Gems From Today’s The Age

Clearly The Age have given up on proof reading altogether… “Gangland daughter Katie Peirce found dead“: Mr Ser, an outreach worker with the Father Bob Maguire Foundation, told The Age in the statement that rumours of the overdose “are yet to be made official”. He said the family were dismayed at the rumours “as it is totally out of character for her to have died from an alleged overdose”. Er. Yeah. I’m pretty sure she’s…

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Lost Email

One of the downsides to having got in on Gmail early enough to get my real name as my username is that as time goes by I seem to be collecting more and more messages intended for other Matt Armstrongs who weren’t so lucky. It’s not spam, as such, but real messages from real people that have just wound up in the wrong inbox by mistake. One of my old work colleagues used to have…

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Plus Ca Change…

I’ve never quite understood the logic behind rail privatisation. Privatisation in general I semi get. You take some service that was previously provided by a single organisation–the state–and sell it off, thus generating a nice cash windfall for the government and in a handy bi-product you open that service up to competition, which should theoretically mean that the customers get a better service. That’s great if it means I don’t have to take my phone…

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Spam

So I’m guessing that at some point in the past I must have become rather annoyed with receiving incessant spam emails from the UK’s least favourite grocer. And I must have decided to vent my frustration in a typically childishly pathetic way that no one but me would ever know about. Well, that’s the only explanation I can think of for why, long after I stopped receiving their spam, and long after I forgot all…

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Some Of My Best Friends Are Australians…

Two polar opposite comedy experiences last night–Sal and I spent a lovely evening out in Melbourne town watching the excellent Daniel Kitson’s musings on life and death. It was a wonderful, uplifting hour and a half of intelligent, life-affirming comic joy. Meanwhile, Australian network television was casually winding the clock back to 1972 with some good old fashioned racism. The comments on the story on The Age website — that would be the supposedly more…

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Paradise…

With 2008 being so dominated for us by holidays–four months of it were consumed by our trip of a lifetime around South America, not to mention a two week suprise trip over to Oz in February–it was inevitable that we would have to pay for it eventually. And so 2009 has been as defined by the lack of time off as 2008 was by living it up on steak and Malbec. Much as I might…

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Whinging Aussies

It’s been an interesting experience so far following the fortunes of the England cricket team from deep in enemy territory. On the one hand, I will get to see far more of this Ashes series than I would have done had I been in the UK, as the time difference turns something that would otherwise have happened while I was at work into prime evening viewing–the 11AM start for the first test translates to 8PM…

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I-Sky: Australian Style

Flicking through the TV guide that came with the Herald Sun (that would be Rupert Mudroch’s Melbourne tabloid) this weekend, I was amused to see that the final episode of Australia’s Next Top Model on cable channel Fox 8 (that would be one of Rupert Murdoch’s TV channels, on Rupert Murdoch’s pay TV network) listed as this week’s “Must See TV”. Apparently: The shining light of the show this season has been [host Sarah] Murdoch.…

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Flat Earth News

So I’m about half way through Nick Davies’ Flat Earth News at the moment. It’s engrossing and depressing in equal measure to read Davies’ detailed insider account of everything that’s wrong with the 21st century mass media–an industry so dominated by commercial pressures to fill space as quickly and cheaply as possible that its journalists are reduced to what Davies calls “churnalism”: the regurgitating of press releases and stuff copied from the internet and the…

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