Posts filed under 'Bizarreness'
This is a story that caught my attention this morning.
A Romanian man who stole seven chickens has been jailed for three and a half years. The man, who is 51, was apprehended whilst returning to Romania after a four year absence, apparently he was recognised by his international arrest warrant. The man was very suprised to find himself on Interpol’s most wanted list.
I’m no expert on Romania or it’s law, but if these chickens are a form of currency he may have comitted an offence similar to robbing a bank.
UK news source Ananova have slightly more details, and not as much humour.
I wonder what he did with the chickens?
Samuel
September 6th, 2005 at 10:42am
In the circus of my life, alarm clock accidents can be minor disasters, making me late for various things, and in general, causing chaos. However after my latest alarm clock accident this morning I heard on the news that somebody else had a far worse alarm clock accident.
An air traffic controller at Canberra Airport slept in, effectively leaving Canberra Airport without an air traffic controller, and a rather worried Qantas flight circling, the pilots must have been very concerned as they wouldn’t have been able to make contact with the airport.
I would have thought that common sense tells you to have more than one air traffic controller scheduled at any given time…but this is little Canberra and I do have a category devoted to idiots…well done Canberra Airport.
Somebody from Canberra Airport did say that it was “unacceptable” and that they would make sure they had at least two air traffic controllers scheduled at any given time from now on, but it seems strange that they didn’t think of it in the first place.
Samuel
September 1st, 2005 at 07:13pm
According to some CSIRO scientists, sheep are not as dumb as a lot of people think.
The scientists sent the sheep through a maze and found that after going through the maze a few times, they had reduced their maze solving time from 90 seconds to 30 seconds.
Personally, I have never seen sheep as stupid. Flocking may be instinctive, but I never as it as a sign of unintelligence.
What I would like to know though, is why did the CSIRO undertake this study, after reading the entire ABC News article I still can’t see why they did it. Does it really prove anything of any value? I don’t think so, so what purpose does it serve? Anybody care to enlighten me?
Samuel
August 30th, 2005 at 11:07pm
I’ve just had a look at my collection of spam emails which I don’t bother deleting as gmail automatically deletes them after 30 days. Anyway, I just noticed some interesting names that the spammers have used lately.
- Gwrtheyrn Zaragoza
- Gralnick
- Grossman
- Erik Fuentez
- Goldenson
- Glucksman
- Fishbein
- Himmelfarb
I must say though, it was interesting to see “Adler” sending me an email with subject “Baldness Won’t Work”. Interesting…I would have suggested that some of the baldness cures won’t work, but I’ve been proven wrong by these masters of the English language.
I have to wonder if “Glucksman” is perhaps a poor attempt at “Glucksen”, a german word for “Chuckle” which is what most of the spam I receive is good for.
Samuel
August 30th, 2005 at 07:15pm
I’ve held this story for a week now because I had far too many other important stories to run, and then forgot to run this one, so here it is.
Last week while I was choosing potatoes in City Supabarn I noticed a pair of people, aged around 13 or 14, taking note of the prices of various produce items and comparing them to prices at other stores around Canberra.
If this was a school assignment then that is fine, but the paperwork they were filling out seemed to be just a bit too professional for a school assignment, apart from which, I can’t imagine why a school assignment would have students comparing prices of onions, bananas, types of meat and other products. Even the most elaborate maths assignment doesn’t require that much leg work. Apart from which, it is hard to imagine a teacher realistically expecting year 7/8 students to go into multiple supermarkets in Canberra (and some of the names I heard were from fairly remote suburbs…relative to Civic) and complete those forms.
I would suggest that it was probably a job that they were being paid to undertake, either by a research company, an industry regulator, or a competing supermarket.
I did try to get a closer look at their forms by inspecting (and choosing) items near them, but I couldn’t get a clear look.
Regardless of what they were doing it for, it certainly breaks the old stereotype of the price checker being the well dressed man in a suit holding a clipboard and squinting at the price tags.
Samuel
August 28th, 2005 at 07:53pm
I love stories I can tie in with previous posts!
You may recall that a couple weeks ago I declared that City News is the worst newspaper in the country, and then regular commenter John B1_B5 noticed that they were using a picture containing some unknown model to promote a theatrical presentation (albeit supplied by The Canberra Theatre Company and not checked by City News).
