“The noisiest paper, without doubt, was the News of the World, which resounded with three continuous notes. The first and most defensible was sport … Then, there were television performers … Last and most cacophonous, there was the assumption, or the ardent hope, that somebody, somewhere, was having sex with somebody he should not be having sex with. Viewed from outside, what this fixation suggested was a giggling braggart, fidgeting in the schoolyard and pointing at girls with whom he’d never have a chance.”

Great article in the New Yorker this week on Murdoch and his empire.

The Social Network. Let’s be frank, we all had our doubts about the entertainment value of a movie detailing the early days of a website. As it happens though, with juicy lawsuits and a killer script, you can make a phenomenal flick. Some have called it the movie of the year and if I was a movie person I might be able to offer my own opinion on that. It’s an excellent film that doesn’t have the usual slump in the middle. Instead, it has youths hooking up a zip-line so they can fly from the roof of their house and into their pool. Always good.

Just after I got out of the screening and tweeted how much I enjoyed the movie, someone asked me what I thought of how Mark Zuckerberg was portrayed. I think that’s one of the crucial questions.

Zuckerberg is shown to be a painfully shy yet incredibly talented and driven college student. While Saverin was worrying about how to monetize this new venture to impress his father, Zuck is more focussed on getting his fledgling baby off the ground. This can be best seen when Savarin is bugging Zuck to start putting ads on the site.

“No!” declares Mark, explaining that ads aren’t cool and that the fact that thefacebook is cool is its biggest asset. That also explains why Zuck gets so pissed off when news-stories appear showing his key staff in a bad light. It’s heavily insinuated that Savarin was diluted out of the company because of the animal cruelty stories in the Harvard Crimson and Sean Parker was “pushed out” of the company in 2005 after being arrested for possession of cocaine. (source)

The book differs from the film in one crucial area, and that’s the fact that the book sides very definitely with Savarin, something that the movie does not. Then again, all Mezrich cares about is the sales so who expects different? Little known fact: Accidental Billionaires was written after Saverin’s friend got in contact with Mezrich before he met with the author in person. Mezrich worked with Saverin, but Zuckerberg never agreed to be a part of the book. That’s not conducive a balanced book, is it? (source) At least David Fincher (director) and Aaron Sorkin (screenplay) did the film some justice — they made something fantastic out of something dire.

“I personally came out of there saying this [The Social Network] is the best movie I’ve ever seen.” — Ben Mezrich on the new movie. I’m sure his wife, lawyer and dog thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread too, seeing as he wrote the book. I’ve talked about Mezrich before here.

Why is being impartial better? Because, to kinda quote the film: if you were going to make a movie about who wronged who in the early days of Facebook, you’d have made a movie about who wronged who in the early days of Facebook. [1] The lawsuits may provide the framework for the movie’s plot but the ‘he’s wrong, I’m right’ side of things that the book focusses so heavily on isn’t given much attention.

At the end of the day, nobody from the early days of Facebook is less than a millionaire, so just how relevant is all this bad blood?

What I want to know is that, armed with the knowledge that such films have the potential to be successful: what web company is next on the yellow brick road to the silver screen? My money’s on Google. Yours?

[1] During the Winklevoss lawsuit, Mark loses his cool and snaps: “If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you’d have invented Facebook.”

Reddit has really gone to town with this, jumping on top of it as if it’s irrefutable evidence that Obama is evil and we’re segueing into a 1984 state.

“They basically want to turn back the clock and make Internet services function the way that the telephone system used to function.”

James X. Dempsey, vice president of the Center for Democracy and Technology, an Internet policy group.

Yahoo! News also leads with this rather misleading opening:

The Obama administration is drawing up legislation to make it easier for US intelligence services to eavesdrop on the Internet, including email exchanges and social networks, The New York Times said Monday.

That is of course, that is not what’s happening. What they’re saying is that law enforcement forces can order all online communication tools — e.g. Skype or Facebook — be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order or subpoena. They can already do that with phone records which are equally private.

Big difference, yeah?

Sources that got it right: The New York Times and, bizarrely, Fox News.

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I don’t usually do ‘I-hate-this’ posts, but this is a special case.

People from mobile networks asking to do surveys. There’s a special circle of hell reserved just for them.

