Absurdity

I came across this wonderful extract this morning...delights my heart!

Usually I spare myself from the news, because if it’s not propaganda, then it’s one threat or another exaggerated to the point of absurdity, or it’s the tragedy of storm-quake-tsunami, of bigotry and oppression misnamed justice, of hatred passed off as righteousness and honor called dishonorable, all jammed in around advertisements in which a gecko sells insurance, a bear sells toilet tissue, a dog sells cars, a gorilla sells investment advisers, a tiger sells cereal, and an elephant sells a drug that will improve your lung capacity, as if no human being in America any longer believes any other human being, but trusts only the recommendations of animals.

Odd Thomas

in Dean Koontz' Deeply Odd

A surfeit of news

I just came across a line in a quote I'd kept which reads: institutions of fear that promise safety by the destruction of others.

This is a wonderful line that epitomizes what's happening in much of the Western world at the moment: we are being led increasingly to believe that we're in great danger from some (unknown) source and therefore the 'institutions of fear' need to look out for us, and in so doing, will destroy others. Hasn't this been exactly what's happened since 9/11?  But it goes back much further than that: the McCarthy era was one particular and horrendous example of it; Hitler persuaded an entire country - or so it seemed - that one racial group needed to be destroyed in order that Germany would be safe. And there are innumerable examples of it throughout history. The worst facet of the contemporary version is that the media picks up on this fear and safety issue very quickly, and very quickly makes an enormous big deal out of the words of men (and some women) who ought to have been ignored for their foolishness. 

Some people would claim that it's our own fault that the media is the way it is. The interesting thing is, however, that if you go without a newspaper, or without television or radio, even for a few days, you quickly realise how unimportant a great deal of the so-called news is.  The news world is a fantasy, for the most part. For thousands of years human beings have got on without the wealth of news that we're subject to, and survived. Only really important things got through (or sometimes didn't), and these things were important to the particular people involved rather than their neighbours in the next city or country. News today involves us even when we have no need to be involved, and makes us feel guilty when we have no need to be guilty.  So in many ways, the media is an institution of fear, like those in the first paragraph.

There are no safety equipment suppliers to overcome the problems of this kind of perpetual interruption of news from the outside as we receive it in this century. Some people, a very few, will not only ignore the news but will hide themselves away from society, as though this somehow helped. It helps them, perhaps; it doesn't get rid of the main issue, which is a superabundance of so-called news. How in the world can it be that we need 24 hour news channels?  Who can absorb so much news?  Who would want to? 

Certainly there are advantages in having access to news as you need it, but it's the 'as you need it' factor that's important.  And we don't actually need it as much as we think. We've just survived a week in Auckland with very little news: I gave the newspaper a cursory glance some days and spent more time on the CodeCracker or the Cryptic Crossword, or the Sudoku than I did on the news. We didn't watch the TV news the entire time, nor did we hear the news on the radio.  Presumably it went on its blathering way, day in and out, and yet we survived with no problem whatsoever. 

I don't want to go to the extreme of never hearing any news at all. I think that's foolish. But neither do I feel we need anything like the amount of news we get, and we certainly don't need it played up to the hilt as it's so often done. News needs to be kept in its place, or it becomes a fearsome monster that eats your life away.

TVNZ7 under threat

I've only recently discovered TVNZ7 because we only got Freeview in the last few months.   Admittedly TVNZ7 has a tendency to repeat itself, which can be fine if the subject is interesting enough. This is obviously part of their policy and means that programmes get more than a single airing, and turn up at different times of the day. 

They have a bit too much news on for my taste - the less news the better, is my motto.  By which I mean TV news, since it's entirely geared around whatever they have pictures of.  If there aren't any pictures, it's not news.

But TVNZ7 is under threat of closure.  For a start it isn't interested in sport, which makes it something of a heretic's channel in NZ.  It's very interested in ART which makes it something of an oddball channel in NZ.  And it's interested in talking about art, and showing it, and thinking about it, and discussing it and everything else you can do with it.   There's a programme on one of the other main channels - How to look at a painting - or something along those lines.   It's not a bad programme - it's shown late at night, of course, when everyone's making their last hot drink before going to bed - and Justin Paton, the presenter, is a good communicator.  But it has a tendency to do the quick flick thing, where picture after picture is whipped across the screen until your eyeballs fall out.   Occasionally Justin will stop and focus (or is allowed to stop and focus) and then the programme actually comes to life, when he tells you what is able to be seen in the painting in question.  But this doesn't happen nearly often enough.

TVNZ7 is far more inclined to stop and look.   That's what I like about it. 

RWC Limericks

A couple of other tweeters and I have considered writing some poetry relating to the current Famous Game that is receiving endless attention here in New Zealand at the moment (first quarter of an hour of the news tonight dedicated entirely to it, as well as all the normal sports news from half way through the News).  

