topicalhuman.com

imdb.com reports that a film adaptation of one of my favourite books, The Monkey Wrench Gang, is in pre-production.

I’m not sure whether to be excited or worried!

I had to post about this article in the Sydney Morning Herald reporting on some recent upheaval at Channel Nine (one of the major Television networks in Australia).

In short, a member of  upper management at Nine has allegedly admitted that their program A Current Affair has little to do with journalism. This is part of an affidavit from an ex-Nine employee. Seriously, we don’t need a disputed affidavit to figure that out.

More Gold: In the same article Sam Newman opines that the recent round of sackings at Nine carried out by Eddie McGuire were only “…sacking insignificant and incompetent people”. Sam - have you looked in the mirror? Sam Newman is one of the biggest tools on TV. I hope he doesn’t wiggle his way out of this round of redundancies. If he does, everyone else would have to have a fair case for unfair dismissal, surely?

From here:

Under the new laws, it will now be legal for people to tape their favourite television or radio programs for viewing by family and friends.

But recordings must not be sold or hired nor played at school or to public audiences.

“These are commonsense amendments which will maintain Australia’s copyright laws as the best in the world for the benefit of our creators and other copyright owners,” Mr Ruddock said.

Good to see the law catching up with the (harmless) reality.

[UPDATE] BoingBoing reports that we’ve been shafted on this! They’ve picked up on this story in the Sydney Morning Herald (my preferred source of online Australian news, btw). I guess the Government figure that a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down, except that in this case the sugar is nothing special and the medicine is poison.

Cory from BoingBoing says in the article linked to above says, “You’d think Australia would be smarter than that: it’s pretty sad to be the easy-lay nation that Hollywood turns to when it can’t convince America to put out.”

Well Cory, it is sad. I thought Australia would have been smarter than too. I feel dirty and used.

[Lee Hopkins touches on the new laws in his latest post, and I leave a comment there pointing him to the SMH article above, along with some more of my views on the matter.]

Want to know what podcasting is? Ask a ninja…

And Ali G interviews Noam Chomsky, with fairly predictable, yet still amusing, results. (For a slightly more serious interview of Noam Chomsky, he is interviewed by Cameron Reilly, and the podcast of that is here).

I also want to link to this article about Che Guevara. It is a couple of years old; it was written about the same time that the film ‘The Motorcycle Diaries was released. I really liked the film, and I recommend it. However, despite my assumptions otherwise, I wasn’t aware of important aspects of Che Guevara’s later life, where he apparently was a pretty nasty bloke. I must admit that I always thought those t-shirts with the famous ‘Che the Revolutionary‘ image looked pretty cool, but I’ve changed my mind after reading the article linked to above, and some of the articles linked to within it. I wonder if the boys from Rage Against the Machine ever read this, and if they have I wonder what their thoughts on it are.

I also wanted to link to another Slate article that touches on issues of racism, freedom of choice, and journalistic standards in modern music and music journalism.

Ali G talking about drugs: Check it!

I just saw this article about Naomi Robson. In spite of my recent criticism of Channel Nine and Channel Seven’s poor coverage of current affairs, I find it a little hard to be too critical of her. But that is only because she isn’t, and never will be, a decent journalist. I have low expectations of her and her show.

She is just a pretty (albeit aging) face on a show that is full of stories that can only be described as ‘beat-ups’, or spurious promotions of new products or services (how much revenue does Today Tonight make from these lame ‘infomercials’?).

Frankly, Naomi is right when she treats her audience like idiots. Because anyone who watches that drivel is an idiot.

If you like to laugh GO AND CHECK THIS OUT NOW!.

I laughed pretty hard at this.

I have to say that I am falling in love with YouTube. There is so much funny stuff over there. I’m sure there is lots of informative/disgusting/boring/weird stuff there too - its just that I’ve mainly been clicking through to the funny stuff.

Flickr is getting a lot of attention, but (gasp) I don’t own a digital camera, so my interest is pretty limited as I don’t have anything of my own to share. Now I don’t own a video recorder either, but I think YouTube takes the cake because I want to be involved, even though I’m not contributing (yet). Seriously, I find cruising the web and finding cool stuff on YouTube for an hour far more interesting than watching an hour of television.

(I really have it in for TV lately, don’t I? Oh well…)

It seems that immediately after a press conference with the Beaconsfield mine manager (which I mentioned below), Richard Carleton collapsed, and died shortly after. Richard Carleton was one of the best known journalists in Australia. He is being lauded as a man who wasn’t afraid of asking the tough questions of whomever he was interviewing. Which I think is a fair comment, by the way, and not just because of the the last line of questioning he took with the mine manager.

I’ve watched him on television since I was a kid, back when he co-hosted the Carleton Walsh Report on the ABC. I didn’t always liked the way he operated, but he was old-school: smart, tough, and not afraid of a scrap. In short, he was a damn sight better than almost every other journalist left on Australian television. Television sucks anyway - it just sucks a little bit more now.

I am a huge fan of the BBC television series from a few years back called The Office. I own the whole thing on DVD. If you’ve ever worked in an office (and the experience hasn’t left you brain dead) you’ll know this is not only great comedy, but it is actually a fairly accurate representation of what office life is often like. Ricky Gervais co-wrote the office with his regular collaborator Stephen Merchant.

Together they also recently ran one of the more popular podcasts series going around, which can be found here.

However, I’ve just found out that they have a new show coming out called Extras (which I found via a link from d*s). Actually it is pretty old news, but it is new to me, so I’m posting about it anyway. I wonder when it will be screened/available here in Australia?