Tag: stuart waterman

The Olympic Games are a wonder of the world

August 10, 2016 / / 0 Comments

buffer rings

And we know how those tend to be built…

This post is an example of my newsletter of curiosities & curations,Waterman’s Fortnightly. You can can subscribe at tinyletter.com/stuartw.

  • “How did we traverse the nation with a railroad so quickly? We just threw Chinese people in caves and blew them up and didn’t give a shit what happened to them. There’s no end to what you can do when you don’t give a fuck about people. You can do anything! That’s where human greatness comes from — that we’re shitty people, we fuck others over.” Louis CK’s ‘Of course… but maybe’ bit came to mind as I was reading…
  • … Marina Hyde, anticipating the start of athletic competition at the Olympics, who wrote: “(The athletes’) feats and fables eradicate the months and years of government overspending, martial displays, human rights abuses, neighbourhood cleansing, and all the other adorable fascist quirks that are an essential part of the undercard to any modern sporting mega-event.”
  • From the forced eviction of an estimated 1.5m people prior to the Beijing Olympics, to the forced labour (and unspecified number of deaths) of passport-stripped migrant workers behind the construction of facilities for Qatar’s World Cup in 2022, to a combination of all of the above thatenabled Sochi 2014 to be staged, it could be said that ‘modern sporting mega-events’ are today’s versions of world wonders built on slavery.
  • Like the Colosseum, they take years to produce, rely on the toil of thousands of oft-exploited people, are a significant logistical & financial commitment, draw fascination from around the world… and look terrific. On the subject of which, consider the irony of the Rio opening ceremony acknowledging Brazil’s slavery record while people covering the event were housed in a media centre built on a mass grave which African slave descendants regard as sacred.
  • Meanwhile, on the official Olympics website: “The Olympic Movement unites all people and builds bridges between all cultures. In Olympic sport, all people are equal, regardless of their ethnicity, gender or faith.” The paradox: you can’t help but suspect that if the Olympic vision of humanity were to become a reality, the Olympic Games wouldn’t exist at all.

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The chef who creates seven-hour podcasts about horror movies

August 27, 2015 / / 1 Comment

The Secret History Of Hollywood podcast

In a recent edition of my newsletter I covered a wealth of great podcasts and related resources, one of which was my new podcast app of choice, Pocketcasts.

The Pocketcasts ‘Discover’ feature has since led me to find a podcast called The Secret History of Hollywood. I thought I might need to get my eyes checked when one of its episodes – ‘Hunting Witches With Walt Disney’ – was listed as coming in at 171 minutes. Then I noticed that another episode, ‘A Universe Of Horrors’ – which tells the tale of Universal Studios’ iconic horror movies – ran to 429 minutes. That’s over seven hours.

As a man who once catalogued every articIe I read in a year, the level of dedication & obsession involved here piqued my interest.

Having listened to ‘Hunting Witches With Walt Disney’, and thoroughly enjoyed the wry tone and detailed historical context (it looks at the HUAC witch-hunts and how they affected Hollywood stars – plus the social conditions that led to them), I decided I had to learn more about the people who produced it.

Only, there is no collection of film journalists or content production behemoth behind The Secret History Of Hollywood. It is but one person: a chap called Adam Roche. And he has no background in radio, or audio of any kind. In fact, he’s a chef.

Adam kindly agreed to answer lots of my questions, and did so in great detail.

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17 great podcasts that aren’t Serial, StartUp or This American Life

July 21, 2015 / / 0 Comments

This list of somewhat lesser-known podcasts originally appeared in Waterman’s Fortnightly – my regular newsletter of curations and curiosities. Subscribe to Waterman’s Fortnightly here.

It’s 2015 and everyone’s going bonkers over podcasts like it’s 2006 (I remember you, Odeo!). Obligatory references to Serial and StartUp go here.

But as the Gimlet Media folk have alluded to, there’s currently a lack of tools to help discovery (especially if you’re a non-iTunes user). So for the past few weeks I’ve been digging into the podcastiverse and sampling a variety of aural delights outside of the big guns mentioned above. These are some of my findlings.

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Introducing Waterman’s Fortnightly

May 20, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Waterman's Fortnightly newsletter

Waterman’s Fortnightly is a new thing I’m doing every, er, fortnight or so. It’s a newsletter covering interesting things, with a slight slant towards digital content and community stuff.

This is a glimpse of the fourth one – if you find it interesting you might want to sign up for future dispatches.

