Starting this week with a successful contestant for PS-sssst!’s popular ‘Headline Of the Week Laughing Award’, recognised and revered world-wide by the acronym HOWLA!
Reporting a ‘massive effort’ to rescue not one, not two but three green turtles from the tropical waters of the Sunshine State, Queensland’s Parks and Wildlife Service reported how hard, but how important, it was to save the trio and get them back into the water in fine form.
“The turtles were in poor health, covered in barnacles and algae” the Wildlife Service explained.
“The trio also had floating syndrome which is where a turtle is unable to dive beneath the surface of the water and therefore cannot access food,” it said.
The Wildlife Service then did its job so the teenage turtles – Ninja or not – were cured, cleaned, conserved and returned fit to the sea after which the QPWS chose to share its aquatic adventure with the media, embossing a statement with the most howling of HOWLA-worth brilliant signals.
The QPWS headlined the turtles’ news release with the inspired headline: ‘Cause for a shell-abration’, prompting the judges to declare it would have won a rare ‘Ugh’ trophy if there was one as well!
SA re-welcomed to the team
Over to South Australia now where PS News revived its SA edition after a 6-year hiatus so the good SA PS staffers get to wallow in the same newsy service enjoyed by nearly all of the rest of the nation’s public sectors.
According to Mr Google, SA’s revived edition No. 1 attracted a modest 274 ‘unique’ readers during its first week, a modestly positive audience that managed to roam its way through 674 pages of PS News’s news and information.
Not quite in the ballpark of the Australian Public Service which delivered 10,565 ‘unique’ readers but a good first step in any case which experience tells us is bound to build up in the weeks and months ahead.
So for those of us keen to find out what’s attracting our ‘crow eating’ PS comrades, the place to visit their new weekly news centre is at this PS News link.
A slice of money
And before unveiling the latest in Rama Gaind’s weekly winathon, a brief word of wisdom from our facetiously farcical Philomena the Phunny One who has spent recent days discussing past jobs her workmates have tried, with one coming clean on a period of pastry pulling.
“I once worked at a cheap pizza shop to get by,” one of Philomena’s ex-impoverished workmates confided.
“I kneaded the dough!”
Ka-boom!
Getting Done giveaways
And now another collection of jolly winners in Rama Gaind’s weekly giveaway where four lucky readers are to become the new owners of copies of the Harvard Business Review book for parents Getting It All Done compiled by Daisy Dowling.
To join Rama’s winners, readers needed only name the author of the book’s article How to Handle Work When Your Child Is Sick and then be among the first four to pop out of the PS News’s infamous Barrel of Booty and greet the judges.
The answer to Rama’s quiz question was ‘Daisy Dowling’ and the lucky correct readers were Geraldine Z from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Donna A from SafeWork NSW, Kyla P from the South Australian Ambulance Service, and Fernando M from the Federal Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment.
Congratulations to all the lucky winners and thanks to everyone for taking part. The prize books will be on their way to their new homes very soon.
For another chance to join Rama’s Army of winning ones, simply fossick out her giveaways for the next two weeks and join in the fun. The giveaways can be found for this DVD The Flood at this PS News link and/or for the Book The Rock at this link, with each prize keen to call a new home home!
As always, good luck to all who put their good luck to work.
Words at work
And finally it’s that time of the year when Hamish Thompson and his Buzzsaw, selects the worst and worstest words that found their way into the taxonomy and terminology of what we call the English language during the past 12 months.
Heading up Buzzsaw’s Hall of Shame where the contenders are rescued from press releases, speeches and blog posts from the world’s mass media, the following tastes of semantic shame were uncovered.
On top of the Shame list is ‘Cohort’ described by the judges as the latest expensive-sounding invention of the HR department, “following in the footsteps of ‘Cadre’ which needed to be replaced because too many people weren’t sure how to pronounce it”.
Also identified for extermination in the Shame collection is ‘Ideate’: “a recidivist from past years but which still manages to suck every atom of joy out of creativity by making it sound robotic”.
In the Buzzsaw Dishonourable Mentions category ‘Content’ comes first, second only to the vacuum of space as the emptiest thing in the universe. “It’s like calling literature or journalism ‘words’,” the judges lamented. “It’s the high watermark in the commoditisation of writing.”
Also among B’s DMs is ‘Awesome’: “Not since the devaluation of the Zimbabwean dollar, has something devalued as much as the word ‘awesome’,” the judge wailed. “To be full of awe in the presence of a tea towel or poached egg is setting a very low bar.”
The full list of Buzzsaw’s 2021 attempt to save the language can be accessed at this PS News link.
‘Til next week….
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