This week I have been Reading
Campaign Ruby, by Jessica Rudd, for our online book club Better Well Read Than Dead. She certainly loves name-dropping her labels.
Watching
The Plan, which reminded me that I haven't dropped enough hints to C recently about how much I want the BSG box set on Blu-Ray.
Listening to
The Pogues
Discovering
...to my great disappointment, that Jared Leto is in 30 Seconds To Mars. Why, Jared, why?
Eating
- Mee pok at Coconut House
- Matt Stone's fresh, Spring-y quinoa salad from this month's Australian Gourmet Traveller. (I decided that dinner was more than a "light meal", though, so added some fried haloumi for a meat-free Monday.)
- Suckling pig rolls at Collins Quarter, which are on for another three or four weeks on Wednesdays (and at $5 a pop are a bargain). They will be followed by Spring lamb!
- Baguette with pork rillettes from Le Traiteur - the crunchy, acid pickles go so perfectly with the rillettes
- Eggplant with minced pork from KL Bunga Raya
- Ipoh Hor Fun (again!) at Gurney Drive. Perfect on a wet and steamy September Saturday. C had the Hainanese Chicken Rice and the rice was beautifully flavoured.
- Some sticky ribs and fish-flavour pork from Fucshia Dunlop's Sichuan Cooking
- Compost cookie batter, with Lanka mix, wasabi peas - thanks to Penny for that idea! - Twisties, Mars Bar, Clinkers and Oreos. Oh, and some Special K. That'll teach me to try to be super-organised for morning tea. (Some did make it to the oven, I promise)
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By Injera, on December 15th, 2009%
Most mainstream media companies seem to have responded to the growth of the internet with fear and loathing. Newspapers, in particular, have failed to break out of the aesthetic of their page layouts which have traditionally represented hierarchies of newsworthiness. This means that newspapers on the web are newspapers adapted to the medium in a very superficial way, and this is not necessarily reader-friendly.
The New York Times is exploring new ways of reading online, and the Times Skimmer is one of these. It offers a much better reader experience than the traditional page layout. I also find it easier to browse than the Google Reader format. As with Reader, you are given the headline and an abstract of the article. To read the full article, click on it and it opens in the skimmer (ads, embedded videos and all) The Times Reader is also available for download and has a similar interface to the Skimmer – the download is free and allows access to the front page stories and previews of all stories in the paper; to read the full edition of the paper you must subscribe. It has a handy “browse” feature, which you can use to flip through the stories and the stories are presented more as they are in a hard copy – columns of text with accompanying images, which are often left out in online versions.
One of the elements of Murdoch’s proposal for paid content that has most riled me is that it hasn’t been presented as anything but a grab for cash; there hasn’t been any discussion on investing in the web to make the content more reader-friendly, the ads less intrusive, or the discussion in the comments better moderated. What the NYT seems to be doing is demonstrating an understanding that the web and the hard-copy are two distinct media, and showing a willingness to invest in ways of translating the content to best fit the internet.
By injera, on August 6th, 2009%
It’s a happy coincidence that combining the words “Twitter” and “haters” results in a variant of the word “Twat”. That was the word I uttered after reading Rebecca Wilson’s column on Twitter today.
Wilson hates Twitter because, unlike “Facebook and blogs (which) appear to serve some useful purpose, Twitter just does not – it is puerile, inane and a shocking waste of time”. Moreover, Twitter users are “vacuous people with too much time on their hands who like to believe we actually care what they are doing”. Wilson has a column where she is paid to spout her own vapid opinions, but she resents the fact that Twitter allows everybody to do the same. She seems particularly peeved that tweets are limited to a character count (she doesn’t seem to be able to settle on whether that count is 140 or 160), although I doubt she’d prefer more extensive “blow-by-blow descriptions” of the “tedium and uselessness” of the lives of people she obviously despises. (How somebody can be “turgid” within 140 characters is a mystery.) Perhaps it’s because she can’t summarise her own vacuousness to the form that Twitter is, to her, “the single most hideous technological breakthrough of the past decade” (she’s never tried Microsoft Songsmith, then, but that’s another story).
Continue reading Twaters
By injera, on July 20th, 2009%
Violence is everybody’s problem, according to the Editorial page in Saturday’s Age. Violence might be “everybody’s problem”, but the bigger problem is that the government is currently spinning “everybody’s problem” to mean “everybody’s responsibility” and, in doing so, is avoiding taking any steps to counter it.
