If the zeitgeist was on Mastermind, Twitter would be its special subject.
LEAVING EARLY
I come from a very anti-social family. Naturally, I tried to rebel. As an adolescent I promised myself that I’d be different. “I’m always going to have heaps of friends, and ask them around all the time, and lead a very busy social life,” I swore.
But now, in my 40s, I find myself declining every invitation that comes through the letter box. After a decade as a society/PR journalist, attending every free bun fight from Mt Eden to Melbourne, I find myself all partied-out and like nothing better than a social diary entirely free of engagements. It’s not that I dislike people, you understand. I just don’t like them en masse.
However, there are times when I am impelled to attend some festivity or other. On these occasions I arrive as early as possible. Thus, when everyone else rolls up about half an hour to an hour later they find me just leaving, my social duty done.
Often I arrive to find my hosts half-dressed, rushing about the living room, hiding old newspapers and children’s toys under the sofa. “Oh,” they say, somewhat distraught, “here already! Is that the time?”
“Sorry, am I early?” I say. “Let me help prepare and you go get dressed.” Gratefully they rush to the bedroom to complete their toilette while I check the ice, chill the wine and arrange the hors d’oeuvres. By the time the other pleasure-goers descend I’ve had a spot of sherry, eaten the best of the snacks and earned the gratitude of my hosts. Laden with Brownie points, I slip quietly away.
By leaving early, before the alcohol-fuelled dramas begin, I see everyone at their arrival best, all clean and pressed. I am thus spared making stilted conversation with complete strangers, and, far worse, the upsetting spectacle of dear friends eating too much, drinking too much and, in general, losing those finer qualities for which I admire them. Take my advice – if you want to enjoy your friends, don’t party with them.
The trouble is that couples work on Venn diagrams when it comes to musical appreciation. The overlapping bit in the middle on our particular Venn diagram does not contain many bands, and sometimes you can have too much Proclaimers or the free ‘Chill Out’ CD that was once taped to the front of the Observer newspaper.
I am a bit cross with her closed mind attitude.
“I think you should give it more of a chance,” I say. “I know progressive rock does have a bit of a bad reputation, but the interesting thing is that the best, most well-regarded stuff - your Genesises, your Tulls, even something like Tubular Bells - essentially consists of a series of cracking tunes linked by short musical bridges. So whilst it’s those bridges that define the genre, if you like, it really just goes back to those cracking tunes, which are the essence of pop music anyway.
“Aside from Yes,” I admit, “who sound like an explosion in a wank factory.”
I warm to my theme. “So whilst many people have likened Progressive Rock to classical music, I’d say that it’s more to do with the traditions of opera - big numbers with a theme and links.”
I am pleased with my analysis. Sometimes I think that I should have been a teacher; perhaps I might re-train one day. There is nothing quite as satisfying as imparting learning to people.
“I think it’s shit,” she replies.
I am annoyed once more. The problem with being a teacher in the twenty-first century is that trendy teaching theories have made it all but impossible to exclude pupils.
“We received a huge number of entries this year and the debate was furious as to which would be included on the shortlist. Six seems such a cruelly low number given titles such as Excrement in the Late Middle Ages and All Dogs Have ADHD were rejected,” said charts editor Philip Stone. “We also had to exclude a few titles because they were published before 2008 – Monumental Beginnings: Archaeology of the N4 Sligo Inner Relief Road and one of my personal favourites, Sketches of Hull Authors. The latter was first published back in 1879, but thanks to print on demand – the wonderful saviour of out-of-print books – you can still purchase copies to this day.”The shortlist is:
The prize was established in 1978, when it was won by Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice. This year’s winner will be decided by a public vote at www.thebookseller.com, and will be announced on 27 March.
Already darkness is expanding its hold over dawn and dusk, and soon enough there will be a sharpness at daybreak, indicating frosts are on the way. And as that time creeps up, so there’s a group of men and women who begin to “sort out their stuff” checking on back-pack straps, overhauling camping and cooking gear, making sure shirt-buttons are sewn on tight, that woollen socks don’t have holes, that thermal underwear is in good condition. Sleeping bags will be aired, tents and pegs and cordage inspected, knives honed, boots greased, rifles oiled and cleaned and sighted in, ammunition purchased or special loads put carefully together.Yes, hunting season approaches. Home Paddock writes occasionally about the urban-rural divide – here, for example – and hunting is a real marker. A metrosexual friend in Auckland was horrified last year by the rise of Sarah Palin: it wasn’t her ignorance, religion or political views that upset him most: “It’s that gun shit I can’t stand,” he said. I didn’t like to tell him that my father-in-law goes duck-shooting in the Manawatu, my grandfather used to take me along to the Tauranga Rifle Club, both my neighbours go hunting (they eat a lot of venison) and most of the dads at my children’s school have guns. All farmers do, all over New Zealand. It’s normal.
