Quotulatiousness

August 19, 2011

Almost, but not quite, entirely unlike a rap music video

Filed under: Britain, Humour, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 16:45

H/T to Maggie Koerth-Baker at BoingBoing (and I’m still a bit astonished I didn’t see it at Ghost of a Flea first . . .) [In-line update: of course he got there months ago. Silly of me to think otherwise.]

From the comments at BoingBoing, it’s apparently called “Chap-Hop“.

For some British rappers, nothing goes better with laying down rhymes than a gin and tonic and a Sunday afternoon stroll.

They have created chap-hop, fusing the American urban musical genre with the imagined lifestyle of the British upper classes. And this coastal town, with its candy-colored Victorian villas and seafront promenade, is the setting for the latest hip-hop feud.

In chap-hop videos, hip-hop tropes are subtly undermined: Barely clothed models are replaced with a ladylike redhead in a summer frock, cricket bats are substituted for uzis.

Professor Elemental, a self-styled “Steampunk Mad Professor” and leading chap-hop MC, is one of its top exponents. He is easy to spot in the Marwood Café here, even amid its décor of spectacle-wearing stuffed owls and dismembered mannequins. Clad in Victorian-explorer garb, complete with pith helmet, he is eager to talk about his planned trip across the Atlantic.

If you want to take the moral high ground, you must live up to it

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 15:27

James Delingpole has a bit of advice for the BBC and the Guardian:

The liberal-Left has many vices. But surely the most noisome one of all (in a crowded field) is its rank hypocrisy. If you’re going to take the moral high ground — as Lefties will insist on doing at every opportunity — the very least you owe the world in return if you have a shred of compunction, decency or intellectual consistency is to demonstrate more integrity than those you are impugning. And if you can’t do that, then bloody well shut up.

In the last few months, you can’t have helped noticing, the liberal-Left media, led by the BBC and the Guardian, have been dwelling on the News International phone hacking scandal with a shrillness and hysteria and foaming moral outrage out of all proportion to the nature of the offence.

Am I defending phone hacking or the leaking by police of confidential information to newsapers? Of course I’m not. I think it’s a horrible, grubby practice which must have left all the people who were victims of it feeling soiled and discomfited. But a) as we saw in the cities of Britain last week (and we’re also seeing on the stock markets) there are many problems far more deserving right now of the media’s crusading attention. And b) it’s not as if News International’s imprints which were the only newspapers playing this game. The gutter end of journalism is, of necessity, an unscrupulous, highly competitive business. Tabloid hacks stand or fall on the number of scoops they get over the opposition. It would be stretching the bounds of credulity to claim that other papers, besides those owned by Murdoch, have not engaged in similar dirty tricks.

Excellent news for players of impact sports

Filed under: Football, Health, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:04

It’s becoming more a topic of concern for players (and especially for the parents of younger players) in sports which feature significant amounts of contact: detecting when a player has suffered a concussion. Football and hockey players are often determined to prove how tough they are by “playing through” injury, but concussions are not like bruises or other injuries — they can have long-term dangerous side-effects. There’s now a product available at the retail level that may help:

Over the next few weeks, a U.S. company called Battle Sports Science is making its Impact Indicator available throughout Canada and the United States. It is a sensor that is fastened to a helmet chin strap and detects when the user’s head undergoes an impact likely to cause a concussion.

Football versions of this device should be on the way to Canada in two weeks, said Battle Sports CEO Chris Circo, and one for hockey is expected to be available in late September or early October.

When attached and operating, a green light will be illuminated at the player’s chin. If the light turns red, it’s indicating that the player has been hit hard and should be evaluated before returning to play.

Once the technology is widely available, the professional leagues and the college and university teams should adopt them as standard equipment. Junior players would have less reason to resist using the device if all the top-level players were seen to be using them. It’ll take longer to retrain sports announcers to stop glorify big hits and featuring them on slo-mo playbacks while saying things like “He got jacked-up”, “They blew him up” and “He got his bell rung on that hit”.

Cage match: Jason Kenney against Amnesty International

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:16

Paul Wells on the ongoing war of words between Canada’s immigration minister and the earnest folks at Amnesty International:

Some stories are so odd nobody knows how to handle them. I don’t know how else to explain why Immigration Minister Jason Kenney’s extraordinary public feud with Amnesty International has attracted so little coverage.

Here’s a senior Conservative minister departing from the Conservatives’ normal bland talking points and unleashing a written broadside against a critic. And Kenney’s sparring partner wasn’t a predictable target. It was the Canadian branch of Amnesty, one of the most revered human rights organizations in the world. But that didn’t stop the minister from calling Amnesty’s concerns “poppycock,” “sloppy and irresponsible” and “self-congratulatory moral preening.”

Here’s what the fuss was about: last month, Kenney and Public Safety Minister Vic Toews released the names and photos of 30 fugitives who’d evaded immigration authorities since being found inadmissible because they’re believed to be complicit in genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes. In short, the ministers were asking the public to help track down fleeing war crimes suspects. The public has stepped up: since the ministers’ announcements, six of the 30 men have been apprehended and three of those six deported.

Defining a business strategy

Filed under: Randomness — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:32

Virginia Postrel looks at the concept of “business strategy”:

Strategy is not what many people think it is. It is not a fill-in-the-blanks mission statement blathering about how XYZ Corp. will ethically serve its stakeholders by implementing best-in-class integrated sustainable practices to grow as a global leader while maximizing shareholder value. Such bafflegab is “Dilbert“-fodder that generates cynicism and contempt. It is, at best, a big waste of time.

Neither is strategy a declaration that the ABC Co. will increase sales by 20 percent a year for the next five years, with a profit margin of at least 20 percent. Strategy is not the resolve to hunker down and try harder — what Kenichi Ohmae of McKinsey criticized in a 1989 Harvard Business Review article as “do more better.” Effort is not strategy. Neither are financial projections. And neither are wishes.

A strategy “is a way of dealing with a high-stakes challenge,” Rumelt told me in an interview. “It’s a way around the obstacles or problems in a difficult situation.”

Every good strategy, he writes, includes what he calls the kernel: a “diagnosis” of the challenge (“What’s going on here?”), a “guiding policy” for dealing with that challenge (the core idea often called a strategy), and a set of “coherent actions” to carry out that policy (the implementation).

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