Tricky - The Prince, 31 July 2008

Saw Tricky last night at The Prince Bandroom in St Kilda. I last saw him about 10 years ago - also at The Prince - and it was great to see him again. He opened with Love Cats (the Cure) and mixed up material from his latest album and earlier releases. Costanza Frankavilla, the singer - and it being a Tricky gig, the person who did most of the actual vocalising - was fantastic and suited the material perfectly.

Tricky spent at least a third of the night facing away from the audience, either smoking joints or just swaying gently - but when he was facing the crowd he had huge charisma, looked amazing and had great energy. His less accessible material made much more sense live than it does when recorded and overall it was a great show. Although missing many of his crowd-pleasing tracks.


I have a few terrible photos from my Blackberry Curve. It's a great phone, but not perfectly designed for gig photos.

I'm ok but my watch sick

The new Lil Wayne album - The Carter III - is awesome.
Funny, catchy, clever, poppy and innovative.
Reminiscent at times of Kool Keith and/or Busta Rhymes, but with a twist.

I'm ok but my watch sick.

We are not the same I am a martian.

Flows so sick I make you want to throw your food up.

They don't make 'em like me no more. Matter of fact never made 'em like me before.

eBay (temporarily) admits defeat

Extract from an email today sent to me as an eBay Australia member:

Changes to eBay.com.au scheduled for 15 July are being postponed until the review process with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) regarding its recent draft notice is complete. As previously announced, eBay.com.au is continuing to work with the ACCC to achieve an outcome that benefits buyers and sellers.

the worst review I've read in some time

From the New York Times' review of The Love Guru:

To say that the movie is not funny is merely to affirm the obvious. The word “unfunny” surely applies to Mr. Myers’s obnoxious attempts to find mirth in physical and cultural differences but does not quite capture the strenuous unpleasantness of his performance. No, “The Love Guru” is downright antifunny, an experience that makes you wonder if you will ever laugh again. And this is, come to think of it, something of an achievement.
What is the opposite of a belly laugh? An interesting question, in a way, and to hear lines like “I think I just made a happy wee-wee” or “I’m making diarrhea noises in my cup” or to watch apprentice gurus attack one another with urine-soaked mops is to grasp the answer.

Allegations against Keddies

The Sydney Morning Herald today publishes serious allegations against Keddies, the big NSW personal injury law-firm. Obviously these allegations are untested - and they are denied by Keddies - but if true they are very disturbing.

Extracts below

THE state's largest specialised personal injury law firm is battling allegations of professional misconduct, including gross overcharging and falsifying documents as well as defamation, during an ongoing and bitter dispute with some former staff.

Former clients have claimed Keddies Lawyers has retained hundreds of thousands of dollars of settlement money from compensation cases without their knowledge.

Crippled and injured car accident clients of the firm maintain they were never sent bills, which in one case would have revealed a businessman had more than 80 per cent of his payout taken in legal fees and expenses.

Another woman, catastrophically injured in an outback vehicle accident six years ago, discovered well after her claim was settled without any court hearing that she had paid about $800,000 in legal fees from her $3.5 million payout.

And the father of a girl killed in a Sydney car accident was compensated $300,000 for psychological injury but received only $85,000 net initially after almost $215,000 in legal fees and expenses were charged.

Keddies says all the complaints against the firm are "totally without substance" and were orchestrated primarily by three "former disgruntled staff members" who were sacked in late 2006 and now "control" the unhappy clients.

The Herald has learnt that Keddies has refunded more than $500,000 to a group of at least seven former clients who complained to the Office of the Legal Services Commissioner about overcharging.

One of them was Mr Gu, who was repaid $100,000. His reimbursement cheques, dated two months apart and for separate amounts of $40,000 and $60,000, were made out to his daughter, who has never been a Keddies client.

Some of the clients received refunds, signed confidentiality agreements and agreed to withdraw complaints.

The managing partner, Russell Keddie, said the refunds - even one as large as Mr Gu's - were not in any way an admission of overcharging.

"Paying them this money, it was more to say, 'We're sorry they were so unhappy'," he said.

Most of the official complaints about Keddies that followed were from Chinese citizens injured in Australia during holidays or while on work visas, and who later returned to China.

Mr Keddie said that without arranging for the cases to be heard overseas, the plaintiffs would have been unlikely to have been compensated for their injuries because visa or medical reasons prevented their return to Australia.

Mr Keddie said there would not have been any complaints except "the horrible renegade employees got into their ears" and encouraged Chinese clients to make them. "How would someone in Beijing or Shanghai, like Mr Gu, for example, understand about the Office of the Legal Services Commissioner?"