Farmers will take you for a walk around the farm, introduce you to the animals and explain how they grow crops. . . Every farm visit will be different. On some farms there will be games to play and activities like sheep shearing, milking cows and working-dog demonstrations. This is not a sanitised farm experience but an opportunity to see real farms and talk with real farmers.Twenty-eight farms across the country will be open to the public. This map shows the ones closest to you. It’s a great idea – see how the other half live and all that. My friend might even discover that farmers tend to be smart, well-informed and, sometimes, quite nice when you get to know them. Even if they do have guns.
It’s fascinating stuff all right. I actually agree to a large extent with John Makinson that publishers will and/or can benefit from digital publishing. It’s the conservative bookseller trade that should be shivering in their shoes, because in the long run they could be left stranded.
I think that for us the big danger is in a possible transition period (some say it has arrived) with bookshop sales softening and falling but income from e-books and the like not rising at the same rate. So our businesses could be in some trouble.
Penguin overseas is devoting huge efforts to adapt and to produce e-books. Us too: all our one-colour new books now have digital e-book files prepared at the same time as the physical book pages, ready to go.
The Kindle is being used in US publishing in-house. Editors now travel around with page proofs on their devices in digital form. Manuscripts too. And on the Metro, of course, they also read the New York Times and Publishers News.
I’m really impressed by the thought that these e-book reading devices are actually quite conservative in construction and use. They’re not very hi-tech, so it’s existing book buyers who are using them.
Now of course there is a honeymoon period, but this is like having a honeymoon with Angelia Jolie instead of Rosie O’Donnell.
. . . it appeals to passionate readers, who want no fiddling with cables (the Kindle works without a computer) or complicated pricing plans (Kindle users pay to buy books and other content, but do not have to pay wireless-subscription fees). It is, in short, perfect for older people. . .Bound books are expensive to produce but each electronic copy is free. As the Economist puts it, “A book sold via a Kindle thus has no marginal cost, but adds revenues.” I can’t find out where the money goes, as neither Amazon nor the publishers will say how revenues are shared. But I shall be very interested to see how the royalties are split between publisher and author.
The Kindle 2 can hold about 1,500 books, and one battery charge allows two weeks’ reading. And since the screen is not backlit but imitates real ink and paper, Kindle owners can read for hours without straining their eyes. . . this does not seem to spell the end of paper books, since Kindle users buy just as many bound books as before, so that their total consumption of books goes up by 2.6 times.
Asked why Peters refused to talk to journalists, [party president George] Groombridge blamed the press.
. . . yesterday I broke the story of the NZ Govt supporting Helen Clark for the UNDP job. Today one Sunday paper has it as a front page story, and ever proclaims it to be an exclusive. Hello? Now sure it is possible the paper was working on the story anyway, but to call it an exclusive when it was broken the previous day? And today the radio is referring to the story as being broken by the newspaper, when it was not.I happen to know that the SST was not working on the story at the time, because I alerted them to Farrar’s scoop about three minutes after he posted it, and it was news to them. They moved commendably fast to get the story in the next day’s paper. But was it an exclusive or not? David Cohen thinks it was:
In journalism, an exclusive usually refers to information provided to, or available from, only one news outlet. Anthony Hubbard’s story in the Star-Times was an exclusive, then, insofar as it officially confirmed the story for the first time.And that confirmation is the crucial difference between blogging and journalism. Farrar’s post begins, “I have heard from a highly reliable source that. . .” So he reported hearsay. That is blogging. Hubbard rang the PM and got confirmation from him that the government was indeed supporting Clark’s application. That is journalism. And that is why it was fair enough for RNZ to credit the SST for breaking the story – even though Farrar’s sources are clearly the equal of any journalist’s, if not better, it wasn’t a solid, quotable story until Hubbard got Key to confirm it.
I know that a lot of other bloggers read Aardvark so I’d be interested to hear from any who might be interested in forming an entity that can properly represent the rights of the blogging community when dealing with the MSM and their unethical ways.Good luck with that. When you’re done, there are some cats here that need herding.
Rather than place the state on a pedestal and defer to its judgement, I would sooner place it in lobster pots, and thereby put it to practical use.
It is the 85th birthday of President Mugabe this month and the zealots of his Zanu (PF) party are determined that it should be an occasion that their great leader will never forget.Reporter Martin Fletcher admits he can’t prove the list is genuine but says it is from a reliable source who:
In recent days they have been out soliciting “donations” from corporate Zimbabwe and have drawn up a wish list that is scarcely credible in a land where seven million citizens survive on international food aid, 94 per cent are jobless and cholera rampages through a population debilitated by hunger.
