I’ve installed a theme switching plugin, which allows readers to choose how they want the site to look to them.  You can do this from the top of the left sidebar.

The default theme is ‘Journal’, which I added tonight.  I’m a bit restless with how this place looks at the moment, but figure giving people a choice means not everyone must bend to my whim.

I have an exam tomorrow for Sociology of the Media and Pop Culture, which has been an interesting subject.  Whilst a little undergraduate in content, it’s thrown up some good analyses of audience and consumerism.

As a reward to myself for having seen off two subjects this semester, I plan to purchase the latest Murray Whelan installment from Shane Maloney, and one of two Kevin Rudd biographies now in book stores.

I’ll also have weekends and nights freer to spend with the lovely wife, whom I admit hasn’t had as much attention from me lately as she should; I’ve been in an academic funk and will be glad to come to the surface over the next four weeks while I take a study break.

I already have the reader for one of my subjects for next semester and it looks to be a cracker, so here’s hoping the motivation to study gets a boost in the second half of the year.

In most newspapers I read, I find a typo or grammatical error, so I’ve decided to name and shame those I find online, beginning with this one from News.com.au:

‘Digruntled’: Fake website email, fake word.

Was getting a bit bored of the look of this place, so have done some redecorating.  Happy to hear thoughts on the new look and feel.

Watched a Lateline interview of Paul Keating (view online here) and enjoyed it, but I’m not going in to all of the politics. What did stick out to me was just how often he uses his hands to cross things off a conversational checklist. He also summarised his arguments by referring to a number of main ‘points’, either three, four or even one (“I’ll make one point, Tony, that is this: …). Right throughout the interview he was checking things off and giving us a visual demonstration of it.

Another older guy I know, who’s also retired but still hangs around his industry, keeping abreast of what’s going on and chucking his thoughts in, does the exact same thing. It got me thinking, are these simply two guys who have a communicative characteristic in common, or is the Hand Checklist something people pick up as they get older?

Have they experienced a lifetime of trying to get their point across and discovered the best way to do it?

A lot of communication gurus will tell you that when laying down an argument, a good structure is this:

Introduce the topic and tell people what you’re going to talk about
On the topic of X, I believe Y and am going to prove this to you by discussing Y1, Y2 and Y3.

Talk about it
Explain Y1
Explain Y2
Explain Y3

Tell them what you’ve told them
Remind them that on the subject of X, Y is true and Y1, Y2 and Y3 make it indisputable.

The above is pretty much common sense and when people explain it to you, you realise it is effective and that you’ve probably been using all or part of it in your own communications anyway.

Is the addition of the hand gestures to help remind people that you’re working your way through a structured argument and that you’re not meandering, and therefore holding their attention better?

Alternatively, is it that ticking things off a checklist helps the communicator stay on message? Could it be that older people need help avoiding verbally wandering off on irrelevant tangents? If that’s the case, Keating and the guy I know would be cases in point, as both can dribble with the best of them; Keating’s obviously getting more this way in his seventh decade.

Anyway, the main point I want to make is (“Tony, the main point is this:”) that whether it is to help the audience stay focussed or the communicator stay on message, the hand gesture can be overdone, and you end up with your audience blogging on it instead of listening to what you were actually saying (or trying to say).

Overnight Australian time a young Los Angeles resident was jailed for 23 days after a series of minor driving offences. This is bigger news than China’s reluctance to pursue some sort of solution to its contribution to global warming and thus save the planet.

According to Media Monitors, the incarceration of Paris Hilton has received 485 broadcast mentions across all Australian electronic media in the past 48 hours. Chinese emissions policy, by comparison, has been referred to 71 times.

Are we there yet? Have we finally arrived at some point at which the public imagination has at last been saturated by the low-life likes of Lindsay Lohan, Nicole Richie, Britney Spears and Paris Hilton? Who are these people? Why are we obsessed with intellectually malnourished, semi-starved, over-coiffed, hyper-indulged air heads? Why on earth does anything that they could conceivably do matter? They are like a cancer of the collective bowel.

The great pity is that only one of them is behind bars. A zoo if it has to be. Just take them away.

Crikey, 5 June 2007.

I want to be writing editorials like that one day.

So, the new automatic update plugin I was using for a while wouldn’t work either. F@cked if I know why. Trying the original one… again…