Given Nice Mr. Donald’s victory this week (I’ll analyse my prediction tomorrow now that it looks like the final states have been decided at last) I thought I’d go back to 2016 and something quite perplexing at the time.
Hugh Hewitt for those of you who don’t know (and I wouldn’t blame you at all for not knowing) is possibly the most boring presenter in all of talk radio…actually no I take that back, there’s a bloke who used to fill in for someone who was much more boring but I can’t remember his name. Hugh is actually quite a nice person, it’s just that he puts together a complete snorefest of a show across the Salem Radio Network.
Hugh worked in the Reagan administration and found his way into talk radio at some stage after that. He is a perplexing character in some ways as he seems to personally be a quite conservative person but suffers from the same affliction as many traditional Republican politicians in that he advocates for conservative ideals until he hits any resistance from the other side and then wants to compromise. This is largely what led to Republican voters embracing Trump in 2016 as he advocated for a lot of their positions and didn’t seem to care about backlash.
Anyway, like most traditional Republicans in 2016, Hugh wasn’t much of a fan of Donald Trump. Every day after Trump secured the nomination it seemed that Hugh changed his mind on whether to support him or not. I considered him to be a good barometer on the support Trump could expect from rusted-on Republican voters as they always had the option to just not vote. Eventually Hugh got behind Trump finally and permanently based on Trump’s list of people he would consider appointing to the Supreme Court as Hugh recognised the Supreme Court and the many Federal Court positions Trump would fill would be of great benefit for conservative politicians for decades to come even if the achieved absolutely nothing else in office.
After Trump won the election and prior to him taking office, Hugh started playing a song every single day as a message to Trump. For a very very boring show, it was extremely surprising, not only because Hugh’s enthusiasm for the song was out of step with the general tenor of his show, but because the song isn’t one you’d expect to find anywhere on the AM dial under any circumstances.
Hugh’s advice to Trump from the song was the “drive it [the presidency] like you stole it”. In other words, just go at getting as much done as possible because you only have a very limited amount of time to do it. While, in 2024, given what happened in 2020, we probably don’t want to offer a president-elect advice about treating the presidency as if it was stolen, I expect Hugh’s sentiment is the same today as it was back then, and Trump’s sentiment certainly appears to be that way. It should be noted Hugh was very pleased by Trump’s efforts to get things done in his first terms and how he seemed to get a lot more done than most Republicans do, so Hugh is firmly behind Trump this time around without any hesitation.
Back to the song. It’s a catchy tune and one worth sharing. I was certainly reminded of it this week.
It’s election day in the US, or what I hope will be a very happy Orange Man Day!
To that end, my Electoral College prediction map (created via Real Clear Politics’ map generator) and I have decided to change the Republican red to Trump Orange.
I’m hoping that tomorrow’s predicted showers in Canberra jump forward just a tad into this evening. Back in 2016, Donald Trump gave his speech at around 7:30pm (about 3:30am in New York) and as soon as he finished, Canberra’s sky turned orange and it started to rain. It’s said that a shower is a sign of a blessing so I took it as a sign that the orange man was a blessing on the world. One certainly hopes for a great bigly orange blessing for the world today!
It’s always a tough race to pick, and it was a fantastic run and ride by Knight’s Choice and jockey Robbie Dolan to get there. I’m pleased that the horse I said couldn’t win based on my settings in the ANZ Analyser, the well-fancied Buckaroo didn’t win. The lay bet there made up a bit of the mess that was the rest of my tips…although it has to be said Zardozi was looking good about 300m out.
1st: Knight’s Choice. Some extraordinary prices too. Betfair SP: $268.01 | VOP: $91 | Tote: $63.50
2nd: Warp Speed
3rd: Okita Sushi
4th: Zardozi – my outsider tip
5th: Absurde
6th: Circle Of Fire
7th: Fancy Man
8th: Land Legend
9th: Buckaroo – the one I said couldn’t win
10th: Kovalica
11th: Vauban – my 2nd selection
12th: Onesmoothoperator – my top tip
13th: Valiant King
14th: Sea King
15th: Interpretation
16th: Sharp N Smart
17th: Trust In You
18th: Mostly Cloudy
19th: Manzoice
20th: Positivity
21st: The Map – didn’t meet Analyser backing criteria
22nd: Saint George
23rd: Just Fine
I’ve put together my tips and some race broadcast information for you in this video, and a summary below.
