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Canberra Today 13°/17° | Saturday, March 30, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Canberra Confidential / Shooting cockatoos

Cockatoos on Wentworth Avenue, Kingston. Photo by Gary Schafer
Cockatoos on Wentworth Avenue, Kingston. Photo by Gary Schafer
SNAPPER Gary Schafer was heading home the other day and couldn’t resist slamming on the brakes, leaping out and shooting this lovely late-afternoon photo of cockatoos enjoying their winter feeding grounds along Canberra Avenue, something that’s a regular winter event, he says.

‘Duck’s’ back for breakfast

Rob Duckworth, left, with US singer Meatloaf at WSFM.
Rob Duckworth, left, with US singer Meatloaf at WSFM.
MEDIA personality Rob Duckworth this week stepped in to the 2CA breakfast spot as “guest host”, replacing Chris Tennant who’s taking a personal break.

The “Duck” originally worked at 2CC before moving to Sydney’s 2UW then 2SM. He has also hosted breakfast and drive shows on Triple M Sydney and Brisbane, MIX 1065 Sydney and, for the last three years, was the drivetime announcer on WSFM.

During his career he has interviewed four prime ministers, Nelson Mandella, Bono, Freddie Mercury, Elton John, David Bowie, Sting, Phil Collins, Billy Joel and lots more. But we’ll leave him to tell you about them.

Welsh back on air

LONG-time 2CC drive announcer Mike Welsh has decided to return to radio, eight months after leaving the Capital Radio station.

Welsh, an award-winning radio veteran with deep news and announcing experience, has landed the afternoon session (noon to 3pm) on 2HC in Coffs Harbour. The one downside? “It doesn’t snow in Coffs Harbour,” he said sardonically.

Stellar marketing

WHAT are the Salvos thinking? They’re partnering (again) with Australian anti-human trafficking charity Project Futures in a national search for the nation’s “Stella Fella”, a bloke who is a positive role model while raising awareness of human trafficking and modern slavery in Australia.

All very commendable, but did no one think about the lazy “Stella” spelling of stellar that inescapably suggests the Belgian beer Stella Artois?

In the UK, Stella Artois has been unfairly nicknamed “Wife Beater” due to a perception that excessive consumption causes violent behaviour. And the local marketing gnomes are deluding themselves if we don’t know that name here.

They’re cousins!

WITH all the inexplicable column centimetres devoted to brewery news in the daily paper (Bent Spoke opens in Braddon; Wig and Pen’s off to the School of Music), beer drinkers will be riveted by this piece of self-centred hokum from the Coopers Brewery spinner worried about the media “confusion about how the managing director of Coopers Brewery, Dr Tim Cooper, and the company chairman, Mr Glenn Cooper, are related”. Really?

Anyway, to spare any more sleepless nights, confusion ends here: “Tim and Glenn are not brothers. The simplest way to describe them is cousins. They both have the same great, great grandfather, Thomas Cooper, who founded the brewery.

“However, Glenn is descended from Thomas Cooper’s first wife, Ann (1827-1872) while Tim is descended from Thomas Cooper’s second wife, Sarah (1842-1928), who Thomas married in 1874.” Cheers.

It’s off to work they go…

HERE’S some counter-intuitive news for the soon-to-be unemployed public servants of Canberra: the “2014 Hays Salary Guide” reports that 34 per cent of more than 2500 employers surveyed planned to increase their permanent staff levels in the year ahead.

A further 51 per cent expected permanent staff levels to stay the same, while 15 per cent say they will decrease.

Refreshing babies

Refresh-a-Baby... “a space-saving tool that allows parents to leave the baby bottles at home”.
Refresh-a-Baby… “a space-saving tool that allows parents to leave the baby bottles at home”.
GOODBYE baby bottles. American mom Gina Almonte, from Florida, has invented Refresh-a-Baby, “a space-saving tool that allows parents to leave the baby bottles at home”.

She says it’s “a unique and eco-friendly invention that allows you to conveniently turn ordinary water bottles into baby bottles” by attaching the special feeding nipple.

Refresh-a-Baby can also be used on ready-made baby formula bottles and juice bottles. Apparently, this makes it a diaper bag “must have”.

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Thank you,

Ian Meikle, editor

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