A few weeks ago A Current Affair hyped up a story about a restaurant which was serving cats. They ran a bunch of promos claiming that they had an investigation in to a restaurant which was cooking cats and serving them to customers. It was a beat up and a half, as it happened the restaurant was serving cats…it was serving them the leftovers. They were feeding a bunch of stray cats. Big deal.
Anyway, it reminded me of an amusing song which I had around here about a restaurant cooking cats. I looked for it at the time and couldn’t find it, however I found it earlier this week and thought I’d share it with you today.
If you have something which you’d like to share with the world as a Friday Funny, send it to samuel@samuelgordonstewart.com and I’ll usually be happy to give it a run.
On Saturday night just before midnight as a lead-in to ANZAC Day, Glenn Wheeler played this song on 2GB. I had been holding on to it myself on my list for the Musicians Of The Week Award, but after hearing Glenn play it I decided that it would be the perfect song for ANZAC Day, so now, half a day late, this week’s award goes to The Andrews Sisters, and the feature song is Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.
He was a famous trumpet man from out Chicago way.
He had a boogie style that no one else could play.
He was the top man at his craft.
But then his number came up and he was gone with the draft.
He’s in the army now, a-blowin’ reveille.
He’s the boogie woogie bugle boy of Company B.
They made him blow a bugle for his Uncle Sam.
It really brought him down because he couldn’t jam.
The Captain seemed to understand.
Because the next day the Cap’ went out and drafted the band.
And now the company jumps when he plays reveille.
He’s the boogie woogie bugle boy of Company B.
A toot, a toot, a toodlie-a-da-toot.
He blows it eight to the bar in boogie rhythm.
He can’t blow a note unless a bass and guitar
Is playin’ with him.
He makes the company jump, when he plays reveille.
He’s the boogie woogie bugle boy of Company B.
He was some boogie woogie bugle boy of company B.
And when he played boogie woogie bugle
He was busy as a busy bee.
And when he plays he makes the company jump eight to the bar.
He’s the boogie woogie bugle boy of Company B.
Andata toodliata-toodliata toot toot
He blows it eight to the bar.
He can’t blow a note if a bass and guitar
Isn’t with him.
A-a-a-and the company jumps when he plays reveille.
He’s the boogie woogie bugle boy of Company B.
He puts the boys to sleep with boogie every night,
And wakes ’em up the same way in the early bright.
They clap their hands and stamp their feet.
Because they know how he plays when someone gives him a beat.
He really breaks it up, when he plays reveille.
He’s the boogie woogie bugle boy of Company B.
This blog moved from Blogger to its own webspace in August 2005, only taking up a couple hundred megabytes at the time (this includes the photo gallery which was moved from a server in my house to the same server as the blog).
By March of 2007 the website had grown to approximately 4 gigabytes. If memory serves, it was about 3.8 GB at the time and grew to over 4 GB quite quickly. I remember this because I moved the website to an Australian server owned by a company which I worked for at the time. I was given the first 4 GB of disk space for free and paid for the rest, and at the time of moving the site, it only just managed to fit within 4 GB.
The site has since moved from Canberra back to the US and is now on a server in Melbourne where it takes up 7,068 MB.
The rate of growth has slowed a bit, probably due to the cessation of regular production of multimedia files (podcasts etc), but still, for what is essentially a personal blog, it is a fairly impressive amount of disk space being consumed. Impressive, that is, until you have to try and move it.
I have no intention of moving the site again, although I’m sure it’ll happen again at some stage as these things do tend to happen. Moving a site this size is not a trivial task as, despite the rapid increase in data transfer rates in recent years, it still takes a considerable amount of time to move this much data, and it is quite frankly a task which I prefer to avoid.
And that’s your dose of useless information for this week.
Apologies for the lack of a Sunday Bits segment last week (and the week before?). Once again it’s been pretty hectic around here. Amongst other things, I’m starting a new job on Tuesday…as if I’m not busy enough already! This job will involve a lot of shift work, so it looks like my body clock can go back to gladly not having the faintest clue whether its coming or going.