Well this week they have a picture on the cover of “The Canberra Review” which promotes a new presentation of Romeo & Juliet and others by the Russian Ballet (you may recall from a previous post that some of this will be “the most captivating and sensual nude scenes ever”). On this occasion they appear to have the picture correct, which suggests to me that The Canberra Theatre took notice of John B1_B5’s phone call and/or City News want to retain at least one shred of credibility.
The real estate section, “City Property” is interesting this week. A quarter page ad semi-formatted as an article on page two, a quarter page article on page 16, an almost half page opinion piece on page 17…and the rest? You guessed it…Ads!
August 27th, 2005 at 06:37pm
It has been interesting over the last few days to watch the various statistical reports that my hosting provider provides coming online and providing conflicting reports.
It seems that none of them can agree on how much bandwidth the site has used (it ranges from about 5MB to 15MB) and they all seem to want to tell me different things about how many 404 errors there have been.
The most interesting statistical anomaly so far is that AwStats is estimating that 295% of the readership have added the site to favourites. If it is true that, on average, each reader has added the site to favourites 2.95 times then I am very pleased, but I suspect it is just AwStats having problems with it’s estimation calculations.
I am still continuing to use the offsite statistics collected via javascript and an image (Webstat & Nedstat) for the moment. Whilst they don’t provide the purely accurate statistics from the webserver logs, they do measure page views pretty well, and are much better at counting visitor numbers due to the use of cookies. (Don’t worry, I have checked the privacy policy of these companies and they don’t even look at the data they collect.)
I will probably download the raw logfiles and analyze them myself with something like Pyflag which is (at least partially) the brainchild of Michael Cohen, organiser of the Security Miniconf at the recent Linux.Conf.Au. PyFlag will provide me with the power to find out what I want to find out accurately, which is more than I can say for the other statistics in use which do their best, but aren’t flexible enough….plus I get to have more fun this way.
Samuel
August 27th, 2005 at 12:11pm
Canberra can be interesting at times. I took these two photos after seeing this rather insane sight and thinking “I don’t know how they managed it, but this needs to be preserved”, and so it is, here, in photo form, for your entertainment.
Firstly, the scenic view, the lamp post is roughly three metres high.
And now, the closeup. Yes, it is three shopping baskets. They are from Woolworths (“The Fresh Food People” is their tagline), and the nearest Woolworths is roughly ten minutes away. There are a number of closer supermarkets so I’m not sure why the Woolworths baskets were chosen.
Needless to say, somebody had too much time on their hands!
Samuel
August 26th, 2005 at 12:21am
Despite the fact I didn’t post it last night, I was watching World Sport and noticed that they changed the question. As you may recall from the previous post on the matter, SBS World Sport asked
Were you surprised by the doping allegations against Lance Armstrong or have they proven your suspicions?
but by the time they went to air last night with the results of the poll they had changed the question to
Does the EPO claim by L’Equipe confirm your belief that Lance Armstrong was not clean when winning the 1999 Tour De France?
So SBS changed the question overnight without telling anyone and then published the results.
The results show that people were confused, SBS World Sport polls are almost always 70%-30% one way or the other, but last night they were
Congratulations SBS, you sure do know how to make a mess and pretend you didn’t.
To change the subject, this post is officially the first one to have a samuelgordonstewart.com picture.
Samuel
August 25th, 2005 at 07:18pm
I don’t know how many of you watch the SBS program, World Sport, but I do on occasion, and I was doing so tonight. They had a story about doping allegations and cyclist Lance Armstrong, apparently it has been semi-proven that he is a drug cheat. SBS then followed that story with their nightly “World Sport SMS Poll”. I don’t remember the exact question, but it was something along these lines:
“Were you surprised by the doping allegations against Lance Armstrong or have they proven your suspicions?”
After this, viewers are invited to send an SMS containing “Yes” or “No” to some phone number that I don’t remember.
But hang on a moment, can you repeat the question?
“Were you surprised by the doping allegations against Lance Armstrong or have they proven your suspicions?”
Errr, isn’t that actually two questions? Which one do you want an answer to? I could quite happily say “No” the allegations didn’t surprise me, and “Yes” they have proven my suspicions…but I can’t send “No Yes” and expect my vote to be counted.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed or not, but World Sport recently changed their wallpaper to a rather eye-exploding “semi-return to the mid 80’s tango redish orange desert pattern safari”, looks worse when they show the set from a distance too, it looks like a few cans of paint exploded.
