Speech Wars
This little site lets you pick two words and compare the number of times they’ve been used by US Presidents (and candidates) in State of the Union, inauguration and election campaign speeches from the 2008 election.
I ran some interesting tests – firstly with the candidates on their own names. It turns out Obama talked about McCain by name a whole lot more than McCain talked about Obama – although he did forget his name a few times…
Then looking at State of the Union addresses I ran tests on faith v hope, war v peace, and must v cannot… the results weren’t surprising – hope is more popular than faith – I think because it’s more positive. Speeches should be positive. War is more popular than peace – and that’s pretty logical when you look at US foreign policy. Must is more popular than cannot – because taking positive action is better than not doing something negative – and there are a lot of synonyms for cannot but not many with the same power as “must” for the affirmative side.
Here are the pics:
Worth your salt
These Rubik’s Cube salt and pepper shakers are the perfect accessory for your multicoloured kitchen. Admit it. You’ve been waiting for me to post a stupid gadget all day – or since I posted the drinking cups with the peeing boy.
They’re just £11.99. Each. Here.
Hollowgram
This is cool. It was in my list of links today – or yesterday – but deserves a post of its own. Find out how to make one here.
Garage Sailing Redux
My Star Wars Auctions on eBay finish up today – actually there’s one item that seems to have slipped through the posting cracks – two if you include the Boba Fett that I haven’t listed for Tim’s benefit.
The good news is that I’ve hit the break even point on the auctions and will actually make a profit. That’s bound to keep Robyn happy.
Feel free to jack up the prices with some last minute bidding action. You may score yourself a bargain. Darth Vader and R2-D2 are due to finish in just over two hours.
Power to the people
Not only will this bad boy have you singing Snap!’s I’ve Got The Power. It will also generate 2 watts at normal walking speed. That’s enough to power personal electronic devices. It’s being spruiked as a solution for power generation in Africa.
Political football
Murray Hurst, The LNP candidate for Townsville has a problem. He’s been pigeon holed as “the former North Queensland Cowboys coach”. Which he was. In 2001. After that he was a councilor at Thuringowa City Council – a much more credible position if you’re running for election. Unfortunately Mr Hurst has a problem. His campaign strategy seems to be to remind people that he was the Cowboys Coach.
“In many ways it’s like a rugby league team at the highest level,” said Mr Hurst, who coached the Cowboys in the 2001 and 2002 NRL seasons.
“You’ve got to worry about your own backyard without being overly concerned about who you are facing in the election.
“It’s always a case that you’ve got to have a good team behind you. Obviously now with a new opponent, one I didn’t expect, it may be different but it’s me and my team against the Labor Party.
In this interview from the Brisbane Times he goes on to talk about important stuff. Like infrastructure spending and health. But it’s too late. The horse has bolted. If you’re reading this Murray – and no doubt your crack campaign team has a google alert set up to tell you when people are mentioning your name – no more football analogies. This is an election campaign.
Who said this…
“I had two women police officers come around who looked like cabaret artistes – all fishnet stockings and deep cleavage – and they did not exactly engender confidence.”
Answer: Australia’s celebrated feminist Germaine Greer after her home was broken into. Talk about undermining equality in the workplace.
Fire branding
One of the elements of longevity for media coverage of the aftermath of a disaster is a good name. The twin towers attacks will always be synonymous with September 11. Or 9/11. The Boxing Day Tsunami had the fortune of hitting on a public holiday.
As I listened to the news on the Today Show before heading to work this morning I heard the Victorian Bushfires called the “Black Saturday Fires”.
Is that the best the media could do? Surely it wouldn’t have taken a marketing genius to call them the “Black Sabbath Fires”.
Who gets to choose these names anyway?
They should sell naming rights to the highest bidder. Insurance companies would love that.
That is all.
Divorce and climate change
There’s some interesting anecdotal evidence, and some reasonable studies that link divorce with social problems, developmental problems and property prices.
The argument on house prices goes that where traditionally couples would have stayed together in “wedded bliss” in the marital home – ie existed as one household – now they are splitting into two households. So the number of “households” has increased dramatically since quick and easy divorces came into being.
According to the ABS Census data on “Living Arrangements” – 9.6% of the population account for 24% of households – those are single person households.
I’m not really a fan of Family First. But I am a fan of families – and think they’re probably the most important “unit” in our society. Steve Fielding from Family First has just done the unthinkable. Linked climate change with divorce.
“We understand that there is a social problem (with divorce), but now we’re seeing there is also environmental impact as well on the footprint,” he said.
“Mitigating the impacts of resource-inefficient lifestyles such as divorce helps to achieve global environmental sustainability and saves money.”
