So, I went out and bought a smart phone. Not an iphone mind you, a respectable one, a Nokia. I quite like it!

Needless to say this is a test post to see if posting to the blog from the phone actually works. Fingers crossed...




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One thing Australian coppers specialise in is a sense of humour. In an AAP news feature (not available online) on the soon-to-be-vacant Chief Commissioner's chair, we learn that not everyone thinks the favourite, former AFP walloper Simon Overland, is the best man for the job:

One suburban detective said many police members believed Ms Nixon favoured "out-of-towners'' such as Mr Overland, whom he said had the derogatory nickname "Lantern''.

"That's because he shines bright but someone's got to carry him,'' the detective, who did not want to be named, told AAP.

This bloke can just about put his fine and conviction down to commercial risk:

A MELBOURNE man who sold decoder cards that gave users free access to pay television programming has been fined $7000.

Rodney Paul Doove, 43, of Mount Waverley, yesterday pleaded guilty in the Melbourne Magistrates Court to six counts of selling unauthorised decoders.

Prosecutor Liz Tickey said the scam was discovered when a Foxtel fraud investigator received an anonymous tip.

"In July 2007 (a) Foxtel fraud investigator received information… that unauthorised decoders, known as gamma cards, were available for sale at $400 each," she said.

The court heard that between July and August 2007 the investigator bought 25 gamma cards for a total of $8550.

I'm no mathematician, but that looks like a pretty good arrangement for Pirate Rod.

A yarn in The Age begins:

A RARE blunder by Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard undermined Labor's parliamentary attack on the Coalition yesterday over its opposition to Labor's $14.7 billion school building plan.

Oh no. What did she do?

Ms Gillard, regarded as the Government's strongest question time performer, was forced to apologise after she got wrong the name of a school in a Liberal electorate that had written to praise the Government initiative.

What?

Ms Gillard produced the email from the principal of "Milton North Primary School", to taunt South Australian Liberal backbencher Patrick Secker, in whose electorate of Barker she claimed the school was located. But after Mr Secker protested that no such school existed in his seat, Ms Gillard admitted she had mispronounced the name, which was actually Millicent North Primary School.

Good god.

Big day for Pat Secker though. Two press mentions!

Liberal backbenchers are stealing my lines:

"YOU'RE acting like Eva Peron and look what happened to Argentina," Liberal backbencher Pat Secker suddenly exclaimed as question time drew to end yesterday.

You're welcome.

The Australian squad for South Africa is in, and Chris Rogers international career appears over.

Ponting, Clarke, Bollinger, Haddin, Hauritz, Hilfenhaus, Hughes, M. Hussey, Johnson, Katich, McDonald, McGain, North, Siddle.

Only one genuine opener in there, and it's the not-yet-21-year-old Philip Hughes. Thirty first class innings is enough, according to the selectors, and the kid from NSW will replace Matthew Hayden at the top of the Australian order. If Rogers' 11,000 first class runs at 49.94 aren't enough now, they never will be. Thanks for coming Bucky, you did what you could.

This is an extraordinary decision by the selectors, and wilfully ignores, in my view, the lessons of history. We talked about this at AGB Cricket the other week. Test cricket, particularly against a resurgent South Africa, is an incredibly difficult caper. Those who succeed at their first try are few and far between. But that's the responsbility being placed on Hughes' shoulders. Good luck to him, he'll need it.

Meanwhile, Rogers finishes with one Test match to his name. Victorians wail on and on about how hard done by Brad Hodge is, but Rogers, who has been the best Australian opening batsman outside the Test side over the past five years, has been treated far worse.

Of the rest of the squad, the pace bowlers are about as good as can be expected given how the stocks have been decimated by injury. The spinners are interesting. McGain goes, as Tony predicted, but Hauritz is preferred over Krezja. I don't see it myself.

The top five appear set but the battle will be over the number 6 spot. Do the selectors persist with the notion of an allrounder in McDonald (who if picked would presumably bat 7 behind Haddin), or do they pick a specialist bat in Marcus North, who can also roll the arm over with finger spinners that have been quite effective in domestic Twenty20, but are likely too innocuous in Test cricket.

I hope they go for North, for no other reason than he deserves it, I think we'll need the runs and I don't see McDonald taking enough wickets to make up for his lack of technique (and therefore runs) with the bat.

This is going to be a very interesting tour for Australia, to say the least.

UPDATE 1.13pm - Hughes is the youngest player picked to play a Test for Australian in 25 years. Craig McDermott was picked to play the Windies in 1984 as a teenager.

So, the Superbowl. Great game, great last-minute catch to clinch the W for Pittsburgh.

There's something about the way federal politics in Australia is both covered and practised that bugs me, and it's neatly encapsulated on the front page of today's Australian, right there in the opening par, of Jennifer Hewitt's comment/analysis piece:

THE Rudd Government will get a big political boost from its $42 billion spending package but the payoff for the country is much less certain.

