All you
voracious readers out there, will you pay a fair price for a book? All you
professional writers out there, will you accept a fair return on your labour,
say $50, 000 and upwards a year?
Yes from both. Alright, we have solved the publishing crisis.
I am not much interested in the latest attempt by the heritage media to use print to troll internet discourse. But
I was taken with the notion of finding a little more about the on-line
community’s assessment of trolling.
I found this excellent presentation by Californian web developer Nicole
Sullivan who is also a gardener and poor car parker. I too am a gardener and
poor parker. While I am not entirely sure what web development is, I am pretty
certain it is a cool thing for people, other than myself, to do.
Finding the Sullivan presentation required incredible discipline on my
part as it was on the second page of a "trolls" Google. It was not even the
top item on page 2, but I found it. (Alright it was #2. but that is not #1)
In response to my superhuman feat, I am asking you to play the presentation all
the way through
Have you played it all the way through? You sure? You know I can wait
you out until you do. You already know about my boundless discipline.
I have to play it again, anyway , as I need to quote the bit
I am interested in discussing.
Let’s watch it again together, shall we?
The advice in the vid is solid and concisely presented. Alright, but the piece I want to talk about is
where Ms Sullivan trolls “the grammar nazi” and I am sure she is talking about me.
“People think grammar is very, very, very important. I don’t understand
them,” she said, looking right at me, through my computer screen.
Let me say, first up, one "very" in a sentence is usually one too many
– ha! ha! gratuitous trolling.
No, what I really wish to say, is Ms Sullivan would not think
half-assed web development was good enough. So it is with writing. “Mean what you
say and say what you mean” applies to personal morality, refusing to troll and
writing.
Sloppy writing creates confusion, reduces elegance and anchors the
imagination, hampering glorious flight.
These are not just academic or aesthetic considerations. They go to the
heart of whether the self-publishing revolution will liberate or debase literature.
Heritage book publishers will tell you it is the latter. Conscientious self-publishers
with respect for good grammar are assisting in making it the former.
Writers and readers need only to remember their childhood to know lots
of good treats are in Grammar’s house.
IT was
a weird start to Games e competition with American super-swimmer Michael Phelps
missing a medal in the 400m men’s individual medley won by teammate Ryan
Lochte.
Lochte one, Phelps nil
Phelps
described it as a “crappy race’’, presumably reflecting on his own performance
rather than the collective effort of the finalists. Still, Phelps missed a
medal in eloquence as well as in the pool.
It was hard
to know what to make of the performance of senior sports scribe Barney Ronay
after the first gold medal of the Games went to China’s Siling Yi in the sport of shooting-at-things. The sub-category was the 10m air rifle. Thank
Mao; the 10m was not the calibre of the rifle but the distance from which you
shoot at things.
On behalf of the guardian .co.uk,
journo Ronay wrote, ‘China’s parpingly jaunty anthem
was the first to be heard in triumph at London 2012.’ Parpingly? Really,
Barney.
The obscure word “parping” seems to
mean the sound made by a car horn.
Whether parpingly can be used
successfully to modify “jaunty”, I just do not know. What I do know is the word
appeared in the online guardian in Andrew Sparrow’s blog on June 16, 2012.
‘
Boris Johnson has arrived in Cape Town to fly the flag for
England's 2018 World Cup bid (and) did give his views on the controversial
vuvuzela, the horn blasted deafeningly by fans during every game of the South
African World Cup.
Johnson said: ’Certainly the vuvuzela is a very very
interesting device…..It's a great way of expressing yourself in a loud,
vehement, parping kind of way. … I think maybe that's not the effect we're
going to want to see in 2012 [at the London Olympics].’
’
Was it coincidence that Barney Ronay revived the word parping(ly) or
was it some sort of tribute to the barkingly mad Boris Johnson? BTW, Johnson brought little to the lingual
table in stating a horn had the sound of a horn and that sound is rarely
jaunty.