My top tip is 13. Onesmoothoperator. Having won the Geelong Cup very nicely at the last start and being in good form, I like the chances of this horse very much. The distance does concern me a bit, being 800m longer than the Geelong Cup, but the 3200m distance of the Melbourne Cup is a bit of a question mark for every runner so I’m not too worried about it.
I also like 1. Vauban which is a proven quality horse, but is carrying an awful lot of weight this time around so I fancy this one to run a place but would be surprised if it wins, and 14. Zardozi is my outside chance as a strong performer over long distances, but it has been well over 200 days since the last win so it’s not a certainty by any means.
My favourite ANZ Analyser system didn’t quite find anything to back which is hardly surprising in such a large field with such wildly different forms. The closest it came to making a selection was 23. The Map which met the criteria for the jockey/trainer combination being very good and is not liked by Sky Racing’s ratings which is good sign, but fell a fair bit short on form ratings.
The ANZ Analyser did pick a horse to lay. 2. Buckaroo which is the top of the Sky Racing ratings. It’s a lay as long as it is paying $4 or more. Currently it’s at $7 so it meets the lay criteria.
Broadcast details
TV and streaming
Another year, another change in broadcast rights. TAB Corp bought the master rights this time around in an effort to limit the amount of advertising their gambling rivals could air during the telecast. The deal makes Sky Racing the host broadcaster and the world feed producer, but also required them to involve one of the major free to air networks.
Nine is the primary free to air broadcaster this year and for the next few years. Note that Seven is running Sydney races and it would be easy enough to accidentally tune into their horse racing coverage and miss the race, so be sure not to tune in to Seven for the Cup by mistake. Of course Nine, as the main free to air broadcaster, is a bit more interested in the fashions than the sport, so if you want more analysis of the racing you might want to look elsewhere.
Sky Racing has coverage on Sky 1. This is available on Foxtel, Kayo, the TAB website and app, the apps of most of the corporate bookmakers, and on the screens of just about every pub and club in the country.
Racing.com, the channel owned by Racing Victoria has been granted limited broadcast rights. They are allowed to air the race on their free to air channel (68 or 78 depending on your location) as it is a relatively low bitrate SD service, and via their website in HD. They have to black out the race on their Foxtel, Kayo and 7plus services however as these are seen as being in direct competition with Sky and Nine’s services.
International broadcasts (the race is at 4am UTC):
The racing.com stream (requires free registration) might work overseas in some locations
New Zealand: Trackside 1 (5pm NZ time)
UK: Sky Sports Racing (4am UK time)
USA: FanDuel TV (11pm ET)
An interesting thing about FanDuel TV is that in addition to a TV channel it has a stream which seems to not be geoblocked. So this is probably an option globally.
Radio
If you can’t get to a screen but still want to follow the race, the radio is a good option.
The National Racing Service comprising Sky Sports Radio, RSN, RadioTAB and TABradio has stations in just about every town in the country. You can find your local frequency via the Sky website for most of the country or for Western Australia on the TABradio website. These can also be streamed in Australia and overseas via those websites.
Nine Radio is taking the official call with Matt Hill on 2GB Sydney, 3AW Melbourne, 4BC Brisbane and 6PR Perth. Nine is also the syndication partner for the official call and is providing it to dozens of commercial stations across the country, so there’s probably at least one where you are.
SEN has its own coverage with a call by Gerard Whateley on almost all of the SEN and SEN Track stations. A list of stations can be found here. They can also be streamed via their website and app.
And ABC Radio has coverage on many ABC Local Radio stations, plus ABC Sport on DAB+, the ABC website and the ABC Listen app.
Ultimately, if you scan the dial shortly before the race you’ll almost certainly find at least one or two stations covering the race.
It is a wonderful day on the Australian sporting calendar. I wish you every success with it!
In this video I shares my scepticism around many of the AI claims advertised all over the place, and show how the AI predictions in Soccer Price Monitor have proved me wrong, delivering ongoing profits on soccer markets around the clock.
Plus some soccer vision which won’t get the video taken down, and a look ahead to Melbourne Cup day.
