13 posts tagged “newspaper”

Harry Mount’s column in The Daily Telegraph was a great laugh:

I once saw [Heather Mills] walking down Fifth Avenue in New York and was staggered by the height of her cheekbones and the depth of the groove beneath them.
   But when she opens her mouth—and keeps it open for 11 minutes, as she did outside the High Court—the spell is broken. You forget the cheekbones and drown in the ocean of self-pity pouring out of that pretty mouth.
   During the French state visit, clever Carla Bruni rarely broke the spell by talking. She realised, like the old pro supermodel she is, that all she has to do is look good and say nothing. …
   The real difference between them, though, is in what they say—or don’t say. The answer for Heather Mills in future is to do what John Galliano did with Carla Bruni's cinched Dior outfit—belt up.

   Thinking that was all that Mr Mount had to offer, I was pleasantly surprised by the final segment in his column:

A new study in the American Journal of Psychiatry claims that mobile phone addiction is a mental illness.
   I’m afraid the illness is incurable; it’s related to an addiction that's been around for ever—the addiction to self.
   People aren’t addicted to the phones themselves. They’re addicted to the attention they get from other people via their phones. Obsessive phoners send texts purely in the hope that they’ll get one back. They don’t ring people from the train to find anything out; only to get other people to listen to them saying nothing of any importance. Why is it that the person on the train is always doing the talking, and never the listening?

   I knew there was a reason I didn’t use cellphones.

Not long ago, I dissed the Times of India for running a story about Miranda Kerr which never happened.
   So I wonder now if Britney Spears actually did marry George Costanza from Seinfeld. After all, it’s in the newspaper. It must be true. (In case they ever change it, Sepia Mutiny has a screen shot.)
   Not only that, the photo was sourced from Reuter. And those guys almost never get it wrong.

Another Ashes to Ashes clip is up, thanks to The Daily Telegraph.
   DI Alex Drake (Keeley Hawes) arrives at the Met’s office and tries to access files on Gene Hunt’s PC. She knows what’s going on because she’s listened to Sam Tyler’s tape in the wake of what happened to him in 2007. She realizes the mind will fashion conduits back to the real world and reaches for a ringing telephone …

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/portal/ttv/lifestyle.jhtml?bcpid=1365140359&bclid=1363192395&bctid=1390827201

   Articles on the series appear in both The Times and the Telegraph. Since Vox won’t let me link these words for some reason (it is really buggy these days), here they are separately:

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/tv_and_radio/article3241252.ece
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/01/26/sm_ashestoashes126.xml

   Can you tell I’m looking forward to the new series?

[Cross-posted] The above advertisement for the Citroën C4 was withdrawn in Spain after complaints from some Chinese that it was insulting to the entire nation.
   Somehow, I think that’s an exaggeration.
   Sure, some folks in the Politburo might be annoyed. But there will be a lot of Chinese who think that Mao Tse-tung is fair game when it comes to advertising humour.
   Americans are quite happy to dress up an actor as Lincoln and make a few jokes, and Elizabeth I appeared in Blackadder.
   At least neither Abe Lincoln nor QEI was responsible for the deaths of 70 million of their own subjects, managing to butcher more than their enemies were able to.
   While it’s true I might get annoyed at the same treatment being given to Confucius, surely a more uniting figure for Chinese people, chances are I’d shrug it off. The late Pat Morita did plenty of Confucius jokes in Happy Days, and I still watched the series—even when the Fonz became the star.
   Having driven the C4—both diesel and petrol models—I can even endorse these cars.
   Citroën, don’t buy in for a second that Mao is a universally revered symbol among Chinese, or that we can’t take a joke.
   And remember that those people writing on message boards about how insulted they are at this ad are under the surveillance of the Red Chinese Politburo. Ten years ago, they would not have even been allowed online. They know this and they know there are spies online. Everyone is just acting as though they are loyal Communist Party members and not being counter-revolutionary.
   You can bet that no one in Beijing will complain if Mao was used in a Mercedes-Benz advertisement as a satisfied customer. After all, the man ordered plenty of 600 models.
   No Chinese complained when Citroën used Chinese symbols to sell the AX (‘Révolutionnaire!’) in 1986–7. As far as I can make out, this is just an extension.
   Of course, Citroën has apologized to the overly sensitive types, I say principally because it has a vested interest in Red China, selling everything from a facelifted Peugeot 206 as the C2 to ZX sedans that command a hefty share of the taxi market.
   Citroën’s statement read, ‘We repeat our good feelings towards the Chinese people, and confirm that we respect the representatives and symbols of the country.’
   Money and capitalism have won the day and assured the Communists an apology. I wonder what Mao would say to that.

