I had a thought....
I agree with Paul Keating that the Unions and their traditional hold over the ALP have had their day. Times have changed and so has society - and yes, that fat union stand-over thug on the shop floor I hope will soon be consigned to history.
BUT I still support collective bargaining.
My politics have been shaped partly by my dad and partly through just getting older ( and wiser I hope). Dad came to Australia from England before I was born and worked as a mechanic (mostly diesel) for a number of companies. I can remember most of his union experiences while I was a teenager and while he worked for a larger 4WD company back in the 60's, where he became leading hand. A blue collar worker through-and-through.
For as long as I can remember he always voted LIBERAL.
He detested unions.
I asked him why.
He said that in the years immediately after the war he saw the unions and the way they did business bring England to its knees when it was trying to rebuild after the economic ravages of the war years. From that time on he had no time for them.
I had a thought....
I suppose I could start this entry by saying that if I hear one more thing about Paris Hilton, I'll throw up. Why do the TV news services keep giving her the exposure that she clearly craves?? She does nothing for this world except be famous for being famous.
Thank God for the ABC
The channel nine news the other night when P. had been sentenced to jail, opened the evening news with the lead in headline of her sentencing as if it was one of the most noteworthy news items. Then expanded on it in the body of the news with more than it's fair share, and then also closed the evening news with P.
THREE times they mentioned her going to jail in the one half hour prime time news. This was when dozens were killed in IRAQ, Lebanon was under seige by muslim militants, Howard was catching Rudd in the turn-around polls, Russia was about to aim missiles at Europe, and other more far more important things than miss P's misdemeanour.
Thank God for the ABC.
So I caught the ABC evening news later at 7:00, and .... not one mention of her.
Paris Hilton - What a waste of carbon.
For the last word check out Nicholson's cartoon -
http://media.theaustralian.news.com.au/nich/20070604_Paris_Jail.html
4/6/2007 - He's telling us what we should think - again!
I had a thought....
One of Howard's little tricks when he's commenting on the box (it's not a box any more, have you noticed?), is he begins a number of his sound bites by saying, "I think the people of Australia want .........".
For instance on the news tonight I heard him say ..." I think the people of Australia don't want the economy to be run into ruins by the irresponsibility of the Labor Party's climate change strategies."
I think this is a really effective way of putting ideas into the public's mind - by telling us what we should be thinking ( even if we're not!). It's a neat little bit of psychological suggestion. And it's one I don't like.
I had a thought....
Now that Hicks is back in the country and safe and sound in the place of his birth, we should all go down there and yell at his window...
"WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU THINKING, YOU IDIOT???!!!"
On the other hand - sorry John, but I will remember that you ignored this bloke (the idiot) for 4 years and willingly let one of our citizens (the idiot) be tortured, left in solitary, without sentencing or trial, without access to his family for so long.
You offended my sense of human rights and how I feel as an Australian.
Not to mention the blatant political cynicism of the timing in bringing him home.
In 2004 the day after the federal election the Australian public woke up to realise we had got it wrong. Understandably we wanted to reject Mark Latham and his policies but ...WE WENT TOO FAR .... we overdid it and gave Howard the senate as well!!!
A lot has been said about Steve's personality in the aftermath of the unbelievable event of his death this week. Oddly, my experience with the man was an intimate one even though I never met him personally.
I was once asked to supervise a pilot for a proposed animated TV series for the Croc Hunter (not the proposed title ) and it was to be done in cut-out style ( e.g. 'Southpark' as well as the titles for the live action series of the same name). To be honest I hadn't been a big fan of Steve - more like 'indifference' really - but of course I agreed to take on the job.
So the task for the animation was to define the style of his image and the rest of the Croc Hunter family and design how it was to be animated. To research it I was given a couple of long doco tapes to familiarise myself with the characters and to establish how to achieve a variety of facial expressions and lip synch with mouth shapes. I dived into as much of the footage as I could to examine his range of expressions. I had to do this by very closely studying every detail of his face, analysing it frame-by-frame, so I had a good idea of how to design a library of expressions, stored digitally, that could be called on for whatever the dialogue would say in each of the episodes.
