An ad that was not quite thought through …

About how originality overwhelmed beauty.

A city in Montana [tried to] requires prospective employees to hand over their Facebook™ passwords[, but has since retreated from the idea].

Remembering Farrah Fawcett.

Remembering Rocky and The Karate Kid.

Asking a spectacularly and offensively stupid question.

Broadway is struggling with the notion of having some diversity … of opinion. About that.

A newspaper ad campaign using near-worthless Zimbabwean banknotes to print billboards has won an award.

The Oz Federal government has set its sights on censoring computer games. Via longi.

A piece on Michael Jackson, aka Wacko Jacko, published just before died. An obituary, on him as a prisoner of fame. Apparently, he was consuming lots of powerful pharmaceuticals, a result reported to be confirmed by the autopsy. About the awful physical decay and his greedy entourage. Having an entourage significantly drawn from the Nation of Islam "looking after" a gay man was not a good start.

More bullying from Canadian Human Rights (sic) apparatchik. How things ended up. Mark Steyn is happy to debate the CHRC: If you schmooze enough Third World thug states, it’s not surprising your postmodern cultural relativism starts to drift past the point of no return. As Commissar Lynch primly notes in her report, America’s First Amendment absolutism on free speech is out of step with the “growing global consensus”—that would be the “growing global consensus” represented by the CHRC and its “distinguished guests.” Take Sweden and Cameroon, split the difference, and that should be enough human rights for anyone.

The six-month old BBC Farsi service has been a major source of information for the protestors. Lists of arrested Iranian journalists. The steady change of views of a NYT columnist from “we should engage with Iran” to “they’re a bunch of theocratic thugs”. Back when he was putting a positive gloss on how to treat with the regime, he failed to distinguish between the Iranian Supreme Leader responding (Khamenei also quieted the crowd when it began its ritual “Death to America” chant) or inciting “death to America” chants.

Actor David Carradine found dead.

About the prose and politics of George Orwell and the search for truth. There is a silly notion you sometimes see among conservative writers that implies that, if he had lived longer, Orwell would have moved rightwards: this strikes me as nonsense, belief in democratic socialism was far too central to Orwell. The above linked piece, although it has quite a lot of thoughtful things to say, finds Orwell not “Left” enough: The socialist critique of Orwell’s late work seems essentially correct – they were not only anti-Stalinist but anti-revolutionary, and were read as such by millions of ordinary people (a fact that Orwell, who was always curious to know what ordinary people thought, would have had to respect). Out of “necessity” he had chosen a position, and a way of stating that position, that would be used for years to come to bludgeon the anti-war, anti-imperialist left.
That he had chosen honestly what seemed to him the least bad of a set of bad political options did not make them, in the long view of history, any better.
The notion that Orwell is somehow blameworthy because Animal Farm and 1984 reinforced opposition to revolutionary politics among ordinary folk misses the point at so many levels: the novels reinforced opposition to revolutionary politics because they so vividly reflected the reality of tyranny, murder and patent failure to achieve decent societies, a reality that the failure of so much of “anti-war, anti-imperialist left” to grapple with rebounded against it.

About poet C. P. Cavafy and a creatively inspiring longing for the past that goes beyond nostalgia.

About the power of George Eliot as a novelist and her remarkable ability to empathise with Jewish aspirations.

About the power of Leonard Bernstein’s music and how little it had to do with his politics.

About an extraordinarily successful new novel on the Holocaust which explores the role of ordinary men in mass killing.

About the political shift of playwright David Mamet and reactions to it.

About Adam Lambert (“American Idol”) being all about the music.

The BBC is running into public controversy over what it pays its radio stars: A committee of MPs found that the lucrative pay packets mean BBC radio shows are up to six times more expensive to produce than their commercial rivals.

Being unimpressed that the US FCC wants to probe an audience measurement system.

About Andrew Breibart and “Big Hollywood” (the blog).

John Pugh’s 3-D building murals.

About the precious notes of Art Tatum, jazz pianist and amazing virtuoso.

