I had a nice quick trip to Deniliquin, encountering less roadwork delays than any other trip to or from Deni. A big thanks to Jesse for the use of his car for the week, effectively saving me from what would have been a rather long, slow and trying experience of two buses and a train with Countrylink.
The trip statistics are as follows:
Trip started at 7:14am
Trip ended at 1:35pm
Break time: 69 minutes
Distance travelled: 525.7 KM
Time spent travelling: 5 hours 12 minutes
Average speed: 101.09615384615384615384615384615 KM/H
It looks like it’s probably going to be a warm and wet week with temperatures in the low 30s and high 20s, with “possible showers” every day this week except for tomorrow.
I happen to be missing two public holidays in one day tomorrow (Canberra Day and Victoria’s Labour Day), however I am somewhat excited to be, for the first time, in a location where I will be able to hear Neil Mitchell over terrestrial broadcast. As per every other time I’ve been in Deniliquin, Nick McCallum will be filling in for Neil tomorrow, however Neil should be on the air for the rest of the week. I’m looking forward to it.
Anyway, it occurs to me that I didn’t publish any of the photos from my first trip to Deni in mid-December, so I’ll publish a couple now and a few more as the week goes on. Also unlike my second trip in late-December, I have remembered to bring the camera with me this time, so a photo of a particular location requested by a particular reader will be shot and published this time.
Here’s a couple photos from December 19, 2008. Here I am with 2QN breakfast host Paul Dix. Paul is the nation’s longest serving breakfast host at a single station, having been at 2QN since 1961.
And a photo of me with Andy Ingram, 2QN’s afternoon announcer and production whiz.
At 4:13am today, Cooma was Australia’s coldest place according to WeatherZone:
I can’t recall any other time where I’ve spotted Cooma or immediate surrounds listed as the coldest place in the country. I’ve seen places up in the mountains listed as the coldest, but not Cooma.
HONG KONG — Cathay Pacific has apologized for embarrassing a customer whose anguish after missing her flight was captured on video by an airline employee and posted on the Internet.
The Hong Kong airline said in a statement to The Associated Press on Thursday that the worker who filmed the video has been disciplined but that another person posted the footage on YouTube, a video-sharing Web site.
The three-minute video shot on a mobile phone shows a woman wailing, throwing herself on the floor, banging on an airport counter and trying to barge through a closed boarding gate at the Hong Kong International Airport on Feb. 4 after missing a flight to San Francisco.
“They have no compassion. The plane hasn’t even left, and they’ve shut the gate. They’re crazy! They’re crazy!” the woman shouted.
[..]
Cathay said it had apologized to the woman “for the inconvenience and embarrassment she may have suffered as a result” and offered to upgrade her seats on her next trip and reimburse her for frequent flyer miles she used for upgrades on recent journeys.
The airline said the woman has not sought compensation from the company.
As far as I’m concerned she should consider herself lucky that she wasn’t flying with EasyJet who regularly film customer tantrums for the television show Airline which is internationally syndicated.
The only difference between this video and every other video of people having a tantrum in public is that this one spread quickly on YouTube and was then picked up by the broadcast media and appeared on almost every news programme on the planet, whereas most sit on YouTube with minimal interest from anyone.
Madam, think about this more entrepreneurially, you could make a fortune out of television interviews about this video…or perhaps start a successful anger management course. Possibilities galore here…although if you’re really embarrassed about it, well you’ll know not to do that again in a public place.
I’ve been thinking of calling US talk radio host Sean Hannity for a little while now and finally decided to do so today. It took me a good forty minutes or so of intermittent redialling to get through, and then I spent another forty minutes or so on hold. By this stage an interview was going overtime and with the other interviews they had lined up, it was unlikely that they would be able to get to me for at least an hour or more, if at all…as I was calling from overseas they were kind enough to inform me of the situation, take down my phone number and offer to call me back tomorrow.
Hopefully I’ll be able to chat with Sean tomorrow. His show airs between 7am and 10am Canberra time (with current timezone differences). If it ends up happening, I’ll be sure to let you know.
