some sort of attempt to annoy me because I’m not a huge fan of the ACT Labor government, so I went outside and confronted Mr. Corbell about this. He informed me that, as usual, I was being far too silly and conservative, and that it was the first day of the government’s special surprise for Canberra: 100 marching bands of 100, playing every day from first light until sunrise, for 100 days, as part of Canberra’s centenary celebrations.

I went back inside and turned on the TV to find out that WIN News were in on it and were running a special news bulletin to “celebrate” it. They were showing two of the other 99 marching bands, one being led by Katy Gallagher and one being led by Julia Gillard. Something seemed a bit odd with WIN News host Danielle Post’s camera angle…it became clear when they zoomed out…Ms. Post was leading one of the bands as well.

It turned out that for the duration of the 100 days, 100 marching bands of 100 people were to be scattered around Canberra every morning, and were to be led by Labor MLAs, federal Labor MPs, and various WIN News personalities. The marching bands were allowed to flout noise regulations thanks to Katy Gallagher using call-in powers to override them…and I was intrigued at how she managed to sign the call-in powers order with a trumpet.

The ultimate amusement came for me when WIN News went to a commercial break and every commercial was for double glazed windows or soundproof home insulation. I, however, did not buy any of this and instead used the most brilliant bit of dream logic ever to soundproof my house by using the television remote’s mute button on every wall and window in the house, although doors were not compatible with the mute function of that brand of TV remote.

This is the second time in about a week that Katy Gallagher has appeared in one of my dreams…either I’m going nuts or the ACT Government has found a way to infiltrate the subconscious of Canberra’s citizens.

Samuel

February 21st, 2013 at 11:17am

The Capital Region Daily Truth

Yesterday afternoon while I was having a nap, I had an interesting dream. The dream took place a few weeks after I had inherited a sum of money and a printing press, and started with me preparing the first edition of “Capital Region Daily Truth”, a newspaper for Canberra and surrounds.

I had hired some journalists to work on the ground in Canberra and some of the surrounding towns, and was looking over the reports I had received from my federal parliamentary reporters for the “House On The Hill” section which took a different approach to reporting on federal politics…they actually reported in detail on what happened in the House and the Senate, rather than just on the press conferences. Looking over these reports reminded me of a few points which I wanted to include in my first edition’s editorial about reporting on the truth of things which have happened rather than on spurious speculation and hearsay.

I had two editorials for the first edition of the paper. One, on the front page, was the one I mentioned a moment ago, and outlined the purpose and mission of the paper, while the other editorial in the paper’s opinion section outlined the paper’s editorial line which would focus on liberty, freedom, and the importance of fiscal conservatism in government.

The first edition of the paper sold reasonably well. It sold more copies outside of Canberra than within Canberra, which I put down to the quality of the reporting on matters which affected areas surrounding Canberra, and Canberra’s habit of being a bit of a left-leaning town which was likely to be sceptical of my “conservative” paper.

Each location had its own page which the reporter(s) were under orders to fill every day, with incentives to fill more space, which is exactly what my Cooma reporter did on the paper’s second day.

The reporter got his hands on an internal plan from Cooma-Monaro Shire Council to install a gigantic loudspeaker on the Council’s roof which would produce a series of tones every hour, allegedly to improve the ability of the soil within the shire to grow grass which had higher-than-normal nutritional value for sheep. The loudspeaker would be loud enough to be heard 200 kilometres away in Goulburn during a southerly wind. The Council’s internal plan noted that the loudspeaker would be approved “by administrative means” so as to avoid the need for it to go in front of a public council meeting, as there was a fear that the public might disapprove if they were allowed to comment before the loudspeaker was built. It also cited research in to the nutritional benefits of tones at various frequencies by a researcher who we were unable to locate.

This story was the lead story for the paper, while The Canberra Times led with a story about Katy Gallagher winning a painting competition. The Cooma page of the paper had other Cooma-based stories filling it, with a pointer to the front page for the loudspeaker story.

As the week went on, we found out that the researcher responsible for this tone idea was flying in to the country to configure the loudspeaker, and had recently changed his name after being disgraced in the University of East Anglia’s dodgy climate change data controversy. Under intense questioning from myself and the Cooma reporter at Canberra Airport, this researcher admitted to his role in doctoring the climate change data, admitted that the planet has not warmed for 16 years and that the evidence supporting man-made global warming has been completely refuted and the data was doctored so that the government grant money would keep rolling in, and that he had completely made up the benefits of tones on the growth of crops in the knowledge that some local government somewhere would fall for it and pay him lots of money to set it up.

As a result of this and other stories which Capital Region Daily Truth published that week, it was outselling The Canberra Times 10:1 by the end of the week, and through the editorial effort to educate on the importance of fiscal conservatism in government, helped to cause Canberra to elect conservative politicians to both Senate and both House of Representatives seats at the federal election, which actually occurred a week later than the announced date of September 14 due to a typo on the writs.

Incidentally, Katy Gallagher’s award-winning painting was very nice. It was a colourful abstract painting based on the idea of Floriade’s flowers being planted on top of a gigantic concrete flower on City Hill, an idea which was later approved, just at Williamsdale instead of the solar power station, not on City Hill.

Samuel

February 13th, 2013 at 04:14pm

Thrifty Cessna Rentals

I had what can only be described as a very peculiar dream this afternoon (yes, this afternoon…the joys of being a shift worker). It started with me seeing an ad in a floating newspaper for a new venture from Thrifty Car Rentals who had decided to buy a bunch of Cessnas and lend them to people.

For whatever reason, I decided that it would be a good idea to fly to Bundanoon (about half way between Canberra and Sydney), so knowing that I don’t have the appropriate qualifications to fly a Cessna, I took out a label maker and covered the word “Driver’s” on my driver’s licence with the word “Pilot’s”.

