Archive for March, 2008
Going away for a bit
I’m off for a fortnight, so I’ll leave you with this photo of baby Bigmouth.
The pic was taken by David, and it’s a vivid illustration of the need for actual talent as well as decent kit. I have a good camera. I don’t end up with photos like that.
(Photo courtesy of David. All rights reserved)
Flat Earth News
As one of the cover quotes puts it, if even half of what Nick Davies writes in his expose of the news industry is true then things are truly terrifying. The stuff on Iraq, the neutering of the Sunday Times Insight team and the problems of “churnalism” have been covered elsewhere, so I won’t go into them here, but one of the things that really jumped out for me was the way in which newspaper regulation in the UK is stacked in favour of newspapers who play fast and loose with the truth, trampling people in the process.
The (newspaper-controlled) Press Complaints Commission dismisses the overwhelming majority of complaints without even investigating them, which means the only redress is via the courts. However, you can’t get legal aid for libel and newspapers’ deep pockets and expensive lawyers mean that you’ve got bugger-all chance of someone taking your case on a no-win no-fee basis. What that means in practice is that newspapers can falsely accuse you of anything, ruin your life and get away scot-free. Flat Earth News contains some horrifying examples of that.
Put it this way: this week’s apology to the McCanns by the Express and the Star was unusual not because of the scale of the apology, but because the McCanns hired Carter Ruck, the famous and famously expensive legal firm, to represent them. Most victims of newspaper falsehoods don’t have that option.
Sodding spammers, again
I’ve disabled user registration (temporarily) because the bloody spammers are back, and I don’t have time to do major security stuff today. Sorry for any inconvenience and/or crap in your RSS feeds…
[Thanks for the heads-up, Kyle]
A messageboard for time travellers
This cracked me up (via Metafilter): posts from the WWII subforum of the International Association of Time Travelers.
Even better than the real thing
This is brilliant: Fake Steve Jobs takes on Wired reporter Leander Kahney and wins spectacularly.
Leander, you are a hopeless pussy. This kind of attitude is why you’re a hack at Wired and not running your own multi-billion-dollar company.
It’s not just that the interview is funny, although it is: it’s that in these days of media management, an interview with the fake Steve Jobs is a million times more interesting and entertaining than an interview with the real SJ would be. Same applies to celebs, whether it’s Craig Brown’s fake diaries in Private Eye or the (hit and miss) celeb diaries in the Guardian on Saturdays.
The whole point of an interview is to get the truth, and these days celebs and CEOs alike are smart enough (or trained enough) to provide anything but. It’s quite frustrating sometimes: you know what the answer is, the interviewee knows what the answer is, but there’s absolutely no way in hell they’re going to say anything on the record and there’s no way they’ll give you anything with a bit of personality. So why bother?
Maybe the answer is for every celeb and CEO to hire a fake version of themselves to take care of media stuff. You could have a Fake Richard Branson, a Fake Mohammed Al Fayed, a Fake Britney, a Fake Rupert Murdoch and so on. You still won’t get the truth, but it’d make newspapers a lot funnier.
Pathetic, I know
When you blab about things for a living you occasionally float briefly into the orbit of famous people - so you’ll interview a famous writer, or the drummer from a famous band, or someone else your mum might actually have heard of. If you do radio, you’ll often meet celebs of all kinds - the Still Game chaps, or Travis, or up-and-coming musicians, or celebrity chefs. It’s all good fun, and my days of being star-struck are long gone.
Mostly.
Pathetic, I know, but the other morning I was leaving the BBC and spotted Rab and Ryan filming an episode of VideoGaiden, a program I’m quite unhealthily obsessed with. I’m very glad they were on-camera when I was nearby, because it prevented me from running up and going OH MY GOD YOU’RE THE VIDEOGAIDEN GUYS YOU’RE DEAD FUNNY LET’S ALL GO TO THE PUB and having a heart attack, or something.
