Archive for November 13th, 2007

A few thoughts

Firstly I would like to apologise to the people who have left comments over the last few days, and didn’t receive a response last night when I said I would reply. Last night after watching Andrew Denton interviewing John Laws I developed a headache and eventually got to sleep, only to find that it was much worse this morning. It wasn’t as bad as a migraine, but it was close.

One thing that bothers me from time to time is the way I worry about coincidence, especially when the coincidence is almost a figment of my imagination. This morning when I called in sick to work, it occurred to me that there was a ridiculous coincidence in that last night John Laws went on national television and mentioned how, due to depression, he sometimes calls in sick to work and claims to have a headache…and that the morning after he said that on television, I was calling in sick to work with a headache.

Whilst I knew that I actually did have quite a bad headache, and when I thought about it logically I knew that my boss would have no reason to doubt it, I couldn’t help but wonder if he may have had doubts based on the broadcast.

The thing that bothers me here is that I know that the coincidence is more of a figment of my imagination than an actual coincidence, and yet for some reason I worry and obsess about it. I suppose I’m concerned that if these “coincidences” occur to me, they may occur to others.

I suppose that as I generally have a fairly active mind, when I don’t have much to keep it active, I conjure up these silly things in an effort to keep my mind busy…whatever the reason, it is quite annoying.

On a different subject, does anybody have a copy of today’s (Tuesday) The Canberra Times? I spoke to a journalist from The Canberra Times on the phone last night after I sent in the photos of the Olims Hotel fire. I was informed that, whilst the photos would not be used, the story would appear as one of the “in brief” stories. The journalist was quite grateful for the information about the story, and the photos…and I was looking forward to purchasing a copy of the paper to see how they covered the story, but as I have been at home all day, I did not get a chance to purchase a copy of the paper.

So, if anybody has a copy of the paper that they no longer need, and would like to offload it to somebody who is willing to pay for it, please let me know. Update: Never mind, a friend who works in a petrol station at night still had a couple copied for sale. End Update.

Yesterday I mentioned that I would wait to see whether or not the weekend news reports were an accurate indication of what John Laws said about his depression during his Enough Rope interview before making any comments. As I said yesterday, my comments about Lawsie’s depression aren’t particular interesting, it’s just that when I was slightly depressed for a few weeks in the early part of this year, one of the people who made me feel better was John Laws.

Samuel

November 13th, 2007 at 11:59pm

Samuel’s Blog Weekly Poll: Compulsory Voting

As you’ve probably noticed, over the last few weeks I have been running politically themed polls. Next week I will be running a poll in the lead-up to the election to find out who people will be voting for. That poll will start on Saturday and finish late on Friday November 23, so that I can publish the results on election day. As such, the poll for this week will be a bit shorter than usual, and for that reason I’m not going to throw an election issue at you…instead I’m going to ask you a question which seems to pop up before just about every election:

Do you think voting should be compulsory?

Total Votes: 41
Started: November 12, 2007

I like the idea of compulsory voting simply because government policy and law affects everyone, and I believe that everyone therefore has both the right and responsibility to shape the government.

Last week’s poll was as follows:

Do you think Labor’s environment spokesman, Peter Garrett, was joking when he told 2UE’s Steve Price that Labor will change their policies if elected?

Total Votes: 36
Started: November 5, 2007

I think that was fairly conclusive. The majority of people believe Mr. Garrett was joking, but there is still quite a decent percentage of people who believe Mr. Garrett was being truthful.

Samuel

2 comments November 13th, 2007 at 12:06am


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