As the final broadcast of John Laws on November 30 gets closer, Southern Cross Syndication have added a new program to their lineup.
Goodbye World is described as “A series of segments that chronicle and celebrate the funny, sad and ground breaking moments that made up an extraordinary career.
[..]
Each segment is fully produced with an allowance for local credits and station ID.”
Undoubtedly the 73 stations which broadcast Lawsie’s show will be interested in this segment. I would imagine that it will be similar to the current series of classic nutty callers that are being played during the show.
I have to check out of the hotel soon, and I still haven’t taken a photo of Mrs. Macquarie’s Chair…I’ll see if I have time.
I had an early night last night and didn’t wake up in time to see John Howard on his morning walk…it looks like I missed quite an event, as he got quite a warm welcome from the people he walked past according to AAP.
I’ve got a number of things to do before I leave Sydney, so enjoy your day everyone, and I will see you back in Canberra.
Samuel
(About to be on leave between Sydney and Canberra)
I enjoyed your call to the RTA this morning. I rang them yesterday to ask them a question and ended up listening to a three minute recorded lecture about the toll roads of Sydney, and then had to mutter at the hold music for a while.
As per your experience though, the staff were helpful…I bet the bloke you first spoke to got a shock when you mentioned your name!
Regards, Samuel Gordon-Stewart Canberran on leave in Sydney
It looks like John Howard won’t be paying his electorate of Bennelong a visit after all. The staff of his electorate office have informed me that they are not expecting him to be in the electorate today.
Reading between the lines of that and the various news reports, it would appear to me that Mr. Howard is staying in Perth for the moment to offer his condolences to the family of the SAS soldier who was killed in Afghanistan yesterday.
I’ll continue to monitor media reports of Mr. Howard’s movements, and if he does return to Sydney, I may have to take an early Saturday morning outing to Kirribilli to meet (or at least greet) the PM on his morning walk.
I must say that I wasn’t impressed by the “no discussion of the PM’s movements” and “you must write a letter to meet the prime minister” responses of his Canberra office when I called them before the electorate office opened. They might be trying to avoid the PM being ambushed by The Chaser, but he is a representative of the people, and some people might like to meet their representatives on occasion. I thank the staff of his electorate office for being much more friendly.
It’s a lovely wet day here in Sydney, so I doubt I’ll be visiting a beach, but there is plenty to do none the less.
The agenda for today:
Now: A walk with an umbrella and possibly the camera
Later: Ring John Howard’s electorate office and work out where I can find him to say “hello” and hopefully get a photo with him.
Later: Visit 2GB in Pyrmont and drop off a present for Jason Morrison.
Later: Meet John Howard. (Note that this is not optional…I will be extremely disappointed and somewhat offended if his office advise that he will not be in town long enough to meet me).
4:30ish: Meet occasional contributor Irene, previously of Brisbane and now of Sydney…and possibly another occasional contributor, Charity. (Looks like a late change of plans has caused a cancellation of this one)
8pm or some time thereafter: Ring Stuart Bocking about something, after all I’ve been in Sydney all week and I haven’t rung him yet. I rang John Stanley yesterday but couldn’t get to the phone straight away when I wanted to ring, and therefore left it a bit late and didn’t get to talk to him.
Apparently John Howard will be in Sydney today. Hopefully this means he will be campaigning in Bennelong as I would like to meet him while I am in Sydney.
John Howard was in Perth at 8:15 last night, so I would imagine that he is staying there overnight and will arrive in Sydney at some stage today. If I can’t find him today, perhaps he will stay in Sydney overnight, and I could make my way to Kirribilli (which, incidentally, Firefox’s spell checker wants to change to “Billionaires” and a few derivatives thereof, as well as Irritability and Billiards) early tomorrow morning and meet Mr. Howard on his morning walk.
In slightly related news, It is almost impossible to walk through a few streets in Canberra at the moment without spotting a house with a “Your rights at work” signs in the front yard. Sydney has its fair share of those signs, but I was very surprised when I saw the following sign in the front yard of a house on the corner of Bellevue Avenue and Sarner Road in Greenwich, just a couple streets away from the 2UE studios.