I’m not proud of this.
iPod porn and news that isn’t news
An interesting article (Salon.com, via Fark) on a rash of iPod-porn stories that appeared on US TV. Now, iPod/iPhone porn does exist - the porn industry isn’t exactly slow to embrace new technology - but what’s interesting is the content of the news reports.
Nine stations aired Raskin’s warnings. Her segments had the look and feel of ordinary local news: Super-coifed anchors offer alarmist assessments of everyday objects, story at 11.
But something here was amiss. In addition to panning the iPod, Raskin used her time on TV to push “safer” holiday tech gifts, including products made by Panasonic, Namco and Techno Source. These weren’t unbiased reviews. The local stations that featured Raskin were fully aware that the three companies had hired her to pimp their products during news appearances
Sounds like a pretty lucrative line of work. Maybe I should ask for cash to plug stuff on radio.
Robin Raskin, the iPorn-wary tech journalist, told me that between 2002 and 2006, she appeared in almost three dozen TV marketing opportunities — roughly eight a year, each of which was sponsored by three to five companies and was built around a holiday or news event.
It’s more fuel for the Flat Earth News argument that cost-cutting in media means that an increasing amount of “news” isn’t anything of the sort.
A great book, but the people who need it won’t read it
I mentioned this briefly before, but I’d like to mention it again: Suckers, by Rose Shapiro, is a wonderful demolition job of the alternative medicine racket.
Like all polemics, it sometimes crushes things that perhaps don’t deserve to be crushed - so it’s very hard on acupuncture, despite some indications that it can be useful in some circumstances - but the overwhelming majority of Shapiro’s targets deserve, and get, both barrels.
Here’s a short extract:
One American alternative practitioner and supplement salesman, Gary Null, tells us that “a solution to cancer would mean the termination of research programmes, the obsolescence of skills, the end of dreams of personal glory . . . Triumph over cancer would dry up contributions to self-perpetuating charities . . . It would mortally threaten the clinical establishments by rendering obsolete the expensive treatments in which so much money is invested . . . The new therapy must be disbelieved, denied, discouraged and disallowed at all costs”.
An imaginary researcher says: “Every year we must show you results. After all, you won’t support us if you don’t think we’re getting something done. On the other hand, we can’t be too successful — and we certainly can’t afford to come up with a cure. After all, if we did that, how could we come back to you next year and get more of your money?”
When in 2003 the US Food and Drugs Administration stopped Alpha Omega Labs selling Cansema, a worthless cancer cure, one supporter suggested that this was “no doubt because their products worked. The FDA has a long history of doing this to developers of successful cancer remedies”.
Alternative cancer therapists say their plant-based “cures” are overlooked by pharmaceutical companies because naturally occurring substances — rhubarb, for example — can’t be patented, precluding profit for “Big Pharma”. But David Colquhoun, Professor of Pharmacology at University College London, told me: “The kudos that a pharmaceutical company would get for finding an effective cure would be so enormous that it’s hard to imagine that they would decline to produce it, even if it didn’t make a lot of money. In any case, even when a plant-based substance (like Taxol, from yew) provides the initial lead, it is common for synthetic derivatives to be made that have better properties than the original.”
The book’s particularly good at characterising the typical alt-med consumer - well-educated, reasonably well-off women - and detailing the ways in which the alt-med industry targets them so effectively. Some bits had me jumping around in fury, and others were just desperately sad. Well worth reading.
Hey, musicians - it’s time for the machines to take over
If you thought Autotune was clever, this will blow your mind.
Direct Note Access is a technology that makes the impossible possible: for the first time in audio recording history you can identify and edit individual notes within polyphonic audio material. The unique access that Melodyne affords to pitch, timing, note lengths and other parameters of melodic notes will now also be afforded to individual notes within chords.
[Via Metafilter]
Serious anti-spam
If any of your feed readers get weird results accessing this blog in the next wee while, can you let me know? I’ve installed some heavy-duty anti-spam stuff on the blog to cut down on comment/trackback spam and site scraping.