Friday, May 22, 2009

People suck


From The Age

More from Cannes and the world of celebrity irony, brought to you by blonde actress Hayden Panettiere - a woman described by some as a less attractive Miley Cyrus, which presumably means more genes from Billy Ray.

She has spent the past few days on the French Riviera, cuddling Pamela Anderson's former lover, Steve Jones, on a boat owned by Elton John and David Furnish.

But the names are not the news - it's the tattoo spilt down her left flank.

The Heroes starlet and sometime singer has no doubt spent a lifetime spelling out the preponderance of vowels in her last name, but she seems to have been less careful in directing her tattooist.

Panettiere, 19, got inked late last year but it was not until she lay out on the yacht that we could read the elaborate script. Vivere senza rimipianti, it reads, with an extra 'i' in rimpianti. The phrase is Italian for "live without regret", but one cannot help imagining she would be feeliing a liittle of the stuuff.

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

USVI


Pretty excited to be heading to the US Virgin Islands in a couple of months as part of our July/August American trip.

According to the official USVI website:

Our long standing, enviable international reputation is not solely based on our pristine beaches, warm weather, and crystal-clear waters -- we're also the most culturally diverse, ethnically rich, and artistically vibrant society in the tropics.
If you're an American it's probably like going to Bali - but not that many Aussies make it to Saint John et al.


How heavily retouched does this picture look?

Friday, May 08, 2009

The queen of dogs

Firepower

A surprisingly emotional outburst from Paul Sheehan in the SMH about the Firepower debacle:

It is difficult to exaggerate the scale of the lies, the extent of the damage, the trail of destructive bastardry left behind by Timothy Francis Johnston, who lied to everyone, cheated everyone, and, as you read this, lives in luxury overseas because the Australian authorities are too stupid to charge him with fraud and thus be able to seek his extradition.

...

Since Johnston graduated from St Laurence's College, a Christian Brothers school in Brisbane, he has become an increasingly deluded, reckless, pathological and criminal predator. His exaggerations accumulated until they became a pyramid of lies which became a pyramid of frauds, built on pyramid selling. Almost nobody checked the detail, and there were so many details which would have exposed the lies.

He could never have wreaked the damage he did without the active support of the Australian government, and the passivity of regulators and police.

Johnston had no patents. No intellectual property rights. No scientific evidence. No factories. No prospectus. No audited accounts.

No large export orders. In fact, he had almost no sales. He spoke of a global company but in reality it was a handful of people in an industrial estate in Perth. The unprecedented scale of this horror story has never been fully understood, and never been available to the public, until today.

Because today is the publication date of a book, Firepower, which lays out the magnitude of this fraud and the depth of its implications. It has to be mandatory reading for the Trade Minister, Simon Crean, and his senior departmental officials. Crean will enjoy the discomfort it brings to his Liberal predecessors in government, but not for long, because Johnston is now his problem.

...

It is the missing due diligence, the prosecutorial zeal, the big picture. It presents the events that should have animated every agency that came into contact with Johnston and his idiotic narcissism. Instead, the job has been done by Gerard Ryle, a journalist.

Firepower groans with a mass of damning detail, the work of someone who has won 15 awards for investigative journalism, including four Walkley Awards. Ryle has been a Walkley finalist 11 times. He is the news editor of this newspaper.


Given that I haven't read it, of course it may be true that Ryle has written the greatest book of all time - somehow displacing Infinite Jest from the top of the list - but the above is fairly heavy praise!! And it even manages to include flattering details about Ryle's career. And amazingly the greatest investigative journalist of all time is the news editor of the SMH, the paper which published Sheehan's story. Admittedly, this fact is fully disclosed about half-way through the article - but for my money this is not enough. If the SMH wants to run an article so strongly praising a book and the man who wrote it - and that man is a senior editor of the SMH - then the disclosure should be upfront in big bold letters.

Having said all that, I do want to read the book.

Aghan Idol

An open letter to my many loyal readers.

Everyone should watch SBS at 7:30pm tonight for the Australian premiere of Afghan Star, a documentary about the television show Afghan Star shown on Tolo TV. It won an award at Sundance earlier this year and is meant to be v good. Plus one of the Mohsenis is a close friend.

Tolo is an Afghani TV station owned and run by the Melbourne/Afghan Mohseni family.

SEE this article from The Age.