Posts by David Haywood
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Don Christie wrote:
Good. Did he say whether it would be out in time for Christmas?
Barring terrible disasters, my book should be out by the end of November/beginning of December. I'm advising all buyers to lower their expectations before reading.
I'm hoping that we'll have a book from Jolisa shortly after that.
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Jolisa,
Thanks for all the hospitality on the weekend, as well as your kind comments on my forthcoming collection of words (I will pay you the bribe money as soon as I get my next salary payment from Public Address).
And, wow, the machine in your photograph is uncannily like my book-scribbler-o-tron, except that it doesn't show the giant syringes that penetrate into the operator's brain (via their eyeballs).
Yes, we like to think of Bob-the-baby as a reformed character these days. Although he did have a relapse on the way to Newark airport yesterday -- an entire hour of solid screaming -- which reminded us what the bad old Bob was like.
Very impressed by your tonsorial skills, incidentally...
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On the subject of Colonel Saunders, many NZers won't know the explanation behind his title (I didn't). A PA reader who lives in Kentucky has just enlightened me.
The things you learn through PA -- I had no idea we were so educational.
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Just managed to sit down and catch up with these comments.
You all sound like a thoroughly lovely bunch of aunts and uncles, I must say. What nice readers we have at PA.
My only regret now is that I never had an Aunt or Uncle that let me throw Molotov cocktails (although my grandfather did make me a lethal crossbow when I was nine; the bolt of which would split a piece of 4x2 at about 10 metres).
Susan Snowdon wrote:
... what about ukeleles? Aren't they all the in thing these days? And with Bob's ear for country music, wouldn't the next step up be a banjo?
Bob does actually help me play the ukulele when he's in the mood.
But I think the next step up is a banjolele -- an instrument considered so loathsome that P.G. Wodehouse based an entire novel on their awfulness.
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Robyn Gallagher wrote:
This is the second post David's made that doubles as an effective form of birth control.
Oh, that's so hurtful!
paulalambert wrote:
My doctor told me you don't get diabetes from sugar. Yay !
I guess my siblings and I are living proof of that.
And on sentence number two Bob-the-baby wakes up -- EOM!
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I do think a stand-alone trust is a great idea -- no doubt about that. And a more do-able solution, in many ways.
But with a non-publishing trust, I just wish there was a way so that it wouldn't end up subsidizing Fairfax and APN for what they should be doing anyway. But maybe that's just a live fish you'd have to swallow...
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In Nippert's defence, he is a very good feature writer. Given the recent staff losses, this may be a simple case of overwork. Or it may be a case of some dumb fuck sub-editor changing 'Italian' to 'French'. This sort of sub-editor gaffe has happened to me and then been published under my name (I'm still recovering from it).
We didn't actually cancel, but alas, we couldn't bring ourselves to renew our Listener subscription this year (the end of Wide Area News was the last straw for us). Quite a sad feeling -- I've subscribed every year since I was a teenager...
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Sorry that I haven't been involved in this discussion for the last few days. I've been up to my neck in work and a baby with a cold. Exhausted to the point of just falling straight asleep whenever I sit down.
To answer Stephen's question, I would envisage a 'PA Weekly' as being the arm of PA that predominantly does original journalism rather than commentary. This would involve dedicated 'subject columns' and a weekly in-depth 'feature article' (see more on this below) that would be ideal for the likes of Che to contribute to -- as long as it doesn't conflict with his paid employment, of course.
To save time, I'm just going to quote from one of my blathering emails...
Subject: Re: Ideas for future of PA
Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2008 22:30:58 +1200
From: David Haywood
To: Public Address WritersHi all,
... [DELETED SECTION]...
I've actually got a couple of ideas that I'd like to put on the table now (I've already discussed these with Jolisa, Keith, and Big Che).
1. A 'PUBLIC ADDRESS WEEKLY' ONLINE MAGAZINE
The idea is to draw together talented people from across the NZ blogosphere to produce a daily roll-out of specialist columns that build into a weekly online (and later, a print-on-demand) magazine.
