Mia Freedman has a number of outlets for her opinion, one of which is a popular blog².  I wondered, then, given the passion with which she backed the social workers in her Today Show appearance, how much she has used her profile to make a larger case for their appropriate remuneration and recognition.  This is the result of an audit on her blog – a search for the term “social worker”.

The search returned seven hits.

1. Mia’s account of the Cadel Evans debacle.  31/7/2011

2. A story about discrimination where one of the victims was a gay social worker. He was refused permission to adopt a child, but not because he was a social worker.  21/2/2011

3. A story about a US program to sterilise drug addicts.  The term “social worker” appeared in the context of the program trimming down “social worker caseloads”.  20/10/2010

4. When the AOC requested more funding. Mia puts social workers in a group of people who deserve a larger share of government money. 24/11/2009

5. In a story (if you could even call it that – Mia attaches an introductory paragraph to a piece from, of all sources, the Daily Mail) that snarks about Madonna’s appearance.  The “social worker” is invoked by the Daily Mail in this context:

Last week, she left her New York apartment in red lacetrimmed bloomers, a hoodie, ski sunglasses and undone strappy sandals. She resembled someone who, rather than being flanked by bodyguards, should have been accompanied by a concerned social worker at each elbow.

Apparently it’s okay to run a piece that creates a perception that the role of social workers is to escort celebrities whose dress sense is questionable.  And, by extension, also okay to use people’s sartorial choices to make assessments about their mental health.   5/12/2008

6. A story that responds to celebrating the achievements of Olympic athletes with a parade by wondering where where the ticker tape parade for social workers (amongst others) is. 15/9/2008

7. A story about a rugby league player who moved to France.  The brief post is incoherent – I’m not sure whether that’s because of my limited knowledge of rugby or hers – but here’s what I think she’s saying: Sonny Bill Williams should be allowed to earn as much as he wants here, but it would be nice if social workers (amongst others) were also paid mega-bucks. She includes a gratuitous bare-torso shot of the player in question, and the disclaimer

What I know about NRL could be written on the back of a computer chip. In texta. But since a lack of comprehensive knowledge about a subject has never precluded me from forming an opinion, I’m going to weigh in on Sonny Bill Williams’ defection from Australian rugby league to French rugby union.

From 29/7/2008

It seems that the only time Mia gets publicly fired up about the plight of the social workers of Australia is when people are celebrating the accomplishments of sports-people, or discussing sports funding.  I don’t disagree at all that there is an inequality in the way different occupations are recognised, but surely it would be more useful for Mia to organise her considerable supporter base in a concerted campaign than to carp about it every couple of years when others are caught up in one of those rare moments of (perhaps irrational) vicarious triumph.

Or maybe “reporting” on a skinny Shane Warne is more important.

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1. Karl says it was a “sporting triumph” and doesn’t call Evans a hero in his introduction to the segment.

2. I don’t have readership figures for the blog, but am judging it as “popular” based on the number of comments posts receive and by the number of times a post-promoting tweet of hers pops up in my twitter stream (which I thought I had curated carefully to avoid any encounters with the MamaMia tribe).

Anyway, after the jump are some of the things unintentional visitors were looking for.

·         an independent panel made up of community leaders

·         the esquire list

·         toyo rice cooker

·         graffiti guy (also graffiti art and graffiti)

·         glow in the dark towels

This is the blog’s most popular search phrase, having brought people here on more than 20 different occasions.  One visitor even used the phrase “buy glow in the dark towels”.  I need an R&D grant – there’s clearly a market for these!

·         gormless guy

I love the word “gormless”, so I am ridiculously pleased with this search.  Having re-read the rant about ads, I realise I used the term “gormless guy” three times in one paragraph.  Perhaps I need to give gormless a rest.  I’m having no luck whatsoever trying to make gorm happen, either.

·         stilnox mix with

A PSA: don’t mix Stilnox with anything.  In fact don’t take Stilnox.

