With the summer season in front of us and what seems like half the country on fire, PS-sssst! is quick to add its voice to the almost unanimous praise being showered on the nation’s paid (read Public Service) firefighters and the army of volunteers working with them heroically and selflessly to save and protect the properties and lives of their fellow Australians.
It comes as a surprise then to note that the nation’s capital city, Canberra, nestled in the Australian Capital Territory, the ACT, depends for its rescue from fire and flames on an organisation relishing in the malapropriate title ‘ACT State Emergency Service’ (SES) when the ACT is a Territory, not a State!
Compounding this confounding contradiction, PS-sssst! can report that the city’s official fire brigade, cheerfully named ‘ACT Fire and Rescue’ looks to have won the confidence of enough Territorians-that-be to have been deigned designate-worthy and granted the use of the Territory’s given name.
One wonders if this nomenclatural inconsistency is worth getting fired up about or whether it can be extinguished expeditiously.
The “i”s had it
And while we’re dealing with names being feebly flung about, PS-sssst! has found itself apologetically indebted to the outgoing Secretary of the Federal Department of Agriculture for tangling his fate with that of the not-outgoing Minister for the Environment when PS News reported the national Public Service’s recently announced organisational reshuffle.
Where PS News identified AgSec Daryl Quinlivan as Secretary of Environment, it meant to say Secretary of Agriculture, for which we are fulsomely apologetic.
In our defence, PS News points out that both Environment and Agriculture are words of 10 letters and, incredibly, they each have an ‘i’ as their fourth letter.
How such a blatantly bold literal collision hasn’t side-trapped many more writers and reporters before this is beyond us but we know we will just have to try harder.
Christmas wishes
credit: strizh
And with this edition of PS News (and therefore PS-sssst!) the final for 2019, it follows for PS-sssst! to let the people who make PS News happen – its writers, designers, editors, administrators and others – have the final word.
And so it is that Frank, Kelly, Lisa, Graham, Jan, Brad, Ted, Rama, Ian, Vic, Lyn, Robert, Paul, John, Ysabel, Natasha, Ed, Terri and Sarah all say: “Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. See you in 2020”.
Naughty boys
And finally just for Christmas.
How do the police describe a young boy who refuses to believe in Santa?
They accuse him of being a rebel without a Claus!
Till next year ……
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