Is it just me, or are SBS trying to dumb down their usage of the English language in an attempt to avoid alienating the mainstream commercial television audience?
For example, they have introduced a new name for an existing show, which to me at least, appears to be an oxymoron.
“World News Australia”
Excuse me? Whatever happened to “World News” & “World News Tonight”? Why has our multicultural broadcaster suddenly decided that all news in the world revolves around Australia? Perhaps it is half of a badly edited statement:
“Good evening and welcome to the world news, Australia.”
Perhaps SBS think that more people want to watch a news that has the word “Australia” in the title. (Well, check the ratings, people seem to like it if it says “Seven” or “Nine”).
Maybe SBS think the world is too big for one half hour.
Or maybe, just maybe, SBS have gone mad.
Whatever the reason is, SBS do seem to be going downhill.
I blame it all (mostly) on the fact that they are cost cutting. They cut those fantastic movie intros from their (then) movie buffs David & Margaret. SBS had themes for each night of the week, and a different presenter for that night’s movie, somebody who specialised in that particular genre of movie. It wasn’t just David & Margaret either, they had a rather talented bunch. I will always remember those Saturday night cult movies, they were often pretty bad sci-fi/fantasy combinations, but they did have a certain charm to them after an intro from the cult movie presenter. One of the many movie series’ I will remember is Gamera, the Japanese lizard dragon monster thing (possibly a copy of Godzilla) which could never seem to make up it’s mind whether it was helping or destroying the humans, but it always had a small boy as a friend and always seemed to encounter a “Toy monster Vs Model boat” scene.
I also remember a time when SBS was the central repository for the cream of international (mainly European) primetime entertainment, buying the rights to many varied and interesting TV shows. It would be common place to get strange looks for talking about that “fantastic Norwegian show that aired every week” but everybody, it seemed, had a guilty pleasure in watching at least one of those shows.
Those days are gone however, and now SBS try to style themselves on the ABC “Tonight, lots of documentaries” and the generic SBS “Let’s throw in some more soccer, inane shows with explosions (ooooh, ratings) and adult programming from sweeden”.
It is unfortunate to see SBS degenerate to such forms of entertainment, and I fear they are producing further cost cutting by buying the rights to the cricket. Seven could have continued the cricket, they did a good job (apart from Tony Squires), or the ABC, but not SBS. The shoestring budget has been stretched, and I fear SBS are going to continue to show programs filled with lunatics blowing stuff up just to prove they can’t do what you saw in that movie, more of those drastic wallpaper changes on the local shows, more documentaries that nobody is really interested in seeing, and more of those Swedish/German/somewhere late night adult programs.
I say bring back the gold old SBS that we had years ago…and scrap The Movie Show, the idiots on there now wouldn’t know a film from a canary.
Anyway, to get back to the main topic of discussion, I will be making sure that I record World Sport tomorrow night to see two things:
1. Will they reword the question and make a nonsense of the answers between now and then?
2. What will the ultimate confused outcome of this ludicrous poll be?
After recording I will take a screenshot and post it here for you all to admire!
Samuel
August 23rd, 2005 at 09:39pm
It would appear that I will be moving this blog soon as I have just bought the domain name samuelgordonstewart.com
There isn’t anything there yet, but there will be soon. I must say though, the hosting company have an interesting statement about custom error pages in their online manual:
Custom error pages that are smaller than 10k in size will not display properly in Internet Explorer. Insert a large amount of text into a comment to create the required size.
Oh thankyou great code monkeys at Microsoft, if I want my error pages to work in your “browser” I have to perform a file bloat….well thankyou sooo much.
Samuel
August 23rd, 2005 at 10:50am
If you have ever been sitting in a New York hotel room and wish you had gone to Africa instead, then you visited New York to early.
It would appear that scientists want to “rewild” animals such as Cheetahs, Lions and Elephants by releasing them in america. They argue that it would help to prevent them from becoming extinct in Africa, they also claim that the long lost semi-blood ancestors of many of these animals once roamed the North American continent.
Now, it might just be me, but an encounter with a Lion at a busy intersection isn’t my idea of fun…and I’m sure that the Americans don’t want an elephant stampede to run across the freeway in peak hour.