  • Has any work software ever received as much glowing coverage as Slack? You can barely open a browser without encountering an article claiming how it’s set to change workplace culture forever…
  • …depending on your workplace. The majority of office workers are more likely to identify with the story of the US government employee who worked from the bathroom in order to bypass his employer’s IT security measures.
  • Slack is supposed to be so compulsive that users are reluctant to leave the office. And while we’re all addicted to web-enabled devices these days, this dispatch from 1982 illustrates computers’ ability to transfix us before you could even do much with them.
  • If smug Slackers’ screenshots are the summit of #LoveMyJob self-satisfaction, what’s the opposite? Toshers are certainly contenders for Quite Likely The Worst Job Ever, having made their living sifting through raw sewage in 19th century London. Pure-finders run them close, though.

Shared recently in Non-Fiction Addiction

The self-castrated hatmaker who killed the guy who killed Abraham Lincoln; why the FBI investigated The Kingsmen and their hit ‘Louie Louie’; what became of the children who survived the Holocaust; and more at Non-Fiction Addiction.

A little suntin suntin for the marketomatons

Links for online content and marketing folk. Skip ahead to Phew glad that bit’s over if that sentence makes you spit chips.

Phew, glad that bit’s over

Stuart Waterman

 

Everything I read in 2012

December 16, 2012 / / 6 Comments

Everything I read in 2012

Into #longreads? Check out my Google+ community, Non-Fiction Addiction

The best thing about the Christmas/New Year period is All The Lists. Lists lists lists. Lists. (Children may feel otherwise, but what do they know.)

I love browsing end of year lists. It’s a great way to catch up on stuff you missed, and it fills those somnolent post-turkey holiday days like a charm. Whether the lists are in newspapers, mags, blogs… Best books, best gadgets, best songs, worst songs, worst pop-up restaurants where you can’t reserve a table and the queuing system amounts to ‘elbow a fellow aspiring diner in the trachea to get a whiff of hipster-fried chicken’ (Wishbone Chicken Brixton, you are death); yes, I love all the lists.

In bygone years I tended to create sprawling music playlists. A top ten of the year was no good. It always needed to be comprehensive, unwieldy and, ideally, drive me to the brink of insanity while I compiled it (example: my Best Of 2010 Spotify playlist features 192 tracks). You know you’ve made a good fist at a list if the mere thought of trying to fulfil your original vision makes you want to cry.

Which brings me to my 2012 end of year list. As I’ve babbled previously, this year has seen my reading habits change significantly. I didn’t read many books (boo), but I did learn that I could send longform articles to my Kindle (yay). Since sending stuff to my Kindle creates a record of all such articles in my Amazon account, I figured it might be interesting (for me, if nobody else) to put everything I’d read this year into a list.

Sadly this only occurred to me in November, and since Amazon accounts only record text information as opposed to links, it meant I had to (I say ‘had to’):

1. Trawl all the way through my Amazon account

2. Copy the title of each article and/or its author

3. Paste this information into Google

4. Go to the source article link and copy the relevant info & URL

5. Paste this information into my list

Now, it might not sound that arduous. But by the time I’d finished compiling my list of Every Article I Read On My Kindle In 2012, it was 457 items long. That’s a whole lot of copying and pasting, and I’d say it’s easily the most boring way to spend time I’ve yet devised. It really cut into my Christmas shopping efforts, too (this year everyone will get a Keep Calm And Carry On tea towel and be happy with it).

This list may be something people like to browse through. I hope so, given the time I spent on it. But when I got the idea I think my main motivation was this: I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone do this before. Why would they? It’s insane, and people have lives. So while it would almost certainly have been generally more useful to create a ‘Best of 2012’ list, I figured people like Longreads and Longform.org have that covered.

(Update: OK, I caved. Here are my 30 Great Reads Of 2012, compiled for The Electric Typewriter; and here’s a Readlist of all of them, should you wish to export them all to your device in one go.)

So my list is unfocused, wide-ranging and includes articles from before 2012. The oldest was published in 1869, but the majority are from 2000 onwards. It’s all non-fiction, and it paints a picture of a reader who is variously interested in, among other things, Scientology, serial killers, Bill Murray, paperclips, pornstars, Carly Rae Jepson, magic, Reddit, David Sedaris, con artists and the Olympics.

If you take a look at it and find something that piques your interest, I hope you’ll share it with others. It might make my RSI worth it.

Every Article I Read On My Kindle In 2012

A mention for the places where I tended to find all these links, and which I continue to browse regularly:

I’ve also created a longform RSS bundle that collects a bunch of these into a single feed which you can add to Google Reader.

Into #longreads? Check out my Google+ community, Non-Fiction Addiction
—
Update: Thanks to @hollyjunesmith for sharing the list with one of the Twitter big dogs – and welcome to those who ended up here as a result.

 

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