As I mentioned earlier this morning, 2CC are broadcasting from Bunnings Warehouse in Fyshwick until midday. I went down there with my inflatable Bunnings hammer and my Bunnings hat, and they appeared to be having a good time.
Pete Davidson, Graham Robinson, Karen of Bunnings Fyshwick, and the fill-in Garden Gurus
I was also pleasantly surprised to see Scott McGregor from television shows such as Better Homes and Gardens who was there to present two French polishing demonstrations.
The crowd for Scott’s 10am demonstration grew slowly over the hour, although the man eating the sausage sandwich (who also happened to have a notepad for taking notes which might be useful in his table restoration efforts) and I were there for the full demonstration.
This photo didn’t quite work, but Scott was quite energetic during the demonstration so I think it fits.
The demonstration went on for about an hour, which is probably longer than it was supposed to, but it didn’t really matter as Scott and the crowd (myself included) enjoyed it.
And by 11am, Scott had finished an abbreviated restoration and polish of the door of an old meter box.
Incidentally, Scott has just finished a documentary for the History Channel on the history of Australia Post. I don’t have access to the History Channel, but I will be buying a copy of it on DVD from Australia Post when it goes on sale. I’m looking forward to it.
I was also pleasantly surprised by the visits of some other 2CC listeners that I know. A bus driver friend turned up just after 9am, and Lillian and her husband, retired Dickson College canteen managers, turned up to see Scott McGregor after hearing about his demonstrations on 2CC. Lillian and her husband recently stayed at Scott’s “Ruwenzori” railway carriage based resort in Mudgee.
2CC’s Graham Robinson and the fill-in Garden Gurus are broadcasting live from Bunnings Warehouse in Fyshwick this morning. If my memory is serving me in a non-devious manner, they haven’t broadcasted from there before.
I’ve been debating for the last few days whether or not I will visit them there, and considering that I have been up since about 4:30am working on the morning sport bulletins for AIR News and upgrading WordPress and other website components, I am now too awake to go back to sleep, and I think I will pay them a visit.
The last time I went to a 2CC outside broadcast was at Bunnings Belconnen on Saturday March 15 where Mike Frame, Graham Robinson and 2CC Program Director and 2CA evening presenter Pete Davidson were in attendance. I still have the Bunnings hat and inflatable hammer I received on that occasion…I might just have to take them with me. I’ve been trying (not hard enough, obviously) to find a reason to wear the Bunnings hat…I wonder if the fact that I’ve been considering wearing this hat to Bunnings Fyshwick as part of my debate about whether or not to attend means that there is something wrong with me?
Probably not…it just means that I have too much time to think.
If you were trying to read this blog over the last hour or so, you may have had some trouble as I was busy upgrading WordPress and various plugins, both of which caused minor disruptions to the normal operation of the site.
A number of you have reported problems, especially with changing your passwords, over the last few weeks. Hopefully the upgrades have fixed that, and I’m looking forward to seeing what has been newly broken by the upgrades.
This has appeared in a few JB Hi-Fi catalogues now, the latest of which arrived in my letter box today.
I suppose it depends on your definition of “play”. If by “play” you mean “can hold a CD which has MP3s on it” then yes, I’d consider the advertisement to be accurate. Unfortunately, I don’t consider “impossible to turn on” or “dead on arrival” to be a reasonable definition of “Plays MP3s”, but then again, maybe I was just unlucky and bought a dud unit.
Either way, I didn’t have an opportunity to return to the store for a replacement in the three days after purchasing it, and as I had more pressing matters to attend to, I forgot about it, leaving it sitting in a cupboard which it has now been residing in for about three weeks…and I now don’t believe that a replacement unit or a $28 refund would be worth the hassle of returning to the store with it and arguing about the definition of a reasonable amount of time in which to work out that an item doesn’t work…especially when I’m considering buying an iPod in the next month or so anyway.
It would be more fun to take the CD player apart (in to ten pieces) and post one piece to the JB Hi-Fi head office each weekday for two weeks and see if they send anything back, such as a letter from the confused person who opens each parcel…that would be worth the $28 plus Australia Post charges. I might do that…it sounds like fun. I’ll keep you posted.
An exploding oxygen tank forced an emergency landing of a Qantas jet in Manila after it blew a hole in the fuselage, air safety investigators have found.
The tank failed and burst, blasting through the cabin floor from a storage area between business and economy class seats on a Hong Kong to Melbourne flight last month, a preliminary report by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) found.
Unfortunately, eight weeks is only enough to catch up on information already known, not to actually find out anything new or useful
Bureau investigators are yet to determine why the tank exploded, almost two months after the July 5 incident.