This was interesting today. The Daily Telegraph reported on the campaign spending (specifically on make-up and grooming) by Nicolas Sarkozy and his rival Ségolène Royal during the French presidential election. Despite being thought of as a conservative newspaper, it painted a rosier picture of Mlle Royal than M. Sarkozy.
   First up, Sarkozy’s (over-)spending was the lead-in to the story, even though Royal’s was much higher. Mlle Royal’s spending was left to the third paragraph.
   Secondly, the standards used to round off are biased in favour of Ségolène Royal. Here are the figures I uncovered, compared with the rounding that the Telegraph did.

• Nicolas Sarkozy, spent €34,445—rounded in The Daily Telegraph as €35,000 (I would have rounded it to €34,000 or said ‘around €34,500’)
• Ségolène Royal, spent €53,581—rounded in The Daily Telegraph as €52,000 (I would have rounded it to €54,000—correspondent Henry Samuel shaves off a hefty €1,581 for the socialist leader)

Reimbursements:

• Nicolas Sarkozy was reimbursed €11,482—The Daily Telegraph reported €12,000 (I would have rounded it to €11,000 or said ‘around €11,500’)
• Ségolène Royal was reimbursed €17,220—The Daily Telegraph reported €17,000 (I would have used the same figure)

In every case, it might have been easier just to report the actual figures.
   The message, unless the figures I got from the French media are wrong: overestimate the spending by the right and make it look like the President is getting more state funds; underestimate the spending by the left and understate its burden on the state.
   The Telegraph might need to re-examine its mathematics.

[Cross-posted] Fascinating: after our post exposing the Miranda Kerr v. Paris Hilton incident at Victoria’s Secret to be false—or at least ridiculously inaccurate, with media outlets getting the year and the venue wrong—the Chronicle’s SFGate.com still reported it. It has taken the post down now, but not before Google News found it: 

   Yes, we are feeling smug, but only because the error was so great that we can’t believe how it propagated. Even the source site, Pedestrian.tv, is amazed, having A Current Affair contact it this week over two-year-old news.
   It stresses the importance for traditional media outlets to be careful. We’re not perfect ourselves, so it’s a lesson we need to take heed of, too.

The way the mainstream media in the US (The New York Times) and New Zealand (TV One) tell it, Victoria Beckham’s arrival in the US was a flop, with people hating her show due to her overexposure.
   Thank God we have blogs. At least two Americans here on Vox thought the show was great and thought highly of Mrs Beckham—one even saying that she expected to dislike the show and wasn’t even planning on watching, but for it being on at her gym.
   Sorry, MSM—I don’t know about Becks, but I think Posh is conquering America. Sure, two people on Vox do not represent twenty million. But that’s two regular people to whom she is marketing versus a handful of opinionated journalists to whom she is not marketing. This is her year.

Hopped over to Magnetix with Monica (assistant) today to find that the good old Observer newspaper has returned to their shelves.
   For ages, Magnetix did not have Pommy newspapers, either the qualities or the tabloids. There was an absence as the qualities began reducing their size, and I have a feeling the importer did not want us regular Kiwis to know that Great Britain no longer had broadsheets. What would happen if we thought their newspapers had all reduced to Euro-sized tabloids and Berliners? Shock! We might think that Britain had joined the Common Market!
   The dailies began disappearing. Then the Sunday papers. As each broadsheet ceased publication in its larger size, there were no more on sale here.
   It was surprising that the Guardian group papers went, too, since they have tended to be at the forefront of good design for many years—first with the Pentagram redesign (someone once said the adoption of Helvetica made it fascist-looking), then with the commissioning of the Guardian family of typefaces from my friends Christian Schwartz (who started in licensing digital type around the same time I did) and Paul Barnes (whom I do not know as well).
   When I wrote an article on The Guardian’s most recent redesign for Desktop in Australia, I had to ask Christian to send me electronic examples, rather than hop down to the local store to buy a copy and scan samples. OK, so I saved myself a bit of money, but there’s still that satisfying feeling being able to see someone’s work in the medium it was intended for.
   Now, bring back The Times—or will the sight of that in tabloid format shock us Kiwis too much?

It’s interesting to get the Communist Party’s official news on the NAC MG Longbridge ceremony in the People’s Daily, which includes claims of NAC’s popularity in Europe (false; it is MG’s) and the highest honour being given to the MG 7 (née MG ZT) at Auto Shanghai, the Shanghai Motor Show (probably true, but so far I have not seen this reported in western media). The criticisms have been removed (e.g. whether 130 was too small a workforce and union demands for an increase, and the age of the MG TF design shown). On the whole, however, I believe the Longbridge ceremony to be good news, so this article doesn’t really rub me too badly.

This is way too cool, and I didn’t find out till today. In The New Zealand Herald, April 2, 2007, Mr John Simm and I both appear. Different pages, mind, but at least I can now say that he and I have been in the newspapers together.
   I get one photo, a quote and a caption. He got half a page. Deservedly so.
   Why no one on the set got my ‘It’s actually 2040 and I’m either mad, in a coma or back in time, and imagining all of you and 2007,’ last Friday on Good Morning, I do not know.