Month: March 2009
Fox Sports subbed by monkey
Can you spot the problem with the following sentence from this story?
“Rumoured to of signed a four-year $450,000-a-year deal with the Sea Eagles back in 2005, Orford would likely have to take a pay cut to remain on the northern beaches with the club battling to reward last year’s premiers and remain under the salary cap.”
If yes, please apply for a job sub-editing Fox Sports Online. The story was from AAP so if you want to be a journalist go get a job there.
JB High Five
JB Hifi, my favourite music shop… in fact my favourite shop, made it into the ASX-100 today. Good news for them.
JB Hi-Fi’s CEO attributes some strange factors to their success in this article:
“We’ve said this is JB – we’ve got a lot energy in the store, we’ve got industrial fixtures and settings, we won’t require our staff to wear uniforms. Then on top of that buying the right product and selling it at the right price.”
Interesting chronological emphasis – sure their products and prices are good – but he thinks its the industrial fit out that brings in the customers. Huh?
Jensen on Sacred Cows
“It is dangerous to shoot sacred cows. We all get upset, irrationally and emotionally when something we hold as precious is attacked. The more irrational our attachment the more anger is engendered when our favourite bovine is assailed.”
“One of the ways to test if something has become an idol is to remove it. If nobody notices or complains, it can safely be restored. If it is declared to be “the end of civilisation as we know it” – it is fairly safe to assume it has developed idolatrous importance to people.”
Dean of Sydney Phillip Jensen on Sacred Cows.
Perhaps his most telling criticism appears below – but the whole thing is worth reading.
One of our generation’s greatest sacred cows is the enlightened view of intellectual and rational discourse. There is the desire in some people to imagine that by the control of human reason we will be able to know God, or disprove His existence, or live a morally and theologically correct life. This emphasis can distrust those things emotional or miraculous; things which are unable to be controlled or which fit into our understanding.
Underbelly creep you won’t see on ACA
“Journalist arrested for links to hitman from Sydney’s seedy underbelly” – it’s almost the perfect opportunity for ACA to run a cross promotional Underbelly story. Only he’s one of their own. Ben Fordham. I can’t believe I missed this last week. Now the hitman (a nephew of Sydney’s mayor) has been arrested. No doubt he’ll come up with a plea bargain that sees the journo and his producer chucked in the slammer as an example.
Ben Fordham’s career as a corporate speaker will no doubt take off. He also has the added benefit of a PR manager – his famous father.
I remember watching the original story – where Fordham bravely foiled a “hit” and thinking they were crossing into some murky grey area of journalistic entrapment. Turns out it was murky enough for criminal charges.
I’m not sure how I feel about this. Personally, from a journalistic perspective, I loathe the sensationalism ACA and Today Tonight pursue. But I also think journalists should be able to become as involved in the story as they do. ACA ran an interesting piece last night where their journo, Martin King complete with prosthetic nose, lived as a homeless person for a period of time and explored the way Melbourne’s homeless are treated. It’s worth a watch.
Ben Fordham is getting a reputation as a bit of a toe rag. The police also cautioned him after an interaction with Belinda Neal last year. He was also the guy who brought us the controversial story about the “last tribe of cannibals” and their prospective dinner, Wawa. Who Nine didn’t rescue – and Fordham allegedly blew the whistle on Seven as Today Tonight made an illegal attempt.
So, what do you think? Should the courts thank Channel 9 for aborting this hit via their story, or should they throw the book at the guy?
Here comes Hamish
My fellow North Queenslanders. I urge you. Buy milk. It won’t be here tomorrow. And by tomorrow I mean next week.
Here comes another cyclone. Hamish. Yet another pansy name. Sorry to any Hamishes that might be offended – but it really doesn’t inspire fear and trepidation.
But it does mean “he who supplants”. So do these other names. Cyclone Diego sounds much more ominous.
Gigapan and scare tactics
Gigapan is an impressive inauguration interactive photo panorama doing the email rounds. It has been around for a while.
This is the email doing the rounds.
Subject: Big brother is watching you, check this out!
This is a photo from the 2009 Inauguration, In which you can see IN FOCUS The face of each individual in the crowd !!!
You can scan, double click and zoom to any section of the crowd… wait a few seconds… and the focus adjusts.
The picture was taken with a robotic camera at 1,474 megapixel. (295 times the standard 5 megapixel camera)
Makes you wonder who’s watching us right now !
Gigapan is an impressive piece of technology. But at no stage did I wonder “who was watching me” – this sort of sensationalism annoys me. I would expect people to be taking photos at major public events.