And as it seems to be a day of quotes, bleeding obvious quote of the day goes to Julian Walsh from the Australian Transport Safety Bureau
I’ll save some of my thoughts for an editorial that I’m writing, but I noted on 2CC’s news at 8am that former Mix 106.3 breakfast host Mark Parton is going to run as an independent candidate in the upcoming ACT election.
Mark has noted on his blog that he will make an announcement on 666 ABC Canberra at 8:30am. Sorry Mark, looks like 2CC beat the exclusive.
Anyway, this should make for an interesting contest. Mark is quite popular in this town, so it will be interesting to see how that translates to the electorate.
Update 10:48am: The official announcement will be at 11am according to Mark. If I wasn’t working, I’d probably be interested in attending even though he is not in my electorate.
Most people who have listened to me in the last 10 years know what I stand for. I stand for the community.
For families, I want this city to be a sustainable, prosperous community so that my children and hopefully their children can proudly call it home.
I am for common sense in Government and for supporting and nurturing business people who have the courage to put their neck on the line and “have a go”.
We need to think green, but we need to do it in a practical common sense way and I want to foster that approach in our community and in business.
I stand for openness and honesty in Government and for solutions that are not shaped by party politics.
Grand statements, but a good brief summary that people will be able to remember the gist of. The Ginninderra electoral race just became interesting. End Update
Samuel
Livenews.com.au’s headline to their story about the New South Wales government’s amazing “we brought you all here for a vote, but you’re not going to vote our way, so we’re not having a vote” circus act has amused me to no end. The headline reads “Run, Morris, run: Iemma Govt avoids electricity vote” and reminds me, possibly intentionally, of the Flanagan and Allen dong “Run, Rabbit, Run” which is currently on my Musicians Of The Week waiting list.
Upon seeing the headline, some new lyrics popped in to my mind.
In the house, on random Wednesdays
In the house, it’s time to vote day.
So, every vote day that ever comes along,
Morris starts to sing a little song
Vote Barry – vote Barry – Vote! Vote! Vote!
My way – or the – High! High! Way!
Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame!
Goes the opposition.
So run, Morris, run, Morris, run.
Run Morris – run Morris – Run! Run! Run!
Don’t give Barry his Fun! Fun! Fun!
We’ll get by
Without our budget pie
So run Morris – run Morris – Run! Run! Run!
It’s just extraordinary that anybody could spend half a million dollars to recall MPs and then not have a vote. What a wonderful waste of our GST revenue. I wonder whether Morris will look into it?
If there is one thing that I have to give Jon Stanhope credit for, he is very good at playing with the media. Whether it’s his “I will spend five minutes answering your question about what you perceive to be a lack of rubbish bins by telling you a story about the social interaction between rubbish trucks and rubbish bins and why the cost of diesel dictates how many of these interactions can be made on a weekly basis, and why we therefore have the most economically sustainable and responsible number of rubbish bins per rubbish truck in the industrialised world” answers during time-limited radio interviews or his surprisingly effective “I’ll keep saying this publicly, and people will believe it, no matter how irrelevant it may be” way of wriggling out of trouble, Jon Stanhope continuously manages to make the media run the message that he wants to have aired.
It’s not foolproof, and people do see through it, but it works surprisingly well. I was rather intrigued by this statement yesterday (courtesy of WIN News and The RiotACT).
The story was about ACTEW Corporation’s yet-to-be-approved, but already heavily advertised, projects to secure Canberra’s water supply. It’s hard to tell whether Mr. Stanhope referred to himself as the leader of the Liberal Party by accident, but it hardly matters. If it was accidental, then Mr. Stanhope showed how well he knows the media by correcting his entire sentence, and not just the errant word. Most of us in his position would have said “I’ve been the leader of the Liberal..err, Labor Party for” etc, whereas Jon Stanhope restarted his sentence, knowing that most, if not all, broadcast media, if they wanted to use his answer, would cut out the erroneous sentence due to their own time constraints, effectively nullifying his slip-up. Correcting only the erroneous word would have meant that the sentence, including error, would have been broadcast by anybody who wanted to use his answer.
The other possibility is that Mr. Stanhope made the reference on purpose. The answer he was providing was clearly one of his “my track record speaks for itself” answers as he was using his line about how many years we have all known of him, and that line is generally part of a defensive argument. In this case, by referring to himself as the leader of a party he his not the leader of, he has distracted the media and the public from his answer.
“Chief Minister makes amusing mistake” is a much more interesting story than “Chief Minister defends his record”, and even if the media did run his answer in full, the public would be much more likely to remember his amusing mistake than his dreary answer. Even more importantly, in a month or so when commentators are looking back over Mr. Stanhope’s reign as Chief Minister, they’re going to have a chuckle about this incident, rather than having anything negative to say about the topic he was talking about. Far from making him look incompetent, it will make him look human in the lead-up to the election.
