ANZACs

Posted in 25 April 2012
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image: http://giorgius.ilcannocchiale.it/

Two people I care very deeply about are serving in Afghanistan this ANZAC Day and, like their parents, I am holding on, hoping, expecting, ‘praying’ for their safe return from dangerous duty a long way from us.

They seem to me, as they did two years ago, implausibly young, impossibly young to be caught up again in such serious matters. We just want them home safe.

I guess it’s always been like that. There’s no ‘right’ age to be at war.

My thoughts are with the families of all those who serve.

– P

Big Questions

I think my cat must read my blog

Posted in 24 April 2012
1 Comment »

I took this photo (above) this morning: my cat, looking for company, reaching under a door … which was what a recent You Tube video I posted six days ago showed.

Just a coincidence? Hmm.

– P

Humour

America, Land of Dreams

Posted in 24 April 2012
1 Comment »

A shorter version of this Rosanne Cash song and video is being used as a US tourism advertising campaign. It does it for me.

via Jeff Bercovici at Forbes.

Encouragement

Chuck Colson RIP

Posted in 23 April 2012
54 Comments »

I’ve just seen the news that Charles Colson has died. He was most famous as one of President Richard Nixon’s henchmen but spent more of his life building a Christian evangelical ministry — which, long ago, was my only contact with him.

From Slate: Watergate Figure Charles Colson Dies at 80…

Charles Colson, often described as the “evil genius” in President Nixon’s White House, died Saturday likely due to complications from brain surgery, reports the Associated Press. He certainly lived a full life. Colson joined the Nixon administration as special counsel in November 1969 and immediately gained favor because of his win-at-all-costs attitude. He once famously said that he would “walk over my own grandmother” to ensure Nixon’s re-election.

Colson was instrumental in running the Committee to Re-elect the President that gathered intelligence on opponents. He called himself a “hatchet man” and compiled Nixon’s enemies list, notes the Washington Post. He ended up serving a seven-month prison sentence after pleading guilty to efforts at discrediting Pentagon analyst Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers.

To say he died a different man would be an understatement.

“He had this reputation as being this ruthless guy. Even Richard Nixon thought he was ruthless,” Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, tells the Los Angeles Times. “That is so different than the Chuck Colson I knew. He was the least ego-driven and one of the most friendly, kind people I’ve ever known.” …

RIP.

– P

Uncategorized

Young ACTOIDS are revolting.

Posted in 23 April 2012
13 Comments »

(‘Civil war’ or simple Generation Gap?)

'Civil War' or Generation Gap? Whatdyareckon?

Young ACTOIDS put a lot of effort into John Banks' election campaign effort. How's that working out for you, ACT on Campus? (pic: Peter Aranyi)

(1) Is ACT entering a Winter of Discontent?
(2) Does anyone care? (Zero percent, remember.)

Joan of Arc oops, Cactus Kate seems to think so … apparently exasperated that John Banks isn’t adhering to the ‘principles’ of the ACT Party. (Well, we sort of agree about that, then. But is it just Banks? Or ‘geriatrics’ in the hip young party?)

Freedom, Choice and John Banks

by Cactus Kate

Enough already.
John Banks won the Epsom seat with the help of his University students called the “Killer Bees”.

He’s now stung them on the arse.

Continue reading →

Media issues - Politics
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ACT: ‘Zero backing. Zilch, nil, nothing at all.’

Posted in 23 April 2012
5 Comments »

I heard someone joke that ACT's party conference over the weekend was 'standing room only' ... because it was held in a LIFT. It wasn't that bad apparently.

John Armstrong attended the ACT Party conference over the weekend, with “80 or so party members present” … introducing his wrap up piece in the NZ Herald this morning like this:

Act kicked off its annual conference on Saturday having just been kicked in the teeth. Delegates woke up to the news that the previous night’s Roy Morgan poll had the party registering zero backing. Zilch, nil, nothing at all. Gallows humour might look at the bright side. At least Act’s support can only rise from there.

Perhaps ACT has reached their natural level of popular support? Given National’s takeover and installation of conservative retread and sometime-wowser (as opposed to libertarian) John Banks as party ‘leader’, what’s left for the party to do?

In some ways I’m surprised at the zero percent figure. It reminded me of this good-humoured commemorative stamp design (featuring ACT’s acerbic propagandist Cathy Odgers/Cactus Kate) issued when party support fell to one percent (below). Many thinking, surely, that would be ACT’s nadir.

Seems like just yesterday. Cactus Kate commemorative stamp design — OK, it was (arguably) funny at one percent support ... but at ZERO percent?

Hmm. Zero support. Is this what the National Party’s ‘regime change’ intervention has wrought for ACT? Maybe.