The list includes 2,000 bottles of champagne (Moët & Chandon or ’61 Bollinger preferred); 8,000 lobsters; 100kg of prawns; 4,000 portions of caviar; 8,000 boxes of Ferrero Rocher chocolates; 3,000 ducks; and much else besides. A postscript adds: “No mealie meal” — the ground corn staple on which the vast majority of Zimbabweans survived until the country’s collapse rendered even that a luxury.
Those who prefer to give in cash, not kind, are invited to send “donations” of between $45,000 and $55,000 to a US dollar bank account in the name of the 21st February Movement, a youth organisation controlled by Zanu (PF) and named after the date of the President’s birthday.
. . . had no vested interest in its publication, was hesitant about releasing it and had himself received it from three or four separate businesses that had been approached for donations.Also on the list: 500 bottles of whisky (Johnny Walker Blue Label, 22-year-old Chivas); 16,000 eggs; 3,000 cakes (chocolate and vanilla); 4,000 packs of pork sausages; 500kg cheese; and 4,000 packets of crackers
She is the first Israeli model to dress down for the cover of the swimsuit issue, which hit US newsstands on Tuesday and will reach a global audience of some 66 million readers.What will John Minto have to say about this?
Malcolm, she writes, “challenges readers to go to StreetView and not be moved”.
Hi Caroline
Last night I took a drive. Not a real drive, but a Google Street View tour. I sauntered through the beautiful village of Marysville. Through the tree lined streets I wandered, past the quaint neatly painted picket fences and the inviting places to have a picnic. The place oozes community and pride. It is at one with nature. It’s your typical lush Australian bushland village. It’s now gone. Obliterated. Betrayed by Mother Nature, this town and many others like it now only exist as a weird alternate universe in cyberspace.
Taking us on a journey from Richard The Lionheart’s simple (and actually rather drab) lament “Ja Nuls Hom Pris” (circa 1119) to Nelly Furtado’s “Maneater” (circa a couple of years ago), Thompson has considerable fun with the notion that there has always been pop music. Styles may change, but the core song form of verse and chorus remains remarkably consistent, as does the essence of the experience: rhythm for dancing, melody for carrying the emotional spirit, lyric for engaging mind and heart. It is a history lesson as a gig, light hearted yet (in its sense of humanity’s connectedness) profound.Here is Thompson doing “Oops I did it again” on some UK TV show, with a bonus snippet of him with ex-wife Linda in their heyday in the 70s. It’s a seven-minute clip: after an excruciating interview (“I live in California for the culture and come to London for the weather”) the good stuff kicks in at about 5:00.
It’s like this, at least in my imagination – you come back home one evening, the house is dark, as you expect it to be, you switch on a light, an extra light, one you didn’t know you had, and unexpectedly your eye goes to a corner of the room that you’ve never seen illuminated before, and in it is crouching a grinning man holding a knife – and then the light goes off, normal lighting is resumed, there is no one in the corner as far as you can see, but you know that if the light came on again you would see him again, see him in more detail, the teeth, one particular and prominent tooth, the completely confident intent in the eyes, the compactness, wholeness, distinctive of his intent to murder you – and you can’t get out of your house, which was once your protection and the most comforting place in the world – it is now your prison, inhabited by you and the creature in the corner, who might also be slipping into other rooms, to catch you there, or there, or there – in his own good time.He died on 8 August 2008.
We have very changeable weather here that also takes a lot of our energy. One day it’s minus 16, and next day it’s around 0. Doesn't make one feel very well I’m afraid.Here in Waipa it is currently 33 and seems to have been that all day.
And a Time Inc. tipster tells us: “Today (Friday 30) all staff are to be told that subscriptions for ALL outside newspapers and magazines are to be cancelled. Read em on line, is the new edict.” Funny thing, for a magazine company.A separate piece details the New Yorker’s woeful advertising sales – just under 10 pages in an 82-page issue – and asks, “Is it time to get seriously concerned?”
It is normally a moment of cheery reassurance when an airline pilot greets passengers during preparations for take-off. But Alexander Cheplevsky sparked panic on flight Aeroflot 315 when he began to speak.And this guy thought he had problems on Virgin.
His slurred and garbled comments ahead of a flight from Moscow to New York convinced passengers that he was drunk. When he apparently switched from Russian into unintelligible English, fear turned to revolt.
