Apparently it just takes four beers in the space of 60-90 minutes (I don’t recall how long it was) when I’m on anti-depressants and painkillers to get me drunk enough for people to want to record embarrassing videos of me talking nonsensically.
I promised to post the video online, so for better or for worse, here it is.
I’ve previously had about the same amount to drink in about the same amount of time when not on medication, and it didn’t have anywhere near as much effect. That said, no excuses from me, I just don’t handle alcohol well. I’m pleased that there was no hangover, but it’s possible that I slept for too long (approximately sixteen hours) for that to happen.
This was last night (Friday the 4th) if you’re wondering.
Twitter is down for scheduled maintenance at the moment and I’m not waiting for nine hours just to make a quick remark.
The cheque’s in the mail! The ACT government are giving me a whole $11 for cancelling my car’s rego. Very desperate to get me off the road!
Apparently I can get a little bit more from the NRMA as they will refund the unused CTP component, but is it really worth my time to stand in line at an NRMA shopfront just to get another dozen dollars when I have already wasted half a morning at an ACT government shopfront?
It makes me wonder why the ACT government can collect money for the NRMA when you pay for vehicle registration, but they can’t refund it when you cancel registration. Seems like bureaucratic “make life harder for the people so they won’t try to get money from us” red tape to me.
If it were like New South Wales and we had a choice of CTP provider then it would make sense to claim a refund from the provider, but when the ACT government are enforcing a monopoly and are seemingly in cahoots with their provider of choice, surely it’s not too much to ask for both amounts to be refunded in one go.
Honestly, if it weren’t for the fact that I was already in Dickson to see my doctor and I had to hand in the number plates at the government shopfront, I would think that spending half my morning being brainwashed by the annoying loop of ACT government advertisements on display at the shopfront, only to receive $11 after having paid the ACT government $6.60 for my transport for the day, would be a complete waste of time.
$11 in exchange for the remaining two months of rego…wouldn’t it be nice if vehicle registration only cost $5.50 per month. We might all be able to afford petrol then.
People who listened to Clive Robertson when he was presenting New Day Australia on 2UE would probably remember his weather updates which would start shortly after the news, often turn in to a story about something, and end about twenty minutes later. Clive had an amazing ability to take the most mundane of daily information, and turn it in to something interesting to listen to every hour.
It would appear that back on the 13th of March 1989, Clive treated the weather to his unusual presentation style on Seven Nightly News, hosted at the time by Roger Climpson and Ann Sanders. I’m fairly sure that, if they didn’t have a story to run after the weather, Clive could have continued with the weather until Derryn Hinch’s show began.
It’s Friday, and it’s about time that the Friday Funnies made a comeback, so if you have a joke or a funny video that you’d like to see here on a Friday, send an email to samuel@samuelgordonstewart.com and it might just appear in the coming weeks.
I could turn in to A Current Affair here and claim to have “exclusive, behind the scenes, never before seen by the public, pictures” but to be fair, anybody who has landed on this website in the last few hours by searching Google for:
mike welsh “ben fordham”
(and a handful of people have done just that) could have seen it, as the fourth result on Google at the time of writing this is for a page of the new, yet to be released, website.
It’s almost an annual tradition for 2CC to launch a new website, and so often they seem to release a seemingly circa 1995 static HTML website, thankfully this time around it looks like they’re actually using a content management system, and have a dynamic database-driven website which they might actually manage to maintain for more than a couple weeks. I’ve got to say, the new website looks pretty impressive.
At long last they have a “Now, next, later, then” system and some useful information about the station on the homepage. It’s certainly a vast improvement over the current website:
Having had a look around the website, it’s clear that there are a few bits of content that need to be modified before the website can go live, such as open line numbers, email addresses, the fact that you need to prefix text messages with “2cc” etc, but overall the website is quite impressive and seems to suit the image the station is trying to portray.
It’s also good to see that, unlike the current website, 2CC have taken new photos of their staff and are no longer relying on the existing photos which are at least four or five years old.
Each presenter now has a readable page, unlike the previous “one solid block of text each” site, and although it’s not visible within the screenshots, each page has a comprehensive summary of regular guests and segments:
Even the newsroom get their own page (although I do recall an old version of their website containing a picture of James Goodwin when he was their afternoon newsreader).
It looks like 2CC have also managed to source the staff photos from 2UE which were used as the basis for the photos on the 2UE website (although the versions on the 2UE website mostly contain a modified background)
Unfortunately there is no sign of online streaming, so it looks like that’s probably not happening. I have reason to believe that the website will be launched in conjunction with a very noticeable and (I would consider it) major change to the station…unfortunately I’m not allowed to tell you about that just yet (you hear things inside buildings that sometimes you just have to keep secret) but suffice to say, I’m making some recordings for before and after comparison.
When will the new website be launched? Well that’s anyone’s guess. I’m not going to post a link to it in its pre-launch state. If you’re really desperate to have a look, then you already have enough information to find it yourself.
The amusing thing is, whoever is developing the site could very easily have locked access down to a few select IP addresses or password protected it. Even a simple robots.txt file would have stopped Google from indexing it…clearly they weren’t too concerned about “sneak peeks”, which for me at least is probably a good thing, because I’ve been trying to work out what they’re doing with their website for a while now…they haven’t been attempting to update the old one for ages, and the new one explains why. Mystery solved, and my head can go back to working on the 15 million other mysteries I seem to ponder at any given time.
I must have been really out of it for the last few days to miss this rather sad news.
