Archive for the 'Perception' Category
One story (only one?) that’s driving me mad this week is the vehicle excise duty one. The government announced the new bands in the budget, saying that the “majority of motorists would be better or no worse off in 2009″. The tone of the reporting on this gives the impression that there has been a [...]
Filed under: Commuting, Conspiracy Theories, Culture, Perception, being chippy, motoring, weasels | Leave a Comment
Tags: excise duty, tax
rose, originally uploaded by mcmrbt.
Further to the recent Dire Straits controversy, I decided to spend the 79 pence to get the 8.5 minute live version (from Alchemy). Most of the extra minutes on the recording are shockingly bad 80s stadium rock filler, so the core of the song itself is basically the same.
On my main [...]
Filed under: Conspiracy Theories, Culture, Downloads, Education, Entertainment, Flickr, Movies, Music, Perception, arts, being chippy, film, media studies, omens and portents, paranoia | Leave a Comment
Tags: dire straits, name of the rose, novels, romeo and juliet, semiotics, umberto eco
This is the view from my kitchen window, now I have built a log store. I looked around the web, and various places were charging ridiculous money for a wood frame with a top on it, none of them really big enough, so we decided to build our own.
Tesco were charging £150 for this, which [...]
Filed under: Flickr, Perception, being chippy, paranoia | 2 Comments
Tags: blogging, diy, photography, photos
New new new new new
One of the truisms about media/advertising is that advertisers are keen on the 16-34 year old demographic, because it’s relatively cheaper to persuade one of these individuals to try something new, or to change brands. The over 40s, on the other hand, while they may have more disposable income than the younger age group, are [...]
Filed under: Character, Culture, Education, Middle Age, Perception, Technology, ambitions, ambitions in life, anxiety, happiness, health, marketing, media studies, presentations | 2 Comments
For font bores strictly
I’ve never gone for sans serif fonts in the way that designboys and girls do, which is probably why I’m a teacher and not a graphic designer. I used to work with graphic designers, and had fierce arguments with them about my deep hatred for Helvetica.
Still, there’s no getting away from the fact that nine [...]
Filed under: Culture, Education, Perception, Technology, arts, media studies, notes and queries, presentations | 6 Comments
Tags: fonts, type, typography
Juno vs. Wade
Went to see Juno last night, one of three films released this week given five-star reviews by such outlets as the Guardian. Even Kermode was mostly positive about it.
I enjoyed the film. Ellen Page is a star, and the one-liners in the script were funny. Interesting question in my mind as to audience, given the [...]
Filed under: Culture, Education, Entertainment, Family, Movies, Nostalgia, Perception, acting, arts, film, lesson plans, media studies, presentations, teaching and learning | 4 Comments
Tags: Juno
Values and Ideology
Quite the hardest aspect of A Level Media, as far as my students seem to be concerned, is the key concept of values and ideology. They find this difficult, I truly believe, because they have been raised to believe that there is no such thing as ideology, that the world is fully transparent and that [...]
Filed under: Conspiracy Theories, Education, Entertainment, Perception, anxiety, being chippy, happiness, lesson plans, media studies, omens and portents, paranoia, presentations | 5 Comments
Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives
I really enjoyed the BBC4 documentary Parallel Worlds, Parallel lives, in which Mark Everett, a musician from a band called Eels who styles himself E (I’m pretty sure it’s Eels and not The Eels), investigated the life and times of his late father, the physicist Hugh Everett.
The film was both intensely personal and moving, a [...]
Filed under: Arrested Development, BBC, Character, Culture, Education, Entertainment, Family, Perception, SF, TV, arts, film, heroes, media studies, sci-fi, science fiction | 5 Comments
Further to my ever-popular post on 10 Things I Hate About You, here is the long-overdue slideshow companion.
This focuses on the technical brilliance of the opening sequence, with its extended opening crane shot (an homage to Orson Welles, perhaps), and lengthy and complex steadicam shots, all of which pack 10lbs of storytelling into a 1lb [...]
Filed under: Character, Culture, Education, Entertainment, Movies, Perception, acting, arts, clothes, film, lesson plans, media studies, presentations | Leave a Comment
Philby Jag
Mount Ararat
I’ve probably had an interest in the Cambridge spies since childhood, based on the way my mother would talk about them. It should have been ancient history by the time I was growing up in the 60s, but of course Philby didn’t defect until 1963, and spy stories by their very nature have a [...]
Filed under: 1960s, Character, Conspiracy Theories, Culture, Luvvies, Perception, TV, Television, being chippy, paranoia | 2 Comments
Tags: espionage, politics, spies
