Mum!

Baseball
Originally uploaded by hadyn.green.

My mum came back from her first real overseas trip in ages (Australia isn't really overseas). She went to England and Paris and a little place outside of Atlanta called Griffin.

While there she managed to score free tickets to the baseball (Atlanta Braves v Florida Marlins). Not only were they free, they were fantastic seats and also got them entry to the "club members area".

Anyhow, while there she managed to almost snag a foul ball and got this awesome photo. If you look at the "original size" you can see the ball being hit. the pic has generated a lot of email discussion with the Dropkicks

MIKE:

the ball would be a blur (see the batter's hands; the ball would be moving around that sort of speed).

Sorry, getting geeky here, but I looked up the typical speed of a baseball hit: 0-60m/s (http://www.iit.edu/~johnsonp/argtalk.html), say this one was hit at 30m/s. The photo was exposed for 1/50s, so the ball would have travelled 30/50 or 0.6m whilst the shutter was open - about the length of the blur just in front of the batter's plate.

Of course, I may be completely wrong - the ball could be in the catcher's glove for all I know.

Hamsters of the Gods

Dear all

Hell Hamsters has been furiously working at that festival wheel!

By July, it had screened or was going to screen at the following festival:

• FantasyCon 2006 (UK)
• HorrorFest (UK)
• Nervermore Film Festival (US)
• A Night of Horror (Sydney, Aus)
• Angry Film Festival (US)
• Zompire Film Festival (US)
• Another Hole In The Head (US)
• DragonCon (US)
• It Came From Lake Michigan (US)
• Rhode Island International Film Festival (US)
• Dark Carnival Festival (US)

Now it will also be screening and in competition at the following festivals:

• Show Me Your Shorts (NZ)
• Terror Film Festival (US)
• Hollywood Film Festival (US)
• ScreamFest LA (US) - in fact it's screening there pretty much at the same time as the Hollywood Film Festival
• Big Mountain Short Film Festival (NZ)
• Eerie Film festival (US)
• Thriller Chiller!(US)
• B-Movie Fest (US)
• Encounters Short Film Festival (UK)

I'm particularly proud that HH was selected for Encounters, as it's the best UK short film festival.

Hell Hamsters has now tallied up 20 festivals - well done all!

Cheers

Elisabeth and Paul

A list of bullet points: Y’know what I hate?

• Reporters copying the press release.
• Bonus tracks at the end of albums that are tacked onto the end of the last song. Especially if the bonus isn’t as good as the last song (see Kings of Leon: Holy Roller Novocaine).
• Mainstream media outlets on the net covertly stealing blog posts.

1 and 3 go together here. When I go to a site like Stuff.co.nz I like to read news, real news, not opinion. Interesting stuff that has been investigated and analysed. Currently I get some good news, some stuff regurgitated from overseas feeds, some stuff regurgitated from press releases and, now, blogs.

Jo’s new blog (and it is a blog this time not an online journal) helps me sum this up: Blogs are Letters to the Editor. A newspaper would never write its own letters to the editor (unless it had no scruples) so why would an online newspaper (Stuff, Herald) do it?

But as for stealing blog posts, I was reading a rugby article the other day on Stuff that was congratulating another Stuff reporter for pre-empting those evil northern hemisphere reports who always claim that the All Blacks are poaching from the Pacific nations. Confused yet? A quote should sort this out:

In a column appearing on Stuff on September 12 headlined Time British scribes got it right, Kayes pointed out that there are more New Zealand-born players in Samoa's squad than Samoan-born players in the All Blacks - debunking the myth that New Zealand gobbles up the Pacific's finest while offering nothing in return.

Except that there was a post on the Dropkicks website on the 11^th that contained the exact same information. The Dropkicks aren’t a huge site (but we are growing!) and so perhaps this isn’t a real conspiracy…except that the post was rewritten by the Dropkicks and posted on the very popular Public Address site the morning of the 12^th. I don’t want to come straight out and accuse Stuff of poaching things off blogs but it’s not like it hasn’t happened before.

I know that a good journalist (or columnist in this case) should always check the sources themselves etc etc, but not even a mention or a “hat tip”?

Burst culture done for the day.

Hawaii

If you really want to know how the holiday was you're just gonna have to email and ask me and most people already have so, that ends that discussion.

If I had to describe Hawaii in one word it would be: Hawaiian

Good now I'll write about some other stuff soon.
(ps. that was a cheating version of a holiday wrap up, I'll put more photos up on flickr soon)