More better do our job

Yet another link to onegoodmove - they really do have all the good stuff at the moment.

George W. Bush, talking to an audience about the rebuilding of New Orleans...

We look forward to working with ya. Let me put it in other words. We look forward to hearing your vision, so we can ... more better do our job.

Video here | More fresh Dubya quotes here.
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Lovely Rita
It's nearly as if nature is mocking us.

Straight from the NOAA Hurricane Centre, which provides endlessly geeky information and imagery for the amateur weather-watcher.

[ Via Crooks and Liars who point out: "you can't make this stuff up!")
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Five damn days, five long daysKanye West's now infamous 'George Bush doesn't care about black people' statement inspired Texas hip-hop group K-Otix to create this song, entitled (amazingly enough) - "George Bush Does Not Care About Black People", which ended up doing the internet blog rounds mere days after the event, and has the group's two MCs rapping over an instrumental of Kanye West's "Gold Digger."

They've now gone one step further, with the release of a video for the song, which features refrains along the lines of...

Five damn days, five long days
And at the end of the fifth, he walkin' in like, 'Hey'
Chillin' on his vacation, sittin' patiently
Them black folks gotta hope, gotta wait and see

mp3 here, video here.
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The Flying Mobulas of the Sea of CortezAvast! Beware the flying manta mobula rays! Arrrr...

Whoosh! Without warning, a mobula emerges from below the surface, its long flat body glistening in the evening light and whip for a tail trailing behind. Flap, flap, flap, maybe a somersault or two, and then smack! It happened again and again. Single flips. Straight-up belly flops. Double flips. I see a single mobula leap a few times in succession; others leap only once and then disappear. I witness mobulas partially emerging from the water, one third of the wingtip still immersed, and rotate around that tip. Sometimes, I don't even see that. All that is visible is the swirl of water left behind. Notarbartolo di Sciara writes that when he was in the Sea of Cortez some twenty years ago, he even observed triple flips. According to him, some mobulas leap at heights of up to two times their disc width or up to six feet high.

[via boingboing]
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Kurt Vonnegut on the Daily ShowI love Kurt Vonnegut. I love the Daily Show. Kurt Vonnegut on the Daily Show - what's not to love? Admittedly, Kurt is looking pretty frail, and is obviously doing the talk-show circuit regurgitating many of the same lines from show to show (he uses nearly the same 'people are a plague on the planet' spiel he used the other day on the Bill Maher show), but his take on the world, politics and human nature is always entertaining.

As John Stewart tells Kurt...

When I first read your books they opened up a whole school of thought to me of humanism that I never thought possible, and the one thing that always struck me was the inherent decency of the characters that you cared about, and it struck me that those characters reminded me so much of - upon reading interviews with you - of you.

Man, I wish I could get to say that to Kurt.

Re-reading Breakfast of Champions now, as I'm going through one of my regular Vonnegut seasons, having recently done Slapstick, Galapagos and Palm Sunday. And must get his new one (which is what he's plugging on the chat-show circuit) A Man without a Country.
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RIANZ welcomes Kazaa verdict in AustraliaFor those of you who follow this sort of thing, you'll already be aware that the company behind file-sharing software Kazaa have recently lost an Australian court case bought against them by Universal Music Australia. The court found that...

...Sharman [the operator of Kazaa] has infringed upon the copyright of sound recording holders, and ordered that the companies involved be restrained from allowing Australian Kazaa users to violate copyrights. In a lengthy summary, Judge J. Wilcox ordered that Kazaa upgrade its file sharing system to include non-optional keyword filtering technology to exclude copyrighted works, that all future versions of the software must include the filtering, and that "maximum pressure" be applied to have users upgrade their software.

The same sort of thing happened to Napster a few years back, with the result being that everyone ditched that particular brand of p2p software for other ones which weren't so crippled by filtering. Even now, the ruling against Kazaa is fairly pointless, as more and more people are already switching to more efficient and faster p2p software like bittorrent, or the myriad of other freely available p2p programs that keep popping up. As much as the music industry would like to see an end to software like Napster, Kazaa and Bittorrent, it's a bit like shooting flies with a shotgun - you'll get one once in a while, but there's plenty more where that came from.

Anyway, here in NZ, the local industry bigwigs have obviously been watching the Australian trial with some interest. Campbell Smith, RIANZ CEO (amongst other employee-creating positions) welcomed the decision, and had this to say on the topic...

The fight against internet piracy is a priority for RIANZ and its members. While RIANZ now has clear international precedent for taking legal action against both users and operators of unauthorised file swapping networks in New Zealand, we hope these decisions provide a strong incentive to those parties to respect copyright and become legitimate. If they do not heed the warning and continue to break copyright laws, legal action is inevitable.

Crikey. It's at times like this that I wonder how sensible it is helping run (or, more accurately, neglect) both an mp3 blog and podcast site that both rely on copyrighted material for their content.
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NZ Political Parties' Art PoliciesNZ Arts TV show Frontseat interviewed all the main political party arts spokespeople for the show that screened Sunday last, and have put the full transcripts of those interviews online. Essential reading for those of you in the arts community...

