30 July 2013

Bronies With Guns

Gordon Campbell writes:

I hope this doesn't qualify as the kind of investigative journalism likely to inflame the military mindset, but the weirdest story of last week had to be the one about the infatuation of certain serving members of the US armed forces and National Guardsmen with….My Little Pony. Yes, the same superpower killing machine that brought you Predator drones and Kent State has spent part of its time last week debating whether US servicemen can attend My Little Pony conventions in uniform, or can wear My Little Pony badges and decals when they’re out on military manoeuvres. Reportedly, the US service personnel in question are called “Bronies” and there’s a news website about Bronies in Uniform here. There’s also a Facebook page for Military Bronies here.

I first came across this debate in an article on the US Air Force Flightlines website that cites the US Army blog Outside The Wire, which goes into far more detail about the phenomenon in a story entitled “Military Bronies Love Their Rifles And Their My Little Pony.”

[At the] recent “BronyCon Summer 2012” at the Meadowlands Exposition Center in New Jersey…a special lunch for service members at BronyCon got a visit from Tara Strong, who voices the magical pony Twilight Sparkle. No sooner did Strong praise the men as “twilightlicious,” than they broke out in a baritone of Twilight Sparkle’s signature song: “T-W-I-L-I-G-H-T, and ain’t no other pony troll down like me. I’m twilightlicious!”

In an odd parallel with the US military’s former “don’t ask/don’t tell” stance towards gays, bronies wonder about how alone they are, and how visible they can afford to be:

On the Military Bronies page, one poster was worried. How common are bronies in the Army? He was about to join and wanted to know how open to be. “Hard to say,” was the reply. “Best advice I can give is be subtle about it. Those who share your interests will notice, and you may even make some battle buddies that way. Best of luck to you as you launch your Army career!”
- Gordon Campbell, 'Bronies With Guns', Scoop.co.nz, 29 July 2013

26 July 2013

A passionate interest in healthy eating

A man caught with a prostitute in his car told police she was there to show him where to buy tomatoes.

West Midlands Police said officers found the woman sitting inside Muhammad Ikhlaq's car while he withdrew £20 from a cash machine, which he said was to pay for tomatoes.

Ikhlaq, 39, of New Street, Dudley, was found guilty of soliciting and fined £400 at Walsall Magistrates' Court.

He was also ordered to pay £665 in costs on Wednesday.

24 July 2013

Twin peaks

Snowy Ngauruhoe and Ruapehu, viewed from the port side of an Air New Zealand Bombardier flight NZ8307, flying from Hamilton to Wellington on Monday afternoon. Plus a shot of the heads at dusk, swinging around for a northward approach to Wellington airport.

Ngauruhoe
Ngauruhoe
Ngauruhoe & Ruapehu
Ruapehu
Ruapehu
Wellington's south coast & Bluebridge ferry

20 July 2013

How one book made every Hollywood film feel the same

If you’ve gone to the movies recently, you may have felt a strangely familiar feeling: You’ve seen this movie before. Not this exact movie, but some of these exact story beats: the hero dressed down by his mentor in the first 15 minutes (Star Trek Into Darkness,Battleship); the villain who gets caught on purpose (The Dark Knight, The Avengers, Skyfall, Star Trek Into Darkness); the moment of hopelessness and disarray a half-hour before the movie ends (Olympus Has Fallen, Oblivion, 21 Jump Street, Fast & Furious 6).

It’s not déjà vu. Summer movies are often described as formulaic. But what few people know is that there is actually a formula—one that lays out, on a page-by-page basis, exactly what should happen when in a screenplay. It’s as if a mad scientist has discovered a secret process for making a perfect, or at least perfectly conventional, summer blockbuster.
The formula didn’t come from a mad scientist. Instead it came from a screenplay guidebook, Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need. In the book, author Blake Snyder, a successful spec screenwriter who became an influential screenplay guru, preaches a variant on the basic three-act structure that has dominated blockbuster film-making since the late 1970s.

When Snyder published his book in 2005, it was as if an explosion ripped through Hollywood. The book offered something previous screenplay guru tomes didn’t. Instead of a broad overview of how a screen story fits together, his book broke down the three-act structure into a detailed “beat sheet”: 15 key story “beats”—pivotal events that have to happen—and then gave each of those beats a name and a screenplay page number. Given that each page of a screenplay is expected to equal a minute of film, this makes Snyder’s guide essentially a minute-to-minute movie formula.

