Rob, Rambling

02.09.10
23:09:42 - Comments (View)

link, us politics, sarah palin, vanity fair, good writing, journalism,

Vanity Fair - Sarah Palin: The Sound and the Fury

I’ve been reading quite a bit of long-form journalism recently, and this is one of the better articles, detailing how isolated Palin has become, and how she seems to be campaigning for nothing more than self-promotion right now.

It would’ve been nice to see a few more on-the-record sources, but it’s a sign of how powerful she is and how much fear she puts into even her friends (and ex-friends) that so few are prepared to put their names to their words in print.

It’s crazy to think that she was so close to being a heartbeat away from the presidency of the US.

14:58:34 - Comments (View)

chat, books, girlfriend, addictions,

The girlfriend has an addiction: hardbacks

The Girlfriend: and getting the new Terry Pratchett tomorrow
The Girlfriend: which would account for £11 of the missing £104 from my bank account
Me: seriously, I need to wean you off hardbacks
The Girlfriend: :(
The Girlfriend: I like being first with the new books
The Girlfriend: you have to wait like another YEAR to get the paperback
Me: delayed gratification is just as good as instant gratification
The Girlfriend: not as far as I am concerned
The Girlfriend: I want instant gratification all the time

13:12:16 - Comments (View)

quote, media, newspapers, celebs, hypocrisy,

News International agreed to pay Clifford one million pounds in exchange for feeding the paper exclusive stories over the next several years.

Probably my favourite line from the NY Times investigation into the British newspaper News Of The World’s phone-hacking scandal.

Max Clifford is a celebrity PR who will be the link between a celebrity and a newspaper when they need to either deny or promote a story. He is notorious for giving a newspaper a particular story/angle if they promise to bury a different damaging story about one of his clients.

A common example is when a newspaper has evidence of a celeb’s drug use. Clifford then negotiates a tearful “coming out” interview with the celeb instead of an outright exposé, which could be more harmful to the celeb’s further career.

The article as a whole isn’t particularly insightful if you’ve been following the story over the last few years, but it’s a very good overview if you haven’t. It really does show how the “dark arts” employed by British newspapers don’t just tread the line between legal and illegal, but trample all over it without a care in the world.

01.09.10
16:52:32 - Comments (View)

picture, memories, food, space, america, tumblr crush,

3 notes

Lauren’s series of posts about the “ice cream of the future” have reminded me about my first (and so far, only) experience of ice cream in dot form.

It was during my first trip to America, when I was about eight years old. We’d stayed with some friends in West Virginia, and then driven down to Florida to do all of the DisneyWorld parks and so on. During our time in Florida, there happened to be a shuttle launch from Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral.

We drove out that way, and ended up pulling over to the side of the road to watch the launch, along with everyone else in the area. The shuttle was pretty much just an orange glow at that distance, but it was cool to see it heading up into the heavens, disappearing into the sky as we watched.

Of course, being so close to the space center, we had to go in. Again, along with everyone else in the area. I remember it being stupidly busy, but also absolutely amazing. Hell, I was a space-geek then, and still am now.

The point of this story though, is that that day brought me my first experience of Space Dots, or real astronaut ice-cream, as it was marketed there. I distinctly remember my little sister (around four at the time) thoroughly spilling her ice cream everywhere, and all these tiny ice cream balls rolling around before swiftly melting on the hot concrete. That meant me having to give up some of my ice cream to her, which at that age is just unfair.

Anyways, if you haven’t yet tried space dots, or astronaut ice-cream, I can highly recommend it. I can also highly recommend the Kennedy Space Center, and the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C.

(photo via TechRepublic)

14:34:00 - Comments (View)

food, link, london, serious business, servicey, burrito,

3 notes

Serious business: London Mexican Restaurant List

Blogged for self-reference, really. Covers everything from proper sit-down restaurants to burrito vans.

12:12:07 - Comments (View)

link, for sale, animals, wtf, london,

2 notes

For Sale: Tame Baby Chimpanzee

The girlfriend wants one.

