Waitasecond

On the new NZ On Screen site that just launched, there’s a clip from NZ comedy legend Billy T James in 1990, doing a ‘newsreader in the future’ gag with the nation’s crooner Sir Howard Morrison. Howard delivers this line: “..there’s no truth in the rumour that the last four remaining Pakeha seats will be abolished…” There is applause and laughter, and the camera cuts away to someone in the crowd smiling happily at this riff on NZ’s controversial Maori seats…
…waitaminute…

…is that…

…a young version of National party leader John Key? The very chap who just got into hot water over the proposed abolition of the Maori seats?
Check for yourself. At the 3’30” mark.

Endorsing The Greens

Ruth just posted on how she’s voting this year, and it has moved me to comment: in a shock revelation that will come as no surprise to anybody, this election I’m voting Green.
Why? It’s the climate change, stupid. (To coin a phrase.) I feel strongly that the Greens are the only party that are really talking about the reality of anthropogenic climate change. The stronger their voice in Parliament, the more they can push the government to start dealing with the problem.
There are other reasons to vote Green; there are other reasons not to vote Green. But from where I’m sitting, climate change is the most important issue in the world right now by a wide margin. All of the other pros and cons of various party platforms just look insignificant next to it, like choosing the best music to listen to while the Titanic goes down.
So I’m voting Green. And if you agree that anthropogenic climate change as the biggest problem on our horizon, I urge you to vote Green as well.
(Also, I loved Ruth’s final comment in her post: “My favourite thing about New Zealand elections is that you vote with a fat orange felt pen, a clear sign of a serious democracy at work.” Hee!)

the right motivation

See, we all know that anthropogenic global warming is gonna make things rough, but its tough to actually get ourselves making changes. This is because humans are rubbish at responding to distant, nearly abstract motivations.
So I’m all in favour of this as a new way of motivating action: if you don’t stop climate change, a tiger will bite you in the scrotum.
Wildlife experts say endangered tigers in the world’s largest reserve are turning on humans because rising sea levels and coastal erosion are steadily shrinking the tigers’ natural habitat… “”We were trying to catch the tiger perched on a tree of our village with tranquiliser shots,” said the 47-year-old villager. “But it flung on me after falling on a net and bit my loins.”
I’m feeling more motivated already.

Powell Endorses Obama

Cheney made him soiled goods by forcing him to front the “case for war” to the UN, and then threw him on the garbage heap. Now Colin Powell gets his revenge on the governing clique that always hated him.
Not that Obama particularly needs the boost right now, and not that McCain is the same as CheneyBush, but it still tastes pretty sweet. Powell was a company man who was deliberately betrayed, but he never lost credibility among the Repub base or mainstream US, so his floor-crossing endorsement is big news. Even more so given that usually he’s reluctant to speak out at all, thanks to his deeply ingrained good-soldier approach to politics (the same one that led him to ruin by dutifully presenting garbage intelligence with those satellite photos of Saddam’s “weapon factories” ahem).
I remember at a party in ’99 or so, gleefully predicting that the 2004 US Presidential race would be between Hillary Clinton and Colin Powell. I was, of course, completely wrong but it has been nice to see them both in play in 2008, with all that confrontational identity content (race, gender) well in the mix. I kinda imagine that the USA right now feels like it’s getting healthy for the first time in years.

Many Good Friday Linky

this week: has been busy and while I’ve had things worth saying i haven’t had time to do them justice. Ah well. At least there are always linky:
Cool knitted stuff, including a bunny the size of a hotel, and cephalapods
Back in 1982, one of the first of those “clues to a real treasure” books was released in the US: The Secret: A Treasure Hunt contained verse and paintings pointing to the location of 12 treasure casks buried by the author. More than 25 years on, only two have been found, one in 1984, the other in 2004. The hunt continues over at The Secret wiki! (Curious side fact: the treasure from the most famous of these books, the UK’s Masquerade from 1979, was found not by a puzzle-solver but by a guy who had inside info from the writer’s ex-girflriend. Wikipedia has the scoop and the solution.)
hix over at multi-dimensional has been running a series of posts on long-range thinking, and why we’re all so crap at it. He’s going somewhere interesting with this, and it ties in to something I’d never heard of, Superstruct, an internet game set in 2019 in which the world’s players respond to major global threats. Keen!
If you’ve ever played one of those classic text adventures (Eat Cake, Take Note, Go North, etc) then you’ll dig this: MS Paint Adventures has a cartoonist draw a scene and then receive “commands” from the internet audience, and then draw the next scene, and so you progress through a very strange adventure indeed. Like a lot of these things, takes a little while to get into its rhythm but is addictive once it hits stride.
An episode of Kamikaze Cookery, a twenty-minute cooking show in which a normal person tries to cook a recipe from one of those glossy recipe books fronted by Jamie Oliver. Cue much insulting of Jamie Oliver and a very entertaining show. Give it a try – I was tipped off that this was coming by esteemed sheep-hater Johnnie, and its good to see an episode out. (There’s also another episode in which they cook a steak with a blowtorch and a vacuum cleaner.)

And finally, a daily three-panel gag strip about the eagle eternally devouring the liver of bound Prometheus! Like Garfield only with a bird eating this dude’s liver in every strip.

