In the red corner we have TV3′s rip off of a PS3 ad from the United States
In the blue corner we have a bunch of Canadians Longboarding down State Highway One at the Bombay Hills
I must admit the longboarding looks pretty cool, and these guys are “professionals”, still State Highway One is a nuts place to do it. With the TV3 ad it is a nice mock/copy but without any homage to the original it makes them look really bad. It is the same as the Telecom ad a few years ago in which everyone around the Telecom office sang, but this was a copy of a viral video from the states. Maybe the same ad agency did both ads?
I just watched the Top Gear America Special on TV it is a few years old but I had not seen it before. The end of the episode has a really serious side to it and Jeremy Clarkson provides a real stinging but truthful social commentary as shown in this clip:
It is an almost scary idea that in 5 weeks time the first decade of the 21st century will be over. I can still remember the celebrations at the turn of the century ten years ago (at the time I was only 12 years old!).
The writer of the article makes an interesting choice for the defining moment:
The defining moment of the last 10 years wasn’t George W. Bush reading “The Pet Goat” to a bunch of kids on 9/11 while New York was burning, or the Hadron Collider finally producing its first bang this week. I fear the true essence of this decade was captured in four minutes of a flash mob video of 20,000 perfectly syncopated bouncing Oprah fans “spontaneously” erupting in a choreographed dance to a Black Eyed Peas performance in the middle of Chicago’s main thoroughfare.
However the article also makes a point that we have gone too far with the mass publicity of our private lives:
It took radio 38 years to reach an audience of 50 million. Facebook got there in 24 months, according to Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod’s now infamous “Did You Know” series. To put this in perspective, Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter didn’t exist at the start of this decade. I can be patient. We’re bound to outgrow this over-sized hyper-connectivity lust. I’ll be the really edgy, new advocate for two people just sitting in a room talking – because that’s all it needs to be sometimes.
Personally I have not given much thought to what the defining moment would be, there are a lot of things that could be considered. Maybe that is the topic for a future blog post?
I have heard Fox News make some silly comments at time. But this is one of the best, in reference to Sarah Palin:
She has 5 kids. Liberals don’t have 5 kids. One of them has Down Syndrome. Liberals certainly don’t allow that to happen. – Bernie Goldberg
The entire clip is below. This is not news, and it is hardly commentary either it is clear bias (no surprises there) and completely misrepents and mispaints an entire political viewpoint.
I picked up a High Def Video Camera duty free when I came back into NZ on Saturday.
So on Sunday I took it for a test run walking from Long Bay to the Okura River and back.
The great thing about the camera is it is full 1080 HD. The bad thing is it stores the videos in AVCHD format which is near impossible to edit with free editors at the moment.
The video below has been edited in Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD Trial, it is USD $40 ($55 NZD) so I will probably buy it so I can edit movies in the future. The footage itself is pretty rushed together, I have pretty much cut each clip into 2 – 6sec chunks and put them together, it was a test of the camera rather than trying to film anything spectacular. The best thing about the video though is the penguins up at the Okura River.
