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TV: IP Everywhere | Nov 02, 2007 10:59

David Farrar has been told that "all blogspot blogs" are being blocked at Parliament with a Websense filter. It actually appears that not all such blogs are being blocked, but a number of political blogs, including No Minister and Michael Earley's blog are. But why are grown-ups being denied access to anything that's not outright pr0n?

These things are usually the doing of over-eager IS administrators who have turned on a bell or whistle that didn't need turning on. Perhaps someone in authority should have a word with them, because it's really quite embarrassing.

Update: Reader and man about the House Felix Marwick reports that the IS people say the problem "was caused by a database update. Apparently an exploit threat was detected on one blogspot site and that's where issues have stemmed from. Definitely nothing sinister or deliberate." Jolly good then ...

Front of the Box, producers of Eye to Eye, the World According to Willie and JT and quite a bit more, have launched Gogglebox TV, a site for both their programmes and user-uploaded video. It's really nice-looking, but, unless I'm missing something, offers no way of linking to an individual clip. D'oh!

So I can only point you to the Gay Goggle page to find a nice interview with Edward Cowley about becoming Buckwheat.

Also in what suddenly seems to be a popular space, Kiwitube, run from a rural address in Northland, has a lot of motorsport and outdoorsy clips, plus this one of Peter Chaplin demonstrating the preparation of terakihi and salad with the assistance of his cherubic son.

Check out Che Tibby's meaty-tastic guide to how to make a terrine and tell me that man doesn't deserve a cooking show. Can't some of you Wellington web wankers take a break from invoicing for our tax dollars and sort the big guy out with some IPTV goodness?

Thanks to Brenda Leeuwenberg for pointing me to the revamped TED website. There's just so much there: nearly 150 video "talks" from TED conferences since 1984: technology, science, culture, design and more.

From the still really, really lame YouTube.co.nz (where the same, mostly irrelevant "featured videos" are displaying more than a week after launch): a new Wellington International Ukelele clip: at the 2007 Nelson Arts Festival, playing 'Weather With You'. Nice.

There are interesting developments at TVNZ ondemand, which announced yesterday that it will be selling (Windows Media DRM, etc) day-after downloads of Disney-ABC programming, including Brothers and Sisters and Daybreak. The day after it screens here, that is.

Elsewhere on ondemand, the TVNZ 6 culture show The Gravy is worth a look. Ondemand is also hosting some CTV8 programming in Mandarin: a game show, a news bulletin and talkback show called I Love New Zealand, which has very dramatic theme music.

The lovely Laura Cantrell, whose work is neither Nashville gloop or boring alt-country, has a WMFU show called Radio Thrift Shop, for which she "scours the bargain bins, church bazaars and yard sales for those forgotten rekkids of all RPM. Often scratchy, swingy and stringy." You can listen to it here.

Kiss on the Paul Lynde Show Halloween special, 1976. Hilarious.

From the Japanese TV show Fountain of Trivia: the world racewalking champion is pursued by sword-wielding samurais. Will he run?

Speaking of running Stephen Colbert takes another step towards running for President -- as a Democrat!

And finally, at the Fundy Post, Mr Litterick finally breaks his silence on the terror raids, and he is very droll indeed. See: The war against intelligence.

PS: Feel free to post your own diversions in the discussion for this post. YouTube URLs embed automatically as long as they have "www" in them.

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Meanwhile in Iraq ... | Oct 31, 2007 09:55

The Daily Telegraph has a story on the accommodations that allowed the British to withdraw from Basra, where the militias now run things.

The Economist has a similar piece, focusing on millennial beliefs about the Madhi, from which this passage jumps out:

Some Basra people say the clashes, assassinations, kidnappings, the daily threat of violence and the enforcement of a rigid Islamist code of conduct amount to a "Shia Talibanisation", with music and wedding parties banned and huge billboards warning women against venturing outside unveiled.

"We live a half-life in Basra," says a university teacher. "There's no space for life, no parks, theatres, cinemas or space for freedom. Civil and political activities are controlled. When you go outside, the fear is inside you that you may be followed and targeted. We're living in a nightmare."

Kevin Drumm notes Marc Lynch's observations on the developing warlord state, and also points to a fascinating post by Lynch about how pissed off al Qaeda is with al Jazeera over the broadcaster's selective editing of Bin laden's last tape.

The Washington Post interviews angry, bitter US troops, nearing the end of their tours.

The handover of Karbala province is marked by the discovery of 20 headless corpses.

