Hoon watch: Last Friday Crikey’s esteemed Wankley panel honoured the brave men and women of news teams across the country, the fearless TV reporters on our roads risking their lives, and the lives of others, to file stories on hoon driving, straight to camera, while at the wheel.
As an extension of this community service, Crikey pledges to highlight the many disturbing instances of hoon driving by reporters. Channel Seven clearly has form on the dangerous practice of frowning knowingly at erractic driving with one eye on the road:
Here’s Seven’s Brendan O’Donahue tut tutting at road safety inside Melbourne’s Burnley tunnel, steering, frowning and talking at the same time:
— Sophie Black
A sign of things to come? Yesterday restaurant critic John Lethlean’s prime space review in The Age‘s Epicure told us that diners might be “ostracised” by the prices. And, (presumably if they passed the social acceptability test), they’d be offered “a tin or sardines” for an entree. Ow. Trust Fairfax won’t be axing any more subs! — Suzanne Yanko, mX newspaper, Melbourne
Vodafone just sent out an Olympic themed SMS to customers Quote from Twitter: Wolfcat: ok… vodafone just sent me an sms saying I can support my team in beijing with rights from their live service… FAIL games are over!
RIP Scrabulous Facebook users in the UK have finally lost access to Scrabulous, the unofficial version of the Scrabble word game, after a formal complaint by the rights holder Mattel. Scrabulous has built a user base of more than 600,000 people globally on the social networking site, but it was closed to Facebook users in the US and Canada after a similar rights claim by Hasbro, the North American Scrabble rights holder. — The Guardian
Ad man diet book a hoax? When Alex Bogusky, the ad guru for Burger King and Domino’s Pizza (among others), announced last week that he is publishing a diet book, the general reaction was, “Ha, hypocrite Whopper-seller.” An alternate theory, though, is that the book is part of some elaborate hoax, or will turn out to be the peg for a new Bogusky ad campaign. But if it is, he’s doing a good job keeping it a secret; Burger King and Domino’s, the two fatty food-touting clients most obviously affected by the book, had to find out about it by reading a news story — Gawker
Go Inside the Big Tent: a Video Tour I’m in the Big Tent — the facility set up a handful of blocks from the Pepsi Center in downtown Denver to serve as a work and social hub for new media types, activists, and blogger during this week’s Democratic National Convention — and am about to break out my brand new Nokia N95 to give a Qik tour. I’ll ask you to be gentle, as this is my first attempt at live video blogging. We’ll get started in a few minutes, so watch this space. — Nancy Scola, TechPresident
Another day, another death list. Despite having an arsenal of anti-press laws at his disposal, the leader of Zimbabwe’s junta, Robert Mugabe, has resorted to using brute force and the threat of assassination to silence the independent media. Yet another list, prepared by Mugabe’s Central Intelligence Organisation, is doing the rounds of internet websites. I take a cursory look at the list, and yawn. The same old names are there – all the stalwarts of our profession who endeavour constantly to bring to the world’s attention the appalling atrocities being committed in the name of sovereignty by the Mugabe regime. — Wilf Mbanga, The Guardian
Stewart mouths off Jon Stewart ripped the cable news networks Monday as a “brutish, slow-witted beast” and castigated Fox News as “an appendage of the Republican Party.” Wearing a gray T-shirt and a healthy stubble, the “Daily Show” host told reporters that Fox’s fair-and-balanced slogan is “a (expletive) you to people with brains” and that only “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace “saves that network from slapping on a bumper sticker . . . Barack Obama could cure cancer and they’d figure out a way to frame it as an economic disaster.” — The Huffington Post
Do brokers Merrill Lynch need some of the Fairfax subs who are about to be made redundant? Crikey is mortified at typos and Merrill’s no doubt will be, but we couldn’t resist this from this morning’s client note on Fairfax’s job cuts:
Fairfax Media Ltd. (Buy)
FXJ to reduce workforce by 5% 63
Meida Team
Your messy desks Selected photos, submitted by msnbc.com readers, of messy desks.– MSNBC
Spam of the day An equal tie between the artful ‘Swarm of Bees Dissipates: Paris Hilton Unharmed’ and the poignant and ironic ‘Britney Spears Pregnant Again, May Lose Custody of V-gina’
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