Plus, the ability to capture the faces of everyone in the crowd is great for security. According to “Lie to Me” police could get in one of those facial specialists to look for angry people and identify shooters in a flash – imagine if this had been around the grassy noll.
A bunch of links – March 6, 2009
- Radiohead Suffer the Wrath of Miley Cyrus
- 10 Tips for Staying on Budget
- Christianity Not a Default
- Evil in Darfur
- Real Estate: To Buy or Not To Buy?
- It’s Time To Start Thinking Of Twitter As A Search Engine
- Main Idea – Another Easy Mistake
- Fix Photos Taken Out Of Plane Windows
- Man Changing World One Facebook Group at a Time
- Pizza joint gives staff t-shirts with the text of 1-star Yelp reviews
- The SMH on The Wire
- STORY CUT
- Well, Is It Or Isn’t It?
True for the US, true here too.
And we care about chickens?
More financial advice from Mars Hill Church.
Interesting note on Twitter’s commercial prospects from the doyen of internet business at TechCrunch.
This is a joke ok. It’s not serious.
“Too complex for broadcast TV, The Wire has thrived on DVD”
Robyn pointed out the herald’s fascination with decapitation the other day.
Is this the worst recession since the 80s? Or ever? check out the graph…
Cat people
Coming late to the party is better than not arriving at all. I’d never really stopped to consider what type of person spends all their comic book existence talking to their cat. My guess – a sad, lonely, and miserable person.
This hypothesis is backed up by the webcomic Garfield minus Garfield. Which has been around for a while – long enough to have produced a book – and you’ve no doubt heard of it already. It reinvents Garfield strips by removing the cat from the picture and giving us an interesting view into the psyche of the cat lover. Or, as they delicately put it:
“Garfield Minus Garfield is a site dedicated to removing Garfield from the Garfield comic strips in order to reveal the existential angst of a certain young Mr. Jon Arbuckle. It is a journey deep into the mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness and depression in a quiet American suburb. “
The results are surprisingly amusing.
If Mr Squiggle drank beer…
He’d do it out of these glasses.
I post a lot of rubbish inventions and gadgets here that you could probably find for yourself at Granny Mays, or any other novelty gift shop.
These glasses are something I’d actually buy. If I was still a single uni student.
This guy got mugged
The awesomeness of this coaster really doesn’t need explaining.
I’m struggling to maintain any level of respectable quality with my headings with my current rate of posting.
Underbelly Creep
Channel 9 (and regional counterparts WIN) seems determined to force as much Underbelly down our throats as they can through a diet of cross-promotion and re-runs.
Last week they ran a two minute news story in the Queensland statewide news about the fact that the happenings documented in Underbelly were real. They happened 30 years ago. I thought news was meant to be timely.
Seven’s relentless cross promotion of their programming during the Australian Open was bad enough.
But this constant diet of Underbelly takes the cake. It was even featured on Getaway tonight. With a Sydney restaurant that’s a regular feature in the new series.
It’ll be on Here’s Humphrey next in the one where Humphrey gets whacked by a gangster, or the cast will bring a famous Mafia pasta dish to the set of Fresh.
What took the cake for me was last night’s A Current Affair. I try not to watch it often. But last night it looked like they were going to have something serious to say about the Pakistani terrorist attack on the Sri Lankan cricketers.
But no – it was about the “seedy underbelly” of Pakistani cricket – lumping terrorism, match fixing and corruption into a package that used the word Underbelly about eight times – and then even showed a clip from the show.
This Sunday morning Underbelly is the advertised feature of the Today Show.
Underbelly is this year’s Gordon Ramsay – and we all know what happened to him. He appears to have been ignominiously pulled from Channel 9’s Thursday schedule, and his family man image is damaged beyond repair. That’s what happens when Nine flog you to death.
No doubt the Footy Show will also have an Underbelly themed segment next Thursday night. And then it will all start over again when there are DVDs to sell.
Finding a niche
Every time I drive down Ross River Road I think to myself “how can this place possibly continue as a business?”
Finding a niche is one thing – being irrelevant is another.
Has anyone ever used this place? I can’t for the life of me figure out how they pay their lease.
According to the Word of Mouth Forum they’re good at their job. They also offer “haircuts at barber prices” so maybe it’s just clever branding.
One, two, three, four
I declare a thumb war, yes this is entertainment – but the hazards are real.
Settle your disputes for good in this thumb wrestling ring:
I love pointless kitschy gadgets. But that’s enough for today.