So $42 billion, the largest handout in the nation's history and an act that officially obliterates the king's ranson of a budget surplus K-Rudd was gifted by the other mob, may not do squat for the economy, but it will buy him a few points in the opinion polls. How lovely.

For $42 billion, shouldn't we know for sure? And shouldn't the press gallery be screaming from the rooftops at Rudd and Swanny to justify this, particularly given the jury is still well and truly out on the effectiveness of the first stimulus package?

$950 cash handouts for all, at a total cost of $12.7 billion, sounds like an awfully indiscriminate way to spend an awfully big pile of cash. I'm not an economist or an infrastructure expert or even a university graduate, but surely there's ways to better target a sum of this magnitude if the goal is indeed to stimulate real economic activity.

In my own case the cash will be going straight back to the mortgage lender and the credit card company and according to Hewitt's piece (which to be fair actually does a good job of explaining why a latter-day Eva Peron act will do nothing to free up credit markets, nothing to encourage banks to loan to businesses which is the fundamental driver of growth) 60 per cent of the cash will be spent the same way.

Of the rest, no doubt Samsung, Sony, Tabcorp and CUB will be absolutely thrilled to bits.

For Labor's sake, they better hope their man's late-naughties impersonation of an early-70s ALP saint works out. Because at the moment his economic conservatism ($500 million winner picked here! $2 billion bailout there! $700 billion bank guarantee here! Wait, we'll start our own bank!) is looking like one colossal joke.

UPDATE 7.35pm: Good on him.

UPDATE 7.47pm: He is absolutely on the right track, but Malcolm Turnbull's performance with Kerry O'Brien on the 7.30 Report tonight is appalling. He allowed himself to be tied in knots by O'Brien, who kept harping on about Turnbull's rhetorical flourish that Rudd was personally responsible for $200 billion of debt when $115 billion of tax revenues have disappeared due to GFC. The whole thing degenerated into semantics when it should have been a straightforward message from the Leader of the Opposition: At the height of a economic crisis, Kevin Rudd is throwing around billions of dollars he doesn't have with no evidence it is doing any good.

The public transport issue has gotten completely out of hand for the Victorian Labor Government, and to Joe Public, Lynne Kosky is surely the deadest of mortal mallards.

Don't tell The Age though. It still blames Jeff. In it's front page story yesterday on the train chaos (not available online, although there's a flavour of it here) the paper reports:

Ms Kosky admitted the rail system was not coping with the heat.

"The extreme heat is having and impact on our tracks and trains," she said, pointing out that the circumstances were extraordinary.

''This is the hottest heatwave Melbourne has experienced in 100 years,"said Ms Kosky, who on Tuesday said "decades" of underinvestment in Melbourne's rail system had left it vulnerable to failure. She has been responsible for Melbourne's public transport system since December 2006.

There's more outs there for Kosky than the bottom of a Bangladeshi batting order. The claim about a one-in-100-year heatwave is simply preposterous, particularly given that when she made it, Melbourne had experienced a "heat wave" of 25C, 34C and 43C when Kosky uttered it.

Then there's Kosky's self serving line about decades of under investment, and The Age's helpful reminder that when it comes to trams and trains, she's a mere Janet-come-lately.

Compare and contrast this to the treatment of the Opposition:

Ted Baillieu - whose Liberal Party has yet to release any policies on how it would fix Melbourne's public transport problems - said the Brumby Government had failed to spend money on the rail system. "There has been a failure to invest, and there has been a failure to focus on the needs of those who use the transport system," he said.

Mr Baillieu would not answer questions about whether the previous Kennett Government had been instrumental in downgrading the transport system. Instead he turned to blame back on to Premier John Brumby.

How unreasonable of Ted. Can someone please remind The Age that this Government has been in power for nine-and-a-half years?

UPDATE 9.14pm Try and blame Jeff for this. What a mess.

Dear readers, I suppose you have noticed too that when you click on a link around here, it automatically opens said link in a new window?

It's kind of annoying, no?

I would like to say this slick-looking site was all my own doing; in fact it was pilfered and customised by yours truly, with some very, shall we say, rudimentary html skills employed in the process.

I quite like how the links on the sidebars open in new windows, but for everything else (comments, in particular, and clicking on the "home" link at the top left) it's just bloody annoying.

Any clues on how I might fix it up?

First things first. I quite like Dan Lonergan. He did his apprenticeship in Perth on ABC radio in the late 90s. He replaced the late, great, Clint Grybas, who replaced the late, great George Grjlusich. Come to think of it, it was Wally Foreman who replaced Lonergan, and he's late and great too. Dan, look out. Clint "Tiger" Wheeldon, look out too. Working with Glen Mitchell can be dangerous.

I grew up in Perth, and therefore, the fact that Dan did a stretch in Dullsville (his Saturday arvo WAFL calls were particularly notable) virtually makes him a West Australian. It's the same logic that sees us claim Gilly. (But the reverse need not apply. We claim Simon Katich too.)

Aaaanyway...