The Christian Science Monitor notes the loss of 27 police recruit lives to a suicide bomber on a bicycle, but also that the Iraqi civilian death toll for October will be the lowest since February last year; at fewer than 10 a day. But the province in which the bombing was carried out, Diyala, has seen more US troops killed this year than in the last four years combined.

The 122nd journalist to be killed since 2003.

According to this Guardian column, about 16% of Iraqis no longer live in their homes as a result of the conflict, and another 60,000 are displaced every month. Disturbingly, more than two thirds of those displaced since the beginning of last year fled the ethnic cleansing in Baghdad.

Still, Baghdad can look forward to the completion of the largest and most expensive embassy in the world.

Meanwhile, Riverbend has posted again: this time on life as a refugee in Syria. I wish she'd write more often.

In an apparently inexorable trend, girls are steadily disappearing from the Iraqi education system, for reasons ranging from security to religious practice

But there are girls studying in Mosul, and, remarkably, they're blogging: this one, studying engineering against a backdrop of guns and bombs, and this one.

Memo to self: must get back into reading Iraqi bloggers.

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High Times | Oct 30, 2007 10:32

Just for a change, a local newspaper has printed a shock-horror story about drugs that turns out to be an urban myth. On Saturday, the Waikato Times ran a story under the headline 'Drug dealers targeting children with P-laced milkshakes'.

It reported a claim made by "Hawaiian drug expert" Gary Shimabukoro in a briefing to New Zealand police that "in a disturbing new trend targeting young people", methamphetamine was being "made into milkshakes to give out a 'steady buzz'."

But as Michael Earley discovered through a few minutes' googling, the story is almost certainly an urban myth; an extension of a similar myth about "flavoured methamphetamine". Michael subsequently discovered a number of other instances where Mr Shimabukoro has been (metaphorically speaking) smoking crack.

I really think there is enough real harm associated with P use to render these silly fictions unnecessary.

Meanwhile, just as Gordon Brown's government in Britain is considering reversing the 2004 reclassification of cannabis in response to a wave of anecdotal horror stories, a Home Office study reveals that:

Cannabis use among young people has fallen significantly since its controversial reclassification in 2004, according to the latest British Crime Survey figures published today.

The Home Office figures showed the proportion of 16 to 24-year-olds who had used cannabis in the past year fell from 25% when the change in the law was introduced to 21% in 2006/07 - still about 1.3 million users… the latest figures suggested that the downward trend in cannabis consumption since 1998 - when 28% of 16 to 24-year-olds reported using the drug - had accelerated.

Oddly enough, more cannabis is being seized in the street; it's just that the people it's seized from generally aren't subject to arrest.

The Guardian's home affairs editor, Alan Travis, noted that the study also doesn't bear out the alarming stories (many of them in The Independent, which has gone from panicking about GE to panicking about pot) about terrifying new "super skunk" strains flooding the market.

Likely to be embarrassed by the news: the Forensic Science Service chappie (the equivalent of our ESR) whose wild guess this month that 75% of cannabis seizures were the dreaded skunk was widely reported as fact. And the Scottish "expert" who claimed yesterday that reclassification of cannabis had sent drug use spiraling out of control.

In fact, although the use of cocaine continues to rise (2.6% of adults said they had used it in the past year), the proportion of Britons using illegal drugs was the lowest it had been since the study began.

Meanwhile, the Dutch have banned the sale of magic mushrooms in so-called "smart shops", in a policy change driven largely by the death of Gaelle Caroff, a 17 year-old French schoolgirl thought to have eaten shrooms before she jumped of a building (although she also appears to have had psychological problems).

A smart shop spokesman noted that her case and a handful of others (involving disturbances rather than deaths) that have come to light also involved alcohol. Indeed, corpses are pulled out of Amsterdam's canals at a rate of about one a week; almost all of them those of pissed people who have fallen in and drowned. But that's … different.

Arnold Schwarzenegger denies using drugs back in the day -- on the basis that marijuana's not drugs, it's a leaf.

And, finally, it's ironic that Amy Winehouse's bust in Norway was for marijuana: if the challenges facing her include bulimia, using pot is quite probably a good thing. And her dad has revealed what tipped into hard drug use: marriage. Clearly, the authorities should look at banning that.

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Moron y Moron | Oct 29, 2007 10:18

Fortunately, I was out when Close Up's researcher called on Thursday to ask whether I, as one of the faces of the current family violence campaign, would care to haul my ass into the studio to pontificate on the implications for the campaign of Trevor Mallard's scrap with Tau Henare in Parliament's lobby.

