Yesterday provided yet more evidence that the internet is transforming the media. In this case The Guardian newspaper is behaving like a radio broadcaster. Yesterday’s entry on its Conference Blog (New Labour is really a post-Thatcherite party) contains a link to an audio interview with Tony Benn at this week’s Labour Party conference in Brighton. So if you haven’t time to read the paper, you may find it more convenient to listen to it instead!
All posts by Kevin
Think Canadian
Do you remember Apple’s television advertising campaign commonly referred to as Switch from a few years ago? There are a number of parodies floating around the internet, at least one of which (starring Will Ferrell) is still available online (Careful – it’s 4.1 Meg).
Well, Tod Maffin of the CBC has produced his own version to highlight one of the risks inherent in the current lockout affecting Canada’s national broadcaster. It’s pretty good, but you probably have to be Canadian to appreciate it fully.
Katrina comments
The NPR web site has an interesting page of comments from the public about Hurricane Katrina. Here’s one example from Marybeth Lima of Baton Rouge, Louisiana:
As a survivor of the outskirts of Hurricane Katrina, right now, this is what I know:
- that in Baton Rouge, La., the winds hit 110 miles per hour, and the hummingbirds navigated this wind, which picked up 200 ton blocks of concrete in Mississippi, like a breeze;– that a tree frog successfully rode out the storm on the leeward side of a Mexican fan palm that battered our dining room window;
- that though the wind thrashed the web of a writing spider and her egg sac, all three sailed through the storm without damage.
I am in awe of these micro miracles in the face of such macro devastation: trees down, power lines live, flooding, storm surge and death, even in our fair city.
Read more at NPR : Affected by Katrina? Listeners Write In
How to fold a shirt
I couldn’t let this discovery go by without recording it. So here’s a way to fold a shirt in 3 seconds flat: Japanese way of folding T-shirts!.
Top 50 Things a Real Foodie Should Do
Just found this article from the May edition of the Observer Food Monthly, but better late than never right?
Top 50 Things a Real Foodie Should Do
To celebrate Observer Food Monthly’s fiftieth edition, we asked some of our favourite bon viveurs what they considered most essential to do before they died. …
31) Get up early and go to market
Preferably in Provence. The smell is a mix of pine and cigarette smoke with the occasional strong hit of goat cheese. Cogniscenti head for the Var area, particularly the markets of Cotignac (summer only), the bustling town of Salernes (Wednesday and Saturdays) and Aups (famous for truffles).
The Moral-Hazard Myth
Malcolm Gladwell has written an interesting article in the New Yorker about the Bush Administration’s innovation to improve health care in America, known as Health Savings Accounts.
Here’s a brief excerpt:
A country that displays an almost ruthless commitment to efficiency and performance in every aspect of its economy — a country that switched to Japanese cars the moment they were more reliable, and to Chinese T-shirts the moment they were five cents cheaper — has loyally stuck with a health-care system that leaves its citizenry pulling out their teeth with pliers.
You can read the rest at The Moral-Hazard Myth.
Google Earth
In recent weeks I’ve been captivated by Google Earth.
If you don’t know it, the BBC television programme Click Online has a good description of this spectacular mapping software at Portal race goes local and global.
BBC Podcasts
The BBC has started to provide MP3 recordings of some of its radio programmes. In cyberspace this phenomenon is called “podcasting” (after the ubiquitous Apple iPod which can be used to play these files) and it’s all the rage.
I’m a cynic when it comes to the hype surrounding podcasting. It’s been simple to record radio programmes on tape for most of my life, and it’s been possible to make your own MP3 recordings automatically, using software such as Total Recorder, for several years already. So I find it difficult to get excited about recording them digitally now.
Nevertheless, I welcome the BBC’s initiative, if only because one of my favourite Radio 4 programmes is included in the trial — In Business. See the BBC’s Download and Podcast Trial for more information.
Hot dog!
A sign of significant progress in North American culture …
CHICAGO — It is a source of frustration at cookouts everywhere: There are never enough hot dogs, and there always seem to be way too many buns.
Hot dogs and hot-dog buns are sold in different quantities, but that is going to change beginning today.
Vienna Beef and Alpha Baking Co., which manufactures S. Rosen’s buns, promise to sell the buns and hot dogs in the same numbers.
Baby Name Wizard
The Baby Name Wizard’s
NameVoyager is interesting. It displays a dynamic frequency distribution for the most popular (top 1,000) first names for American children born since 1880.
Having run some of my relatives’ names through it I can see that my extended family has been pretty conventional in its choice of names over the years, despite not residing in the US.