Shallow roots?

A telling line in Armstrong’s report about how the former National Party Laura Norder cabinet minister and one term Auckland mayor John Banks was received by the party faithful was to describe the speech as “his first as both party member and leader”.

Well, yesss. Now, there’s nothing wrong with a meteoric rise. But remember: former National Party leader & PM-in-waiting Dr Don Brash, having destabilized his ‘good friend’ Rodney Hide with Hollow Men-ish PR dark arts, only himself joined ACT just in time to step in and accept the mantle of leadership.
So, maybe one could say Banks is following in a new ACT tradition? Where will it lead?

Some would say ACT doesn’t look like a party with particularly deep traditions or principles
— or, if it had them in the past, perhaps it’s not particularly attached to them. There’s a point where political pragmatism becomes indistinguishable from something else … but I can’t think of the right word at the moment …

– P

Media issues - Politics
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An obituary for Facts

Posted in 22 April 2012
1 Comment »

Read and enjoy: Rex Huppke’s Facts, 360 B.C. – A.D. 2012 – an obituary.

To the shock of most sentient beings, Facts died Wednesday, April 18, after a long battle for relevancy with the 24-hour news cycle, blogs and the Internet. Though few expected Facts to pull out of its years-long downward spiral, the official cause of death was from injuries suffered last week when Florida Republican Rep. Allen West steadfastly declared that as many as 81 of his fellow members of theU.S. House of Representatives are communists.
Facts held on for several days after that assault — brought on without a scrap of evidence or reason — before expiring peacefully at its home in a high school physics book. Facts was 2,372.

I read the Allen West comment about communists in the House, snorted at its ludicrousness, and thought no more about it. (Andrew Breitbart’s defense of Tea Party animal West [video here] was an indicator, if we needed one, of West’s … ‘reliability’ re truthfulness).

Rex Huppke’s response was so much better.

– P

Media issues
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Ouch

Posted in 20 April 2012
2 Comments »

Negative attack is one way to diminish your rivals, but it’s not building a vision …

“You have to campaign to govern, not just to win,” [Gov. Mitch] Daniels told Matthew Tully of The Indianapolis Star. “Spend the precious time and dollars explaining what’s at stake and a constructive program to make life better. And as I say, look at everything through the lens of folks who have yet to achieve.”
According to Mr. Tully, “after a pause, Daniels added with disappointment, ‘Romney doesn’t talk that way.’

From After Endorsing, Indiana Governor Criticizes Romney — NY Times

Encouragement - Politics
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Parody of the ‘booty shot’

Posted in 20 April 2012
4 Comments »

Classic:

image: kevinbolk.tumblr.com (click)

Revised:

image: kevinbolk.deviantart.com (click)

Artist Kevin Bolk:

This is a parody of this promo art for the Avengers movie. I couldn’t help but notice that in most of the ad material, the guys are all in heroic stances but Black Widow is almost always in an impractical, curved-spine “booty shot” pose. Figured I’d flip it around for my lady friends out there. Seemed only fair.
Them’s some strong male characters, amirite?

Excellent!

Humour

Leonard Cohen’s manager sentenced. He wishes her peace.

Posted in 20 April 2012
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Leonard Cohen in Weybridge, Surrey, on his world tour. Photograph: Matt Kent/Redferns via The Guardian

Leonard Cohen’s former manager Kelley Lynch whose [alleged] theft of his retirement funds while he was, for years, in a Buddhist retreat has been jailed — not for the theft, but for her harassment of the singer after he fired her.

Here’s a sentence from his statement to the court:

“I want to thank the defendant Ms Kelley Lynch for insisting on a jury trial, thus… allowing the court to observe her profoundly unwholesome, obscene and relentless strategies to escape the consequences of her wrongdoing,” he said.

“It is my prayer that Ms Lynch will take refuge in the wisdom of her religion, that a spirit of understanding will convert her heart from hatred to remorse, from anger to kindness, from the deadly intoxication of revenge to the lowly practices of self-reform.”

Pretty wonderful sentiment, huh?

via The Guardian: Leonard Cohen’s poetic thanks as former manager and lover is jailed for harassment … which also carries another article suggesting we, as Cohen fans, maybe should be grateful to Kelley Lynch for forcing him out of retirement and sparking a late burst of creativity. Well, I know what the writer means.

I have seen Cohen in concert Live twice now, in Montreal and in Wellington, and those concerts were damn near perfect. I found them and think of them as ‘holy’ experiences that I am so glad to have been able to enjoy. Wonderful.

– P

Encouragement
,

Crafar farms decision déja vu

Posted in 20 April 2012
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Rubber stamped for a second time …

Good bye hectares? I heard 'business leader' Graeme Harrison on Morning Report today literally saying: "Can a foreign investor come in with a ship, hitch up a piece of land and take it away? No." See link below.