Sigh.

11:14:13 - Comments (View)

text, journalism, statistics, edinburgh, churnalism,

You can prove anything with statistics, they say. An apt example is the Edinburgh Festival’s crowing this week about the highest ticket sales in the event’s history, an astounding 1.95m tickets this summer.

(Unfortunately, this year none of those tickets were mine, as I didn’t have time to get up there, but I’ll be going again next year. I’ve had such a blast over the last couple of years that I’m disappointed not to have had the time this August to have even just a few days in Edinburgh. It’s a crazy place, and just buzzing 24/7.)

Anyways, what the press release and subsequent media coverage failed to point out, is that whilst ticket sales were up by 5%, the average number of tickets sold per performance had dropped off quite dramatically:

In 2009, ticket sales were 1.85m for 32,000ish performances. That works out as 57.8 tickets sold per performance.
In 2010, ticket sales were 1.95m for 40,000ish performances. That works out as 48.8 tickets sold per performance.

That looks like a fall of just over 15% in average attendance per show, which doesn’t exactly strike me as a blinding success.

The sheer growth in terms of the number of performers and shows is what accounts for the growth in ticket sales as a whole, but each individual performance is actually seeing a reduction in ticket sales, which in turn is making it harder for productions to break even.

Of course, the Edinburgh festival organising committee wants to put a positive spin on things, and it’s just a shame that none of the journalists writing about the festival’s ticket sales have done any simple maths to show that all might not be quite as rosy as is claimed…

31.08.10
20:09:34 - Comments (View)

text, dentist, music, random,

1 note

Sitting in the dentist’s chair earlier, I noticed that she had Classic FM on in the background, and it made me think that if I were a dentist, I’d be so tempted to drill in time with the music.

Dun dun dun dun dunn, drilldrill, drilldrill and so on.

19:58:26 - Comments (View)

text, work, foreign, languages,

6 notes

One of the best things about my job is that I speak to people from all over the world, and get to meet them. One of the guys I was out to lunch with today was from Georgia (as in the country, not the US state), and it was really interesting to talk with him about the so many differences in culture and language from us Brits.

What really threw me though, was the couple of times he began a sentence with “I was out bear-hunting this one time…”.

He even told a story of how one of his best mates had to cut open some animal and sleep practically inside it because it turned so cold one of the nights they were out hunting. Like Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, seriously!

Interestingly, he said that the Georgian language was pretty much entirely self-standing, and completely different from any other. It is over 2,000 years old, and has a written script that isn’t at all Cyrillic or Latin. I’ve looked it up on Wikipedia this evening, and linguistic historians have not been able to find any connections to other languages in the European or Asian area.

Apparently the closest is Basque, which is odd because the two regions are over 2,000 miles apart. What is even stranger is that the eastern part of Georgia used to be called Iberia, and the Spanish-Portuguese peninsula is the Iberian peninsula. Coincidence, or were there some very well-travelled Georgians in Roman times? I find this kind of thing fascinating.

Anyway, I’m going to make it a goal of mine in life to be able to start a sentence “I was out bear-hunting this one time…”.

19:43:48 - Comments (View)

video, music video, reblog, arty, music, the knife,

32 notes

The Knife - Heartbeats (Unofficial Animated video)

Animated by Guy Collins

(via atencio and hipsterdiet)

This is simply fantastic. I love this song, and The Knife have so many good tunes that it’s impossible not to like them. The way these visuals take each element of the song and animate it repeatedly reminds me of Michel Gondry’s take on Chemical Brothers’ Star Guitar, which used aspects of the French countryside to represent each instrument or melody within the song.

When done correctly, like this one is, it looks amazing and adds another layer to the song as you can see when certain instruments come in and drop out at different points. Fantastic stuff.

Reblogged from: hipsterdiet
Originally posted on: Atencioblog

Rob, Rambling - A lot of things interest me...

The girlfriend has an addiction: hardbacks

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