Photos through time: old photos put up and rephotographed against the current backdrop.

Striking black-and-white pictures of the Graf Zeppelin over the Capitol in 1928 and of New York in 1931 here and here.

About the new formalism in poetry.

Pigman, anti-jihadist cartoon hero.

Some WWII movies you may have missed.

Why journalists deserve low pay.

The media around President Obama’s Supreme Court nomination.

Following the logic: police union wants newspaper columnists fired. Explaining the logic.

About being conservative within literary US: So far as fiction goes, for instance, there’s a huge and dynamic non-literary world of narrative genre writing out there: sci-fi, crime, romance, erotica, and more. In my experience these writers are often far more free-thinking and far less doctrinaire and party-line than the literary crowd is. They’re also just as smart and often far more talented. They create works in modes that everyday people can understand and enjoy, and they do so in what’s often a friendly, accessible, and even businesslike spirit. And it’s a far larger world than the literary world is. More. Genre fiction as being more welcoming.

An Irish student puts a fake quote on Wikipedia™: Wikipedia passed, journalism flunked. More.

Guy Ritchie, Robert Downey Jnr and Jude Law do Sherlock Holmes: what’s not to like?

About the overwhelming majority of Eurovision entrants being in English.

On art not being a special case and the importance of freedom to offend.

About “realism” in fiction and the dubious games about what does, and does not, count as “SF” or “literature”.

About literary theory in an age of globalisation.

Hollywood know-how is helping the US Marines with training simulation facilities.

On The Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons and church boycotts.

Same survey, two headlines. The SMH and the Oz.

Worries about the viability of American newspapers. Suggested regulatory changes to help save (American) journalism. The Netherlands is proposing to have government-paid journalists in private media companies.

Claiming that documentary evidence confirms that radical journalist I.F. Stone was a Soviet agent from 1936-1939: A 1941 internal KGB summary report broke down the occupations of Americans working for the spy agency in the prior decade. Twenty-two were journalists, a profession outnumbered only by engineers (forty-nine) and dwarfing economists (four) and professors (eight). Disputing their use of evidence and the claims about Stone.

Website of an ex-Marine who does war documentaries. Interview with him here and here.

7 minutes 31 seconds that justifies every talent show ever broadcast.

The creators of South Park have a signed photo from Saddam Hussein.

Doubting that beauty is a purely a thing of reason.

About the pervasiveness of religious imagery and metaphors in film and TV SF.

Grand Theft Auto as tragic work of art and social commentary.

Examining a French, German and English novel for their self-vision of so-very-civilised Europe.

An amusing set of rules about what celebrities can and cannot give each other.

The original creator of Spiderman has a few things to say about comics, heroes, truth and contributing to the culture.

An ex-soldier on his very positive experience of Hollywood while serving.

Experienced script writer, having talked about drama-as-choice discusses plotting, character and theme as interactive enterprise using Michael Crichton and Jurassic Park as an example.

Fighting over the right to use a song for parody. The US Federal government is attempting to an end-run around the First Amendment for political films. Pressure to have “community advisory boards” for radio stations (i.e. platforms for activists).

The Victorian bushfires have probably destroyed this art project and tourist attraction.

Battlestar Galactica to be discussed at the UN.

Plans to turn Das Kapital into a theatrical production in China.

Remembering a 1927 silent movie masterpiece.

Noting how unrepresentative of actual crime crime shows are.

Mark Steyn on the decline of American newspapers due to not understanding they are in the content business.

Rupert Murdoch is not Jewish but …

FoxNews is finding the election of the Obama Administration is good (ratings) news.

Obama gaffes do not get the video-released-and-publicised treatment

About a son of Liberian migrants who made a doco about being a Marine in Iraq

A Canadian journalist who converted to Islam is facing beheading after being captured by Taliban. She runs this website.

Website for uploading film against the powerful acting oppressively.

Having a bit of a dig at Hollywood’s notion of evil and scary country folk.

About the difference between opinion and bias.