"We do have happy clients," Mr Keddie said, as a pile of testimonials and pictures of smiling, well-compensated claimants in their journal to clients attests.

The partners also denied the firm had a reputation for overcharging.

"Keddies is a conservative firm," Mr Keddie said. "We are not as aggressive as some of our rivals."

A time ledger of the Keddies solicitor David Marocchi's work for one client, seen by the Herald, shows that on one day in November 2005, he recorded 22 hours of his time and charged $2175 "to review" a file transferred from a colleague, a further $2610 "to peruse" it, $1740 "to consider" it, $1087.50 for "drafting" and another $1087.50 for further "considering". That day's work appeared to total $9500. Mr Marocchi has denied inflating fees or recording excessive hours.

Ebay paypal exclusivity shot down

According to The Age, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (the ACCC to us Aussies) is planning to disallow the trial of eBay's new business plan - the compulsory use of PayPal.

[by way of background, eBay has been proposing ceasing allowing the use of any payment mechanism in Australia other than PayPal or cash on delivery... its corporate filings indicate that if successful it intends to roll this out worldwide].

The competition watchdog has flagged its intention to scuttle a plan by online auctioneer eBay to force its Australian users on to a PayPal-only payments system.

Citing concerns about the "anti-competitive effect" of the proposal, the chairman of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, Graeme Samuel, has issued a statement calling on eBay to delay implementation of the plan, which was supposed to take effect from next Tuesday.

eBay's proposal would have required items bought and sold on the site to be paid for using PayPal, which eBay owns.

...

"The ACCC is concerned that the [PayPal proposal] will allow eBay to use its market power in the supply of online market places to substantially lessen competition in the market in which PayPal operates," Mr Samuel said in the statement.

"Given eBay's position as Australia's leading online market place, the [PayPal proposal] will substantially reduce competition to supply online payment services to users of online market places more generally."

The ACCC has issued a draft notice proposing to revoke eBay's request for immunity from prosecution, which the company lodged in April.

Fantastic Rupert Murdoch article

From The Atlantic - focusing on Murdoch's acquisition of the Wall Street Journal, but also some cheap shots (especially about Murdoch's Australian-ness), genuine insights and reasonably good anecdotes.

Some selected quotes:

With his thin hair dyed rusty brown and brushed straight back off the wide dome of his forehead, and modish wire-framed glasses over small, heavy-lidded eyes, his face was all too familiar, its deeply creased cheeks sagging in a fine cascade of syncline folds to the crisp knot of his blue silk tie.

We’ve come here to expand, he said. He has announced his intention for the remade Journal not just to supplant The New York Times as the nation’s preeminent daily newspaper but to become the first truly global daily. This would be music to the ears of any newsroom, so hope mingled with the professional dread in Murdoch’s audience that afternoon. He may be awful, but he is rich and awful, smart and awful, powerful and awful, and while he may well be crazy to still believe in the future of print, he is determined and crazy. Murdoch might be the last person The Journal would have chosen as its savior, but newspapers may well be down to last hopes.

Rupert Murdoch is, by most accounts, a delightful man. Born to wealth that he has manifestly multiplied, he is a man who lives a globe-trotting lifestyle, a man who need never carry his own bags or stand in line at a security checkpoint at an airport, a man who moves through a string of fabulous residences; it would be easy to assume that he is a coddled, petulant creature of privilege. Yet Murdoch often flies commercial, carries his own bags, prefers a regular hotel room to a suite, uses taxis, and shops everywhere for bargains.

He is a bare-knuckled, union-crushing capitalist who has had more success than anyone wooing the ruling Communists in China. He is a Thatcherite conservative whose New York tabloid has endorsed Barack Obama. He is a 77-year-old who lives the life of a young man, with a Chinese-born wife (his third) who is almost four decades his junior and two small daughters to complement his four middle-aged children. He is a global-media baron, a titan in his field, whose empire now includes 20th Century Fox, Fox TV, Fox News, Fox Business Network, HarperCollins, The Times and Sunday Times of London, The Sun, the New York Post, The Weekly Standard, Dow Jones, BSkyB television, National Geographic Channel, MySpace, etc., etc. But Murdoch still sees himself as a stubborn outsider, a freethinking cultural marauder come to rattle the halls of power—a kind of Aussie Bart Simpson writ large. And nothing gets his juices flowing faster than a chance to disturb any establishment, be it Britain’s labor unions (he broke their stranglehold on London newspapers), the BBC (which he has successfully challenged with BSkyB), the dominant American TV networks (which he has taken on with his Fox channels), or CNN (which his Fox News Channel surpassed as the leading all-news cable channel, after CNN’s Ted Turner famously promised to squish Murdoch “like a bug”).

