Posts by Craig Ranapia
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Which is better than the parent who turned up to my son's 4 year old birthday with a t-shirt which had "I fucked your boyfriend" on the front. Yup...
Eww... If that's not an occasion to put a parent on the naughty step for some serious time out, what is?
I feel lucky that I don't have to intervene much, but abuse towards the women here is the best way to cop a permanent ban.
Very chivalrous, Russell. But dissing the laydeeze around here is more like to draw a request for protective custody than a ban. :) Seriously, I can see why you want to set standards and enforce 'em -- and 99.999% of us respond in kind and appreciate it. In the end, it boils down to karma. You get back what you put out there, and if you're not going to set the tone above a cock-fight, then don't play the victim when the commentators follow your lead.
You might want to consider that, Tane. As they say in Boston, politics ain't beanbag -- but the political blogisphere doesn't have to be Saw-style torture porn either.
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And just to semi-jack... Russell wrote:
Yesterday, we saw the monster movie du jour: Cloverfield. I really liked it. The idea of capturing the entire narrative via one consumer video camera was perfectly executed (although that thing had some battery life …)
Well, I loved the headline on the NYTimes review: "We're all going to die! Grab you camera!" Heh...when you think about it, it makes no sense whatsoever but all you have to do is maintain willing suspension of disbelief for a little under 80 minutes.
The American reviewers who got all huffy about it being a cheap reference to 9/11 need to chill out. It's just a movie.
Yes and no... I can understand why a lot of German critics and commentators couldn't say 'it's just a movie" after seeing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Untergang__Downfall__ -- which struck me as an interesting but flawed film from outside the pretty fraught cultural-political context the film exists in in Germany.
I don't know if I'd be quite so blase about making a film in Auckland like this -- where the dramatic core is a terrorist attack on a crowded ferry. The Rainbow Warrior Bombing may have been a long time ago, but that's not imagely I'd allude to lightly.
Anyway, I thought Cloverfield was a pretty good way to waste an hour and a half. Didn't live up to the hype, but nothing could have.
Now JJ Abrahms is going to have to face a real monster: Trekkies. Live long and prosper, JJ, ;cause if you fuck this one up Marlena's explosively nasty death is going to look gentle by comparison.
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a scumbag like Robin Maxwell
Sorry let's get the right scumbag: Ian Robert Maxwell born Ján Ludvík Hoch) -- decorated war veteran, Labour MP, media mogul and all-round shit bag.
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(And yes, I know defamation suits are mostly a waste of time and energy with little or no return, but one can dream...)
Ah, they can be a damn sight worse. One of the saddest things I saw David Lange say towards the end of his life was that he would have left Parliament long before he did -- but he needed the steady income. The costs arising from Lange v Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Lange v Atkinson must have been considerable, and not the kind of legacy you'd want to leave to your wife and young daughter.
Meanwhile, a few employees of the Mirror Group might still have some part of their pension fund if a scumbag like Robin Maxwell hadn't been so effective in using British defamation law to intimidate and harass journalists who were asking inconvenient questions about his financial dealings...
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And off memory I have only twice posted about KBB, once being to point out I was actually defending the Govt when they accused me of spinning Nat Party lines. To suggest I spend all my day picking fights with them is ridiculous. I in fact ignore 95% of what they throw at me.
Um, I don't see where I suggested you "spend all my day picking fights with them" but if you took that away, my apologies. I just don't see why you bother engaging with them at all -- especially in the specific example you cited. Its not as if people who are absolutely convinced you're a lying Tory sock puppet who regurgitates talking points as a dog returns to its vomit are going to change their minds in the face of rational rebuttal!
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Agreed. This stuff is doing my head in at the moment -- it's not fun. I've just had to go and deny a confident claim from a Kiwiblog commenter that I'm a part of some ninth-floor-directed conspiracy to defame whaleoil by calling him a paedophile.
Oooh, I can top that -- the rather charming lefty-troll on Kiwiblog who repeatedly accused me of 'supporting' the 'pedophile' Mark Foley. Feh... I should not have made the mistake of thinking such people are susceptible to rational engagement. And much as I hate to say this, I think its a matter of when not if DPF finds himself on the sharp end of a serious defamation action.
The screaming & bitching from KB is because of the success of Kiwiblogblog & The Standard at exposing Farrar's links to the Nats and exposing (in their opinion) the hyprocrisy of the Right in the same way that Farrar et al has exposed the "hypocrisy" of the government.
Paul, I'm sure RB can speak for himself, but I wish Farrar and the Standard/Kiwiblogbog folks would get a room -- preferably one with padded walls and no handle on the inside of the (locked) door -- and fuck already. Their blog-bitching is about as tiresome as listening to Uncle Ken and Aunt Barbie's relentless, petty and poisonous bickering every time they're out in public.
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After that, Bjork was intriguing and avant-garde, but not entirely what the Rage crowd wanted to hear.
I like Bjork, but have to admit she doesn't exactly make it easy -- like Tori Amos (who I also adore - go figure) the line between utter genius and tooth-grinding pretension is a very fine one indeed. But I thought the successful BDO experience involved getting thrown all the way out of your musical comfort zone at least once. I have a friend who in Oz who had that experience with PJ Harvey -- caught her set, hated it, but couldn't quite get it out of her head. For me, that's when music, art, cinema and literature gets exciting -- the completely unexpected - perhaps even unwelcome - connection.
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In itself, it's hardly a scandal, but The Standard has hammered David Farrar regularly for his National Party links, which often go undeclared when he's tapped as an "independent commentator" in the media.
Come on Russell, it's gotten a little more thrashing, screaming and outright pants-pooing than that. By the Standard standard, you're a honorary Hollow Man and National Party media whore by failing to 'declare' my National Party links on PA Radio. Hell, if you want to get really pathological about it Joanne Black and Jane Clifton should be sacked until they stop (literally) sleeping with the enemy, and polluting the Listener with their sexual treason.
In the end, it's the hypocrisy stupid. Because it takes precisely zero imagination to picture The Standard going up like a flaming bag of dogshit if Kiwiblog had an equally 'technical' connection with the National Party.
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Yes, even if I did wish she'd played more of a pop show, it was remarkable art.
You might be interested in this New Yorker profile by Alex Ross - it's long (consider where it was published) but fascinating.
Though she now spends much of her time in New York, she keeps coming back to Iceland, where she lives for several months of the year. The relative simplicity of the place is reassuring to her. Once, she translated a local news headline for my benefit: “TIRE TRACKS IN FOOTBALL FIELD.” A look of pleasure crossed her face as she studied photographic evidence of the catastrophe. “This is so Iceland,” she said.
heh...
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Clive James may know plenty about making enemies (and gloating), but he knew sod all about book publishing when he wrote this
Clive James knows quite a lot about all sorts of things, but I suspect there's a fair bit of (not so gentle) urine extraction going on -- not only of himself, but the whole London literary scene which can often seem like something out of the scarier reaches of Greek lit. I'm a huge fan of his 'unreliable memoirs' too, not only because they're often very funny but because some of the best jokes are James sending the pretensions and idiocy of his younger self without mercy.
Listening to the Holy Father whilst naked? I'm sure there's a special punishment for that ...
... and its not as much fun as it sounds. :) You recovered from the BDO quickly this year, Mr. Brown.
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