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…

Continue reading

War On Everything

While there are many reasons why Sal and I moved over to this supposedly sunny side of the world, we certainly didn’t do it for the quality of Aussie telly. As we’re increasingly discovering during these long, dark, wintery nights, Australian TV is, for the most part, pretty rubbish. Not that they can’t make decent shows over here–the first series of Underbelly, for example, is testament to what local talent can do given enough money…

Continue reading

St Kilda Shorts

Sal and I spent an entertaining couple of evenings down in St Kilda last week, at the Film Festival. I’d picked up a leaflet about the 6 day event one lunchtime a few week’s earlier, and we’d decided to buy a couple of midweek tickets, which would get us in to as much short film as we could take over the space of two nights. I was a bit worried that we were being overly…

Continue reading

A Little Behind

Yeah. Sorry. I know. It’s been a while. And not for any particular reason. Time just seems to whizz by these days and before I know it another month has passed and I’ve only written two posts. Or in the case of this month, none at all–with only a couple of days left to go in May 2009 I’m in danger of letting a whole calendar month pass me by with no new entries for…

Continue reading

Going To Need A Lot Of Coffee Today…

I might be in need of some strong coffee this morning, but I’m nevertheless very happy with my decision to stay up into the small hours to watch Everton secure their place in the FA Cup Final early this morning. When I made the decision to stay up for what was a 1AM kick off here in Australia, I hadn’t even considered the possibility of the game going into extra time and penalties, and thus…

Continue reading

The Bump

It’s fair to say that the aussies like the odd bit of sport. Although cricket might nominally be the national game (at least when the aussies are winning), and although there’s a growing national interest in “soccer” since the last world cup (at least when the aussies are winning) and while folks in Sydney and Queensland might like a bit of Rugby, down here in Melbourne there’s only one game in town. Aussie Rules. Rules.…

Continue reading

Like Twitter But With More Characters. See? We’re Totally Different

So I’m about three weeks late on this one, but anyway I just stumbled across this blog post explaining Facebook’s philosophy behind their latest redesign. When I first saw it I thought that the philosophy behind the redesign was “let’s try and make Facebook look as much like Twitter as possible and maybe all the people going on and on about Twitter will come back and start talking about us again…” but for some reason…

Continue reading

What’s The Deal With “Craig” Then?

I’m intrigued by the messages from “Craig” that have been doing the rounds amongst the Melbourne peeps I’m following on Twitter. Apparently these have been “found” taped up to lampposts and mailboxes in Windsor, which is a suburb of Melbourne and also happens to be the place where I get off the train most mornings on my way to work. You can see the full set here: http://users.tpg.com.au/morepats/Craig/ And also here and here and here…

Continue reading

Facebook Causes Cancer? Right. I’m Only Twittering From Now On

I swear that the Daily Mail only write these stories as fodder for Ben Goldacre, but surely they’ve reached a new self-parodying low with their Facebook causes cancer story. Inspired by reading the excellent Bad Science book, and the fact that Ben posted the link, I read the original magazine article on which the story is based. Go on, have a look: it’s worth it if only to see the amusing use of tenuous stock…

Continue reading

“The Feelgood Film of the Year”

I’m about a month or so behind everyone else on this one, and so as usual I have nothing new or original to say, but anyway Sal and I finally got round to seeing Slumdog Millionaire earlier this week. We had been planning to see it at the moonlight cinema, outside in Melbourne’s Royal Botanic Gardens, but after I stupidly left it too late to get tickets, we decided instead to go to the old…

Continue reading