Posts by Craig Ranapia
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Hard News: Holiday Open Thread 1: Beach…, in reply to Russell Brown,
I swung by Dressmart on my Boxing Day ride. Sheer bedlam.
Shit, yes -- we were going to a party on Boxing Day evening, and in a fit of madness thought a wonder around Westfield Albany in the morning would be pleasant. Ended up having to park in the stadium parking lot, and I swear it was so hot I had to peel my clothes off when we got home. Needed four solid hours of the lovely Doctor Who box set Santa brought to deal with the trauma.
Still, got Inception on BluRay (and hours of hi-def bewilderment for all the family) for an utterly ridiculous price from JB.
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I've got a bone to pick with you usually impeccable PAS trendsters. Why was I only introduced to the sublimely freak-tastic Janelle Monáe and her brain-blastingly awesome album The ArchAndroid last week?
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Hard News: Holiday Open Thread 1: Beach…, in reply to Russell Brown,
I think quite a few tourists didn't get the memo about Auckland emptying out:
It plays pleasantly merry hell with your estimated travel times -- we had a very nice day out last week in Onehunga. Best second-hand bookstore in town, DressMart and generally a rather nice part of town for aimless wandering and window shopping.
Otherwise, why the hell didn't the usually impeccably on-trend PAS tell me about the truly wonderful Janelle Monáe? The ArchAndroid has been getting heavy sweaty living room dancing airplay:
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Hard News: Holiday Open Thread 2:…, in reply to Russell Brown,
On another note, we’ve found the Cem Erbay story pretty distressing.
Aw, who the fuck wouldn't -- and I've got to say I've been far from impressed by the way the media have been pumping up the "Police are treating this as a suspicious death" angle, which might be technically correct, but still crass beyond belief. There's "silly season" and there's "please STFU until you people can prove your genome contains human DNA"...
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Being entirely superficial: The Doctor Who Christmas special was awesome. Steven Moffat is a mad, sentimental bastard, and while Prime at least made an effort (we got The Next Doctor on Christmas Day) it would have been nice if they could have cut a deal with the Beeb...
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Hard News: A few (more) words on The Hobbit, in reply to martinb,
Can we just say he's the head of a major film thingy, not Mother Theresa? Ask James Cameron's wives...
WTF? If anything, James Cameron's divorces seem to be the one part of his life that are amicable and astoundingly free of nightmarish drama. Certainly on good enough terms that he managed to work with iron-jawed bitches like Gale Ann Hurd and Kathryn Bigelow after their divorces. Hell, Cameron spend more of last year's Oscar season campaigning for The Hurt Locker than his own film.
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Hard News: Behaving badly at the bottom…, in reply to giovanni tiso,
I take it. Good.
And to be fair to you, I've reviewed my Tweets on the subject and you probably didn't see where I spelled that out at considerable length over the next hour or so because they were in the forms of replies to others you probably didn't see.
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The "now the Uruwera 18 will be martyred and they don't deserve it", which was the tenor of a very ungeneorous tweet of Craig's after the news came out, is something I could have personally done without from you too, Russell. It's not about either of you, you know?
First, Gio, you've earned my first "kiss my 'roids" of 2011 five and a half hours early. Win!
Yes darling, the spectacle of people being denied trail by jury without very good reason indeed is about me. It's about Russell. It's also about you, your wife and daughter. It's about all of us, and every other citizen of this country who is entitled to due process and a fair trial -- whether it is politically convenient for the Government of the day and/or the Police or not.
And I will continue being spectacularly "ungenerous" towards people like Simon Power, Judith Collins, their shadow numpties on the Labour front benches and their ignoramus enablers in the media who think my rights and protections against overweening state power are an optional extra. (I'll do you the courtesy of skipping the epic man-splain of how hard won the right to trial by jury was, and what kind of abuses it was meant to mitigate.)
And as we're already seeing, the prosecutors could present a rock solid case and secure convictions that would bear scrutiny under and electron microscope, and this idiotic decision has just given the usual suspects grounds (fairly or not) to scream "show trial" at the top of their lungs. If the prosecution doesn't have a solid case that can withstand a vigorous defence and the scrutiny of a jury, it deserves to go down.
Yes, Gio, I think that's a form of martyrdom nobody deserves because everyone is entitled to a trial that is not only fair but seen to be fair. Especially when, as far as I'm aware (and evidence to the contrary may be forthcoming) we're hardly talking about Te Quaeda but something more closely resembling a tragicomic farce.
ETA: Oh, and thanks heaps for putting me in a foul frigging mood I'm going to have to shake off more quickly than usual. Not really how I want to go to a New Years Eve party or see in the new year.
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Hard News: Media 2011, in reply to giovanni tiso,
Have been thinking about Arts and Letters Daily, of which to be fair I wasn't an assiduous reader,
To be honest, A&L Daily isn't as essential as it used to be (partly because I'm more web-literate and confident, and also because other aggregators followed its lead) but it is still my home page, and never fails to make me feel much smarter than I really am. :)
ETA: Is it just me, or were Dutton's pithy little teasers (sometimes more interesting and better written than the articles they linked to), proto-Tweets?
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Couldn't think of a more appropriate thread to put this in, but shit. The media (and on-line culture) in 2011, got a little less interesting and essential.
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