Amid the recent flurry of commentary about China, I particularly enjoyed a couple of vivid and thoughtful posts by Simon Grigg about a week in China, the first "from the 19th floor of a riverside hotel in Guangzhou," and the second, still sorting through his thoughts about the experience, from back home in Bali.
NBR has finally lured David Cohen to the blog side as part of its new online Comment section. He has a little more on the Sunday magazine flap. Nevil Gibson did say the new site was going to be like a right-wing Public Address, so perhaps you could pop over and give them some comment love …
At Blogging it Real, dc_red conjured the magnificent phrase "this ball-scratching monstrosity of an MP".
At Synthetic Thoughts, Chris Esther visits a small-business expo and finds that the best thing there is … Statistics New Zealand!
Tim Robbins' keynote speech at the National Association of Broadcasters conference on Monday has been something of a sensation since; not least because of the circumstances in which it was made. Conference organisers appear to have only discovered in the green room what Robbins planned to say. The speech, urging broadcasters to rise above the tawdry, almost wasn't given at all, and (ironically) cameras in the room were ordered off when he did speak. But, of course, mobile phones are digital recorders. You can hear the final, rousing six minutes, or a lesser-quality MP3 of the whole speech.
And, of course, there's always something good at The Hand Mirror.
And that'll do. I'm at the boardroom on NZ On Air in Wellington for a meeting of the NZ On Screen Trust, and we get to see a live demo of the new website, which will launch later in the year as an archive and showcase for New Zealand screen culture. The prospect of the demo almost makes up for being inside on such a lovely day. Especially after yesterday afternoon, when I arrived from 21-degrees-warm Auckland to what seemed like a midwinter southerly …
PS: Might I draw your attention to the ad on these pages offering a free bag of Eden organic coffee if you pre-order the new Portishead album? It's quite a good deal.