Paging Dr Wigley

Openbook, one of the most entertaining sites on Internet, was shut down for legal reasons, according to Wikipedia, one of the most annoying sites on Internet; the developers, though, say they had moved on to other things - which confirms what Wikipedia says. This is a pity, since Openbook was an insight into the world of people who cannot manage their Facebook security settings. I might start posting my archive. In fact, I will.

Kurrently does much the same thing, with Facebook, Twitter and something called Google+.

In other news:

KATE Middleton‘s topless picture scandal might stop her from becoming Queen, it has been claimed.
According to America’s Globe magazine, Prince Charles‘ scheming wife Camilla cruelly taunted Kate, and made her cry, hocking photos of the beauty sunbathing topless exploded around the world.
“Camilla screeched at Kate and how Prince William rushed to comfort his distraught wife,” a source said.

This, of course, is rubbish. The succession law does not work like that. Anyway, the last sentence of that paragraph does not make sense. And now, following the topless photos scandal, there is a bottomless photos scandal, which is just as dull. Quite why a magazine from Denmark, where almost everybody gets naked at any opportunity, should be interested in grainy photographs of someone who will never be Queen because her grandmother-in-law will live past 100 and her father-in-law will then be King for his prolonged dotage is beyond me.

Fun fact: Mark Wigley plays for Girlington in the Spen Valley Association Football League. Is there no end to what  can do? My next project shall be a comic called Wigley of the Rovers, in which the boy form Palmerston North deconstructs Association Football. On a related note, Peter Eisenman can can name all the teams in the Premier League, Serie A and Bundesliga,







This is funny:

Papercuts

More than a third of primary school children are failing writing standards because they don't read enough and are confused by texting language and slang, say experts.

RLY? Sez who? Sayeth the Principal of the New Zealand Writers' College:

"The language they are hearing is all jargon. There is a lot of slang and it's almost phonetically based and not spelling based." "So when they have to sit down and write something, it is completely alien to them."

So, what kind of expert is this Principal?

Nichola Meyer started her career as a freelance writer in 2001, and has written feature and cover articles for several leading magazines, among them O: The Oprah Magazine, Femina, Your Baby, Essentials and Child. With a university Major in English, Honours (magna cum laude) and a Masters Degree (cum laude) in Psychology, Nichola has a special interest in reporting on issues of interest to women and parents.

She has written for Oprah. She is that kind of expert. And what is her College all about?

Choose from over 30 writing courses tutored by professional, award-winning writers. Learn to write from the comfort of your home from anywhere in New Zealand. You will receive one-to-one support, guidance and mentoring from an expert in the field, every line of the way.

So it is a correspondence school, where you can pay to be tutored by professional, award-winning writers: who are these people? What do they want? They are mostly South African. The Copywriting course is tutored by one Mandy Speechly, who is Head of Copy at the AAA School of Advertising in Cape Town.  The novel writing course is tutored by one Sonny Whitelaw, whose oeuvre is in the novelisation of Sci-Fi TV series. The course tells you all you need to know, including – at the very end – a module on the lifestyle of the working writer (Protip: we go to lunch and complain about not having any work) and an assessment of your partly-completed novel; if you want to know how to finish it, you will have to go on the Advanced Novel Writing course. And oh look, there's Sarah Lang; she at least is well-known and local.

This college is virtual and unaccredited. It teaches adults how to write, in writing, so long as they part with large sums of money: the poetry course costs more than you will ever earn. The Principal has degrees in Eng Lit and Psych. She did some teaching, a while back. In what way is she an expert on children's writing abilities? Of course, if you keep reading, you will get to hear from a real expert,
Professor Judy Parr, head of the Auckland University School of Curriculum and Pedagogy; but that is way down the inverted pyramid, where there will be few readers still reading. So what happens in this story is that the opinion of someone who had no apparent expertise in this field is favoured over one of its leading experts. Of course, Ms Meyer's opinion is a commonplace – it is all because of the TXT MSSGNG. Professor Parr says something that all writers will know: in order to write, you have to read. And that means parents have to take responsibility for providing their children with books, rather than blaming Internet and schools.

