Sporting groups cry foul over alcohol sponsorship ban

The Daily Telegraph

July 18, 2009 12:01am

No solution ... AFL boss Andrew Demetriou says a propsed ban on alcohol sponsorship would cripple football.
* Plan would devastate sport, say codes * Wouldn't make a dent on problem drinking * Government tight-lipped on proposal
BANNING alcohol sponsorship and advertising would devastate sport and not make a dent on problem drinking, major sporting groups said yesterday...

Full article

I'm sick to death of living in a nanny state where those in charge concentrate so much effort on trying to modify human behaviour with regard to products that are perfectly legal to produce, purchase and consume. The role of government is to administer the finances and laws of the land, not to tell us how to live our lives. They seem to think, naively, that if you keep information from the public as to what choices are available then they will cease to seek out the things that they want. This is obviously not the case. Everyone knows alcohol exists, everyone knows where it can be purchased and anyone who wants to avail themselves of it will continue to do so. All that will be changed by banning alcohol advertising is the amount of time people spend in bottle shops choosing what they want to buy. If you know what you want you ask for it, if you don't, you browse. By causing people to spend time browsing they will actually have the reverse effect of what they are trying to achieve. It's a retailers dream to have uninformed customers wandering about looking at their wares. The more time people spend looking, the more they buy. So sport suffers for no positive outcome. Stupid.

VIDEO: Hoon drag race

Look at this video:
VIDEO: Hoon drag race

Link to the story:
Hoon drivers post illegal street race videos on YouTube

HOON drivers are laughing in the face of authorities, posting an internet video showing an illegal street race in front of a southern suburbs police station.
A video posted on website YouTube just four days ago shows a young male driver street racing in front of the Christies Beach police station on a wet and slippery Dyson Rd at night.
The video creators and hoon driver reflect precisely the dangerous drivers Road Safety Minister Michael O'Brien describes as a "cohort of highly irresponsible, predominantly young, male drivers" who are responsible for causing a "bedrock" limit to reducing the state's road toll.
The video shows two high-powered cars at traffic lights directly outside the police station, revving engines in a bid to entice a drag race.
Cars and a truck pass in front of the ready-to-race vehicles, the red light holding them on their start line. The road ahead is wet from rain, is poorly lit and narrows to a single lane shortly beyond the intersection.
The camera records an expression on the face of the hoon driver before turning to the opponent's rear wheel – which spins madly as the lights go green and the race starts with a screech and roaring engines...

My (Grumpy of Norwood) comment:
Rubbish! That video shows nothing more than a great demonstration of how to make something seem more exciting than it really is with the use of sound. At no stage did the other cars wheel "spin madly". It merely started to rotate as the car went forward and we hear a squealing noise that suggests a spinning wheel. The car in which the filming was done never appears to go particularly fast, it just makes a lot of noise - and I'm not convinced that sound wasn't added later either. Total beat up story based on absolutely no evidence of anything actually going on. Watch it again with the sound turned off and see how exciting it seems then.

Email scammers target taxpayers

A link

Email scammers target taxpayers
By Eoin Blackwell
AAP
June 26, 2009 02:03pm

* Emails promise $250 with tax return * ATO says it "never sends these emails" * Online scammers in stimulus grab
CYBER criminals purporting to be the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) are using a sophisticated email scam involving personal tax returns to fleece consumers, a computer security company says.
The scam ATO email, which promises a $250 bonus on top of a tax return, links the taxpayer to an online form that asks for personal details including ATM pin, credit card details and tax file number."

My (Grumpy of Norwood) comment:
Oh My God. This article cannot be serious! I got that email and it was the least sophisticated attemp at fraud I've ever seen. It was in Courier, badly centred, English was obviously not even the writer's 2nd language. I laughed. I called people in from other offices to show it to them so they could laugh as well. And the link didn't even work! Nobody is going to be fooled by this silly scam.

My job is now keeping me awake at night

It's after 1am and I can't sleep because I'm so frustrated, bewildered and angry about a ridiculous thing that's going on at work. It's entirely caused by ignorance, at least it's not malicious or intentional, but that doesn't change the fact that I'm stuck with it.

OK, so let's try to sort this out. I've been asked to do a logo design for a housing development. Great, I love designing logos. They are the most challenging and rewarding task for a designer. Get the logo right and everything else becomes easy. The logo sets the type, colour and style basics for everything that follows - stationery, advertising, website, brochures - they are all so much simpler to design if you nail the logo first. You get to create a consistent look for the client that becomes recognisable in the marketplace, which helps everybody. It makes it easier for the client to reach the target audience for their product, it makes it easier for the audience to recognise the client's brand, it makes it easier for the designer to produce everything required because the logo sets the style for it all.

When a client comes in and says "I've got this new product, I'm going to need a brochure", the correct response is, "OK, we'll first need to sort out the logo then so we can get started on your brochure". Not, "OK we won't bother the designer with that yet, instead we'll have our production guy knock up a brochure layout and worry about things like the logo later".

