Media & Message

This autumn St Michael's is running three mid-week talks on the media - worth attending especially in the light of the events of the hacking scandal. Tuesdays at 7:30pm (at St Michael's Macclesfield - in the town centre):

• 4th October - Revd Clair Jaquiss - radio producer of religious programmes - A Priest in Broadcasting - Life at the coalface
• 11th October - Andreas Whittam Smith (founding editor of the Independent) - Why the Press behaves as it does
• 18th October - Keith Ravenscroft - worked in advertising and communication - Are we killing the words of life?

When I find more information on the web, I shall link to it! - The St Michael's website now has a link to the pdf of the handout - and the order of speakers in my piece has now been corrected.

Not ashamed

Whilst down in Sussex a fortnight ago I picked up a copy of Heart of West Sussex - a local Christian newspaper, it contained this quote from George Carey:

Now there was hostile opposition to the Christian message and our values, demonstrated in newspapers like the 'Independent' and 'Guardian':`Words like 'evangelical, Bible, traditional values, faithfulness in marriage, worship' are boo words. Religion is despised.

(apparently from the Bognor Bible Week). I think Dr Carey has been spending too much time reading commenters on the Guardian web pages the free-for-all forum - I don't recognise that description and I am not ashamed to be either a Christian or a Guardian reader (I read the Independent too, on Sunday). I note the scare quotes around the newspaper names in the quote!

The Daily Mail Song

Hat tip to Maggi Dawn

DJs, Christians and gays

Hat tipping to the Church Times weblog comes this tale of Fat Roland's trials with Refresh FM in Manchester (website looks as out of touch as their phone lines). An item covering this story from Pink News is here
From the Fat Roland blog:

You may feel the need to protest or campaign after reading this piece. You can talk with me further at dj (at) fatroland.com. Whatever you do and to whomever you speak, please show the same grace that I have tried my hardest to show throughout all of this (often through gritted teeth or teared eyes!). You will not change minds by shouting at people: start from their point of view and work from there.

What shall it profit a man?

Nothing but profit:

The only reliable, durable, and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit.

from James Murdoch's lecture last week. I'm old fashioned enough to believe that the society which takes that as its motto has nothing left to learn of devaluation!
(whilst I'm on media big cheeses!)

It's only the truth

The most distasteful aspect of Silvio Berlusconi's behaviour is not that he is a chauvinist buffoon, nor is it that he cavorts with women more than 50 years younger than himself, abusing his position to offer them jobs as models, personal assistants or even, absurdly, candidates for the European Parliament. What is most shocking is the utter contempt with which he treats the Italian public.

for some reason Berlusconi didn't like this Times leader, here quoted from the Guardian

Oops

From today's GuardianInsert some meaningless verbiage here to finish off the weblog posting nicely.

I _am_ the administrator

I'm trying to install Adobe Air on this Mandriva/Linux/FSF system to try the BBC iPlayer. Tried the various links from the BBC page and the Adobe Air phase just seemed to do nothing. So followed these instructions, and I get this message:

I tried running it as root and then as myself when it asked me to enter the root password but still the same result. I am the administrator, I'll go and talk to myself for a bit...but I think I need a bit more work to get iPlayer up and running!
(the suggestion I found on googling of closing down firefox first, doesn't work for me, I suspect it might want use of audio, tomorrow will try immediately after a login so nothing else will - I hope - be getting in the way)
Later (31st Dec)... I've tried logging out and in, tried it with kde rather than my preferred blackbox desktop, tried rebooting and again with both kde and blackbox, so at the moment I'm stuck, maybe a little more googling?
And again... Mandriva 2008.1 (which I'm running) comes with firefox 2.x.x, I've previously installed firefox 3 but with a tarball and in my home area, I guess Adobe Air is looking for firefox 3 and when it doesn't find it stops with that unhelpful message. I've now added the main backport repository and installed the firefox 3 rpm and now Adobe Air installs correctly! (a good diagnostic would have been so much more helpful!!!)

Know your readership

I spotted this depressing headline in today's Daily Star (sorry no link!) but I guess they don't have many Muslim readers. I wonder how many female readers they have?

I'm shocked!

For some reason the Church Times didn't publish my caption in their latest competition:

FoCAs unveil their range of flying bishops -

maybe it was thought too rude?
I submitted another attempt which also mentioned that German aeroplane maker.

Blinks

on seeing this news - sounds pretty good to me!

are you my mummy?

somehow sounds appropriate for this evening

Self-promotion

My caption seems to be mentioned in the latest Church Times caption competition - but maybe being mentioned is easy?
Oh, and I see I've now managed more blog entries so far this year than in the whole of 2005 - when I had considerably more time on my hands!

Get one's tribute in early

It brings a warm glow:

The mad privatiser who held a quasi-religious belief that the market was the ideal mechanism for social organisation, who thought naked personal ambition was fine, who crushed the unions, who knew how to appeal to our basest desires, who turned us into a nation of selfish toads.

from Michele Hanson in today's Guardian.
Curiously I read this (for, I think, the first time) last night:

This woman is headstrong,obstinate and dangerously self-opinionated

Skiing on the BBC

Looks like a white-out - or the almost complete absence of racing coverage which now appears to be the norm.

Black and white

And tonight's film - this time at SilkScreen was 'Good Night and Good Luck' on McCarthyism, but also on the devaluation of truth and of television that we see today by those wishing to manipulate. A bit too much though was required after some hard watching and thinking over last night's Kite Runner!

Biscuits

And while we're on the subject of food advertising, Geoff Coupe points me to this Biscuit of the week - especially for my Serbian readers!

Penguin!

Pingouin
Originally uploaded by fflparis

After a link here, was directed to this picture. There are longer and more outrageous versions of the ad findable from the comments on the first daily motion version.

Weekend press

On an Overgrown Path has this quote from the Guardian letters page:

I asked Roger Wright, head of Radio 3, a few years ago why the BBC didn't broadcast more new music. We get too many complaining letters was his reply

Then there's Rowan Williams on the right wing American loonies:

When people talk about further destabilisation of the region - and you read some American political advisers speaking of action against Syria and Iran - I can only say that I regard that as criminal, ignorant and potentially murderous folly

should make his next meeting with Nazir-Ali fun!

Things that might have been better phrased..

from today's Guardian weekend section:

There was the same icky expectation of seeing a former child actor in a sex scene, but Radcliffe pulled it off, as does Bell in Hallam Foe

well I hope they re-attached it afterwards!
And there's a WTF from this week that I greatly enjoyed - I put a TODO on a form in our application only yesterday - need to make sure it goes before release!

Losses

Last week we had a TV in the gite - well we had one in both but the reception was considerably better for week 2! - and on the news on France2 on Monday they covered the deaths of Michel Serrault and Bergman. These were items 1 and 2, in each case they had a biographical sketch, film clips and then an interview with (the same) film critic live in the studio. By the time they'd done this we were 20 minutes in to a 40 minute bulletin - I just couldn't imagine the BBC doing a fraction of this in the main bulletin with anyone involved in the arts! The next night one channel showed La Cage aux Folles I & 2 (and another of Serrault's films on another channel) and there's been at least one of his films every night since. Bergman also collected a couple of schedule changes to include his films.
I didn't know that Serrault had spent time studying in a seminary makes the relentless camping up in La Cage Aux Folles a little uncomfortable but maybe it was so far over the top one could put the doubts about agendas to one side.
Serrault's funeral service was in the wooden church in Honfleur I photographed last year and which we'd seen a few days before.