I’m a few days late on this one, but I couldn’t let it go without mentioning it.
Barack Obama’s appointee as director of Urban Policy, Adolfo Carrión Jr., is facing some rather interesting scrutiny from his recent stint as Bronx Borough President. The New York Daily News broke the story early this week with an investigative feature which Sean Hannity summed up quite nicely:
Adolfo Carrion Jr. [..] had a mysterious pattern of receiving contributions from various groups and individuals, either right before or right after approving their building projects.
The New York Daily News story goes on for three pages and includes many examples of the suspicious payments…far too numerous for me to quote them all here, although I will be saving the document for future reference.
I’m losing count of these ethical problems in this administration…I pity the 47.1% of American voters who voted against this mess.
WASHINGTON – Ron Kirk’s excess deductions for basketball tickets and failure to report speaking fees as income have cost him $10,000 in back taxes, a Senate committee disclosed Monday, in the latest IRS-related embarrassment for an Obama Cabinet pick.
The problems are the first indication of potential trouble for Kirk’s nomination to be U.S. trade representative, though White House officials and key senators called the errors minor and predicted the former Dallas mayor will be confirmed by the Senate.
And who was the senator who declared the issue to be a minor issue? Why it was the illustrious “I got my high speed train from L.A. to Vegas in the stimulus bill” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of course!
“When you put anybody’s tax filings under a microscope, people don’t have to be dishonest,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. “It’s just hard to do all the right things. It certainly shouldn’t disqualify him.”
In Senator Reid’s defence, I suppose it is small compared to the other tax problems in the cabinet, but really, how many more of these tax problems are we going to find?
I went for a two hour walk to my post office box and back at about 2am, and found a letter, marked “urgent”, from a gentleman in Cobram in there, urging me to drop most of Channel Ten’s AFL commentators in favour of Kelli Underwood, an up-and-coming female commentator who caused a stir in 2005 when 3AW made her a match co-commentator, a move which Ten have repeated recently during their NAB Cup coverage, making Kelli the first female to call AFL football on television.
I agree with the sentiments of the letter writer as I think Ten’s commentators are generally quite awful, and Kelli is a vast improvement, however I’m not sure what I can really do about it.
I think I’ll write back to the letter writer asking for permission to publish their letter in full as a “Letter To The Editor”. That’s probably the best thing that I can do under the circumstances.
Critics Question Obama’s ‘Fuzzy Math’ on War Funding Estimates
President Obama has presented Congress with some questionable accounting for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, analysts and Republican lawmakers say, as they begin to pore over his $3.6 trillion budget for the next fiscal year.
Critics say the administration at once has both grossly over-estimated the amount of money it will save by winding down the war in Iraq and under-estimated the actual price of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in the years ahead.
“This budget is a lesson in fuzzy math,” House Republican Leader John Boehner said in a statement to FOXNews.com Monday.
The budget includes a “placeholder” estimate of just $50 billion per year for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan starting in 2011. By comparison, the total war cost for fiscal 2009 is expected to hit $142 billion.
At the same time, Obama’s budget team projects saving $1.5 trillion over 10 years by scaling back the wars. But this estimate assumes the price tag for the wars would exceed $100 billion almost every year through 2019, despite pre-existing commitments to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of 2011.
Boehner said the move creates “phantom savings for money they never intended to spend in the first place.”
The estimate basically assumes the Department of Defense would shell out military spending at current rates. War costs hit a high in fiscal 2008, at $188 billion. But Obama’s budget assumes the government would still be dishing out $183.5 billion in 2019 if his administration didn’t step in to rein in spending.
“It’s like a family trying to claim savings of $10,000 by assuming a family vacation and not taking it,” said Brian Riedl, a senior federal budget analyst with the conservative Heritage Foundation.
Riedl said the estimate is unrealistic and allows Obama to claim massive cuts to spending that was never going to take place anyway.
[..]
Using these and others estimates, the White House claimed last week it was acting to head off a whopping $9 trillion deficit 10 years from now.
I wonder if it could work in reverse for me? I haven’t spent the lottery winnings that I haven’t received yet, therefore my bank balance should be a few million dollars.