If the client has, say, $5000 to spend on a logo, brochure and website, you allocate at least a few days worth of solid time, perhaps $1000, to producing logo options, refining and editing down to the final result until it's perfect. It makes sense because then the brochure and website will only take half the time to design because you already half know how they should look.

What you don't do is, again, get the production guy to produce a single brochure visual, with no logo, present that to the client and get their approval, do nothing for a week and then tell the designer he has to design the logo and the website in a single working day. That would be nuts, right?

That would mean that the logo now has to be something that will fit into this already approved brochure design, which makes the job both far more restricted in scope and therefore infinitely more difficult. And it means that this riddle has to be solved within a few hours, so it's never going to be anything special, or going to work as well as something that was designed solely for the purpose of representing the product. It has to be a compromise before it's even begun.

I'm sure you've guessed which route they've taken at work. I have 1 day to not only design this logo and the website, but also the website layout for another job as well. Obviously we're just not a company that rates quality of design very highly, which is a shame because, as a designer, I do.

I want a ladder.

At any given moment, with absolutely no warning whatsoever, anything in my house has the capacity to amuse me. Tonight it was my step ladder. I was passing through to the back of the house in which I live and, sitting by the back door, there was MY stepladder. Mine. I own it. I went to a shop and I paid money and bought it for me to use on those occasions when something is marginally too high to reach by precariously balancing on a chair of dubious stability. Adults own things like that. Not children, they use their parent's stepladder. Ergo, I am an adult for owning a stepladder. Hoorah.

Among the plethora of things that I own, a proper grown up ladder, of more than 4 steps that you can reach the ceiling with, is not among them. I shouldn't own one because there are rules about such things and the rules say so.

I rent. That's it in a nutshell. Further among the things I do not own is a house. I was never inclined towards, or financially capable of, such a feat. The fact is that people who rent have no business owning proper grown up high ladders. If something needs doing in a house that is rented that requires the use of a grown up high ladder then it is the landlord's job. That's the rule, the line that needs to be crossed to get from "tenant's job" to "landlord's responsibility." The ladder is that line. I don't know if that's how it's worded in the tenancies agreement but in practice, that's how it works.

But I want one. I covet them. Years this has been going on. Honestly. I'm that crazy, really. I'm mad me. I don't own a house but by God I shall have my ladder. A ladder with a gimmick, obviously, because if a person who isn't strictly qualified to own something insists on having one anyway, there must be some other, less practical aspect to it's operation that opens its usability options up into hitherto unexplored vistas. Something a practical, house owning grown up with a need to maintain his or her ceiling wouldn't absolutely find essential to perform normal grown up ladder type tasks, in this particular case.

A bendy ladder, perhaps. Hmmmmm,...

On the Subject of Myself and Other Creative Persons Wot I Know

I just worked out a thing about myself which may go some way to also understanding several of my friends, acquaintances and business associates. This revelation can be compressed into a simple sentence which, obviously, me being me, I shall then expand upon at length in the form of a rant. It's what I do and this, I guess, is the point.

Creative people are difficult.

There, I said it. We're difficult. Let me explain (I warned you!).

For the last few weeks I have been required to work extended hours to achieve certain goals that have been thrust upon me by my employers. Usually I only have to work 20 hours per week under relatively stress free conditions for an (almost) exorbitant rate which nets me more income than a lot of people have to work 40 hours to match. It's a doddle. However, as the hours have grown, so has my temper. This afternoon I had my boss promising to buy me a bottle of Scotch as a reward for just doing my job. I had become so scary that he thought the promise of free alcohol was the only thing that would calm me down.

Now, I like the idea that I can scare people because I genuinely think that I'm among the least threatening beings on the planet. But then I finished work, came home and found myself thinking about it, over a good deal of the very substance offered to me earlier, and I realised what I like to call... "A Thing".

This must be the very reason why I have worked alone in my own home or rented private office since the age of about 28. I'm actually not fit to work and play with others. It's the way I function: pressure + stress = anger + shouting. What I realised today is that this is what I need to do in order to be creative under pressure. It has nothing to do with the task in hand, it has nothing to do with the people who are dumping this annoying shit in my in-tray all day. It's not personal. There is simply a direct correlation between what is required to be done and the amount of shouting that is necessary for me to be able do it.

I'm sure there's a link between creativity and anger. Another day, when it's not after midnight and I don't need to be back at work in less than 8 hours, I might do some research and add some statistics and/or facts to my postulation but, alas, it's time for bed.

Goodnight.
And GRRRRRRRRR!

Do I LOOK like a spy?

I always enjoy a day when my synaptic functions operate well and I manage to formulate intelligent and amusing thoughts and express them clearly in the form of coherent sentences. Some days I'm doing well to grunt.

Today I did well. At lunch everyone laughed at all the right times, my opinions were sought on a wide range of topics and my responses treated with respect. Much wine was consumed, the sun went down and I was later left alone to contemplate dinner which, I decided, had to involve a stroll up to the supermarket for onions. I like a night stroll.