Murdoch is given credit for great business acumen, but he is less a pioneer and visionary than a wealthy and aggressive collector. He has vast resources and is constantly adding and subtracting companies to and from his empire. He identifies potential markets, and then, like a rich art buyer writing big checks for the work of artists who have already achieved critical recognition, he buys into companies that have demonstrated promise in reaching those markets. He doesn’t have a record of consistent success; some of his biggest newspapers lose money, including the New York Post and The Times of London. What he has are the resources to absorb failure.

at a time when every big newspaper is tinkering with futuristic business models, Murdoch is doing so with both feet planted firmly in the past. His strategy for success in 2008 is to behave as though the year is 1908. So while his competitors retrench, Murdoch is going to war—by challenging The New York Times, in particular, to an old-fashioned newspaper battle. Except this time the stakes aren’t nickels in Times Square, but dominance in America, and the world.

It’s a war he could well lose. For print journalists, the good news about Murdoch is that he believes the old Gutenberg technology still has legs, and that he is willing to back that belief with capital. But any 21st-century newspaper war is going to be fought in large part on the Web, and when it comes to new media, Murdoch’s record is mixed at best. From the 1990s on, he has repeatedly and unsuccessfully attempted to establish a foothold on the Internet. There was Delphi, an early player in the online industry, which he abandoned a few years after purchasing it. There was PointCast, a venture featuring something called “push” technology that Murdoch flirted with before it sank as quickly as it surfaced. Today he has staked his claim with MySpace, and he is actively seeking to broaden that beachhead by shopping around for a proven performer he can buy. He has flirted both with keeping The Journal’s content behind a firewall (where it remains at the moment) and with offering it for free, which indicates that he hasn’t cracked the central problem of Internet publication: How do you make it pay?

It’s also a war he could abandon if it doesn’t seem to be going his way. As his Internet ventures suggest, Murdoch has a history of moving aggressively into new territory, only to retreat just as quickly. He has built his media empire not only by identifying proven properties and investing in them, but also by ruthlessly discarding those that fail to measure up to his expectations. He can be a fickle patron, because his enthusiasm for a project is grounded not in a deeply held belief or commitment, but in the bottom line. And some speculate that he may ultimately value Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal less for their own sakes than for what their brand names bring to his other properties, particularly his just-launched Fox Business Network, although Dow Jones has a contract with CNBC that will not expire until 2012.

Even literary ambition began to creep into the pages of the great newspapers. At the best ones, when the material justified it, reporters were encouraged to write creatively and at length. A certain kind of reporter—and I was one—competed against others not so much for scoops, but for recognition, prizes, and tenured positions at papers where the rarefied work of “serious” journalism was underwritten. Mine was The Philadelphia Inquirer, where my byline read not “staff reporter” or “staff correspondent” but “staff writer,” and which we writers called, in its heyday, “the greatest care-and-feeding system for journalism ever invented.”

while the Web is rapidly destroying the business model that sustained all of the above, it has yet to develop institutions capable of replacing print newspapers as vehicles for great in-depth journalism, or conscious of themselves as upholding a public trust. Instead, the Web gives voice to opinionated, unedited millions. In the digital world, ignorance and crudity share the platform with rigor and taste; the independent journalist shares the platform with spinmeisters and con artists. Cable television and satellite radio have taken broadcast journalism in the same direction, crowding out the once-dominant networks, which strove for the ideal of objectivity, with new channels that all but advertise their politics. When all news is spun, we live in a world of propaganda.

The worst part of this is, the public doesn’t seem to care.

and he doesn’t buy the ideal of objectivity. He sees it as pretense—or hypocrisy—because he perceives a distinct liberal skew to the established journalistic powers. In Murdoch’s view, the public is best served not by objectivity, which he regards as impossible, but by “balance.”

He rejects the idea that the media should be dominated by a few respected, independent voices; he embraces instead a din of competing voices and interests. He is a Jeffersonian, a believer in a lively free market of ideas (except, of course, where it doesn’t suit his interests—notably in China, where he’s willing to make nice with the oppressive regime), and he scoffs at those who see danger in his acquisitiveness, at those who worry about the ever-widening reach of his media empire.

