the lion returneth

Been a while since I last blogged here. Pictures from my overseas trips do not count.

First one thing I need to get off my chest...

91.3 fired Joe Augustin and Petrina Kow!!!!
They are both great deejays in their own right, and put them together and you have the best teams on radio bar none. We know Petrina was thinking of quitting as she had trouble juggling her work and family on top of her duties on the Morning Show. But she was willing to stay on air until a suitable replacement had been found.

Jamie R Meldrum, Radio 91.3’s Programme Director had this to say,"We weren’t interested in continuing the revolving door of Joe’s partners and inviting the never-ending comparisons and other baggage that went along with that. So after considerable deliberation, we decided to make a fresh start, in line with what we’ve done with the rest of the station."

really do not know what to say about the official explanation given above. it is wrong on so many different levels. You have a winning team with a loyal band of fans tuning in every day, and what do you do? You sack both of them! So understandably fans of the show are peeved and are tuning out in droves. It was disrespectful to not only Joe and Petrina, but their loyal fan base as well.

It would be well and good if they replaced them with a high calibre morning team, but who did we end up with? First it was the football crazy duo of Jeremy Ratnam and Elliott Danker. And then they were replaced by...*drumroll*.... Suzanne Walker and Sheikh Haikel.

z z z z z z z z z z z

I can see how this change has really revolutionised morning programming. Or as Jamie Meldrum succinctly put it,""simply a programming change". Suzanne Walker is a veteran and can hold her own, but she is no where near being an able replacement for Petrina Kow. And what can I say about Sheikh Haikel that has not already been said? He should not even be on radio, or even TV, but here he is once again hogging up the airwaves with his inane comments and lame jokes. He has crapped up every show he has ever been on and this one is no different. Surely there are dozens of other better candidates for the job that that fat piece of lard.

the only good thing they have going on there now is The Married Men show by Andre Hoeden, Rod Monteiro and Audrey Lim in the evenings.

ARRRGGGHHHHH!!!

ok I feel better now.

in case some of you may have somehow missed it, I was away in Berlin with the wifey last week. Was an 'OK' trip as far as trips go. here are the highlights:

- grafitti.
amazing how much grafitti there is in Berlin. almost every wall has some form of grafitti excluding some monuments and government buildings etc. no idea how much time and paint was used to do all the handiwork on display. You find it on buildings along the train tracks and even on the glass of the trains itself. The side of homes and building are inundated with writing and drawings.

- Gays and Lesbians.
"With approximately 300,000 homosexuals living in Berlin, the German capital ranks as the third largest gay metropolis in all of Europe, with only London and Amsterdam boasting greater numbers."
considering that Berlin has a population of about 3.4 million, it works out to roughly 1 in 10 people being gay/lesbian. Agnes and myself were treated to several public displays of affection including 2 dudes sharing a long wet french kiss on the train.

- Food.
I do not know about anyone else, but in the opinion of this eurasian boy, german food is crap. We did not have a single decent meal whilst we were there. Our main orders were of the usual suspects, fast food and chinese restaurants. otherwise we would have been goners I tell ya. I had one of the worst meals I can remember as I decided to sample one of the dishes Berlin is purportedly famous for, Pork Knuckles. It was undercooked. it was oily. it was tasteless. and I ended up the next day with a bad tummyache and out of sorts all day. did i mention it was salty too?