The ACT had an election yesterday. My thoughts on it actually date back to the 2020 election which saw some very strange swings towards the incumbent Labor government and their friends the Greens, especially in electorates where such a thing probably shouldn’t have happened (Brindabella in southern Canberra which is the only part of town which consistently leans towards the Liberal Party, and Murrumbidgee in the west which picked up a couple Liberal-friendly suburbs in a redistribution and yet had quite a swing against the Liberals). These swings could only really be attributed to the incumbency bounce which occurred in many elections in 2020 due to COVID.
This election has mostly seen those swings reverse. Labor and the Greens have fallen back a touch which due to the peculiarities of the Hare-Clark system means the Greens have lost about half their seats. The Liberals recovered largely in Brindabella and Murrumbidgee but fell overall due to various independents doing quite well and probably picking up two seats. The Liberal vote also suffered overall as leader Elizabeth Lee, battling with three other party leaders in Kurrajong, didn’t pick up a quota on her own which is unusual for a leader in an ACT election.
The upshot of it all though is that, for all of the excitement about some independents getting in, Labor and Greens combined still have a majority so it’s likely that their governing coalition will continue unabated. As usual, as I have observed in every ACT election since 2012, people have expressed a desire for change but not actually voted in a way which delivered any change. Even if there had been a real change from this election, I doubt it would be smooth sailing. So much change is required that I’m sure many things would slip through the cracks, create controversy and derail the new government eventually.
Ultimately, being a voter with a conservative viewpoint in the ACT is a wasted effort. Not just in territory elections but in federal ones too. My electorate in the middle of Canberra is such a safe Labor seat that it barely even attracts candidates outside the major parties, and when it does it’s usually someone further left than the Greens. Even the Senate seems to be a lost cause now.
I could worry about it, but I realised a while ago that even when I do get some politicians elected whom I happen to support, they usually do something to disappoint me or fail to live up to the ideals I thought they would represent. One, who is no longer in parliament, even cemented my decision to get out of party membership entirely by boldly lying to me about a very shabby internal party matter (which I happened to know quite a lot about, maybe more than this person thought I knew) while trying to get me to vote a certain way in an internal party election.
So ultimately I now just accept that government and party politics is broken, especially while we have electoral systems which claim to be democratic but put people in parliament that in almost every case were not the preferred candidate of the majority of their electorate. It’s a farce, and it’s fair to say I am thoroughly disillusioned with the whole thing. For the record I did cast a formal vote, but it’s beyond me why I bothered. If only ballot papers had a “none of the above” option and people who received fewer votes than it were ineligible for election.
Which leads me to the song. The line from the song which comes to mind is “I used to care but things have changed”. Ironically, this song was used for a Canberra tourism commercial at one stage.
Good song. As cynical as I have become.
By the way, I misspelled “independents” and “indepents” earlier today. Autocorrect wanted to change it to “ineptness”. Changing the party name Independents For Canberra to Ineptness For Canberra sounds like a perfect description of the ACT Government. Another four years of ineptness, hooray! I think I’ll just look away…
I came across an unusual problem about a week ago which has probably been an issue on this particular computer for a long time without me realising it as I have one other application on there which uses a large amount of memory if left open for a long time, so I have a routine to restart that application once every couple of weeks.
Unfortunately such a thing isn’t really possible with an antivirus program without restarting the computer, and this particular system needs to stay running as much as possible. Restarting it is something which I can only really schedule in a couple brief windows each week without causing other issues.
This particular system is running Windows 7 so it is well and truly out of date in terms of Windows support, and Eset doesn’t release new software versions for it but does continue to provide antivirus definitions for it. Updating it to Windows 10 or Windows 11 isn’t really an option due to some of the software running on it being antiquated. One piece of software in particular has been discontinued and replaced by a different product which doesn’t quite work the same way and isn’t suitable for my purposes any more. I don’t know if installing and activating the old software on a new system would even be workable and the last time I had an interaction with support for that software, it left me less than certain that they knew much about how it worked at all. So I’m left needing to continue to run a Windows 7 system. While this does present some security risks, if properly managed these can be largely mitigated.
So, back to the problem I started to encounter with Eset Antivirus.
The other week I was investigating some performance issues with the machine and noticed one component of Eset was using over 900MB of RAM. This was unusual as it has never really left double digits before in my observations. The process in question was eguiProxy.exe. This process acts as a bridge between the Eset program window and the backend processes, allowing the Eset window to get and display information about the Eset Antivirus status and allow the user to start scans etc without needing administrative privileges. The eguiProxy.exe process is supposed to close shortly after the Eset window is closed, but a bug in some version 16 installations causes eguiProxy.exe to not close (and in some cases to run even if the Eset window was never opened) and to instead just sit there and eat up RAM indefinitely. Sometimes it will close after a few days, while on other occasions it just sits there until it is using up as much memory as the system will allow and starting to cause issues for other processes.