Indeed, if you’re on the lookout, you can find Snyder’s beats, in the order he prescribes, executed more or less as Snyder instructs, in virtually every major release in theaters today. Yet once you know the formula, the seams begin to show. Movies all start to seem the same, and many scenes start to feel forced and arbitrary, like screenplay Mad Libs. Why does Kirk get dressed down for irresponsibility by Admiral Pike early in Star Trek Into Darkness? Because someone had to deliver the theme to the main character. Why does Gina Carano’s sidekick character defect to the villain’s team for no reason whatsoever almost exactly three-quarters of the way through Fast & Furious 6? Because it’s the all-is-lost moment, so everything needs to be in shambles for the heroes. Why does Gerard Butler’s character in Olympus Has Fallen suddenly call his wife after a climactic failed White House assault three-quarters of the way through? Because the second act always ends with a quiet moment of reflection—the dark night of the soul.

Watching poorly executed movies with Snyder’s formula in mind can become a tiresome and repetitive slog. How many times can you watch a young man struggle with his problems, gain new power, then save the world? It’s enough to make you wonder: Is over-reliance on Snyder’s story formula killing movies?

- Peter Suderman, 'Save the Movie!' (excerpt), Slate, 19 July 2013

19 July 2013

Big business in little New Zealand?

Like me, you probably didn't know that the disreputable megacorp Goldman Sachs has (or had) over a hundred subsidiaries registered in New Zealand. This comes as a surprise because this website visualisation highlighting the Byzantine complexity of big companies' ownership arrangements mainly depicts no-doubt-legal but still questionably tortuous chains to countries famed for their loose control over high finance, like the Cayman Islands (739 GS subsidiaries), Luxembourg (202), and the UK (122). But there are also 155 New Zealand subsidiaries connected to Goldman Sachs, including such impenetrable titles as Hauraki Private Equity Fund No.2 Limited, TTPE 07 No.25 Limited (de-registered in January 2013, actually), and innocuously-sounding, the Tourist Hotel Corporation of New Zealand Limited (dissolved in 2000). For the latter THC listing, the website lists a control chain as follows:

GOLDMAN SACHS GROUP, INC., THE > GS HLDGS ANZ II PTY LTD > GOLDMAN SACHS AUSTRALIA GROUP HOLDINGS PTY LTD > GOLDMAN SACHS AUSTRALIA INTERNATIONAL PTY LTD > GOLDMAN SACHS NEW ZEALAND HOLDINGS LIMITED > GOLDMAN SACHS NEW ZEALAND MANAGEMENT LIMITED > PORTFOLIO CUSTODIAN LIMITED > TOURISM HOLDINGS LIMITED > WAITOMO CAVES LIMITED > TOURIST HOTEL CORPORATION OF NEW ZEALAND LIMITED

Got those 10 steps straight in your head? Me too. And of course I'm sure it was all 100% legal and above board. Te Ara notes that 'in 1990 the government sold the Tourist Hotel Corporation to US-based South Pacific Hotels Corporation', and in the 1990s it seems to have wound up owned by GS.

I don't know much about high finance, but I'd be interested to read why New Zealand features so prominently in Goldman Sachs' ownership structures, and what that means for our economic sovereignty. Is this just a by-product of a generation of state asset sales to overseas investors, or should we be more concerned about the strength of our company laws for international investors? Is the prevalence of outdated or expired listings in the New Zealand register significant?

Goldman Sachs ownership via OpenCorporate

The OpenCorporate blog indicates that perhaps New Zealand's strong presence in the visualisation is due to the principles of open government:

The shareholder data from the New Zealand company register, for example, is granular and up to date, and if you have API access is available as data. It talks about parental control, often to very granular data, and importing this data allows you to see not just shareholders (which you can also see on the NZ Companies House pages) but also what companies are owned by another company (which you can’t). And it’s throwing up some interesting examples, of which more in a later blog post.

In other words, New Zealand is prominent because elsewhere in the world the company listings are far more opaque. From an earlier blog post in April, OpenCorporate cites the New Zealand register as a potential exemplar for other countries seeking to open up to proper public scrutiny:

So which company registers perform well, and which perform badly, from a public-purpose perspective? Well, the stand out is the New Zealand company register, which makes everything freely available, without any significant exemptions, and in our dealings with them have been clear in their position as a public register with a public purpose. That’s not to say there are no problems with New Zealand companies, but we suspect that one of the reasons they come to light is the ease of access.