What is the Murdochian point of view? It is not so easy to predict. His interests are dizzyingly diverse and famously open to change. He is a social liberal and a strong advocate of unfettered international trade. Other than that, he tends to be conservative, but he is also influenced by personalities, and has reportedly cozied up to the Clintons and warmed to Barack Obama. His various newspapers have staked a variety of public positions that are at least occasionally at odds with Murdoch’s own—TheTimes of London, for instance, has been consistently critical of the repressive Communist regime in China, despite its owner’s blatant and well-documented kowtowing.

Murdoch is a panderer. Like most businessmen, he wants to figure out what his customers want and then deliver it. The salvation of The Wall Street Journal may well be that its highly educated readership wants precisely what the paper has been offering for more than a half century. But at the very least, it’s clear that Murdoch intends to give that tradition a good working over.

Beating other papers at their own game is exactly what the new ownership seems to prize. In a conference call to the paper’s Washington bureau in April, Thomson pointed enthusiastically to a page-one political story by the reporter Monica Langley. Headlined “He’s Back,” the article detailed the increasing influence of Bill Clinton on the presidential campaign of his wife, Hillary. The new publisher-editor described it as “perfect in every way.” But Thomson’s Washington-bureau audience was merely whelmed. True, the Langley piece was timely, it came on the heels of a resurgence in Hillary’s campaign, and what it lacked in access it made up for in provocative analysis. In other words, it was the kind of story The New York Times would have loved to have. But the old Journal would not have cared, or at least not that much.

It does, however, reflect classic Murdochian principles, and Murdoch does seem to have a sense for what sells. He apparently intends to expand the Journal staff to add meat to that broadened coverage, which would mean more stories like those found everywhere else. But even if aping the competition increased the newspaper’s readership—and it is hard to see how it would—it would also destroy what made TheJournal great. In addition to stressing more breaking, general-news stories, Thomson has made clear that he intends to “clarify reporting lines,” which is taken to mean that he plans to thin the ranks of the mid-level editors who were the newspaper’s line of defense against sloppiness and error. It is worth noting that the number of corrections in the first quarter of this year, under Murdoch’s reign, has risen by more than 25 percent compared with the first quarter of 2007, an increase that the company says reflects an increase in the number of stories the new Journal is running.

“People are running around frightened and confused,” said one longtime Journal reporter. “The push is toward news, news, news. It feels like Murdoch wants to make us more like every other newspaper in the country.”

new BRW Rich 200 List:: first thoughts

The 2008 BRW Rich 200 magazine was released this morning.

I am generally a keen reader of the Rich List (my local newsagent noted that I was the first customer to purchase the magazine this morning). Unfortunately due to work pressures I haven't had a chance to read it properly yet.

My first thought is that this is finally the year a Macquarie banker makes the list - Allan Moss, the very-recently-retired former CEO. It has puzzled me for years now that the Macquarie guys can pull in $20m+ / year over a long period (and presumably it doesn't all go on lifestyle) but not make the list. Moss (at $225m) still looks low to me.

Nick Moore? David Clarke? Bill Moss? I'm looking at you guys. What are you doing with it all?

more later...

Starship Troopers 3: Marauder

It is hard to believe, but Starship Troopers 3: Marauder is apparently soon to be released.

See the trailer:


Poor Casper Van Dien. He once seemed like a rising star. Now he's reduced to semi-ironic posturing as Johnny Rico still trying to Kill 'Em All

Transformers

Finally got around to watching Transformers on DVD, and I have to disagree with Lucas [who I cannot insert a link to because he's taken his blog down] - I thought the film was really really crap.

The script was incoherent, the "funny bits" felt forced (and almost without exception weren't funny) and the film perpetuated cheap and unnecessary stereotypes such as the nerdy teacher who can be sweet-talked into giving a student a better grade. There were a few moments of character-development sunshine - such as the family's solicitous and unexplained devotion to their chihuahua and its pain medication - but overall it felt like an underwritten crappy film about a teenager who wants to be cool, interspersed with lots of explosions.

Also - why did the Autobots speak to each other (and have interior monologues) in English, while the evil Decepticons usually spoke to each other in 'robot language' - although when Autobots and Decepticons were speaking to each other it was in English.

Anyway, there were somewhere between 1.5 and 2 good reasons to see the film (and between 0.5 and 1 of those reasons is Australian). See below.

Rachael Taylor (the one that's not Megan Fox) is a Tasmanian girl who scored a mid-size part in Transformers out of basically nowhere.

Slick Rick will (probably) not be deported

Governor Paterson of New York has announced he is pardoning Slick Rick for his attempted murder and weapons convictions. See NY Times article.

