I was prepared to give Channel 9 in Sydney the TV cockup of the year award for showing a pre-recording of Saturday’s lotto draw in place of Monday’s live lotto draw by mistake a few weeks ago, but I can’t help thinking Channel 4 in the UK has gone one-up on them.

On Thursday night, Channel 4 showed a Green Party election broadcast. The subtitles, however, were of the election broadcast for the rather right-wing UK Independent Party.

Friday’s Guardian picks up the story.

A remarkable story that I was unaware of until today. April 22, 1959, and the acclaimed ballet dancer Margot Fonteyn is detained in a Panama City lock-up for 24 hours while her husband is on the run attempting a coup against the Panamanian government.

BBC Online’s On This Day section picks up the story.

The Roman Catholic Church has a new Pope, and I have revamped my cricket blog yet again. It’s now being done in Wordpress, same as this. I promise it will be different. I can’t promise it will be interesting, though I try. I can’t promise I will update it often, and I can’t promise that I will try. All of which fails to explain why I have done four entries so far today, two of them being commentaries on Powerpoint demonstrations.

That link again (except that I didn’t give it to you before): http://cricket.rickeyre.com/blog/.

From the “It depends what the meaning of is is” shelf at the Doublespeak Shop:

Charles Hurt (Washington Times): Have you ever crossed the line of ethical behavior in terms of dealing with lobbyists, your use of government authority or with fundraising?
Tom DeLay: Ever is a very strong word.

(Here is the complete transcript of the interview that led to DeLay’s proclamation.)

DeLay is a member of GWB’s Texan Republican mafia, and the US House of Representatives Majority Leader. For now.

What more fitting celebration could there be of the 50th birthday of that icon of American culture - McDonald’s - than with that other great icon of American culture - the drive-by shooting? No one was hurt when shots were fired outside Macca’s at Parramatta Road, Stanmore, in the early hours of Saturday. This, incidentally, is the same Mickey D’s where a pivotal scene in Melissa Marchetta’s acclaimed 1992 novel, “Looking for Alibrandi“, is set, ie, where the central character is almost gang-raped in the car park.

At about the same time that the Stanmore McDonald’s was dodging pot shots, McDonald’s were doing a live webcast of the opening of their official 50th birthday McDonald’s outlet in Chicago. Here is the broadband real video archive of that milestone in world culinary history. Here’s the Maccas 50th birthday corporate website.

McDonald’s (NYSE:MCD) shares fell 46c or about one and a half per cent on Wall Street on Friday to $30.30, but to be fair, the whole market belly-flopped on Friday. Stay tuned for the webcast of McDonald’s Q1 earnings report this Thursday.

The official McDonald’s 50th birthday press release can be read on their corporate website, but I’d like to reproduce just one heart-rending paragraph here:

Also recognized at the 50th Anniversary celebration was one of McDonald’s first-ever customers. Glen Volkman of Eau Claire, Wis., then a high school junior, was one of the first customers served at the original McDonald’s location in Des Plaines on April 15, 1955, ordering a cheeseburger, French fries and shake for about 80 cents that day. Proud of his unique McDonald’s experience, Volkman has followed the success of McDonald’s since and attributes McDonald’s global success to ‘’good food and good people.'’

A more pertinent celebration of fifty years of McDonald’s came on Friday when The McLibel Two (Helen Steel and Dave Morris) stomped on a 50th birthday cake outside McDonald’s Euroheadquarters in Finchley. And here is some viewer reaction to the BBC’s screening on Thursday night of the documentary, McLibel.

Footnote: Three days after the opening of the first McDonald’s at Des Plaines, Illinois on 15 April 1955, Albert Einstein died.

April 15, 1955, and the first McDonald’s “restaurant” opened in Des Plaines, Illinois, named by milk shaker-salesman Ray Kroc after the McDonald brothers, Dick and Mac, whose hamburger stand in San Bernadino, California became his inspiration. The rest… yeah well you know.