Enough of this nonsense bring on that jaunty sound.
That
anthem could have been written for a Chinese victory in the international sport
of shooting at things. The lyric about China facing its greatest danger is a
bit dodgy though. This anthem is likely
to be around for centuries so the message for the generations is be on a
constant war footing. Grab your air rifle and be prepared.
I am not sure tourists will flock to that new
Great Wall if it is made of flesh and blood; could be a bit slippery. Perhaps I
am being too literal.
It
is heartening to see the Chinese lyrics pay homage to the French anthem La Marseillaise. The
Chinese version has the good taste to ditch that French stuff about fearsome soldiers coming into our midst to cut the throats of your sons and consorts. It is
something of a surprise France does not do better in shooting-at-things. I
believe the reason is the French athletes try to sell their arms during the
competition, leaving them at a distinct disadvantage during the shoot-offs for
medals.
During
shooting-at-things, athletes are encouraged to only fire at inert objects. Live
pigeon shooting had its only appearance at the 1900 Paris Games. It did not
take off.
Neither
did the 21 pigeons Belgian Leon de Linden shot to win the gold. They do not
call them pigeons for nothing, but even the IOC could see the ineffable killing
the unflappable was a trifle off.
Crap is the word
CRAP is quick off the blocks in the competition for
the golden word of the 2012 London Olympics.
Swim champ Michael Phelps missed a medal in the
400m men’s individual medley and described his performance as a crappy race.
Tory MP Aidan Burley took to Twitter to describe the Opening ceremony as
“leftie multicultural crap”.
You would have thought that phrase has few shades of meaning,
far fewer than 50, but Burley said he was misunderstood. Unfortunately for
public figures, the nature of Twitter makes it difficult to bleat the old
stand-by of being taken out of context.
The MP then went on to make the bizarre claim the rappers did his head
in.
‘We had all these rappers – that is what got me to the point
about multiculturalism.’
Burley received little support from his Conservative colleagues.
The Mad Mayor of London said it was nonsense, a subject on which Boris Johnson
is an authority.
‘People say it was all leftie stuff. That is nonsense. I'm a
Conservative and I had hot tears of patriotic pride from the beginning. I was
blubbing like Andy Murray,’ Johnson said. Why he had to tie-in Murray’s tears
after losing the Wimbledon tennis final was anybody’s guess, if anybody wants
to bother interpreting thoughts from the addled Mayoral mind.
Burley was right.
This was not an opening ceremony but an excuse by the liberal elite to pour
more of their absurd and defeatist multi-cultural propaganda into the Olympics.
Why Danny Boyle, for crying out loud.
Look, next time, why not just have an opening ceremony
full of addicts and ravers at a disco and cut the attempts to present the
distorted history lessons. Why bother with the athletes at all? This country
has lost it.
Hilarious! An opening ceremony for an event featuring
athletes from more than 200 nations, hosted by one of the most culturally and
ethnically diverse cities on the planet branded “leftie multicultural crap”!
Where does the Tory party get such prize turnips from? I know they don't like
their MPs to be too clever, but he really takes the gold for ignorance and
boorish stupidity. Cameron should promote him to the Cabinet immediately- at
least he's honest about his racism, xenophobia and fascistic tendencies!
Bernie Dowling July 29, 2912
If you enjoyed this rant, please pass it on or share a link to this blog.
THESE Olympic reports are written from the edge of the city
and the jaws of hell.
The city in question is Brisbane where, as in all fair cities of
Australia, good drug and alcohol-fuelled
citizens are regularly bashing one another senseless, and occasionally
lifeless. Friday and Saturday nights are
the preferred times for such mayhem but
any warm or cool enchanted evening will do.
I am confident the industrious denizens of the western world’s capital
cities are similar indulging in random violence to share the terror of life in
war zones.
This is why these reports on the noble Olympic games are writ from the
jaws of hell. Our patron for the Capital-G Games is Thomas Hobbes.
