As anyone who has read this blog for any length of time would know, I have some very peculiar dreams, and various characters from The Bill have been known to appear in them. Well, imagine my surprise when I came across this music video the other day and found actor Jeff Stewart (PC Reg Hollis from The Bill) in it. I don’t think I can make any sense of what’s happening in this video, but it really could be a scene from one of my dreams. It makes about as much sense as my dreams.
This is Sam Brown’s 1988 cover of Marvin Gaye’s “Can I Get A Witness”.
Courtrooms have appeared in my dreams before too. I had a dream where I was a prosecutor and mid-sentence forget absolutely everything about the defendant I was questioning and the case I was prosecuting. I asked the magistrate for a moment and referred to him as “your judginess” which prompted him to declare the defendant not guilty and find me guilty instead! Yep, makes as much sense as the courtroom in this video.
Something I enjoy doing is playing with older computer systems or getting virtual or emulated versions of older computer systems running on modern machines, and using that to play with older games and software. This is especially enjoyable when I can get some of my favourite childhood games to run.
In today’s video I go through some of the systems and games I have running, and well…while it’s fun, I’m not actually all that good at computer golf!
Also here is the wonderful free DOS-based cash register program by Dale Harris which Dale is still maintaining, and some fun with internet browsing which doesn’t quite work in older browsers.
I was recording the first episode of Samuel’s Persiflage but for some reason I was recording it in a rented office in a busy warehouse rather than a room at home where it was really recorded.
The busy warehouse looked like a cross between Officeworks, Bunnings and a factory. I was recording the operatic introduction (which I still think was wonderful even if the listeners did not) while wandering around the warehouse and was accompanied by actor Richard Belzer who was playing various instruments. It wasn’t at all clear why Belzer, portrayor of Detective Munch was there; he just was.
The staff in the warehouse were trying to avoid us and the noise.
I suppose it’s not surprising that people would have been doing their best to get away from the noise of my opera. It has been known to startle unsuspecting animals. I recall one time when I was looking after a neighbour’s cat and started singing while changing the kitty litter…the cat froze, eyes wide open staring at me, then ran to the other end of the house as quickly as possible. The cat probably thought I was about to explode!
My opera has also been known to entertain, baffle and confuse people who get through to my voicemail, where a lovely dose of 40 seconds of my opera greets people before they can leave a message. The reactions of various callers when they leave a message are quite entertaining, with everything from singing in reply, to mild amusement, and even outright horror at having had to sit through it. I answered a call once from someone who had previously reached my voicemail and he expressed great relief at not having to hear my singing again.
A recording of my lovely operatic voicemail greeting
Pebbles and Shyley are accustomed to it, although Pebbles will often give me a strange look if I start singing, while Shyley may bark at me or join in the singing with a howl of sorts.
I had a strange dream the other day. You could say that all of my dreams are strange and I wouldn’t argue with you about it.
Anyway, in this dream I was a detective in a police procedural / murder mystery show. I was not the main character but rather a supporting character who usually worked on cases unrelated to the main plot and was mainly there to make the office look busy and occasionally have a thought which helped the main characters with their case.
In this scene, the main characters asked how my case was going, to which I gave a rather generic response about ir “progressing nicely” and then the main characters noticed that my partner was absent, and asked where my partner was.
“No idea! I think they’re not here because the show’s budget is being used on your guest star suspect and we can’t afford an extra character with lines this week”
The main characters asked how I knew their suspect.
“He’s been in the promos all week. Didn’t you see them? Look, he’s obviously guilty as the producers wouldn’t pay for him to just be a witness. Get him into the interview room and yell at him for a bit, then encourage him to have a lengthy monologue. That should get him to confess. But not yet. Finish your coffee first. There’s still two commercial breaks left this hour.”
And then I went to get a cup of coffee.
This isn’t the first time I’ve been a character who knows they’re in a TV show in my dreams. I once dreamt I was in a repeat of Third Watch and nobody was particularly interested in doing anything because everyone knew what was going to happen anyway.
For most of the week, the majority of attention from the world’s news media was on a political conference in Milwaukee which showcased the likely next leaders of the American government. Of course, this all got wiped off the news agenda shortly after it finished when a very dodgy software update became the news, except that most news outlets were severely hampered by it and could barely report on it.
Anyway, the focus on Milwaukee reminded me of one my favourite performances by Jerry Lee Lewis, singing What’s Made Milwaukee Famous.
It is one of the many questions I have about the attempted assassination of former US president Donald Trump over the weekend. Why was that roof not secured?
