Dadblog

Didn’t know about these before the MediaGuardian story today, but apparently the Shaftas are awards for the most appalling British newspaper behaviour and cock-ups of the past year. I’ve often wondered what an informal watchdog of the British press would look like. You could either go pompous and outraged, or just take the piss - as the Shaftas seem to do. But who’s behind them?

Best story in here: Worst Broadcaster of the Year, which went to Anil Bhoyrul, aka Frank Bailey, of LBC and the Sunday Express. Bhoyrul is an appalling little shitbag who uses his column to write lies about others, particularly egregious given he’s supposed to be a business journalist.

“Incredibly Bhoyrul managed to mistake lauded film director Ken Loach for Coronation Street star Bill Loach, who plays Ken Barlow. Told that Loach had been filming in Mozambique for six weeks, he asked: “I can’t wait to see that episode, can you give us a little taster of the storyline?”

“It’s mainly about starving children,” replied Loach. “Sounds great,” remarked the best undercover media reporter in the business. “The guys at EastEnders will probably be surprised.”

Cue radio silence before Bhoyrul hurriedly fumbled into a commercial break.”

Genius.

Courtesy of Bruce Sterling, this corker: Saddam Hussein was a fan of Athena-meets-Yes-album-cover artist Rowena. He had two of her paintings on the wall of his seedy middle-aged Lothario love-nest.

She wants them back, because she doesn’t want to be associated with the bloodsoaked booby. But what does this say about the mindset of the Tikrit Tosser? Just think - all those teenage boys playing Warhammer and listening to W.A.S.P and looking at pictures like this. They’re all potential fascists. Scary.

Schlunzi, the German Who Must Be Obeyed, has started a collection of Blogs Owned By Yahooers (former and current). As this is firmly in the “circle jerk” Church of Blogdom (The RegisterTM), it can only be whole-heartedly applauded.

And of course by calling Schlunzi, someone you don’t know, the German Who Must Be Obeyed, a reference you couldn’t possibly understand, I am only enhancing my elitist blogging credentials. Not so much an in-joke as an in-lifestyle.

Management techniques are a continuing source of fascination, so here’s an interesting one: Semco, a Brazilian firm run by Ricardo Semler. What they do (site and inventory management) is irrelevant to how they do it. The highlights:

• Employees work in groups of 12, set their own salaries, and decide who they want in the group each six months. So if you set your salary too high, and you’re perceived to be taking the piss, you’re not asked back into the group in six months (ie, feedback in an emergent system, as Steven Johnson would have it>
• Meetings are optional. If no-one turns up, the subject is too dull or unimportant to be pursued
• There are hammocks for people to take time out to think
• There are no receptionists or PAs - why take all the shit parts of people’s jobs, package them up, and then give them to somone else to suffer?
• Semler doesn’t believe in growth for growth’s sake or forecasting - he believes a company of 500 people is as interesting as a company with 30,000

All barking mad, probably. But I should read the book, The Seven-day Weekend, and there’s a good Guardian Unlimited summary here.

There was a great article in Word magazine last month (by Andrew Harrison, I think) about how iPod had taken over his life as well as his record collection, with his one human function reduced to “feed the iPod”! It is weird how this little piece of technology changes behaviour. For me, its impact went as follows:

• iPod time +1: Flurry of downloading, focussing on that stuff that you never got quite round to buying - for me, this meant a lorryload of Frank Zappa for reasons I can’t quite fathom. All these downloads (particularly Zappa) were pretty much worthless.
• iPod time +2: Start ripping entire CDs from the home collection onto the iPod. This takes weeks, and only make it to the letter D in the music collection.
• Start being more choosy about the CDs that get ripped, allowing me to get to the letter O.
• Start being more choosy about the tracks that get ripped, allowing me to get pretty much to the end of the music collection. But…..
• Still buying CDs, which can’t squeeze onto the 5GB hard drive (the pains of early adoption).
• Also, iPod is now chock-a-block of songs I know really well, and because of some localised technical weirdness iPod seems to like playing the same 30 or 40. Music starting to feel stale.
• iPod present: Decide to only rip songs and CDs I don’t know inside out. This has led to bizarre internal calculation about when a song is “known” - decide on rule of thumb that “if you know the next line to the one you’re listening to, you know the song” and off it comes.