Overseas Investment Office docs (hat tip: NZ Herald): Recommendation | Decision summary

Sir Graeme Harrison on Radio NZ National’s Morning Report (before the decision was announced).

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

MP3 file for non flash users

Updated with audio links

  • enclosure: http://podcast.radionz.co.nz/mnr/mnr-20120420-0809-business_leader_says_foreign_investment_nonsense-048.mp3 1661624 audio/mpeg
Business/Investment

OTT?

Posted in 20 April 2012
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The NZ Herald gave a bucketload of real estate to their story about a grieving family’s claims that too much Coca Cola killed their mum.

20120420-120049.jpg

Don’t you think?

– P

Slight purple tint is intentional. Irony. (cf: ‘Purple prose’.)

Media issues

Slow motion mayhem

Posted in 19 April 2012
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Wow.

(via Jolisa Gracewood)

Humour

Free access to information … to ‘hate’ it?

Posted in 19 April 2012
4 Comments »

'Information wants to be free' ... partly so we can DECRY it. (image: vimeo.com/20907711)

In the middle of a worthwhile Guardian article quoting Tim Berners-Lee on the need for web users to be able to get their data out of social media and proprietary ‘silos’ (see: Tim Berners-Lee: demand your data from Google and Facebook), is this interesting sentiment:

“Every time somebody puts a magazine on a phone now and doesn’t put it on to a web app [a form of open software] you know we lose a whole lot of information to the general public discourse – I can’t link to it, so I can’t tweet it, I can’t discuss it, I can’t like it, I can’t hate it.”

Note, the desire for access to information and freedom to ‘hate it’.

Earlier, the same article refers to Berners-Lee’s view — expressed with the authority that he as inventor of the world wide web and only a few others can claim — about the ‘centrality’ of open data access to the vision of the web:

Berners-Lee has in the past warned that the rise of social-networking “silos” such as Facebook, and “closed world” apps such as those released by Apple, which cannot be indexed by web search engines, threaten the openness and universality that the architects of the internet saw as central to its design.

I’ve been thinking about ‘openness’ since my brief comment this week about some political bloggers stalking their targets and so-called enemies by ‘friending’, ‘following’ or ‘liking’ them on social media … then using that platform or information obtained to repeatedly and publicly abuse, denigrate or ‘sledge’ them.

That behaviour makes me queasy (even though I pointedly quote others’ tweets myself now and then). At times it feels like there’s a kind of misuse of social media going on. (Yeah, that sounds like an oxymoron to me too.)

Watch what you’re doing

It’s more than the privacy-intrusion stuff we discuss on ThePaepae.com now and then, e.g. when considering the Herald on Sunday tracking a private person to her front door(!) ‘using Facebook‘.
A reporter gaining access to your personal Continue reading →

Media issues - Writing/Publishing
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Origin of the word ‘deadline’

Posted in 19 April 2012
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20120417-223327.jpg

I visited my pal and fellow publisher Roger briefly in Wellington last week. One of the many things we share in common is a quirky interest in words — old or new, interesting words and unusual derivations. Roger mentioned the word deadline which we live and die by (ahem, not literally, keep reading) in publishing and the media had its origin in military prison — referring to an area around a military penal institution outside of which prisoners were liable to be shot … by their guards.
As in, Cross the line: shot, like, dead!*


I was agog and looked it up, sure enough, there’s a prison reference in Oxford (right), also in Wikitionary, but angling seems older …

Etymology

The context of a due date originated in journalism, probably from an earlier usage in printing, representing a guideline marked on a plate for a printing press (inside which all content should appear). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, early usage refers simply to lines that do not move, such as one used in angling; slightly later American usage includes a boundary around a prison which prisoners must not cross.

Noun
deadline (plural deadlines)
A date on or before which something must be completed. ‘I must make this deadline or my boss will kill me!’
(archaic) A guideline marked on a plate for a printing press.
(archaic) A line which doesn’t move.
(archaic) A boundary around a prison.

Dictionary.com:

  • 1. the time by which something must be finished or submitted; the latest time for finishing something: a five o’clock deadline.
  • 2. a line or limit that must not be passed.
  • 3. (formerly) a boundary around a military prison beyond which a prisoner could not venture without risk of being shot by the guards.

    • … does anyone have any other sources?

    – P

    * Which reminds me of a graphic I saw on a TV tower in Singapore — I asked my friend naively what the sign meant (it looked in part like a soldier aiming a rifle) and she said, ‘You climb the tower and we shoot you!’ Oh.

    Writing/Publishing
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