Congratulations to Ohope’s Pietra Brettkelly for her and her editor Irena Dol’s win at Sundance of the World Cinema Documentary Editing Award. From what her friends saw at the raucous fundraiser held last year so she could complete the film, it’s a cracker – despite or because of its subject, photographer Vanessa Beecroft. There’s a good piece on the film and its subject here.

John Clarke is a national treasure.

And like a lot of the national treasures of this country, he lives elsewhere.

Yet despite having resided in Australia for three decades he has managed to remain a proud Kiwi, and seems quite happy standing astride the Tasman like some kind of antipodean humour colossus.

We sat down with a virtual Victoria Bitter with the man, and asked him about getting on to the web, Australia since the election, and Flight of the Conchords. Read more.

She’s one of the great violinists of our time, up there with Nigel Kennedy but not a prat, and her new album is available for download here for free. Not, as with Radiohead’s In Rainbows, via an honesty box. No, this one is absolutely free. Read here in the Guardian and here in the Times why. Basically it’s because, as she says, “Classical music, for some reason or another, has this reputation that you need a certain kind of education to listen to it, you need to be a certain colour or live in a certain place and I’m a bit fed up with that. I wanted to take away any possible barrier and see if it makes a difference.”

The album is great stuff – pieces for solo violin by Bach, Ysaye and Patterson, with Little’s spoken introductions to each one. All she asks in return is that you undertake what she calls the Tasmin three-step challenge: “First, download the recording. Secondly, write to me at my website, saying what you didn’t like about my chosen music or playing. Thirdly, tell me what barriers still remain that prevent you from entering a concert hall. In other words, what is your problem?”

The future of media is emerging during the US writers strike - and it looks pretty good, and pretty democratic, to me. Express yourself online, any way you like, and control your own destiny. The readers, or listeners, or viewers will do the rest - if you are worthy.

Check out Zadi Diaz on Epic-Fu, for instance. She's a bit hyper for this old boy, but more interesting than most of the crap we get fed on broadcast. Then there's BoingboingTV or CinematicTitanic or Mahalo Daily.

Even better, my broadband connection can actually deliver this stuff now.

Without getting sentimental and posting all our baby snapshots (well, all right, just one) I want to start the year by saying how fortunate I feel. My son Frank was born in New Zealand—and on New Year’s Day, the best possible start to 2008. He entered the world at Birthcare in Parnell, and the entire experience was a joy. I grew up in a country with ‘free’ healthcare—as Russell Hoban once said, it may not be health but it’s certainly national—so I didn’t pay a penny for medical and dental care until I left the UK for good in the mid-1980s. But I doubt you’d find Birthcare standards of midwifery and maternal care in the UK nowadays without the wherewithal to pay through the nose for them. Three days of hotel-standard accommodation with a 24-hour focus on our newborn; our own room with shower, toilet, TV, balcony and a view of the Domain and Auckland Museum; a bed for Dad and good food for Mum; tips on feeding and bathing for Frank: a far cry from Elisa’s experiences more than a decade before, when her first son was born at National Women’s. Everything about Frank’s birth felt blessed, and after some initial difficulties finding a midwife, we struck gold and found one who supported all our decisions and helped to make it not only unforgettable but as natural and free from interventions as possible. I wonder whether the Birthcare model is unique to New Zealand; it seems like one of our ‘best kept secrets’. This style of birthing might catch on elsewhere if everyone wasn’t so focused on ‘user pays’. We paid only $150 for Frank’s birth (and that was to cover my three nights’ accommodation; I’ve paid more to sleep in motels with bedbugs). The rest was New Zealand’s first investment in Frank’s future. So thanks, Birthcare—we won’t forget it.

Who will be the first New Zealand politician to start pointing and grimacing at invisible friends in the audience?

A most irregular column.

Poneke, who like me is a big fan of Jane Clifton, is quite kind about the Listener and Steven Price isn’t, at least not about the new issue.

Poneke points out that “In its ‘golden years’, the Listener’s circulation was huge – more than 300,000 copies a week.” I was on staff in those golden years – the biggest-selling cover, as I recall, was for the soccer World Cup in, it must have been, 1982. That really annoyed the Wellington journalists.

I was also on staff at Metro in its golden years when it sold more than 40,000 copies a month. (Coincidence? You be the judge.) The Listener is now at 69,300 and Metro, after a resurgence under the brilliant Lauren Quaintance, is now down to 14, 250. The former is quite respectable in this market if advertising holds up; not sure about the latter.

Am I the only one who thinks a statement like this should not be published on the website of a Crown agency?

Labour-led government support for businesses doing innovative research and development is paying dividends, says Research, Science and Technology Minister Pete Hodgson.

Call me old fashioned.

Yes, unacceptable language from the Indian cricket players. But perhaps the lesson for the sensitive Aussies is, sledge not lest ye be sledged.

Legend has it that when Australian bowler Glenn McGrath called out, after an 85 mph delivery whistled past Zimbabwean batter Eddo Brandes, “Oy, why are you so fat?”

Brandes replied, “Because every time I fuck your wife, she gives me a biscuit.”

Even the Australian team collapsed laughing.

This US election is the most interesting in decades.

Trying to be president of the US are: a woman, a black man, a Baptist preacher, a Mormon, a self-made millionaire, a billionaire (probably), the mayor of 9/11, a war hero. Others will come and go.

And it's business time for Hillary Clinton.

Is it surprising, or inevitable, that America could consider - all talents aside - electing a black man ahead of a woman? And what would the country look like if Mike Huckabee won?