Protected: Radio Listening

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Radio Listening

Two interesting programs on Radio National this afternoon. The first programme featured on Radio Eye is perhaps not what you would think as a topic suitable for radio in that it is about a visual medium, but interesting nonetheless –

Painting the Weather

Before 1800, the sky was seen as the realm of the Divine. It defied representation, unable to be explained or contained – and certainly not reproduced…enigmatic, ethereal and ever-changing. Yet in the opening years of the 19th century an unknown scientist by the name of Luke Howard explained the clouds. Suddenly there was a pattern to the atmosphere – hitherto considered random and unknowable. Howard also named the clouds.

It was during this intoxicating atmosphere of scientific discovery that the Romantic artists also flourished. The English painter John Constable began his ‘cloud sketching’, and was fascinated by Howard’s meteorological discoveries. Constable’s billowing cloud landscapes, his sunshine and reflected light represented a revolutionary break with earlier landscape artists.

His insistence on reflecting both scientific and spiritual truth on his canvases set him apart from his contemporaries, and although disregarded by many at the time, Constable is now known as one of England’s greatest landscape painters

Audio link (Real Media Format) –
Painting the Weather

The second program was on the concepts of taboo and censorship on Lingua Franca
Forbidden words

Summary:

Keith Allan on taboo and the censoring of language.

Humans apply taboos not just to behaviour, but also to language. How strange that we seem to have no word in English for such a universal practice until 1777.

Keith Allan is Reader in Linguistics at Monash University. He and Kate Burridge, Professor of Linguistics at Monash, are co-authors of Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language, which this talk is based upon.

Here is the audio link (real media format) –
Forbidden words

Here is the mp3 download link for the program (Right click and ‘Save target as’) –
Forbidden words

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The Serpent’s Code

I was amused and agreed with this review by Brendan Shanahan of that vile book by Dan Brown –

I’m with the church on Da Vinci
Brendan Shanahan

The news this week that the Catholic Church is against the film version of The Da Vinci Code is a welcome, albeit, I suspect, ultimately futile development.

Recently I succumbed to morbid curiosity and read the book. I can now say I’m with the priests: The Da Vinci Code should be banned. Not on religious grounds, however, but because the book is without doubt, by ratio of popularity to quality, the worst that has ever been written in modern English.

In The Da Vinci Code when people ask questions they are “confused”. When something of great portent is announced wind “howls” in the trees. We are told three times on the first page that the murder victim is a curator.

Dan Brown’s world is one in which English aristocrats still say things like, ‘Well played old chap’ and librarians have “thick” horn-rimmed spectacles. Where every gunshot (every single one) “thunders”; and where a middle-aged academic bearing an uncanny resemblance to author Dan Brown manages to win the beautiful French cryptologist despite being a paunchy snob whose penchant for calling women “my dear” and recounting prurient descriptions of ancient sex rites would have earned him a swift kick to the balls in the real world.

As one who has a degree in the subject I can assure you that no art history professor of mine ever spent time looking for hidden symbols in Da Vinci paintings.

My lecturers were much more likely to be on paid leave, chaining themselves to a fence in Jabiluka, or conducting vital research into regional galleries in the tropical north and their relationship to the local snorkelling industry. The only arcane conspiracies in which they were involved stretched no further than three doors down the corridor sand were ideological only insofar as they involved vicious personal vendettas stretching back to the Fraser years.

The Da Vinci Code is not merely mind-bogglingly awful. Many of the creepy fascist overtones seem to have slipped under the radar – the conspiracies expounded by Brown and taken as fact by impressionable readers the world over were Nazi favourites and are advocated by neo-Nazis today.

This is a fact which will, no doubt, be as conspicuously absent from the film as it was from the novel.

What is really remarkable about the film, however, is that there is anyone left in the world sufficiently ignorant of the plot to constitute a worthwhile audience. Just in case, here’s the twist: Jesus and Mary Magdalen had a baby. The “Holy Grail” is their “bloodline” from which the beautiful French cryptologist is descended. Oh, and Ian McKellen’s character seems nice but is actually evil. Don’t trust him.

The film of The Da Vinci Code will, I expect, be as awful as the book – if only because it stars Tom Hanks. If you want to know the real conspiracy then I’ll tell you: Hollywood can take a pile of poo and turn it into gold.

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Protected: I’m with the Croc

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I’m with the Croc

I’d try and take a bite of a chain-saw wielding idiot chopping down a tree if I was having a little rest, nothing worse. I remember going down to Canberra for a few days and staying at a college in the quite pleasant grounds of the ANU, surrounded by gum trees, very sylvan and being woken up at 6:30 am by chain-saw wielding maniacs lopping limbs off said gum trees. I know they have to do it in the Autumn for safety reasons in that in Winter with the cold down there the trees tend to keep their sap in the trunk and a few branches may be shed, but did they have to start ripping into the trees that early in the morning?

Cranky croc snatches chainsaw from man
Friday Apr 28
A crocodile agitated by a chainsaw’s noise has chased the man operating it and snatched the machinery from him.

Freddy Buckland was at a Northern Territory roadhouse on Friday cutting a dead tree that had fallen against a saltwater crocodile pen during Cyclone Monica when the 4.4-metre reptile struck.

“As he was trimming up the tree on the outside the croc jumped out of the water and sped along the tree about 18, 20 feet and actually grabbed the chainsaw out of his hands,” said Peter Shappert, the owner of the Corroboree Park Tavern, 80km east of Darwin.

“It must have been the noise … I don’t think he was actually trying to grab Freddy, but I’m not sure. He had a fair go at him … I think he just grabbed the first thing he could and it happened to be the chainsaw.”

Mr Buckland was not injured, nor was the crocodile, named Brutus.

“But he (the crocodile) is still a bit upset … he’s still a bit agitated, but he’s all right,” said Mr Shappert.

“He chewed on the chainsaw for about an hour-and-a-half, then we finally got it out.

“We got a bit of reinforcing rod, bent with a hook on the end, and at the same time we were draining the pen. It’s still in one piece but, yeah, it’s buggered.”

Mr Shappert said he was thinking about changing the crocodile’s name to “two-stroke”.

As for the cleaning up effort, it’s been postponed for a couple of days.

“We’ve just left the tree where it is. I think we’ll reassess how we’re going to do it,” said Mr Shappert.

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Lemming-like I follow rubydreamer over the cliff

Which country should you REALLY be living in? Spain Usted es el español! You have a passion for fine foods and beautiful scenery – as well as feeling a great love for your country and fellow citizens. You wish to remain independant in a world which is hard to stand out, and you are doing it well. Ibravo!

Click Here to Take This Quiz Brought to you by YouThink.com quizzes and personality tests.

That’s a bit of a surprise.

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Lemming-like I follow <lj user = “rubydreamer”> over the cliff

Which country should you REALLY be living in? Spain Usted es el español! You have a passion for fine foods and beautiful scenery – as well as feeling a great love for your country and fellow citizens. You wish to remain independant in a world which is hard to stand out, and you are doing it well. Ibravo!

Click Here to Take This Quiz Brought to you by YouThink.com quizzes and personality tests.

That’s a bit of a surprise.

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Protected: Little Johnnie’s Restless Sleep

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Little Johnnie’s Restless Sleep

See one of his nightmares –

Little Johnnie’s Nightmare!

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