Standing in the queue, basket in hand. The man before me, who I didn't recognise, looked back at me, sheepishly said "Dirk Gently" and expectantly smiled.

"Hello, yes" I replied, assuming he must be remembering that my name is something like Derek, well, exactly like as it happens, and Dirk was as close as he could get. I'm crap at remembering people so perhaps he wasn't a stranger after all I reasoned.

"Do you know what I'm saying?"

"Yes, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency"

More smiling, "Ah! Someone who understands what I'm talking about!"

"Not really. Knowing what you're saying and understanding what you're talking about are two completely different things and I'm only managing one of them at the moment."

He turned and walked forward to be served and I was left wondering if I'd just failed to respond with the appropriate reply in some clandestine meeting of spies. "The pigeons fly at midnight". "Yes, it is very unexpected at this time of year"... but at least I'd sounded intellingent while doing so.

Use of flashing lights by Police vehicle

I sent the following, last Saturday afternoon, to the Police Complaints email address I found on the website of my local Police force. It's self expananatory:

"Earlier this afternoon, at about 1.30pm, Saturday 17/5/08, I was waiting to walk across X Parade., a few hundred metres west of the intersection with XXX Terrace. There was quite a lot of traffic queued facing east at a red light and, at a break in the centre island on X Parade. A police vehicle facing the opposite direction was waiting to do a U-turn, but this was obviously not being facilitated with as much ease as the driver wished as there was no break in traffic to allow this manoeuvre.

So on came the flashing lights atop the vehicle, causing other vehicles to stop as they approached to let the police car turn and then, with lights still flashing, vehicles were persuaded to either pull aside or close up to others in front of them to create a big enough gap for the police vehicle to cross 2 lanes and enter a car park to their left. I watched, assuming they were going to cut through the car park to avoid the lights and carry on down XXX Terrace about some business, but no. The vehicle was then parked and a uniformed officer got out and went into the Subway takeaway to order himself some lunch!

I was left wondering about the legality of this sequence of events. Surely the flashing lights are meant to be used in emergency situations and the power to make other vehicles get out of the way is something that should be reserved for some sort of police business, not to speed up entry to a takeaway to buy a sandwich. Consequently I took note of the registration of the police vehicle, which is XXX-XXX, and decided to bring this matter to the attention of some appropriate authority.

To be honest, I'm getting a bit sick of this sort of thing. It feels like bullying, throwing weight and authority around unnecessarily. As a resident of XXX Terrace I quite often witness police vehicles travelling up the road in the wrong direction (ie. on the wrong side of the traffic island opposite the X Hotel) for something like 20 to 30 metres in order to perform nothing more important than, again, access the Subway store across the road there, but this usually just causes me to laugh, being fully aware that should they see anyone else do exactly the same thing then the driver would be pulled over and fined. The use of the flashing lights to facilitate the same objective, however, seemed one step too far for me to be amused by it.

Regards,
Justified Ancient of Mu Mu"

I got an official letter in the post today, informing me that my complaint had been referred to the "Internal Investigations Branch" and that I would soon be receiving a phone call from an officer to initiate a "conciliation process".

I'm scared!

What moron invented money?

Every day there are dozens of things that annoy me. They start first thing with the alarm clock which just shits me on principal, reminding me every morning that we as a species are completely fucked. What other animal sets up their civilisation in such a way that nearly all freedoms of the individual are voluntarily given up? I’m not talking about ants or bees, they don’t really function as individuals in the first place and besides, they have the simple, basic, shared purpose of survival to take care of. We humans are perfectly able to look after ourselves as a hunter/gatherer species and yet we have chosen to delegate those tasks to others in favour of each pursuing a single, self chosen task for the purpose of acquiring small rectangles of a paper-like substance that we exchange for the goods and services we can no longer acquire or do for ourselves because we’re too busy doing the crap thing we decided to do for the rest of our lives. Whose bright idea was that? What fucking idiot thought that life would be better if we shared tasks and exchanged money to balance out everyone’s efforts? That person was wrong. Yes, civilisation as a whole benefits, we progressed, and we get a bigger, brighter, more complicated choice of stuff we can have, and I love stuff more than most, but it’s a pretty rubbish system from a personal satisfaction, enjoyment of living perspective. Take me for instance. I work on a computer and will happily admit that, as a task, this is a hell of a lot easier than building my own shelter, growing my own vegetables, hunting the occasional wild animal and trying not to to get myself killed in the process, but I can’t help feeling that life would be a lot more interesting and fun that way. The biggest challenge I face each day is heaving myself unwillingly out of bed each morning, cursing the moron who invented the concept of money and who is responsible for each of us having to be up and dressed and off out to our daily job at a set time every day. Cunt.

Earth Hour

Bah Humbug. I've been shopping for spotlights and power boards this afternoon and at 8pm my intention is to light my house up like an airfield. Landing lights, that's what I need and lots of 'em.

Fucking hippies.