I planned to do a lot of reading this week. And I failed. We watched too much West Wing – it’s as intellectually stimulating as reading.
I did however manage to almost finish one of the cleverest books I’ve read for a long time. It’s all about salt. It’s fascinating. I will no doubt blog a lot about salt in the next two weeks as I think back through the interesting bits.
Salt is the bedrock of civilisation.
You should read this book.
This post should potentially come with some sort of gag warning. But I’m sure all my female readers will appreciate it – and single guys can probably learn something from it…
We watched the Baz Luhrmann version of Romeo + Juliette this afternoon.
Now that I’m married I enjoy romantic tragedies even less than before.
Speaking of which, we had our two year anniversary this week (on the 22nd). And my wife is still wonderful. I don’t normally go for soppiness online – it falls into the category of sharing information people don’t really want to read (oversharing).
I do love my wife very much though, and I’m happy for this fact to be published.
I took lots of photos during our holidays – most were at a wedding and will be boring to all of you. Some were at the beach. Like these (and whatever else I eventually upload to this album).
I’ve been having a lot of fun playing with aperture and exposure settings.
And here’s the dust storm on the Sunshine Coast.
Holidays are almost over. We’re back in civilisation today. We had lunch with Andrew and Simone.
Which reminds me of the news of some import that is worthy of note.
Last Monday we had our interview regarding candidacy with the Presbyterian Church of Queensland – we passed. We’ll, if all goes according to plan, be studying at QTC and working at Clayfield (with Andrew and Simone) next year.
Were still on holidays, but Ive got a blogging itch, which Im scratching using my iPhone while I sit in a church waiting for a wedding to start.
Were early because Robyn is an usher.
Ill return to normal posting over the weekend.
Someone wise (I cant remember who) once told me that you can tell what a church’s priority or point of difference is by what they have literally occupying centre stage. For some it’s the drum kit, for others a baptismal pool, and for others the pulpit.
Ive started paying attention when visiting churches, its quite telling.
In the spirit of my “let me google that for you” post recently, let me share with you another little piece of online etiquette that is bound to make you less annoying to friends, family, and coworkers.
It’s called Snopes.com. And it’s the place to go before sending on any forwarded warning/sob story/wealth generating chain letter.
If you send me a stupid forward about a missing child who needs prayer, or a sick kitten, and I find it on snopes, I am going to mercilessly call you out on your stupidity in the hope that you’ll learn your lesson. These letters are designed to clog up the Internet.
You don’t even have to go to snopes – a quick google will normally kill any stupid internet rumour.
Remember those really exciting little videos about technology these days? You know, the ones that boggle your mind with the sheer size and amount of information floating around. Figures like the ones in this picture (found here):
Here are a bunch of the videos, including a couple I hadn’t seen before, in one easy post. Watch them before your next dinner party.
I saw this watermelon art a couple of days ago – and it’s been floating around waiting to be posted (and possibly haunting me in my dreams since… seriously). There are more of these here. It makes my head hurt.
A while back I was trying to figure out the difference between nerds and geeks. My hypothesis is that the terms are not interchangeable. I think the matter is settled once and for all by this Venn Diagram…
I thought long and hard about what my next article was going to be. I have been working somewhat on a series of articles related to children, including should children be subsidised and are current custody laws in the Family Law Act adequate. However, these article take a fair amount of time to do.
However, for me, there were two events last week that really stood out. The first was the release of the latest Sensis Business Index.
On Wednesday the Sensis business index came out, and included one of the findings that, after 21 consecutive quarters of this prestige title, New South Wales was overtaken by Queensland as the least popular Government amongst Small and Medium Enterprises (in terms of their opinions of government policies impacting small business).
Anna Bligh is already struggling in the poles, and you think that this would be a fine source to use to ridicule her. Instead, the Queensland opposition seemed unblissfully unaware of this. Instead, from my limited media exposure, the main topic for journalistic reporting for the day was the Treasurer beating up the opposition over teddy-bears. Further, few media outlets even realised the Sensis report. Queensland Business Review picked it up rather early, but otherwise it mostly went missing.
This compares to earlier in the week, when the most recent Tourism data was released. The big story was Victoria overtook Queensland in Domestic Tourist Visitors. It led to quotes like this:
“The offer of big events, cultural events, retail, food and wine is considered more attractive than stuff like theme parks, Big Pineapples and gee-whizzy type of stuff,” Victorian Tourism Industry Council chief Anthony McIntosh said.
Apparently culture includes the absence of severe storms, floods, an oil spill and all the bad PR stemming from these. But this is beside the point.
Last week highlighted two things, the severe disadvantage the opposition is at due to its lack of human resources, and the absolutely woeful state of Queensland journalism.
I have always hated Today/Tonight. I think it more miseducates the public rather than provides a good consumer watchdog type service. While I think the media has become to an extent the method of exposing and crushing certain elements of society that seemingly fall through other safety nets (e.g. exposing dodgy dealings, etc), I am not sure Today/Tonight deserves much kudos in this regard. I tend to think Today/Tonight more highlights rather unimportant issues, directing attention away from issues that deserve focus and onto things that benefit less from continual oversight. It gives many issues that really don’t deserve much more than a passing comment a place in the limelight, determining the content of talkback radio switchboards the following day. And the ABC isn’t much better. I watched some Tony Jones interviews a while back that were absolutely terrible. He got various politicians on to discuss policy, and Tony Jones’ interviewing technique was all about aggressiveness and trying to get the interviewee to trip up. If a certain issue wasn’t working, he moved on to the next one. Providing an interview that provided information to the public and discussing the actual policy was non-existent. It was all about the spectable.
In a perfect world, the media would be on-top of issues, and be able to disseminate and present it to the public in understandable chunks. While it seems many journalists aspire to report the facts and avoid opinion, it seems that disection, inference and explanation also have disappeared. Instead, they go for the candy issues, the stuff that BTN would present to schoolchildren if all BTN’s employees were dead.
Analysis should be an integral part of journalism. Journalism has become a spoon-fed role. Journalists get given a prepared statement, and they put it through the journalism machine and out pops an article. I think the machine applies quotation marks and a snappy headline. Still, the commercial goals of the media are not in alignment with Australia’s democratic processed. With the media more concerned with the easy stories and the politician cheap-shots or trips-ups, politicians will be more focused on media and perception management rather than governance and providing policy related information.
Without the resources and personnel the government has available, opposition attacks seem to be limited to what they can derive from mainstream media. These days, Australian opposition parties are very limited in the extent of their government oversight roles, and winning an election is more a case of the government losing the support of the populace rather than the opposition winning it.
We have to begin to wonder, given the importance of the media in our political structure, does something need to be done?
Play Doh is one of those play things that has no doubt suffered because of the sheer awesomeness of modern toys. Have you seen the new Transformers toys?
Play Doh’s marketer obviously has – because this new campaign they launched in Singapore is pretty awesome. And edgy. Here are some of the print ads.
I deal with journalists frequently. They are often a cause of professional frustration. But it can be a tough job. Especially when your screw ups are very public, and live. Like these.
So you’re producing a movie. You want it to win an Oscar. Where should you set it? It’s one of life’s great questions.
A question finally answered by this infographic.
If you were writing a movie about the sugar industry you could set it in North Queensland, in Lucinda, and this title would then make sense.
These aren’t real (well, nobody sells them), but if they were they’d be deadly and awesome.
Found here.
