That's Not A Name, It's A Thrash/Speed Metal Trademark

Somewhere in Australia, there is a child legally named Metallica.

However, according to this story, it is illegal to call your child 'Ned Kelly.'

Sir Lady Chief Maximus Duke Seven is also out.

"I've Not Felt This Well For Ages", Then Death

The last meal of legendary British TV chef Keith Floyd, stricken with bowel cancer, was as follows :

A Hix Fix cocktail - "a morello cherry soaked in Somerset apple eau de vie topped up with champagne"

Cigarettes

A glass of white burgundy

A plate of oysters, plus potted Morecambe Bay shrimps.

Red-legged partridge and bread sauce for the main, washed down with a bottle of Côtes du Rhone red

Apple pie and perry jelly

Floyd's personal motto was to enjoy good food and wine to the full. A few hours after the meal, he died in his sleep.

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You Drive Me Insane, In The Nicest Possible Way

Nick Barker's back on the road in October. Always an excellent show, from one of Australia's greatest live performers.

This is his song about his grandmother, who suffered from senile dementia. She came to believe that she lived in two homes, and wanted to know when her family would take her to "the other house". A song from the heart. Sad, but beautiful.

Murdoch Media Reports Murdoch Media Plans Won't Work



It was there on the front page of Rupert Murdoch's news.com.au for a few hours, then it was gone. A story featuring Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, explaining why Murdoch's plans to charge people to read digital news is doomed to fail :

Publishers of general news will find it hard to charge for their content online because too much free content is available, (Eric Schmidt) the chief executive of Google says.

Mr Schmidt was responding to an announcement by News Corporation chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch that he could start charging for content online.

"In general these models have not worked for general public consumption because there are enough free sources that the marginal value of paying is not justified based on the incremental value of quantity," he said.

The story was open for comments, all of whom agreed with Schmidt. One example :

Gone are the days of people getting all of their news from the one source. People get their news from a variety of sources now. There is absolutely no reason to confine oneself to a singular edition of news on a single web site. I wonder why Murdoch doesn't understand this?

No doubt the automated publication of that news wire story on news.com.au must have caused a few palpitations.

What Would Jesus Do...If He Took Control Of Your TV Remote?


image from the Orlando Weekly

The Australian Christian Lobby is sending out 'Stop The TV Smut' press releases again :

With standards governing on-screen content being reviewed for the first time in six years, the Australian Christian Lobby launched the "Tame the Tube" campaign to combat what it says are industry attempts to weaken TV standards.

"Sex, violence and foul language are normal fare these days as TV networks push the boundaries," ACL managing director Jim Wallace said.

ACL said it had about 10,000 registered supporters, mainly from orthodox and evangelical churches.

They don't like Underbelly much.

There should be a suburban crime show based around the jaw-dropping Biblical tale of Lot and his two daughters. Then we could have a God-fearers friendly TV drama where a stranger wanders into a new town, say St Kilda, pursued by a gang of locals intent on raping him, the stranger takes shelter in the home of Mr Lot, who then volunteers his underage daughters to the rape gang when they drop by to attack his house guest. The town explodes, killing just about everybody. Mr Lot flees with his two daughters, who then get their father drunk and seduce him. But no swearing, butts or tits, of course. The ACL thinks that would be going too far.

@ClubWah provides a provocative retort to the lobby group the Daily Telegraph has, curiously, branded the 'Wrath Of God' :

"fuck off you fucking shit-eating fundi cunts!"

In answer to the question posed in the headline, I'm sure Jesus would be regularly tuning into Top Gear, if only to marvel at how far transport has come since the days of the donkey express.

The Dan Brown Code

The secret is out. Outraged connoisseurs of fine literature, formal sentence structure and the holiness of the Queen's English crack the secret to Dan Brown's success :

(In every book, the) attractive protagonist gets called unexpectedly to help in a case where he/she is an expert. There's an obvious antagonist, physically unattractive, who's clearly out to get the protagonist. There's also the trustworthy mentor, who helps out the protagonist. At about three quarters of the book, the antagonist gets killed and turns out to be actually been helping the protagonist, whilst the mentor is the evil one. Meanwhile, the protagonist and his/her attractive helper of the opposite gender run all over the place to collect hints and clues, they persevere in the end, and in the final chapter they have intercourse. Oh, and every chapter ends with a cliffhanger.

