I just want to give some recognition to the best design work of the NZ election campaign thus far, and it has come from an unexpected source – the Green party. The Greens don’t have a history of excellence in the visual design stakes, and their hoardings for the last election were (IMHO) pretty damn ugly:
The whole series of 2005 billboards is visible here.
This year, they have put some serious resource into the billboard campaign – either that, or they’ve stumbled across an exceptional designer willing to work for cheap. Everything about their ’08 boards is on point. Check out this one, which was the first one I saw:
It’s perfect stuff – the composition of the image is great, the broad horizon speaks to the Green’s themes, even the demeanour of the model is well-placed. The simple, simple, simple message is genius. And I love the typeface of the key message (although I would have preferred the “vote for” typeface to match). Best of all, it works on the big scale – it looks fine on the screen, but enormous on the side of a building it really throws weight.
It’s great to see. Billboard design has symbolic importance for this election, thanks to the role played in the 2005 election by the highly contentious (and very well-designed) “iwi/kiwi billboards”. Sure enough, googling up the images for this post has turned up much interest and praise, some of which is summarised here at FrogBlog. Labour partisans The Standard even fear these billboards are too slick!
I think this is a significant step up in game that the Greens need to make if they want to make it happen this election. They have clearly decided internally to campaign on the “vote for your children” line, which seems like a risky choice to me but executed this well they might pull it off. I’m impressed with these billboards, and their new leader Russel Norman is giving a good account of himself (even though he seems to be hated in the house?). You go, Greenies.
Author:
Friday, w/ Assorted Linky
Your assortment of linky this Friday includes:
Concept Ships – a blog of conceptual drawings of nifty spaceships. Breathtaking imagery. Good for SF and design heads or anyone who likes nice pictures of things.
The Superest, another drawing blog, in which an artist comes up with a wacky superhero/villain, then another artist devises someone who would defeat them, and so on. The first twenty or so were nice but meh, then somehow it found its groove and since then it’s been amazingly inventive. Plus: funny drawings!
Via the Alligator, a New Yorker piece on Sarah Palin, elites and moose: “Now, let us discuss the Élites. There are two kinds of folks: Élites and Regulars. Why people love Sarah Palin is, she is a Regular. That is also why they love me. She did not go to some Élite Ivy League college, which I also did not. Her and me, actually, did not go to the very same Ivy League school. Although she is younger than me, so therefore she didn’t go there slightly earlier than I didn’t go there.”
And speaking of moose – how about some baby moose and their mama playing in a sprinkler?
And finally, a free-in-pdf comic in which a gorilla who is also a luchadore fights creatures from the Cthulhu mythos. I linky you…. El Gorgo!
Joy of Passwords
Specifically, the joy of devising a new password that meets minimum safety requirements (6 characters, mix of letters and numbers, doesn’t contain any dictionary words) that I know I will always remember.
I have a pool of about 15 passwords in my head – I mostly remember which ones go with which applications, and if i don’t I usually get it on the second or third try. All of these passwords have been with me for about a decade and a half (hey, that’s about one a year!), moving from place to place and institution to institution. When I have to change a password, I swap it for another of my golden fifteen. There’s a lot of double ups – I think I have about forty or so logins in different places around workplaces and the internet.
Many of my 15 passwords are acronyms. Take the first letter of each word in a saying, song lyric or movie quote, and you’re underway. Mix it up a bit – some letters you can replace with numbers because they look similar or the words they reference are actually numbers. Mix case up and down if your password is case-sensitive; put the emphasis words in capitals. Easy as pie to remember, and very much uncrackable. (e.g. a password devised from that song from Grease “You’re the one that I want” => “Yt1tiW”)
And now, using a variation of the above scheme, I have come up with a new password. It delights me because it is so simple and so memorable yet still quite safe. It is a strange thing to take pleasure in, but there you go. I’ll probably still be using this new password in another fifteen years.
So. Got passwords? How do you manage to remember yours? Do you discard old passwords forever or keep them around in your head to use in other places?
Recent Davids
Cal and I have recently been preferring sitting at home watching a DaViD, rather then going out to a fillum, partly because the range of fillums on offer has been uninspiring and partly because a David gives you a $2 entertainment as opposed to a $32 entertainment. Or, in the case of a borrowed David, a $0 entertainment as opposed to.
Recent Davids watched:
Into the Wild (2007)
Ravishing to look at. Dude abandons family, lives in a bus. Feels a bit too sure of itself for my taste, but chunks of this film have stayed with me.
