Forwarded to me by my friend Kate who suggested that countless chavs across England will now bestow the name upon their children.
November 20, 2009
The March for Democracy?
I was going to go – I love hitting children – but I really hate democracy, so count me out.
November 18, 2009
On Books
I’ve found the Witi Ihimaera plagarism story interesting on a personal level: as someone with literary ambitions but without a work ethic or technical ability I’ve often wondered if you could write a novel by stealing lots of classy turns of phrase from other authors and patching them together; it worked for the Tanakh but they didn’t have Google back in 100 BC. Another childhood dream dashed.
Something to buy the geek in your life this Christmas: Daemon by Daniel Suarez. It has the Slashdot seal of approval. The book is about a software developer who writes scripts to scan the newspapers for his obituary and then implement his evil, diabolical plan when they find it. The ending is disappointing and the writing is bad (every character in a suit is ‘impeccably dressed’, every female character is described in terms of how attractive they are) but the author knows his technology and hacker jargon. An increasing number of sci-fi writers understand that they don’t need to set their books in the future or write about imaginary technology: as William Gibson says ‘the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.’ Instead of writing a book about a fictional strong AI, Suarez realised that we already have weak AI.
Martin Amis reviews The Original of Laura, Nabakov’s unfinished novel published against his dying wishes: it sounds terrible and the popular consensus is that it marked the decline and death of Nabakov’s talent:
When a writer starts to come off the rails, you expect skidmarks and broken glass; with Nabokov, naturally, the eruption is on the scale of a nuclear accident.
Nabakov is one of my favorite authors but I’m trying to imagine what an unfinished version of Pale Fire would look like. Nuclear accident sounds about right. Book cover fetishists might enjoy this slideshow of Nabakov covers redesigned as specimen jars (Pale Fire cover above).
November 17, 2009
Almost like old friends
Two of my favorite government departments are in the news today. Here’s the Prime Minister expressing his confidence in Treasury:
Key . . . slammed Treasury predictions that the proposed changes to the ETS would add $50 billion to the price tag of the scheme.
“The numbers from Treasury are nonsense. Treasury can’t tell us what the deficit is going to be in December let alone what’s happening in 2030 or 2040.
I know I harp on about this but I just don’t understand why we can’t outsource Treasury’s core competancies to those guys in Cuba Street who drink lighter fluid, scream at walls, piss in the bucket fountain and expose themselves to schoolchildren. Maybe the Prime Minister will get to that in his second term. Meanwhile, we can all sleep safely in our beds while the SIS stands guard:
The Security Intelligence Service has approached university lecturers asking for help to stop foreign states gathering information on “weapons of mass destruction”, says the union representing tertiary workers.
. . . the SIS has also sent out a brochure called “A Guide to Weapons of Mass Destruction: Your role in preventing proliferation of weapons of mass destruction”.
Dr Ryan said the brochure warns scientists and researchers to look out for people who could be trying to learn how to make “weapons of mass destruction”.
He said the pamphlet has been distributed widely and includes fax, email, and web contacts for the SIS.
You know, a couple of weeks back one of our Yemeni Honors students was asking about how to create a weaponised form of anthrax that would bring a swift, painful death to all the enemies of Islam – at the time I didn’t think anything of it but looking back it does seem kind of weird.
The SIS have been pestering the universities for a while about whether they have students from certain countries (take a wild guess) doing post-grad research in science. I’m a little hurt that my lab hasn’t received a copy of this brochure though – our weapons of mass destruction research projects are all on hiatus this summer while the head of our lab is on sabbatical, so maybe that’s it.
So Mrs Kennedy, other than that how was Dallas?
Mike Moore has an op-ed in the Herald today:
Except for the past 18 months, this has been the most successful decade in economic history.
Also worthy of note was this intro to Paul Holmes’ column on Hone Harawira:
If a European Member of Parliament had railed against Maori motherf*****s raping the country through the centuries, the reaction would have been volcanic, not only in the Maori community but across the Pakeha community as well.
Setting aside Harawira’s use of foul language, the fact remains that Europeans did spend several centuries exploiting Maori (although I struggle to see how that justifies Harawira’s junket to Paris); Holmes’ counterfactual would make sense if Maori had spent several centuries exploiting Pakeha, but that never actually happened. It’s a bit weird that one of the country’s top journalists doesn’t know this though.
November 16, 2009
That is not it at all
Tim Murphy – editor of the Herald – responds to Cactus Kate’s post about APN’s editorial policy:
a) there is no truth whatsoever to the claim that our editorial legal budget has been restricted or that we need to alter our approach to legal challenges or threats over Herald stories. No cut. No change. and
b) the rest is a heavily truncated mish-mash of unremarkable legal discussion points (a to g) in a 66-page media law training paper put together by our lawyers, Bell Gully, and provided to 80 or so participants from throughout APN. Nothing secret about them and nothing new.
They are not publisher instructions or editor directives; they are not new (same general thoughts have been included in the training document for years) and in the context of training staff, and shorn of your views on each point, the basic points are entirely matter-of-fact for anyone seeking to get things right and avoid legal pitfalls the media have encountered before.
There is no new ‘conservative’ approach, no recent guidelines discussed, received or implemented, no change. No orders from on-high. No end to investigations or to keeping newsmakers honest or to speaking truth to power. Put simply, no story.
That last sentence always sends my spin detector into the red: I imagine Mr Murphy hears it often, mostly from people who grace the front page of his paper a few hours later.
Also, the excerpt I posted earlier about editors censoring their stories as an alternative to obtaining legal advice seems like an odd thing to end up in a media law training manual; maybe it’s all taken out of context. Anyone at the Herald who wants to sing out (anonymously or otherwise) feel free to email me at the link on the right.
Media Death Watch
Cactus Kate blogs about new editorial guidelines at APN (publishers of the Herald and the Listener) discouraging editors and journalists from running stories that might incur any legal costs. Kate has the text of the guidelines. Money quote:
Editorial could take a more conservative approach to the subject matter and content of the risky or contentious articles. Where editorial identifies an issue or risk in an article the relevant passages could be proactively removed, or rewritten internally, to remove the perceived risk, as an alternative to obtaining legal advice on the risks of publication (emphasis mine).
I guess this is inevitable when your newspaper has falling revenue and no real competition in it’s main market (Auckland, although I don’t know how their website could compete with other national media outlets that actually break real stories). It also helps to explain the obsession APN publications have with house prices.
Exercising caution is one thing – nobody wants to get sued – but if the editors are self-censoring instead of checking with the lawyers then it really is time to shut down the presses and turn off the lights.
November 15, 2009
Quote of the day, Discipline and Punish edition
The Standard have been running with a Marxist analysis of the Harawira auto de fe, while over at Red Alert Trevor Mallard introduces Foucault:
Everyone knows this debate is not about Hone, bad language or racisim. It is about the future of the Maori Party and in particular how many more times the male members can be humiliated by John Key and Tariana Turia working together as a team.
I doubt Turia’s ‘plan’ is to destroy her own party or that Key wants to see his coalition partner disintergrate one year into the parliamentary term, but then I’m not a clever political strategist like Mallard.
Deep thought
If the Maori Party does expel Harawira for racism I hope they do it at another of these hui that only Maori media are allowed to attend. Fingers crossed.