Sounds great, fast-paced, a few twists, but easy on work-depleted brains. No wonder he's sold so many books.

Another commenter to the hilariously tweed-draped Dan Brown's Top 20 Worst Sentences rams through this observation, bursting with snark for the grammar nannies :

Proper grammar exists only to keep snobz in jobz.

It's all about getting yer message over, Innit? If yer message is much more interesting than the crap that some people write in t'fish wrapper, then everyone's happy except those who got battered as kids by sadists in public schools for splitting infinitives.

For many millions who buy and read Dan Brown's new book, The Lost Symbol, it will be the only book they read this year, or will have read in years. But They're Still Reading A Book where they otherwise would read nothing. How anyone can see a massive, if brief, enthusiastic increase in novel reading as a bad thing, as something destructive, because the writer often beats the English language out of shape for the purposes of page-turning entertainment, is beyond me.

Move Over, Kevin, We Have A New Contender

Our prime minister is probably the world's most famous living picker of head-located orifices.



Well, not anymore.

While President Obama was posing for what will easily become one of the most legendary presidential photos ever taken (at least for the Star Wars generation)....




This guy went for a dig....



It's too late for Photoshop.



(h/t - Reddit)

Murdoch Celebrates Death Of Newspapers : "It's Going To Be Great"

By Darryl Mason

It's not just smirking bloggers and feisty independent New Media snarking over the Death Of Newspapers. Now Rupert Murdoch, who convinced a generation of British fathers in the 1970s and 1980s that they should be proud to see their 18 year old daughter's tits on Page 3 of The Sun, is joining in the newsprint grave dancing :

"I do certainly see the day when more people will be buying their newspapers on portable reading panels than on crushed trees.

“Then we’re going to have no paper, no printing plants, no unions. It’s going to be great.”

But the monopoly of distribution and political influence he once enjoyed, and exploited, with newspapers is gone forever. Now Murdoch's news has to compete in the ultimate free market, as he tries to force readers to pay for news that they will (soon after it breaks) also be able to find elsewhere on the internet for free.

Murdoch has also announced plans to increase prices for the cable sports programming he controls. He believes News Corp. has been “undercharging". Australian subscribers to premium Fox Sports channels will be surprised to hear that.

The first example of how Murdoch's YouWillPay! system will work, as far as news and opinion content is concerned, comes with the announcement that :

The Wall Street Journal...will start charging non-subscribers $2 a week to access content on mobile devices such as the BlackBerry, he said. Current subscribers will be charged $1.

So even if you already pay a few hundred dollars a year, or more, to access The Wall Street Journal, Murdoch's going to hit you up for another $52 a years minimum to read it all on your hand screen.

The headline on this Financial Times story reads :

Murdoch Hails E-Readers

Like he has a choice now.

How Can We Sleep While The Earth Is Weeping?

By Darryl Mason

I don't know about you, but this is one of the stupidest fucking things I've heard this year :

A Midnight Oil hit advocating Aboriginal land rights in the '80s is being used in the noughties to mobilise nations to combat climate change.

The band's former frontman and now Environment Minister, Peter Garrett, helped write new lyrics to Beds Are Burning, as part of the celebrity-led initiative.

Yes, Bob Geldof is involved. So is Duran Duran. Nothing in music is sacred, not even a Midnight Oil song that helped to bring the idea of Aboriginal reconciliation to a new, more open-minded, less bigoted generation. The only consolation I suppose is that Bono isn't involved.

Well, not yet anyway.

The original Beds Are Burning lyrics....

''Out where the river broke/The blood wood and the desert oak/Holden wrecks and boiling diesels/Steam in 45 degrees''.

....have become :

''Down at the river bed/The earth is cracked and dry instead/Farms a failing, cities baking/Steam in 45 degrees.''

This :

"The time has come/A fact's a fact/It belongs to them/Let's give it back."

Has become this :

''The time has come/A fact's a fact/The heat is on/No turning back.''

"The Heat Is On"? Someone call Glenn Frey!

Garrett won't be singing on the rebake, and it will be given away online.