But what of the stats? What of these national standards that so many children are failing? Well, it is funny you should ask, because the journalist who wrote this story – Vaimoana Tapaleao – also wrote this one:

Many people referred to the data as "ropey" - a reference to a word Prime Minister John Key used earlier this year when he described the national standards information as "ropey at best".

So there we have it: many people who know what they are talking about (and the Prime Minister) think these standards are (to use a technical term) tosh. They are not standards at all, because the data is not standard. So why do we have here a story about children failing, when the evidence for this failure is so  suspect? Because fear sells papers, that is why. It is easier to frighten people with the prospect of their children failing and the school system producing a nation of idiots than it is to do a properly-researched story about education.





Broadcast, singing about writing:

The letterbox as metaphor

Island Bay, Wellington was used for the cover image on the Winter 1975 issue of the literary periodical Islands, accompanying Duggan's last and posthumously published story 'Magsman Miscellany,' which both is and is not a self-portrait. Two weatherboard houses abut at an odd angle. The gap between them and the sharply receding diagonals, produce a vortex-like perspective. In the right foreground there is a letterbox with a narrow rectangular slot, which looks almost animate: a blank face staring back. Could this also be a metaphoric face of New Zealand suburbia, so often stereotyped as bland, boring, featureless? 

Christ, Len Bell writes a load of bollocks. This is from Marti Friedlander; Auckland University Press, 2009.

In any case, why ask these ridiculous questions? Why not just ask the photographer? It is not as if she were dead five centuries. Go on, Len, call her:

"Marti, did you mean that letterbox in the Duggan photograph to be a metaphoric face of New Zealand suburbia? 

Marti, are you there?"

And what on earth is a vortex-like perspective? You can see the photo here and decide for yourself, if you must. And then you could ask yourself, how is it that art historians do not know the first thing about architecture but persist in talking about it?



Pic unrelated, of course. Here are the Neo-Kalashnikovs, exploring New Zealand domestic architecture. It both is and is not a self-portrait:

Cherry Chapstick

And that is the most galling thing for intellectuals who abhor her. Intellectuals find normal people offensive. Intellectuals spend ages trying to learn about culture and making themselves read boring books and struggling to show they are better than other people. Imagine how miffed they are to see those blithe, dumb ordinary types who seem quite happy doing normal stuff like having sex and putting on lip gloss.

Oh no Hill Cone. Does this mean we have to watch them having sex?

 I think I have a book to read.

 

Winning in the nineties

Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to extend a warm welcome to you all, particularly those people who have travelled some distance to be here. In fact, I would like to make this the mother of all welcomes. Thus spake Bernard Fenton (President, BOMA NZ) in his opening address to the 1991 conference of the New Zealand Council of Shopping Centres, a conference on the theme of Winning in the Nineties.

The mother of all welcomes! It almost creates an expectation.


But the nineties are not just about winning. It is a time of civil disobedience by superannuants: "There is no way the pensioners were going to be helpful in filling out the forms."

And who else but Mr Bernard Fenton has the courage to stand up and ask why the people of Wellington are so quite?

And yet we all new of the abuses within the social welfare system and the changes that needed to be made.

So what is the relevance of all this? The Christmas period is normally the retail lifeline. This year, 1991, Mr Fenton believes that Christmas will not fulfill this function. It is not going to be an easy year but for those of us who can display leadership and communicate, it will be a year with its rewards.

You read it here first.

French Disko

Here in France, like New Zealand, same-sex marriage is presented to a puzzled population under the banner of equality. And who can fight against equality? 

Well, some French friends put the notion of equality under examination. They say same-sex marriage "n'est pas l'egalite, il s'agit de la liberte". It's not about equality; it's about liberty. 

Governments who choose to redefine marriage seldom understand what they're doing. "Il a toute la laideur de la fierte." It has all the ugliness of pride.     