·         injera (also njera bread and njera)

I feel particularly guilty about the searches for “injera” that ended up here.  I named my cat Injera because the breed is Abyssinian and Abyssinia is now Ethiopia and injera is an Ethiopian bread.  This provided a bread link to my previous cat, Bagel.  When establishing this blog, I spared no thought for somebody who may have been trying to track down reliable information on the delicious bready goodness that is injera.  For anybody in the Melbourne inner north or west region, good injera can be found at a number of restaurants, such as Cafe Lalibela and the Blue Nile in Footscray, and The Abyssinian in Kensington, as well as though Sorghum Sisters, a catering venture (pdf menu here).

·         Andrew Symonds solo advert

No idea why someone was searching for this. 

·         breville breadmaker hopeless

This seems like more of a Tweet than a search.

·         ullrich criticises evans (and jan ullrich criticise cadel evans, and cadel evans criticised by jan ullrich)

I’m assuming that somebody was really keen to source a quote or a story on this.  That makes more sense than thinking three different people were researching the Kaiser’s thoughts on Cadel, doesn’t it?

·         breville rice cooker water to rice ratio

Nooooooooooooo!  It doesn’t matter what the ratios are – it’s a Breville so it won’t work properly!

·         “putin rears up”

·         short story prince Caspian

·         zimbabwe november 2008 advocate or petition

·         tiger rice cooker where to buy Melbourne (also tiger rice cooker, tiger rice cooker Melbourne and best rice pot congee maker japan)

I raved about this rice cooker and now I feel bad that somebody else was looking for it and found absolutely no concrete information on where to find one!  If you’re still out there, looking, I can’t give you the name of the shop because it was a fairly unmemorable name, but it’s a big kitchen supplies place on the southern side of the eastern end of Victoria Street, Richmond.  Hope that helps. 

·         pangkor mee

I don’t even know what Pangkor Mee is, but I’m craving some!

·         robbie mcewan

·         christopher hitchens bob carr abc and wasilla is the meth capital of America

Both of these just demonstrate that I obsessed too much about the US election.

According to a case described in the medical journal Sleep Medicine, a 44-year-old sleepwalker logged onto her computer and emailed out party invitations to friends. Fortean Times magazine looks at this case and several other bizarre episodes of somnambulism. From Fortean Times: The mails themselves were perhaps not up to the woman’s waking standard; each was in a random mix of upper and lower case characters, badly formatted and containing odd expressions. One read: “Come tomorrow and sort this hell hole out. Dinner and drinks, 4.pm. Bring wine and caviar only.” Another said simply: “What the…”

There have been a number of stories over the past couple of years about the strange things people have done whilst taking Ambien, which is also sold under the name Stilnox.  Some of these have been in the form of trashy current affairs stories, complete with actors re-enacting late night strolls in Y-fronts and woozy camera effects.  According to an old story in the Sydney Morning Herald,

A national drug reactions hotline fielded 500 calls from Stilnox users who reported odd behaviours from crashing cars to falling from balconies after popping a pill. One patient gained 23 kilograms over seven months after unknowingly eating from the refrigerator while asleep. Another patient woke up with a paintbrush in her hand after painting the front door.

I haven’t ever suffered from insomnia, but was prescribed Stilnox for a flight.  We had booked a very short visit to Tokyo and I didn’t want to waste any of it catching up on missed sleep, so I figured sleeping tablets would be a reasonable answer.  They did the trick – after the traditional take-off G&T and some typically nasty Qantas food, I popped my tablet and was soon in the land of nod.  I woke up feeling refreshed and ready to make the most of my break.

After this positive experience, I had no hesitation in taking another for the night flight home, and was quite surprised – and a mite skeptical – when I started hearing reports of problems with the drug.  Even though one of those reports was from a colleague – not a “friend of an aunt” or “cousin of a next door neighbour”, but a first-hand sufferer – it wasn’t enough to dissuade me from using them on a trip to South Africa.

I will not use them again.

