The Friday night Hitler documentary
So seriously, do we really need SBS’s weekly Friday Night Hitler Documentary? I mean, almost every single Friday night, or so it seems.
Don’t get me wrong: I know it’s vitally important for the human race remember and learn from the terrible deeds of the past, but don’t people get sick of this stuff?
Okay, so maybe it’s not every Friday night. But looking at the last six months or so, they have been showing a LOT of documentaries about WW2:
Fri 9/5/2008 8:30pm: Deadly Battles of WW1
Fri 16/5/2008 8:30pm: Tiananmen Square: The Tank Man
Fri 23/5/2008 Eurovision
Fri 30/5/2008 8:30pm: The Pacific War In Colour: Part 1
Fri 6/6/2008 8:30pm: The Pacific War In Colour: Part 2
Fri 13/6/2008 8:30pm: The Wehrmacht: The Blitzkrieg
Fri 20/6/2008 8:30pm: The Wehrmacht: The Turning Point
Fri 27/6/2008 8:30pm: The Wehrmacht: The Crimes
Fri 4/7/2008 8:30pm: The Wehrmacht: Resistance
Fri 11/7/2008 8:30pm: The Wehrmacht: To The Bitter End
Fri 18/7/2008 8:30pm: Not Nazis or even WW2 for once: Space Hackers
Fri 25/7/2008 8:30pm: Some other cheery tale called The Body Hunters
Fri 1/8/2008 8:30pm: The Body Hunters part 2
Fri 8/8/2008 8:30pm: The Body Hunters part 3
Fri 15/8/2008 Olympics
Fri 22/8/2008 Olympics
Fri 29/8/2008 8:30pm: Nixon: The Man You Loved To Hate
Fri 5/9/2008 8:30pm: An Ariel Dorfman doco instead
Fri 12/9/2008 8:30pm: Inside The Mind Of Adolf Hitler
Fri 19/9/2008 8:30pm: As It Happened: Tito’s Ghosts (ooh, mixing it up a bit, let’s try a different WW2 Fascist)
Fri 26/9/2008 8:30pm: A merciful break from the doom and gloom: Marvin Gaye
Fri 3/10/2008 8:30pm: As It Happened: Hitler’s Sunken Secret
Fri 10/10/2008 8:30pm: Between Gandhi and Hitler
Fri 17/10/2008 8:30pm: The SS: The Struggle for Power
Fri 24/10/2008 8:30pm: The SS: The Madness Of Himmler
Fri 31/10/2008 8:30pm: The SS: The Rise and Fall of Heydrich
Fri 7/11/2008 8:30pm: The SS: Death’s Head
Fri 14/11/2008 8:30pm: The SS: The Waffen
(Source: SBS online schedule)
I’ve enjoyed plotting little graphs recently, so here’s another one:
Tags:
15 comments
Regeneration coming
10th Doctor David Tennant is moving on after the 2009 special episodes.
I wonder Who’s next? Anybody want to speculate?
(via Tony)
Oh dear. Maybe he’ll never meet River Song after all?
PS. Video of DT talking about it … and his live announcement to fans.
Tags:
21 comments
A few pics
It’s nice that the all-new Jazz has come to town… but which town? Judging from the poster, London, apparently, not Melbourne.
The order’s Roll. Beef Roll.
Bless ‘em, they’re trying their best to stop any redundancy redundancy.
No. You don’t understand. IT DOESN’T APPLY TO ME.
(Mind you, with people apparently continually parking on it, it’s looking more like dirt than lawn.)
Tags:
5 comments
The rally
The rally on Sunday was good. At least a couple of hundred rowdy residents protesting against the proposed $8 billion (or $9 billion, or maybe more) road tunnel proposal.
I had prepared some notes, but sure enough, didn’t follow them when I spoke. I never do. Of course, the act of preparing notes lets me go through the factoids I need to know for when I speak. Hopefully it sounded okay; I was asked for ten minutes of speech, but probably delivered about half that. And I forgot to note that the recent survey from those ratbags at Metlink: 94% of people want more investment in public transport.
A number of other speakers, particularly from resident groups along the road tunnel path, spoke to a rousing reception. Media covered it extensively, with television reports on channels 2, 7 and 9.
Amusingly I wasn’t the only speaker in a retro-geek t-shirt: I had my ZZap 64! shirt on, and a lady from one of the Footscray groups had a Commodore t-shirt. And a couple of hours later in Flinders Street a bloke walking past me said “Top t-shirt man!” Retro-geeks live!
With most ministers unavailable on the weekend, it was left to Health Minister Daniel Andrews to respond, saying that the forthcoming transport plan would be a balance between roads and public transport.
Ah yes, balance. Apart from the fact that Melbourne already has more roadspace than most comparable cities, meaning it’s questionable that we need more — particularly at a time when the last thing we should be doing is encouraging more people to drive — it’s worth reviewing what the last ten years of “balance” has produced:
Note these figures don’t include capacity boosts, such as the M1 widening (underway now, $1.4 billion) and the Tulla-Calder interchange ($150 million), nor rail projects which have increased capacity. I’ve also assumed 3/4 of the cost of Citylink was the tunnels, Bolte Bridge and new motorway sections.
