No news here…
As of Sunday evening, the most viewed story on the Guardian website was this: Tiger Woods rescued from crash by wife Elin Nordegren carrying a golf club.
I’ll reframe that for you.
On the weekend that a bomb killed thirty people in Russia, over one hundred people died in floods in Saudi Arabia, dozens died on a capsized ferry in Bangladesh (to point out but a few stories), what was everyone talking about?
A man who hits little balls around the grass with a stick, has crashed his car. Sorry, a man who gets an obscene amount of money for hitting little balls around the grass with a stick (and has a man to carry his spare sticks for him) has crashed his car.
No, scratch that.
A man who gets an obscene amount of money for hitting little balls around the grass with a stick (and has a man to carry his spare sticks for him) has crashed his car, was rescued by his trophy wife (using one of his sticks!) and has sparked an inordinate and disproportionate amount of media attention and speculation as to what might have made him crash into a fire hydrant outside one of his houses.
That is all…
Another apology…
More stomach-turning revelations about the Catholic Church in Ireland: Irish Catholic Church apologises for abuse by priests.
Yes, there’s a public apology, but how many times do these people have to say sorry before it loses all meaning? The sheer scale of these abuses would surely have seen any other organisation shut down long ago and its perpetrators punished.
Did the culpable Bishops and Cardinals go to confession and admit their sins to their fellow men of the cloth? I wonder what sort of penance you’d be expected to pay for the facilitation and cover-up of child rape and abuse?
Unqualified nonsense…
It’s an interesting indictment of today’s employment practices that some industries not only require applicants to have a degree, but some will not even give your CV a second glance unless its the right kind of degree from the right institution as well. I read with interest yesterday the comments made by Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto: I wouldn’t get a job here now.
Miyamoto is a true games guru. He’s the man behind the classic Mario and Zelda games and the innovations such as the Gameboy and Wii consoles. But he admits that were he applying to work with the company today he’d struggle to get in with his qualifications. So what does this say about the way we measure creativity and intelligence?
It reminded me of when I bumped into an old colleague a while ago. We’d worked together about fifteen years ago for a utility company. He was still there but bemoaning the fact that everyone there is now a graduate, even for basic clerical jobs. This of course meant also that despite his years of experience, he’d hit the glass ceiling long ago and was just killing time ’til retirement.
An interview coach recently posted a list of the way out and weird questions that Google might ask you if you decide that you want to work for them: 140 Google Interview Questions. I don’t know about anyone else, but my bullshit threshold is quite low and I’d probably walk out of any interview that fired nonsense like this at me.
All this is weighing heavily on my mind at present. I’ve just come out of a ‘job matching’ process at work and a set of arbitrary and out-sourced criteria have decided that I’m not worth what I’m being paid. My bollocks feel well and truly kicked and the job market seems a daunting and uncertain place.
‘A pair of oversized breasts and a happy ending…’
So Montgomery Burns (aka Rupert Murdoch) wants to start charging for content from his newspaper sites: Murdoch puffs Microsoft over Google.
It’s not yet clear how his strategy might work. The conjecture seems split between plans to erect ‘pay walls’ around the sites and the idea of a deal with Microsoft to feature content only found through its Bing search engine.
Either way, it’s obvious that Mr Burns doesn’t like the open nature of the internet. He and his son want to see organisations like the BBC charging for their (our) content too. This is supposedly in order to level the playing-field for companies like News Corp who are hemorrhaging money and readers from their newspaper businesses.
I do occasionally read The Times Online but today got this (pictured) reminder of why it won’t be such a great loss if I can’t access the site in future. Apart from being utterly sick of the constant sight of these two moronic cretins in the press recently, it was the very idea that they are considered part of the site’s ‘Arts’ coverage that struck me. The Times is still considered in parts to be a high-brow paper, but its contribution to the dumbing down of the arts is there for all to behold. X-Factor may be mass entertainment TV but it is certainly not art, in the same way, not everyone with a recording contract is an ‘artist’ and not every newspaper or news site is full of ‘news’. Increasingly its all just celebrity gossip and lifestyle pieces. If you want to lose the contents of your stomach, try a visit to the emetically middle-class anxiety of the Alpha Mummy blog. I mean, who writes this shit and who reads it?
Of course, for the main part, Murdoch still plays to the cheap seats through Sky TV and The Sun. And, if any of his publications purvey any culture at all, then it’s surely just an attempt to mop up a small demographic of the literate. Just look at the Sky Arts channels (if you can find them) for recycled, clichéd, antiquated and second-rate programming.
In the U.S., Murdoch’s flagship network is Fox News, a station slammed by the government there as ‘either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party.’ Murdoch doesn’t peddle news so much as he peddles an agenda to support his world view and that of his many business interests. That he now wants you to pay for his piss-poor content is a measure of his arrogance.
I looked for further similarities between Burns and Murdoch and I stumbled across this quote:
“Just give the great unwashed a pair of oversized breasts and a happy ending, and they’ll ‘oink’ for more every time.”
If you didn’t know the source, would you be sure which one said it?
So, much like the music industry assuming that every illegal download is a lost sale, Murdoch Burns assumes that people using the internet are now using Google to steal his content and that every time someone reads his sites, they are not buying a newspaper. He just want to secure revenues from new channels down which he can pour cheap shit to anyone fool enough to pay.
The truth is that the internet doesn’t function on the old top-down model and people will find content for free and in the way that suits them. And, there’s nothing that Monty or Rupert can do about it.
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