London Games Patron
Before we introduce our patron to the enthusiastic international
audience we should satisfy ourselves that we indeed live in violent times. Over
a long period in journalism I have seen the reality of falling crime rates go hand-in-hand with public perceptions of their increase . Some politicians and
sections of the media love to play the crime card: a fearful population are an
impressionable lot.
I believe the perception of violent
crime today matches the reality. For a long time, I have toyed with the notion that
times of war and lauded militarism create parallel violence in civilian populations. My days of meandering through the halls of
higher learning are long gone but I would like a phD student test my theory in a thesis. What the civilian ‘Libyan “liberators”, of
the National Transitional
Council, theGonzoid rants on the London Olympics 2012.
WARNING: This video has been
identified as potentially offensive or inappropriate by some viewers.
Most of the assailants appear to
be unarmed civilians watched by gun toters in military-style dress.
This was an inauspicious start for Libyan democracy.
Meet
our patron
Thomas Hobbes is a 17th century English
philosopher. I say ``is’’ as Tough Tom is alive in many people’s heads.
Hobbes wrote that you should bash people long and hard before they have
a chance to fuck you over. Hobbes went on that, in a sophisticated society, the
State could do the pre-emptive bashing
on your behalf. He wrote these things in
my version of his book Leviathan. My
version only exists in my head but you can download another edition here http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3207
The Religious Right owe a great debt to Hobbes. This is why they like
to shooy at things while they spread the a-Hobbesian gospel of the free market.
You can see why Thomas Hobbes is an excellent patron for the London
Olympics 2012.
In rant #2, we introduce the Games national anthems of England,
the United States and Australia.
Olympic shorts
GREATER London 16-year-old Mahamed Awale recently tweeted: USAIN BOLT IZ
A V GD FRIEND OF MINE HIM BCOMIN A RUNNA WOZ MA IDEA.
I don’t know that time line and geographic distance pans out to validate
Awale’s contention.
But Mahamed was kicked off one of those
reality TV shows in the first round. Being booted first-up from the BBC Series2 of Young Apprentice gives the lad a lot of cred in my book.
THIS reminds me of when I covered the final Goodwill Games in Brisbane
in 2001.
American Ted Turner began the Goodwill Games in Moscow in 1986 in response to the politicisation of
the Olympics after the 1979 Russian invasion of Afghanistan.
The games were bought from Ted Turner by Time Warnerwhen Turner's company merged with TW in
1986. TW promised to keep the Goodwill Games alive
The corporation descended from Warner Bros which brought the world,
hungry for justice, John Wayne movies. That lineage was interested in
namby-pamby sports détente and they canned the games when ratings tanked in
America.
At the final Brisbane Games I interviewed reigning Olympic 100m champion American Maurice Greene who broke
down in Goodwill Games preparation and did not compete.
It was at the Goodwill Games
that I suggested Greene become a runner. No, wait, that cannot be right. I
suggested, as he wasn’t competing at the Games, we go to Brisbane’s best Chinese
restaurant and do a runner before the bill came. Maurice declined.
THE Olympic Gold medals and
memorabilia of Australia’s first ever
double Olympic Medal winner Bobby Pearce (1905-1976), will be auctioned at Bonhams Olympic Games Sale on 25 July 2012. The Olympic Games sale will be held
at Bonhams Knightsbridge, London, saleroom in case you wish to pop down. that way.
Rower Pearce went to the Amsterdam
1928 Games and won the Gold from American entrant Kenneth Myers who was said to
be so disgusted that he smashed his boat.
Pearce won skulls gold again at the Los Angeles
Olympiad in 1932.
Pearce’s Olympic
Gold stuff is expected to fetch £30,000
– 50,000 ($44,000 - $73,000 AUD and much the same in US dollars). I have Maurice Greene's autograph on an Goodwill Games cap if the under-bidder is interested.
If you
enjoyed the first of this Gonzoid Games coverage please re-blog or a share a
link to this blog.