I then walked out to Canberra Airport rather than driving as for some reason it seemed logical that if I had changed the purpose of my licence, then I would not be able to drive. When I got to the airport I was more than a tad surprised to find that the people at Thrifty quite gladly accepted that my licence with a sticky label on it was perfectly valid, handed me the keys to an aeroplane and off I went. Even more strangely, the aeroplane had an AM/FM radio so I tuned in to the Olympics (which is odd considering that in my dream it was 10am and the Olympics would not have been on at that time of day) and heard Mark Levy getting ready to commentate on the singing competition which Gordon Bray was competing in.

I took off…in reverse, but eventually figured out how to fly forwards, which made the air traffic control tower people happy, and started to make my way to Bundanoon. As I took off, Gordon Bray started singing Love Potion Number Nine which he was caught singing the other day, and with the Cessna on autopilot I sent Mark Levy an email advising that I thought Gordon deserved a gold medal, which he promptly read, although he disagreed as he saw that Ray Hadley was joining the competition and thought that Ray would be tough competition for Gordon.

Unfortunately I didn’t hear Ray sing as once I passed Goulburn, the radio stopped working and I had to insert eleven coins so that the engine would keep working. I then landed on the roof of a barn in Bundanoon and had a nap, at which point the dream ended.

As I say, most peculiar.

Samuel

1 comment August 8th, 2012 at 10:19pm

But, pre-recording future events is easier, isn’t it?

This afternoon (yes, I do sometimes sleep in the afternoon when I’m on night shift) I had a dream that I was a regular guest on a TV show. It was my role to opine on the news of the day, and it looked like the TV show was a breakfast show, although it wasn’t one of the breakfast shows which is currently in existence. Instead it was a show titled “Talking” and had a set which looked like it was built out of concrete in Soviet Russia (hmmm, Maritz will read this…I wonder what she thinks of concrete buildings?), with a few small square bits of coloured paper stuck to the wall to make it look less bland…not that it helped.

Anyway, I walked on to the set one day for my segment, took my seat and was approached by a producer who quickly whisked me away in to an office to inform me that I was not going to appear that day, and would instead need to wait around until the end of the show so that I could pre-record a month’s worth of segments. According to the producer, I was “very difficult and troublesome to work with” because I wanted a cup of coffee each day instead of the company’s usual glass of water. According to the producer, coffee was “hard to come by” and “goes off very quickly once opened” and it was therefore not feasible to buy a new jar of coffee every few days when I was the only person drinking it. Instead, what they were going to do was buy a jar of coffee once per month and make me one cup of coffee per segment so that the jar would be emptied, the coffee would not be going to waste, and they would only need to buy one jar per month instead of four.

I told the producer that this was insanity, and that it would be impossible to pre-record opinion pieces on the news of the day a month before the news had happened, to which the producer replied “but, pre-recording future events is easier, isn’t it? I mean, that way you don’t have to worry about being late with a story because you can be ahead of it.”

I stared at the producer blankly before bursting out laughing, but the producer didn’t get it. I asked him how he expected me to know what would happen in advance, and he informed me that it was simple.

“News is all on the teleprompter, so if we just scroll forward then you can read it and then record your opinion segment” he said.

I told him that he was nuts, and as his decision had the full backing of the network executives, I enacted the severance clause in my contract which entitled me to one free tin of coffee and three coloured squares from the studio wall, and I left.

My segment was replaced that day by Blinky The Fortune-Telling Clown who, after a month on-air, had a zero percent accuracy rating. Oddly, the ratings for the show went up, and he was awarded with two segments per day. The network even launched an advertising campaign for it: “Just as much Talking, with double in inaccuracy”.

The dream ended when I saw the ad for that in the newspaper.

Samuel

April 3rd, 2012 at 07:22pm

In my dreams, wiping out a suburb can get you thirty years!

Yesterday I had a dream that I was at work and was going about my business, walking along a corridor which looked surprisingly like the back corridors of the CIT campus in Reid. While I was walking I was handed some papers by one of my supervisors at work, and he advised me that the papers needed to be delivered to rooms 2 & 3 immediately. The papers appeared to be some of the usual correspondence that I receive at work on a daily basis.

I changed direction to head to rooms 2 & 3, but accidentally dropped one of the papers and it fell through a grate in the floor, down to the basement. I hurried down to the basement (which looked like the basement of my primary school) and saw that the paper had landed on some equipment, caught fire, and was levitating. I picked up a fire extinguisher and aimed it at the floating and burning paper, but it did not put the fire out, instead it blew it over towards a petrol tank which quickly became engulfed in flames, and exploded.

The explosion wiped out the entire suburb, however despite the speed at which this occurred, I was able to escape the area along with everybody else. We probably broke the land speed record.

I was approached by a fire investigator who asked me how the fire started. Feeling guilty, I tried to deny any involvement, however he marched me off to court where, upon meeting the judge, agreed to admit to starting the fire. The judge announced that he would sentence me to thirty years in prison, and that ten years of that sentence was a direct result of me lying to the fire investigator as the sentence he normally hands down for wiping out suburbs in explosions is twenty years per suburb (suburban destruction must be more common than I thought).

Samuel

2 comments April 3rd, 2012 at 04:20pm

Previous Posts


Calendar

March 2024
S M T W T F S
 12
3456789
10111213141516
17181920212223
24252627282930
31  

Posts by Month

Posts by Category

Login/Logout


Blix Theme by Sebastian Schmieg and modified for Samuel's Blog by Samuel Gordon-Stewart.
Printing CSS with the help of Martin Pot's guide to Web Page Printability With CSS.
Icons by Kevin Potts.
Powered by WordPress.
Log in