Gentle reader Craig Young discovered this curiosity from the ODT, written by none other than Bruce Logan. We have not heard from him for a while. Its seems that Bruce fetched up in France, like Oscar Wilde. Or perhaps, like Tony Hancock, he heard the barbarians at the gate and fled to Paris to realise his dream of being an artist. But there he seems to have fallen in with the Lettrists and decided to stop making sense.



Anyway, here's Stereolab again. Please excuse the writhing dancers, but this is from The Word, an often annoying mid-90s show that nevertheless had some top musical moments, of which this is one.

This Britain

Minor members of the Royal Family – including the Earl of Catford and the Hon Humphrey ffoulkes-Thynne, Thegn of Thanet – join the popular music combo One Direction for a spirited rendition of Spem in Alium.  As they sing, five hundred female students of Eng Lit commingle with an equivalent number of City types, forming into pairs for a spirited display of synchronised spanking that both pays tribute to Britain’s latest literary sensation and symbolises Britain’s dire financial straits. Members of the Bullingdon Club look on and snort. As an old London Pea Souper fog rolls across the stadium, the reddened buttocks of the students glower with such instensity that the form of a Remembrance Day poppy appears, one that can be seen from the Shard.

The fog clears, to reveal a desolate civic centre in the Festival style, where the pound shops have been undercut by the 99p shops, where the only food is fried and on a stick and where the At-risk Youth Secure Accommodation Facility is now called an academy. Suddenly, the eery silence is broken: a vast rubber johnny billows up, from within which can be heard a cacophany of young voices, all of them complaining about something.  Dramatically, the condom (designed by Zaha Hadid) splits and out of it tumbles a host of chavs and chavettes. Dressed by Adidas and Burberry, they slouch towards the Social Security office.

For today is Giro Day. And this is Britain, sea-girt and rather desperate.

Broadcast:

Englishman in New York

Many of you may have worried that literary Brooklyn wasn’t macho enough, what with all the female authors, and the important female editors, and all the attention paid to ladyissues, and all those memoirs you heard about from those women who read comic books when they were kids in Brooklyn and then something something. Let me tell you: Martin Amis just pulled your fat out of the fire, who doggie! He’s mannin’ up the borough right and left! He gestures out the window of his brownstone “Out there, it’s Arcadian,” he said. “It’s prelapsarian. It’s like living in the ’50s.” 

You know what I love about the ‘50s? The rigid racial apartheid. That’s the best part, seriously. Oh, shit, no—I messed up—the crippling sexism and hatred of homosexuality. No, no—goddamnit! I’m going back to the rigid racial apartheid thing I said just now. That’s the best. It’s like having 3 favorite flavors of evil! That’s why the ‘50s are so tempting and delicious: just far enough away to see recognizable humans betraying their dearest in the service of ideology, just close enough that you know they knew better.

Oh my. Look at that leap. With one mighty bound the author (Belle Waring,  the sort of name that an Amis character might bear) takes leave of her usually finely-honed senses and lands in a student newspaper editorial about the unfairness of it all. All it took was for her subject to mention the 50s and Ms Waring is in the Twilight Zone, playing that old family favourite, Guilt By Word Association.

I suppose she must have seen a lot of those movies where the villain is always handsome, cultivated and English. Perhaps it is Marty's use of words like Arcadian and  prelapsarian that frighten Belle so.  Perhaps it is that she finds herself agreeing with him. Perhaps she fears a terrible beauty being being born in Brooklyn, that Marty will take them all back to the '50s and she will have to wear a girdle and cook with spam.

But then, this always happens. Marty has a new novel out and folk get frit. Hordes of scribblers denounce him for his many transgressions, sins that began back in the '80s with having his teeth done and which have multiplied since. The scribblers go to the cuttings, to find records of what he said during previous launch periods, sayings with which he can be condemned. They point fingers, they accuse. His book sells.