If you think about it, there have been lengthy debates about saving native American species, and some previous attempts at relocating various species have been dismal failures.
I’m not saying don’t save the Elephant, Cheetah, Lion, etc. I’m just saying, don’t make a whole new species. The world doesn’t need an American elephant, and the freeways don’t need lions.
It’s not quite the same thing, but I suspect somebody has watched the fiirst half-hour of Jurassic Park a few too many times….to that person, watch the rest of the movie and see what happens, you should also watch Jumanji which will give you a pretty good insight into the workings of wild animals in urban areas, no matter what your doctorate tells you, they won’t be playing cards and smoking cigars. I can guarantee that you’ll rethink your insane idea…unless your brain isn’t useful, which could very well be the case with an idea like that.
American Elephant? Nah, I’ll pass…
Samuel
August 20th, 2005 at 11:12pm
In case you are looking for a job, Tree Of Life in the Canberra Centre are advertising for an “Acting Assistant Manager”, yes, you read it correctly, an “Acting Assistant Manager”.
Now, to my mind, somebody who is acting in a role is simply filling the role of somebody who has retired or gone on leave…acting is an internal pseudo-promotion, not an actual job…..I suppose that Tree Of Life could be preparing to produce a film…are they going to pay the “Acting Customers”???
I’ve just found the feedback form on their website, I might ask them what they think an “Acting Assistant Manager” is. Interestingly, none of the other jobs are “acting” positions.
Whilst we are talking about the civic area, tonight a woman was standing outside Supabarn and took a photo of the checkout…a minute later she took a photo of Baker Delight, causing much hysterical laughter amongst the staff there…don’t ask me what the photos were in aid of, it just seemed rather odd to me…and the surrounding people.
In a nearby apartment block, somebody has somehow managed to put a shopping basket on top of a lightpost…I don’t know and I don’t want to know how they did it (well, maybe I’m a little curious), but I would like to know why they did it….maybe they’ll build a shop around it….who knows…
All these things serve one purpose….keep the planet interesting!
Samuel
August 19th, 2005 at 08:17pm
The title explains the answers.
When I plugged in my flash drive a few moments ago, I had Windows Media Player minimised, and as soon as I plugged it in, Media Player decided it had to ask me if I wanted to scan it for media files ten times.
My answers, well, I’ll read the title of this post to you:
“No, No, No, No, No, No, No, No, No, No”
Thankyou to the lovely loony monkeys typing code for Microsoft, you have made my life so much easier…now, what did I plug in my flash drive for in the first place?….Blast, I forgot, and I think it was important too….
Samuel
August 11th, 2005 at 11:15pm
This afternoon at work, we were discussing pie’s (the charming Indian boss who had never heard that word thought we were talking about “pine”, which really isn’t as tasty and often leads to tooth damage), and after following a link to a pie recipe, I noticed an ad telling me I had won something. Normally, I would not click on one of these ads, but on this occasion, I quite simply couldn’t help myself.
After clicking the link, I was presented with a page that had a strange little animation “calculating” my reward, which turned out to be $1101, the page also presented me with a timer telling me I had three minutes to call the number on the screen, which just happened to be an Australian free-call number, I printed the page (it had the claim number on it) and went next door to the office, which has the phone.
Upon dialing this free call number, I was transferred (at the advertising company’s cost) to a US call centre indentifying themselves as the “prize claim hotline” or something.
I told the girl who answered the phone that I had just won $1101 and she seemed to become excited (I don’t think many people ever ring the number, maybe she was happy to hear another person) and she proceeded to ask me for my claim number, which I gave her. She then went and asked me a few strange, although suprisingly understandable, questions about my holiday habits, how long has it been since my last holiday, what credit card to I prefer to use etc. She also asked for my name and phone number (office phone).
She then went on to tell me about this prize I had won, she was pretty much elaborating on what I had on my printout, a holiday to various places, I didn’t really care whether I was going to see a beach near a rollercoaster or not, but I pretended to be interested. She went on and on and on and on and on, until eventually she made the scam a little bit clearer, I was getting this fantastic holiday, I had to take at least one other person with me (which makes the per person cost seem much lower), and the third & fourth person is free. The total cost of this amazing holiday was a mere $1699. Naturally I had my $1101 discount, so it was only going to cost me $598, on credit card NOW and I can take my holiday whenever I want for the next 18 months.
