Friday, July 22, 2011

I ask for your forgiveness in advance

Just reading an article about the killings in Norway today. And I want to be clear that I'm as horrified by the thought of them as I hope every reasonable person would be. So I don't mean to make light, rather to take some solace in dark humor, when I say that this sentence from the story jumped out at me.

See if you can tell why.

"I saw many dead people," said Elise, whose father, Vidar Myhre, didn't want her to disclose her last name.


Sigh. Laugh, clown, laugh...

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

A choice of replies

Paris Hilton storms off TV interview after being called a has-been


1. Don't you have to have once been something in order to be a has-been?

Or...

2. To be fair, Paris still can wear clothes, help cause the failure of movies (some of which should've done better) and be at least two different kinds of whore. That's not a has-been at all, that's all she's ever been.

Thank you.

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

They couldn't have just turned on a TV, I suppose. (Edited w/addition)

I'm not saying journalism all over the world has other problems than the Murdochs...but I did just notice something. If you read news items of the father and son testimony today, you'll see that in some of them, Murdoch, Sr, tells the committee, "This is the most humble day of my life."

But in others, it was "...the most humble day of my career." Well really, how hard is that? We're talking about testimony which is being televised (live) on a multiplicity of stations around the world. And they can't get right words he spoke less than two hours before?

ETA: On the other hand, Murdoch later claimed that he wasn't sure whether or not he'd said the arrested ex-employee Rebekah Brooks was his "priority." (He's been so quoted by low-profile outlets like the BBC. )

Why isn't he sure, he says? Because there were "about 20 microphones stuck in my mouth" at the time. As if the number of devices that convert sound into electronic signal in front of one's mouth at any given time have any effect on what comes out of that mouth, or memory of same.

Even granting that might be true of you or I, or any so-called "regular people," it doesn't fly when we're talking about someone who has been an influential media mogul for more than 30 years.

You're telling me he doesn't know exactly what he's saying to that self-same media at any given time, no matter how many microphones are in front of him? Well. This is another one of those problems.

Either he knows perfectly well and is lying about it, which doesn't say much for his ethics, or he truly doesn't remember something he said less than two weeks ago, which doesn't say much for his faculties.