In a few years time, if global warming doesn't turn out to be the "clear, catastrophic threat" that Rupert Murdoch predicted, and the Earth turns more icy than melty, Midnight Oil could always rewrite the lyrics to Cold Cold Change.



Great fucking song. By the way, Cold Cold Change is now 30 years old.

Impossible Fiction

By Darryl Mason

Found this on Twitter last night : 'Enter The Times Cheltenham Twitter Competition'. The task is to write "a story" in less than 140 characters. Fucking hard. Infuriatingly hard. Which, of course, is what makes it such a fun and 'must try this now!' writing challenge.

So here's a few of my post-midnight entries :

* "Run! the voice in her head yelled. "Run NOW!" She got up from the table and ran outside. A car mounted the curb and killed her instantly.

* The plane exploded. She counted the stars as she fell, ready for death. Then she saw her house far below. She aimed for her pool....

* "How much do you love me?" "More than life itself." She handed him a knife, "Prove it." "Okay," he said, "you're number two on my Love List."

* "I can't marry you," she sighed. "I'm not real. You made me up." The moment he realised this was true, she vanished. He picked up his pen, again.

* "One day you will invent a time machine," the visitor said. "I'm here to show you how." The visitor was decades older than my reflection

* When he left Earth, he was an astronaut. When he arrived on The Moon they told him he was, in fact, a soldier, and he would never go home again.

Note, these stories as they exist here are slightly longer than 140 characters, but only because I removed the Twitter shorthand which renders 'about' as 'abt', 'you're' as 'yr', 'realised' as 'realsd' and so on, for easier reading.

You can look at the other entries to the comp. here.

I'm still up in the air about Twitter as a vehicle for fiction, incredibly short fiction as above, or very well structured serial fiction told 140 characters at a time, over God knows how long. It's like trying to stuff a fat old reluctant dog through a tiny cat door.

Turning, or translating, a finished novel into a Twovel seems an equally impossible task. I've been working my way through a novel of mine that was published in 1996, Max & Murray, converting it into a twovel, as you can see if you look to the right of this page and down. But so far it feels pretty much like a total fucking disaster. Which makes me want to both abandon it and finish it as quickly as possible so this ridiculous experiment is done with.

Anyway, I'll get into all that in a longer post, later, with some examples of paragraphs from Max & Murray the printed novel versus the twovel posts I've done so far here.

Yes, I know, thrilling stuff.

@darrylmason

Professor Blainey : TV Has Taught Footy Players To Speak Proper

From the Herald Sun :

Prof Geoffrey Blainey said one of the biggest changes over the past 50 years was the astonishing improvement in pronunciation and grammar.

"That clearly has come from television and radio and films, not from what's been taught in schools," he told the Herald Sun.

Prof Blainey said earlier generations used to say things like "them days" and "all of youses".

"I'm not criticising them, that's what they learned in childhood, but that old grammar has virtually vanished," he said. "Even when you listen to the footballers today, they all speak well."

It Was A Stupid Waste Of Time, Until I Started Using It

In May, Tony Wright, national affairs editor for Fairfax media, unloaded a tirade of anti-Twitter bitterness, claiming "much of the chatter is less substantial than air" (excerpts) :

Twitter, for those free souls who have avoided contact with modernity, is a method of shooting your latest thought (a term used loosely) into that disembodied world inhabited by the millions who operate a computer or a mobile phone. You have precisely 149 characters, including spaces, to type each thought, which boils down to the sad question: "What are you doing now?"

The result, almost universally, is banal communication almost beneath description.

It is the current equivalent of citizens' band (CB) radio, where the poor sad sods who drove trucks up and down the highway shouted "breaker, breaker" into their hand-held mikes, followed by inane fantasies that rarely amounted to more than the truth that here was a bored person sitting isolated on his bum, watching the traffic go by.

A recent Nielsen survey that found 60 per cent of Twits quit in the first month is cause for hope that we have not all lost our minds. Dross is dross, even if it spins in the enchanting cosmos of cyberspace.

Tony Wright joined Twitter on August 15. He now uses Twitter prolifically, primarily to cover Question Time.

"Look! They're Reading! Books!"

Australia's media, including Channel 9 News, Channel 10 News, Live News, News.com.au, SMH and the Daily Telegraph, according to Mumbrella. gathered this morning in a Sydney bookstore to watch people speed-read Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol.