17 July 2013

Clive James on Dan Brown's 'Inferno'

[The hero, Robert] Langdon, though an American, still favours English tailoring. It must be easier to run in. Running beside him is Dr Sienna Brown, described as a “pretty, young woman”, in keeping with Dan Brown’s gift for inserting the fatal extra comma that he or one of his editors believes to be a sign of literacy. And indeed I should perhaps have written “the fatal, extra comma”, but something stopped me: an ear for prose, I hope.

Dan Brown has no ear for prose at all, a handicap which paradoxically gives pathos, and even tenderness, to his attempts at evoking Sienna’s charm. He has no trouble evoking her brains. She has an IQ of 208 and at the age of four she was reading in three languages. You can picture the author at his desk, meticulously revising his original sentence in which, at the age of three, she was reading in four languages. Best to keep it credible. But how to register her beauty as an adult? Here goes: “Tall and lissom, Dr Brooks moved with the assertive gait of an athlete.”

Would that be the assertive gait of a Russian female weightlifter? Probably more like the assertive gait of the British pentathlete Jessica Ennis. Anyway, as usual with a bad writer, the reader has to do most of the imagining [...]

I had better not reveal how it all comes out: there might be a few readers of this review who have not already read the book. But just in case you haven’t, let me suggest that it ends the way it began, as a fizzer. Your enjoyment will eventually depend on how much you, in your role as a symbologist, can revel in the task of decoding the text to lay bare the full extent to which the author can’t write.

- Clive James, 'The heroic absurdity of Dan Brown', Prospect Magazine, 11 July 2013

14 July 2013

'May I speak freely, your Majesty?'

Last night I caught another instalment in the National Theatre's NT Live performances - this time The Audience, with legendary Dame Helen Mirren reprising her role as Queen Elizabeth II from the 2006 film The Queen - the film that won Mirren an Oscar, a Bafta and a Golden Globe for her regal performance. Peter Morgan, the writer of that film, has delved back into the monarch's long relationship with the 13 Prime Ministers who have served during her reign (12 who took office during her reign plus Churchill, who was Prime Minister when she took the throne), and who all make the weekly journey to Buckingham Palace to discuss the state of the nation and the world with the head of state. While The Queen was focused on the crisis surrounding Diana's death and the relationship between the Queen and Tony Blair, in The Audience, Morgan has turned the spotlight onto Elizabeth's other Prime Ministers.

Blair does not appear at all, which was an interesting choice - given that the Prime Ministers do not appear in chronological order, I was expecting him to turn up at the end for a comedic finale full of fawning and self-regard. But he is not particularly missed, and in their audiences Gordon Brown and David Cameron both hark back to his exploits - Brown greeting jokes at Blair's expense with a rueful glee, and Cameron recollecting how hard he was to budge during the Tories' long years in opposition. Of the two most recent Prime Ministers, Brown's character is portrayed in a more well-rounded fashion (and with marked skill by actor Nathaniel Parker, who has the jaw-drop mannerism down pat) and with touching vulnerability as his struggles with his inner demons. Perhaps David Cameron is too recent a figure to have as much resonance - and in fact, for a moment when he first entered I wondered if the striding sharp-suited figure was meant to be Blair.

There are other fine Prime Ministerial performances in The Audience. Richard McCabe appears three times as Harold Wilson, lending credence to the view expressed in the script that Wilson was secretly one of Elizabeth's favourites. He also features in one of the play's funniest scenes, in which he proudly promises to display his photographic memory and asks for a book. Elizabeth casts about the Balmoral drawing room and, finding none, has to resort to the telephone to seek something so resoundingly unfamiliar as a printed work. 'Yes, hello. I would like a book. Doesn't matter which'.

Paul Ritter (Major) & Helen Mirren
Pic (C) Johan Persson
Edward Fox is gnarled and fusty as an ancient Churchill, top-hatted and gold-chained, tut-tutting at young Elizabeth's desperate wish to take her husband's surname or at least to hyphenate to preserve his manly pride: 'Double-barrelled? No, your Majesty. It's common'. John Major (Paul Ritter, excellent in Friday Night Dinner) gets two scenes, one of gently comic despairing at his unsuitability for the top job, and another in which he relays the ill news of the irrevocable split between Charles and Diana. In the latter, he reveals he tried out his negotiation tactics gleaned from the Bosnian crisis, to no avail. Anthony Eden (Michael Elwyn) cuts a tragic figure, dapper but ailing, weighed down with the pressure of underhand and ultimately disastrous conniving that led to the Suez Crisis of 1956. And Margaret Thatcher (Haydn Gwynne, of Billy Elliott: The Musical fame) offers a real battle of wills between a Commonwealth-loving Queen and a supremely confident Prime Minister deeply sceptical of any idealistic and in her view naive attempts to pass sanctions on the apartheid regime in South Africa.