During this entire performance, she was telling me information I was supposed to write down, names of places I could visit, and her name which, just on the off chance she is real and wants to google herself or you speak to her, was Shirley Mathis
She then had a recap of this amazing holiday, and then wanted my email address, she didn’t say why she wanted it, so I asked her:
“Are you going to spam me?”
to which she replied
“I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear you”
I asked her a second time and she froze, after a silence of about five seconds she said she was transferring me to her supervisor who “would be able to handle my enquiry better”.
I placed them on mute temporarily while I updated my surrounding co-workers on the status of this bizarre call (it was originally on speakerphone, but Shirley couldn’t hear me very well, so I picked up the handset), after a brief time on hold, an American man who never identified himself answered the phone and started blabbering more repeated details of this holiday before asking me for my email address, I asked him whether he was going to spam me, to which he replied
“I’m not going to stand on you!”
so then I said
“No, Spam…SSSS-PAAAAM”
He paused, and seemingly went into shock, and after about five seconds said
“Oh, no, no, no (chuckle) we just want to send you a verification code so you can see your prize again.”
He didn’t bother asking for my email address again, and instead went on to a postal address, I started with a number, and had to spell it out to him, then I had to spell out the worded part of the postal address….twice, at which point one of my co-workers burst out laughing and rolled on the floor for a while, which I told the man on the phone, he seemed to ignore that, and as soon as we were finished with that he went and told me (for the third time) that once he was finished with me he would put me through to a tape recording from the legal department which would ensure that I knew what I was receiving (as if they hadn’t told me enough times already). I was beginning to suspect that he was a tape recording himself.
He eventually got to the “I want your credit card details” section of the conversation, and I made an excuse, I told him I had left my credit card at home today, and he said that people usually tell him that when they don’t believe the holiday deal. He suggested that I should call home
“Put me on hold and call home!”
I couldn’t argue with that logic, so I said I was putting him on hold, couldn’t find the hold button and pressed mute instead, I obviously wasn’t going to ring home as I had no intention of giving them my financial details, during the time I had them on mute I discussed the progress of the call with my co-workers and heard Shirley saying something to her supervisor about me, which sounded derogatory, it also sounded like she was saying something along the lines of “I think we’ve got this one”. I’ve always wanted to listen in on people who are on hold, it can prove to be entertaining, my wish came true today.
I waited a few more seconds before taking them off of the muted hold, and continued to play their game as if I hadn’t heard anything.
Samuel: Are you still there?
Shirley: Yes, I’m here
Samuel: Oh, ok, your supervisor said I should ring home to get my credit card details
Shirley: I know, I was standing right here
At this stage I was thinking “But you said you were transferring me, how many other people are listening to this, perhaps you are in a small office and the other call centre voices are just a recording.”
The call continued
Samuel: Well, I tried, but nobody is home.
And the banter went on for a but longer, she started to sound disappointed, and told me about my holiday again, what came next really caught me off guard.
Shirley: You should borrow your bosses credit card…he can take it out of your pay cheque!
Samuel: (Laughter) I suppose, but he isn’t here right now
He was actually less than four metres away at his desk listening to me talking, but I wanted to finish this call politely, maybe they would let me have the bogus holiday to secure the scam…but alas, Shirley reached the stage where
Shirley: Well, I’m not going to be able to process your order without a credit card, I’m really sorry, I really wanted to help you out, I always look out for the people who sound like they need a holiday, and you sounded like that, and I really wanted to help you…
Samuel: Well, with the rate that your ads keep appearing, I’m sure you will be able to give it away to somebody, it is a pity, I would have liked the holiday, it sounded great, I guess it’s just not my day.
Shirley: Well it will go back into the system, I really wanted to help you, but I’m so sorry I can’t, maybe next time.
And that pretty much ended the call. I went back to the computer to find the three minute timer had changed to “Call Now”, I refreshed the page, and got the same claim number, the same prize, and another three minutes to call.
The call itself lasted for 24 minutes and 17 seconds, all of which was paid for by these lovely scammers.
Now if you have some spare time, and want to make those scammers pay, give Shirley and her supervisor a call, the more people the better, just use the details from my printout.
Ah yes, the fun that can come from those internet ads.
Samuel
August 9th, 2005 at 10:55pm
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