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I note with some pleasure that my good friend and former 1WAY FM colleague Lynn Nerdal, who left 1WAY FM around the same time as I did, has found herself a new home on the radio dial, 96.7 QBN FM on Sunday afternoons between 3pm and 6pm…when the local AFL coverage doesn’t take over bits of her show anyway.
Lynn makes for great company on the radio and I thoroughly enjoyed co-hosting with her on a number of occasions. I missed her first show last week, but will be sure to tune in to at least some of it this week.
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I also note with some pleasure that 91.9 and 94.3 1WAY FM are broadcasting Sheridan Voysey’s Open House program again on Saturday Sunday (edit: oops, brain snap there…you’d think I’d remember the day seeing as I drew great pleasure from working on a show which is in competition with Sharyn’s Psychic Boredom on 2UE) nights between 8pm and 11pm.
When I left 1WAY FM in late March, unfortunately they were not able to immediately fill my position as panel operator/weather presenter for Open House on Sunday night despite me giving five weeks of notice, and so for about a month, they replaced Open House with music. Thankfully they have been able to find somebody else to sit in the studio on Sunday night, and Sheridan Voysey’s wonderful program is now back on the air in Canberra.
To the Open House fans in Canberra, I apologise. As I’ve said before, I was simply unable to maintain finishing up late on Sunday night and backing up to work at 9am the next day. My body simply couldn’t take it any more. I was pushing it with the five weeks of notice that I did provide to the station.
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On that note, I empathise with 2GB’s Ray Hadley who is currently working seven day per week and, understandably, wants a day off.
The logical choice to me is Saturday. Ray’s only role on Saturday is to head the five hours of self-described gibbering that is Weekend Detention. He could safely leave this in the hands of “The C Team” (asking B-teamer Andrew Moore to do it would be pushing Andrew a bit too much), which would allow him to still host the show and call the football on Sunday.
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The changes keep on coming over at 2UE where Program Director Greg Byrnes has resigned, leaving to take up a senior position over at Sky News. I doubt that with a new program director, the changes at 2UE are likely to slow down…if anything I expect them to increase as the station tries to claw back some ratings points from 2GB.
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The Rudd government’s bizarre proposed mandatory internet filter is on the back-burner, and might not see the light of day before the federal election. And on the off-chance that it does re-appear before then, never fear, for the trivial task of bypassing it will not be punishable.
Whilst this is great news, it does make one wonder what the Rudd government’s definition of “mandatory” is, and what other of their words fit in to the “my words mean what I want them to mean” category?
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It seems that the policy surrounding what constitutes a death which counts toward the road toll has changed as suicides are apparently no longer counted. A few weeks back, somebody apparently deliberately ploughed in to a concrete wall at Parliament House in the wee hours of the morning. According to Police:
The incident is being treated as a deliberate act and will not be recorded as an ACT road fatality.
I can think of at least two other deliberate crashes in recent times which did count towards the ACT road toll, so when did this policy change, and why? Surely any death through the use or misuse (and I’m sure that we can agree that you need to misuse a motor vehicle in order to deliberately kill yourself with it) of a motor vehicle on a public road should count towards the road toll. Why do I get the feeling that, given our already higher than usual road toll so far this year, somebody in authority has just said “we can probably get away with not counting this one, that’ll help keep the road toll number down”.
What’s that saying? “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics”?
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On a related note, I see that Google is now censoring suicide searches by adding extra information about helplines. I know from experience that searches for information on suicide are already heavily stacked in favour of suicide prevention. Do we really need to alter the search results further to the point where we’re effectively applying censorship? It just seems like an odd stance for a company which is opposed to Rudd’s proposed internet filter.
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It seems that the New South Wales government does not believe in the freedom of the press. The National Parks and Wildlife Service, a division of the Department of the Environment, has a curious policy titled “Filming and Photography Policy” which controls who can take photos and film in national parks, and how much they have to pay to do so.
