The highly admired PS virtue of ‘transparency’ reached highly admired new levels in the ACT this week with the collectors of all things recyclable announcing a clever plan to turn unwanted glass products into sand for use by the installers of water pipes around the suburbs.
Glass, for those of us who don’t remember year 11 chemistry, is made from sand and if the sand can be reclaimed, it can be used as bedding for water infrastructure projects like pipes and so on.
And who better to announce the new level of ‘transparency’ than Canberra’s local X-ray-viewing, bullet beating, leaper of tall buildings at a single bound, Chris ‘Man of” Steel, cleverly disguised as the ACT’s mild-mannered Minister for a great metropolitan Recycling and Waste Reduction portfolio.
According to the real Mr Steel, contractors use 200 tonnes of sand for piping projects across the ACT every year and the ex-glass sand will replace natural river sand which has to be trucked into the ACT at a high financial and environmental cost.
Don’t look now but up in the sky it’s a bird, it’s a plane it’s….. etc etc
Preservation kitting
And while we’re on the case of aptonymically named workpersons aptly named after their responsibilities, PS-sssst! can report on an equally apt response from the Western Australian border guards after a collection of uninvited refugee crabs turned up unannounced from Victoria.
“Officers from the Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development (DPIRD) intercepted a 40-kilogram consignment of the noxious listed Carcinus maenas, known as European shore crabs, last week,” the DPIRDers declared.
“The four boxes of live crabs had been imported from Victoria and were intended to go into the retail and restaurant trade.”
But who better to pick up the Westerners’ case and convey their concerns to Victoria than DPIRD’s highly experienced quarantine director, and similarly appropriately named, Greg Pickles.
As millions of Australians have learned to their benefit generation after generation, if you want something preserved, you trust Pickles!
PS-sssst! is sure Greg will keep the lid tight on this event.
Impositively positive?
Unscrambling the egg that was the question of why a gaggle of Attorney-Generals called themselves Attorneys-General last week, led to a modest but fruitful response, with the juiciest coming from a university overseas.
According to Carlo N of London (Uni as yet unclear), the culprit in the case is the English language’s unusual practice of positioning some proper nouns ahead of the adjectives their attributes are attributed by, producing the opposite order of what most accommodating, amenable and amiable adjectives abide by.
Formally known as ‘postpositive adjectives’ or in Carlo’s creative formality ‘arse-about adjectives’, Her Majesty’s English looks on ‘Attorney’ as the noun and ‘General’ as the adjective and finds nothing odd about them being described as ‘Attorneys-General’ when the rest of the language would avoid the exoticism and settle for Attorney-Generals.
In conclusion, ‘sssst!-PS’ finds this little eccentricity of the English language more difficult to endure than most.
In the meantime another fabulous PS-sssst! prize pack (Book, Torch/Pen and T-Shirt) is on its way to Carlo for his international trouble.
Winners’ corner
To Rama Gaind’s weekly giveaway now in which two lucky readers get the chance to become the legal owners of crime novelist Michael Connelly’s latest acclaimed story Fair Warning.
To join Rama’s Army of weekly winners, all we needed to do to get our Fair Warning was name the publication where Mr Connelly worked as a police reporter, that esteemed outlet being the Los Angeles Times.
And the two correct readers whose entries also squeezed out of the PS News Barrel of Booty first were Mike P from Services Australia, and John V from the Federal Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment.
Congratulations to Mike and John and thanks to everyone who joined in the fun. The books will be on their way to their new owners shortly.
In the meantime, to give Rama another run for her generosity, join her in her latest competitions for a delightful book prize at this PS News link and another book bounty at this link.
Good luck to all!
Until Next week….
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