Back in 2003, then-president George W. Bush visited Canberra. One of the places he visited was the Australian War Memorial. My high school is across the road from the Australian War Memorial and the roof of the building is probably a little bit further away from where President Bush went than the distance the shooter was from Donald Trump. And yet, arrangements were made for school to end early that day, at lunch time if my memory is accurate, with extra buses put on to get the students out and with staff expected to be off the premises shortly thereafter. This was so that Secret Service had time to fully sweep and secure the buildings and put snipers on the roof.
This was all done in a foreign country with a building which wasn’t really even an obvious security threat given fairly poor visibility from the school to the bits of the war memorial which the president was going to visit. And yet on home soil, a barn with direct line of sight was missed. It just doesn’t add up.
A lone police officer is reported to have climbed a ladder to investigate a report of a man on the roof, but retreated when a rifle was pointed at him. Why? What would make a police officer tasked with securing a political campaign event think it is in any way appropriate to back off from an unknown person who is armed with clear line of sight to the candidate?
There are some aspects of the news coverage which made me wonder if the news media was expecting some sort of big event. For example, Fox News was covering the rally live, which is not something Fox News normally does these days. Some smaller channels such as Newsmax normally do cover Trump rallies live, but Fox stopped doing that a long time ago. Here in Australia, Sky News just happened to have their chief news anchor on the air filling in as host of a show which he doesn’t normally host (he used to host it but that role was given to someone else this year). The major Australian commercial networks had their big name anchors taking over from the perfectly-capable weekend breakfast show hosts pretty quickly and ABC even had the host of their American-focused news and analysis program ready to co-host coverage. On a Sunday. The chances of all of that happening without coordination just don’t seem plausible.
I’m not saying the media knew there would be a shooting. But I am left wondering if someone knew this was planned and tipped off some parts of the media that there would be a major story breaking and they should have their top people ready to go. The very strange poor security adds to my questions about this.
Assuming this was more than just a lone nutter, I’m not singling out any particular group as being responsible as I can think of many reasons why people from all over the political spectrum might have wanted to do this. There are people who would have wanted the shooting to be successful and people who have wanted an unsuccessful shooting to occur. I have no reason to believe or dispel the notion that any of these things are possible.
What I will say is that I’m glad the shooting was not successful. I believe the US is in a low-grade civil war and has been for many years, and the world doesn’t need it escalating to a full-blown conflict, which is exactly what would have happened if the shooting had been successful.
I should also note that I am a trump supporter. The history of my posts here will show that he was not my first choice in the Republican pack in 2016 but he won me over and I thought his presidency, on balance, was a good thing, not perfect by any means but good, especially the work he did to return the US justice system to following the constitution by appointing judges who believe the constitution should be interpreted from an originalist perspective.
But regardless of what plays out politically from here on, I certainly hope we don’t see scenes like the one on the weekend again any time soon. Alas, if my fears about what went on to make this possible are in any way correct, I can’t imagine this being the last attempt.
Apologies for not getting around to a Sunday Share post over the last few weeks.
This week we resume the series with one of my favourites. Longtime top-rating Sydney breakfast radio host Alan Jones had the very distinctive opening instrumental portion of this song as his theme music. Although only played briefly a couple times per day, there was no doubting what show you were listening to when this came on.
Although actually I did get confused one morning when I was listening to Rush Limbaugh as he was on around the same time as Alan and sometimes used this as bumper music. In my half-awake mode at the time I was slightly confused as to which station I had tuned into and why Rush was filling in for Alan!
As for why it’s one of my favourite songs. I am in awe at the effortless power and range of Laura Branigan’s voice. A marvel of musical talent.
Today I’m looking at the football correct score market and how the Real Money Staking system has been profitable throughout the Euro 2024 tournament, and how Easy Bet Bot Deluxe simplifies placing the bets. Plus a look at how some other sports would work with this staking plan.
As a follow-up to last week’s video on Shorties Staking with horse racing and greyhound racing, today I explains how I have been using Shorties Staking on the tennis during the Wimbledon tournament. Plus a Quick Look at a free website and app I use to keep track of various sporting events.
Perhaps it’s a bit cynical of me, but then I have become quite jaded about politics, but it has become hard to consider most elections as anything more than a circus, where clowns get sent to some other part of the country under the banner of their ringmaster. It just seems that, no matter who wins, nothing much really changes. Sure, there are differences between the parties, but on 90% of issues they seem to broadly agree with each other…the main parties anyway.
Here in Australia we are fortunate to have a building which looks like a big tent. The National Circus! You probably can’t park there, but for a quick obligatory photo opportunity when the constabulary aren’t looking, who could possibly resist?