Go get em Steve. So, the left blogotariat (like the commentariat but in blog form) have predictably panned him. The central pillar of the left’s argument is this:
“Fielding thinks that divorce is bad because the Church thinks divorce is bad, but most Australians accept it as a necessary part of life, so Fielding tries to link divorce to something that most Australians do think is bad”
The logic of that statement seems to be that Fielding is wrong that divorce is bad because most people think it’s “necessary” which seems to equate to “good” – with good being the binary, and logical, opposite to bad.
My question, particularly to my left leaning non-Christian friends, is does anybody actually think divorce is a good thing?
It’s not like anyone from the Christian side of things is arguing that it should be illegal – divorce is included in the OT laws in the bible and spoken about by Jesus – essentially as a necessary evil.
I don’t think anyone argues that – I would have thought someone suggesting that we look at ways to lower the rate of divorce as a way to lead more carbon friendly lives would have the backing of the left. It seems like a nice policy solution to an emerging cultural, environmental and economical issue.
It’s particularly an issue because while households are shrinking in number of people they’re growing in number and size.
The 2006 Census Housing Overview says:
Despite the decrease in average household size in Australia discussed earlier, changing lifestyle preferences and greater wealth have resulted in an increase in the average size of houses over time. This is especially evident in the increase in the average floor area of new residential dwellings; which increased by 31% in the 20 years to 2006–07.
And:
“The higher rate of growth in housing stock can be linked to the steady decline in the average number of people per occupied private dwelling, from 4.5 persons in 1911 to 2.51 in 2006.”
Divorce must surely be one of the factors in this change – it’s not unreasonable to make the sort of link that Steve Fielding made. I’m not sure he deserves the scorn being poured on him by commenters at the Courier Mail and the original blog post from the left.
Climate nazis
My own personal climate change skepticism not withstanding… actually, I’m much more skeptical on the politics and economics of climate change than I am that the climate is changing… this little outburst by a Liberal MP has done nothing for the opposition’s credibility in a week where Malcolm Turnbull has slammed the government for not going far enough. When describing the myth that “scientific consensus” is meaningless Dr Dennis Jensen even managed to break Godwin’s Law:
“Albert Einstein was very much criticised by Hitler, and Hitler actually had a group of 100 top scientists in Germany write a book called 100 scientists against Einstein,” Dr Jensen said.
“Einstein was asked: ‘Doesn’t it bother you Dr Einstein that you’ve got so many scientists against you?’
“And he said: ‘It doesn’t take 100 scientists to prove me wrong, it takes a single fact’.”
Nanny state
I hate stupid legal proceedings. And this one takes the cake. The court in the UK should be absolutely ashamed of this.
Here’s the summary of the story:
The couple’s nightmare started in October 2003 when Mrs Webster took their second son to hospital with a swollen leg.
He was found to have a number of small fractures which doctors said could be caused only by physical abuse.
The following year they were permanently removed and put up for adoption after a one-day court hearing.
Medical experts later concluded that the injuries were not caused by violent twisting and shaking, but were symptoms of rare case of scurvy.
Mr Webster, 35, and his 27-year-old wife fled to Ireland in 2006 to stop their fourth child, Brandon, being taken into care at birth.
The Appeal Court ruled on Wednesday that even though the Websters ‘may well’ have been victims of a miscarriage of justice the adoption order on their eldest three children could not be revoked because the youngsters are now settled with their adoptive parents.
Apparently the principle of “innocent until proven guilty” and a parent’s fundamental right to raise their children are both things of the past in the UK.
Bank error
A Swedish woman had a nice surprise when checking her bank balance yesterday – she found an extra billion dollars thanks to a “bank error in her favour”… unfortunately it doesn’t seem like she gets even $200. It seems Monopoly is not like real life after all.
There’s a PR lesson here though. For some reason the general public expect big corporations to pay up when they make mistakes like this. It’s like the Townsville couple who thought they’d won big at the Casino due to a Pokie malfunction. It’s as though the “customer service” obligation we enjoy at supermarkets when things are priced or processed wrongly has become our normal expectation.
The bank should – if they want some free positive international coverage from the event – give the woman a nice little bonus. She’s be an ambassador for life then – all the TV and radio interviews she’s no doubt doing around the world right now would be much different if the bank had given her even$1000.
Unfortunately if you want to comment on this post you’ll have to avoid using the word bank. Because I’ve had 90 spam messages containing “bank” in the last two days it’s currently on the blacklist.
Bimonthly
I had to describe a function that happens every two months on our website today. Naturally I said it was a “bimonthly” event. And then I wondered if that describes an event that happens twice a month.