The full article is here; below are some items of particular interest to me.
Continue reading The problem of violence, and the non-solutions
By injera, on June 22nd, 2009%
The always interesting New York Times “Lens” blog features On Assignment: Covering Tehran, work by Iranian photojournalist Newsha Tavakolian. The interview is engaging, but it is the images that really speak.
As demonstrations continue in Iran, more information is emerging about the legitimacy of the election, including reports from some districts where voter turnout was greater than 100%. Protests in support of disenfranchised Iranians continue around the world – #iranelection on Twittersearch is a good place to find local action.
By injera, on June 15th, 2009%
John Elder has never been one of my favourite writers at The Age. If I notice his name in the byline, I generally skip the story. If I start reading one of his articles without realising, the over-wrought prose generally turns me off within the first couple of paragraphs and a glance at the byline confirms why. I never miss anything of any importance by not reading his work – the stories are usually of the “human interest” type, where “human interest” is defined as “of interest to nobody but John Elder”.
I missed the byline on the Sunday Age article “Swine Flu Fears Not To Be Sneezed At”, but the name of the writer was repeated in the first line. For some reason I kept reading.
Continue reading Swine flu fears and the meeja
By injera, on June 2nd, 2009%
Last Monday, the New York Times ran a story about a group of scientists in the Netherlands who are trying to reinvent Polaroid film. It seemed like a quirky little project and I wondered how many people would be interested beyond the novelty. Alongside the story, the Times asked readers to send in some of their polaroids. They were probably expecting a few die-hard polaroid fanatics to submit a couple of photos. In the end, they received over 900!
Our amazement … soon gave way to grateful and respectful astonishment. The quality of the work was even more impressive than the quantity. Lens readers in this hemisphere, in Europe and in Asia showed an imaginative command of the medium. Their work exploited the idiosyncracies of the Polaroid formats, especially the SX-70 films: the square format, the slightly soft-edged rendition, the occasional defects from the developing process, a color palette that paradoxically seemed warmer than normal but also bent a bit toward blues and greens.
And here they are. It’s best to look at them in full screen mode. Amazing!
By injera, on April 27th, 2009%
As a “bonus” with Saturday’s Age, we received a copy of
theage
(melbourne)
magazine
There’s an awful lot to dislike in this shiny, inconveniently sized publication. Earnest lower case titles, random use of contrasting colours, and enthusiastically misplaced brackets are only a small part of the problem.
Continue reading Oh, no – another whinge about the paper
By injera, on April 17th, 2009%
Actually, two tales of two kitties, but there’s a point beyond which a strained play on a literary reference renders the reference pointless.
Jezebel linked to a story about a couple who were reunited, after a two year period, with their much-loved 20lb Maine Coon cat.
Bob was brought to the local humane society in Minnesota two years after his disappearance and workers found a microchip embedded under his skin with the Meide’s contact information. When they moved they didn’t update their contact information. Workers could not find their new phone number, but eventually thought to search for their names on Facebook. “We love everything about his personality. We love the size, we love big, fat cats,” said Nicole Meide, who first got Bob with her husband after they returned from their honeymoon. She said Bob’s return “brought tears of joy.”
Continue reading A tale of two kitties
By injera, on April 5th, 2009%
Buying the weekend newspapers is nothing more than a habit for me now that the “news” is available online. It’s a habit I just can’t seem to break, even though they aggravate more than they enlighten me. The Sunday Age is the worst culprit, with its supplements that skew nauseatingly to the “women’s magazines” end of the market. Usually, I flip through the “Life” and the “M” and rant to my partner. With him away, I’m reduced to this. Blogging a whinge.
So, what are the things I hate most?
Continue reading Things I hate most about The Sunday Age (and something I like)
By injera, on February 13th, 2009%
I went through a stage of believing myself to be misanthropic. I can’t remember why – it just seemed to be that, for a time, I found people to be mostly annoying, at best. It occurred to me to change my surname to “Anthrope”, but then that would have required abandoning the title “Ms” for “Miss” in order for the name change to achieve any sort of effect. Also, it would have required then being called “Miss …”, which was unlikely in that phase of my life, and would have been considered eccentric had I insisted upon it.
Continue reading Misanthropy: a side-effect of reading the Herald-Sun
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