We don’t meet many metaphors in our journeys through the Public Service literature and maybe the creative courageousness of the Queensland and Federal Emergency Ministers during the week holds the reason why.
Announcing a new educational game for kids designed to help them prepare for one of the tropical State’s natural emergencies, the respective Ministers from the State and Commonwealth extorted the virtues of the project, happily declaring how the agreement to share the costs had followed an earlier major disaster
“The initiative is funded under joint Commonwealth-Queensland Disaster Recovery Funding Arrangements (DRFA) through the Community Recovery Fund,” the Ministers extolled.
“Established in the wake of the 2019 north and Far North Queensland monsoonal flooding event”.
In the wake of the flood?
Who needs the anxiety of a technicolor HD flashback reliving recollection when one little well-placed metaphor can do it all by itself.
Acrimonious acronym
It’s been said before and it will be said again: There’s no such thing as an inappropriate abbreviation, anagram or acronym to the eyes of the non-pedantic, un-didactic, anti-pedagogue illiteratchiks who thrive amongst us.
But here at PS-ssssst! we think we’ve found an abbreviation candidate that might even sway the unswayables to say its way out!
News from South Australia republished around the nation is all abounding with the possibility of a vaccine for the dreaded COVID-19 pestademic which is making life so miserable for so many of us.
“The BCG vaccination to reduce the impact of COVID-19 in Australian healthcare workers following the Coronavirus Exposure (BRACE) Trial is a multi-centre randomised controlled clinical trial of the BCG vaccine against COVID-19,” the medical people nattered to one another in their own language recently.
But the ever-inquisitive PS-sssst! wasn’t conned or cajoled into taking whatever-it-said for granted so it took upon itself to translate the medical gobbledegook into plain old normal person gobbledegook by hunting down the hidden meaning of the acronym BRACE.
It found that BRACE (believe it or not), is the acronym abbreviating: “(BCG vaccination to Reduce the impact of COVID-19 in healthcare workers following Coronavirus Exposure).
Fourteen words crammed into a five-letter acronym and there isn’t even a middle ‘A’!
Oh-mazing!
And to make matters more memorable, healthcare workers keen on joining a BRACE trial are invited to start by filling in a ‘Participant Information Sheet’, far less creatively acronymed as a PIS!
Planted!
To a less spectacular play with words now with the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service announcing a project to save an endangered Australian plant at the State’s Gundabooka National Park as part of its Saving our Species program.
In case anyone was in doubt as to the credentials of the troubled plant, the NPWS made sure all was clear and clarified by choosing a witty little headline for its official announcement.
The Service opened its statement with: ‘Wattle it be?’
No prizes for guessing the rest!
Giveaway by the sea
To Rama Gaind’s gratuitous giveaways now where mild-mannered readers of a great metropolitan newspaper get the chance to leap tall quiz questions in a single bound and take home a super-prize without even looking up in the sky.
Rama’s super reward for this week is three copies of the seaside DVD documentary Wonders of the Sea featuring today’s relatives of undersea explorer Jacques Yves Cousteau: Jean-Michel Cousteau, Céline Cousteau, Fabien Cousteau and long-distance non-relative Arnold Schwarzenegger.
To add the Wonders of the Sea to your DVD collection all you needed to do was tell Rama correctly the names of Jacques Yves Cousteau’s grandchildren and then surface from the PS News Barrel of Booty as one of the first three to scoop up the prize.
The answers were Fabien and Céline Cousteau whose father, Jean-Michel was the son of Jacques Yves Cousteau.
And the winners are: Deborah L from the National Health and Medical Research Council,
Nigel P from Services Australia; and Catherine T from the Western Australian Department of Justice.
Congratulations to all the winners and thanks to everyone who took part. The DVDs will be on their winners’ ways very soon.
For another chance to put your giveaway-winning skills a going over, follow this PS News link to this weeks book prize and take this link to go to last weeks book giveaway.
Good luck to all!
700 not out!
And finally, this week marks PS News’s 700th online publication after entering the world as a pimple-faced online offering to the Commonwealth Public Service way back on 22 November 2005.
Over that time we’ve enjoyed the privilege of recounting more than 10,000 stories about the Federal public service and at least as many – indeed many more – relating to the rest of the Australian public service sector who have followed in PS News’s footprints as the years unfolded.
And in all that time, PS News has maintained its relevance, independence and popularity to the extent that it’s now unusual for many public sector staff members not to be a subscriber than it is to be one!
And for that, we at PS News feel genuinely, honoured, grateful and personally humbled that we are still going – and growing! – after all these years.
So, as the 700-issue milestone passes by we take this opportunity to thank each and every member of the nine Public Services we serve and have served in the past and we renew our promise to keep the stories coming as long as you keep reading them.
Here’s to the next 700 issue of PS news. May we all be around to read it!
Till next week…..
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