I stood silently for a few moments watching my son sleep, before, with whatever sense tells us in our dreams that we are being watched, he rolled over to face me and opened drowsy, quizzical eyes.
"Good morning son," I said. "There's been some news.
"Microsoft has announced a new partnership with Peter Jackson, which will involve him creating a new games development company, Wingnut Interactive. And Wingnut will work on a new chapter of Halo for the Xbox 360 - totally new storyline. So Halo will be developed from Wellington, New Zealand."
Sleepy eyes widened. He sat up in bed:
"Permission to swear?"
"Granted."
"Holy shit …"
In other news, Don Brash on bFM this morning, with respect to Tariana Turia's decision to stop seeing him:
"I don't mind if she wants to think of herself as Maori."
Good grief. Red rag. Bull.
The Daily Show on the controversial NIE report that finds that the war in Iraq has worsened the global terrorism problem:
"But remember: this is from a US intelligence report. Take it with a grain of salt."
Murdoch's New York Post notes that Bush-unfriendly MSNBC host Keith Olbermann received an anonymous threatening letter at home, which spilled out white powder - and thinks it's funny.
I'm a little late on this, but Spare Room has the priceless footage of Pete Hodgson and Trevor Mallard dancing like your embarrassing uncle at the government's obesity campaign launch. Yowsa.
Tim Michie recommended the blog of space tourist Anousheh Ansari, who is blogging from the International Space Station. It really is good:
In space it is okay to play with your food. The astronauts and cosmonauts all do. The cheese puffs are not put into the mouth by hand, they are slightly jolted out of the container and flown to your mouth. When you open a bag of soft food like yogurt or soup, if you are not really really careful, small yogurt bubbles or soup bubbles start floating around and then you can catch them with your spoon. But if you try to catch them too fast, one bubble hits your spoon and becomes 10 smaller bubbles and now you have to catch ten of them!
I've had some reader feedback on yesterday's Chumby post. Some readers thought the Chumby sounded intriguing and were desirous of possessing one. Some others still couldn't understand what the Chumby is. Let's just say the Chumby is your new alien overlord and leave it at that, shall we?
I had a good evening yesterday. First I sat in on the audio-visual collage workshop run at the Red Bull Studio by the half of Coldcut that is Matt Black. Then I went to the Rialto cinemas to watch Antenna 2, the second showreel of new British music video to be staged here by the British Council, and conducted a subsequent onstage Q&A with the half of Coldcut that is Jonathan More.
It was all very interesting, and leaves me more than usually amped for the Coldcut show at the St James tonight. I saw Coldcut buddies Hexstatic do the same sort of audio-visual performance at the same venue about four years ago and thought it was mind-blowing then: I'm looking forward to seeing how much this stuff has moved on in the interim.
If you're interested in new media, you really should think about going tonight. It being a school night, it'll be over by midnight (Pitch Black 9.15; Stinky Jim 10pm-ish; Coldcut 10.30pm). As I noted, myself and my man Andy Mo' will be having the night out and I daresay we might go and have a drink or two to steady our nerves after the show. Tomorrow, as a consequence, has been cancelled, although I may still be available for lunch.