The Notebook (2004)
Pleasant love story with some effective silly weepie moments. Works entirely due the chemistry of Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams, of which there is plenty. Best for when you’re in a forgiving sort of mood.
Raising Victor Vargas (2002)
Nervous, sweet little film about some teenagers learning a little bit about themselves and each other while they fall in love. More subtle in its characterization than you’d expect, so it grows in the memory.
Great Expectations (1998)
Wildly off-kilter but highly enjoyable updating of the Dickens classic, with Ethan Hawke and Gwyneth Paltrow being surprisingly not annoying as director Alfonso Cuaron barely holds the film together around them.
Bella (2006)
In New York, a chef and a newly-fired waitress engage in a sort-of romance as she comes to terms with the fact that she’s pregnant and he recalls a past mistake that haunts him. A great film, although a self-conscious one. [Cheers David for reminding me of the title for this one!]
In other David news, it was announced yesterday that the patron of this blog is engaged to be wed! Congratulations and felicitations to the happy couple.
Steven Price on the “Terror Raids”
I spent last night thinking and reading about the “terror raids” of last October. First I attended a public meeting on the subject organised by the October 15 Solidarity crew, with Media Law Journal blogger Steven Price speaking on the contempt of court case surrounding the raids.
It was interesting stuff, and Steven (as ever, I’m advised) was a great and interesting speaker. The case he talked about, currently before the courts, concerns the publication of excerpts from a leaked affidavit by the Domionion Post and other related outlets.
It alleges that the editor of the Dominion Post (Tim Pankhurst) and colleagues prejudiced the right to a fair trial of the October 15 defendants. Price thinks the case is likely to succeed, and he outlined several reasons why:
- The newspaper article was highly sensational and ran at a time of high public interest
- The article cherry-picked the most sensational parts of the affidavit and did not represent its overall contents well.
- The affidavit was itself a cherry pick of evidence by the police, who meant to use it to convince a Judge to allow search warrants; so the article was a cherry-pick of a cherry-pick.
- The newspaper’s decision not to identify who was speaking in published quotations had the effect of encouraging the public to attribute the inflammatory statements to all the defendants, even if these views were not shared
- The affidavit was suppressed and would never make it to trial, so the evidence presented would never be encountered by jurors and could not be addressed and contested in a trial context
Steven thought last night that the likely outcome was a guilty verdict that would see Pankhurst & co. fined for their act of publication. That would be an outcome I wholeheartedly support. In this I part ways from the sage commenter on NZ affairs Russell Brown, who recently said “If Pankhurst and his employer are not successful in their defence, it would worry me if the court were to apply a very harsh penalty.” I personally think a very harsh penalty is entirely in order. It isn’t, to my mind, the fact of publication that makes Pankhurst et al. so deserving of punishment – it’s the manner of that publication. It would have been entirely possible to run the leaked affidavit in a less sensational and prejudicial way, tempering the most dramatic material with contextual information and generally trying to avoid the leap to conclusion. It would still have been a leak, it would still have been a suppression breach, and it would still have been a bad decision in my opinion, but there I think Russell’s point about the public’s “right to know” stands up. If that “right to know” is being fed highly biased and prejudicial material that is in turn sensationalised, then that is a distant bridge too far, and Pankhurst and the others involved should bear the consequences.
Steven continued, however, with something I hadn’t seen coming but that is obvious in hindsight: should the contempt case be found against the DomPost (as he thinks is likely to happen), he believes the Judges hearing the “terror raids” cases will be hard pressed to deny a request for a stay of prosecution. In other words, the DomPost’s eagerness to show that the arrestees were worthy of being arrested may directly result in them getting off the charges.
There was much more to the evening’s discussion, including a memorable aside about whether the Prime Minister’s words about “napalm blasts” meant she herself was in contempt… In any case, I read all the material I could track down on the case that evening, and to my mind the best account still comes from Nicky Hager (no surprises there). The two relevant quotes in this post are all the refresher you need.
Anyway. This story is developing, as they say.
Easy-to-amuse Monday
Arrrday Linky
Avast, ye bilge-scum, ahoy! There be linky ahead! Yarr, we shall plunder their riches me hearties, and send the rest down to Davey Jones! Arrrrrr!
(Yep, it’s that time of year again. Don’t forget to celebrate in your job interviews and performance review meetings!)
A great piece of spoken word courtesy of Judd about being a kid at the library and more:
Film people will be well aware of Ron Cobb, whose incredible design work on many films is justly revered – his work on Alien was an important grounding counterpoint on the wildness of Jean Giraud and the weirdness of Giger, while being every bit as beautiful as either – and his CV also includes key design work on Star Wars, Total Recall and others. But I didn’t know until this week that Cobb was a particularly acidic political cartoonist as well. Some of his social comment cartoons are included at the link, well worth a look.