Dang, didn’t work…I suppose I’d be jailed for fraud if it did.
Some journalist at The Scotsman must have been having a bad day when they wrote this contradictory nonsense:
Scientists in Britain have identified new eight-legged spider species that could soon invade Scotland. Experts say the creatures are moving northwards due to climate change. The dark-colored spider comes from the Canary Islands and Madeira and has been brought into the country in boxes of imported bananas.
Experts now believe these spiders will soon be crawling across Scotland. They have also expressed concerns about another spider specie[s] named, the “false black widow”. This one rushes towards people who come along its path. It is not really clear whether these mass spider movements are generated by climate. This is because other media in Scotland say they are moving northwards to decongest their populations in the South of the country.
An eight-legged spider? In other words it’s not one of the daddy long legs from my house.
The spiders are migrating:
1. because of climate change
2. in boxes of imported bananas from the Canary Islands (how did they know the climate would be better at in Scotland?)
3. in order to decongest southern Scotland
Perhaps the journalist had been out in the sun for too long…
Are you looking for a new job?
Do you enjoy complicating things?
Do people often struggle or fail to comprehend your decisions?
Do you often struggle or fail to comprehend your decisions?
Do you believe that the quickest way from point A to point B is via points C through F, L through Q and Y via H?
When you follow a map, do you still end up in the wrong place?
If you answered yes to all of these questions, then ACTION want you to become a valuable member of their network planning team. In reality, the word “planning” gives the wrong impression…what ACTION want is somebody who revels in chaos and can make their network even harder to comprehend than it currently is.
Being able to write gibberish which can be fed to the Minister for Territory and Municipal Services which will then be used to fill articles in The Chronicle will be considered advantageous.
What brought on this extraordinary outburst I hear you ask? Quite simple really. I caught the 25 from Woden to Cooleman Court, got off at the first stop on McInnes Street and walked the rest of the way. I beat the bus to Cooleman Court by seven minutes.
Add to this the odd belief that people don’t want to travel before 8am on Sundays, and the even weirder belief that Erindale, via a lengthy detour through Wanniassa, is a major town centre on weekends…a belief which adds a lot of time to the run between Woden and Tuggeranong, and I think you start to catch my drift.
I have a handful of far-left blogs on my regular reading list, mainly for the amusement value, and partially so that I can get a better understanding of views that I probably don’t share, and the reasons behind them…on rare occasions I learn a thing or two from them.
Today isn’t one of those days. Today is a bipartisan day of amusement courtesy of Qed
Ah, well that would explain how I manage to continuously find new problematic situations for myself!
Even I, a person who doesn’t believe that Fox News is anywhere near as biased as people claim, was shocked to see them citing Crikey in a story this morning:
Surprise Asteroid Makes Near-Miss of Earth
A small asteroid buzzed by Earth Monday, though only real astronomy geeks in the Pacific would have noticed.
The rock, estimated to be no more than 200 feet wide, zoomed past our planet at an altitude of 40,000 miles at 1:44 p.m. universal time — or 8:44 EST.
Dubbed 2009 DD45, it was discovered only on Friday by Australian astronomers.
Forty thousand miles may sound like a lot, but it’s only about one-seventh of the way to the moon, and less than twice as far out as many telecommunications satellites.
Had 2009 DD45 hit the Earth, it would have exploded on or near the surface with the force of a large nuclear blast — not very reassuring when you consider humanity had only about three days’ notice.
According to the Australian news Web site Crikey, the asteroid is likely to be drawn in by Earth’s gravity, meaning it may return for many more near misses in the future.
(emphasis added to final sentence by Samuel)
At that altitude one can only hope that space junk doesn’t collide with the asteroid and send it plummeting to Earth. Needless to say, that would be bad.
I was watching Terminator 2 last night and noticed something which I haven’t noticed before, and I’m amazed that it took me this long to notice it.
The character Tarissa Dyson was played by S. Epatha Merkerson, who I know much better as Law & Order‘s Lieutenant Anita Van Buren.