The details ought to be familiar enough by now: Tau Henare goads Mallard in the House about his marriage breakup, using the name of his new partner, follows him out into the lobby and, in the course of the subsequent slanging match, grabs the minister's tie. Mallard responds by hitting him and the two men have to be separated by grown-ups.

Two men, behaving like idiots, with the one who threw a punch unquestionably the greater idiot, on account of having thrown the punch, and of holding a position where the expectations of him ought to be higher.

Does this really, as a number of commentators have been keen to suggest, undermine the key messages of the campaign? Does it actually change any of the grim facts about family violence; most notably the stark statistics that show the association between child deaths and violence in the home generally? Are we really about to trivialise these things because it makes a good political headline?

The idea that the government will never be able to speak credibly about violence again is a media creation. The campaign was not actually created by the government, but by the Families Commission, a taxpayer-funded agency itself created at the behest of Peter Dunne. The scripts were written and produced by an advertising agency, in consultation with relevant experts in the field.

Look: Mallard punched someone, under provocation: he has suffered widespread humiliation, been publicly criticised by his boss, made an abject apology to the public and to Henare and had his personal life discussed all over the place. He will be very publicly demoted this week. This, coming on top of his father's very recent death, and a dimwitted Sunday gossip columnist running an item associating him with a woman he's never met. Isn't all that enough to emphasise that it's not okay?

Meanwhile, people you wish would STFU for a bit. The Maori Party, which emerged from its AGM with a statement that seems to allege that the present police operation is a conscious act by the "Labour Minority Government" against all Maori:

We condemn in the strongest possible terms, the recent actions of the Labour Minority Government against the Tuhoe Nation and the Ruatoki community in particular and against tangata whenua in general … We call on the Labour Minority Government to suspend all broad-ranging actions against communities forthwith

We should have no doubt that the Maori Party feels strongly about the police's conduct of the operation -- perhaps with good reason -- but this is either hysteria or cynical politicking.

And then, elsewhere in the sandpit, Winston Peters pops up with that old favourite: linking the mere existence of the Maori Party to apartheid, and decrying the "militant racists" who protested the police action. Politicking is hardly the word.

And finally, Sunday's interview with Tuhoe historian Tamati Kruger. Kruger did not, anywhere in the interview as it screened, explain what he believed Tuhoe wanted (and neither, it must be said, did Ian Sinclair bother to ask him), but that did not stop him intoning on what might happen if Tuhoe didn't get it:

"There are many, many Tuhoe women, children and men that would rise up very quickly to defend their culture, their beliefs, their ideology and their philosophies …"

Sinclair: So you would turn to arms if necessary?

"Well, that's an open question. Let me put it this way. I believe that it is the duty of every patriot to defend their beliefs and defend their culture. It is the duty of the oppressed to rise up and break the chains of distress and despair."

He went on to invoke Northern Ireland, and say that violence "can never be discounted by us", then said that Tuhoe did not want that, but that there was a risk that it could be "the only thing left".

It was romanticising tosh; as one of our readers put it, either vaguely threatening or threateningly vague. And more than a little disappointing from a man who has regularly lectured on anti-violence.

I'd much rather look to Tuhoe.com, an initiative of the Tuhoe Education Authority that, with the help of a $500,000 government grant, has brought broadband into the mist. The focus is on e-learning and the hope is to change the situation where nine of 10 people in the area do not have jobs. And there's another aim: next month, Tuhoe.com will occupy a prime slot at the Digital Summit, to talk about preserving heritage, history and culture by taking command of digital tools.

Anyway, a little geekery: MacOS X 10.5 Leopard is out, and I'll certainly have a piece of it, once I've created a full bootable backup in case anything goes wrong (it seems not everyone's who's come a cropper is an idiot trying to upgrade over dodgy low-level system hacks), and, probably, migrated to Mail. Rod Drury got himself a link on Macintouch with this little bit of amusement.

And, finally, thanks to everyone who offered to help with the 1983 John Cale Gluepot recording (and especially to Chris Knox, who digitised his cassette and packaged up the CD quite beautifully). Turns out, it's available here, at Kiwi Concerts, a fan recordings MP3 blog that has some remarkable stuff. The Wiz, who runs the site, has been collecting live bootlegs for nearly 30 years. Led Zep at Western Springs in 1972, anyone?

PS: Apologies for the lack of service on Friday. I was out at The Checks the night before. They were great -- and I actually think Sven is one of the better guitarists I've ever heard. Unfortunately, our little gang's festivities didn't stop after the encore, and as a consequence I was not capable or motivated in the morning.

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