Posts by Simon Grigg
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Hard News: Holiday Open Thread 2:…, in reply to Neil Morrison,
since similar DLC graphics could be easily found.
There was one in 2004 with a sight - got any other examples because a target logo just doesn't work as an equivalence as explained by several people upthread.
No one takes these signs literally in this sort of context.
Good to see you are so in the mind of every nutter out there on the periphery, Neil.
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Hard News: Holiday Open Thread 2:…, in reply to Angus Robertson,
One you shoot at and one you shoot with.
Really? I'd argue that one targets the item/place (in this case a district) for something, perhaps change, whilst the other is almost universally attached to a gun and used to kill or maim a living thing.
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Hard News: Holiday Open Thread 2:…, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
So, we looked at the internet and the first thing we found in 2007, the Democrat Party had a targeted map with targets on it for the Palin district.
Perhaps Mr. Ailes needs one of his "intellectuals" to calmly explain to him the gulf between a targeted district and the rhetoric and imagery of assassination.
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Hard News: Holiday Open Thread 2:…, in reply to James Bremner,
Simon, how many "left wing potheads" do you think are devoted followers of Palin and Beck et al? Not exactly the profile of your average Tea Partier.
Good to see you've managed to work out exactly what was in his head the day of the shooting from a series of tweets from someone who didn't know him particularly well four years earlier.
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Hard News: Holiday Open Thread 2:…, in reply to James Bremner,
Anyone want to climb down from their kneejerk reaction blaming Palin et al for the actions of a nutter?
Hey James, wanna read what was actually said in the thread before you stagger in here with a 'kneejerk reaction'? I guess not.
You do love those straw men....
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Hard News: Holiday Open Thread 2:…, in reply to Kumara Republic,
The Ministry of Truth would be proud.
As they would with this bit of utterly bizarre reinvention:
"We never ever, ever intended it to be gun sights," said Rebecca Mansour, who works for Palin's political action committee, in a interview with conservative radio host Tammy Bruce.
"It's a surveyor's symbol," Bruce suggested. Mansour agreed, adding that the graphic was contracted out to a professional and approved without much thought. "We never imagined, it never occurred to us that anybody would consider it violent," she said. It was simply "crosshairs that you would see on a map."
There is "nothing irresponsible about our graphic," Mansour added.
Words fail....
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Hard News: A few (more) words on The Hobbit, in reply to recordari,
WWW
Heh... OWW. It's early in BKK.
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Hard News: A few (more) words on The Hobbit, in reply to BenWilson,
I ever heard abroad were about Once Were Warriors.
I was at a dinner some years back and an American woman (who I was told was once married to Nile Rogers) at the table announced that she had come to Auckland to meet some of the 'boys' she'd seen in Once Were Warriors.
We offered to drop her in certain parts of South Auckland after the dinner party..
WWW was heavily identified as being from NZ and I've met countless people around the world who referred back to it when I said I was from the country. It was very much a point of reference for a generation.
OTOH far fewer seemed to have made the connect between the country and The Piano which may have generated more at the box office.
I'd argue a similarly high percentage have failed to make any connection between NZ & LOTR, if my conversations can be extrapolated out into anything as tangible as an average.
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Hard News: A few (more) words on The Hobbit, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
Going from "you should play a certain amount of nz music" to something further - whether it be "here's what you need to play" or "here are some people to help you decide what you need to play" gives me the heebee geebies however.
But it currently goes the other way: "these are our commercial boundaries, as defined by these charts in Billboard and these offshore playlists so we insist that you use your money to make music that we deem acceptable to those to play on your airwaves."
We know from history that radio will happily ignore music which would have fitted perfectly - Th'Dudes for example got no airplay at the time - and happily, too, that has changed over the years for a variety of reasons, NZoA providing several and the Labour government's quid pro quo of a voluntary quota or you get a Youth Radio Network and/or statutory quota. They did however, go down with some resistance. They've managed to manage the endgame however by ensuring that music that is funded at the commercial end of the spectrum still apes the balance of what they play from abroad by picking the winners which suit.
The raft of press over the last few days praising The Phoenix Foundation (who have, of course, had NZoA support) in the UK (including The Guardian's 'the simultaneously sad and euphoric feel of an album that already seems destined to be among the best of 2011') makes me fairly certain that they are going to have longer legs than every act added to NZ commercial radio playlists (which ignored the band) in the last two years combined.
Why this is seems obvious to me.
It's great that they have had NZoA support but I'm uncomfortable in the thought that they only had more than token support because they were unavoidable. I wonder how many artists with a lower profile who were perhaps deserving (and made music that would have worked on radio but pushed the envelope in our direction a little) were given no or token support in the funding rounds but were overshadowed by repeated funding of acts deemed safe and acceptable to the radio people who dominate the choice process.
I really don't know the answer to that, although I can think of a few, but I wish somebody was asking these questions closer to the decision process than the voices on the periphery like mine.