I don’t think I painted any buildings, ate voraciously, operated heavy machinery or undertook any other activities after taking the pill on the flight home.  It’s just that I don’t remember anything about the flight home.  Including transferring between planes at Hong Kong Airport.  I struggled to navigate HKIA on the outward journey; I have no idea how I managed to get safely from Cathay to Qantas on the way home.

Sometimes I still think I’ll appear in grainy footage on one of those “World’s Craziest Travellers” type of shows, walking around Chek Lap Kok with my knickers on my head.

First impressions do count.  I know it’s still a Beta version, but do all the tabs have to crash every time I open more than two stories from my RSS reader?  That’s enough to drive me straight back to Firefox right there.  (Not that I wasn’t nearly back there already, what with the decidedly un-kawaii logo.  C’mon, Google, give us a small, furry creature!  Or something. Something recognisably something.)  

Another strike against Chrome is that the Diigo toolbar isn’t available.  Again, early days, I know, but when a product is trumpeted as being all “2.0″ (and I look up “2.0″ and think “huh, really?”) and then my social bookmarking site is not supported… I start thinking “if only there was a cute, furry animal involved, I’d feel better about this”. 

I do like the minimalist look of the page and much prefer opening new tabs the IE way, rather than the FF way.  I’m also a fan of having somethink to look at on the new tab, although I’m not sure how handy it’s going to be to see my “most visited” sites, given that they are also on my bookmark toolbar.  What would be good – and I’m more than a little bit surprised that it’s not there – is a link to… Google.  As in, the search engine.  As in the-reason-”google”-has-been-verb-ised-and-popped-into-dictionaries.

Finally, “Chrome”?

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Update: 20/09/2008

Now I’ve had some time to play with Chrome, and wander around the internet looking at other people’s comments on it, I’ve found the “Google within address bar” feature, which is fabulous and explains why the developers didn’t need to embed the Google home page. It also sent me back to the Firefox add-ons to find a “new tab” button and the “fast dial” function. Probably not what Google wanted, but the existence of Chrome has improved my Firefox experience! I still use Firefox at home and IE at work (not by choice, but because I can’t seem to get FF or Chrome to load when I’m plugged into the school network) but will check on Chrome every now and again to see what they’re doing so I get more ideas for FF add-ons.

One of my regular stops in blog-land was Culture Strain. Over the past few weeks, updates to this site have been few. Regardless, I continued to check daily, just in case. On Saturday, Sam acknowledged the dearth of new posts, and offered the following: I advise you to add Culture Strain to your RSS reader of choice (and if you don’t know what an RSS reader is: seriously, it’s 2008 now. Try to keep up) to keep abreast of whatever updates are made here.

I had no idea what an RSS reader was! I felt so out of touch! Google offered a number of solutions to my RSS-reader-free existence and I went with FeedDemon. It came with a bunch of pre-loaded feeds and I kept a couple of those: BBC News and The New York Times. In a “newsy” frame of mind, I also added The Age, The Mail and Guardian, and The Australian. Then I plugged in all of my usual daily visits and waited for the feeds to come through.

They did. Despite knowing that I had a choice in what I read – that I wasn’t under any obligation to consume every story fed through to me – I gorged myself on Sunday. Problems with delinquent adolescents in Humberside? I’d better be on top of that story. Rookie police officer killed during a firearms training session? Of utmost importance. My Sunday feeds took me hours to get through. The killer was Tuesday. Evidently, feeds take some time to process, depending on the source. Having heard nothing from the M&G on Sunday, I was completely unprepared for 190 unread stories to appear in my list.

I’m learning how to prioritise. I still eat my “vegetables” – i.e. the news and opinion folders – before my “dessert” – YouTube links, fashion blunders, music reviews – but I am skipping stories that I would ordinarily skip if they appeared in print form. I’ve put some aside for later, then deleted them. I’ve deleted some outright, knowing that I will always come across them on the web if I really need to. I’m still spending more time that I was prior to the RSS revolution, but it’s early days.

And I’m still seeing good stuff like this:

‘Warcraft’ Sequel Lets Gamers Play A Character Playing ‘Warcraft’