Advocacy group GetUp! had booked advertising space on Channel Seven before and after the opening ceremony on Friday night to show a thirty-second appeal to Kevin Rudd to speak out for the human rights of Tibetans whilst in China this week.

The ad didn't go to air. Channel Seven said that they didn't receive a booking for the ad, no, wait, they later said they had a booking but it was for a GetUp! Fuelwatch ad, no, wait, they couldn't show it because the opening ceremony ran overtime, no, wait...

I have to laugh. A press release from the World Bank hit my inbox in the last couple of hours bearing the opening paragraph:

EMBARGOED: Not for news wire transmission, posting on websites, or any other media use until August 4, 2008 at 7pm in Washington DC (EDT), which is 23:00 UTC/GMT.

Just to recap, this was received at 5pm Washington time on August 1, 2008 (2100 UTC), 74 hours prior. I'll respect the embargo on the email, which is nothing earth-shattering anyway, but sheesh...

My 2005 campaign on these pages for Philadelphia all-rounder J.Barton King's nomination as the Greatest American of All Time has gathered support, albeit three years after the poll closed and was won by an obscure mid-western baseball commentator.

With WYDstock 2008 happily out of the way for ten days now, time for me to make a few comments, having spent most of the WYDstock Week out of town taking my daughter on school holidays.

Firstly, this was a Northern Hemisphere event transplanted to the Southern Hemisphere. It's summer vacation time for students in the Global North, but in Sydney it's mid-winter. And, school holiday fortnight notwithstanding, not an especially quiet time for the Central Business District in July either.

Tens of thousands of migrant workers won't be recycling any trash this August as they are being pushed out of town as Beijing gears up to present a sanitized modern city to millions of Olympic visitors. Reuters picks up the story.

We're reliably informed that the spectacular breaking of ice from the Perito Moreno glacier in Argentina on Monday has little to do with global warming, and more to go with the glacier's alignment.

Still, it's 91 years since ice has broken from this glacier during an Argentine winter. Video from Reuters:

It's a warm welcome to Bulgaria, Estonia and Turkey. One of the more sensible outcomes from this week's ICC meetings in The Home Of Cricket, Dubai, was the expansion of the governing body's membership by three, to now encompass a total of 104 countries.

This represents cricket's biggest incursion into eastern Europe to date. Estonia is the first state of the former Soviet Union to attain ICC membership, while neighbours Bulgaria and Turkey join Croatia and Greece as south-eastern Europe's representatives in the cricketing community.

There's been no official announcement yet, but if all the rumours are true then the ICC executive is about to alter the result of the 2006 Oval Test between England and Pakistan.

With five weeks remaining till the start of the Beijing Olympic Games, the laying of the turf at the Qingdao Olympic Sailing Centre is running ahead of schedule.

Wishful thinking. Sigh.