Jack Scott's Blog

There’s something I need to get off my chest. You may have guessed what it is by now.

I’m getting really sick of news outlets calling Facebook pages ‘websites’. It’s really demoralising to the people who actually own websites and put effort into maintaining them. I mean, it even costs money! I bet you don’t get the people who create pages spending money on them.

So, Southern Cross News, WIN News, and even ABC News (this one, I admit, surprised me), please just stop confusing pages and websites. If you really want to get pedantic, a Facebook page is indeed a webpage, but it’s not a website. Facebook as a whole is a website.

It also alarms me that the easier it gets to create content on the web, the stupider the content gets (I’m talking about this and this). Which makes me wonder: were the book publishers and the newspaper publishers right? Has the quality of published work suffered because of the Internet? The fact that they might just be right… well, that scares me.

This evening I spent time on Youtube (uh oh…). After the usual clicking between videos, I ended up on this song. For the uninitiated, the Ning Nang Nong is a song by legendary poet Spike Milligan, but made famous (to Australians at least) by being made into an animation sequence on a children’s television show (Play School, on ABC TV). I spent about an hour listening to this video, over and over and over. It never gets old.

According to Wikipedia, Play School is the longest-running childrens television show in Australia, and more than 80% of young children watch it at least once a week. I’d say that’s been true for the entire running of the series too. Every person I’ve talked to on the matter has watched Play School as a child. Even though they’ve taken the Ning Nang Nong off the regular programming, it does occasionally get a run. And boy does it deserve it.

The Ning Nang Nong has so much pure win in it. It’s hilariously funny, completely insane, horribly addictive, and it impregnates itself in your brain forever. Very few Internet memes can pull as much win. From one comment on YouTube:

GreenCristina: [...] The amount of win it contains cannot even be articulated.

So after a bit of thought, I came to the decision that more Australians would be able to recite more of the Ning Nang Nong than they would of the Australian national anthem (Advance Australia Fair), without listening to either song before hand. I know that I know more Ning Nang Nong, for certain.

So tell me (in the comments), have you seen the Ning Nang Nong? Is it the highlight of your childhood? Can you recite more it than Advance Australia Fair? And is it the biggest pre-Internet win ever?

Well, yesterday saw the last episode of Gardening Australia ever hosted by the extraordinary man himself, Peter Cundall. I’ve never been much of a gardener myself (I think my last attempt at gardening produced more rocks than vegetables), but I just want to say, in my own little way, thankyou.

Peter Cundall has inspired tens of thousands of people to take up gardening, and to get out and enjoy the outdoors a bit more. He is also, without a doubt, the most consistently enthusiastic individual in Australia. I have never seen him not excited about something.

There’s an interview with Andrew Denton that gives amazing insight into his life… he’s been in both the British and Australian armies, presented television shows for over thirty years, and stood for election for the communist party and then not voted for himself. An odd man to be sure.

I hope the rest of his life is just as fruitful.