Memory usage after a few days of uptime
I had to restart this machine at a not-at-all optimal time to clear the excess memory usage and allow the rest of the system’s software to function normally, and due to the timing of this also had to manually fix a handful of processes which were interrupted or failed.
I was running Eset Antivirus 16.0.26.0
Eset released an update to version 16.0.28.0 to solve this issue, however in most cases the Eset application does not automatically update to this version and instead requires a manual update. As you can see in the above screenshot, Eset thinks it is up to date despite being on version 16.0.26.0 and not 16.0.28.0.
Hopefully the file remains in that location, however Eset’s websites have a habit of pages moving around quite a lot, so I have decided to mirror the file myself. It can be downloaded here. As it is a signed file, you can verify its authenticity by whether Windows accepts the signing to be valid. Regardless, if you can find the file on Eset’s websites, it is better to get it from there than from a random website on the internet such as mine, but I provide the download just in case you can’t find it elsewhere.
What isn’t clearly explained on the Eset website and doesn’t become apparent until you try to install it is that to install it, the system must be running at least Windows 7 SP1 with two specific updates installed, KB4474419 and KB4490628. If you try to install the Eset update without those Windows updates, it will refuse to install and send you to a series of Eset pages which provide a mishmash of information about whether or not you can install the Eset update.
As Microsoft stopped providing updates for Windows 7 some time ago, I disabled the Windows Update service (you can do that in Windows 7 – it’s a pain in Windows 10 and later, but I documented a method for doing so a few months ago) as I found it was often using excessive CPU to check for updates which were never coming. In order to install those updates, the Windows Update service must be enabled, so I had to re-enable it temporarily.
It turned out I already had SP1 and KB4474419 installed, and just had to install KB4490628. Once I did that, Eset version 16.0.28.0 was happy to install. The installer requests a login to Eset Home but this is not necessary. If Eset Antivirus is already activated, once installed the new version will recognise that, but if it isn’t activated you can always active or login after installation.
So now I have version 16.0.28.0 installed
And pleasingly the eguiProxy.exe process now only opens if the Eset window is opened, and closes shortly after the window is closed, no longer draining memory until Windows is left exasperated at the diminished resource.
In recent months I have received occasional correspondence informing me that someone has registered on this blog but not received the automated email confirming the registration and allowing them to set a password. I had thought it was a bug which had crept in to the WordPress installation over numerous upgrades over the course of nearly two decades, but it seemed strange that I was still receiving emails from the blog without issue informing me of new comments and user registrations. I wasn’t quite able to put my finger on what was going on.
The other day I received another one of those messages and was pleased to receive it within a few hours of the person registering as it meant all of the relevant logs would still be fresh, so I set about investigating. The WordPress installation doesn’t keep logs of the emails it sends (although it might generate an error which would be logged by the webserver if it encountered an error while trying to send an email) but the server itself does keep logs of email sending activity, so I had a look there.
I could see from this log that as far as the webserver’s internal email server was concerned, the email to me advising of a new registration as well as the email to the new user were both generated and sent. This immediately ruled out WordPress as the problem as it had clearly generated and sent both emails. The problem had to be further down the line.
Now, I should explain that email for the samuelgordonstewart.com is not hosted on the same server as the website, however the server for the website has an email server so that it can send emails. This server can also be used to receive emails but for me at least, it is not used for receiving. Like many website, this site is hosted on a shared server containing many completely unrelated websites. Each of those websites could generate and send emails, and for the hosting company there is always a risk that an insecure script on someone’s website could be exploited and be used to send out spam, which would have the impact of putting an unnecessary strain on the server’s resources as well as potentially getting the server blacklisted by a bunch of spam filtering services, affecting all of the websites on the server, not just the website generating the spam. To mitigate this risk, my webhost, VentraIP, employs an outbound spam filter. Emails from this server and many other servers in their fleet are funnelled through the outbound spam filtering before being sent on to wherever they’re intended to go. This outbound filtering isn’t particularly vigorous, but just enough to avoid having one of their servers send out copious amounts of obvious spam.