Part ten, after announcing that the news and current affairs media do not have to pay for access, declares:
All news and current affairs filming, including matters which relate to a particular incident, such as a bush fire, must be referred to the Public Affairs Division on (02) 9995.5295 in the first instance. Incident related information will then be referred to the nominated Incident Controller by the Public Affairs Division. The Regional Manager must be notified of any intention to film/photograph for news and current affairs by the Public Affairs Division and give consent for the carrying out of such filming.
So, how do you rate the chances of 60 Minutes being given consent to film in a national park for the purpose of a story about mismanagement of national parks creating fire hazards?
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I was astonished this week to read that a third of American mobile phone owning teenagers send 100 text messages per day. I just can’t get my head around this. It has been weeks since I last sent a text message and even longer since I received one from a human (I receive them from robots for work-related reasons all the time).
To each their own I suppose, but I would much rather use email instead of SMS for most text-based communication. I’m curious though, I don’t send or receive 100 emails per day…what could people possibly be discussing which requires 100 text messages to be sent per person per day?
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Finally, it is ANZAC Day, may we all remember and have the utmost respect for those who have, and those that would, lay down their lives so that we may remain a free country. Many brave people have laid down their lives for us, and many more are risking their lives for us as you read this now. To them, we should be eternally grateful.
It’s interesting the ways in which we end up reflecting on the sacrifices of our soldiers. For me over the last week it really came about when I was appalled to hear that a friend intended on going clubbing on ANZAC Day. That was a knee-jerk reaction, and it was a wrong reaction, but it got me thinking about what ANZAC Day really means. I later apologised to the friend in question as, after some thought, it occurred to me that our soldiers have laid down their lives so that we may live in a free country and accordingly so that we may choose how to spend our days.
The morning of ANZAC Day, especially the dawn, is sacred and nothing will ever change my view on that, but we are privileged to be in a country where we are free to spend our time as we please. Regardless of whether you choose to observe ANZAC Day, as long as you do not actively show disrespect or contempt for our soldiers, past and present, I have no problem with how you choose to spend today, and neither should anybody else.
I do, however, ask you to remember the sacrifices of our soldiers, and spare a thought for the families of our military personnel on this 95th anniversary of the ill-fated landing at Gallipoli. Lest we forget.
I thought I was dreaming this morning when I heard on the radio that Chief Turnip Jon Stanhope intends on removing bicycles from Northbourne Avenue and moving them back to their rightful place on off-road cycle paths. He even, apparently, wants to move the buses our of the already over-congested left lane of Northbourne Avenue.
It was the (lack of sane) planning of the Stanhope government which gave us on-road cycle lanes on busy roads, many of which are 80km/h zones. Northbourne doesn’t fit in to the 80km/h category, but it fits an even more dangerous category for combining cars and bicycles, it’s a super-busy road with buses which have to stop in the bicycle lanes constantly.
I’m pleased to see this policy backflip. It’s good news for cyclists and motorists alike, but it must surely put the fragile partnership between ACT Labor and the ACT Greens under further strain. The Greens have already been shafted by Labor on many occasions, and now it looks like one of the Greens key policies is the exact opposite of Labor’s policy.
The Greens believe in having more bicycles on the road and less cars on the road. Labor apparently believes in the opposite now. How they’ll work this one out when the Greens are in favour of making it difficult to even own a car in the suburbs, let alone use one on a main road, is beyond me.
With any luck, now that Labor has adopted the sensible policy of removing bicycles from our roads and placing them back on the cycle paths, the Labor/Greens partnership is dead, and we won’t have to have any more pandering to the peculiar ideas of the enviro-socialists.
What happens when you entrust an egocentric psychiatrist with the task of creating a short jingle for his radio show? Perhaps we should allow Dr. Frasier Crane (Kelsey Grammer) to demonstrate.
By the time you finish playing that each hour, it’d be time for the next news surely.
As you would have undoubtedly heard by now, the Melbourne Storm have been stripped of two premierships, three minor premierships, all of their competition points so far this year, are unable to accrue any further competition points this year, and have been fined $1.6 million dollars for systematic breaches of the salary cap totalling at least $1.7 million over the last five years.
