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Glen - Breakfast host:

Beatlemania!! (Remastered):

Today we’ve been talking about the long-awaited release of the digital remasters — from the original analogue tapes — of The Beatles 14 studio albums. 

Think I’ll stick with my box set of vinyl Beatles albums myself - love the old records with their artwork, size and that sense you get that it’s a substantial product or artwork that you’ve got in your hands. Also quite like hearing them as they were recorded - complete with the pops and squeaks of old drum pedals and other things that locate it in time and place. This was where technology was at then - state of the art - and that’s okay and interesting in of itself.

Meanwhile, we reported today that the authorities in France are hoping to, at least temporarily, change the nations entrenched passion for kissing as a greeting (and a national pastime).

With up to 20-thousand new swine flu cases a week, they have taken the bold decision to advise people to stop kissing and maybe opt for the more anglo practice of shaking hands, or even better, keeping your distance completely.

They’d suggested the same thing when I was in Argentina recently - they’re also big on the kiss hello. Not sure if they resisted the need to press the flesh but Argentina quickly became one of the worst affected countries for H1N1 with a huge rise in flu-related deaths. Not sure the romantic French will be easy to persuade.

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Mark - Breakfast EP:

Speaking of The Fab Four, we ran a poll on the Newsradio website over the past 24 hours asking if listeners thought the original recordings could be improved.

Two-thirds of people said yes.

It might be great to be able to hear things so clearly that you can hear “Ringo’s squeaky bass drum pedal” as Giles Martin from Abbey Road Studios told CNN’s Jim Bolden, but I still have a real soft spot for my Mum’s slightly scratched and well worn 1965 pressing of “Rubber Soul”.

The track separation between left and right wasn’t perfect and the “bottom end” tended to distort when you turned it up on the old portable record player…but actually, it all seemed to add to the sonic punch on tracks like “Nowhere Man”.

Besides….how are they going to do the famous continuous “end groove” montage from Sergeant Peppers’?

(http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/09/08/2679618.htm)

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Debbie - Sports presenter:

The expression “Super Mum” really galls me. In fact, on most occasions when reporting sport I’m not a fan of referring to a woman’s parental status.

It doesn’t define who a woman is — and it shouldn’t be considered remarkable that a woman who’s borne children can still have success in sport.

Dutch athlete Fanny Blankers-Koen was already a mother of two when she won four gold medals at the London Olympics in 1948. So it’s been going on for a while.

In some ways, though, that’s what makes Kim Clijsters situation in tennis all the more remarkable.

Having reached the semi finals of the US Open, she’s two wins away from being just the third woman ever to win a grand slam title after having a child. It hasn’t happened since 1980 when Evone Cawley won Wimbledon. And before that you have to go back to 1914 when Dorothea Lambert-Chambers  took the title at Wimbledon.

Beats me why it should be so unusual. Maybe women earn so much money in tennis that they don’t need to think about working again after having kids. And maybe that’s why I can’t help cheering for Kim. She’s back because she wants to play — and she knows she can still kick some butt in a sport in which none of the newer generation of top ten players seem to have any consistency.

So I guess it’s unavoidable that Kim being a mum is going to get a mention or two in coming days. But I prefer to think of her as a super player rather than a super mum. And at least we’ve moved on from the days of nicknames like “The Flying Housewife” — which is what Fanny Blankers-Koen copped for her trouble.

Even patronising-cliche writers know dubbing someone “The Serving Housewife” would cause riots.

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Marius - Politics:

Kevin Rudd recently declared an end to the “history wars” - that debate over the colour of the armband appropriate for Australia’s historians as they assess the crimes and achievements of our national past.

But having buried the wars a couple of weeks ago the Prime Minister has now revived them with his account of government in Australia. The Rudd view is that, at least in recent times - say since the election of the Hawke government - Australia has been a Labor project.

“The great Australian contract”, in the Rudd view, was forged by Hawke and Keating and he has inherited their legacy - a legacy that was interrupted by the dark neo-Liberal years of Howard.

He put that view at the launch of Paul Kelly’s new book, a book that finds far more continuity in the governing of Australia over the past 30 years than is allowed for in the Rudd analysis.

The Rudd view was too much for Malcolm Turnbull who described it as as: “..the most graceless address” he had ever heard.

“It was as though he had erased every part of Australian history that didn’t feature the Labor Party.”

So it’s on again: the History Wars Part Two.

And when history gets hauled into the political arena you can only feel sorry for history.