Actor Don S. Davis, arguable best known for his portrayal of Major General George Hammond on Stargate SG-1 (and the odd appearance on spin-off show Stargate Atlantis) passed away on the 29th of June after suffering a heart attack. He was aged 65.
Davis will still appear in the upcoming direct-to-DVD film “Stargate: Continuum”.
I would like to take this opportunity to post two videos, the first is a brief profile and interview of Don produced for the first season of Stargate SG-1.
The second is a tribute to Don, put together by a YouTube user going by the name of edison700
This afternoon a bit before 5pm, A Current Affair’s Ben Fordham rang 2CC’s Mike Welsh to take exception at something Mike Said yesterday. Ben made the call after reading a Media Monitors notice which said that Mike referred to Ben as a bully.
2CC have placed the somewhat peculiar exchange on YouTube:
As I said to Mike when I spoke to him a bit later in the day, I don’t know what Ben thought he was exposing because it was blatently obvious that Mike had not seen the video when he spoke about it yesterday, as the video had not gone to air, and Mike had been referring to Ben’s boasting on the Steve Price morning show.
I also have to wonder if the whole thing was a strange attempt by Ben to plug Channel Nine as much as possible.
2GB breakfast host Alan Jones has just announced at a press conference that he has been diagnosed with prostate cancer and will be off the air for the next few weeks for a few weeks when he has surgery, which is expected in a couple weeks.
More details shortly.
Update 12:33pm: I had to step away from the computer for most of the press conference, but I managed to record it anyway.
[audio:https://samuelgordonstewart.com/wp-content/AlanJonesProstateAnnouncement20080703.mp3] Download MP3 Audio courtesy of Radio 2GB
I suppose there’s not much to say, other than to wish Alan a speedy recovery. Best wishes Alan. End Update
Following on from my car crash last night, all of the “what ifs” surrounding it have been running through my mind. I’m surprised that I managed to get any sleep last night with various parts of my body trying to punish me with pain.
Ultimately it was my own stupidity that caused that crash and I’m not going to try to diminish my responsibility for it. I am going to try to work through the “what ifs” though, so that I can try to understand what was going through my head at the time, and to help me learn from the experience.
After the crash it occurred to me that if I hadn’t managed to miss an appointment with a neurologist yesterday morning (which has since been rescheduled now that I have realised my mistake), I probably wouldn’t have had the money to pay for the tow truck. But what if I had gone to see the neurologist? Would I have then made my trip in to Weston once I was finished with the doctor? If so, would I still have crashed on the way home from Weston?
I believe that I would have gone to Weston and that I probably would have avoided the crash because:
1. The roads were dry at that time of the day.
2. With more traffic, I wouldn’t have been speeding.
Then there are the immediately more relevant questions:
What if I’d gone home a couple hours earlier rather than sticking around and going to the Weston Club for a while? (And before you ask, no, I wasn’t drinking…although I’m surprised that the Police didn’t bother to breath test me)
More traffic, and it was still raining at that time. I probably would have been driving slower…in fact the stupid thing is that I left Weston, drove around for a bit and went back, if I had just gone home, I doubt that this would have happened.
What if I had stayed in Weston for longer?
I doubt that it would have made a difference. I would have been driving just as fast, and the roads would have been slippery, not to mention the impossible winds on Parkes Way at the time. It probably would have been just as bad, if not worse.
What if I had a passenger at the time?
That might have saved me. I’ve noticed that I’m more cautious when I have a passenger than when I’m on my own. I knew that I was going too fast last night, and there is no way that I would have done that if I had a passenger in the car. With a passenger, I highly doubt that there would have been an accident to talk about.
OK, but what if I’d had the accident anyway?
The passenger would have come off worse than I did as pretty much everything that was loose in the car (eg the CD cases in the console, my mobile phone, my glasses which flew off my head, and even the dirt from the side of the road after the windscreen was pushed back a bit) flew in that direction. The structure of the body of the car survived, so the passenger wouldn’t have been too bad, but the debris flying in their direction could have done some serious damage. In fact it could easily have flown in the other direction and injured me.
There are more “what ifs” where they came from, but I’m going to wait until I’ve spoken with the Police today before I write any of them.
I should have known that yesterday was going to be weird from the moment that some drug-crazed nut interrupted me to babble about “gear” and “five dollars” before wandering off as quickly as they had appeared. I don’t know what that has to do with anything, but I feel like telling the story anyway.
I’m lucky to be alive, but considering that I often struggle to feel safe in vehicles being driven by others, and that I don’t trust myself now (I’m still debating whether I ever want to drive again), I think I’ve just put myself in my very own psychological hell.
One day a time for now I suppose…and this one is not going to be one of my best.
You may recall that, prior to the introduction of the GST, the federal government ran a lengthy advertising campaign featuring Joe Cocker’s “Unchain My Heart”, images of people being freed from the chains and shackles of the old tax system, and voiceovers answering “questions” about the new tax system in much the same way that a government MP will gladly waffle on for many minutes during Parliament Question Time in reply to a Dorothy Dixer.
I was trying to find footage of some of these advertisements online. I didn’t find any (although I didn’t look very hard) but I did find a rather amusing sendup of the advertisements by Paul McDermott and the rest of the Good News Week team. It features voiceovers by Robbie McGregor so there is definitely no way that I can stop myself from sharing the video with you. Happy eighth birthday of the GST!
Incidentally, I forgot to mention it when I wrote this the other day, but at the time this was filmed, Australia was going through one of its many “Sorry” debates, this one in the leadup to the Sydney Olympics. How is that relevant? Watch the video and you’ll see.