The music trend sweeping the internets by storm: take one of your MP3s and add some cowbell! And a little bit of Christopher Walken! More Cowbell shows the way! Recent artists given the cowbell treatment include Foo FIghters and Eric Clapton at the time of writing…
Political linky: incisive description of how the right-wing noise machine in the US can operate an attack on everybody’s friend, Oprah Winfrey, and get away with it. Bonus linky: The Edge, a cultural comment site that looks amazing but I’ve only just started to explore it.
And finally: KARATE CHIMP WILL ROUNDHOUSE YOU
When Subeditors Attack
Scoop, NZs independent news site, delivers all the press releases that come its way in unexpurgated form – but it gleefully editorialises the link titles on the front page. Whoever’s on task today has entertained me greatly with this barbed header to a press release by Heather Roy on Helen Clark’s comments on the cost in Kiwi lives if we’d gone into Iraq. The ACT MP has titled her own release Morally bankrupt PM hits new low in politics, but the linky on Scoop’s front page is helpfully titled “Roy Demands Respect For Memory Of Hypothetical Dead Soldiers”. Hee! The selection of photo art for many stories is also a thing of beauty – local Who gaggersnark blog ‘Zeus Plug’ recently expressed its amusement. Hear hear.
Much respect to the Scoop massive for delivering such an amazing news service. If you’re a Kiwi, you really should visit regularly – Gordon Campbell’s election coverage is quite amazing all by itself!
Muslim With Excalibur
I was delighted to discover this week that someone has been messing with symbols in a way that seems unprecedented to me. Over in the UK, writer Paul Cornell (best known for his work on the new Doctor Who TV series) has been writing a superhero comic for Marvel based on venerable character Captain Britain. Like his earlier series Wisdom, which was one of the few comics I allowed myself money to buy in 2005, he is using it as a chance to explore ideas of Britishness in the 21st century. Who are these Britons, anyway?
He has attracted controversy for including in his ranks, as the reader viewpoint character, a young muslim woman, Faiza, complete with traditional attire. The controversy hasn’t come from an outcry – rather, from occasions when the comics media has gone all inappropriate (making ‘terrorist’ jokes is just the start of it). By and large, everyone’s been quite happy with Faiza, and it helps that the series as a whole is well-conceived and well-crafted fun.
In an issue released a month ago, young Faiza moves from initiate to full-blooded hero when she pulls Excalibur from a stone, being judged worthy to do so. (Yes, I know it was a different sword in the stone in the legend, so does Cornell, just roll with it.) This is both an obvious move and an audacious one. The King Arthur legend is the only mythology that is claimed by Britain, and over which they feel ownership. And with British identity very much under contest at present – witness endless tabloid headlines about those Muslims changing the way we British people live – it’s a bold political statement as well, about what being British means today.
Here are the panels in question:
Anyway, there’s plenty more that could be said about this but I’ll spare you because I need to get in to the office now.
The issue also includes the shocking death of another character, a shapeshifting alien who assumes the form of John Lennon most of the time because he likes it, and who is executed for mocking his fascistic captors. That’s very British, right there, not being executed for steely defiance, but rather for doggedly taking the piss. I think Britishness is in good hands with Cornell.
Further reading: Cornell’s blog where he takes reader comments on the issue in question.
Waste Minimisation Bill enters law
About two years ago, I tried out that small group action thing I’d been talking about. Three friends and I got together and decided we were going to do something – we chose to make a submission on the Waste Minimisation Bill that was then in committee.
In February 2007, we fronted up before select committee to speak to our submission. I wrote about the experience here.
Now, a year and a half later, the bill has passed into law. It has changed a bit from its earlier form, and you’d have to be a bit of an optimistic reader to find any evidence of our specific submission contributing to the changes, but I feel a kind of ownership nonetheless. This bill coming into law is an important step towards getting this country to sort out its relationship with waste and recycling.
The passing of the Waste bill has mostly gone without comment – largely due to the passing of the Emissions Trading Scheme the same day. The Greens put out a press release but that’s about it – you can read that here.
Anyway, its nice to be able to draw a line under that action. Key lessons:
(1) lawmaking takes a long time
(2) NZ’s system of government is genuinely open to participation from everyone – we have enormous power to influence things, if we only spare the time and energy and interest to use it.
Nice one.