Unfortunately this makes the server’s log’s indication that the email was accepted by the receiving server to not mean much, as all it is really saying is that the outbound spam filtering server accepted it. Beyond that, what happened to the email can’t be determined from this log.
At this point I could have asked my webhost to check the spam filter logs to see what happened and see if Gmail’s servers accepted the email, and while that might have provided some information, it probably wouldn’t have told me much, and there was more I could investigate first. There were two clues in the logs I already had. Firstly, the receiving mail server “out.smarthost.mxs.au” was not one I was familiar with, and secondly the ultimate destination was supposed to be Gmail which has some fairly strict sender verification checking as part of its spam filtering.
One of the first lines of defence against spam is a domain name’s SPF record. The main purpose of this record is to determine which servers are allowed to send email on behalf of the domain. A few months back I made a change to one character in the SPF record of samuelgordonstewart.com. At the end of the record I changed
~all
to
-all
This had the effect of changing the policy of the SPF record from “servers which aren’t explicitly allowed to send email for this domain might still be OK to send such emails” to “only email from servers which are explicitly allowed to send emails for this domain should be accepted, everything else should be rejected”.
I changed this rule at the time because (1) I should have done so a long time ago, and (2) I had noticed I was receiving spam allegedly from my domain but which had clearly come from servers with no connection to my domain whatsoever and I wanted to stop this from happening.
Going back to the logs, the fact I didn’t recognise “out.smarthost.mxs.au” as a server which had been doing filtering for my webhost made me wonder if it was not present in my domain’s SPF record and emails going through it might have been getting rejected by Gmail.
To cut a long story short on this, the answer was yes. At some stage my webhost had changed how they organised their outbound filtering, and my SPF record had become outdated as a result. The DNS records which host the SPF record are in fact hosted by my webhost, so in theory they could have updated this automatically and for many of their clients they almost certainly did, however as I had made a number of custom changes to my DNS records including my SPF record over the years, it was probably beyond the scope of their automated systems to make this change for me. In fact, the way my SPF record was configured, their automated system could have drawn the inference that I didn’t want their outbound filtering to be allowed to handle mail from my domain and thus adding such a record would have been inappropriate.
My SPF record was
v=spf1 ip4:103.42.110.11 +a +mx +include:spf.hostedmail.net.au +include:spf.messagingengine.com -all
Effectively what this said was that I was permitting mail to be sent by the server at 103.42.110.11 (the IP address of the server hosting the website), any server listed in the domain’s A records (this rule basically duplicates the first rule but allows the IP address of the server to be changed without me having to manually add the new IP address in), any server listed in the MX records (the servers which receive email for the domain) plus any servers specified by the records of spf.hostedmail.net.au and spf.messagingengine.com.
spf.hostedmail.net.au had previously included the outbound filtering of my webhost. This record belongs to my webhost’s separate email hosting service which I used to use. I believe it shared outbound filtering with their webservers, but apparently doesn’t any more.
spf.messagingengine.com belongs to Fastmail which is my current email host.
When I checked the the SPF record of another domain I have hosted by VentraIP I noticed it contained a different server: spf.hostingplatform.net.au, which is indeed the record for my webhost’s outbound spam filtering.
So I adjusted my SPF record to include this:
(I can probably remove the spf.hostedmail.net.au as it is no longer needed, but one change at a time…)
Then I registered a new account on this blog using the email address of a Gmail account I have access to. I don’t have a personal account at Gmail and haven’t for a very long time…in fact I probably wouldn’t have any account with Google at all if it wasn’t for the fact I have to have an account with them for YouTube. Email contains an awful lot of sensitive information about a person and I’d rather pay to have my email hosted somewhere where I can be confident it’s not getting scanned for advertising targeting or profiling purposes. Anyway, the registration email went through…it landed in the spam folder and Gmail noted the email looked very similar to emails it had previously rejected, but at least it got delivered and wasn’t silently blocked. I was then able to mark it as “not spam” to help train their filters and hopefully with time Google will start to recognise that emails from my blog are legitimate again.
What’s interesting about all of this is that various email services and spam filters have differing ways of handling spam and interpreting things. In this instance, I was receiving emails from my blog at Fastmail without any issue but Gmail was blocking them completely. So it seems that Fastmail and Gmail have different ways of deciding which server is the sender of the email, and although I pay Fastmail for my email service and am quite happy with them, frankly I think Gmail has the correct interpretation here.
