Category: music

Posted on

Rupert Murdoch the Communist

Do you know the famous misquote that goes something like: “A young man who isn’t a socialist hasn’t got a heart; an old man who is a socialist hasn’t got a head”?

Well, apparently, at some point young Rupert Murdoch was a huge fan of Lenin. The following quote is from Murdoch: Revised and Updated, page 38:

“He added an an extraordinary postscript, written in magenta ink, reaffirming his loyalty to Lenin. “Yesterday was the 29th anniversary of the Great Teacher. We stood to attention for one minute in front of THE BUST on the mantelpiece and drank several toasts-and then settled down to some good reading of adulatory Russian poetry.””

Picturing Rupert reading “adulatory Russian poetry” and owning a bust of Lenin brings a tear to my eye.

Posted on

Dreamblog: Having a Ball

Two nights in a row I had dreams about attending balls. The first dream had me hanging out with Count Pyotr Andreyevich Tolstoy in 1700s. This is pretty easy to explain — I am reading a book about the Tolstoys.

This morning I had another dream, where I was at a Newscorp ball at the Hilton and talked to Rupert Murdoch. He completely agreed with all the things that I proposed to be done at TV Guide and I woke up very pleased with myself.

Posted on

Murdoch Erotica

In the tradition of The Sneeze, which runs “What May It Be“, I present my own version:

Rupert Murdoch

Before your fill my blog with indecent comments, I quickly present the answer: it’s Billionaire Tyrant’s upper bridge of the nose, as photographed by Platon for Wired Magazine article “His Space.”

Rupert Murdoch

Using harsh lighting that brings out every wrinkle is a cheap trick, Platon. I might just be jealous because nobody lets me take magazine cover photos, but if I did, I’d probably come up with something other than “face closeup”, “three quarter turn from below” and “sit your model down and take a picture from crotch level”.

Posted on

Take That, Rupert

The majority of deadprogrammer.com traffic these days consists of myspace.com users hotlinking images. I really don’t mind hotlinking, in fact, I encourage it, but the thing is myspacecadets never ever link back to me. It’s common courtesy – if you use somebody’s image as well as server resources, provide a link back.

Well, now I use this little snippet of code that in my .htaccess file to replace any hotlinked image from myspace.com with a tasteful ad for deadprogrammer.com:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.*\.)?myspace\.com/ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpe?g|gif|png)$ photos/hotlinked.jpg [L]

All of a sudden, hundreds of popular myspacers are promoting me:

Classy. If you have a better idea for a replacement image, let me know.

Posted on

“I’m Rupert Murdoch, the billionaire tyrant. And this is my sky-box.”

You see, ordinarily I have the most horrible memory for faces and names. Just terrible. It’s because my brain is a bit lazy. So I decided to work on that. I bought a book about remembering faces and names and started paying attention.

Something slightly surreal happened to me today. Rupert Murdoch said hello to me in an elevator. You see, I was reading Murdoch’s biography a while back and studied the pictures well enough to recognize him. So I guess he noticed the look of dumb recognition on my face and said “Hello”. I said “Hi”. Probably I’ve seen him many times before in the elevator – his office is a few floors above.

This is approximately how it went down:

Here’s the soundtrack.