Evil League of Evil

Bad Horse put out the call: the Evil League of Evil was seeking applicants. A rare opportunity to get on-side with the Thoroughbred of Sin. Many people rose to the challenge. And I helped one of those people. Here’s the app:

Evil League of Evil Application: The Embezzler from Jarratt Gray on Vimeo.
This is all a spin-off from internet musical Dr Horrible, created by Buffy-maestro Joss Whedon during the writers’ strike. When Dr Horrible is released to DVD, ten or so ELE applicants will round out the package. The open call was an invitation to compete for one of those spots.
JB saw his chance and devised a heck of a script around the Embezzler character. He gathered together a crew of amigos and amigas to make it all happen. A lot of effort went into prep, and a lot into editing etc. afterwards, but it still felt like the day of the shoot was when it all happened – always to remember, shooting a film takes a lot of effort. I was recruited to play second-string character Devil’s Advocate, and when we did a script readthrough in the morning I took the opportunity to stick my nose in about how the story resolved. To my delight, the whole crew managed to usefully find a shared creative energy – sometimes too many cooks will spoil the broth, but here it felt like every idea contributed moved us closer to a solid final product. I note that I am co-credited on the script, but to be honest, it’s very close to JB’s original, and most of the changes originated from other people – my main contribution was finding a good structure for a three-minute bit, and even then I had lots of help.
It was cool to have Jarratt behind the camera. its the first time we’ve worked together on a film since ’99 I think, and his expertise has grown – he does this sort of thing for a living after all. The rest of us could have put our heads together and got the material down to about 3′ 15″, but the only way we would have made the required 3 minutes was by cutting out jokes. Jarratt was able to apply years of experience to slice it down to 3 minutes without losing anything important, finding just the right way to compress information. That is highly impressive to me.
Directing was shared between everyone, even me for a bit (is this the first time I’ve directed since the nonsensical Morgue’s World project of ’92?) and in fact everyone pitched in all over the place. Lovely crew made a very busy shoot a delightful experience. I had some doubts when I arrived in the morning that it would all get done but it did, and while it was hard work it wasn’t unpleasant. Good fun times were had, pizza was scoffed, and baby Hurricane made numerous behind-the-scenes appearances.
Speaking of Baby Hurricane, here’s his application, the work of Debz (the assessor in the Embezzler vid) and Matt C (who spent most of the shoot wandering the streets with the leetle super hero). It’s a treat as well. Good luck to them both!

Flowups: McCain, Green Billboards

Two linky followups to posts from previous-time:
In relation to the dumbfounding “My fellow prisoners” comment uttered by John McCain, here is Bob Harris with a considerate reflection that merits your attention:

McCain’s weird POW flashback this week, where he called supporters his “fellow prisoners,” is another reminder (as if we need one) of just how much McCain processes things through the lens of Vietnam. (Speaking compassionately: how could he possibly not?) And of course, his personal anger toward his captors remained intense enough that he refused to apologize for openly calling them “gooks” as late as the 2000 campaign: “I hate the gooks,” McCain said to reporters on his campaign bus. “I will hate them as long as I live.”

And my post on Green billboards mentioned that billboards are of particular public interest in this election – evidence of the fact, the Sunday Star Times has invited John Ansell (designer of the hugely divisive Iwi/Kiwi billboards) to write a semi-regular column about this year’s political billboards. You can find the full version on his blog. He snarkily gives props to the Greens for their material, but more interesting is how he excoriates National for their rubbish billboards but tries to weasel around this by saying they’re meant to be rubbish. Er, no John, no. They’re just rubbish. (h/t Poneke)

Friday Linktronic

Ephelants! Ephelants in a hotel lobby! Not a Muppets sketch – actual and real! A particular wild herd had a hotel built on their patch, and decided they were gonna eat the fruit there anyway. Charming story and photos here.
Fine, okay, here’s an ephelant-related Muppets sketch too. One of the best from the post-Henson 90s Muppets Tonight reboot.
I saw this several places but at mundens first: the literal re-interpretation of Take On Me! Just wonderful.

Another talk from NYU’s Clay Shirky, who is everywhere at the moment in the wake of his book ‘Here Comes Everybody’ about new technology making it easier to work collectively. Here’s Clay talking about the role of inconvenience in social systems, and how the same fluidity of new media that makes organising easy causes problems when it comes to interacting with institutions. How can we inject inconvenience in the right places to achieve certain kinds of functionality? Great case study of the guy who got sued by his university for organising an online study group! Not a great talk, but it covers some cool stuff and essential if you’re thinking about this stuff. (Hint: I am.)
And finally… a children’s book like you’ve never seen before. “When she woke up, Ellen thought about her dream. And deep, deep down inside herself Ellen really did wish that she could marry her daddy some day. This is what happens when an entire culture starts taking Freud seriously…

My fellow say what now?

(Man, busy. So I’ll just propagate this instead of saying anything new. Picked up on GMSkarka’s LJ, but it’s all over.)
In this 13-second clip, McCain calls Americans his “fellow prisoners”.

To be fair, however, he is very very old.
(It don’t mean anything, of course – but don’t pretend the US media wouldn’t be all over Obama if he made a slip of this magnitude. They might yet come after McCain for this one.)