Yesterday, I was doing homework at the kitchen table when my phone rang. It was a 0044 number. I ignore it because I frequently get calls from a random 0044 number. The first couple of times when I picked up, nobody spoke. I learnt to just ignore them. So yesterday when I was doing homework, I silenced my phone and continued with my homework.

A couple of minutes later, Mum’s mobile rings. She’s in the sitting room on the house phone talking to a friend. I would ignore it, but Mum uses that mobile for business so I’d better answer it.

“Hello?”

“Hi, [unintelligible] can I ask you a few questions?” The line’s terrible, and what does this guy want? Cue standard telemarker response:

“Uhm, now’s not really a great time. We’re quite busy here.”

“Yes, I understand there’s a Meteor and a Vodafone customer in the house and…”

Oh, I think. You’re one of *those* callers. I was halfway through a Maths question — not the best time to disturb me with frivolous ‘to make our service better’ calls

“Yeah; well, I can’t answer you now because we’re just far too busy here.” I answer, my patience waning.

A pause.

“If I could just ask you a couple of questions about your mobile usage….”

I get actually ticked off now. “I told you — we’re too busy to take your call!”

He must be able to hear my annoyance. “Ok sir, sorry, goodbye”

And now I’ve lost my train of thought and have to start my maths question again. Thank you, guys.

When one thinks of the South of France, one can’t help but imagine the sunny skies, golden beaches and laid back lifestyle.

We have one of the above. We’re currently in Mausanne-Les-Alpilles, where we stayed over the last couple of years (camping), even though that’s not where we’re strictly ‘based’, for the want of a better word. We’re really staying at a friend’s summer house in nearby Sérignan (about 135 KMs) south-west of here.

Much and all as I enjoy the rain (it’s the blistering sun I’ve a problem with), being in the South of France in the middle of torrential pours does put an, uhm, damper on the holiday.

I’ll get my coat, in both senses of the word.

Oh, crap, it being the South of France, I didn’t bother bringing a coat.

Damn.

This morning, I checked out the local library to avail of their free wifi, to check if 4.0 was released to the general public. It wasn’t, but I realized that developers would’ve been able to get it straight away. I asked a developer I knew over MSN if I could use her developer account to log in and download the 4.0 release. She agreed and I began downloading. It was a 378 MB file and Chrome told me it would take over an hour.

Around 13:00, I wondered what time the library closed at, if I’d be turfed out before the download finished. Since about midday, an alarm had kept going off and stopping intermittently – I’d assumed it was a car alarm.

I got up to check what time they’d closed for lunch at when an alarm went off. It dawned on me that the two events (me standing up and the alarm going off) might not in fact be unrelated. I went out to the main hall -I’d been in a ‘wifi room’- and saw the lights off, the shutters down and the alarm growing louder. With nobody in sight, I checked the sheet of opening times and discovered the place had been closed since 12 until 4.

Interesting!

And so, I appeared to be locked in. The alarm around the front door was absolutely berserk – it would deafen most normal people and it was only my 4 years drumming that kept me from running towards a window and making my escape.

As a matter of fact, with power and wifi (and a lack of hunger), I was perfectly satisfied where I was. It was an inconvenience, sure, but I wasn’t scared or in danger or annoyed. On the contrary, being allowed to spend time online without anyone bothering me is quite fun! :) If I’d been locked in overnight, sure, I’d have done something, but 2 hours is grand.

I was disappointed that my ideas of Night at the Museum-esque events happening didn’t actually happen – there was nobody around and no cool artifacts to come alive save some books.

I’m looking through my MSN conversations to try and give some bearing as to the time-frame of my imprisonment:

13:10:20 ☆ Tommy : library is deserted tho
13:10:29 ☆ Tommy : wouldn’t surprise me if they’d forgotten about me and locked up
….
13:10:45 ☆ Tommy : speaking oh which, shit, when do they close for lunch….
….
13:11:49 ☆ Tommy : well it’ll either be 13:30 or 14:00 they close (assuming they do) and probably the latter
13:11:59 ☆ Tommy : actually haven’t seen anyone in about an hour… :S
….
13:15:08 ☆ Tommy : also – I saw dad drive past in the car but he hasn’t come in
….
13:15:43 ☆ Tommy : he mentioned collecting me. brb, checking if anyone’s around
….
13:16:04 ☆ Tommy :  an alarm keeps going off at random intervals
13:16:08 ☆ Tommy : some sort of motion sensor
13:16:09 ☆ Tommy : ?
13:16:17 *other person*: I dunno
13:16:22 *other person*: oh god
13:16:24 *other person*: maybe
13:16:50 ☆ Tommy : yes
13:17:01 ☆ Tommy : lights off, shutters down
13:17:04 ☆ Tommy : I’m locked in!
13:18:35 ☆ Tommy : brb, again
13:18:55 *other person*: kk
13:19:51 ☆ Tommy : fucking hell, they’re closed til 4
13:19:55 ☆ Tommy : another 2 hours and 40 mins
13:20:44 *other person*: balls
13:20:57 *other person*: at least it ain’t overnight
13:21:14 *other person*: how careless to just lock up like
13:21:38 ☆ Tommy : yep, not even hidden away
13:21:46 ☆ Tommy : texting dad now
13:22:20 ☆ Tommy : and yup, it’s definitely a motion sensor alarm
13:22:26 ☆ Tommy : goes off when I stand up
13:22:36 ☆ Tommy : goes batshit crazy when I went to look up times
13:22:51 *other person*: and noone comes to check the place out when the alarm goes off
13:22:53 *other person*: mad Ted
13:23:18 ☆ Tommy : D is on his way, though

It did strike me as slightly odd that nobody had checked on me before they locked up. I think it’s actually a French thing – they expect the people to bugger off before they close for lunch. It’s the same with French folk with dogs – the people will let the dogs crap in the streets with no thought of picking it up – ah, that’s someone else’s problem. There seems to be a definite lack of self-responsibility here, which is what caused this. After all, I wasn’t hidden in a corner or using headphones when they locked up. Out of sight, out of mind..

However, my Dad had texted me, worried as to my whereabouts. He’d gone to the nearby police and told them of his daughter (fils) (thank you Dad’s broken French…) stuck in the library. The librarians weren’t far away and were able to re-open the doors.

So, a fun escapade, no harm done either… apart from having to leave my download with only 11 minutes left.

People have asked me – if I had been stuck there over-night, what would I have done? Well, I wouldn’t have stayed over-night, that’s for sure. I would’ve looked for an emergency exit door first and exited that way. Failing that, I’ve seen House M.D. break a window with his cane in an episode, I can follow suit.

As sporty people will know (Dad, sit up), Tiger Woods made his quasi-triumphant return to the world of golf earlier this month. It’s an excuse, however flimsy, for the Aunt-Petunia-from-Harry-Potter-style gossip mongers to come out in force and have a good old-fashioned chinwag about the whole affair. One of the few good things to come out (insert your own innuendo here) of the whole ordeal, this blogger thinks, is the introduction of the world chexting into the world.

Chexting, as the name suggests, is cheating on one’s spouse or partner through the medium of text messages,”. It’s not really a new word — there are examples of use dating back to at least the mid-2000s. But what chexting lacks in recency it makes up for in interestingness, at least linguistically. It’s the suffix -exting that grabs our attention. We’re used to it from the shock-horror, kids-these-days, what-is-the-world-coming-to word sexting, which refers to taking nude or seminude pictures with a camera phone and then sending them as texts (usually with tragic results). So used to it in fact, that in writing this post, all other -exting words were questioned by Chrome’s spellcheck function except for sexting.

-Exting is blended into other relationship words as well — brexting (breaking up with someone via text message, a truly slimy thing to do), drexting (sending text messages — often amorous ones — while drunk), confexting (confessing something — possibly chexting? — via text message), and fexting (fake-texting, that is, pretending to be sending a text message in order to avoid talking to someone).

And those are just the quote unquote serious, relationshippy ones. There are also plenty of jokey or facetious -exting words, including hexting (sending curses via text message), Czexting (sending text messages in Czech), Quebexting (sending text messages in Canada), objexting (what lawyers do when they text in the courtroom), vexting (sending intentionally upsetting text messages), and wexting (texting while walking).

It seems that -exting has its own kind of cultural pop, with an overtone of salaciousness — but why? Part of the reason is that we already “know” that text-messaging is supposed to be bad for us. It’s making us dumber, and degrading our language, or so the thinking goes. (David Crystal, the noted linguist, efficiently debunks in his recent book, “Txting: The gr8 db8.” At least one study has found that children who used the most abbreviations in their text messages scored the best on tests of reading and vocabulary. So there.)