After this process I felt that I became so familiar with his personality and his features that I had his 'animated' character under my belt so to speak.
Two things came out of this:
First, I became a Steve Irwin fan. He really IS what you see - yep the WYSIWYG effect. Utterly and totally committed to what he does. It is not an act. He gets over-excited maybe but the passion he has for his work is infectious.
Second, how can you caricature a person who is already a living caricature!? The job was already done - and the animation would just be recreating his live action persona. (OK, the TV animation series, to justify itself would have to explore places and themes that live action couldn't.)
When looking for the animation angle on anything you always look for all the exaggeration opportunities - to get the humour out of the caricature - to push it well beyond reality. This is what gives animation its appeal. But when I paused the VCR on the 'extremes' of his live action expressions I often recoiled from the screen, gob-smacked, asking myself, 'How can I plus this!?'
Has anyone noticed the tragic symbolism of his death? His Heart. His heart that has been so spoken of in awe - a heart that was so dedicated to animal conservation and environmentalism - was pierced by one of the subjects of his life's work.
A while ago I was given the job of animating a TV commercial that was to promote the wearing of car seatbelts.The department of Transport had reported that there was a strong resistance to wearing seatbelts, particularly with older drivers, and an advertising campaign was needed to convince drivers this was in fact a safe thing to do.
As I began developing the script for the 30-second spot, my thoughts went something like this:How best to get to the adults and change their behaviour?How do you make adults remember as soon as they get into the car that they should buckle-up?
I know! … I’ll do it through the kids.By getting the kids on side, by ‘convincing’ them that wearing seatbelts is a cool rule, I can get their well-known persuasive powers to work on the adults in charge of the vehicle.
To enact my bit of indoctrination, I adapted a catchy phrase I had heard from the MRD, ‘Buckle Up, Click, Clack!’ and extended it.Here is the verse –
Buckle Up, Click-Clack, Buckle Up, Click-Clack!
Buckle in the front and buckle in the Back,
…And in the middle, too.
Click, Clack!!
Now put this to a really catchy piece of music, a jingle, courtesy of a local sound house.Once you have the kids singing along – and repeating it daily- you’ve got em…. for life!
Mind you, this is nothing new.How many beer commercials can your children sing? The beer company ads are their investment for on-side future beer drinkers -
“I feel like a Tooheys, I feel like a Tooheys …..”
OK, they don’t drink beer now ( maybe they do) but they will still be humming that damned song in years to come.The key word here is ‘pre-disposition’.
In years to come they *may* try drinking beer and most likely will give Tooheys a try ….
The British censors have censored all sequences of Tom and Jerry animated cartoons that depict characters smoking.This is in case the attitudes of children will be shaped into pre-disposing them to smoking in adulthood.Does this mean that the authorities are finally catching up with the fact that animation is one of the most powerful indoctrination mediums in the world?
It is beautifully subtle how the most serious of attitudes can be indoctrinated into the minds of the young through the humour of cartoon animation.
This is why I am against letting my children watch The Simpsons and definitelynot Southpark.
Ever had a conversation with someone in a dark room? A really dark room. It's rather disarming. Gone is the non-verbal communication - the eye contact, the head nod, the hand gestures. You only hear the voice. There could be one person in the room or a million people - you wouldn't really know. But you open up a little more than you normally would, being more frank with your thoughts and possibly even saying things that you normally wouldn't allow yourself to express. There's no apparent primeval feeling of a 'threat'. Photographers know what I mean - they work in dark rooms (... sometimes).
Well Blogging is a bit like that - at least that's my first impression of it. As I write this I have no idea if anyone is listening - am I the only one listening in to my thoughts or are there many more? - I've no idea.
I feel like letting off a little steam through this blog as we roll on the next election. I want to jot down a few of my thoughts on the world here and even add a little drawing or two to make it more visual than just text.