Back in the 80s - at least for a moment - Slick Rick was a huge rap star. He shot his cousin (who he believed was trying to kill him) and another man, and went to jail for 6 years. Because he was born in England and moved to America at 11, he is liable to deportation - even though his wife and children are American. [note that Australia has similar laws]

There appears to still be legal proceedings to be had, where Rick will need an immigration Court to decide to exercise its discretion in his favour, but he is inching closer to a decision that will allow him to stay in America.

Ashes of Time (redux)

Wong Kar-Wei has put together a new (and shorter!) version of Ashes of Time - shown out of competition at Cannes.

Out later this year. Looking forward to it.

From the New York Times:

Mr. Wong has explained that he set out to make the definitive edition of “Ashes” after he discovered that there were many versions floating about, authorized and not. Culled from prints gathered from around the world, this newly re-edited and digitally tweaked iteration runs about 10 minutes shorter than the original, and rather more coherently. The fragmented story involves a melancholic desert dweller (the late Leslie Cheung), who functions as a kind of broker for various swordsmen (Tony Leung Chiu-wai included) and their clients (Brigitte Lin, among others). Drenched in shocking color — the desert shifts from egg-yolk yellow to burnt orange under a cerulean sky — the film is Mr. Wong’s most abstract endeavor, a bold excursion into the realm of pure cinema. It also now seems like one of his most important. “Ashes of Time Redux” will be released by Sony Pictures Classics in September. We’ll have more to say about it then.

Holy Relics - from forbes.com

Amazing article on forbes.com about the trade in Christian relics [souvenirs from Jesus or from the Saints - bone fragments, hair, items that touched a saint... you name it, you can buy it]. My favourite bit:

Some of Broomer's clients are people who have parted from the church or been shunned by it. "Perhaps owning a relic is a way back in," she speculates. Her typical customer is male, single, middle-class and gay. Priests and Catholic church parishioners make up the rest of her clientele.

Extracts below - read them - it's good stuff, I promise:

Broomer sells the skulls of martyrs ($4,500 each). She sells the teeth of saints ($300). For $975 you can get what may be a tiny splinter from the cross upon which Jesus Christ was crucified. It takes a certain amount of blind faith to believe all the claims attached to religious artifacts.

Other items in stock include, ostensibly, pieces of the body of Saint Thérèse, the Little Flower, made into paste; clothing worn by Saint Anthony of Padua; and a "touched" nail, meaning a nail that once touched a nail from the Crucifixion.

Vendors have a lingo in which relics are classified into grades. "First class" pertains to body parts of saints--a fingernail of the Apostle Paul, say, or a strand of the Virgin Mary's hair. Items (supposedly) touched by Jesus often are first class. The second class encompasses the relics of lesser figures--Mother Teresa's tennis shoes. The third class has items that have touched something first class--the "touched" nail described above, for instance.

Some first-class relics come with a red papal seal (meaning they've been vetted by the Vatican) and papers, usually in Latin, describing the item and its history. But if saints' bones can be faked, so can pieces of paper. Broomer says that while her clients care about authentication, in the end, "They want to believe."

Trade in relics arose in the Middle Ages, when Catholic pilgrims returned home from the Holy Land with tokens of the burial places of martyrs or of the martyrs themselves. These relics were believed capable of working miracles. Predictably, copies began to flood the marketplace--the fake Louis Vuitton handbags of their day. Sixteenth-century Protestant theologian John Calvin once quipped that there were enough pieces of the True Cross to "form a whole ship's cargo."

Catholic canon law now plainly forbids their sale. But the door to buying them is left open by an injunction that Catholics "rescue" relics. If, for instance, a Catholic sees a relic in a pawnshop, he or she is obliged to buy it, so that it won't be used for blasphemous purposes by a nonbeliever.

The Vatican itself owns what it believes to be a fragment of the table from the Last Supper and marble stairs that are the same ones Jesus ascended on His way to appear before Pontius Pilate. Asked if the Vatican's collection is one of the best in the world, a spokesman says, "Yes, it is that."

Broomer, a native Londoner, opened her antique store in Manhattan in 1987, selling mainly ceramics. Two years later a friend brought her some relics. "I loved them at first sight," she says, especially the ornate reliquaries. Soon afterwards she began selling relics almost exclusively. She's built up a small (300) but active list of clients. Being Jewish, she does not believe in the holiness of the objects. But, she says, "I very strongly believe in my clients' experience with them." One customer told her that while he lay in bed one night his relic emitted a strange sound. He got up to inspect it and was thus saved from being crushed when a wall collapsed upon his bed. Other customers report relics with palpable heartbeats.

