Posts by Toby
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Red Hot Chili Peppers. You know what I mean?
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Hard News: Back to mediocrity, in reply to Russell Brown,
Awful beer was awful Speights rather than awful Tui, I think
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You may complain about not being able to see the score on the big screen, but at least it was made very clear in large scrolling type throughout the game that it was a great time to grab a $12 combo.
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The long, long pauses from Daisey in the retraction piece (at about 29 minutes) are staggeringly gripping radio. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/play_full.php?play=460&podcast=1
The Rebecca Hamilton mentioned in the Salmon piece, btw, is I'm pretty sure the NZ-born Rebecca Hamilton who penned this moving piece on the New Yorker blog: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/03/last-words-rebecca-hamilton.html
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Not clear to me what time limit is. Am i being dim?
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On polling day, Jonathan Freedland wrote this nice piece last year: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/06/polling-day-general-election
And there are some interesting comments amid the muck, too.In UK, btw, TV and radio are proscribed from political coverage on election day, not so press
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I'm all for the Warrior baby getting to Oz for the final, but still feel uneasy at least about Sir Mad having a batline to the PM to get a passport expedited, a yarn the Herald reports as if a fireman has rescued a cat from a tree. Is Sir Mad, eg, a National party donor? At risk of getting carried away, remember the Hinduja affair, anyone?
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Hard News: The Minister's Brain Has Exploded, in reply to barnaclebarnes,
Lack of ‘stewards’ or other helpers with radios to help people out, give directions and generally move things along
Important point this, and a lesson that I hope isn’t lost in the wash.
Queen’s Wharf was closed 20 odd minutes after it opened, but almost no one knew this. Apart from a solitary display at the main entrance, there was no means, as far as I could see, employed to let the crowd know.In the crush on Quay Street I spent about an hour winding in a miserable moshpit congaline (along with at least half a dozen tearful small peope on parents’ shoulders) going nowhere. Had there been a steward/marshal with an old-school megaphone telling us that there was no way thrhrough, the crush would have eased considerably. Part of the problem seems to have been that they were relying for communication between organisers on the mobile network. I’;ll say that again: the NZ mobile network.
A similar communication failure by all accounts exacerbated the train problems. No one knew why they had stopped – and that just ratchets up anxiety, and then people do things like pulling emergency tracks, walking up the tracks, etc.
At events with large crowds and on mass transit systems around the world the efforts to disseminate information are noticeably now made a very high priority part of planning. Its almost complete absence on Friday was surprising and disappointing. -
Louise Mensch is foolish on social media shutdown, but that shouldn't overshadow some good questioning around the News Intl scandal. Chutzpah, too. after a Twitter row with Piers Morgan (fmr Mirror ed, now CNN smarm expert; to be fair, she had misquoted him), she received an email from an "investigative journalist" digging into her past. Her reply is inspired.
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I wished the ushers (or I) had a Taser to hand when pockets of (half-pissed?) audience chatted through Taxi Driver and whooped at the Famous Bits, as if they were watching Grease