If you're an obsessive consumer of news and how its reported, the earth tremor that shook most of residential Melbourne and surrounds last night almost undoubtedly proved the growing irrelevancy of the printed media. Within 10 minutes of it occurring, 12 of my friends on my Facebook had reported it in their status. (Some with accompanying "It's the end of the world" comment, which had me lamenting that Carl Sagan might actually be right and that these people never paid attention during their Geography classes) With a turnaround of 12 hours as opposed to a propagation speed of minutes or even seconds, major events reporting will soon be the domain of internet-enabled citizens with newspapers taking a more supporting role such as analysis or criticism of the event rather than direct reporting. A compiler of citizen-originated event reporting could even be achieved using some sort of rudimentary tagging system. Even then its hard to figure that anyone will bother to read that, either.
So it goes.
I can't (read: won't) say much about it, but my new job "cleaning the internet" (not content, just dodgy domains) had an unassailable lead for best job ever...until they blocked the good parts. I do love the mandatory eating of breakfast as the first order of business though.
Uni's back; and so it would seem, my wit.
Shai and Crushtor have a smoko
Me: You see that chick over there? With the beret?
Shai: Which one?
Me: The one that looks like she's an extra in a Godard movie.
Shai: Yeah.
Me: Arts student?
Shai: Absolutely.
Me: Let's test it out. Just casually name drop a critical theorist and see if she looks over at us.
Shai: Lacan.
Me: Foucault.
Shai: Did she look?
Me: She totally glanced up! Let's try it again!
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Soup and such
Nermal: I can't believe you downloaded 200GB worth of TV shows, Damith.
Damith: Why not, if the Uni doesn't block it, I'll download it.
Me: Why bother Damith, all American TV shows fall into one of two categories: Shows about Lawyers or Doctors doing ordinary stuff; or, shows about ordinary people with some kind of hidden talent, superpower or one of them being placed in an extreme situation.
Shai: My god, you're right.
Me: Think about it. Law and Order, Grey's Anatomy, Boston Legal. Shows about professionals that are just doing their jobs. Reaper, Chuck and Breaking Bad? Shows about guys on minimum wage with special powers and/or put in weird situations.
Damith: What about House?
Me: Well, House is just shit.
I really should write up my Cannibal Corpse interview.
Intrigue and Incense
When a party is in opposition, especially one that believes in its divinely ordained right to rule our nation by virtue of their mere existence, high profile players usually snipe at one another via the media when it becomes evident their policies won't wedge the government of the day - case and point of John Hewson telling Peter Costello to resign. That's all fine and dandy, but the fact that he attacks the man personally on his achievements baffles me to say the least. Not really out of character for the usual Tory ad hominem smear politics. (Remember! They made Latho cry! Actually fucking cry!)
Sure, he was never made leader of the parliamentary Liberal party, but he did deliver a GST and win a whole bunch of elections; something Hewson never achieved despite his ambitious aspirations, even suffering a defeat, losing the "unloseable" Fightback! campaign of 1993. (And he was in Opposition! He not only didn't win, he actually lost. Cue the sad trombone.)
On second thoughts, the squabble could be reduced to an Onion-esque headline: "Old loser tells hurt loser to quit."