Posts by Joe Wylie
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The cops made the shit up . . .
Haneef gave his sim card to a stingray - or maybe a dingo.
As someone once said about 'Honest John' Howard, he's called honest just like red-haired people are called Blue.
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. . . is television giving us a shortened attention span (MTV generation, etc), or has the technology of television just caught up with the speed of human thought?
Of course, whatever the brain does during that shrinky-dinky attention span may not necessarily involve thought.
Longer commercial breaks? For the last couple of decades at least so-called 30-minute shows clock in at 22 minutes or less. Episodes of the aforementioned Wait Till Your Father Gets Home ran to a full 26 minutes. Doubt if your kids will be grabbed by that ancient Australian-animated precursor to Family Guy, unless "topical" cracks about such pressing 70s pop-cultural issues as Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, or guest spots by shittily-drawn dead celebs such as Don Knotts happen to rock their boats. Maybe if they'd dragged it from the frozen tombs while the 70s were still hot.
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. . . is television giving us a shortened attention span (MTV generation, etc), or has the technology of television just caught up with the speed of human thought?
Of course, whatever the brain does during that shrinky-dinky attention span may not necessarily involve thought.
Longer commercial breaks? For the last couple of decades at least so-called 30-minute shows clock in at 22 minutes or less. Episodes of the aforementioned Wait Till Your Father Gets Home ran to a full 26 minutes. Doubt if your kids will be grabbed by that ancient Australian-animated precursor to Family Guy, unless "topical" cracks about such pressing 70s pop-cultural issues as Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, or guest spots by shittily-drawn dead celebs such as Don Knotts happen to rock their boats. Maybe if they'd dragged it from the frozen tombs while the 70s were still hot.
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Probably not quite the ambience you're after, but twiglets and lights, all at the same time:
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From this time last year - and now more relevant than ever:
http://www.newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2625 -
Nice web, Mister Crackspider.
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I guess I count myself as an "urban techno-greenie" . . .
Sounds like what's known in Australia as a plastic wombat.
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Chesterton on fairy tales (and Yeats) - a good one-page quickie:
http://www.online-literature.com/chesterton/all-things-considered/31/Apart from the essays most of Chesterton - including The Man Who Was Thursday - is, IMHO, a load of smug bumph.
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That's an indictment on the state of US political documentaries.
Amen to that.
Hard to see Moore's films as something you can rate according to their artistic merit - the early stuff, like Canadian Bacon and Roger & Me were built of great moments, but since then these have become subordinated to the message.
Which is no bad thing. Moore's later movies - and his occasional TV outings - go stale very quickly. They're all about hitting the message hard in the moment. The Marilyn Manson piece in Bowling for Columbine was fine in 2003. Now it's pretty cringe-inducing.Moore's smart enough to realise that, in an era where it's seen as some kind of positive that the President can barely string a sentence together, pitching to teenage is an effective way to convey his message.
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. . . before that I read Wild Wales by George Borrow, an 19th Century Travel Log. Make of that as you will.
If you like accounts of picking fights with Catholics Borrow's the bloke. He even manages to slip in a bit of narrative between his endless gloating accounts of how he tore some Papist or other a new one.