Image credit: NBC Television
I suppose the thing that really threw me off until now is that in Terminator 2 the character Tarissa Dyson spends almost her entire time looking absolutely terrified, whereas Lt. Van Buren is a generally authoritative figure who usually looks to be in control. She also used her voice quite differently in T2, using almost none of her trademark deeper voice which she uses to such great effect in Law & Order, and she was also about as skinny as me in T2.
She is a great actress, I’m just surprised that it took me this long to connect the dots.
On that note I should probably mention that I’m enjoying the current series of Law & Order, which recently started screening on Channel Ten and has been screening for a while on NBC, a lot more than the last couple of seasons, and I think the writing has improved significantly. Lt. Van Buren has a much-needed stronger presence in the investigations, the two detectives work very well as characters which is probably helped by the on-screen chemistry between the actors Anthony Anderson and Jeremy Sisto.
Jack McCoy’s (Sam Waterson) promotion to District Attorney and his love-hate working relationship with the clever but stubborn Executive Assistant District Attorney Michael Cutter (Linus Roache) adds a strength and complexity to the District Attorney’s office which seemed to be lacking for a while. I dare say that Alana De La Garza was well cast as Assistant District Attorney Connie Rubirosa, quite possibly the character which prevents the DA’s office from falling in a heap.
I also note that Law & Order: UK debuted on ITV last week. I watched it with some interest, although I nearly switched off after about ten minutes due to the cardboard acting of the two Detective Sergeants which severely detracted from the show. Thankfully they got better, and the rest of the actors hit the mark in a rather complex and intriguing storyline. I hold out some hope for this series, it was a good start overall and will hopefully get better as time goes by.
When it’s a tax credit which becomes part of your taxable income. Barack Obama giveth $13 per week with one hand and instructs the IRS to retrieve it with the other.
Rush Limbaugh Show: Friday February 27, 2009
RUSH: Gail in Lakeside, Arizona, you’re on Open Line Friday. Hi.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. Thank you for all you do for us.
RUSH: Thank you very much.
CALLER: I wanted to share quickly what I found out when I had my taxes prepared last week. The man that prepared my taxes for me cautioned me to watch out for my tax cut. He said, [“]and you may want to adjust your withholding to take that back away, because the tax rate tables for next year when preparing taxes are not changing[“]. So I could possibly owe my tax cut back to the government next year.
RUSH: You gotta be kidding. Not even I was aware of this trick. Say that again. They’re not changing the rates, right?
CALLER: The tax rate tables that they use when you prepare your income tax.
RUSH: Yeah, these are not tax cuts.
CALLER: Right, exactly.
RUSH: These are transfer payments. These are tax credits and all that. There’s no tax cut here. I should have been able to think of this on my own here, absolutely right. You’re getting income, you’re going to be taxed on it next year.
CALLER: Right. And we won’t be able to pay it back $13 a week.
RUSH: ‘Cause the same rates — ah, man, your tax preparer is not only pretty smart but he’s pretty forthright and honest with you on it. So what you are going to do?
CALLER: Change my withholding and take my tax cut away so I don’t have to pay it back next year. Thank you, president, for nothing.
RUSH: (laughing) It just never ends. There’s nothing real from these people. They don’t say anything they mean.
It took me a little while to get my head around this because virtually every tax cut which we receive in Australia is via a change to the tax rate tables, and the federal treasury usually produce examples of what the effective tax cut (ie. increase in net pay, post PAYG witholding) would be for people earning certain incomes, which then get repeated on the news.
The “tax cuts” in the US are not that at all…in fact they’re about half way between the $900 stimulus payments which the Australian government are handing out to a lot of people, and the tax table adjustments. The $900 payments are effectively the government giving people money and are deemed to not be taxable income, and the US $13 per week is similar in that it’s a “discount” on your income tax and is therefore a payment from the US government, however as there are no changes in the tax tables and the $13 per week is not deemed to be untaxable, it ends up becoming taxable income…I’m still struggling to fully comprehend the horribly convoluted legislation which produces such a bizarre outcome, but I sure am glad that I’m paying tax in Australia and not in the US.