Every email you send or receive is basically just a big heap of text. There’s a lot of text you don’t normally see in the “headers” with information about where the email is from and where it has been, and attachments are encoded as text which looks like pages and pages and pages of gibberish.
A portion of the headers of an email sent to me by this blog advising me of a new user registration
The headers contain information about every server which handles the email along the way, including the time the server received the message and where it received it from. Email servers often add other information as well such as any spam filtering checks they did, or in the case of an email server on a webserver, which account on the webserver generated the email. Ultimately this is just text and there’s no way for a mail server further down the chain to verify any of the information added at an earlier stage. The only information which a mail server can be sure of is the address of the the server or device which it received the message from, and any information the server adds itself.
Fastmail seems to be accepting that email might get routed via another server but as long as the headers list an authorised server as the originating source of the message, the email should be let through. Whereas Gmail is much more strict and will reject an email if the server it receives the message from isn’t an authorised server for that domain, regardless of what is listed in the headers.
Given it is impossible to verify details listed in the headers by previous servers in the chain, it is possible to fake a portion of the headers of an email, and a sufficiently sophisticated spam operation would be wise to do just that in order to make it look like the ultimate source of the email is authorised. In fact I have no doubt some spam operations do just that.
SPF isn’t the be-all-and-end-all of spam filtering by a long way, but it’s an important first step, and while I know Fastmail is used to receiving email from my webserver and knows it’s not spam, the fact that it seems to let perceived reputation and unverifiable header text cloud the judgment of its spam filtering is a concern. I can see merit in sending such emails to the spam folder rather than Gmail’s policy of flat out silent rejection and deletion, and if Fastmail had been doing that then I would have picked up on the issue with the SPF record not listing the correct outbound filtering servers sooner as the headers inserted by Fastmail’s spam filters would have provided that information, but ultimately I think Gmail’s policy of treating the server which sent it the message as the sender to be checked against SPF is the correct methodology, even if I think some of those emails could be put in the spam folder rather than being silently deleted.
Fastmail’s spam filtering is not proprietary to them. Some aspects of it might be but it is built on systems widely used elsewhere for spam filtering, so one has to wonder how many of the spam filters in use by email servers right around the world have an overly permissive approach to SPF records and are willing to take the word of header text which may be completely illegitimate with no way of being checked. Too many, I fear.
I trust that if you’re in one of the parts of Australia which observes daylight saving, then you, like me, stayed up until 2am to excitedly wind the clocks forward to 3am. (Actually I have a computer system running some radio automation which needs a little bit of attention at daylight saving switchover. The playout is fine it’s all of the scheduled recordings and scheduled tasks which keep things working behind the scenes which need a bit of fixing)
Or perhaps you’re a bit like my good friend the confused cow who has absolutely no idea what time it is.
I first met this nice cow when I was preparing a weekend informational document at work in 2015. The cow was very confused and agreed to be photographed and appear in this informational document if only I would help figure out the time.
Once that was done, we pondered a question for which I still don’t have a good answer: if it’s daylight saving, why is it that we put away an hour of darkness and release it in April the following year? And we don’t even get any interest on it. Seems like a ripoff to me.
I’m particularly excited to bring you today’s video. It is the culmination of a couple months of testing and adjusting and refining settings and testing again until it reached the point where I was happy that I had something really worth sharing.
Today I take a look at how the Double Dutch 2 Greyhound bot can give you two dutches per greyhound race and be reliably profitable. I demonstrate a method which has returned 18 profitable days in the last 21 days of racing.
The method in this video works well for Australia and New Zealand but not for the UK. I’m working on other approaches in the Double Dutch 2 Greyhound bot which are suitable for the UK, and hopefully I’ll have something worth sharing with you on that front soon.
The last time I shared something with you on a Sunday it was a closing theme for Art Bell on his various shows. Well, this week I am continuing that theme with the opening theme from Art Bell’s various shows, most notably Coast To Coast AM which has continued to use the theme despite Art leaving the show many years ago and running various competing shows (which mostly used the same opening theme) after that time.
The piece of music is by Giorgio Moroder and is simply called “Chase” and sometimes mistitled as “The Chase”, while also being the theme to the movie Midnight Express.