This time it is worse. Marty and his wife, Isabella Fonseca, a native New Yorker, have moved to Brooklyn. For his British critics, this is betrayal; for the Americans, it is colonization. No wonder Belle is so unnerved. He is now amongst them, in New York. He has bought a castle in Brooklyn. He gestures out the window of his brownstone.

Look, Fenton; see how innocent it all is. These little people, going about their little lives. They only want what is due to them: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They know noting of our ways, of we literary people. They know nothing of Oxford or the New Statesman. The know still less of the fate that shall befall them soon, of what we shall do in   this little town.

Do you feel something in the air, Fenton? It's fizzing, isn't it?

Or something like that. What is it about Marty that moves the scribblers so?  Why are they so frightened of him? Few of his critics, I hasten to add, are bookish types. It is not the quality of the latest novel nor its content that troubles them. Few appear to have any knowledge of his writing or indeed of literary fiction in general; I learned of this particular diatribe from a local bore who reads nothing more demanding than the novelisations of science-fiction TV series. Yet all of them have opinions about Amis fils. No other living writer causes so much fuss, just for the fact of his existence.

What can it be? Is it that he is clever and funny? Do the authoritarian left dislike him because he might make fun of them? Or is it that he is a better writer than his critics? Nobody likes a smart alec. Or perhaps the cause lies in that second paragraph Belle quotes from the NYT:

At a certain point Mr. Amis unwedged himself and slipped out to smoke a cigarette on the sidewalk, looking vaguely menacing under a street lamp. “I’ve sort of hung out with a few thugs all my life,” he said later. “I love thugs. I’m keen on them.”

No, not the thugs; the cigarette: Martin Amis is the only living smoker in New York. That is the problem. Everybody else gave up years ago but still yearns for a cigarette. And there he is, on the streets of New York, smoking. Oh, the temerity.

Stereolab, again:

whipping up spanakopita

Facebook fans beware - the days when you could snoop through your friends, former partners' and work colleagues' pages anonymously are due to end 

The social networking site has announced that it will soon let users see who has been snooping through their pages. The move is expected to dramatically cut the browsing habits of hundreds of millions of users. 

The change to the website - which has more than 900 million members - applies to group pages; meaning users can see who has visited any group which they are a member of. 

But already there are suggestions that Facebook may unfurl the technology across the site, meaning the naughty-naughty-stalky-stalky generation may soon see their fingerprint-free snooping habits curtailed, or face the embarrassment of their ex's new boyfriend/girlfriend realising they were too curious to resist an online-curtain twitch.

There are suggestions; made by whom, one wonders? Made by the author of this piece, one suspects. "The change to the website ... applies to group pages; meaning users can see who has visited any group which they are a member of," she writes, poorly. But then she leaps to her suggestions and descends to  sub-Glucina puce prose: "the naughty-naughty-stalky-stalky generation may soon see their fingerprint-free snooping habits curtailed"

No, Vaimoana Tapaleao, they won't. You made it up. You have no sources, no facts. You are not writing journalism. You have taken an unexceptional event and made it salacious. You have invented a story and found some witless university student, mostly likely one of your friends, to pad it out with her breathless Oh-My-God-this-is-the-end commentary. The paper for which you work (if that is the appropriate verb) has descended from being a source of news and opinion to a purveyor of title-tattle. That is why they employ you, as can be seen from your history.

All of which is a shame, because only a couple of years ago you won a Qantas, for real journalism. Yet now you are making up stuff, and writing about celebrity hair.

It is time to go. Get a real job doing journalism. If you stay at the Herald you will wind up like Shelly. See what she has just done: she has found the 2012 Shopper's Guide to Pesticides in Produce by the "US-based Environmental Working Group" and made a scare story about it, in her own particular way: "Cannelloni stuffed with spinach is my Sunday night go-to dinner and I often whip up spanakopita too. I'll be tracking down organic spinach for sure."

But what, you may be asking, has this to do with New Zealand? Well, nothing, since it is not a survey of New Zealand produce. Who knows what fruit and veges are covered in chemicals here? Shelly certainly doesn't.

