Author Archive
What a twit!
Remember the name: Jon Snow Channel 4 news anchor (ahem). Snow swallowed a lie from a ‘parody’ account at Twitter about Piers Morgan supposedly suspended by CNN and passed it on to his network credulously… as if it were true, without checking its veracity and without attributing it to source. Ross Neumann spills the beans […]
More inconvenient juxtaposition
While I am committed to the principle of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ I must admit to a groan of dismay and recognition when I read this NZ Herald headline: Missing uni cash: priest quits job A priest working as a senior executive at the Auckland University of Technology has resigned after “accounting discrepancies” involving hundreds […]
Like Piers Morgan, your past associations linger
Former editors of the News of the World. Personally I see Morgan’s June 2009 comments on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs as well short of a smoking gun, as does Jeff Bercovici: ‘That Piers Morgan Smoking Gun? Not So Smoky’. Read Morgan’s ‘admissions’ yourself and see what you think. Kirty Young BBC: What about this […]
A trolling we will go … anonymously
Touching on one of our perennial themes here, criticism, anonymity and unpleasantness on the interwebs …in ‘How the internet created an age of rage’ The Observer‘s Tim Adams delivers a worthwhile treatise on how commenters are able to hide behind a cloak of anonymity, making the blog and chatroom have into forums for hatred and […]
Lucky to get out …
A while ago I was on a mid-winter tour with one of my authors and to end the trip we held a final session in Queenstown — arguably New Zealand’s ski capital. My events manager and I were booked to fly back to Auckland while our author and his spouse planned to take the ‘scenic […]
The measure of character
Reuters columnist David Cay Johnston on his howler: COLUMN-How I misread News Corp’s taxes: David Cay Johnston Readers, I apologize. The premise of my debut column for Reuters, on News Corp’s taxes, was wrong, 100 percent dead wrong. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp did not get a $4.8 billion tax refund for the past four years, […]
The attribution argy-bargy. Recidivist HuffPo ruffles feathers.
A teacher of mine used to say: ‘The only person who knows how far is ‘too far’ is the person who goes too far.’ With respect, NO, sometimes it’s blindingly obvious for others to see. Such as The Huffington Post’s relentless ‘aggregation’ — ‘Driving traffic, Darling’, says Arianna Huffington justifying the activities of the largely […]
Watching paint dry with Steve Lambert
I have a collection of quirky 404 pages in an album ThePaepae’s Facebook page. Here’s a new one thanks to Marco Arment (Instapaper) retweeting Daniel Jalkut (MarsEdit) … it’s funny, dude. Do it: http://visitsteve.com/404.html
A little bit of understanding of Asperger
Congratulations to journalist Janet McIntyre, giving us an insight into life for someone with Asperger syndrome via her ‘A tale of two light bulbs‘ documentary. I hope some more understanding of these people will result from such public/media exposure. (Is that too much to hope?) We discuss Asperger here on ThePaepae.com from time to time […]
In praise of Cameron Slater (yeah, I’m surprised too)
If you’d suggested to me a year ago that I would be writing an article in praise of ‘WhaleOil’ blogger Cameron Slater I would have laughed at you. Hard. Yet, here I am doing just that. Let me explain. We’ve discussed these issues before: responding to criticism or negative feedback about one’s actions or statements, […]
Capital Gains Tax: ‘Politics is the art of polarization’
The NZ Labour Party has (deliberately) let the cat out of the bag with its ‘soft launch’ confirmation that a Capital Gains Tax in some form will be part of its election policy for November 2011. Cue the scary music! And the completely predictable howls of outrage (some justified) with cries of ‘unfair’, ‘inconsistent’, ‘distortionary’, […]
Smoke gets in your eyes, Carrick?
Tonight TV3 broadcast an Inside New Zealand documentary: Dying for a Smoke, highlighting some of the health issues and the political debate around suggested moves to increase controls on the sale of tobacco products — and even suggestions to eliminate tobacco products from the country by 2020 … which strikes me as a pipe dream, […]
Head on a spike
So Alasdair Thompson’s words, taken by so many to reveal an anachronistic misogynist attitude, have cost him his job. Even more intriguing is this line from the NZ Herald‘s ‘breaking news’ story: His conduct sparked an angry outcry on micro-blogging site Twitter and saw the Council of Trade Unions call for him to be fired. […]