Some of Broomer's clients are people who have parted from the church or been shunned by it. "Perhaps owning a relic is a way back in," she speculates. Her typical customer is male, single, middle-class and gay. Priests and Catholic church parishioners make up the rest of her clientele.

Father Paul Halovatch, chaplain at Southern Connecticut State University, is a customer. He has 100 relics and likes to use them during Mass. "I pick out a favorite saint of mine, and when his feast day comes up, I'll lay out some relics." He has ten purported to be from the True Cross. "I'm confident that with ten, at least one is the real deal," he says.

ames Jackson, owner of Jackson's auction house in Cedar Falls, Iowa, first wandered into Broomer's shop a decade ago. "I thought it was sacrilege," says Jackson, who describes himself as a devout Catholic. "I bought a whole shelf of stuff, to get it out of circulation."

Later, however, he began selling relics himself, through his auction house. How was he able to circumvent the church's prohibition? What the winning bidder would be buying (stated the catalog) were reliquaries, not the relics they contained. The relics would be given to the winning bidder "as a gift." Jackson's December 2006 catalog, for example, offered a pair of gilt bronze reliquaries containing relics of the Apostle Paul for between $6,000 and $10,000. Buy the box, and you got Paul gratis. Jackson has since had a crisis of conscience and no longer sells relics.

Obama backpedalling but it won't be enough

I stand by my previous post.

Obama is trying (see this Washington Post article), but Reverend Wright's comments cannot successfully be repudiated by Obama. He is simply too linked in to the man who officiated at his wedding and baptised his children. How can Obama survive the inevitable Republican attack?

If Wright is "presenting a world view that contradicts who I am and what I stand for", as Obama said yesterday, then how did Obama not know this given that he has known Wright for 20 years and has attended his church since 1992!

If true, what does it say about Obama's judgment?
If untrue, what does it say about his integrity?

See extracts below:

Sen. Barack Obama today strongly criticized the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, his former pastor, saying that Wright's comments about the United States in recent days have been "destructive" and "outrageous."

...

"I am outraged by the comments that were made and saddened over the spectacle that we saw yesterday," Obama told reporters at a news conference Tuesday.

His strong words come just six weeks after Obama delivered a sweeping speech on race in which he sharply condemned Wright's remarks but did not leave the church or repudiate the minister himself, who he said was like a family member. After weeks of staying out of the public eye while critics lambasted his sermons, the former pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago made three public appearances in four days to defend himself.

On Monday, Wright criticized the U.S. government as imperialist and stood by his suggestion that the United States invented the HIV virus as a means of genocide against minorities. "Based on this Tuskegee experiment and based on what has happened to Africans in this country, I believe our government is capable of doing anything," he said.

And perhaps even worse for Obama, Wright suggested that the church congregant secretly concurs.

"If Senator Obama did not say what he said, he would never get elected," Wright said. "Politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls."

Obama stated flatly that he doesn't share the views of the man who officiated at his wedding, baptized his two daughters and been his pastor for 20 years. The title of Obama's second book, "The Audacity of Hope," came from a Wright sermon.

"What became clear to me is that he was presenting a world view that contradicts who I am and what I stand for," Obama said. "And what I think particularly angered me was his suggestion somehow that my previous denunciation of his remarks were somehow political posturing. Anybody who knows me and anybody who knows what I'm about knows that I am about trying to bridge gaps and I see the commonality in all people."

...

"I gave him the benefit of the doubt in my speech in Philadelphia explaining that he's done enormous good. ... But when he states and then amplifies such ridiculous propositions as the U.S. government somehow being involved in AIDS. ... There are no excuses. They offended me. They rightly offend all Americans and they should be denounced."

While Obama said he remains a member of the church "obviously this has put a strain on that relationship.

"There wasn't anything constructive out of yesterday," said Obama. "All it was was a bunch of rants that aren't grounded in truth."

The Secret: legal battle

Fascinating legal battles emerging over The Secret, as detailed in the New York Times.

The Secret is a self-help book/video/money-marking venture based on the belief that adherents to its philosophy will receive “unlimited happiness, love, health and prosperity”. And who wouldn't want unlimited love? And some unlimited health, happiness and prosperity sounds ok too I guess. Try not to laugh - The Secret has apparently pulled in revenue of $300million.

Apparently "the universe will make your wishes come true if only you really, truly believe in them". Obviously to date I haven't wished hard enough for a new Maserati, Red Hill acreage and for Rachel Bilson to fall deeply in love with me. I'm gonna start wishing harder -starting now.