So, I’m listening to all sorts of music I don’t normally listen to in the day-to-day. Today, it’s Bobby Bland. I am turning into a fat 40-year-old world-music-jazz-and-blues Radio 3 bore. Ain’t life grand?

Something’s always puzzled me about dictatorships - who are all these people who support them? And who wants to bring them back? When Milosevic was tottering in Serbia, there seemed an endless supply of men and women prepared to stand out in the rain and shout support for the horrible sod. Not all of them can have been rent-a-mobbed. Give it a couple of weeks, and there’ll be some morose Iraqi lamenting the “good old days” of Saddam. And apparently there’s been talk in Russia of restoring the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the forerunner of the KGB, on his former plinth in Lubyanka Square.

This is more than just nostalgia or the bleatings of a privileged few who stand to lose out when the dictator topples. There seems to be a political class of “wannabe oppressed” who thrive on political masochism. There was a fantastic Steve Bell cartoon after the 1992 election, which showed the Tories boasting about lying, cheating, messing things up - and still winning elections! The 1992 election seemed to be a mild, British episode of political masochism. Sheer inertia kept the idiots in power. Better the devil you know.

There’s more to this than I’m capable of going into. But every time I see some old lady waving a dictator’s banner in the air while the rest of the world is trying to rid her of him (and it’s always a him, pace Thatcher), I’ll ask myself: why? For God’s sake, why?

Buying unknown music is always risky - that’s what makes it fun, yes? Well, two years ago I walked into a CD shop in Silves, the old Moorish capital in Portugal, and asked the guy in there to sell me a couple of CDs by Portuguese artists which were in some way representative of what the Portuguese liked to listen too.

Now, Portugal has a rich folk music tradition. The most notable strain is fado, a kind of mixture of maudlin Celtic and delta blues. So I was quite excited by what I might get.

I shouldn’t have been. I got a CD by a band called Xutos & Pontapes, who are terrible, increasingly ancient Gang of Four copyists, and a double CD by a chap called Rui Veloso, who looks like Ned Flanders and plays like Eric Clapton trying to be Carlos Santana. So my “local music” purchase ended up with a bunch of UK indie copyists, and an American blues copyist copyist (the double copyist is deliberate).

Slightly over-the-top title to this piece, but I’ve just read a fascinating article from the Japan Media Review which asserts that “PC literacy” is becoming an issue in Japan because most people don’t use PCs to access “Web” services. They’re all using their mobiles.

This seems to be because in Japan, communications tools - particularly email - are the killer app. People are more interested in messaging each other than finding the latest news story, but they don’t want to talk to each other (I read somewhere that it’s considered extremely rude to talk on your mobile in a public place, which is why there was an explosion in SMS in the first place, and why email-by-mobile is now the number one app).

Another issue is the perceived herd mentality of Japanese youth, who are not interested in dipping into the chaotic mediasphere of the Web, but would rather just consume the walled garden content supplied by Japanese telecoms carriers, led by NTT DoCoMo. Not so sure about this one: the Japanese think a term like “media literacy” is pretty meaningless, and I can’t help thinking they’re right. As one guy in the JMR article says, “News is all around us — there are televisions everywhere. I have no need to read the news on my cell phone.” Well, exactly. Only a world obsessed with itself (ie, the Western world) needs the Drudge Report. It’s fairly typical of a Western writer/thinker to perceive a lack in another culture as something inherently negative.

The JMR piece was written by Tim Clark, author of the Japan Internet Report. Clark is a Senior Fellow at Tokyo-based venture incubator SunBridge and editor of the monthly Japan Entrepreneur Report.

I was thinking a lot about yesterday’s Guardian Life piece about the attack on American science by the new Right (read the article here). It did lead to one positive thought. If the religion of the far right in the States really does stamp on cloning, stem cell research, evolutionary theory and the like, it’s going to hit America where it really, really hurts: right in the wallet. It may be that the religion that holds the new Right together also holds the seeds of its destruction. Which is a settling thought.

It was interesting to see Gordon Brown’s Budget make a specific commitment to investment in stem cell research. This wasn’t picked up by the papers in any great detail, but in the context of a Budget which aligned British investment strategy very closely with that of America (in the form of state-funded venture capital firms), a commitment to invest in a type of research which is anathema to the current U.S. administration is at least significant.

Brilliantly scary article on Guardian Unlimited’s excellent new Life section today about the growth of “stealth creationism” in America. Read it, I won’t quote from it.