Here are a couple of limericks written, it must be admitted, with a little speed.... 

There once was a Rugby World Cup

That made many sane people fed up,

With the constant insistence

And petty persistence

On every dread detail close up.

There once was a very small game

That somehow acquired worldwide fame,

In spite of its shallowness

It gained status All Hallowness

Making most other games seem quite lame.

Morning Glory

Over the last week and a bit I've been away on holiday, so blogging has gone off the radar completely. Which isn't a bad thing, and I haven't actually missed it particularly. However, it's nice to get back to doing some writing, even though taking a break from that too has been fine.

Anyway, while we were in Wellington over the weekend, we went to the movies - mainly to rest our weary feet, I think. The choices weren't great, or else the times weren't convenient, so we wound up seeing Morning Glory with Rachel McAdams, Harrison Ford and Diane Keaton.

Keaton, who's a superb actress in the right roles, seems these days to play dopey characters with issues. However, given the material she has in this script, she does it perfectly, and is often very funny. Ford plays Mr Grump of the Year - or the Third Worst Person on the Planet, as one of the other characters describes him (the underused Patrick Wilson, who's supposed to be the hunk in the story, but gets no room to develop his character in any great way). Ford doesn't have to do much except be grumpy, and he does this very well. He's probably relieved that he never has to walk at more than a snail's pace - at 68 it's definitely time for him to hang up the action hero hat. (There was a noticeable moment early on in his last Indiana Jones movie, where he was required to jump up from one tall box to another. As a fellow-sexagenarian I could feel his - and see- pain.)

Rachel McAdams, who's not an actress I've really come across before, (though she was in the Sherlock Holmes movie that came out a year or so ago, but I think there she was struggling to be seen amongst all the hamming-up done by the two male leads) here plays an 'energiser Bunny' as Roger Ebert puts it. Quite honestly, she drove me a bit batty: she was supposed to have great talent, but was such a ditz that you had to wonder how the talent could shine through. Anyway, she's the lead, and she has a ball with her kookie character. I'd hate to come within a hundred miles of the person she plays, but that's okay, I'm not likely to, since this person gets up at 1.30 am every day to go and produce a breakfast 'news' program. Whether what they do is 'news' is what the movie is partly about, and is the source of Ford's character's issues. The former NZ Breakfast Show presenter Paul Henry was widely regarded a plonker after what he said about the Indian politician and the Governor General, but it's likely that most of the characters in Morning Glory would approve him entirely. He'd certainly fit in with their mentality.

There are few serious moments in the movie, when one character actually faces up to another with the truth, but the truth usually gets whizzed out the window a few seconds later.

I think we were probably too tired to enjoy this for what it is, but at least in the dark of the theatre we could take our shoes off without anyone noticing, and rest our weary feet.

There is no average person

Seth Godin rants in a recent post entitled 'Deliberately uninformed, relentlessly so' about those people who choose to get their opinions from shallow TV shows rather than taking the effort to read the news, or informative (and formational) non-fiction books.

It's possible Seth was having one of his rare bad hair days (quite an achievement for him), particularly when he goes on to say: Hal Varian at Google reports that the average person online spends seventy seconds a day reading online news. Ouch.

I'm guessing that he's quoting the following sentences from a piece Varian wrote back in March this year where he says: However, visitors to online newspaper sites don't spend a lot of time there. The average amount of time looking at online news is about 70 seconds a day, while the average amount of time spent reading the physical newspaper is about 25 minutes a day.

It's a bit of a surprise to see Seth talking about the 'average person.' As he's pointed out on more than one occasion (and I'm working from memory here, so I can't link to a specific blog post), there is no average person. [My italics, incidentally.]

The people who read online news don't equally spend 70 seconds each day. It does seem to indicate that a large number of them spend a small amount of time reading the news online, but we don't know, since we have no indication of how large a number of people this is altogether, or where this statistic comes from. Nevertheless, in order to get that average figure we would have to have a number of people who read the news online for a good number of minutes, maybe more than those who 'on average' read the newspaper for 25 minutes a day, as well as having a good number of people who read the online news for less than 70 seconds a day.

But we just don't know: 'Mr or Ms Average 70 secs' is a non-existent person, and should never be invited to anyone's party, not Seth's, nor Hal Varian's - not even mine.

Twitter effectively

Tamara Erickson is a regular writer on the Harvard Business website. In a recent piece called Are You Fun to Follow on Twitter (it's interesting to note that the Yanks don't appear to have heard about the move towards not capitalizing the first letter of each word in a headline) she notes that Twitter can be used effectively if you think about why you're using it. And she's not just talking about businesses - her ideas apply to the personal use of Twitter too.

