Posts

Showing posts from June, 2007

Friday Follies Of The Linkless Kind

Everyone's always saying how tough it is for professional sports people to reach "the top". I reckon they have it easy. In her recent Wimbeldon loss to Serena Williams, Alicia Molik scored 48% on first serves (or 48% of something, anyway, I don't understand tennis). imagine if in the course of your work day, you only got it right 48% of the time. You wouldn't get an Uncle Toby's ad contract, you'd be sacked. One thing's for sure, I'm never going to any doctor who used to be a professional sports person. I rather fear what they'd consider to be an acceptable rate of medical negligence. I read somewhere that if the current growth in the number of Elvis impersonators continues, by 2019 a third of the Earth's population will be Elvis impersonators. Just think about that for a minute. Imagine going to the supermarket, and every third person you pass being an Elvis impersonator. Think of attending a meeting with 100 colleagues, 33 of whom respond

The Election X Factor

Watching the news this week, I came across the story reporting that Australia's labour regime is one of the worst in the world . Hearing this, I thought oh come on . Okay, the Howard government IR changes have caused a lot of suffering, but surely there have to be at least 25 countries worse than us? (I can't imagine being a 10 year old working in an Indian rug factory is much fun, and even my experiences in retail can't be as bad as earning 14c an hour making Nike apparel in Indonesia). However, there was a viewer poll asking whether people agreed that Australia was one of the 25 worst Labour regimes, and a significant minority voted yes. Sadly, I had to wonder, did everyone who voted know precisely what they were voting for? Perhaps some thought they were voting not on our labour regime, but on the Labor regime, i.e. whether we have one of the worst Labor parties. (Even thinking being in Opposition is, somehow, a regime). You may not think this is possible, and neither di