Tag: class

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Weekly Wrap 365: A certain quality of light in May

The Library a la Jeffrey SmartMy week of Monday 22 to Sunday 28 May 2017 wasn’t special in any way whatsoever. Why should it be? All this carry-on about magical lives is a bunch of middle-class smugness that should be erased from the earth.

Did I tell you I broke my glasses on Wednesday? That event shaped the latter part of the week, because I’m struggling a bit to organise replacements. That’s under way now, thanks to the generosity of friends, and I’ll tell you more over the next few days.

For now, on with the show…

Articles, Podcasts, Corporate Largesse

None, but I did write a piece for ZDNet that’ll appear in the next few days, and podcast plans are detailed below.

Media Appearances

  • On Monday 22 May, one of my photos was used to illustrate a piece on The Conversation, The weather is now political. I’m continually amazed by the way people find a use for what are really just random snapshots, and poor ones.

The Week Ahead

Like last week, this week I plan to do a solid amount of work on the SEKRIT editorial project; write a thing or two for ZDNet, plus, I guess, a bunch of other things, like organise new glasses. I won’t assign specific tasks to specific days, because as I explained last week, that tends to jinx things.

The next episode of The 9pm Edict podcast will be recorded and streamed live on Tuesday 30 May Thursday 1 June from stilgherrian.com/edict/live/, starting at 2100 AEST. You still have time to support this podcast with a one-off contribution.

(For those of you who’ve been asking about ongoing contributions, yes, I still intend to set up a better system for that. That won’t be finalised for a while, though, so one-off contributions are very welcome.)

Further Ahead

I’m covering 5th International Conference on Cybercrime and Computer Forensics (ICCCF) on the Gold Coast from 16 to 18 July, I hope; and the national conference of the Australian Information Security Association (AISA) in Sydney on 10 to 12 October.

If there’s anything I should add in there, please let me know.

I also plan to produce a short series of podcasts which will be conversations with people I don’t necessarily agree with. These might be public figures — I hope to speak with One Nation’s Senator Malcolm Roberts, for example — or people who simply represent a different point of view. In June, I’ll record a pilot episode, kicking off with an easy question: Is there a God?

[Photo: The Library a la Jeffrey Smart. The view from the cafe in the Blue Mountains Cultural Centre in Katoomba, photographed on 5 May 2017. The cropping and adjustments to the colour needed to bring out detail in the seated figure drew out the light in the matter of a Jeffrey Smart painting.]

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Sydney Harbour “giant gambling den” bullshit reportage

Map showing "giant gambling den in relation to Sydney Harbour: click to embiggen“Is A Billionaire Former Scientologist Shaping Sydney Harbour Into A Giant Gambling Den?”, asked the headline in an email this morning from The Global Mail. Is he? Let’s see!

The story in TGM, the philanthropic media project of Graeme Wood, also a key investor in The Guardian’s forthcoming Australian edition, is obviously about plans by James Packer to build a casino at Sydney’s Barangaroo development.

The proposal is controversial, certainly. But Sydney Harbour becoming a “giant gambling den”? FFS! If it’s not immediately obvious why this is complete bullshit, I’ve drawn a picture for you. A special kind of picture called a “map”.

The black bit is Sydney Harbour, traced from Google Maps. The red bit is the entire proposed casino complex, assuming this report in the Sydney Morning Herald is still roughly correct. You might have to click through to the full-size map to see the red bit.

Sydney Harbour is clearly not becoming a “giant gambling den”. Sydney Harbour will be changed in a way that will be barely noticeable, at least if your global perspective manages to make it any further west than Glebe Point Road. And I’d have thought that the intelligent, well-educated people at TGM would be able to figure that out for themselves.

We were told that The Global Mail was about “quality journalism”, but apparently it’s just another in a long series of comfortable colour supplements for Sydney’s whining middle class, with bonus points for waving the good ol’ Scientology scare-stick.

The story itself is by Nick Bryant, whose work I like. He’s got a biography of Packer coming out, so I assume the article — which I haven’t read yet — is an extract from that book and somewhat better than the promotion it’s been burdened with suggests. I’ll let you know once I’ve read it.

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Australia 2020 rejection letter finally arrives

Thumbnail image of Australia 2020 Summit rejection letter

This morning I finally received a letter (pictured) telling me that I hadn’t been selected for the Australia 2020 Summit. Gosh. I’d already figured that out from not being on the published lists of those who were going.

Apart from the rather late arrival of the news and the traditional passive-voice bureaucratic writing style, there’s two interesting points about this letter.

  1. I left the “title” field of the nomination form blank, since I don’t use them. I think titles like “Mr”, “Miss”, “Mrs”, “Ms” etc are an archaic way of labelling people. Nevertheless they felt compelled to use “Mr/s”, even though I had filled in the gender field.
  2. The official website said that people who applied via email, like me, would receive an email reply. They can’t even follow their own published procedure.

I really am trying to find good-news stories about the Summit, I really am…