A big happy, sweaty and record-breaking birthday wish to the Australian Institute of Sport this week which reached the creaky old age of 40 on Australia Day and still looks as fit and sporty as it did in 1981
As a member of the national Department of Home Affairs’ Sport and Recreation Branch in the years leading up to the opening I can divulge after such a long time that the AIS was almost an illegitimate off-spring of Prime Minister Malcom Fraser’s Government, delivered only by the covert fatherhood of Sports Minister Bob Ellicott who built indoor and outdoor sports facilities in Canberra behind the PM’s back.
Not known as a sports lover, Mr Fraser took little notice when Ellicott spent his annual Ministerial project allowance of $1.99 million a year on each of the facilities without troubling Cabinet.
After a lamentable 2-gold medal performance at the 1980 Olympics which followed an even more humiliating zero gold in 1976, Fraser saw the writing on Ellicott’s walls and so an Institute was born.
And just for the record, once the AIS was officially conceived, the Olympic gold rose to 4 in 1984, 7 in 1992, 9 in 1996, 16 in 2000, 17 in 2004, 14 in 2008, and 8 in both 2012 and 2016.
Not bad for a 40-year old!
Signs of Snafu
Pleasant news for the good people of Canberra last week with the local Transport Canberra agency announcing two new ‘Park and Ride’ locations along the city’s public transport routes, allowing commuters to drive part of the way to work before securely parking their cars and completing the trip on a bus or tram.
“Park and Ride is a great alternative to driving and saves paying for parking in the town centres,” the Agency explained.
It said the two now locations were available in the suburb of Evatt – at Chomley Court – and at Lyneham “opposite Swindon Street light rail stop.”
For newcomers to the capital keen to take advantage of the Lyneham facilities, trying to track down Swindon street, could prove to be challenging.
That’s because it doesn’t exist!
There is a ‘Swinden’ street however, and it’s near Lyneham and a light rail stop.
One of them could be a typing error in the street sign of course!
Ducking the paddywack
It’s a tough world in the land of anagrams and it looks as if Victoria’s Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning (DELWP) may have come up against it.
Hailing the great news that a four-way partnership between the Department, the Bureau of Meteorology, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and the University of Melbourne was making progress, DELWP also delivered two documents supporting the State’s water sector to develop a response to climate change.
It said the project was known as the Victorian Water and Climate Initiative which reduced to the abbreviation (VicWaCI).
While most commentaries on anagrams comment on the letters chosen to make them up, few go to the trouble to comment on the articulation of the anagram after it has been abbreviated.
PS-sssst! accepts that it could be seriously mistaken by trying to express ‘VicWaCI’ as it appears to the uninformed, but it looks very like ‘Vic Wacky’ to us.
Of course it could all depend on where we place our em-pharsis!
Police IFU please
Keeping with the pronunciation of abbreviations now, Victoria Police has come to the party setting up a new unit of experienced firearm investigators with the job of preventing firearms falling into the wrong hands, primarily organised crime
Announcing the new unit, Victoria’s Minister for Police said it would be an Illicit Firearms Unit or IFU for short, with many of the personnel appointed coming from the force’s Firearms Investigation Teams, otherwise known as FITs.
The Minister strengthened the argument in favour of the IFU by referring to an estimate from the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission that found the number of illicit firearms in Australia around 260,000, a problem which would seem to indicate the national Commission would be giving the former FITs ACIC along, IFU see what we mean!
Rama reminder
And finally, a reminder that Rama Gaind’s Army of Giveaway Guerillas have just a few days to wait before the first favourite freebies of her 2021 series of gratuity gifting hits the cybersphere and her World of Winners opens up again for us all to get the chance to get something for nothing.
The much run-after Rama returns next week.
Till then….
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