The columnists would consist of existing PA writers, as well as talented bloggers such as Stephen Judd, Idiot Savant, Don Christie, Moira Goldie, Paul Litterick, Robyn Gallagher, Craig Ranapia, Kracklite, Bart Janssen, Steven Price, etc.
Each columnist would commit to one column per fortnight to be self-posted on a given day. For example, odd-numbered weeks might be:
Monday: Politics (Idiot Savant), Cinema (Moira Goldie)
Tuesday: Music (Graham Reid), Economy (Stephen Judd)
Wednesday: Books (Jolisa Gracewood), Sport (Hadyn Green)
Thursday: Science (Bart Janssen), Religion (Paul Litterick)
Friday: Editorial (Russell Brown), Feature article (various), Humour (Damian Christie).
Even-numbered weeks would then consist of roughly the same column subjects, but with different columnists. For example:
Monday: Politics (Craig Ranapia), Cinema (David Haywood)
Tuesday: Music (Chris Bell), Architecture (Kracklite).
...
Friday: Editorial (Russell Brown), Feature article (various), Humour (Emma Hart).
etc, etc...
From the daily reader's perspective, there would be two new posts to read on every weekday, and an expectation of a given topic on any given day. For the occasional (approx. weekly) reader there would be a week's worth of quality journalism on each visit.
The weekly in-depth feature article would be generated from two sources (a) solicited from academics, and (b) the contributing columnists each writing one feature article per year.
The online magazine set-up could be easily implemented with a clone of the existing PA Supermodel structure. Discussions from the various articles could feed into the existing PA fora, in parallel with the blogs from PA 'Classic'. The magazine would also be available as a downloadable PDF (properly typeset) compiled at the end of each week -- I can easily write software to do this in Latex and Python [NOTE 24AUG07: this has now been done], and obviously this opens up the future possibility for a paid print-on-demand version (for people who like to read on the dunny).
The motivating factors for the columnists to produce their fortnightly column and annual feature would be:
(a) Increased exposure for their own blogs.
(b) Profit-sharing based on advertising, readers' donations, and sponsorship.The hope would be that the 'Public Address Magazine' site would become THE site for quality independent NZ journalism, and would pull many more readers into Public Address. It would obviously be targetted as a higher quality alternative to the 'NZ Listener' -- possible slogan: "Like 'The Listener', but free, and not crap". [NOTE 24AUG07: this is a joke]
There is also the possibility of doing this in conjunction with Scoop (i.e. as a 'Public Address-Scoop Weekly).
Obviously someone would be needed to do some wrangling in terms of organizing the feature articles and PDF generation, and I'm happy to put my name forward for that (unpaid) job.
2. [DELETED SECTION]...
I'm a bit hamstring in further discussions on this topic because I really think it could only work it it were leveraged off PA (as a third arm to the blogs and system features). And it's really up to Russell to make the final decision as to where he wants PA to head, and then for the rest of the PAers to put our shoulders to the grindstone and help him do it.
Of course, the other PAers might not want to be involved. A couple of the PA writers have expressed some interest, but there's been an exhausted-sounding silence from most of the other PAers -- which, when you think about it, is totally fair enough. One PAer has definitely indicated that he doesn't think it's a good idea and wouldn't want to be involved (which, of course, is totally fair enough too, given what he's already got on his plate!)
For the moment that's where things stand.
The slightly interesting news is that Secret PA Plan 2 has been approved by Russell, and I'm working full-time to make that happen at the moment. It's a much more modest proposal, but it may help to (slightly) improve things for the PA writers...
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I'll echo Emma's comment. Wonderful writing, Jolisa.
You know, you should really consider putting out a book of your Busytown essays.
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Stephen Judd wrote:
I am IN.
er... to quote from a recent email of mine on this topic -- which sought to answer the question "apart from PAers, who else would you find to write for such a publication"...
... talented online writers such as Stephen Judd, Idiot Savant, Don Christie, Paul Litterick, Robyn Gallagher, Craig Ranapia, Kracklite, Bart Janssen, Steven Price...
You were kind of already in (hypothetically)...