I reckon Dan Lonergan is a very capable and professional sports broadcaster. This does not, however, mean I want to hear him call the tennis. Tell me the following is good radio:

Murray serves... deep in the corner. Granoyers returns. Murray-forehand-cross-court-Granoyers-backhand-slice-Murray-top-spin-forehand-Granoyers-forehand-Murray-forehand-Granoyers-forehand-Murray-forehanddowntheline-Granoyers-backhandslice-Murray-forehand-Granoyers-backhand-Murray-forehand-Granoyers-forehand-Murray-forehand-Granoyers-forehandintothenet... Murray wins the point... 15-love...

It is not.

Yet on and on it goes, every afternoon and evening for two weeks. I suppose it spares us Tony Delroy's quiz. For small mercies we should be thankful.

But I just can't help but think that whoever is in charge of these things should rethink live play-by-play tennis as a viable radio proposition.

Apropos of this*, The Half Back Flank presents part 1 of a continuing series entitled "A Blight on Australian Society".

1. The Fanatics

Not funny, not creative, not cool. Not even, I hypothesise, actual sports fans. Something about the dressing up and the over-the-top green-and-gold gives me the creeps. It also suggests the prime objective is to get on telly, rather than watch the contest at hand.

Plus the chants. Contrived. Pommy soccer fans chant and sing, and because they've always done it, they're quite good at it. American sports fans are told when to chant and cheer by the playing of too-loud rock and rap, and the jumbotron. It would be awfully cheesey if tried here (anyone been to a Twenty20 international lately?) but in a Seppo ballpark or a football stadium, it works beautifully; it's part of the sporting culture.

The Fanatics? Not so much. It's contrived, but worse, these clowns celebrate boorish behaviour, like the Aussie Aussie Aussie chant** and reinforce negative stereotypes about Australian sports fans.

Just stop it please.

To be continued.

* Thanks to Tony from After Grog Blog for the link. Talk about efficiency. He obviously checks his referrer logs. I guess this means I have to keep writing.

** When travelling overseas with a particular group of mates, we have only one rule. Any person who participates in an Aussie Aussie Aussie chant is on the next Flying Kangaroo home.

And while we're on sports that aren't all that interesting, Lance Armstrong is in Australia at the moment - you hadn't heard? - and is creating all sorts of warm and fuzzy picture opportunities, like this one in a South Australian hospital.

It seems 37-year-old Lance of Yellow Wristband can do no wrong in this unlikely-looking comeback when it comes to the Aussie media coverage of his tour through the Adelaide hills. Don't put the Herald Sun's Trevor Grant in that category:

WHEN we were children the best way to avoid anything horrible or uncomfortable was to pretend it did not exist.

As far as I know the people who run the South Australian Government are all grown-ups but they seem to have borrowed this tried and true method of avoidance.

From Premier Mike Rann down, they have simply chosen to ignore some inconvenient realities as they go weak at the knees in the presence of cycling's controversial champion, Lance Armstrong.

And it's not just the politicians who prefer to look the other way as they preen themselves over the appearance of Armstrong, secured at an estimated cost of $1 million to the taxpayer.

Ask about drugs as the Tour Down Under cyclists whiz past in the Adelaide Hills this week and you are liable to be flung under wheels.

Grant, being a proud Victorian, slings some gratuitous insults at fawning Croweaters (this is to his credit). But the beatification of St Lance has been a pursuit indulged by all media across the country. Not that I've been watching all that closely, but the 7.30 Report has been the only media outlet I've seen that's really raised the fact that an Armstrong urine sample from the 1999 Tour de France allegedly contained the banned endurance enhancing substance EPO. As Dr Mike Ashenden, an expert in blood doping, told the ABC the other night:

I think that Lance Armstrong's era is unquestionably associated with drug use.

It seems like following the Tour de Phil late at night on SBS gets trendier every year. July is now accompanied not just by freezing cold weather, but boring know-it-alls who drone on and on about how the Aussies go OK on the plains but get eaten alive by the Europeans in the mountains. Even when Cadel came so close last year (accompanied by media coverage normally reserved for future Test openers from NSW who are yet to face a first class delivery) I just can't get excited about a sport that's been based on cheating for at least the last 20 years.

On the other hand, Major League Baseball (greatest. game. ever.) is an entirely different story.

Hypocrite!

Was listening to Derryn Hinch on 3AW this arvo on the drive home from work when the bearded one crossed to the Strayan Open.

Aussie Jelena Dokic had just despatched her first round opponent, prompting AW's sports reporter Shane McGuiness to comment on the circumstances of her comeback (apparently - I don't follow the tennis much - she has been Much Maligned™ of late).

Opined McGuiness: "It's a terrific result for Jelena, the perfect start, and it will certainly silence her distractors."

Indee... er, what was I saying?

Hi. I guess this thing works now.

Welcome.

This blog has no big plan, no grand raisin d'extra. It's simply a spot for me to write about stuff that occurs to my tiny brain. You can probably expect observations on stuff in the Australian media, and the sporting milieu.

Or it could just be rubbish. Who can tell. Won't you join me!