• Labour - Helen Clark
• National - Georgina Te Heuheu
• Progressive - Jim Anderton
• ACT - Deborah Coddington
• Maori - Pita Sharples
• Greens - Sue Kedgely
• United Future - Marc Alexander
• NZ First - Brian Donnelly
  

Some highlights...

Marc Alexander - United Future

With the Venice Biennale I’m not convinced that the public has been fully accounted to by Creative NZ in what goes on. The idea of a public toilet, or whatever it was, sent over there, I’m not sure if the public would be happy to see their tax dollars going on that. [emphasis added]

"Or whatever it was". Informed opinion there, then.

Brian Donnelly - NZ First

Certainly we wouldn’t reduce any funding from the present point in time and we very much support the voluntary quota of NZ Music, we think that’s had a very big impact, a very positive impact.

I find it frightening to think that NZ First would actually make a good choice of coalition partners for Labour based on their arts policy.

Helen Clark - Labour

Certainly expect to see more New Zealand films being made with the Film Commission baseline funding doubled. We've had the very interesting project done on how to create more export potential for kiwi music, and we have the development fund to be rolled out with support through the Music Industry Commission.

Yay for Labour. I love how she calls it 'kiwi music'. But time to review some of those older funding schemes, though.

Georgina Te Heuheu - National

Q. Current arts funding levels – would you cut, increase or maintain?

A. They’ll be maintained at the current level, yes.

Good-o.

Q. How would you make an arts supporter who was going to vote Labour, vote National?

A. Well from my interaction with the sector I know, I've been told that a number of participants in this sector think there's too much looseness in the way funding is dispersed and in some parts of the industry, various industries, they'd like to see just a little bit more business like approaches because they don't think there are. I was visiting with a group of people yesterday in the music industry that basically said if we want to grow our local industry then we've got to get serious about it and make sure there are proper, we're efficient, we're effective in the way we spend money and so I mean, the policy we've put out reflects a lot of what we've heard in the sector.

Also good, in theory.

And maybe just be a little bit smarter about funding success, rewarding success, I don’t know if that necessarily goes on at the sector at the moment.

Sounds vaguely related to the 'commercial viability' rule-of-thumb that NZ On Air use for their music funding decisions to me, which has caused much nashing of teeth and pulling of hair amongst the NZ music community over the years.

Deborah Coddington - ACT

Primarily tax relief so people can choose which arts to support rather than have the government choose for them. If National privatised TVNZ, have some or all of that money go into contestable fund for independent producers and drama makers to use. Maori Television, encourage that to become an independent, standalone entity like MAI FM. Revamp the funding of NZ films so that it’s not politicised and get the bureaucrats out so more money goes to the actual films. And overall funding we would maintain as it is.

Sue Kedgely - Green

We think that the amount of money that the government has invested in the arts sector over the last 5 or 6 years is fantastic and it's made a huge contribution not just to the arts sector but to the whole economy, to our culture, to our identity, so we're wildly enthusiastic about that and would support more funding perhaps in certain sectors.

ie. "We're with Helen on this one."

Pita Sharples - Maori Party

Actually I think the state should keep right out of the arts and just supply the putea, keep the money coming in and fix the act up a little.

Um, right.

Jim Anderton - Progressive

I think taking the arts and the cultural traditions seriously and funding them at a level that they haven’t been funded for a very long time. The challenge now is to keep that going and make it a continuum so we don't get this up and down funding of arts and culture. That we have a steady line up and then we can be quite proud of ourselves in due course.

In due course? How about now? He also manages to name-drop Shakespeare, Van Gogh, and his own opera-singing daughter through the course of the interview.

A replay of the show will be on air this coming Sunday (11 Sept) at 6.30am, on TV1. (Yes, 6.30 AM - in the morning. I recommend swotting up on the VCR's scehduled recording options).
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Louisiana is a city that is under waterBest bit of media commentary I've seen on the New Orleans debacle yet. A five minute editorial smack-down by MSNBC's Keith Olbermann.

No one is suggesting that mayors or governors in the afflicted areas, nor the federal government, should be able to stop hurricanes. Lord knows, no one is suggesting that we should ever prioritize levee improvement for a below-sea-level city, ahead of $454 million worth of trophy bridges for the politicians of Alaska.

But, nationally, these are leaders who won re-election last year largely by portraying their opponents as incapable of keeping the country safe. These are leaders who regularly pressure the news media in this country to report the reopening of a school or a power station in Iraq, and defies its citizens not to stand up and cheer. Yet they couldn't even keep one school or power station from being devastated by infrastructure collapse in New Orleans — even though the government had heard all the "chatter" from the scientists and city planners and hurricane centers and some group whose purposes the government couldn't quite discern... a group called The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

And most chillingly of all, this is the Law and Order and Terror government. It promised protection — or at least amelioration — against all threats: conventional, radiological, or biological.

It has just proved that it cannot save its citizens from a biological weapon called standing water.

Read more...
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