Flight attendants initially ignored passengers’ complaints and threatened to expel them from the Boeing 767 jet unless they stopped “making trouble”. As the rebellion spread, Aeroflot representatives boarded the aircraft to try to calm down the 300 passengers.
One sought to reassure them by announcing that it was “not such a big deal” if the pilot was drunk because the aircraft practically flew itself. . .
An Aeroflot spokeswoman said that tests had revealed no trace of alcohol in the pilot’s blood. She blamed “mass psychosis” among passengers for the decision to replace the crew, although the company later issued a statement saying that Mr Cheplevsky could have suffered a stroke just before the flight.
Mr. Day, a systems administrator who has been barbecuing since college, suggested doing something with a pile of sausage. “It’s a variation of what’s called a fattie in the barbecue community,” Mr. Day said. “But we took it to the extreme.”I bet she did.
He bought about $20 worth of bacon and Italian sausage from a local meat market. As it lay on the counter, he thought of weaving strips of raw bacon into a mat. The two spackled the bacon mat with a layer of sausage, covered that with a crunchy layer of cooked bacon, and rolled it up tight.
They then stuck the roll — containing at least 5,000 calories and 500 grams of fat — in the Good-One Open Range backyard smoker that they use for practice. . .
Mr. Day said his wife laughed the whole time.
They called it a lesbian paradise, the pioneering women who made their way to St. Augustine, Fla., in the 1970s to live together in cottages on the beach. Finding one another in the fever of the gay rights and women’s liberation movements, they built a matriarchal community, where no men were allowed, where even a male infant brought by visitors was cause for debate.Whoah there – a Jack Russell?
Emily Greene was one of those pioneers, and at 62 she still chooses to live in a separate lesbian world. . .
She walks each day in the woods with her two dogs, Lily, a border collie mix, and Rita Mae, a Jack Russell terrier. . .
“That that’s not the right thing to do and it’s not defensible,” he replied. “What we’ve set up as a process to deal with the questions that people have been asking about what has happened in this particular instance.”
I used to be optimistic about the capacity of our political leaders and central bankers to avoid the policy mistakes that could turn the current global recession into a deep and lasting global depression. Now I’m not so sure.And he finishes:
We can go down in history as the generation that created the Great Depression of the Noughties. Just keep on beating the protectionist drums. Keep on the foot-dragging that prevents effective qualitative and quantitative monetary policy easing in the Eurozone and the UK. And go ahead with unsustainable fiscal stimuli in the US, the UK and elsewhere that will spook markets, push up long-term interest rates and raise the spectre of sovereign default by countries not belonging to the group of usual suspects. Yes we can! I hope we won’t.The stuff in the middle is, as the late Neil Roberts would say, fairly interesting.
Over the past dozen or so years, television and movie-makers have managed to blur the border between fact and fiction to an unprecedented degree. They pretend increasingly that their film is based on a true story. Every device possible, from computer-generated imagery to place names and dates thrown onto the screen seek to suspend the disbelief of historically illiterate audiences. Alarmingly, the new technology has coincided with a dramatic growth in conspiracy theories. . .Guess he’s not a big Oliver Stone fan.
The home-produced movie Loose Change takes the ultimate conspiracy-theory approach to 9/11. It is now said to have been seen by more than 100m people on the internet. A few weeks ago, a leading Russian TV channel broadcast Loose Change to mark the anniversary of 9/11. The film was accepted as completely true by the presenters and the studio audience, who debated it in a three-hour prime-time programme.
Studies of internet sites reveal an unholy alliance between left-wing 9/11 conspiracy theorists, right-wing Holocaust deniers and Islamic fundamentalists. Many Muslims throughout the world now believe that no Arabs were involved in 9/11. Significantly, Islamic websites have also been learning from American creationists and have eagerly embraced their theory of intelligent design, which attributes the origin of life to a higher power and opposes theories of natural selection.
In a post-literate society where the image is king, the scope for mischief is almost without limit. I suspect that it will not be long before we see a Holocaust-denial movie. It could take the form of a Da Vinci Code-style thriller, and be packaged as straightforward entertainment. . .
It should be the duty of not just every scientist and historian, but also of every writer, publisher, movie-maker, TV producer and ordinary citizen to fight all attempts to exploit the ignorance and gullibility of audiences.
That a bank who has as a solution to keeping New Zealanders in jobs, has outsourced to India, can attend with any shred of humility, a Jobs Summit discussing how to keep New Zealanders in jobs at a time of impending financial crisis.....is really quite amazing.The Economist is in favour of deep-fried sea kittens.
Perhaps more attention should be paid to the fact that premarital sex, masturbation, homosexuality, cheap lager and brandy pudding are all root causes of Islamist terror.