Freemasonry, and its role in shaping George Washington's revolution against England and the building of the city that bares his name, including the often downright bizarre architecture of Washington DC, plays a key role in Brown's new book.

The Sydney Museum of Freemasonry, only a few blocks away from where dedicated journalists reported stoically on people reading books, must be wondering why they didn't get a call.

It's not like the MoF is trying to distance itself from The Lost Symbol. They're now selling it in the museum's bookshop, with big posters in the foyer.

BTW, freemasons' run the country. At least, they did between 1923 and 1941.

Mungo MacCallum On The Legacy Wars

From Crikey :

It’s all Kevin Rudd’s fault. Here we are, nearly two years out of the Howard years and happily consigning them to well-deserved oblivion.

And then Rudd has to mention the war; and of course John Howard and Peter Costello lurch out of the political cemetery to boast about the size and quality of their tombstones and pretend they are not really dead after all, and Malcolm Turnbull feels that he has to join in and defend the two people in the world he most wants to forget. Such is the level of discussion in contemporary Australia.

The trigger, of course, was Paul Kelly’s latest blockbuster, a weighty, indeed ponderous, attempt to spin the 24 years of government by Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and John Howard with (in alphabetical order) Peter Costello into one seamless thread of economic reform.

Launching the book, Rudd predictably dismissed the Howard-Costello period as a mere hiatus; he and only he was the true bearer of the flame kindled in 1983. This admittedly partisan view was derided as mean-spirited and mendacious, but it did invite a critical appraisal of Howard’s legacy and what, if anything it has left us. And on close examination it is not a legacy which can be dismissed lightly. It can, however, be dismissed heavily, so here goes.

The proudest boast of Howard and Costello was that they handed over a robust and vibrant economy, free of debt and sizzling with growth. It was indeed free of government debt; on the other hand private debt, vigorously encouraged by government policy, was through the roof and still climbing. And certainly Australia’s economy was growing and had been for many years.

The problem was that the growth had been squandered on election bribes to middle class voters. Vast quantities of tax had been collected only to be handed back, although the hand outs disproportionately favoured the top end of town. Very little was invested in infrastructure and still less set aside for the inevitable downturn – thus Rudd’s need to borrow large amounts, which is now the target of coalition outrage.

Indeed, so extreme had been Howard’s profligacy that if all his 2007 election promises had been honoured, the budget would have gone into structural deficit even if the boom had continued. Not much of a bequest after all.

*************

Rudd’s principal charge against them is that they did almost nothing to boost productivity against the inevitable time when the mining boom came to an end. Education, research and innovation were all allowed to run down, almost to the point of stagnation. This is where the bonanza should have gone and this will be the priority in the years ahead.

In other words, economic reform will certainly continue, but not as an end in itself: it will henceforth be a means towards social reform. And it is by this criterion that Rudd’s own legacy will be judged.

Read The Full Story Here

Malcolm Turnbull On Death Of Newspapers

Turnbull writing on the fall of newspapers, and the controversy over mainstream media charging readers for news content, in The National Times :

It was Rupert Murdoch who shrewdly, if gloomily, predicted: "The internet will destroy more profitable businesses than it will create."

And there are few businesses more vulnerable to the internet than newspapers, especially those dependent on revenues from classified advertisements.

It is hard to imagine many people poring through hard copy classifieds if they have access, as most do, to the speed, functionality and comprehensiveness of online classified sites.

While the demise of newspapers has been greatly exaggerated, the trend is certainly against them.

As an avid consumer of news, I can say that I only buy hard copy newspapers nowadays out of habit.

The vast bulk of the news and opinion I read I have received electronically – much of it before the newspaper itself actually finds itself to my front door.

We all understand that the circulation revenue of most publications, and certainly all newspapers, was always woefully inadequate. The newspaper was a cheap, on occasions free, platform upon which to sell advertisements both display and classified.

A similar observation could be made of free to air television, although there the oligopoly was a function of regulation.

The internet has changed all that. As broadband, especially wireless broadband, becomes more and more ubiquitous the barriers to entry to compete against free to air television, newspapers and magazines are evaporating.