I can’t help but feel very sorry for the fans of the Melbourne Storm right now. They, of all people, have the most right to be angry, and should be the most upset by the atrocities committed by the club’s management, and it is them that it hurts the most.
The fans are the innocent victims; they are the people who supported their club in what is already hostile territory, and they have now not only lost two premierships and three minor premierships, but have absolutely no good reason to attend a single match for the rest of this year. The Storm can not gain any points this year, can not be lifted off the bottom of the ladder, and quite frankly have no reason to bother putting in any effort on the field. The only reason they might even think about playing well is to try and prevent their hometown supporters from deserting them.
The corruption, fraud and blatant dishonesty of the powers-that-until-today-were at the Melbourne Storm deserve everything that is thrown at them. Whether criminal charges can be laid I do not know, but I have no doubts that, given the nature of the cover-up, and the devastating results of the scandal, News Limited, owners of the Storm, have every right to sue the people responsible for this travesty. And I hope they do. In fact, I hope the NRL as a whole join in.
The damage to the game is immeasurable. The NRL has worked long and hard to stamp out this sort of nonsense after the breaches of the salary cap in 2002 by the Bulldogs, and has now had all of that hard work undone by a bunch opportunistic creeps in suits. It takes a lot to make NRL Chief Executive David Gallop sound disheartened, and today he sounded absolutely shattered. His work over the last eight years has been trashed, and it was obvious that he was distraught when he fronted the press conference this afternoon.
Fans have every right to follow in Gallop’s footsteps here. This is a shock to the Storm fanbase, and to the NRL supporters in general. The entire game has been brought in to disrepute, and I wonder how long it will take the game to recover. I suspect it will take years, and for the Storm, even longer, if they recover at all.
As I said earlier, the Storm are in hostile territory. Melbourne is AFL territory, and given that the team now have the better part of the year to be unable to play a game which means anything, it could be years before the team has a decent supporter-base again, and I really do think it’s going to be struggle for them to survive over the next few years.
As many of you will know, I’m a Bulldogs fan. I was devastated by the Bulldogs’ salary cap breach and its consequences in 2002, but I was lucky in comparison as the season was almost over. The Storm find themselves in a much worse position, and with all the excitement of weekends filled with AFL down there, Storm fans would have to be very loyal indeed to continue supporting their team.
I do hope that the Storm can rebuild and recover in an honest manner, as it would be a shame to lose them from the competition due to the actions of a corrupt few. That, however, is a long-term thing. What is of more importance now is finding out who knew, how much they knew, and taking swift and decisive action against them.
In my view, everyone who is found to have been knowingly involved in this (and if it includes players, then so be it) should be sacked, fined, and banned from any involvement in the NRL for life. There can be no room for this kind of disgusting act. For those that were involved, I can only say “sack them all and sack them now”.
2GB, as one would expect from the nation’s leading NRL broadcaster, were all over this story this afternoon. Jason Morrison’s show crossed live to the press conference and then had the reaction from chief NRL commentator Ray Hadley, followed by that of callers and others. Here, courtesy of 2GB, is the audio of the press conference and Hadley’s reaction as heard on the Jason Morrison Drive Show.
After the maternity leave fiasco, it’s nice to see Tony Abbott making some sense again.
The idea for firm time limits on the dole (the payment for people who are unemployed, are not students, not retired and not ill or disabled) has always seemed like a good idea to me, especially seeing as in the area where I live, there seems to be an endless supply of drug-fuelled dole-bludgers who manage to stay on the dole by attending job interviews for jobs which they have no intention of getting, thereby fulfilling their payment requirement of appearing to be looking for work.
I don’t support the idea of completely banning the dole for people under 30 years of age, although I would be in favour of tighter restrictions on the dole for people under 21 years of age. At that age, quite frankly, it’s a case of study or work.. If parents want to fund their adult offspring’s leisure, then so be it, but the offspring shouldn’t expect the taxpayer to do so.