Anyway, onto the legal stuff. It sounds messy - involving Hungarian companies, jurisdictional battles between Courts in the US and in Australia, conflicting views as to authorship and lots more fun stuff.

Watch this space - I'll try and follow this case through.

Extracts from the New York Times follow:

On Monday the movie’s director, Drew Heriot, filed a copyright suit in United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division, against Ms. Byrne and her production company. The suit claims that Mr. Heriot is the co-author of the screenplay and the book and is therefore entitled to up to half of what his lawyers estimate as $300 million in “Secret” revenue.

The suit alleges that Mr. Heriot worked on the screenplay, conducted most of the interviews for the film and supervised its editing and postproduction. The book, much of it a transcription of the movie, is based on documents Mr. Heriot created, the suit alleges.

Because he was an independent contractor and not an employee of Ms. Byrne’s production company, Mr. Heriot retained rights to his creations, and Ms. Byrne promised him a percentage of profits, the suit argues.

The legal wrangling over the project began in July 2007, when TS Production applied for the United States copyright to the “Secret” movie and spinoffs. The next month Mr. Heriot applied for copyright to “The Secret,” claiming authorship of the movie and the screenplay.

Soon after that, TS Production filed suit in the Australian courts. Both Mr. Heriot and Ms. Byrne are Australian, and they began working on projects together around 2000. That’s when Ms. Byrne, then a television producer, contracted with Mr. Heriot’s production company for his services as an editor on “Australia Behaving Badly,” a “Candid Camera”-style series.

In the Australian courts, TS Production has asked to be declared owner of all copyrights to the book and movie “The Secret.”

Mr. Heriot, the court papers argue, “directed the film under the terms of his employment under a contract of service” with Ms. Byrne’s company and is not entitled to any copyrights.

After filing suit in the United States, Mr. Heriot’s lawyers filed a motion in the Federal Court of Australia, Victoria District Registry, notifying it that he had started litigation in the United States, the country where the copyright registrations had been filed, and asking it to postpone or dismiss its version of the case on jurisdictional grounds.

I'm calling it: Clinton over Obama

Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Senator Barack Obama's long-time minister, has spoken at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. His comments included:

You cannot do terrorism on other people and expect it never to come back on you. Those are biblical principles, not Jeremiah Wright bombastic, divisive principles.

...

MODERATOR: What is your motivation for characterizing Senator Obama's response to you as, quote, "what a politician had to say"? What do you mean by that?

REVEREND WRIGHT: What I mean is what several of my white friends and several of my white, Jewish friends have written me and said to me. They've said, "You're a Christian. You understand forgiveness. We both know that, if Senator Obama did not say what he said, he would never get elected."

Politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls, Huffington, whoever's doing the polls. Preachers say what they say because they're pastors. They have a different person to whom they're accountable.

...

MODERATOR: In your sermon, you said the government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color. So I ask you: Do you honestly believe your statement and those words?

REVEREND WRIGHT: Have you read Horowitz's book, "Emerging Viruses: AIDS and Ebola," whoever wrote that question? Have you read "Medical Apartheid"? You've read it?

(UNKNOWN): Do you honestly believe that (OFF-MIKE)

REVEREND WRIGHT: Oh, are you -- is that one of the reporters?

MODERATOR: No questions...

(CROSSTALK)

REVEREND WRIGHT: No questions from the floor. I read different things. As I said to my members, if you haven't read things, then you can't -- based on this Tuskegee experiment and based on what has happened to Africans in this country, I believe our government is capable of doing anything.

...

See a transcript of his speech here. I'm not sure I even excerpted the good bits - for example the questionable comments re Israel. There's strong stuff in there.

As I see it, this will be the death of Obama's candidacy. Primarily because it makes him unelectable at the general election. A strongly-worded denunciation of Wright by Obama is not credible (and in fact, Obama gained substantial praise for the way he dealt with the last eruption) and at some stage the chickens will come home to roost.

These remarks, combined with what has been said before and what appears likely to come, are just too perfectly suited to attack ads. Obama's credibility with middle America (as opposed to the people Australia calls 'chardonnay socialists') cannot survive being linked to this stuff.

furniture

obsessing about furniture for chambers...

current obsessions:
walter knoll drift


emeco hudson armchair

FriendFeed

Have signed up for friendfeed, after seeing it discussed on BB's blog.

A good step along the way to the multiplicity of communications, but not the final answer. For where things are right now (simultaneously projecting myself via email, blog, facebook updates, twitter, digg, shared items on google reader, putting photos up at flickr et al) it is doing a good (but not perfect) job of aggregating them.