From the consumer's viewpoint there is the prospect of almost infinite abundance of information and opinion. Our son in Hong Kong reads the Australian media online with the same ease as he, and we, are able to read the New York Times, the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal - not to speak of the South China Morning Post.

And the access to opinion is not limited to those big names. Increasingly opinion leaders have their own online blogs. If you want to get an expert, often contrarian, insight into the Chinese economy for example you can go to www.mpettis.com a specialist blog by a professor at Peking University and enjoy not just Michael Pettis' views but also a vigorous debate and commentary on every post.

The days when only a handful of media companies controlled access to the media megaphone are fading from view.

There are four main players in this game and it is interesting to consider each of their positions in the old and new worlds.

The author of the content – the journalist for example – faces the challenge of news organisations with diminishing revenues. But he or she still has a valuable and important contribution to offer. People want to read Annabel Crabb or listen to Alan Jones. But what about the humble news reporter whose byline is less memorable or compelling? The advertiser has it made. The avenues for spruiking their wares gets wider and cheaper all the time. The internet offers the opportunity of very precise targeting too – so its all upside for the advertiser.

The consumer too has it made – content is becoming more and more diverse and almost all of it is free. Those sites which try to charge big money run the risk that they drive down traffic which then reduces their attractiveness to advertisers who after all are only interested in eyeballs.

The publisher, the big, established media company, has the most to lose. It is all downside. The reason the Sydney Morning Herald could charge a premium for its classifieds (or indeed its display advertising) was because it had a large number of dedicated readers for whom there was no, or very few, alternative mediums – now there is an enormous range of alternatives most of them offering vastly superior functionality.

Many traditional hard copy publishers have sought to move into online publishing, but in doing so they have arguably only hastened their own demise. Because they assumed the hard copy publication was paying for the content, the marginal cost of repurposing it for the internet was negligible. Hence access to online newspaper websites is almost invariably free. They therefore offered advertisers the opportunity to access the readers who were interested in the content offered in hard copy for a tiny fraction of the price of an advertisement in the newspaper itself.

And you can see this decline in the share price of Fairfax. When the Tourang consortium took over Fairfax in 1992 the shares listed at $1.20. Today – seventeen years later – the stock price is $1.64.

So who wins out of all this? Certainly the advertisers and the consumers, that's a no brainer.

The established newspaper companies will struggle to build enough additional value in their online businesses to offset the loss of value in their declining hard copy businesses.

But what about the writers and journalists? Are they to face an anarchic brave new world where they have to try to sell their wares on line as Alan Kohler and Bob Gottliebsen are trying to do?

And what happens to investigative journalism?

Opinion is relatively cheap to acquire or produce. But who now can pay for a team of reporters to work diligently away at government or corporate misconduct?

This era of profitless abundance should give us cause for concern – it raises real issues for our democracy. Will newsrooms deprived of the resources to do their own sleuthing become more and more dependent on packages of information prepared and presented to them by the growing army of government media advisers and spinmeisters?

How independent can the media be if it lacks the financial resources to do its work?

Good question.

The answer will become clear over the next two years.

Just Another Journalist Who Wants 9/11 Victims' Families To Shut Up

By Darryl Mason

President George W. Bush, November 10, 2001 :

“Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September 11.”

Daily Telegraph associate editor, Tim Blair, marked the eighth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on Washington DC and New York City with this remarkably weak and predictably puerile smearing of those who hold doubts about the official Bush White House 9/11 conspiracy theory :

When someone starts in on that stuff, it's time to leave the room. "Truthers", as they are known, hold two mutually-exclusive beliefs: That the Bush administration was run by morons and that it pulled off the greatest conspiracy of all time. Truthers are spectacular idiots.

Here are some of the people utterly incurious journalists like Tim Blair think are "spectacular idiots" for demanding a new investigation into the events of September 11, 2001, and for those in the Bush administration who failed to protect Americans that day to be held to account :



Ten Australians died in the 9/11 attacks. Some of those victims' friends and relatives have their doubts about the Bush White House official version of events. Considering the abuse dished out by journalists like Tim Blair towards other 9/11 victims' family members, you can understand their reluctance in going public with their doubts.