A few Prime Ministers are omitted to keep things rattling along. James Callaghan is almost but not quite left out - wreaking havoc with the chronology, he bursts on during Cameron's session with Elizabeth and in a brief but entertaining cameo, demands not to be forgotten - but despite leading the UK for three years from 1976 to 1979, he is perhaps little known today thanks to the political tsunami Thatcher unleashed. Douglas-Home is mentioned once in passing, as is the 'odious' Heath (but then the adjective was offered by Harold Wilson, who was hardly an impartial observer). And from memory, Harold Macmillan (1957-63) is not even mentioned.

The natural constant in the production is of course Helen Mirren. Her performance as Elizabeth across seven decades shows off the Queen's lively wit, sound judgement, and occasionally a flash of her conscience as she plays 'tribal chief in exotic costume' - the tribe being 20th century Britons - receiving and offering counsel to the often anxious, haunted souls who inhabit the Prime Ministerial office. The playwright Morgan suggests that in offering a (mostly) impartial and confidential ear to powerful individuals, the Queen has played the role of therapist to the Prime Ministers who pass on their most private observations about the state of the nation. And in their own way, the Prime Ministers helped Elizabeth to grow as a stateswoman and to gain a greater understanding of the pressures faced by a nation in relative decline for much of her reign. Through all this, Mirren is expert at portraying the various stages of Elizabeth's life, from a slightly timorous mourning-garbed girl in her 20s, to the mannerisms of the bluff, wry middle-aged Queen, to the gentle cynicism and profound devotion to lifelong duty that is exhibited in a woman in her 80s who has performed an exhausting job for 60 years and whose only true retirement will come when she dies.

Helen Mirren & Nell Williams
Pic (C) Johan Persson
Aside from the random dose of Callaghan, The Audience is also inventive in portraying Elizabeth's childhood by casting Young Elizabeth as a separate role that the adult Queen reminisces with and gently chides. In the cast filmed for broadcast the role of young Elizabeth was played by the excellent Nell Williams, who nails the ethereal circa-1940 accent heard in wartime regal wireless broadcasts and that seems so alien now.

Aside from the skilled cast, it is also worth mentioning the fine costumes and umpteen wigs, which help to portray the various stages of Elizabeth's life. In a gesture to the theatrical arts, two important costume changes are handled imperceptibly and almost instantaneously on stage. With some clever trickery that was almost completely invisible to the viewer (presumably involving double-sided costumes) Elizabeth is transformed from mourning black to a smart red dress in mere seconds while staff whisk effortlessly around her. The audience even gasped when they realised. You begin to see why Mirren was so cross when a parade outside the Gielgud disrupted her performance - because The Audience is a play and a performance truly worth savouring.
  

Command an argosy to stem the waves

Down on Petone beach this afternoon by the pier, on a typical Wellington roof-shaker day. Initially I was going to use the theme from 'Happy Days' as the soundtrack - you know, 'goodbye grey sky, hello blue'. Instead I've gone with the more appropriate snippet, Blue Turning Grey by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah.

12 July 2013

On a ship called Dignity

In honour of my sisters' first T in the Park festival in Edinburgh tomorrow, here's Scottish group Deacon Blue (who are on the bill on Saturday) performing their first hit, Dignity, in Glasgow, 2006. Normally I don't enjoy it when bands let the audience sing their songs for them, but it's hard to avoid the bonhomie in this performance. The single was written by singer Ricky Ross and was taken from the band's million-selling 1987 debut album RaintownIt reached no.31 in the UK pop charts (plus a charting of no.20 when it was re-released in 1994). Deacon Blue have chalked up 16 top 40 singles in the UK.
 

See also:
Music: Orchestra Baobab - El Son te Llama, 26 June 2013
Music: Cmdr Chris Hadfield - Space Oddity, 13 May 2013
Music: Meryn Cadell - The Sweater, 22 March 2013

10 July 2013

NZ Cricket 2013/14 contracts

Monday's announcement of the 20 players contracted to the New Zealand national cricket team provides a once a year chance to examine where the game planners feel their team is headed in the coming year. The list of 20 players doesn't preclude selecting players from outside the list, but it provides a guaranteed base income for the highest-ranked (male) players in the country and signals that those outside the top 20 need to improve their game to challenge for a spot.

