Dunc Wilson » Current Affairs

Boy? Balloon? Balloon Boy? WTF?

Dunc — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 04:02:30 +0000

From 3news.co.nz: “A six-year-old boy has been found hiding in a cardboard box in his family’s garage after being feared aboard a homemade helium balloon that hurtled 50 miles through the sky on live television.”

What the…? No, really: WTF? (Play video to see John agree with me…)

As if this story making ‘news’ wasn’t bad enough, a video of the little grimer has now surfaced on youtube. Of him rapping with his mates. Sigh…

Crapsicle.

“Turban Warfare” – Utterly Unhelpful and Meaningless!

Dunc — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 05:48:50 +0000

A good friend of mine currently living the United States drew to my attention the headline chosen by the New York Post this week to report on the Iranian election crisis: ‘Turban Warfare’.

Obviously some little misinformed spade at the Post came up with this irrelevant pap some months after 9/11 and has been waiting for a ‘suitable’ time for its publication for the best part of eight years. When turmoil erupted in Iran recently, they presumably ignored the advice of several more-educated interns at the paper and ran the headline anyway.

It’s a real shame for them, getting it wrong on such a grand scale. All they had to do was open an ‘Atlas of the World’ and look up Iran’s main religion to see that this headline wasn’t actually appropriate in this case. This is the level of research readers’ hard-earned money is put towards at good newspapers.

My friend in the States saw the headline on a copy of the ‘paper’ in a cafe. He left, having remarked, in ink, on the front page: “Racial Propaganda”. I suggest you do the same.

Aussie Quit Smoking Ad Causing Upset…

Dunc — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 21:02:23 +0000

News this morning is of the Australian quit smoking advertisement that has got parts of the world all in a frenzy. Here it is…

People aren’t stressing so much about the message, but more about the stupid rumours that ‘the production team really made the boy cry by taking his mother away from him’.

MANURE!! Look at him! He’s clearly an actor. The whole thing is PR, PR and more PR! And bloody good PR too.

Toughen up, people.

Death Of Jade Goody Quotes Carry Some Sense…

Dunc — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 20:07:01 +0000

As an overseas Brit, I have to admit the death of reality TV’s Jade Goody and the quotes surrounding her passing on Sunday morning shook me slightly. It’s not that I was ever really a fan of her, before or after the ‘race thing’, but there is no greater reminder that Britain carries on without you when you leave, than a celebrity dying. As odd as it sounds, it helped spell out to me that I have left ol’ Blighty and it will never be the place it was when I left again.

That’s not what I want to write about, though. I was more moved by the tributes and quotes that poured in in memory of Jade. One quote that really impressed me came from a really unlikely source: Tory scrubbing brush John McCririck. In a tribute to Jade Goody, he was quoted with this: “She brought out one of the most serious problems in this country, the inherent racism… that people try and keep quiet.

“It’s about people who don’t know they are racist but when they’re losing an argument with somebody who’s Asian or a black person they go back to the old stereotypes, and she did that.”

I’m sorry, but was that John McCririck talking sense? Let’s just check:

“She brought out one of the most serious problems in this country, the inherent racism… that people try and keep quiet.

“It’s about people who don’t know they are racist but when they’re losing an argument with somebody who’s Asian or a black person they go back to the old stereotypes, and she did that.”

Somebody has died, that’s terrible, but here we see somebody turning it around for the benefit of humanity. I never thought I would say this, but good on ya John.

Quote source: bbc.co.uk