When it comes down to it, the only person who truly knows whether the statement was an accident or intentional is Jon Stanhope (and possibly his advisors), and regardless, it has given the public something to laugh about as they enter the weekend, rather than remembering the rather awful week that he had. People won’t forget the week of events, but they won’t be as prominent in their minds. And the fact that I’m writing about this, and not the week of events, says something about how good Jon Stanhope is at making the media (and I’m including bloggers in the definition of that word) see and hear what he wants them to see and hear.
I managed to find a good point about having the Olympics on at night and Seven’s AFL coverage delayed until 7:50am in New South Wales…if I sleep for thirteen hours from 6pm on Friday, I can wake up on Saturday and still see most of the AFL.
Anyway, the Dennis Cometti quote (and I had to decide between a few…it seems that letting Dennis loose to call all the action without Bruce McAvaney next to him results in far too much amusement, not that I’m complaining of course). Dennis referred to Ryan Hargrave as looking “fresh”, and then a minute or so later Hargrave looked quite exhausted, which prompted a number of Dennis’ co-commentators to have a bit of fun at Dennis’ expense.
Not long after this, Ryan Hargrave was off the field with ice wrapped around his ankle. One of Dennis’ co-commentators (possibly Nathan Buckley) noted that Hargrave didn’t look very fresh any more, prompting Dennis to say “if he was an avacado, you wouldn’t buy him”.
There was supposed to be more than one post on Wednesday, and I was expecting to write more yesterday and today. Noticeably, and for multiple reasons, this has not happened. Normal programming will resume tomorrow though (and the planned Friday Funny for this week will be held over (again) for a week.
Teenagers and young children searching and downloading the latest tunes over the Internet are being exposed to pornographic images and websites.
The popular Internet tool LimeWire is at the centre of the pornography scare.
Searching for Britney Spears and even children shows The Wiggles and HI-5 return explicit images, and links to child porn websites.
That’s just a tad too selective…in truth, searching for anything on LimeWire is likely to produce results which aren’t what you’re searching for, and if you’re lucky you might find what you’re looking for as well.
But who came up with this astonishing revelation? The next paragraph of the article should clarify that:
Detective Superintendent John Kerlatec, commander of the child protection and sex crimes squad, says police are seriously concerned about file-sharing programs like LimeWire and their capacity to expose children to inappropriate material.
“Police have previously received reports and conducted investigations into the receipt of this kind of material,” he told News Ltd.
Well, good luck Detective Superintendent John Kerlatec, organisations with much more money to play with than you will ever see (the RIAA for one) have been doing their best to get rid of file sharing for many years.
For better or worse, where there is file sharing, there will be unsavoury content, this has been known for a very long time, so why it has managed to make the news today is beyond me. Surely Kevin Rudd has said something on his latest overseas trip…even if he was just ordering dinner, it would be more newsworthy than this tripe.
Update: news.com.au are claiming to have an exclusive on this story, and their article even links to the Limewire website. Does this mean that the folks at news.com.au want people to download Limewire and search for The Wiggles and HI-5, and then follow the yellow brick road to the content that the article whinges about?
While we’re at it, would somebody like to wake a sub-editor?
In April, ?? men were sentenced to jail in Queensland and the Northern Territory for also accessing child porn via LimeWire.
I could be mistaken because there appear to be satellite issues tonight causing parts of words to be replaced with blips and blops, but did I hear you refer to "talkbock radio" at the top of the show? Could this be related to the "Bock of the 90s" from one of your previous haunts?
In regards to tennis at the Olympics…I can't stand tennis! Golf and Lawn Bowls need to be added to the Olympics, shall I leave it in your capable hands to organise that? I can see it now, Stuart Bocking, Australia's first golfing gold medallist.
Caltex successfully convinced me yesterday that they do not use logic when deciding on petrol prices. I was fairly convinced of that already, but they made sure of it yesterday.
According to 2UE’s Tim Webster, all the Caltex stations he passed in Sydney were selling unleaded petrol for 146.9 cents per litre. In Weston yesterday the Caltex Woolworths petrol station were selling unleaded petrol for 139.9 cents per litre, a price which was repeated at another Caltex just off Drakeford Drive. Oddly though, another Caltex near Drakeford Drive was selling it for 143.9 cents per litre.
As for today’s prices…I don’t want to know, as it would only make me try to find logic where this is none.
If only I had a recording of that conversation Glenn Wheeler had with a petrol company spokesperson just before Easter (at least I think it was just before Easter). That was one of the most amusing and confusing conversations I’ve heard and I think Glenn was right when he summed up the petrol company’s explanation as something along the lines of “take a number, divide it by five, add a couple tomatoes, a pineapple, a coconut, and an onion, and hey presto! It’s a perfect petrol price”.
I wonder if it would be more cost effective to buy crude oil and refine it myself?
