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?
I tuned in to a few minutes of the swimming last night and I have to agree that Bruce's commentary was flat, which surprised me as he covered the 2006 Commonwealth Games in partnership with the late great Clinton Grybas and their commentary was spectacular. That said though, I'd prefer a flat Bruce over Ray Warren whom I just can't stand commentating anything let alone swimming.
Personally I think Seven should have outsourced the AFL coverage to Fox and simulcast the matches much like they do with the Sunday game in some markets when Fox have the more relevant match for the region. Doing this would have enabled them to send Dennis Cometti to the Olympics to relive his fantastic swimming commentary of the 2000 games.
I don't really care about the Olympics though so I'm glad that Dennis is here doing a great job with the AFL. I'll be interested in the Olympics once they add golf and lawn bowls to the schedule.
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.
In reply to the question of whether I have ever seen a dog walking a human, the answer is yes, every time my dog takes me for a walk. I have almost no say in which direction we go or how often we must stop to sniff things…and for some reason, whenever I want a quick walk, the directive from my canine overlord seems to involve a lot of very slow walking and a stop every half a metre.
It’s very clear who wears the doggy coat in this relationship!
I'm disappointed with Channel Seven and Prime Television in Canberra this evening. In Melbourne the AFL started half an hour early at 7pm to allow Seven to screen the entire match before the opening ceremony of the Olympic games. Normally in Canberra we would get the AFL match at 8:30pm on a one hour delay, however tonight they've been running various shows about China and the Olympics since 7pm, and they're not going to show tonight's AFL match until 7:50 tomorrow morning.
I suppose I can be happy that they;re not replacing the overnight shopping at 1am with the AFL and I can therefore watch it at an almost sensible hour, but I would have been much happier if the AFL had been screened at 7pm in Canberra.
I see that the ACCC have decided that their amazing solution to everything, a website with a list of prices, would be a good idea to keep the supermarkets in line.
For petrol I can almost understand it because it’s a very small number of products which can easily be compared between outlets…I don’t, however, see how “grocery watch” is going to have any chance of succeeding when each supermarket has thousands upon thousands of products. The only way that such a website would work is if either the supermarkets are required to report their prices each day which would take a bit of work, especially for smaller outlets who might want to have some discounts during the afternoon, or if the ACCC were to pay people to walk around each store every day noting the prices on a portable computer which reports back to the website.
Having the supermarkets do it would mean that they need to spend more time monitoring their own prices, a cost which would effectively be passed on to consumers, and having the ACCC run the monitoring operation would require a massive increase in their budget, which would get passed on to us as an increase in taxes. Ultimately, for the website to work, our cost of living would have to go up…it hardly seems worth it to me.
As for mandatory unit pricing…well that idea has been floating around for ages…it’s nice to see that the ACCC know how to take credit for an idea though.
As you would probably be aware by now, Google Street View was launched in Australia this morning, with pictures of many places across the nation now available as part of Google Maps.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the concept, basically Google sent cars with cameras mounted on them around a large number of streets and how now made the pictures available in conjunction with their place on the map. It’s an interesting concept and good for a quick bit of research if you ever need to work out exactly what a place looks like before you get there…or maybe want to know what some of the nearby landmarks are.
I had a little play with it this morning and noticed, amongst other things:
That my old car appears both at home and at my former workplace.
A friend’s car does not appear at their house, but might be visible at my old workplace (to get close enough to see it clearly, I have to move to a point where Google have switched to weekend footage of an empty carpark…probably due to privacy concerns).
There was a time when petrol was only $1.28.9 per litre.
Google drove through the “buses only” zone of the Civic bus interchange illegally
and were quite happy to show some people in relative clarity
but decided to blur out others.
Buildings which no longer exist (and that I forgot to photograph before they were destroyed) are saved temporarily for posterity
and buildings which could only have been designed by somebody who likes monstrosities unfortunately still exist in Google’s world.
I suppose the thing which Google must be very happy about though, is that this country is not one of the odd countries where taking pictures like this
can get you in a whole lot of trouble.
I did briefly consider the possibility that Google’s project may nullify my plan for a photographic series after I finish the “Canberra’s Dams” series, where I was going to pick a random street in Canberra each week and take photos of it…but then I noticed that Google’s photos don’t come with a date attached, whereas mine would. Mine would also last longer than “until we decide to drive around again”, which means mine would have some lasting historical value. I think I’ll go ahead with my series anyway.
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.
As I’ve previously noted, I like to read through the ACT and New South Wales police press releases on a daily basis because there is usually at least one peculiar or slightly amusing story in there…and it’s nice to see the raw version of the more serious stories which manage to make their way in to the mainstream news as it gives me a better understanding of the story. Unfortunately it also has the rather unwanted side-effect of scaring the living daylights out of me at least once every few months:
A driver has died following a motor vehicle collision involving a truck and a car near Cooma this morning.
About 3am a Subaru Forrester was travelling south along the Monaro Highway, about 10km north of Cooma, when it has collided with a semi-trailer travelling in the opposite direction on the Numeralla Bridge.
As a result of the collision, the driver of the Subaru has died at the scene.
The male driver of the semi-trailer and his female passenger were uninjured and have been taken to Cooma Hospital for assessment.
I know two, possibly three males who own a Subaru Forrester, although I can’t imagine why they would have been driving to Cooma at 3am. I now need to contact each one of them…I usually try not to send them an email saying “there was a car crash near Cooma, please tell me that you weren’t involved” or similar…rather I contact them without making any reference to the crash.
Last time I went through this was a few months ago after a fatal car accident in Canberra. Thankfully the person I know wasn’t involved in that crash…but I hate going through this anyway. It’s just a really awful feeling reading that sort of press release and thinking “that matches the description of someone I know…I hope they’re OK”.
[..]the National Parks section of Corin Dam Road (past the ski field) will be closed until further notice due to rocks falling.
The ski field will still be accessible to motorists however Corin Dam will not.
Barriers as well as warning and diversion signs will be erected to alert people to the road closure.
For up-to-date information on road closures please call Canberra Connect 13 22 81.
Corin Dam was the next on my (seemingly halted) list of dams to photograph as part of my photographic series on Canberra’s four main dams. That reminds me that I still haven’t made the pictures of Googong Dam available publicly…I must get around to doing that.