I’m going to commemorate half a century of Macca’s today in the most symbolic fashion I can think of: by eating a works hamburger from the corner shop. It will be more nutritious (though how nutritious will be open to debate), contain none of that chemical mixture they call “special sauce”, and I’ll be supporting local small business.

And tonight I might get out the “Super Size Me” DVD again.

I stopped going to Macca’s about three years ago (though I did have a dinner at the now-defunct McDonald’s subsidiary Boston Market next to the RPA the night after Adara was born). At my worst I was a twice-a-day Maccas person, when they had an outlet across the road from my place of work in Hunter Street, Newcastle. Then the 1989 earthquake shut the McDonald’s (and most business in Hunter Street) down rather abruptly. Perhaps the one and only reason to be thankful for the earthquake.

These days, the only fast-food franchises I visit are Australian-owned, in particular Oporto and Michel’s Patisserie.

Read the Corporate Responsibility section of the McDonald’s website. The McDonald’s Australia website has a PDF download of a piece of glowing propaganda called the MacPack (it’s 3.4 megs and they don’t tell you much about corporate responsibility or community involvement on their non-flash website).

And when are we going to get McDelivery like they have in Mumbai?

Perhaps a more useful resource is McSpotlight, the official website of the McLibel case. The updated documentary of McLibel was screened on BBC Four a few hours ago and had its world premiere in the cinemas last weekend.

And this Sydney Morning Herald article from 2003 documents the successful resistance to McDonald’s expansion in and around the city.

It’s probably the dream match-up. India have qualified for their first-ever Women’s Cricket World Cup Final, and they’ll be playing Australia on Sunday. A chance for revenge for the men’s World Cup Final of 2003 perhaps? I’ll be busy following the final on Cricketwoman this Sunday, please drop in and join us there.

It always irks me to hear talk of the December 26 calamity as the “Asian Tsunami”. Somalia was affected badly too. This report from IRIN (originally at http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=46502):

SOMALIA: War and tsunami force Somalis into slums

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

NAIROBI, 7 Apr 2005 (IRIN) - Civil war and December’s tsunami have inflicted mass devastation on Somalia’s housing situation, a Somali government official said on Tuesday at the 20th Governing Council of the UN Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT) in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital.

“Because of the frequent movements and internal displacements due to the civil war, certain areas of Somali cities are extremely overpopulated, while other areas are not populated at all, and have become ghost neighbourhoods,” Qasim Hersi Farah, the permanent secretary in Somalia’s ministry of environment, said during a plenary session.

“This has led to heavy garbage disposal everywhere, shortages of shelter [and] water, and the growing spread of communicable diseases,” he added.

Delegates from 58 UN member-countries are attending the five-day meeting, opened on Monday by Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki. The conference is expected to give new impetus to plans for meeting the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), in particular target 11 of MDG 7 - improving the living conditions of at least 100 million slum dwellers by the year 2020.

Somali delegates at the conference estimated that 85 percent of their population were currently living in slums or partially destroyed homes.

A special theme of the meeting is “post-conflict and natural and human-made disaster assessment and reconstruction”, a subject with special meaning for Somalia, a country devastated by 15 years of civil war and, more recently, the 26 December 2004 tsunami that tore through its northeastern coastline, leaving more than 20,000 people in need of aid.

UN-HABITAT estimated that up to 1,500 buildings and 40 villages in northeastern Somalia were damaged by the tsunami. The agency aims to repair 1,000 houses and build 500 new ones in affected areas, at an estimated cost of US $2 million.

Moreover, Farah explained how Somali society was abandoning its traditional, pastoral way of life.

“It is estimated that no fewer than 60 percent of the Somali population are living in urban areas with [or] without adequate shelter,” he said. “This statistical proportion shows that the situation has changed from what it once was - a country in which 75 percent of people were nomadic or farmers before the 1980s.”

Several years of drought have also exacerbated the humanitarian situation in the country.

According to UN-HABITAT, crises such as Somalia’s can “turn back the development clock”. It noted that a significant majority of Somali victims were civilians, especially women and children, in a world that already had to protect an estimated 20 million refugees and 25 million internally displaced persons.