It was the early 1980s and my mother and father had just moved in together, when a television commercial for American Express travellers cheques captured the public imagination, giving my parents a new annoyance to deal with.
Posts Tagged ‘television’
Why can’t you tell me where my train is?
September 12th, 2012
4 Comments
It is 5pm on a Friday afternoon, you are standing around at the railway station waiting to head home, but there hasn’t been a train for ten minutes. If you haven’t got your smartphone out to find out what the issue is, then you’ll be listening out for the platform staff making announcements over the public address system. So how do they get kept in the loop?
Beware the television mutilator
September 9th, 2011
6 Comments
Last week on my way to work I discovered dozens of obsolete CRT televisions placed out for the hard rubbish collection – this week I walk past and a half dozen of said televisions have had their screens shattered and the back panels ripped open. So what are they looking for?
Funeral for a cathode ray tube
September 2nd, 2011
7 Comments
Melbourne is currently in the middle of the changeover to digital television, with the original analogue system to be turned off in December 2013, leaving millions of older televisions with cathode ray tubes on the scrapheap. So how to get rid of them?
Vandalising celebrity Wikipedia pages
September 13th, 2010
3 Comments
Tonight on Good News Week the comedian Amanda Keller discussed the vandalism of her Wikipedia page, describing the addition of such “facts” as:
- She went broke making ATMs for midgets.
- She worked on a short-running TV show “Shower Time With Uncle Bert”.
A few minutes after the segment on Good News Week went to air, people were helpful enough to add the “facts” into the page, at least until the page was locked. Will the wonders of Wikipedia ever cease?