Of course, one might think that life would be simpler if one reduced the number of communications media in one's life, thereby eliminating the need to aggregate.
But I have no intention of doing that - instead, I intend to continue to sign up to everything going in the firm belief that everyone is vitally interested in what's going in my life at all times.

One interesting (but unsurprising) quirk / bug is that FriendFeed refused to recognise my Google Reader shared items page until I manually deleted the '.au' from its address.... a bug that simply wouldn't be picked up by US testing...

More good Gatto / Opes Prime stuff

From The Age today:

Directors of Opes Prime-linked companies Mr Moghe, Gordon Browne and Raj Maiden had agreed to meet today, Mr Gatto said. The men deny they have, or control, any of the missing funds. Mr Gatto was angry at suggestions Mr Moghe was rushing back to Singapore to fly his wife and children out for their own protection.

"That's not our style," Mr Gatto said. "I haven't spoken to him or anything at this point.

"I've got a reputation to uphold and one of my key points is I don't interfere with women and children. I'm firm on that.

"We've got no intention of doing anything illegal or untoward to anyone."

Mr Gatto said he had planned to make people worried. "We don't mind them being a little bit nervous because they'll be honest and truthful with us, and hopefully we will get a result."

and

"Don't worry about how we are going to get the money. We aren't here for the noodles."

My Blueberry Nights

When (and if) this ever makes it to Australia, I am so looking forward to My Blueberry Nights - the first Wong Kar-Wei english-language feature starring Miss Natalie Portman.

See this review by AO Scott for the NY Times. Scott gets the appeal of Wong Kar-Wei. The luxurious, beautiful visuals and the creation of a mood - both of which completely overwhelm his plots (to the extent a plot exists at all - see ChungKing Express, Fallen Angels and 2046 for a few examples). The languid pacing. The total absence of reality.

Awesome new BB post

Great post at Ben Barren's blog yesterday - 24 hours in the life of - for wannabe 2.0 entrepreneurs it will read somehow simultaneously as both a cautionary tale and an inspirational one.

A Gatto update

Following on from my post earlier in the day, this afternoon on the online edition of The Age:

Gatto said the company provided a simple service where ''we go and see the client and we say... 'we really think that you should pay, and it's all done amicably and 9 times out of 10 its settled and the client's happy and we're happy and of course the bloke who owes the money is happy to have that weight of his chest'.''

And who wouldn't want that weight off his chest.

Mediations, Arbitrations and Opes Prime

Possibly one of my favourite stories of all times in today's The Age - and presumably also in the Herald Sun but I haven't checked.

The quote to end all quotes:

Mr Gatto's private company, Arbitrations & Mediations - which he says makes "problems disappear" - has in the past been engaged to deal with feuds on Melbourne construction sites.

Yesterday, Mr Gatto told The Age: "These Opes Prime clients can take their chances and lose all their money to lawyers and to the receivers, or they can take their chances with me to extract a return on their behalf.

"The proof is in the pudding with me. I solve problems … It's my way or the highway".

and later in the article:

Barrister Nicola Gobbo confirmed that Mr Gatto - the man who shot dead underworld hitman Andrew "Benji" Veniamin in 2004 and was later acquitted of murder on the grounds of self-defence - would be travelling overseas to try to track down money and shares related to Opes Prime.

Asked about Mr Gatto's clients, she said: "Some would be described as business people, if you very loosely used the term 'business people'.

Facebook / ConnectU

According to the New York Times (and commented on by Techcrunch) Facebook is about to settle the ConnectU litigation. The litigation arises out of allegations that Mark Zuckerberg stole ConnectU's ideas (source code, business plan and design) back in 2003 - Zuckerberg was at college with the founders of ConnectU and worked for it before starting Facebook.

Regardless of the truth of the allegations, it is a distraction that Facebook doesn't need. If the action can be settled on reasonable terms then I would think that Facebook should do all it can to settle.

The Kid Stays in the Picture - the audiobook

With many many thanks to Lucas, I've been listening to the audiobook of The Kid Stays in the Picture. The Robert Evans book / movie / mini-industry is now an audiobook. And what an audiobook! Narrated by the great man himself with more verve, panache and brio than I knew was possible, the audiobook simultaneously demonstrates why Evans never really made it as an actor and why he is a truly compelling 20th century figure.

I just wish I'd been able to locate a snippet to link to - but I can't :( - so all I can say is that it would make a fantastic early christmas present, so start pleading with your mamma now. you MUST hear it.

A rare (unique?) example where I think the audiobook is actually the best vehicle for the content. Better even than the film.