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On Twitter, The Chaser's Chas Licciardello picks his favourite protest sign from the massive anti-Obama rallies in Washington :



(via @ChasLicc)

Digital Dinosaur Boomers Alert : Rudd Begs YouTubed Video Game Brainwashed Online Youth To Help Him Save The Country

Why can't I write Fox News-style headlines and stories on an Australian blog? I can, and I will.

By Darryl Mason

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, or Krudd as he is covertly known by the 'wired-up' generation who are champing at the bit to sit on death panels to weed and cull the ranks of future national wealth-absorbing Baby Boomers (unless a Liberal Party government wins the early 2010 elections and John Howard returns, Menzies-style, to shepherd them into senility) is now inviting the digitally-enhanced hordes of Generation Y to help him design future Labor policy.

It's true! The most nightmarish future fear of all Baby Boomers has already come spine-chillingly true. Goths & Emos are deciding how to run the country.

If you were Prime Minister for a day - what would you do to :

• help our young people grow up safe, happy and resililient
• give young people the skills they need to learn, work and fully engage in community life ?
• reduce the physical and mental health risks facing young Australians, including negative body image, anxiety and depression, obesity and alcohol-fuelled violence?
• enable young people to accept responsibility for their actions and their behaviours?
• help young people to negotiate the challenges of today's society?

Wait....resililient? R-E-S-I-L-I-L-I-L-I-E-N-T?

Yes.


How can Kevin Rudd run the country when he can't even master SpellCheck? If what the Liberal Party is saying is true about what the K Rudd Krew is doing to this nation (and let's face it, when have The Liberals ever lied [?]), the Goths & Emos probably can't do any worse.

But maybe the prime minister himself didn't write that piece on his blog today. Maybe it was a staffer? Maybe Krudd's emo-advisor?

Nope.



The prime minister is already sending people scurrying for their dictionaries (or as the digital youth call them "those word things") on a near daily basis without him going and making up words.

Even quite catchy words like Resililient.

UPDATE : On Twitter, I tried to blackmail the prime minister using the screencap of his misspelling of 'resilient'....



...but I decided instead to go pubilc with it fro the glood of th natoin.




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Once Were (Political) Warriors

Prime minister Kevin Rudd has succeeded, once again, in getting the past and present stars of the Liberal Party to waffle on defending decisions made one, two and three decades ago. Just as he intended.

Dennis Shanahan in The Australian :

John Howard and Peter Costello have struck back politically and personally at Kevin Rudd's characterisation of their government as indolent and uncaring neo-liberals, declaring the Prime Minister has reached "new heights of political mendacity".

Stirred from his sick bed, Australia's second-longest-serving prime minister has accused his successor of politicising and demeaning 30 years of continuing Australian government reforms, including those of the Hawke-Keating era, for partisan benefit.

On Monday, Mr Rudd, at the launch of The March of Patriots, by The Australian's Paul Kelly, said the Howard government had been "indolent" and the Coalition could not claim to be partners with Labor in Australia's economic reforms of the past 30 years.

"The Liberals' failure to advance a framework for increasing national productivity is not a minor blemish on their economic record," Mr Rudd said.

"It reflects a fundamental failure of long-term economic reform and casts legitimate doubt over the extent to which the Liberal Party can be regarded as partners with Labor in the great project of economic modernisation."

Even social reforms that "endured through long periods of Liberal rule" survived, according to the Prime Minister, only because of political expediency and not because of any genuine support or belief.

Rudd has effectively pulled off this kind of caper, of forcing Liberals to go on the defensive about their most important claims to economic success and major reform, from the very first week of his leadership of the Labor Party. Rudd's strategy of getting the Liberals all hackled up succeeded all the way through the 2007 election campaign. And it's still working now for Rudd.

As John Howard proves, as he desperately seeks to remind Rudd that he used to be someone important :

In one fashion or another we are all political warriors, but we have a superior obligation to the national interest. That obligation obtains in opposition as well as in government.

No side of Australian politics has a monopoly of either virtue or merit. Each according to its own value system has attempted to improve the lot of Australians.

In failing to acknowledge this last Monday, my successor diminished himself, and not the Liberal and National Parties.

This 24 hour wonder must have been worth a few good laughs for Rudd.

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Fire Dancers, Fiji, August 2009 :











Photos By Darryl Mason


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