All of the completed motorway projects and train extensions are of course packed with users. In laymen’s terms it’s “build it and they will come”. In economists terms it’s “supply-led” growth.
Interestingly, while adding up all these projects, I also looked at the length of each, giving a rudimentary figure (and perhaps not entirely accurate) of cost per kilometre for freeway expansion vs rail electrification. You could expect rail to cost more if you had to establish the alignment and so on as well, though electrifying an existing track adds to costs because of things like service interruptions.
Another cost comparison for new rail lines might be Perth with its Mandurah line, which opened last year at a cost of $1.6 billion for 70 km ($22.8 million per km), but which included underground tunnelling in central Perth. And come to think of it I’m not sure if that cost included the train fleet to run on it.
The bottom line: it’s cheaper to build railway lines that motorways. And they produce better transport, congestion, and greenhouse gas outcomes.
PS. ABC News report from the rally:
Tags:
6 comments
Interest rates
Last year I took a gamble and locked in my home loan interest rate at 7.85%. At the time, and for the first half of this year, it looked like it had paid off.
With the recent drops though, I’m not so sure it will in the long term. I’m locked in at 7.85%; the current basic home loan variable rate through the same bank is now 7.94% (though it’s 8.57% for the standard variable rate), though who knows how long it’ll stay that high. People who didn’t get around to fixing their rates may end up ahead.
It’ll be interesting to see how the current financial mess affects the rental market. It may be a minor hiccup in what appears to be an ongoing upwards trend. At one point I was semi-seriously considering the benefits of buying an investment flat somewhere half-decent that one day in 10-ish years when they move out, my kids might live in, subsidised by me. Though at present, my own savings might be in no state to try such a thing.
Tags:
2 comments
Giving blood
For regular donors, the Blood Bank will send you a letter a couple of weeks before their mobile branch visits your area. Then if they haven’t heard from you, they ring you up in the week before. I never seem to find the time to ring them before they ring me.
The problem is by then they’re inevitably booked out. So they’ll ring me up and I’ll say Yeah I’d like to book in, and I’ll nominate a few times, and none of them are available. In fact sometimes they ring up and tell me straight up that virtually no times at all (convenient or inconvenient for me) are available. Which makes it a little pointless in ringing me, to be honest.
It’s frustrating when I know, and they know, they need the blood. But if they don’t have the capacity to take it when I can give it, what can you do?
The Southbank centre is open long hours, but the location a long way out of the way. The Bourke Street centre is in a much more convenient spot, but the opening hours aren’t very good. (If I were running it, I’d do the long hours at the more convenient location. But maybe that’s just me.)
I’m on the wait-list for the local collection next week… but if that doesn’t work, I’ll try and get in at Bourke Street in the next few weeks.
Tags:
18 comments
Muckup day FAIL
It seems some students at Xavier went over-the-top in their end of school celebrations, ties used as G-strings, with one student injured, food fights on trams, jumping on cars, firecrackers let off at Balaclava Station, and all year 12 classes cancelled. (Some newspaper reports say the entire year level was suspended, but the principal was on radio on Wednesday morning saying this wasn’t strictly true.)
I don’t think it’s really that difficult to come up with pranks that are highly amusing, yet don’t injure anybody and cause no permanent damage to anything. Longtime readers may recall I wrote about the Year 12 prank I participated in, dumping loads of bean bag beans around the school hall… which when we were caught, resulted in us having to vaccuum them up.
Other stunts I saw and heard about from my time at high school in the 80s were using traffic cones to divert traffic through the school; various banners flown from nearby buildings; a fake school newsletter issued to all classes (I still have my copy somewhere); shaving cream liberally applied to buildings, clothes and on cars; and apparently once at Melbourne Grammar a teacher’s car was disassembled, moved to an upstairs room and put together again. Though that last one may be merely urban legend.
All it takes is a little imagination, and a wish to amuse, rather than annoy.
Tags:
15 comments
Activist things
I don’t know what’s wrong with The Age web site, but frequently the online version of the Letters page leaves big slabs of text out of people’s letters. They did it with mine this morning, which is a response to a letter in yesterday’s Age. Given the heading they gave it, the missing first paragraph means it makes no sense whatsoever. Here it is in full:
Letter from a fan?
Two cheers for Graeme Russell for rushing to the defence of Public Transport Minister Lynne Kosky (Letters, 21/10). But is this the same Graeme Russell who, until recently, was Ms Kosky’s Chief of Staff?
Meanwhile, Premier John Brumby has poured cold water on the new public transport plan produced by Melbourne’s local councils. The financial crisis will make it difficult to finance public transport projects such as new rail lines, he says. This is a bit rich coming from a Premier who has just signed off on his share of $700 million for a new road, and is contemplating spending billions more on freeways.
Secondly, the Channel 31 “Conflict of Interest” programme I recorded last week (for which they sent me a bottle of Grenache as thanks) airs tonight at 9:30. I’ve had little practice at long form interviews, particularly television, and I hope I didn’t make too much of a fool of myself. (They usually post it on Youtube after broadcast, so I’ll link to it from here when that happens.)
Would you believe I forgot to tune-in, but here it is:
See also: Introductory segment.
Thirdly, rally for better PT outside Flinders Street Station, Sunday midday. Be there!
Tags:
12 comments