In the UK they aren’t quite so fortunate, although it is interesting that while they have Downing Street for the ringmaster of their circus, in Sydney we have the Downing Centre Local Court. Named after different people, but hard to ignore the similarity. Perhaps today the good British folk are sentencing someone to be incarcerated in Downing Street for five years. Perhaps that’s why people get frustrated when PMs quite early…they didn’t serve their full sentence!
One of the great things about British elections is the wonderful and very British sense of humour displayed by having Monster Raving Loony Party candidates in fancy dress. Such is the great tradition of it, that all manner of other candidates pop up in outlandish costumes without being Monster Raving Loony Party candidates. The great incentive to doing so is that, over there, it is a requirement that candidates all be present at the location where the returning officer will announce the results for that electorate, so you end up with scenes in local, national and even international media where a bunch of very solemn and serious-looking candidates are flanked by someone in an outrageous costume. At the last election, Ringmaster Boris was flanked by two of them! Boris Johnson, Elmo, and Count Binface. None of them were from the Monster Raving Loony Party but in years to come history might judge them all as if they were
I must say, I am amused by a few of the Monster Raving Loony Party policies at this election, such as
Immigration..We will replace employees of the Border Force with GP receptionists. This will dramatically reduce the number of people getting in.
Foreign Policy…Once in Government, we will replace the Foreign Secretary with a British one!
Self-Serving….. Anyone using a self-service till in a supermarket will be given a 10% discount off their shopping.
The last one almost seems sensible. Why shouldn’t I get paid for doing someone else’s job?
On a serious note, if the polls are to be believed, it is possible that the Conservatives may receive fewer votes overall than Nigel Farage’s Reform UK (previously known as the Brexit Party). While this might not equate to Reform having more seats than the Conservatives, it is quite an extraordinary circumstance that one of the two major parties might be about to slip out of majorhood for the first time in living memory. A sign, perhaps, that people want real change. Not just a change of the person in Number 10, but a wholesale change in how government works and is run. Time will tell.
I do sincerely wish the British people well with their voting. I’m not convinced it will really make that much difference, but despite my cynicism, I do hope they get a government which isn’t a circus and actually works the way the people want it to work.
So as the results trickle in late into Thursday night and Friday morning in the UK, or through the middle of a Friday in Australia, while I fear the only real change will be in the colour of the governing party and not a meaningful change in overall policy direction, I look forward to the spectacle of great and peculiar costumed people treating the election with the levity and derision it deserves. It is a highlight of the political calendar for me…and there aren’t a great many of those left these days. One can’t take it too seriously, lest one fear all hope is lost!
Today I’m looking at how the Shorties Staking plan can be used to make the most of short-priced runners, with a particular focus on the favourite in the place market of British horse and greyhound races, although the system can be used on a much wider variety of sports and markets. While this is primarily a manual betting staking plan, I also look at ways to use automation to assist with it.
It has been quite remarkable to watch the ongoing saga of the betting scandal surrounding (almost certainly) outgoing British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, which has provided almost the only interesting spectacle in an otherwise quite dull election campaign, with the only other interesting facet being Nigel Farage entering the fray as leader of Reform UK (previously known as the Brexit Party) and managing to get ahead of the Conservatives in a number of polls, although whether this translates to more seats is yet to be seen.
For those of you who aren’t aware, the scandal relates to bets placed on the date on which the UK election would be held. Shortly after Rishi Sunak surprised just about everyone by standing in the pouring rain to announce a July 4 election (a date very few people expected), it came to light that his main protection officer had placed a bet on a July 4 election a few days before the announcement. After that, the scandal grew to encompass the Conservative campaign director, multiple MPs, at least one wife of an MP, and multiple Metropolitan Police officers.
While there is no suggestion that Rishi Sunak instructed anybody to place any bets, it seems clear that he told a few people about the date on which he was going to hold the election, and they thought they could make a few dollars on it. For some this may have been a way of getting something out of their own certain defeat at the polls, while for others it may have just been an opportunity. What’s amazing though is that none of these people seemed to realise that a bunch of bets placed on an unlikely outcome days before the announcement would raise the eyebrows of bookmakers and make them dig into who had placed the bets, or that it might look a bit suspicious that a person with ties to the PM would place a bet on something the PM could conceivably have given them information about.
If one is being uncharitable, one could wonder if perhaps the reason Rishi made the strange pouring-rain announcement was because one of the people who placed a bet rang him up and asked him to hurry up as they needed the payout for their gas bill.
Naturally, I feel a bit left out. It seems that Rishi told everyone except me that he would have a July 4 election. Then again, perhaps he tried. Maybe all of those daily missed calls from a Romanian number were from an agent of his, and they didn’t leave a voicemail because they didn’t want to leave any traces behind.
