Archive for the ‘News’ Category
You are currently browsing the archives for the News category.
17
Oct
2009
Don’t hold your breath for tolerance.
In the past week, Stephen Gately, former member of Irish boy-band Boyzone, died. Jan Moir of the Daily Mail wrote an incredibly repulsive article on the subject and Charlie Brooker responded indignantly.
Meanwhile, a Ugandan minister of parliament has proposed legislation to enforce a penalty of death for the “offence of aggravated homosexuality.”
Well then.
7
Oct
2009
Die Stimme des Klaviers
Peter Ablinger, an Austrian composer currently residing in Berlin, has done something rather interesting: he made a recording of a child reading the Proclamation of the European Environmental Criminal Court, then invented a mechanical piano player capable of reading notes in a very high time resolution from a computer.
The computer performs a frequency analysis of the sound spectrum, aided by Ablinger himself, which is then fed into the piano player and out comes the child’s voice.
<object width=”490″ height=”344″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/muCPjK4nGY4&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1″></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><param name=”allowScriptAccess” value=”always”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/muCPjK4nGY4&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowfullscreen=”true” allowScriptAccess=”always” width=”425″ height=”344″></embed></object>
(Video in German with English subtitles)
While I wouldn’t have much hope for people trying to work out what the piano is “saying” without the aid of seeing the words as they’re heard, I think it’s a pretty interesting experiment. The auto-player in itself is something to be marvelled at. Neat!
1
Sep
2009
Ethnic Hungarians in Slovakia to be fined for speaking their own language
Daniel Tencer has posted his English translation of an article in Gazeta Wyborcza from Warsaw, Poland, which describes a new law which imposes a fine of five to ten thousand euros for publicly speaking Hungarian in Slovakia:
Ethnic Hungarians in Slovakia are planning to protest today in the city of Dunajska Streda against a law they say violates their basic human rights. Under a penalty of five to ten thousand Euros, as of today it will be a crime in Slovakia to use the Hungarian language in public places.
As the Hungarian weekly Heti Világgazdaság states, every Hungarian doctor in Slovakia will from now on be required to speak Slovakian with their patients, even ethnically Hungarian patients, even if neither party wishes it so.
[Explanatory note: There are 550,000 ethnic Hungarians living in Slovakia. They are there because after the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed in World War I, the Allied Powers drew the borders of Hungary in such a way as to marginalize the Hungarian nation. A full 3.3 million Hungarians were left out of Hungary, and have been living as minorities in Slovakia, Romania, etc. for the past ninety years.]
The protest marks the culmination of several nightmarish weeks in Hungarian-Slovak relations, during which time the Slovak government refused entry to the Hungarian prime minister, and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences declared the new Slovak language law a violation of fundamental human rights.
It’s always a thorny issue when governments get involved in mandating and prescribing the use of language in their respective societies, but it’s surprised me that such an incredibly racist law brought in in Eastern Europe has gone almost completely unnoticed in the news media — especially when one considers the background to the Hungarians’ presence in Slovakia.
Edit: Ah. Literally minutes after I clicked “Publish” (I didn’t know my blog was that closely watched! ;) ), a story about this appeared in the third most prominant position on the BBC News website.
30
Jun
2009
OMG DID YOU HEAR MJ DIED
Michael Jackson died and Charlie Brooker wrote a great blog post about the death and how the media’s handled it:
I was at Glastonbury when Jacko died. That’s not a factual statement, but a T-shirt slogan. The day after his death, souvenir tops with “I was at Glasto 09 when Jacko died” printed on them were already on sale around the site. In fact, when Jacko died, I was at home playing Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars on a Nintendo DSi. I am 38 years old.
…
The next day he was still dead, but somehow deader than the day before. He was all over the radio and papers. The TV had clips of Thriller on heavy rotation, which seemed a tad inappropriate, what with him playing a decomposing corpse in it. If Bruce Willis died falling from a skyscraper, I doubt they’d illustrate his life story by repeatedly showing that bit from Die Hard where he ties a firehose round his waist and jumps off the building.
Across all the networks, a million talking heads shared their thoughts and feelings on his death. They had rung everyone in the universe and invited them on the show. On This Morning, a Coronation Street actor revealed he had once had tickets for a Michael Jackson concert but couldn’t go because of the traffic. It was a sad day indeed. At 3pm, his death was still “BREAKING NEWS” according to Sky, which has to be some kind of record. Even 9/11 didn’t “break” that long.
He ends with a well-expressed sentiment I share completely:
But the news is not the place to “celebrate” Jackson’s music. The Glastonbury stage, the pub, the club, the office stereo, the arts documentary: that’s the place. The news should report his death, then piss off out of the way, leaving people to moonwalk and raise a toast in peace.
11
Jun
2009
Is this some kind of sick joke?
From BBC News:
John Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono has been given a lifetime achievement honour at Mojo magazine’s awards in London.
Mojo chief editor Phil Alexander, who hosted the event, praised Ono, 76, as “a huge influence on modern music”.
Bollocks.