A philosopher reflects on art’s embrace of ugliness: The question is: Why did cynicism and ugliness come to be the game you had to play to make it in the world of art? …
The world of postmodern art is a run-down hall of mirrors reflecting tiredly some innovations introduced a century ago. It is time to move on.

A Canadian parliamentary committee hearing in Ontario about its Human Rights Tribunal. Canadian MPs in favour of policing speech question Mark Steyn, who is famously against it. You judge who comes out ahead.

Geert Wilders, who is being criminally prosecuted for hate speech, has been banned from entering the UK. His 17 minute documentary is online here.

House of Lords has ruled that the BBC cannot keep an internal report on anti-Israel bias secret. The BBC is continuing to fight for its right to secrecy in assessing its own performance.

A film examines Berlin 20 years on.

Website of keen sibling book-reviewers.

A writer remembers how he ended up writing his first script for M*A*S*H.

It will perhaps be no surprise for me to state that I have no time for Creationism and Intelligent Design is clearly not science, but it really is not clever to feed martyrdom complexes and the poster is right, there is a persistent hypocrisy in the sharp differentiation the treatment of “traditional perspectives” depending on whether they are Western or non-Western.

A bad year for the movies: The total of thirteen nominations for “Benjamin Button” has to be some sort of scandal. “Citizen Kane” received nine nominations, “The Godfather: Part II” eleven, and this movie, so smooth and mellow that it seems to have been dipped in bourbon aging since the Civil War, is nowhere close to those two. … What is this strange movie really about? A guess: many people in Hollywood endlessly have “work” done to put off aging, and here’s a movie that begins with a wizened baby and ends with physical perfection, a progression that may encapsulate both the nightmares and the dreams of half the Academy.

Brunswick St gallery tricked into exhibiting the work of a 22-month old.

The issue of what torture videos are much shown, and what are not. Page with a series of links discussing free speech in an age of jihad.

The “war” over Joe the Plumber is almost as entertaining as that over Sarah Palin.

President-elect Obama dined with various conservative pundits and columnists.

Obama’s Inauguration will be quite a bash. Noting a difference in media commentary because coverage of the expenditure on Dubya’s 2005 Inaugural and Obama’s 2009 bash.

Mayor arrested on child-sex charges: can you guess his political Party affiliation (yes, from the fact that you have to guess because the news report does not tell you). More cases of “name that Party”. Similar silences have been known to happen in Oz reporting.

Noting that David Marr made a rather narrow selection of “best” Australian essays 2008.

How the Quadrant hoax is quite different from the Ern Malley or Sokal hoaxes. It is also worth mentioning that Prof. Sokal submitted his paper under his own name. And also. Perhaps the hoaxer (who has a bit of a history of being in favour of chilling debate) hoaxed the wrong magazine. About the need to use Google™ and whether small magazines can survive. The hoaxer was apparently very critical of Helen Demidenko/Dale’s hoax. Who has also commented (and provides lots of links). The hoaxing article.

Thomas Woods’s How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization is the good news (and only the good news) about the Catholic contribution to Western civilisation.

Which is enormous, as Woods has no problem demonstrating. The Catholic Church dominated the intellectual activity of Latin Christendom from Late Antiquity to the Reformation. It maintained huge scholarly, scientific, educational and charitable efforts during and after that time. It was a remarkable, trans-jurisdictional institution with no real equivalent in any other civilisation. Of course it was central to the construction of Western civilisation. Indeed, I would argue strongly that the squabbling alliance between (usually Germanic) warlord and Catholic Church is precisely how Western civilisation was born, after the collapse of Classical civilisation.

And Woods does very useful service lucidly detailing the extent of the contribution as there has been—as he quite rightly points out—a fairly longstanding pattern of disparaging the Catholic contribution. Originally Protestant-inspired, more recently secular. ( all the good news )

But even one-sided books can be useful correctives. There is genuinely a pattern of disparaging, or being simply ignorant of, Catholic contributions to Western civilisation. How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization is an easy-to-read compendium of such contributions. As long as you remember that it is only the good news.