Thursday, April 12, 2012

What I’m reading

An excellent interview with Damon Albarn, who back in the day took loads more and harder drugs than we knew. The skinny: Blur are back, but not for long, and there will be no more Gorillaz. And he’s now BFF with Liam Gallagher. WTF?

Joshua Brown says that any social media site/platform that claims it is “committed to protecting your privacy” is possibly being economical with the truth. Money quote:
And when we say data – we have pictures of you and your friends and family and kids. We know where you go on vacation, what political leanings you have, who you pray to, what size clothing you wear, what you read, which foods you like and what kind of shit you buy at 2 in the morning from an iPad. We know the movies you rent, the music you download and we can triangulate your purchases to determine when you might have a baby, get married or quit your job.
And if we can’t monetize this stuff, you’re goddamn right we’ll find someone who can. Our millions of subs are warm bodies to be harvested and advertised to, if we could find a way to stick a cookie up your ass, believe us, we would do it. Keep clicking.
David Shearer says New Zealand should be more like Finland, which has more heavy metal bands than anywhere else. Has he really thought this through? Life is hard enough in Hamilton as it is.

More sense from Home Paddock on a Chinese company buying the Crafar farms. Always good to hear from a farmer. Good comments too from people who know.

This is disgusting – seriously – and totally NSFW but is a useful example of the nastiness that nice people on the left will excuse from their side but would condemn if it came from the other side. My Labour friends think that the Democrats are lovely, like Labour here; that the Republicans are evil, like National only more so; and that only right-wing nutters believe that the BBC has a left-wing bias. Maybe so, but here is a BBC presenter recommending a clip by a US stand-up comedian about Sarah Palin’s vagina (he doesn’t use that word, uses the four-letter one) and “retard baby”. Ugly, not funny and impossible to imagine even the most right-wing shock jock doing something equivalent about, say, Michelle Obama. Unless Howard Stern has already been there.

Agonies of the left, from David Thompson:
Amanda Marcotte tweets:
“I also love them pretending there’s no such thing as multi-tiered hierarchies of racial privilege”
Zohra Moosa:
“We were talking about sexism in games and whether pac man is gender essentialist”
Matt Nolan, an economist, on the Productivity Commission’s report on housing affordability. He reckons that “housing affordability has improved over the last decade” and “when adjusted for quality, rent relative to income has been declining”.

Julia Jones on crime novelist Margery Allingham’s dad. Nobody reads him now and probably few still read his daughter – great though she was – but what’s interesting is his obsession about the format of the published work. Weirdly pre-echoes today’s concerns about whether an e-book is really a book. Money quote:
Over the next fifty years until his death in 1936 he wrote at least ninety-eight identifiably separate serials which were published at least two hundred and ninety nine times in various formats (re-print, abridgement, re-write, re-format) in at least fifty-eight different periodicals or newsagent’s ‘libraries’. The weekly readership of some of these papers was measured in the hundreds of thousands or even millions. Over the fifty years of his publishing career Allingham’s words touched the lives of many working people -- many of them among the most financially impoverished in society. Yet Allingham did not consider himself to be a ‘proper’ author. To be a proper author, he told his younger daughter, Joyce, you had to be published in hard covers.
Finally, Guy Pearce may be an actor but he is smart and funny and brilliant about Canberra:


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