While watching the second episode of Venture Brothers on DVD, the TV turned off by itself. I thought perhaps I'd bumped a button so I turned it back on. Within seconds it had turned itself off and wouldn't turn on again.
I'll spare you a description of the next hour or so of taking deep breaths and trying not to cry.
Turning the TV off (at the wall) for a bit and back on "resets" it and everything works fine again. Until I try to watch Venture Brothers.
After a day of experimenting we discovered that everything else plays fine including VHS tapes, digital TV and other DVDs. We thought perhaps it was just NTSC DVDs. My DVD player converts NTSC to PAL for playback on TV but we thought something might be screwy there. So we watched a bit of Invader Zim and Metalocalypse (both NTSC TV shows) and they were fine.
We tried plugging the DVD player directly into the TV via S-VHS, regular RCA cables and through the VHS. All had the same effect, the TV would turn off after about 10 minutes of watching.
So I thought I'd be clever and convert the Venture Brothers DVDs to DivX to play on my media box. The irony of this didn't escape me...
So now the show is in a completely different format playing on a different machine through a different input. After 10 minutes... the TV turned off. VOODOO CURSE!!!
What that at least told me was that it was something in the image or audio that was doing it. So I turned off a few settings in the TV and turned down the brightness. No problems. We watched the rest of the season except the last episode without problems.
So I'm guessing something in the TV didn't like a particular colour or brightness level and overheated.
The particular model of TV also has a "known" problem of randomly turning off, which probably explains how a year-old UK-made TV ended up in a factory seconds outlet in Australia for a third of it's "new" price.
The current member, Liberal "Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations" Joe Hockey has promised to quit his seat if WorkChoices changes significantly if the Liberal party is re-elected.
The potential and likely new Prime Minister in such a case would be Peter Costello, who is on record as saying he would "like to take WorkChoices further".
If politics worked the way it does in my head, Hockey would lose his seat. If this election is being fought significantly on voter dissatisfaction with WorkChoices, as the media suggests, then it makes the most sense to remove the minister responsible for this portfolio, as a message to the government.
It doesn't work this way though. Hockey will probably keep his seat with a reduced majority. The Prime Minister John Howard is more likely to lose his seat than Hockey, even though if you wanted to really blame anyone, it would be the Treasurer, Peter Costello.
I don't get to vote for or against any of these people in my electorate though. I'm in a marginal (2.7%) Labor seat that is most likely to remain Labor. I have the pleasure of being able to vote for a friend, and to direct my preferences to parties I believe in, and to leave the last numbers for those I don't.
If you asked me, as a completely uninformed observer, to pick a winner in this race I'd pick Labor by one seat, with multiple parties holding the balance in the Senate, but I think I'd just be stating my wishes, not an actual political analysis.
At the last election I had the pleasure/displeasure of watching the whole count at a party.
I don't know what I'll be doing this year...