Posts by FletcherB
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The Venue, whose proprietor, a Mr Russell Crowe,
A-hem…. He was calling himself Russ LeRoc at the time :D
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Hard News: Music: In before Christmas, in reply to Alan Perrott,
your starter for ten: what telly theme did this inspire?
Unfortunately, my Friday evening alcohol addled brain is unable to fathom which TV theme was inspired by this (slightly brilliant) tune... On the other-hand, It is hugely evident that said tune was (more than a little bit) inspired by "Wild Thing" by The Troggs.
P.S. all else you've posted is also (at least) slightly (if not more-so) brilliant - cheers!
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Capture: A Funky Good Time, in reply to Graham Dunster,
Rumour has it, this was to avoid paying royalties to British Telecom (or whatever it's pre-cursor was named)?
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Those "pre-historic" special effects were, at the time so advanced they were the subject of TV documentaries... people couldn't believe how "real" they looked.
Quite possibly the beginning of the whole "The making of XYZ" tv shows put out to tease/advertise the latest block-buster, and now obligatory "extra content" in the DVD release...
My family were not frequent movie goers when I was smaller, and my brother and I could not convince our parents to take us to the city to Star Wars upon its first release... but 18 months or two years later it was showing in a suburban cinema during school holidays, so I finally got to see it, after my school friends had all seen it. I was already familiar with the basic plot-line from reading the cartoon-picture retellings of it, Mad Magazine's spoof of it, playing with action figurines, plastic model kits of the fighters, Seeing the a-fore mentioned TV dock on making it, and also the wierd christmas TV special about all the Wookies living on wookie planet in the ginormous trees....
I guess my point is that any kid seeing it now for the first time just isnt going to be over-run with all the hype and publicity (and thus, anticipation) that seemed to be in the culture of late 70's/early 80's.
It was also the start of the whole merchandise/promo tie-ins that are now obligatory (and they make more money?) for any kids movie...
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Hard News: The Watching World, in reply to Sacha,
winning party in each state runs the following election
Actually that’s wrong – think it’s the one currently in govt at state level. Sorry.
David hood has already addressed how it's not this simple....
But I'm suffering from a logic fail issue... Surely you've just re-iterated the point you appeared to be debating/questioning?
How would the party in govt NOT be the one that won the last election for that state?
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Ben,
What if "they" aren't as incompetent as you suspect, and they do indeed detect that you have more data than you admitted...
Then you could be in a pile of legal doo-doo...
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OnPoint: H4x0rs and You, in reply to john Drinnan,
FletcherB, there’s no hedgehogs in Oz?
Certainly not in suburban Melbourne... elsewhere, I couldn't be 100% sure, but I cant see them not migrating over the whole eastern time-zone and S.A. by now if they were introduced 150-200 years ago to one part of it.. The big red dry bit in the middle, might stop them migrating east/west if some loony didn't put a pair in their car on purpose?
Anyway, they've got the echidna, which looks a bit like one on steroids!
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OnPoint: H4x0rs and You, in reply to Paul Williams,
<threadjack>And why is there no bumblebees in Australia, clearly they can’t fly very far…</threadjack>
I spent my first 11 years of life in Australia… before I came to NZ I had assumed that big fluffy bumble bees were just a children’s story-book fantasy… I consulted with my mother (40+ at the time) and she had assumed the same… We were quite shocked to see them in real life…
Also surprised to find hedgehogs in NZ.... we knew they were real, but the early settlers didnt bring them to Aus...
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OnPoint: H4x0rs and You, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
In EVERY case that I’ve ever seen a story reported where I had any background or inside information on the topic (though there haven’t been that many), the journalist has got it wrong.
I'm in complete agreement....
And i expect, my personal areas of expertise have no, or low cross-over with yours....
The point is... if, on the few occasions you see a report in an area you consider yourself to have some (any?) level of expertise, and you find it "wrong" or at least "more wrong that right" ... it's very easy to assume the area in question is quite specialized, and maybe the reporter is just not quite on form for that subject?
But ask any of your friends or acquaintances... especially ones who's expertise is considerably different from your own (i.e.. not your work colleagues)... and they feel the same way about news stories they personally feel they have some background knowledge on...
How can this be?
When you see a report that contradicts your own knowledge, from a main stream media source, most reasonable people assume it's an aberration, because they only see news on a subject they consider themselves reasonably knowledgable about infrequently...
But if every story is "wrong", "wrong-ish" or "misguided" according to the people who have "more knowledge than average" on any given topic... then you have to question what it is our media is doing for us?
I'm not an "expert" on many topics, and have "some knowledge" of only a few more...
But whenever I see a news story on a subject I consider myself to have more than just passing general knowledge of... the best I could ever say is "somewhat OK-ish"..."more right than wrong" is common but not a clear majority, and "more wrong than right" is all too frequent. "Completely and utterly wrong" is more common than it should be, and "missed the main point of interest" is frequent too...
It's easy to feel that this is simply because a generalist journalist cant be expected to have the knowledge on any subject that someone intimately knowledgable on a particular subject has, and it's probably not as bad a problem on "other topics I'm not so expert in"... but if/when everyone you talk to feels the same about the topics they know about....
The only reasonable conclusion is that you cant trust what you read in the papers or see in the TV news.
I have no doubt that the reporters are trying their best... but theres just too much information on too many topics for them to research and present several stories a day with any level of accuracy ... (in my opinion :)
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Legal Beagle: Kim Dotcom: all the fault…, in reply to mark taslov,
Mark, cheers... exactly what I was wanting to know...