This year's announcement saw Tom Latham, Hamish Rutherford, Mitchell McClenaghan, Corey Anderson, Colin Munro and Bruce Martin join the list. Departures from the last contract (including two retirements) were Daniel Vettori (taking a year out to recover from injury), Chris Martin, Jacob Oram, James Franklin, Andrew Ellis, Daniel Flynn, Rob Nicol, Tarun Nethula and Kruger van Wyk. It might be interesting to note that of the 20 contracts, five are held by non-New Zealand-born players, with four South African-born players (Watling, Wagner, Munro and Elliott) plus Brownlie, who came from Australia in 2009.

NZ Cricket does not publish the actual order of the 20-strong contract list, which is diplomatic of them because the list ranking determines the cricketers' base salary, with each step on the ladder earning more than the one beneath. Test performances and potential are supposed to be weighted above performances in the shorter forms of the game, reflecting that the side needs some players who are not suited to limited overs cricket. Here's my guess at how the top 20 list might be ranked, based on the assumption that captain Brendon McCullum must be ranked no.1 and the presumed whisper from NZC to the Dominion Post writer at the weekend that listed the bottom five contract holders in a plausible order.

1
Brendon McCullum
11
Dean Brownlie
2
Ross Taylor
12
Peter Fulton
3
Tim Southee
13
Kyle Mills
4
Kane Williamson
14
Doug Bracewell
5
Martin Guptill
15
Neil Wagner
6
Trent Boult
16
Tom Latham
7
BJ Watling
17
Corey Anderson
8
Nathan McCullum
18
Colin Munro
9
Hamish Rutherford
19
Grant Elliott
10
Mitchell McClenaghan
20
Bruce Martin

The top contract reportedly earns an annual retainer of $181,425, with each rank below earning progressively about $6000 less, down to the bottom three contracts, which each earn a retainer of $73,000. This sounds like relatively modest rewards for playing international cricket, but in reality the additional match fees make a big difference.  For 2013/14 the match fees for the New Zealand men's team have been set at
NZ$7508 per test, $3250 per ODI and $2120 per T20I.

If you consider the number of games played by the contract holders in the past 12 months you gain a rough idea of how much they might be earning in a year's cricket. The rewards are considerable. Naturally, emerging players may only have played for part of the last season so their tally for 2013/14 may differ considerably. 

No.
Name
$Base
$Match
$Total?
1
Brendon McCullum
181,425
184,654
366,079
2
Ross Taylor
175,425
156,778
332,203
3
Tim Southee
169,425
125,792
295,217
4
Kane Williamson
163,425
173,204
336,629
5
Martin Guptill
157,425
134,272
291,697
6
Trent Boult
151,425
122,456
273,881
7
BJ Watling
145,425
123,356
268,781
8
Nathan McCullum
139,425
89,310
228,735
9
Hamish Rutherford
133,425
54,640
188,065
10
Mitchell McClenaghan
127,425
49,460
176,885
11
Dean Brownlie
121,425
67,572
188,997
12
Peter Fulton
115,425
39,660
155,085
13
Kyle Mills
109,425
70,090
179,515
14
Doug Bracewell
103,425
84,672
188,097
15
Neil Wagner
97,425
60,064
157,489
16
Tom Latham
91,425
22,610
114,035
17
Corey Anderson
85,425
13,850
99,275
18
Colin Munro
73,000
34,218
107,218
19
Grant Elliott
73,000
30,240
103,240
20
Bruce Martin
73,000
30,032
103,032

To reiterate - the '$Match' column above is a guess at game fees earned based on last year's number of international appearances. While the calculations and the contract rankings are supposition, they do show that the idea of New Zealand cricketers as underpaid novices is a myth. Even the lowest-ranked players can earn a healthy $100,000 salary. And at the top levels, senior players attract hefty sums: using the above guesses, the take-home weekly pay of the captain Brendon McCullum might be around $4850 per week, while veteran short-form bowler Kyle Mills might earn $2450 per week. 

This amount of pay is hardly world-shattering when compared with the millions earned by cricketers in India, England and Australia. But it might be worth remembering how much some younger players are taking home: 24-year-old Tim Southee potentially earning $3900 per week; 22-year-old Kane Williamson taking home $4450. Then the next time a high-living scandal emerges along the lines of Doug Bracewell's foot injury, remember these are young men flush with cash, and sometimes that can contribute to poor decision-making on and off the field.