I have occasionally bought and read a copy of Vanity Fair, it sometimes has interesting articles, mixed in with Hollywood gossip and a strange fascination with celebrity and people who holiday in the Hamptons. I could never really figure out what it was all about, but I recently came across this quote, which I think hits it:
Vanity Fair: the magazine about celebrities who wish they were intellectuals, and intellectuals who wish they were celebrities.
Update: I found where i saw the above quote on Crooked Timber.
The etymology of the terms first rate and second rate is quite interesting. They come from the age of sail warships, when new forms of warships were developed. European warships of the 15th and 16th century started to have “castles” built at both ends of the ship to allow archers to fire down on enemy ships, and these castles were eventually built into the hull leading to ships such as the Mary Rose, carrying cannons along both sides, which could be fired all at once in a “broadside”.
Naval war-fighting changed with the new forms of ships in the 17th and 18th centuries. The tactics of the time were for the ships to sail past one another in a line firing broadsides in and attempt to force back and destroy the enemy. The ships that sailed in these formations were called Ships-of-the-Line. Given the destructive forces involved only the biggest and best ships could sail in the line. The British Navy developed a rating system to describe the ships of the line. The best were the large warships with 100 or more guns on three decks (such as Lord Nelson’s Victory). These were rated first: First Rate. Of course these ships were expensive to build and to operate and smaller and cheaper ships with 90-98 guns were built, known as Second Rate ships.
Hence the terms, First Rate: best quality, Second rate: of lesser quality than First Rate.
I had five dollars on the Prime Minster resigning by the end of the week. Damn it!
I have always been a fan of podcasts since they first started to come out. They provide an opportunity to not only to listen to programs at a time convenient to you (rather than according to a radio station broadcast schedule), but also to access content you would not otherwise. So, for example, many amateurs are producing podcasts on interesting topics (you can listen to fan podcasts on your favourite TV shows), but more importantly for me, some great radio programs are available from stations such as the BBC, the ABC, and NPR in America.
I have just noticed that iTunes is now listing podcasts from universities in America that provide podcasts related to some of classes. (see picture below). I have just subscribed to Information Science 103: The History of Information from Berkeley University.
Microsoft have released a new website that covers the new features in Mac Office 2008. And it does look like there are lots of new improvements. One of the benefits that they promote is the ability to create “professional looking” newsletters from their new templates. Will this lead to the fading away of design as a proffesion, as the tools and technology come to the masses?
It has always struck me (as someone who is interested in the whole graphic design area) that there is a lot more skill to it than having the right instruments. And the Microsoft website itself demonstrated that. It the picture below they show some layout. Now, a closeup of a coffee cup might be a useful design element in a presentation, but putting it in a white shadowed border as if it were a photo? Please!
One of the problems of Rudd’s “small target” political strategy is that he ends up looking too much like the Liberal’s and has limited ability to distinguish himself in anyway.
Obviously the key areas he can attempt to do this are education and health, and he has the added leverage of being able to work with the Labor State Governments.
Unfortunately Rudd’s recently announced hospital policy was a great disappointment. In essence he has promised a $2b fund to assist the States to lift their game on hospital care provision, and if the States don’t perform them the Commonwealth will take over hospitals.
When this was discussed at on ”The Insiders“ (ABC TV, 9 am Sundays) last weekend there was divergent views in the room on the efficacy of the proposal (Andrew Bolt made the valid point that a program that costs a extra $2b can’t be very effective at improving efficiency). But the one issue that was never asked was what are the actual proposals that Rudd want the States to implement? What are the actual proposals, what are the actual problems that Rudd wants to fix and how does he actually propose to do so?
The policy seems to be based on some kind of assumption that there are large inefficiencies in the hospital system that Rudd (or some Commonwealth public servant in Canberra) can identify. Obviously there are inefficiencies in the hospital system, as there are in any large administrative system, public or private, but I fail to see how Rudd is the only one who can see them. Obvious problems would have bee resolved already by the States, and I am not sure what other proposals Rudd has.
In the end this is only a semantic variation of the Howard Government States bashing. Even on this policy Rudd has failed to distinguish himself.
This is the third in the sequence of the Bourne Identity movies, baed on the original novel by Robert Ludlum. If you have seen the first two movies then you could well imagine the basic premise of this movie: Jason Bourne, the main protagonist, is some kind of secret agent/trained killer, who has no memory of his past and spends the most of the movie trying to uncover his origins while utilising his amazing secret agent skills to ward off the ever increasing resources of the secret CIA people who originated him but now want to kill him. Don’t worry if you haven’t seen the movie, this is not a spoiler, these plot details are pretty much revealed in the first five minutes.
What most of the movie is, is an action packed physical playing out of the above plot. Not much is added during this physical play out, but there are some interesting scenes, the cities look great and Jason Bourne is really tough.
The movie suffers from the inevitable 3rd movie syndrome. This occurs for any of these franchise type movies, everyone who has seen the previous movies knows all the plot details etc, so there is little point spending time on the slow reveling of information. Instead directors tend to rather focus on action, and of course the way to beef it up from the previous movies is more and bigger action. The side effect of this is that the main character seems to gain more fantastic capabilities. Whereas in the first movie, it was mostly a psychological thriller, this film ends up being an action film where you would not at all be surprised if it was revealed that Jason Bourne was in fact, the second coming of Christ and could walk on water (as well as defeating the entire CIA single handedly).
On a purely technical note the movie was filmed entirely in handheld mode, a cinematic style that can sometimes suit certain types of movies. However, “Action-Thriller” is a type of movie that is almost never improved by hand-held and some of the car chases in particular exemplify this, where the constant cutting between wobbly blurred clips reduces the information load to little more that “some care moving and crashing” with no definition.
Of course, all this negativity shouldn’t imply that I thought that the movie was that bad. Matt Damon is actually quite good in the role of emotionless Jason Bourne, the action is quite passable you never get bored (which in my experience is better than most movies). But that is about the extent of it, nothing really grabs you, and honestly, the most interesting thing to discuss afterwards is why it wasn’t a better movie.
