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Digging Deeper on Community Radio: Triple R and Indispensable Airwaves
To get to the venue involves a calming, if early, ritual. Uneasy sleep beforehand, given the morning slot. Eagerness to prepare for the topic to be discussed in the global affairs segment, accompanied by that childish sense of worry that approval means something. Then, getting on a tram to the venue, which, as luck would […]
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The Rise of the New Culture Commissars
The annual rites of Oscar are nigh (Sunday, March 10), in case you hadn’t noticed—and given the sharply declining trend of the show’s ratings over the past decade, you probably hadn’t. Once a momentous occasion of national mind-melding of near-Super Bowl proportions, this increasingly tedious exercise in tacky self-aggrandizement and PC hectoring from gazillionaire celebrities […]
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The 2024 Oscars: The Rise of the New Culture Commissars
The annual rites of Oscar are nigh (Sunday, March 10), in case you hadn’t noticed—and given the sharply declining trend of the show’s ratings over the past decade, you probably hadn’t. Once a momentous occasion of national mind-melding of near-Super Bowl proportions, this increasingly tedious exercise in tacky self-aggrandizement and PC hectoring from gazillionaire celebrities […]
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A Wishful Gamble: Rugby League in Las Vegas
The history of such experiments is not promising. Why would those in the US like the game of rugby league, when an established code of superficial similarity already exists? Fundamental differences, for one thing, abound. The US NFL Superbowl tries to keep blood and violence off the pitch. Force, when exercised, is chivalric, the moves […]
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What If Our Society Valued Civics as It Does Entertainment?
A teacher once said to me: “A society pays for what it values.” If so, our society values commercial entertainment, including spectator sports, orders of magnitude more than it values civics defined as the rights and duties exercised by citizens in a democracy. What if we lived in a society that valued both equally? 1. […]
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Fame vs Celebrity
Orientation Questions about fame and celebrity What does it mean to be famous? Does being famous go all the way back to hunter-gatherers or does it have an origin later in history? What does it mean to be a celebrity? Is it common in all societies or do celebrities emerge at a certain point in […]
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Calf Days and Rationed Broadcasting: The Women’s World Cup
FIFA is a funny organisation. Mafia-run, obscenely corrupt, it governs the most popular game on the planet with a shameless, muscular vigour that must make other criminal enterprises green with envy. But even its members must find the curious limitations to viewing matches of the 2023 Women’s World Cup being held in Australia and New […]
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