The plan from Tony Abbott and the opposition, apparently, is to limit the dole to six months. This seems perfectly reasonable to me, and should be more than enough time for people to get back in to the workforce, even if it means going in to a job other than one which they would prefer. They can always change to a different job later on if necessary.
The idea of the dole is not to act as an income from which one can live, but to act as an interim safety net, accompanied by one’s savings, to get one through a brief period of unemployment. People who are working and paying taxes should not be expected to pay for the lives of those who are capable of working, and choose not to work.
Paul Howes, boss of the great socialist empire known as the Australian Workers Union, calls this whole idea a “Sarah Palin moment” and, for once, I agree with him. Where I disagree with him, is that he thinks this is a bad thing. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Sarah Palin is a great conservative figure with a great understanding of the economics which help countries to thrive, and I’m sure that Tony Abbott would be delighted by the comparison. Personally, I’d call it a “Stan Zemanek moment” as the late Stan Zemanek battled for this type of sensible policy for years.
Now, I’m sure that people (it’s happened before) will point at me as an example of why this policy can not work as I spent much of last year out of work. The fact is, I was looking for work for almost all of the time that I was out of work last year, but I had saved enough money beforehand to avoid needing to rely on the public purse. Things were tight for a while, but I did not, at any stage, receive a government unemployment benefit. There were a few times where I almost took a job which I didn’t really want, and if it had been necessary, I would have taken those jobs, but I was fortunate that small amounts of ongoing work, and an eventual more permanent job made it possible for me to get by without needing government handouts.
It’s true that I had to learn a lot more about budgeting and sacrifice during this time. In fact, for large portions of the year I went without a car. It is this sort of careful planning and budgeting which makes government handouts, for the most part, unnecessary in the long-term and hopefully for most people, in the short term.
I fully understand that there will be some people who need the financial assistance during a period of unemployment. That’s fine and that is what the dole is for. But as I’ve already said, the dole is a temporary measure, and should have firm time limits on it.
As Sean Hannity would say, “when you’re unemployed, it is your job to find a job”. It is on this basis, that dole payments should be made. A temporary helping hand while you get back on your feet.
Ever since just before 2GB sacked David Oldfield so that they could replace him with his predecessor Jim Ball, the rumour mill has been on overdrive with news that Oldfield would simply be switching with Jim and be taking over 2UE’s overnight show. As usual with this kind of rumour, it was half true. David is indeed coming to 2UE, but not to take over their overnight show which is now quite comfortably being anchored by Mike Jeffreys, but rather to bolster their fill-in roster.
This was confirmed within the last day without dates by the emergence of a Facebook group dedicated to David’s emergence on 2UE, and I have now received this information from an anonymous but reliable source. It reads like an extract of an internal memo, so I’ll copy and paste it verbatim.
I’m pleased to announce that David Oldfield will be joining us for several weeks in May, filling in on Drive and Nights.
David will step in for the holidaying Two Murrays from Monday May 3 – Friday May 7. He will then move to nights for two weeks filling in for Stuart Bocking.
Most recently David was 2GB’s overnight host – prior to that he had an extended stay in both state and federal politics.
Could a permanent shift be on the cards for David in the not-to-distant future. Given his performance on 2GB overnights, and pending a decent performance in his fill-in roles, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it happen.
According to The Daily Telegraph earlier this week, John Laws will be on ABC Local Radio across the country for the last hour of Australia All Over with Ian McNamara. This airs between 9am and 10am in eastern Australia.
Ah, yes, of course I am going to yell at you if you, in an 80 zone, decide to not only move in to my lane right in front of me without indicating but also decide to stop suddenly in the process. That neither of us were hurt is a miracle. You are an idiot, please do not drive ever again.
Update Thursday afternoon: Apparently I didn’t make it clear enough at the other end of this post. It’s over. All wrapped up around midnight…that’s when they all left. End Update
Police are currently surrounding the unit of a “Simon” not far from my place in Reid. A police negotiator named Carly is attempting to coax him out of the property.
