Malcolm Turnbull’s question time youtube, hmm. Goes OK.
I do wonder though whether all this focus on new media interactivity … quick turnound question time video, Joe Hockey tweeting from the house, Malcolm tweeting from the bus to Bondi … is up to much.
It gives an admirable sense of bustle, it’s unmediated … which is a plus for a political message … but who is it getting to?
I wonder this myself about the likes of Twitter. It’s so circular at the end of the day. The conversation is lively, it all seems engaiging, but there’s a nagging sense in the back of the mind that we’re all just talking to ourselves.
Mike Leyland is dead. Let’s take a moment shall we?
Almost there now. First day in maybe 18 years without a mobile phone.
You can stop calling me now mother.
How so? Dead iPhone — oo look, six weeks out of warranty and the home button doesn’t work. Anyway it’s off at the doctors and I am writing this in the hope that Steve Jobs has me on an RSS or some sort of super dooper iPhone reference world wide search thingy and a light has just gone off at Apple HQ saying give jgreen a new phone on Monday. That would be nice. I do miss it, and am prepared to say very nice things in public about Apple if they can deliver.
No phone (they didn’t have a loaner at the Optus shop, quelle surprise) also means no iPod, so today’s bike commute was conducted in the relative quiet of the breeze, air brakes and birds.
Had I had music, I might have craved this:
I have a thing about this song, and the distinctive country minor-lilt of the harmonies. That interval, that particular pairing of vocal parts, IS country music. How does something like that evolve? Is is just based on a regional singing accent? What’s the thing? I can’t get that question out of my head. Listen to the chorus and ponder for me would you?
On Monday MHR Michael Danby made some pretty tough attacks on Crikey and New Matilda, both agents of malignant anti-Semitism, it would seem. His speech to the House bothered me. Bothers me. I’ve never been pigeon-holed as a racist in the federal parliament before. Read it here.
On the everything looks nicer on a doilly theory, I thought his words might feel better if rendered as a wordle. Thus:
More harmonious than the Humphries version.
It’s a small world after all. Kyle Sandilands is a boofhead. The lie detector incident. He writes a piece for News Limited blog The Punch defending himself. It’s still The Punch’s most commented post by the length of the Flemington straight. Kyle is a boofhead again. The concentration camp incident. Kyle is suspended. Punch editor David Penberthy appears on PM, the radio show hosted by ABC employee and Punch blogger Mark Colvin as an at-length Kyle and media commentator. Cosy. Kyle is still a boofhead. The circle closes.
Excellent Media Watch piece tonight on the Mullumbimby High story (catch it on their site I’m guessing).
How can ordinary folk continue to tolerate the behaviour of the press? How do these people, these alleged journalists, in TV of all networks and all sizes of print, have the nerve to claim the privileges of the fourth estate?
The more you see of this sort of story, the more you witness the behaviour of popular media in the field, on the hunt, slavering on the prowl … the more you realise they are agents of utter misanthropy. Why do people, ordinary people, often people in the most miserable states of despair and distress, give these parasitic worms the time of day?
And then why do they watch the ordure they then produce and commit to air and paper? Honestly, it shames us all. It parades itself as news and current affairs, but in truth it is the worst sort of malicious, cynical evil. It deserves total contempt. Sorry rant. But after 30 years in this caper … well sometimes I wonder where we’ve come.
Watch the Media Watch segment. Then turn off your TV. Memo people in Situations: the media are not your friends. Don’t talk to them. Just. Walk. Away.
Have I said before how much I love a genius playlist? I have? Ah well.
Here’s this morning’s ride to work. Thank you apple, thank you eighties!
and then
before
then
before finally
There you go, an entire bike ride just for you … minus the Bridge Road hill. Up yours Russell Crowe.
It’s probably safe to assume that tomorrow’s talkback — especially the Neil Mitchell grumpfest — will swing to attack Victorian Water Minister Tim Holding, for you know, walking alone, in the cold, after dark.
The indignant callers will presumably turn on the Bullimore-like expense of the search and recovery. blah blah.
And there’s some point in all that. A single acronym for Tim: EPIRB.
Anyway, all that said and noted I’d just like to say how wonderful it is to have a senior politician in this state who takes some joy in a solitary embrace of wild nature. That to me speaks volumes for the man’s soul.
