Archive for January 28th, 2009

“Changeial”?

Macquarie National News, presumably delirious in Sydney’s cooler temperatures after recent “scorchers”, have invented a new word to describe the supposed issue of greenhouse gases making the planet hotter…apparently the climate is “changeial”.

Changeial be the climate
(click to enlarge)

Macquarie get full credit for this one as, despite the story being from AAP, there is no sign of the word “changeial” anywhere in the AAP feed, or on any of the other websites which grab content from AAP.

So, is “changeial” the act of causing change (eg. “Humans are supposedly being changeial to the climate”) or the process of something changing (eg. “The climate is being changeial all by itself”)?

Update: They’ve changed the headline to “Rudd, Obama pledge to team up on climate” which, whilst great from a typographical standpoint, leaves me no closer to finding out what “changeial” means. End Update

Samuel

January 28th, 2009 at 01:48pm

How does this keep happening?

It’s virtually a boilerplate story now:

A [man/woman] broke the window of a [insert location here] childcare centre with a [insert object here] when [he/she] arrived to find the building locked, the lights out and [his/her] tiny [son/daughter] trapped inside.

This time around it’s a woman from Darwin with a brick:

A woman broke the window of a Darwin childcare centre with a brick when she arrived to find the building locked, the lights out and her tiny son trapped inside.

Yula Williams, 30, said she could hear her eight-month-old baby Xavier “screaming and crying”.

“It made me terrified to know that my son was inside the centre, locked and in the dark,” she said.

Ms Williams had dropped her son off at the centre in the Darwin suburb of Wagaman around 8am (CST) on Tuesday and went to work.

She had dropped her car off at a local mechanic and arranged for one of her cousins to collect her son from the centre before it closed at 6pm (CST). But when she arrived home later that night her son was not at the house.

“It was just a mother’s instinct that I went back to the childcare centre and looked around,” she said.

Ms Williams arrived at the centre shortly before 6pm but staff had already left the building. After scanning all the the security screens the frantic mother climbed the back of the building to call Xavier’s name through elevated slats.”I couldn’t hear him from the outside but when I walked around and called through the vents to the bedrooms I heard him scream,” she told ABC radio in Darwin.

Desperate to get to her tiny son, Ms Williams then picked up a brick from the garden bed and smashed it through a window.

[..]

Ms Williams said that while she could understand the misunderstanding with her relative over the pickup arrangements, she could not understand how the centre had not called her to let her know that no-one had come to collect her son.

Police said they were continuing to conduct investigations into the incident.

I think Ms. Williams summed it up with the statement that she “could not understand how the centre had not called her to let her know that no-one had come to collect her son”, and it’s completely beyond me how they managed to lock up with a child still on the premises…surely the register would have told them that there was still a child in the centre, even if they couldn’t see him.

And with the publicity that stories just like this one have received in recent times, one does have to wonder how long it will be before incompetence is seriously considered as the reason for these stuff ups.

Samuel

January 28th, 2009 at 01:33pm

Tennis + Heat = Whinge

I knew this would happen…I said as much a week ago. None the less, an email to 2UE’s Steve Price:

G’day Steve,

I heard you talking to Mark Parton about the heat at the tennis on 2CC this morning.

I have a simple solution to the problem…move the tennis to winter. It rains less on average in winter, so you’d have less rain delays, and it’s colder in winter so you wouldn’t have to worry about heat stress…and if it was really cold, the players could keep warm simply by playing!

Enjoy your day.

Regards,
Samuel Gordon-Stewart
Canberra

January 28th, 2009 at 09:24am

Just a few of the things I’m working on

Sadly I won’t have time to get any of these articles finished this morning, but I’m working on them and hope to have them to you soon:

  • The Bureau of Meteorology claimed that last year was hot in Canberra, but I’ve been looking at the figures, and they seem to disagree with the Bureau.
  • The “Global Economic Crisis” seems to be having a very sad side-effect…it’s difficult to go a day without a story from somewhere in the world about a suicide or murder-suicide shortly after someone loses their job.
  • And with more people apparently out of work, are recruitment companies becoming sloppier and slacker with their job advertisements simply because they know that people will apply?
  • Surprisingly (some people should sit down before reading this) I actually like a handful of the songs in Triple J’s “Hot 100” this year.
  • All that and more, still to come on Samuel’s Blog.

    Samuel

January 28th, 2009 at 08:24am


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