Despicable rags

Obsolete has written a fantastic post about Robert Murat’s successful libel action against 11 – 11! – newspapers.

the truly unprecedented payout to Robert Murat by not just the Express papers but every single one of the daily tabloids with the exception of the Daily Sport, three of the Sunday tabloids and also the Scotsman is an indictment of a journalistic culture that regards the lives of those who are being written about as being of no concern whatsoever…

Murat may receive £550,000 damages; split that 11 ways and it adds up to just £50,000 a newspaper, which to the Daily Mail and Sun especially is absolute peanuts. They’ve had a year of fun, boosted their circulations, brought in far more than that through their race to the bottom, competing with each other as to who could print the more lurid stories, and at the end of it they have to cough up a whole £50,000? To spout a cliche, they literally must be laughing all the way to the bank.

Does your iPhone 3G sound different?

Here’s one for the 3G owners: does your iPhone sound different to your old iPhone when you’re playing music? I’m using the same headphones, same EQ settings and same music, but the 3G sounds less bassy than the first-gen iPhone: it’s hard to explain, but the best way I can describe it is that the overall sound is crisper but it’s lost some of the low-end thump. Which is a pain when there’s no manual EQ setting.

Anybody else finding the same thing? It’s definitely not my imagination.

Perfect parenting: Brad, Angelina and the N-word

In much the same way I love trashy pop music, Mrs Bigmouth loves trashy magazines – particularly the ones with soft-focus shots of impossibly good-looking celebrities and their impossibly perfect offspring. She particularly enjoys looking for the N-word, which occasionally sneaks into the article and depth-charges the portrayal of perfect parenting.

The N-word is “nanny”.

There was a good one last week (sorry, I forget the magazine) where it talked – after a few pages going on and on about what great parents Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were – about how the couple were having to manage with “just one nanny”.

Just one!

At least the article actually mentioned the nanny (or nannies, in the case of Hollywood royalty. Apparently three nannies per child is normal – one for daytime, one for nighttime and one for the weekends). Most don’t, so you’re left with a few thousand words about how brilliant parenthood is. It’s not tiring, you always look perfect, you can resume your career in a matter of days, and the whole thing is a big happy adventure.

It’d be funny if it weren’t such a fuck-you to real parents who can’t just do a baby dump and bugger off to the gym whenever the little ‘un gets annoying, and who can’t just leave the baby in a separate wing of the mansion when they fancy a nap.

I know that actors are in the business of acting and that magazines – particularly ones aimed at women – are in the business of distorting reality, but wouldn’t it be nice to have a bit of truth for once? “God, early parenthood sucks,” said Famous Lady. “Even with a nanny to help out, I felt like punching Chrysanthemum Space Cakes through a hedge loads of times. But you know what? That stage doesn’t last long, and when it’s over it’s a hoot”.

Radiohead go open source

Well, sort of. The video for House of Cards uses a whizzy data visualisation technique, whatever that means, and techy types can download the data from Google Code and fiddle with it.

Here’s the video.

Or you could just zoom around a 3D model of Thom Yorke’s head.

[Via Metafilter]

Seven-word DVD review: Jesus Camp (documentary)

Makes you want to punch a nun.

Supplemental review: could do without the doomy music. What’s on-screen is scary enough, so the music’s just annoying.

More iPhone 3G nonsense

As Charles Arthur puts it: O2 opens brewery, forgets bottles.

For what it’s worth my local Carphone Warehouse didn’t open at 8.02; it opened at 9, and when the doors opened there were five people already at the counter. Maybe they were magicians, or maybe they were friends and family of staff. IT IS A MYSTERY!

It seems the shop’s total allocation was a mighty eight 8GB phones and 4 16-giggers. Credit checks – for existing customers, despite O2′s repeated comments that existing customers wouldn’t need a credit check – are taking an hour-plus.

What a shambles.

Ad-supported music can’t work

An interesting post on Silicon Alley Insider about the business model for advertising-funded music:

The basic economics: A song lasts 3.5 minutes. The majors have been asking for a penny each time one gets played. Let’s say the site shows a new ad every time the song changes. To break even the site needs to sell one ad per song at the rate of 1 penny a song, which gives you an effective CPM (‘eCPM’) of $10.