It may also be that a salacious text message leaves no room for innocent explanations. No one accidentally hits the “flirt” button on their cellphone, and there’s no “can’t stop thinking about you, baby” autocomplete. When we hear the word chexting, we think not only of the chexter’s behavior, but also of their partner’s dismay at having to discover the infidelity on a tiny screen. (Of course, maybe that partner was “pexting,” peeking at another person’s text message.)

OK, I don’t hate the internet that much – that I wouldn’t post for 3 days. The reason for this is the simple fact that we’re putting on a 2.5 hour show twice in one day in 8 days time (tomorrow week!) and the rehearsals are eating away at time which would usually be spent on blogging. Sorry, folks!

In other news, I’m still half-expecting the sky to turn dark and the horsemen to appear and all the other Armageddon symptoms because of what’s happening in Iceland, or rather, all over mainland Europe. Patrick was due to fly home on Friday and that just didn’t happen.

Also, my lack of blogging could also be attributed to our internet being up and down more often than.. some form of busy elevator. Having to restart the router every 5 minutes doesn’t a Salisbury Steak make. No, wait, I’m mixing my metaphors – all restarting and no blogging makes Tommy a dull boy. That’s the one. On that subject, the infamous “Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeere’s Johnny’ scene in The Shining took 3 days to film and used 60 doors.

Well, is it still a cast update if I don’t actually have a cast on at present? Details, details…

I am currently cast-less; admittedly 3 weeks earlier than usual, but without-cast all the same.

Yesterday while watching a film with Mum, we noticed marks/stains around my right knee on the cast. I’d been feeling more pain than usual over the past 4 or 5 days but hadn’t conclusively been able to pinpoint the cause of the pain. Recently though I’d been thinking that it almost felt that the cast was rubbing, but hadn’t been confident enough in that thought to actually go about taking off the cast early.

Whatever about stiffness and even some pain, the sight of blood was definitely not one of the things we expected to see/happen while in the cast, and this prompted us to take it off early. Doctor Dad and Nurse Mum went at the cast with a pair of scissors (it’s a soft cast, luckily) and sure enough, when we had removed it, I’d a rather large wound on my knee which was caused by the cast rubbing off it.

Despite the sore, it was quite a relief to be free of the cast. Even though I could only bend my knee a small bit before pain started shooting through my leg, it was still more than the cast had ever allowed me. Since it was a pressure sore and not an infection, the pain almost immediately went away once the source of the problem (the cast) had been removed. It was replaced by an intense itching however and a lot of stiffness. I was almost surprised at how itchy I felt because that hadn’t been a problem when I had the cast on, when it would’ve been a lot harder to scratch (a friend of mine who had a cast had huge problems with itching and his plan of scratching his leg with a small plastic knife went awry when it slid down too far and he couldn’t retrieve it…)

The physio came back to us this afternoon – we’ll put back on the cast after making a hole for the knee to relieve the pressure and then secure it in some way. Progress! :)

We had a meeting with the physio and a surgeon on Wednesday morning who told us that since we’d exhausted other methods of relief (painkillers, ice, electronic stimulation), we should try cortisone injections into the knee joint. I recognized the name from somewhere but didn’t place it until afterwards: corticosteroids, from House M.D.

That was fine with me. I’d realized long ago that life was simpler if you just got over fears of needles. Even them talking about putting me under anesthetic for a time didn’t bother me. Indeed, the only spanner in the works came later.

“Oh, if we give you these, and you go back to walking as you did before, the stress on your knee will negate some of the effects of the injections, so I think we’ll put you in a cast to force you to rest it.”

That seemed fine once again. I’d had casts before – it was no big deal, until I remembered RENT

The local drama group that I’m a member of are doing “RENT: School Edition” in April, and I was dearly hoping to audition for it. Would being in a cast hinder my attempts to get in the cast?

Eventually though, I decided to take the injections as soon as possible — the sooner I’m in the cast, the sooner I’m out of the cast. The brief thoughts I had of waiting were quickly dashed when I thought to myself “I haven’t been able to go to school because of this pain.. how do I think I’ll survive until April?”

So all I can do now is rest my leg as much as possible until 8am on Thursday. I’ve got my new crutches. Surprisingly, I didn’t find it too difficult to adjust between having two crutches instead of a cane — the most annoying part is the fact that I can’t text and walk at the same time!