We have, of course, seen similar things here in Australia. There was a recent case of people with inside information about the Australian Of The Year award getting in trouble for placing bets on what they knew would be the correct outcome. I have to admit I considered doing this one year when I was accidentally sent a copy of the winners list before the announcement, but I didn’t go ahead with it.
I do, however, have my own similar story from the mid-2010s. This didn’t rely on inside information though, and was in fact down to bookmaker error so I couldn’t see any problem with it. After all, the bookmakers can always void a bet if they realise they have made a mistake…but they never did.
My story relates to Time Magazine’s person of the year award. In the mid-2010s, the winner of this award was announced on NBC Today about an hour before it was published on Time Magazine’s website. Australian bookmakers seemed to either be unaware of this, or didn’t care because there was no live airing on NBC Today in this country (Seven aired it early the following morning and received the delayed west coast airing so didn’t have access to the live version). This therefore meant that the betting market remained open for almost a full hour after the announcement was made. So for a few years I would find a not-at-all-legal stream of an east coast NBC affiliate and watch the live announcement of the winner, and then place bets on this outcome wherever I could find decent odds. About an hour later when the announcement was published to Time’s website, I would make a small profit. From memory I think I made about $50 at a time and not all from the same bookmaker, so it wasn’t a big profit but enough to be worthwhile, and generally the winner was one of the favoured outcomes so it probably didn’t seem at all odd or suspicious that someone would bet on it.
I forgot all about it one year, and when I checked again the following year, the bookmakers had worked out that the announcement was being televised prior to online publication and closed their markets at the start of NBC Today, so the loophole was gone.
Was it wrong? Maybe. But I don’t really think so. The bookmakers advertised a closing time matching the time of publication on Time’s website, and I was placing bets based on publicly available information. I wasn’t using secret information. Also, as the bookmakers had the power to retrospectively void bets if they decided the market should have been closed earlier, as far as I was concerned it was their mistake to not know as much as they should have known about their own markets. To my mind, this is not at all the same thing as the naughty fraud of being provided with outcomes ahead of time and betting on them. But maybe that’s just me, and the shades of grey might look different to others.
None-the-less, it does bring me back to Rishi and friends and the broader concept that it is remarkable to me that bookmakers have so many markets where certain people can know the outcome ahead of time. Everything from award winners and interest rate decisions to election dates to who will perform at half time of the Super Bowl. It really seems to be asking for trouble for bookmakers to open themselves up to the possibility that people who know things may bet and go undetected. I’m sure that for all of the ones we’ve heard about lately who have been detected, many many more slip through the net. It also seems to me that if bookmakers have such markets, they should wear the risk of insider knowledge and not be able to void bets or ban or prosecute people after the fact. If they don’t want the risk, they shouldn’t have the market.
But that’s just me. And I know my libertarian viewpoint on such matters doesn’t align, and probably never will align, with any form of regulation.
After the previous rather long video covering the ANZ Horse Ratings and Analyser and how it can be used to improve selections and profitability, this week I am working through a few tutorials on how to set up the Analyser spreadsheet and import data, either to analyse large amounts of previous races or specific types of races, and also how to look ahead at a day’s races and get a listing of the horses which meet your criteria.
Part 1 – Sanitising and importing data
Part 2 – targeting specific days and tracks (with Pebbles’ squeaky ball in the background)
Part 3 – Getting selections before the day’s races begin
For eleven years, John Kerr hosted New Day Australia on weeknights on a number of stations across Australia, headquartered at Sydney’s 2UE. For much of that time he used a very fitting song to end his broadcasts, with lyrics noting that “we’ve talked the whole night through”. It was the song Good Mornin’ from Singin’ In The Rain.
Later, when John hosted the weekend version of New Day Australia, he occasionally used the song to end the show, however for a lot of his weekend reign his show ended on 2UE earlier than it ended on the network so there wasn’t really an appropriate time to play the song. John moved to the Gold Coast while still hosting the weekend edition of New Day Australia and 2UE graciously paid for flights and accommodation in Sydney so he could continue to host the show, however eventually John retired from commercial radio. Thankfully John didn’t give up radio altogether and these days hosts an excellent country music show on Friday nights on Gold Coast community radio station 94.1FM.
Sean Hannity tends to have very very long openers for his show, combining clips of multiple songs with clips of various politicians and newsmakers. Unfortunately with the lengthy commercials breaks it does eat into the useful program time in each hour, but I digress.
For a few years around 2009, Sean used the chorus of Martina McBride’s Independence Day as one of the bits of music in his opener. It is a very powerful piece of music. I wish he still used it to this day, but alas.