Not a night has gone by in US radio for decades where this piece of music hasn’t been broadcast on hundreds of radio stations. One can only imagine the royalty payments which have stemmed from that.
As you may have noticed, I’ve been absent for a little while. A large chunk of that time was due to hayfever really hitting hard this year. Unfortunately most medications do absolutely nothing for me and I pretty much ran out of the only one which does work for me while I waited for more to arrive from the US. I’ll tell you more about that later.
For now though, I have some ideas to share with you which are proving profitable for betting on harness racing. I also demonstrate how I have used the ANZ Ratings and Analyser to work out some ideas, and how I have implemented them in the ANZ Bot.
The place market for greyhounds is notoriously difficult to make money from, with low prices and limited liquidity, but with some careful selection criteria to ensure enough market liquidity and carefully keeping bet size within a reasonably narrow window, a profit can be made.
In this video I show you some settings in SAW Greyhounds Deluxe to turn a profit in the place market. It’s not huge money, but every little bit helps.
Art Bell was something of a pioneer of overnight talk radio in the US, with a format which has been emulated ever since. A lot of talk radio is political, but Art Bell found that the middle of the night was a good time to discuss more unusual things, and that the night-time audience was much more interested in such discussions than in a continuation of political talk. Art was a storyteller and was captivating when he could find a narrative to wrap around a discussion of the paranormal, the unexplained, or ideas which were outside the mainstream. Art didn’t stay permanently in the paranormal realm, often interviewing various musicians and actors, which probably explains why his show was such a hit as the subject matter, while often familiar, was never repetitive.
Art was also a very good listener, which made him a good interviewer. He could have guests on to discuss all manner of strange and unusual topics, and it really didn’t matter what Art believed on the subject, he was able to have an interesting and intelligent discussion with the guest, no matter how outlandish the guest’s subject or their claims, and get listeners involved as well. He was a true master of the theatre of the mind, and through the height of his popularity through the late 1990s and early 2000s, his show Coast To Coast AM was heard live in just about every market in the US and Canada, attracting millions of listeners in the wee small hours of the night.
After Coast To Coast AM was bought out by Premiere Radio, Art’s career was somewhat more checkered. Art semi-retired a few times citing various reasons for departing and coming back, and hosted weekend shows and served as a guest host on Coast To Coast intermittently for a few years, moving to the Philippines after he remarried and his new wife was not permitted entry to the US. Eventually after an on-again off-again relationship with Coast To Coast AM, he finally left the show permanently in 2011, and in 2013 started a competing show on Sirius XM satellite radio which lasted all of six weeks.
In 2015 he started an online show, again in basically the same format as his Coast To Coast show, this time called Midnight In The Desert. This show was picked up by a handful of terrestrial radio stations and seemed to attract a decent chunk of Art’s old audience who had come to the conclusion that Coast To Coast AM had grown stale without his presence. Indeed, the host since Art’s departure from Coast To Coast AM, George Noory, retained many of Art’s guests but tends to let them just talk for entire segments rather than engaging them in discussion. Art’s Midnight In The Desert show lasted about six months, with multiple technical issues along the way causing various shows to not air or be cut short. Eventually Art left this show after, it was claimed, people opened fire into his studio from the street, although the local police department never confirmed any of this.
Art suffered various health issues after this and died in 2018.
Midnight In The Desert and Coast To Coast AM continue to this day, and myriad of other paranormal-themed overnight shows have also appeared. It is now a thriving genre and a mainstay of US talk radio. Naturally some shows are better than others, and the ones where the host is a good storyteller and can engage in interesting conversation with the guests are probably the closest thing there is to a natural successor to Art’s legacy.
While Art was hosting Coast To Coast AM, Crystal Gayle performed a song called Midnight In The Desert which Art often used as his closing theme.
When Art launched the Midnight In The Desert show in 2015, he continued to use The Chase theme from Midnight Express as his opening theme, just as Coast To Coast AM continues to do to this day, but also continued to use Midnight In The Desert as his closing theme. Upon launching this show in 2015, he interviewed Crystal Gayle about the song.
Today I demonstrate how my ANZ Ratings, Analyser & Bot strategies have found big winners in recent days on Australian and New Zealand horse races, and I show how to implement these and other strategies in the ANZ Bot to run on autopilot. Plus updates on previously demonstrated strategies, and a trick to get the bot to look at only harness races if you have a strategy specifically for harness races.