A $10 eCPM isn’t feasible. Sites don’t earn that kind of rate with 100% sell-through. And even if it were feasible, it leaves no room for the rest of the business.

…Sites that try to comply with label requests repel users and soon go out of business.

Babies don’t come with instruction manuals. But you can buy one

You get a lot of advice when you’re about to become a parent, or when you’ve just become a parent. Most of it is well-intentioned, but it’s largely useless. Sometimes it’s contradictory – so one person says “you MUST do this!” while someone else says “you MUST NOT do this!”; sometimes it’s based on half-remembered newspaper scare stories or long-discredited parenting theories; sometimes it’s based on rose-tinted nostalgia; and sometimes it’s from someone who’s just really, really thick and passionately believes in whatever New Age shite is kicking around.

Even when the advice is good, it’s still pointless. If you’re about to become a parent, you just know that everything’s going to be great and that you’ll automatically become The Best Parent The World Has Ever Seen – so you ignore it. And if you’ve just become a parent, it’s a bloody miracle you can remember your own name. You’re barely capable of making a sandwich, let alone absorbing parenting advice.

There is the odd exception, though. Shortly before Baby Bigmouth turned up, a colleague of Mrs Bigmouth told her that The Baby Whisperer book had changed his life. And he seemed to be telling the truth. While parenthood isn’t easy, he’d changed from an absolute wreck of a man into something approaching a human being. The difference, he said, was The Baby Whisperer.

We bought the book. In fact, we bought two – Secrets of The Baby Whisperer, and The Baby Whisperer Solves All Your Problems. Unfortunately we bought them just before becoming parents, so while we did read them the advice went into our brains and immediately fell out of our ears. We were going to be the best parents ever! We didn’t need no parenting books! And then, when we were parents on pretty much sod-all sleep, we read them again. But we were too tired to follow a sentence, let alone a chapter.

Eventually, though, we did manage to read the books and to put some of the advice into practice.

And it changed our lives.

You know me. I’m a cynical sod. But my tongue isn’t in my cheek here. By following the ideas in the books we went from utterly clueless, desperately tired parents to utterly clueless, desperately tired parents who know how best to deal with an extremely spirited baby. We get a reasonable night’s sleep. We know how to avoid over-stimulation and interrupted sleep. We know how to ensure Baby Bigmouth gets enough food during the day to ensure she doesn’t wake up hungry in the wee small hours. And most importantly of all, we’re enjoying being parents.

Babies, we’re all told, don’t come with instruction manuals. But the Baby Whisperer books are the next best thing.

On O2′s iPhone upgrade system

If you’re only allowing people to upgrade online and you’re encouraging every single one of them to visit at the same time, it might be an idea to check that (a) your website works and (b) it can cope with the demand.

Just a thought.

“I don’t want to start any blasphemous rumours / but I think that God’s got a sick sense of humour…”

Remember the attempts by Christian Voice to prosecute various people over Jerry Springer: The Opera? And the £90,000 costs awarded against CV’s Stephen Green? It seems Green is asking for some good old-fashioned Christian charity from the very people he tried to prosecute.

The money is due to be paid today, but Stephen Green doesn’t have it.

He has written to both Mark Thompson and Jonathan Thoday inviting them to waive their costs in the interests of goodwill and justice.

Apparently chasing him for legal costs would be “vindictive”. Media Watch Watch says:

Vindictive? Like Green’s relentless self-interested pursuit of the BBC and John Thoday, and his gloating over the dearth of royalties accruing to Stewart Lee and Richard Thomas as a result of his censorship campaign wasn’t vindictive?

While we hesitate to celebrate anyone’s financial ruin, it is hard to feel sympathy for the whingeing hypocrite as he begs Thompson and Thoday to waive their charges. And we seriously doubt it will shut him up.

Chicken Yoghurt is amused, while Richard Bartholomew points out that Green was solely responsible for the “adverse, grotesque costs” and that he targeted two individuals rather than a public body.

Green says:

It is outrageous that a public-spirited individual should be dissuaded from upholding standards of public decency in a public body because of the fear of adverse, grotesque costs orders.

Which is an interesting way of looking at it. As Bartholomew notes, there’s a reason why Green should pay up or face bankruptcy.

without the risk of losing money there would be many more enemies of free speech using the courts – and the very same threat of high costs – to silence ideas they didn’t like.