Worse still, you might end up with friends like Shelly's. They are not terribly bright, you see. They get fooled by Internet scammers. Yes really; you can read all about it here:

"I just felt so grateful for his help," my friend said later when she'd cancelled her credit cards and generally tidied up in the aftermath of unwittingly providing her passwords and bank details to the con artists. "And I felt so clever each time I managed to do whatever he asked me to do," she added, aware too late that by following his step-by-step instructions she was actually helping him gain remote access to her computer.

Yes, that dumb. And what about her dinner party hosts?

Our hostess answered the telephone. "It's for you, darling," she said and promptly handed it to her husband. "There's something wrong with my computer?" he asked as he wandered into his study, presumably to switch on his laptop.

"This must be a serious matter, darling.  The Computer Company wouldn't phone unless it were important, especially at this time of night. I had better deal with it right away, before it gets worse."

"I always leave this sort of thing to him. He is so good with technical things and I'm just a housewife. Would you like some more cashews?"

I should advise you that made up those two lines of dialogue, just in case you thought it must be true because you read it on Internet. It would be an easy mistake to make.





Stereolab, une fois de plus

Spy vs Spy

Spy: Lets cut to the chase, was Sonny a good lover?Jaime: (blushing, hard) I'm not answering that!
Spy: Sally, was your bedroom next door, could you hear the athletic love-making?Sally: (also blushing, mildly outraged) No! I was downstairs!
Spy: Okay, and this is fair, Jaime, was Sonny a good kisser?Jaime: Yes, he was a good kisser.
Sally: Do you know what, I have to say, Sonny spent a lot of time in our home and he was a beautiful person to have in the house. Not just visually, but in terms of his aura, and personality.
Jaime: Mum! Not just visually?
Sally: Hehehee. No, but seriously, he was amazing with my kids Astin, Oclane and Boston. Chicky (Oclane) used to call him Sunny Bunny and Boston just thought he was the coolest guy ever. He is just lovely. Such a nice guy. The one thing that fascinated me about Jaime and Sonny was the age difference. When you spent time with them together, there was no age difference. Jaime was 18 and Sonny was 26. I mean come on.

I mean blurgh. What is wrong with these people? Who asks questions like that? Who answers them? People who give their children names like Jaime, Astin, Oclane and Boston; that's who.

Of particular note is the exchange over the entrées:

At this point, as the first course of dinner was served, Ricardo, Sally and Jaime remembered that the three of them had appeared together (with 10 other celebrities) on a Metro celebrity cover shoot in 2011.
Sally: Drama! There were some nasty people on that shoot. Rachel Glucina and Denise L'Estrange-Corbet. I shouldn't say Denise is nasty, because I don't know her, but .....
Spy: Denise is lovely once you do get to know her. Though she isn't afraid to speak her mind, it's true. Do you know Denise's daughter Pebbles?
Jaime: I haven't met her, but she has tweeted some horrible things about me. She won't tweet me directly but makes jokes about me. If you're going to say that stuff, why not include me in the tweet?

Indeed, why not? Why not let us all hear what one teenage girl has to say about another? All the news that's fit to print, as someone once said.

The aforementioned  Rachel Glucina, of course, is the former editor of the Spy, the Herald on Sunday's trash-to-cash celebrity gossip page in which this interview appears. Glucina is now editor (if that is not too professional a word) of The Diary, the weekday Herald's serving of figs, waffle and custard, a page in which she regularly airs her obsession with Duncan Garner. She is also the author of prose like this, also to be found in today's HoS:

I spent a surreal four nights in the company of the legendary ladies' man. There was copious amounts of flirting and rigorous banter.

No, she won't win a Pulitzer; but she is a colleague and it is quite extraordinary that the mystery diner who writes under the Spy banner should print the Ridges' snarlings and make no attempt to defend her.

But then,  they are all horrible, the lot of them. If one found oneself dining near them, one would ask to be moved to another table. These people could make the soufflé of the season turn.

One other question: who the hell is Ricardo?


Encore de la Stereolab: