Public Address - Hard News (Home)

Still waiting ... | Jan 19, 2006 10:10

I wonder whether the fact that Sony BMG has finally agreed terms to join the Australian iTunes Store flicks any kind of switch for New Zealand. The absence of Sony BMG product - and with it such beloved entertainers as Bic Runga, Dave Dobbyn and Che Fu - would have been a critical hole in any local offering.

As far as I know, the work on a local store is still in progress, but an update from anyone who knows would, naturally, be very welcome. As an iPod owner I would be in like a robber's dog - or perhaps the dog of a law-abiding consumer of music - and I know that Aaron Bhatnagar is with me on that one.

In related news, Apple has shut off a "SpyTunes" feature that, without asking, examined the contents of users' existing iTunes libraries in order to generate lists of recommended songs and videos. The if-you-like-that-you-might-also-like-this principle is a key element of online retail, but I think it was a bit of a bloody liberty to go looking at people's local libraries with specifically asking.

And Laura Bush reveals that her iPod rocks to the sound of Dolly Parton's cover version of 'Stairway to Heaven'. Does that version have the backwards satanic messages too?

Flip4Mac, now free in its basic form, plays Windows Media files via QuickTime, a whole lot better than the tragic WM player for MacOS X does - the deal lets Microsoft cancel development of Windows Media 10 for the Mac, which may be a mercy for all concerned. But be aware that you'll need the 2.0.1 version if you're running the new QuickTime 7.0.4. And no, it won't help you watch the for-sale video at the Google Video Sore. That's a DRM issue. And speaking of which, I'm getting a little bit worried about everything getting locked up inside Windows-only DRM.

On which tip, I wrote a roundup of copyright law quirks for this week's Listener. See Drop the CD and come out quietly.

Oh, and something for everyone who's looking forward to both The Stooges and 2ManyDJs at the Big Day Out tomorrow. Go Home Productions go crazy with 'TV Eye'. Not subtle, but why would you want it to be?

Yes, only one more sleep. Must get to work on that "back to mine" playlist for later …

PS: Thanks to reader John Horvath for pointing out that today is the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Robin Hyde . You can read 'The Singers of Lonelieness' here. Maximum respect.

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One more time ... | Jan 17, 2006 10:19

Okay, I think I have it straight now, thanks to Geoff Cumming's useful story for the Weekend Herald: the design for the lately controversial Queen Street upgrade and the two rounds of consultation on it were carried out while John Banks was mayor and the CitRats controlled the council.

Actually, the second consultation round began under one mayor and concluded, without notable incident, under another. But the idea - and a popular one it has been amongst the chattering classes - that somehow what is happening in Queen Street is all the fault of that dreadful Dick Hubbard and his PC leftie chums does not fare too well in the face of the actual facts.

That didn't stop Fran O'Sullivan, in the same edition of the Herald as Cumming's story, introducing her opinion piece on the matter with a cheap gag about Dick "being a bit of a Dick". And, for that matter, it didn't stop the Herald spending three weeks on silly-season rabble-rousing before it thought to inform its readers of what are really fairly basic points of fact.

There may well be issues of concern about the upgrade: somehow, for instance, I think the conceptual subtleties of taking out trees at the lower end of the street to reflect its former identity as a tidal zone will be lost on both the public and tourists. Indeed, the council seems likely to make a pragmatic over-correction in the face of the tree panic today. And the council needs to find a way of consulting so that people actually pay attention sooner. But, jeez, there's been some crap talked in the past month.

Still, I suppose it sets some sort of record that Banks (a) actually did something, and (b) didn't loudly claim credit for it.

On a related theme, can someone please find Wayne Mapp a real job? He seems to move from one storm in a teacup to another. The latest: the Auckland Regional Council is going to ban the sale of a half dozen exotic plants that spread wildly, displace native plants, block drains and - in the case of phoenix palms - put an average five Auckland children in hospital every year. Note that no one will have to remove their plants. They just won't be for sale, and the ARC is asking people not to distribute them manually.

Here's the research the decision is based on. (There are also the full reports as PDFs if you like.) Three of the species "were found to be invasive in a range of ecosystems, to spread into remote and inaccessible areas and to have significant environmental impacts on natural areas they invade."

NB: Someone from the council has also pointed out that this isn't even a regulation yet, just a proposal. There are two rounds of consultation, including hearings and public submissions, before it's decided what goes into the pest management strategy.

This, says Mapp, is "the nanny state going crazy … The public have to stand up and be vigilant in protecting their freedoms." And MPs should save the ten-dollar words for real issues.

Last week, Mapp railed against the committing to paper of a verbal understanding between the Golden Bay volunteer fire brigade and local Maori on the handling of fatal accident scenes. The protocol, which includes the attendance of a local archdeacon to bless crash sites, at no cost to the rest of us, has been in place since 1998, without controversy. Mapp claims he doesn't object to such "sensitivity", but the fact that an agreement has been written down. Personally, I don't subscribe to the spiritual or cultural beliefs involved, but so long as fires get put out, it seems a harmless piece of community practice. What I possibly do object to is my tax money being used for idle exercises in political sounding-off by under-employed members of Parliament.

Anyway, better do some work so I have time to watch tennis later on.

It looked for a short time as if both Williams sisters might be out of the Aussie Open in the first round yesterday, but little Na Li never really looked good enough to beat Serena. Not so with Tszvetana Pironkova, who tipped out Venus: damn, she can play. Meanwhile, how about Sharapova's little blue sundress?

Speaking of players who can play, I bought an issue of The Observer (which has followed its sibling, The Guardian, into the nice Berliner format) last week, and it happened to be one with the excellent Observer Sport Monthly in it. The mag contains novelist Paul Bailey's lyrical appreciation of Roger Federer. I'm looking forward to watching him.

(BTW, while we're on sports media, of all the 2005 sporting wrap-ups, Chris Rattue's in the Weekend Herald was the best, easily.)

And, finally … seeing as this is probably my last post for the week: we won! On the garlic thing, that is. Eighteen months ago I was bitching - with the approval of a number of readers - about the disappearance of fresh New Zealand garlic from the shops, in the face of a wave of super-cheap Chinese stuff. (It's not that it's Chinese, just that it's old and crappy and sprouting.) But this summer, the new season garlic has been coming in week after week. And no, I actually don't mind paying $15 a kilo. Although I'd rather pay $7.95, like I did on the way back from boogie-boarding at Muriwai with the kids last week. I only bought one bulb. But that sucker was the size of my fist …

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Second-time blog virgin | Jan 16, 2006 10:39

Deborah Coddington claims to have discovered the blogosphere last week, and she was shocked. Shocked. "Planet blogger is a sad, pathetic sphere," she lamented in her newspaper column. She's not entirely wrong, especially as regards the character of argument in many blog comments forums.

But Coddington is hardly the blog virgin (still less the delicate little flower) she claims to be in her column. There was, after all, the matter of a certain anonymous blogger character-assassinating Damian Christie on her behalf, all of two years ago (I'm not suggesting she directed the attack, just that the rather odd man involved seemed to feel he was batting for her team, and she read and recommended his blog).

And when I criticised a flimsy report she had put her name to (and which directly involved me) here around the same time, she certainly read that - she got all flouncy and dramatic and started quoting Nietzsche.

I actually think the tone of comments, having become quite poisonous during the election campaign, has improved lately, which is a relief. I think the nastiness really deters ordinary folks from offering an opinion. I still don't blame Jordan Carter for recently deciding that he'll only be opening comments occasionally on his Just left blog. During the campaign he'd open a topic only to have the same handful of nutters flying in to scream at him. I'm all for a bit of ginger in an argument, but that kind of thing gets wearying.

There are already useful related discussions on Sir Humphreys, Kiwiblog and No Right Turn (the last being, typically, the most considered of the three).

I'm somewhat amused to see earnest weighings-in on this topic from a number of people who have repeatedly abused me personally. I'm pretty much used to it - Hard News has been inducing spluttering attacks for nearly 15 years now - but I still don't like the rest of my family seeing it. The trick, I think, is to see people with different views as human beings, not as paranoid caricatures.

Anyway, the Sunday Star Times has a sympathetic story about Queenstown bus driver Garry Adams, who loses his passenger transport licence today, because many years ago, when he was 16, he had a consensual fumble with a girl who was 15. Her parents went to the police and he eventually pleaded guilty to an indecent act. From today, the Passenger Transport Amendment Act sees the withdrawal of his licence. He has no right of review or reply, unlike drivers who have committed quite serious acts of violence, because his sexual offence was potentially subject to a jail term of up to seven years.

But hang on. Is this the same newspaper that ran a hysterical and inaccurate front-page story, claiming that the age of consent was being reduced to 12 - thereby sparking a moral panic that eventually forced Phil Goff to withdraw a proposal for a so-called age-gap defence that wouldn't have made convicted sex criminals of under 16 year-olds who consensually experimented?

It is? Well. One might think there was a deal of hypocrisy going on here …

This law is well-intended but it sorely needs attention - the easiest course seems to be to simply allow for review of cases like Adams'. Inevitably, its impact has triggered the usual bitching about "the left", but actually, the Greens opposed it - predicting exactly the sort of unfairness that has become apparent - and it was Deborah Coddington who sounded off about it not being sufficiently draconian.

Part one of Richard Dawkins' two-parter on religion for Channel 4, The Root of All Evil?, has generated a good deal of debate online. I obtained it through the usual means (ignore the fact that the Mininova page says there are no seeds - it's a glitch), and certainly enjoyed it. I tend to think that Dawkins and his crowd devote too much time and energy to trying to disprove that which can't be proven anyway, but it's quite bracing to hear someone stand up on prime-time TV and declare that faith is the enemy of thought.

There's a short clip of Dawkins interviewing Ted Haggard, the creepy head of the leading McChurch, New Life Ministries, on OneGoodMove. Haggard is vile in the programme, but not as much as Jonathan Cohen, a secular jew who went to Gaza and somehow became a cold-eyed radical Islamist. On the other hand, Cohen is just a common zealot; Haggard claims to have regular phone conversations with President Bush. Amusingly, both of them can agree on one thing: they really hate atheists.

There are reviews by American bloggers here and here.

Andrew Sullivan goes looking for the roots of the freakish negligence of the Iraq adventure in a column for the Sunday Times which is largely informed by his reading of Paul Bremer's book.

Is Blair getting scarier or what? Having expanded surveillance powers over the public, Tony Blair has now okayed spying on elected MPs. As an outraged Labour MP puts it, "This goes to the heart of what is to have a free Parliament, not some privilege enjoyed by MPs."

On a related note, reader Dave Waugh made some fair points about the column on Britain's ASBO orders that I pointed to a little while ago. The boy banned from saying "grass" in public said - and did - a bit more than that. And the 87-year-old made subject to an order was not entirely blameless. But I still think the essence of the ASBO system - the way it allows criminal offences to be designed to order around individual behaviour - is unhealthy.

Elsewhere: new study finds iPod users are far less likely to steal music than owners of competing digital music players.

And Slashdot discusses the Ars Technica review of the new Google Video Store. And, clearly the Google store is a rush job, and well short of the standard you would expect from a company with Google's reserves of cash and intellectual firepower. I can't say how the paid video works (it's Windows-only …) but I do quite like the way the free clips are handled: you can watch your clip in Flash video or download an AVI. Unfortunately, there's no way of telling how big your download is. The source page doesn't tell you and the server is misconfigured, so the file size doesn't even come up when you start the download. Honestly, isn't this stuff basic?

Still, there's some good stuff, including a spectacular demonstration of the Mentos-and-Diet-Coke experiment (there's an explanation of this interesting phenemonenon on Steve Spangler's science site).

And also this clip of the Flaming Lips performing 'Bohemian Rhapsody' on board a cruise ship. Absolute bedlam.

Which reminds me. Big Day Out. Only four sleeps. Can hardly wait …

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