From Knackered Downunder

Dana Gioia, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts in the US, is bemoaning the lack of connection that many Americans now have with culture. It may be a familiar argument, but Gioia’s point is that it wasn’t always so.

What’s also interesting is that Gioia — in a commencement speech at Stanford last week — claims that one of the side-effects has been the bifurcation of America into passive and active citizens; in other words, those who spend time as passive consumers of electronic entertainment, and another group which uses and enjoys the new technology.

They go out — to exercise, play sports, volunteer and do charity work at about three times the level of the first group. By every measure they are vastly more active and socially engaged than the first group. Continue reading ‘art for art’s sake’

As pointless exercises go, collecting a copy of the latest Harry Potter at midnight Friday/Saturday comes fairly close. Because this is the last book expected in the series, and because the oldest Chip off the Old Hack was able to keep himself awake this time, I relented and we traipsed into town amid the latest Friday convention of Bath binge-drinkers to join the thronging hundreds in wizard costumes queuing up outside the two chosen bookshops.

There was clearly a Pareto 80/20 distribution going on, with Waterstone’s bagging the lion’s share of buyers in exchange for some form of goodie bag (or so I heard), while the smart money (KH and COTOH included), who did not want to stay up all night, chose the more down-at-heal WH Smith’s outlet, where a more straightforward and expeditious exchange of money-for-book took place. It was not really a party atmosphere, more like some tired observance of a ritual whose original import has been forgotten. The only spectacle was that of the muggle bingers taunting the Potterholics. Continue reading ‘harry potter and the messed-up circadian rhythms’

The Knackered Hackette has, once again, spent too much time in the dictionary. She writes…

I had a niggling feeling that the about section didn’t offer a full and fair definition of “knackered”, so will attempt to set that right here. Non-philologists and those of a squeamish or prudish disposition should look away now.

There’s an illuminating investigation of the term at World Wide Words, offering connections to sixteenth century bridle-makers — “knackers” — and trinkets that gather dust on the mantelpiece — “knick-knacks”. It continues:-

But there’s another slang sense of knackers, for the t*sticles, which grew up a little later, possibly also from knack, but possibly from yet another sense of knacker, that of castanets (which could be an altered form of knockers, but might come from an obsolete sense of knack, to knock or to make a sharp, abrupt noise). To knacker, therefore, is to castrate.”

Ouch! Continue reading ‘proper cream crackered’

Five years ago, I wrote a letter to the bow tie-wearing Bloomberg editor-in-chief Matt Winkler. Finally, today I get an email back from the company. But, you guessed it, through the passage of five years they have managed to entirely miss the point of my original proposal! They want me, the Knackered Hack, holed up in the long-tail of journalism to promote a podcast they have done with Nassim Taleb. If you are me, there is a rich irony in all this. If you are not me, it is Friday afternoon and you have better things to do.

As I recall, the gist of that old letter to Winkler was to say what a good idea it would be for his news organization to be less hierarchical and develop a more networked model of journalistic interaction. My experience had suggested that that was the way large editorial groups needed to operate to have a chance of scaling our ever more complex news environment effectively, by sharing expertise more readily in real-time. Those people who know the Bloomberg news organization would probably tell me that I didn’t have a prayer. Continue reading ‘bloomberg not real-time at all’