Police were monitoring the property from an unmarked van for about half an hour before they decided to move in. It seems that Simon is wanted in connection with an incident this afternoon. So far, he has refused to leave the property, yelling “go away” at one point.
More as it develops.
Update 11:55pm: I can’t see it from here, but after some hiding in his cupboard (which Carly could see through the window) it sounds like Simon has been convinced to come out, much to the relief of his sister who was waiting outside. According to Carly’s announcements, whomever else was involved in Simon’s incident this afternoon, is OK. This seemed to help convince Simon that it was safe to come out and that the police would not hurt him.
It’s over, after about half an hour of standoff between Simon and the police. The armed police and surveillance vans are packing up. A good outcome. End Update
Sad news from western Russia this evening. The President of Poland, Lech Kaczyński, has been killed in a plane crash from which there are no survivors.
MOSCOW – Polish President Lech Kaczynski and his wife died Saturday along with 130 others when their plane crashed while coming in for a landing in western Russia, officials said.
The governor of the Smolensk region, where the crash took place about 11 a.m. (0700 GMT), said no one survived.
“The Polish presidential plane did not make it to the runway while landing. Tentative findings indicate that it hit the treetops and fell apart,” Sergei Anufriev said on state news channel Rossiya-24. “Nobody has survived the disaster.”
The Polish foreign ministry confirmed that Kaczynski and his wife were aboard the plane.
The head of Russia’s top investigative body, Sergei Markin, said there were a total of 132 people on the plane, a Tu-154.
It is sad whenever an elected head of state is killed, however given my political allegiances I am especially saddened by this news, as Lech Kaczyński was one of those few good politicians who had plenty of good conservative values and recognised the inherent dangers in allowing giant bureaucracies like the European Union to be allowed to expand in to domestic affairs.
My thoughts and prayers are with Mr. Kaczyński’s family, and all of Poland, at this terrible and tragic time.
May Lech Kaczyński rest in peace. He will be missed.
Update: This story is getting worse unfortunately. It seems that many more high-ranking Polish officials were on the plane. More from the FOX News story linked above:
Kaczynski was flying to Russia for events marking the 70th anniversary of the massacre of thousands of Polish officers by Soviet secret police in Katyn and elsewhere during World War II.
The presidential plane was a Soviet-built Tupolev TU154M, at least 20 years old. The Army chief of staff, Gen. Franciszek Gagor, National Bank President Slawomir Skrzypek and Deputy Foreign Minister Andrzej Kremoer were on the passenger list.
In Warsaw, Prime Minister Donald Tusk called an extraordinary meeting of his Cabinet.
[..]
According to the constitution, [Parliament speaker Bronislaw] Komorowski would take over presidential duties.
The next Presidential election was due in Spring. It may now be brought forward. End Update
I was saying last night that I would love to hear Rex Hunt and Eddie McGuire calling AFL together now that Rex has found a home at Eddie’s station of Triple M in Melbourne, and that I was surprised that Eddie wasn’t calling football.
My prayers have been answered this afternoon. Rex Hunt and Eddie McGuie are both calling the North Melbourne V West Coast match right now.
This year, with a lack of the annoying Brian Taylor and the addition of Rex Hunt and Eddie McGuire, it’s more than fair to say that Triple M rocks football!
This year’s first radio ratings have been released and are as follows:
1st: FM 104.7 20.2% (up from 18.3%)
2nd: 666 ABC Canberra 18.5% (up from 16.1%)
3rd: Mix 106.3 16.9% (down from 18.0%)
4th: JJJ 8.0% (down from 13.5%)
5th: ABC Classic FM 7.6% up from 7.4%
6th: 2CA 6.8% (up from 4.1%)
7th: Combined unlisted 6.6% (up from 5.4%)
8th: 2CC 6.3% (no change)
9th: ABC Radio National 6.0% (down from 7.5%)
10th: ABC NewsRadio 3.1% (down from 3.4%)
I don’t really have time to do any analysis of this at this very moment, however I intend on doing so this evening. Stay tuned!