And in true political style, one helping of positive publicity is never enough.
Goodness…what a nightmare that bloke who claimed you're a clone of Stan was…and Norman had another appearance ranting and raving on the John Laws show this morning…if this is what we're getting before the full moon, imagine what we'll get when it's completely full.
Of course we could just put it down to the rain…I remember a relief teacher saying to me once when I was in primary school that she dreaded being asked to work on a rainy or windy day, as classes were usually restless and uncontrollable on such days. I also had another elderly relief teacher who seemed to bring the rain with her…every time she came to the school, it rained.
P.S. I hope you're enjoying the chocolates…and that there are still a few in the box.
Regards, Samuel Gordon-Stewart On my second last night in Sydney
I noticed an advertisement on 2UE a short time ago promoting the fact that Daylight Saving starts at 2am on Sunday (which becomes 3am) and advises people to wind their clocks forward by one hour before they go to sleep.
Interesting idea…but surely it would be better to advise people to “be listening at 1:59am for John Kerr’s clock winding special”.
It would be fairly easy to do, instead of running the final ad break of the hour at 1:57 and then running the top of the hour promo followed by the news, I would suggest the following schedule:
1:56 Final ad break
1:58 John Kerr’s clock winding special
1:59:55 usual time pips
2:00 (optional) Three cuckoo clock chimes as a news intro
The clock winding special would be fairly straight forward, it would contain John Kerr advising people to wind their clocks forward to 2:59 and stand by sixth time pip, at which time their clock should be wound forward to precisely 3am.
And to add to the fun, John could invite people to call in with their Daylight Saving disaster stories from years gone by, and the first three people to do so would win a clock radio (and if possible, signed by the retiring John Laws).
Who would have thought 3am could be turned in to the most exciting part of the day?
It's very nice to see the rain, although I am a tad disappointed that it is expected to stay in town until I leave Sydney on Saturday. I do hope that tomorrow's thunderstorm turns up as I have never seen a coastal thunderstorm…it will probably be much the same as an inland thunderstorm, but it would be nice to see anyway.
Incidentally, do you mind if I take the rain with me to Canberra on the weekend?
But they may take a while…I’ve got just under 100 to upload, and I’m averaging 7 kilobytes per second and a couple megabytes per photo.
I’m currently uploading 89 of the photos, and I’ll make the gallery publicly available once it completes. I’ll deal with uploading the other photos, and the captions, and my write-up after that. Today has been good, but a bit too long for me to try and write a description of the last few days before I have the photos uploaded.
Update 8:29pm: Unfortunately the Unwired connection’s upload speed is getting lower…and the signal strength seems to be failing a bit in the wet weather. The good news is that I have temporarily moved over to the hotel’s Internet connection which is averaging 60 kilobytes per second…much better upload speed, but a bit more expensive than the Unwired connection. It, thankfully, will fit in to the budget. End Update
Update 10:58pm: Now averaging 15-20 kilobytes per second…this is incredibly exciting…so much so that if you have some paint I can borrow, I’ll go and watch it dry. End Update
It’s Wednesday and it looks like it will rain, I would like a day or two with a bit of rain while I’m here, but the weather forecast looks a bit dire:
(Courtesy of Weatherzone)
Wet until I leave…and even worse it looks like Canberra will only get a sprinkle.
On the agenda for today, a trip on the monorail to cut down walking time to Martin Place. There is, apparently, a Harvey Norman printing centre there, and I have some digital photos that need to be printed before I visit 2UE this afternoon to watch John Stanley’s afternoon show and meet Frankster.
Then it’s back to the hotel for the afternoon…and that means I have no excuse for not uploading all the photos I have of the week so far (and the handful of videos).
And while those photos are uploading, I’ll be able to summarise yesterday’s events for you.
Some of you might be interested to know that the maximum speed of the lifts in this hotel is 5.328 km/h. This is based on a sign in lift #1 which states the maximum speed of the lift is 1.48 metres per second.
I would post a picture of the sign, but that would reveal the location and name of my hotel…and for the moment, that is entirely a guessing game. I’ll update this post with a picture of the sign on Thursday.
