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X-Factor

Could I just point your attention towards…

Dec 8th, 2009
by Dan.
22 comments

Just as humans evolved from apes, blogging evolved from lists of links. And while it’s nice to have speech, art, and tools at our disposal; sometimes it’d be fun to shed all our clothes and swing about in the trees for a while.

There’s been something missing from my feed reader for quite a while now (since July of this year in fact). And that something is NYC Watchdog’s Sunday Smorgashboard. While there’s no way on earth I’d want to take up such a mighty mantle, I do think that there is value in pointing out things that you’ve enjoyed from within the blogosphere once in a while. People don’t link to each other enough any more in my opinion.

First up is Heather from Notes From Lapland who has made my blog reading about 300% less frustrating with her post 5 tips to make blog reading, commenting, subscribing faster and easier. Primarily by pointing out how to deal with reading truncated blog feeds while remaining within Google Reader:


Read and comment on blogs without leaving Google Reader – comment shows up on blog.

With the FireFox extension Better G-Reader this is now possible.

  1. Add Better G-Reader FireFox add-on.
  2. Re-start FireFox
  3. The add-on pop up box will appear when you re-start.  Click on the Better G-Reader add-on and click options.
  4. Under the general tab click on the ‘preview item (click button or headline)’ box, click OK and exit (the ‘preview item automatically’ option doesn’t work for me)
  5. Open Google Reader and click either on the little blue arrow next to post title or on the ‘preview’ button at the bottom of the post.
  6. The blog will now open inside google reader.  You can read and comment as if you were on the actual blog and your comments will show up on the blog as if you were too!

Read the full post here

This is especially exciting to me as my new blog project (Lee and Dan’s Midnight Movie Club, opening this Wednesday) is going to have to have a truncated feed due to the unique way it’s formatted, and I’ve been feeling very guilty about it.

Andrew Collins (writer, 6 Music DJ, and co-host of my current favourite podcast) wrote a marvellous rant about the campaign to make Rage Against The Machine Christmas number one rather than the X-factor:

Others on Twitter seem to think that Simon Cowell’s “empire” needs “toppling.” Why not Google’s empire? Or Amazon’s empire? Or Microsoft’s empire? Maybe they think those empires need toppling too. I suspect not. Because those empires provide things that people on the left approve of, whereas manufactured pop music – eek! – is for idiots and plebs, who are too stupid to know how bad the music they like is, and the choices they make on iTunes or in HMV are in some way inferior to the choices made by Rage Against The Machine fans. (By the way, the #ratm4xmas campaign seems to have little to do with Rage Against The Machine, and plenty to do with the fact that the song has “fuck” in it, which isn’t magically going to be played on Radio 1 or the Christmas Top Of The Pops anyway.)

Read the full post here

Ian from Single Parent Dad wins my award for vaguest half hearted film review made by someone who can’t be bothered watching the film:

Santa Buddies has been on, but did not really engage us, we had visitors – including girls, aged four and two – and none of them appeared very enamoured for very long. And I was too busy roasting a gammon joint, answering the wishes of the little ones and nattering to our adult company to notice much about it.

Read the full post here

I had to sit through that monstrosity this week Ian. I demand you do likewise

Mrs W from Clinically Fed Up has some very interesting insights into the nature of grief:

When you’re 19 you also think that these things always happen at Christmas. At Christmas there’s always a house fire that wipes out a family, a new born baby found abandoned, a car crash. It’s only with the benefit of years that you realise these things happen all year round. They are, however, highlighted at Christmas, aggravated by their incongruous setting at this happiest of times. When we are so full of goodwill and joy it’s just worse. Which is why my tummy flipped and my heart grew heavy when I read a report on the BBC website on Saturday and I mourned the tragic passing of three strangers in a car accident in the Highlands. A mother and her two sons, here one day and just gone the next. Like that.

Only it turned out they weren’t strangers.

Read the full post here

And finally, my brother Sam, of Rabbit Confused With Raisins fame, has been out walking again, and took some pretty stunning photos too. All the more impressive when you consider he is a complete imbecile.

See the rest of the post here

And that’s all I have time for now, although there have been a multitude of other great posts this week. The “Letter to a 16 year old me” meme that’s been going round has been particularly facinating, although I wouldn’t like to pick out just one for praise.

I’m, not sure if I’ll be doing this kind of thing again, but I better make a sort of standard disclaimer: just because you are not listed here doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy your post or don’t think it’s as good as or better than the ones I have mentioned. it just means that I didn’t list you this time, that’s all.

Aspirations

Oct 6th, 2009
by Dan.
58 comments

If you ask Amy what she wants to be when she grows up she’ll give you one of two answers – either “a famous pop star” or “a horse riding teacher”.

It’s very hard not to take these responses as a indication that I’ve failed as a father. I’ve already blogged at length about my dislike of the horsey set. And as for aspirations of pop stardom – well let me assure you, if Simon Cowell or his ilk came within an inch of my daughter then I’d give them jolly good punch up the bracket.

But really Amy’s aspirations aren’t really my fault – it’s society wots to blame. Well, society and the Disney Corporation.

Hanna Montana is a bloody awful program. The acting is dire, the plotlines and humor humdrum, and the overall production values are just plain bland. What’s worse is that it implants the all pervasive obsession with fame and stardom into minds that are just too young. It contributes to that overwhelming modern pressure that drives girls towards adulthood far too early. And that is not good. It’s not good at all.

And furthermore, because it has the full force of the Disney marketing machine behind it, it can often seem like it permeates every single aspect of a child’s life. I challenge you to walk through a UK supermarket and not be able to find a Hannah Montana piece of merchandising on every single shelf. Shampoo, spaghetti shapes, tissue paper, magazines, sweets, donuts, it’s all there for the eager consumer.

I don’t approve of Hannah Montana.

So why do I let Amy watch it then? Because I’m weak, that’s why. And because I’m too liberal to start banning things in our house without a lengthy period of angst and indecision. As much as I’d love to indoctrinate my kids into liking only Peppa Pig, Laurel and Hardy, and Fraggle Rock I just can’t bring myself to enforce any form of cultural dictatorship. We’ve banned Bratz, but that was an easy one – anyone with half a clue can see though the camouflage and recognise the poisonous toxins beneath that particular product.

But Hannah Montanna, High School Musical, and all the rest are a little more complex than that. They walk their path in a very grey area, and if you start banning those you’re on a rocky road that can eventually see you smugly proclaiming that you only allow your children half an hour of television a week, and only then to watch a nature documentary hosted by that nice Mr Attenborough

So the theory is that the values that Kerry and I instil in our children should counteract any negative stereotyping she gets exposed to through popular culture. But I don’t know sometimes if that’s enough. Popular culture seems pretty big and powerful and we as parents seem pretty small. Plus we’re human, and therefore horribly inconsistent ad flawed (especially me).

As a society there has never been a time when our children have been more exposed to such powerful, pervasive, and homogenised cultural influences. I have no answers, but really hope our kids can stay kids as long as they can, and that they come out ok on the other side.

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