Author Archive
Makes you think
From The Guardian: Martin Rowson on the final crisis of capitalism European and North American stock markets are at their most volatile since the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers. We had a GFC film festival at our house over the weekend watching Michael Moore’s Capitalism: a Love Story and the Academy Award winning documentary Inside […]
A business model to die for …
In the finest tradition of ‘wealth transfer’, here’s the end of the line for those who subsidized the debt-gorged Private Equity Partners ‘foray’ into book retailing. REDgroup: A ‘company’ (harrump!) conceived, badly-operated and then run into the ground by Australian accountants, taking with it a dollop of cash, milked by the ‘administrators’ then buried in […]
Browser choice and IQ
What a hoot reading the different ways a ‘study’ ‘finding’ that browser choice has been correlated to IQ has been (cough) ‘reported’… People with higher IQ are shunning Internet Explorer: study IE Users Have Lower IQ Than Users of Other Web Browsers [STUDY] Internet Explorer Users are More Stupid Than Others: Study Internet Explorer Users […]
Right wing vixen Louise Mensch front-footing it
We’ve discussed before my preferred policy of tackling criticism head-on, and also, as a policy, publishing all threats I receive. Yesterday British MP Louise Mensch, a protagonist in the ‘hackgate’ scandal admitted she exaggerated Piers Morgan’s ‘admissions/boasting’ of phone hacking in his Daily Mirror days, and publicly apologised. (Although in typical politician fashion, still tries […]
What a twit!
Remember the name: Jon Snow Channel 4 news anchor (ahem). Snow swallowed a lie from a ‘parody’ account at Twitter about Piers Morgan supposedly suspended by CNN and passed it on to his network credulously… as if it were true, without checking its veracity and without attributing it to source. Ross Neumann spills the beans […]
More inconvenient juxtaposition
While I am committed to the principle of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ I must admit to a groan of dismay and recognition when I read this NZ Herald headline: Missing uni cash: priest quits job A priest working as a senior executive at the Auckland University of Technology has resigned after “accounting discrepancies” involving hundreds […]
Like Piers Morgan, your past associations linger
Former editors of the News of the World. Personally I see Morgan’s June 2009 comments on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs as well short of a smoking gun, as does Jeff Bercovici: ‘That Piers Morgan Smoking Gun? Not So Smoky’. Read Morgan’s ‘admissions’ yourself and see what you think. Kirty Young BBC: What about this […]
A trolling we will go … anonymously
Touching on one of our perennial themes here, criticism, anonymity and unpleasantness on the interwebs …in ‘How the internet created an age of rage’ The Observer‘s Tim Adams delivers a worthwhile treatise on how commenters are able to hide behind a cloak of anonymity, making the blog and chatroom have into forums for hatred and […]
Lucky to get out …
A while ago I was on a mid-winter tour with one of my authors and to end the trip we held a final session in Queenstown — arguably New Zealand’s ski capital. My events manager and I were booked to fly back to Auckland while our author and his spouse planned to take the ‘scenic […]
The measure of character
Reuters columnist David Cay Johnston on his howler: COLUMN-How I misread News Corp’s taxes: David Cay Johnston Readers, I apologize. The premise of my debut column for Reuters, on News Corp’s taxes, was wrong, 100 percent dead wrong. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp did not get a $4.8 billion tax refund for the past four years, […]
The attribution argy-bargy. Recidivist HuffPo ruffles feathers.
A teacher of mine used to say: ‘The only person who knows how far is ‘too far’ is the person who goes too far.’ With respect, NO, sometimes it’s blindingly obvious for others to see. Such as The Huffington Post’s relentless ‘aggregation’ — ‘Driving traffic, Darling’, says Arianna Huffington justifying the activities of the largely […]
Watching paint dry with Steve Lambert
I have a collection of quirky 404 pages in an album ThePaepae’s Facebook page. Here’s a new one thanks to Marco Arment (Instapaper) retweeting Daniel Jalkut (MarsEdit) … it’s funny, dude. Do it: http://visitsteve.com/404.html
