Samuel's Blog

Twitter Updates for 2012-04-03

• @leolaporte that's nice of you Leo, but don't feel too bad. We all make mistakes from time to time. in reply to leolaporte #

April 3rd, 2012 at 09:00pm

But, pre-recording future events is easier, isn’t it?

This afternoon (yes, I do sometimes sleep in the afternoon when I’m on night shift) I had a dream that I was a regular guest on a TV show. It was my role to opine on the news of the day, and it looked like the TV show was a breakfast show, although it wasn’t one of the breakfast shows which is currently in existence. Instead it was a show titled “Talking” and had a set which looked like it was built out of concrete in Soviet Russia (hmmm, Maritz will read this…I wonder what she thinks of concrete buildings?), with a few small square bits of coloured paper stuck to the wall to make it look less bland…not that it helped.

Anyway, I walked on to the set one day for my segment, took my seat and was approached by a producer who quickly whisked me away in to an office to inform me that I was not going to appear that day, and would instead need to wait around until the end of the show so that I could pre-record a month’s worth of segments. According to the producer, I was “very difficult and troublesome to work with” because I wanted a cup of coffee each day instead of the company’s usual glass of water. According to the producer, coffee was “hard to come by” and “goes off very quickly once opened” and it was therefore not feasible to buy a new jar of coffee every few days when I was the only person drinking it. Instead, what they were going to do was buy a jar of coffee once per month and make me one cup of coffee per segment so that the jar would be emptied, the coffee would not be going to waste, and they would only need to buy one jar per month instead of four.

I told the producer that this was insanity, and that it would be impossible to pre-record opinion pieces on the news of the day a month before the news had happened, to which the producer replied “but, pre-recording future events is easier, isn’t it? I mean, that way you don’t have to worry about being late with a story because you can be ahead of it.”

I stared at the producer blankly before bursting out laughing, but the producer didn’t get it. I asked him how he expected me to know what would happen in advance, and he informed me that it was simple.

“News is all on the teleprompter, so if we just scroll forward then you can read it and then record your opinion segment” he said.

I told him that he was nuts, and as his decision had the full backing of the network executives, I enacted the severance clause in my contract which entitled me to one free tin of coffee and three coloured squares from the studio wall, and I left.

My segment was replaced that day by Blinky The Fortune-Telling Clown who, after a month on-air, had a zero percent accuracy rating. Oddly, the ratings for the show went up, and he was awarded with two segments per day. The network even launched an advertising campaign for it: “Just as much Talking, with double in inaccuracy”.

The dream ended when I saw the ad for that in the newspaper.

Samuel

April 3rd, 2012 at 07:22pm

In my dreams, wiping out a suburb can get you thirty years!

Yesterday I had a dream that I was at work and was going about my business, walking along a corridor which looked surprisingly like the back corridors of the CIT campus in Reid. While I was walking I was handed some papers by one of my supervisors at work, and he advised me that the papers needed to be delivered to rooms 2 & 3 immediately. The papers appeared to be some of the usual correspondence that I receive at work on a daily basis.

I changed direction to head to rooms 2 & 3, but accidentally dropped one of the papers and it fell through a grate in the floor, down to the basement. I hurried down to the basement (which looked like the basement of my primary school) and saw that the paper had landed on some equipment, caught fire, and was levitating. I picked up a fire extinguisher and aimed it at the floating and burning paper, but it did not put the fire out, instead it blew it over towards a petrol tank which quickly became engulfed in flames, and exploded.

The explosion wiped out the entire suburb, however despite the speed at which this occurred, I was able to escape the area along with everybody else. We probably broke the land speed record.

I was approached by a fire investigator who asked me how the fire started. Feeling guilty, I tried to deny any involvement, however he marched me off to court where, upon meeting the judge, agreed to admit to starting the fire. The judge announced that he would sentence me to thirty years in prison, and that ten years of that sentence was a direct result of me lying to the fire investigator as the sentence he normally hands down for wiping out suburbs in explosions is twenty years per suburb (suburban destruction must be more common than I thought).

Samuel

2 comments April 3rd, 2012 at 04:20pm

RIP Jimmy Little

I was saddened yesterday to hear of the passing of Jimmy Little. Jimmy, although not a musician of my generation, was an iconic voice of my childhood. His music, especially “Royal Telephone” was in high rotation in my household.

It is hard to believe that it is six years since I awarded Jimmy with the Musician Of The Week award, and even harder to believe that a man with such great talent is now gone. Still, I pray that he is now up there in heaven, out of pain and performing as he has always done, with great ability to bring joy to the masses.

I have previously featured the recorded version of Royal Telephone, so today I will instead bring to you a video of how I envisage Jimmy in the afterlife, happily performing his music in front of a live audience.

Rest in peace Jimmy.

Samuel

April 3rd, 2012 at 04:06pm