128 posts tagged “media”

Surprisingly, I have never pasted this video on my blog before. About time that was redressed.

   The YouTube comments include one that reads, ‘Balls of steel’.

This is as disturbing as when I began to see American publications capitalize after colons in 2001 (which is generally incorrect, according to US publishing professionals I asked, though there are exceptions; it is certainly incorrect in English).
   Carbon dioxide is written out in full or with CO, followed by a subscript 2. Technically, it is incorrect to write CO2. Normally in modern typesetting, if we do not have a subscript font, we would use the superior two (²) and move it down a few points. However, surfing today, I noticed a very disturbing C02 (C-zero-two) at both Reuter and the Los Angeles Times.
   I have no idea how this came about. There is no zero in carbon dioxide. This is as bad as those weather pages that insist that the temperature is measured in coulombs (C) and not degrees Celsius (°C).

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Kateblogs, who used to be a regular here on Vox, pointed me to a very interesting blog post by an American who has experienced the British National Health System. It is not all positive, but I think it is a fairly written piece, and the writer concludes that she prefers the British one. The comments are very interesting, too: again, not all are positive, and some describe negative experiences with the NHS. However, it is a better statement about the NHS than what some in the American media have come up with to date.

A very good one found on Snowy’s blog. So, Mr Beck, which is it?

For completeness, here is an analysis of the video, which attempts to give some context to Glenn Beck’s remarks. However, even the writer there feels Beck has fallen short, but for different reasons.

Some Grey Bloke has got it right with the swine ’flu: that it is the Susan Boyle of illnesses. It hasn’t done much, but everyone with an internet connection knows about it.

I stayed away from Twitter for a day and was surprised to find #MrsSlocombesPussy a trending topic. When I searched for it, however, nothing came up, and I decided it was an elaborate prank by hackers.

   It was only much later, in a Facebook comment (after I had noted that I had had a 24-hour gap between Tweets) that Kate (who used to blog here at Vox) told me of Mollie Sugden’s passing, at age 86 (odd, there was nothing on my Google News home page). Which means, of course, that I broke Twitter’s search. (Notch another one up to my brilliant skills with computer programs.) And that if I were Frank Thornton, I would be really worried.
   Farewell, Mollie.

PS.: I have just discovered that every other search works on Twitter, just not one for #MrsSlocombesPussy. The reason, says one Tweeter, is that this hashtag has been blocked. Shame on Twitter: it is either down to ignorance (they do not know the cultural impact of Are You Being Served?), xenophobia (American admins balking at British culture), disrespect (to the memory of Mollie Sugden) or dirty minds (everyone else outside Twitter HQ knows that this refers to Tiddles, Mrs Slocombe’s pet cat, and we also know the meanings of pussy, but at least in the rest of the English-speaking world, double entendres are acceptable).

Here was Saturday’s newspaper:

with Farrah Fawcett relegated to a tiny box and an inside page:    On the day she died, Farrah Fawcett, once the Charlie’s Angel who wanted the most attention, did not grab the day’s headlines. But given the privacy her family wants, I have a feeling she does not mind.

I’m firmly an officious bystander in the whole “Michael Jackson thing”: I am sad people have lost a son, a brother and a father. But since the mid-1980s I have not been a big Michael Jackson fan. His death, while premature, is not going to make me suddenly say that I adored the man and his music. I’m not one of those people who made every single item on Amazon.com’s top 10 a Michael Jackson one. I’m not going to join his MySpace page and leave a tribute.
   But I do not think he was a nonce. When the media go on about child molesters ad nauseam, I am not surprised that some accused Jackson of molestation. Paranoia alone could have seen to that. Some may have seen dollar signs and took the man for a ride. Psychologically, I don’t think the man was capable of forming the sick thoughts that pædophiles have.
   He may have paid off some of his accusers, but think of it this way: if you are a lawyer and your client has the mentality, or tantrums, of a child, what do you do? A father might encourage his son to stand for the truth and go through even a difficult experience to build his character. Someone less close, knowing the person had millions, might just advise paying up to spare a fellow human being more emotional pain than he seemed capable of handling. Michael Jackson seemed like one such person: the stresses we might choose to bear were anathema to him.
   That is, perhaps, how one should think of Jackson: a man who preferred to live some form of childhood than recognize that he had reached adulthood. In his interviews, during the legal cases, Jackson came across in words and manner as a man deeply hurt, as a child might be. Visually, however, his damaged appearance through continual plastic surgeries swayed many of us into thinking he was a monster. It is easy to be fooled by what one sees, and Jackson was the victim of his own choices in that respect.
   I am not excusing him fully. I am not going to say that Michael Jackson lacked an adult’s mental capacity. He was able to reflect on his own mortality, according to his ex-wife Lisa Marie Presley on her MySpace page. He knew what was going on, even if he chose to shield himself from it.
   But he was a deeply troubled man, with a very different perspective on life because of his experiences. He chose himself to be as defined by his eccentricities as his music. Just as with Britney Spears shaving her head, many chose to poke fun at the person rather than say that they needed to be protected and looked after. Jackson’s plastic surgeries and his strange complexion were signs, in my layman’s understanding, of someone who chose to dissociate himself from his true identity. This was not about race, as many want to paint, but about a man who never understood who he was.
   Still, I have devoted a post to him. One part of it was seeing the negative comments pages with his videos are attracting on YouTube. He did not deserve many of them. The other part is that there was a Michael Jackson, once, who was a great performer, who never divided opinion as deeply as he does today. I choose to remember hits like this one.

Swine ’flu was long predicted by the Doctor Who writers. Except that time it was caused by Daleks.

   I am so sick of the fear-mongering in the New Zealand media at the moment that has caused a rush on Tamiflu. This is not big news anywhere else, and it should not be big news here. Headlines like ‘Swine flu toll at 109’ hint at fatalities (this is not the case) and, once again, makes me question The New Zealand Herald’s agenda in all of this.
   How are your Roche shares looking today?

I’m quite a big fan of the work of Andrew Niccol, not because he is a Kiwi (and an underrated one at that), but I get the messages he puts in to his movies. After viewing a few of his films over the last week on DVD, I was surprised to find this claim about his film Simone on IMDB and, one of my must-dislike sites, Wikipedia:

Al Pacino’s character, Viktor Taransky, is based on Ray Kurzweil and his female alter ego Ramona.

   I do not know for a fact if this is true, but I do know that Mr Kurzweil’s ‘Ramona’ demonstration was in 2001. According to Mr Niccol’s father, whom I have spoken to on numerous occasions, Simone was written before The Truman Show, which débuted in 1998. So unless Mr Kurzweil had some proto-Ramona in the mid-1990s, then the claim on IMDB and Wikipedia is fictional.
   But you try correcting something on Wikipedia. A friend of mine attempted to remove some false information about his wife, but was blocked, so the inaccuracy (possibly defamation) stands. I once put in something about an actor and it was removed because it was ‘original research’. So, my conversation with Mr Niccol senior would be branded the same.
   The other Wikipedia experience I recall was providing an authoritative view on the capitalization of the definite article, along with supporting evidence, and I got severely shot down by some idiots who refused to acknowledge it, despite their requesting a professional come in and settle the argument. Folks, if you don’t want it, don’t ask for it.
   Conclusion: things like Wikipedia are merely a collection of gossip and inaccurate rumour, which is given weight if it has been published in a less-than-reputable source. I’d give it a wide berth.
   Somehow, given the message of Simone, on how the media spread fictions because people prefer to believe them, Mr Niccol may well love the way life has imitated art in the virtual world.