-Schloss Sanssouci.
On one of the days Agnes took time off from her workshop and we headed to Schloss Sanssouci. Sanssouci is the former summer palace of Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, at Potsdam. it is situated in the the vast Sanssouci Park which contain several other notable buildings and palaces. The place is so huge and there is so much to do there that it would take us a whole day to do it all.
anyway we got there around noon. then we had a hard time finding the place where the palace visit was supposed to be located. we spent over an hour searching the grounds based on the maps we had. In the end we missed our appointed time and were unable to view the interior of the palace. So our entire trip was bombed. we could not see what we had come to see. It was all my fault for venturing too far and getting lost.Poor Agnes was so upset. To make things worse I had eaten that vile Pork Knuckles the day before, and ended up with one of the worst tummy problems I can recall. I will not get into the specifics here, but needless to say it was nasty.
We had also not eaten nor packed lunch. We brought hardly enough water to sustain us on a hot day like it was. So after 1 hr of walking, a missed visit to the palace and an unfortunate trip to the toilet, we were understandably deflated, tired and hungry. We continued to walk as best we could but it was a losing battle. Agnes and myself could barely walk as we trudged along the paths. We then ventured to the New Palace /Neues Palais. problem was it was like a good 2 to 3 kilometers from where we started from. by the time we got there we were like totally knackered. worst part was that it was closed!! The bloody place was not open. we had wasted all our time and energy to get there for nothing. Can't imagine how frustrated we felt just then.
Then we were faced with the burning question of what to do next. we were in no shape to make another 3 km walk back to the main gate. but how else would we get out?
after resting and weighing our options we decided to gamble on walking out by a rear gate and taking a bus from there rather than walking all the way back to where we had began from. thankfully it paid off and we were able to get a bus back to the train station. but on the bus we also came to the stark realisation that there were bus stop all along the perimeter of the park! so actually we may have been better served by a bus stop even nearer to where we were than the option we had taken. like they say hindsight is 20/20.
all in all a bad day out for us on a day when little went right.Pity as it was the only full day that we had out together during the whole trip.

Tiergarten.
Tiergarten (German for Zoo) is the name of a large park in the centre of Berlin. And the Tiergarten is Berlin’s most central and largest park, near to the city’s major tourist attractions, its business center, and historical monuments to empire, war, and modern justice.



There is so much to see and do in Tiergarten. I had a hard time making it from one end to the middle of the park and back. that feat coupled with scaling the Siegessäule (the panorama above from atop the Siegessäule lookout)took me around 3 hours. and I did not even cover a quarter of the park but only those nearer the edge and close to where I was!

anyway a brief description of some of the more notable landmarks in Tiergarten:
"The park houses many parliamentary and governmental institutions, among others the Bundestag in the Reichstag building and the new German Chancellery. The residence of the German President, Schloss Bellevue and the Carillon are also located in the Tiergarten park. It contains several notable sculptures including the four-tiered Victory Column (Siegessäule), the Bismarck Memorial and several other memorials to prominent Prussian generals, all of which were located in the ceremonial park facing the Reichstag before they were moved to their present location by the Nazis. In addition, the tree-lined walkways emanating from the Victory Column contain several ceremonial sculptures of Prussian aristocrats enacting an 18th century hunt.

The Brandenburg Gate and the Potsdamer Platz are situated on the eastern rim of the locality, the former frontier between East and West Berlin. Nearby is the Kulturforum stretching from the Berliner Philharmonie, a 1963 concert hall by architect Hans Scharoun and home of the Berlin Philharmonic orchestra to the Neue Nationalgalerie built by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 1968. In between are the neoclassical Saint Matthew Church, built in 1845 by Friedrich August Stüler, the Gemäldegalerie as well as the new branch of the Berlin State Library (Staatsbibliothek). A villa that stood in the place of the bus station next to the Berliner Philharmonie at Tiergartenstraße No. 4 was the seat of the Nazi killing of disabled persons ("euthanasia") program Action T4. A memorial marks the site.

The adjacent area between the park and the Landwehrkanal is home to Emil Fahrenkamp's 1932 Shell-Haus, numerous embassies and the Bendlerblock, where in 1944 Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg and the conspirators of the July 20 plot were shot by a firing squad . Today the building serves as second office of the Federal Ministry of Defence. Nearby are the headquarters of the Christian Democratic Party, the Konrad Adenauer Foundation and Friedrich Ebert Foundation academies as well as the Bauhaus Archive and the high schools Französisches Gymnasium and Canisius-Kolleg. The adjacent western area at the border to Charlottenburg houses the Berlin Zoo.

At the Victory Column and the Straße des 17. Juni the Love parade from 1996-2003 and 2006 took place as well as the German Live 8 concert on July 2, 2005. Since 1987 the annual Berlin Marathon starts here."

***** to be continued another day ***** (maybe not...)