by cameron | Nov 23, 2006 | Culture Jamming
Some quotes to think about…
So by the end, they (MSNBC) were ordering us, if we booked one guest that was anti-war, we had to book two that were pro-war. If we booked two guests on the left, we had to have three on the right. At one meeting a producer suggested booking Michael Moore and she was told for ideological balance she would need three right-wingers. It became more of a nightmare, as the war got closer; and then we all got terminated three weeks before the invasion was launched, and it was purely political.
– Jeff Cohen, noted US TV media critic
“You can educate the people about what is happening in the world, but you can’t ever go to impose a will which is not their own,â€
– Venezuelan-U.S. Attorney, Eva Golinger, author of new book, Bush vs. Chavez: Washington’s War Against Venezuela (Monte Avila Editores, 2006, Caracas).
Q. How has Microsoft Australia demonstrated that it is innovative?
A. Microsoft Australia values innovation very highly both internally and also in terms of our engagement in the local economy. ….. ……..
Another good example has been the joint venture that Microsoft sponsored with PBL to create the start-up company NineMSN which has been an innovative and successful new company in Australia.
.. Microsoft Australia CEO Steve Vamos. My spies at Microsoft Australia don’t agree with that statement. I keep getting told that most of the innovative people have left the company in the last few years and that the company is getting more and more like IBM every day. NineMSN is an example of innovation? Jamming together Australia’s biggest media giant with the world’s largest software company nine years ago?
Steve also mentioned Victoria.Net which (I believe) was the idea of one of my old managers, David Sajfar. Great idea for bringing together Microsoft’s developers in the local market but… cmon… it’s a portal. Those two things were Steve’s top examples of local Microsoft innovation? A nine-year old JV with Packer and a portal? Sheesh. Buy Google stock.
by cameron | Nov 22, 2006 | Uncategorized
God it shits me when the media in this country go apeshit over someone because of their sporting prowess. Ian Thorpe has retired from competitive swimming. Frak, with the blanket media coverage this morning you’d think peace had been declared in the middle east. Actually I don’t think that would get this much press.
Channel 7’s Sunrise show has declared it “Thorpe Day”. Get over it people. He can swim. Yeah – pretty fast. Great. Wonderful. Do you realize he kicks his feet for a living? That’s it. That’s his contribution to the world. Kicking his really big feet fast. Is this reason to get all slobbery over him like teenage girls at a Robbie Williams concert?
Bigger news this morning is that Robert Altman died aged 81. He directed 87 films and TV shows since 1951, including classics such as MASH, McCabe and Mrs Miller, Nashville, The Player, Short Cuts (I still fondly remember Julianne Moore’s full frontal doing the ironing)… oh and Popeye. Altman was Mr Ensemble. He had the ability to pull together a large cast of character actors and bring them together into a cohesive ensemble. If you haven’t seen those films, treat yourself this weekend.
by cameron | Nov 16, 2006 | Podcast
Lynn Fischer now has over 1,000,000 healthy cookbooks in print, and her “Low Fat Cooking for Dummies” has been an amazing best seller for the past four years. With so much talk in the media at the moment about the rise and rise of Type II diabetes, I thought it was time for us to talk more about eating to live. So when I met Lynn by chance in San Francisco, I picked up some easy to follow tips for you fat, nerdy geek types out there. 🙂
by cameron | Nov 13, 2006 | Podcast, Uncategorized
As part of my new job as part-time entertainment gossip mongerer for the showBUZZ podcast, I’ve had to learn how to find stuff like this – the recently released 19 second clip of Britney Spears’ alleged sex tape that rumours say her ex-husband K-Fed is going to sell the full version of. WARNING: NOT WORK SAFE… unless, like me, you work for yourself. In which case, bring it on. It’s a tough job, but someone has to do it.
by cameron | Nov 11, 2006 | Uncategorized
This clip of Bush admitting to journalists that he lied to them a few days before the elections about his ongoing support for Rumsfeld is amazing. Have you ever seen him this squirmy?
A couple of nights ago I was strolling around Chinatown and stumbled across the City Lights bookstore which is apparently pretty famous. I picked up a copy of Kalle Lasn‘s 2000 book Culture Jam
and grabbed a seat in a cozy little bar called Tosca on Columbus near the bookstore to start reading it.
I’ve been admiring Lasn for sometime. I first heard of him a year or so ago when he launched the Blackspot Sneakers and then I learned about his magazine called Adbusters. He’s trying to get people to wake up to the way that corporate advertising is conditioning us to live lives which are killing us and destroying the planet. I invited him onto the show last year but was palmed off to one of the marketing folks at Blackspot and it was a pretty boring interview so I never aired it.
Anyway, Lasn’s book has really messed me up. It made me remember why I started TPN in the first place – to create a new kind of media that is small, intelligent, passionate, informed, global, viral and for the people. To fight the system. To change the system. To change the world. Now the problem is that these thoughts don’t sit nicely with thoughts about raising venture capital and doing the whole Silicon Valley thing. I’m having an existential crisis. I keep asking myself over and over – “what is my definition of success?”.
I hate questions like that.