Here's how she concludes her article:

1. Don't report banal details. Unless you're observing a true breaking news event (and note: this term does not include what you or your child ate for lunch), skip it.
2. Do interpret your experiences. How do they make you feel? What do they mean to you?
3. Do share the oddities you observe. Look for things that seem unusual, out-of-place, surprising.
4. Do share things you love - quotes, phrases, descriptions of events that brought joy to your day.

Slow down, enjoy. Listen to the world's music. Share the best of your experiences, but remember, 140 characters is a unique format — more like poetry or Haiku than news reporting. Using it well requires our thoughtful attention.

[My italics in point number 2]

And here's a curmudgeon on the same topic, from the same site.

Pre-Budget Announcement

Yesterday, two of my daughters and their respective (five) children gathered together with my wife and I to celebrate a pre-budget announcement from the Minister of Health, Pete Hodgson. He was in Dunedin for a regional (and small) Labour Party conference, and brought his press secretary with him – a delightful lady who took to our grandchildren with enthusiasm.
TVNZ was there, and TV3, and the ODT reporter came along too. As well as these, there was a woman from the Ministry of Health, and Fiona Colbert, the general manager of the Meningitis Trust. I’ve forgotten some of these people’s names, since it was quite distracting having to hold my latest granddaughter some of the time, or play with other grandchildren at other times.
Why were we involved? Because last year, one of my grandchildren got pneumococcal meningitis, and went through a terrible time of fits, and some weeks in hospital. He gave us all an awful fright, since at one point we thought we were going to lose him. We’re one of the very few blessed families in this respect, not only because we didn’t lose him, but because he didn’t get any of the possible after-effects of the disease, such as deafness, blindness, or the loss of limbs.
And what was Pete Hodgson’s announcement? That after considerable politicking on the Trust’s side, the Government had decided to fund Prevenar inoculations to try and prevent this disease from damaging other lives. They’re spending $68 million on the job from 2008 in order to offer free immunisation to all new-borns.
My daughter appeared on the National News last night, on two channels, and some of the other members of the family were also visible, including the grandchild himself, of course. TVNZ came up to the house and did some filming here, but only a fragment of it made it onto the news – as you’d expect.

Playing

Last year I took a small but important role in a full-length play for the first time in four decades. This year I landed myself a bigger part, that of Uncle Andrew in The Magician’s Nephew, the second of C S Lewis’ Narnia stories to be dramatised by our church.

It’s no surprise that we use the word ‘play’ for things associated with at least two of the arts: theatre and music. Being Uncle Andrew was like having the opportunity as a sixty-year-old to return to childhood, and to remember again how much fun it is to play – in what might be called a ‘controlled environment.’ Uncle Andrew’s a spoilt child, self-centred; a two-year old in adult’s clothing. I could put on his garb without suffering any consequences for his bad behaviour.
I loved performing for the audiences (physically exhausting, yet also energising), but I enjoyed the rehearsals even more. They were a return to that time of your life when you laugh without restraint.

At the rehearsals there wasn’t the pressure to get everything right. Certainly we did lots of serious hard work, making sure things went smoothly, fitting in with each other. But I don’t think I’ve laughed so much in ages as I did during the rehearsals themselves - and even more during the tea breaks. For some reason Lewis’ nonsense line, ‘Womfle pomy shompf’ (uttered by Uncle Andrew when his top hat is pushed down over his head) brought us all near to hysteria. (Though it never raised an out-loud laugh during the performances.)

There were the ‘deplorable’ words – or lack of them - and the attempts of the actress playing Jadis to find something explosive but incomprehensible that would do for a ‘spell’ to bring Aunt Letitia to her knees. And the same actress’ refusal to admit that in spite of her character saying she could see through walls and into the minds of men, she was not only singularly unsuccessful at this at any time, but remarkably dense about what the inept humans were up to.

Nor could she take her task seriously when she had to grasp Uncle Andrew’s chin, twisting it this way and that while she inspected his face for signs of a ‘real’ magician. Equally, as Uncle Andrew, I wasted long minutes of one rehearsal because I couldn’t burst in on Aunt Letitia and inquire ‘what on earth’ she was doing with the mattress, without collapsing in a heap. Those actors’ moments of madness you see at the end of movies don’t only happen to movie stars.

The boy playing Digory delighted in holding the fake guinea-pig (named Russell by the cast) like he was a wet sock, or giving him a goal kick into the stalls. Russell suffered much during the show, getting a nightly short sharp shift from Polly, who had to make sure he ‘vanished’ off the stage.

Digory also had a couple of ‘deplorable’ words. In one scene, the word ‘wondering’ always came out as ‘I should think a person would go on wandering all his life…’ It was rather like the mispronunciation of the TV3 sports newsreader (Clint Brown) who always calls the Warriors, the 'Worriers.' (And well he might!) Digory was equally unable to get his tongue around the line, ‘In an asylum, do you mean?’ Only the producer’s desire to keep to Lewis’ original text as far as possible kept her from substituting, ‘In a madhouse…’