Rarely outside of Bond films will you get to see evil geniuses aiming for world domination, but this week ABC supremo, Mark Scott has been accused of just that in his new strategy for the national broadcaster. At the Media 140 conference (perhaps while Austen Powers was dangling over a vat of genetically mutated tiger sharks) he revealed his evil plans. And what was the dark genius at the bottom of his schemes? Widgets and soft diplomacy.
I was expecting at least a laser pointed at the UN, so freeing up the ABC's content with open feeds was a let down. A lot of ABC content is already available through RSS feeds (and videos like the one used above) so the real news is, as Margaret Simons pointed out, that content will be free to anyone including commercial users like, say, News Limited. Although as it's your ABC it could be argued that you've already paid for it.
Still this is at odds with the Murdoch's talk of locking his content up behind a paywall and stopping the parasites who leach the precious news from various web properties (that's anyone who links to news stories BTW). There were some delays with milking the content cash cow. And even speculation that Murdoch would launch a search engine - another deed for evil geniuses right?
But Simons tells us from the Media 140 conference a News Limited journo 'let slip' that there would be a 'cool new toy' with which has been jokingly referred to as the iRupert and The Sunday Kingdle. News Limited journo Mark Day says there's a clue in the Times Plus which has recently stashed culture and travel content behind a membership fee of fifty quid per year. Murdoch's The Australian has recently begun its A Plus section, so it's not too difficult to join the dots. Prepare to pay for your Sunday supplements if you want 'em online.
So the future of media comes down to these two media titans slugging it out - with their widgets and toys. And here I was hoping for at least one battle of super monsters.
(Interesting in this video that one monster has "sheer brute force... while Kong is a thinking animal" - which is Murdoch or Scott?)
Flemington by fascinator
It's the race that stops the nation and keeps Melbourne's milliners in business. Living not far from the track means that I've seen heaps of feathered finery so this Melbourne Cup I snapped a couple of fascinators while escaping the throng.Made from feathers, flowers or fur and later on in the day bits of bread, beer caps and raceday flotsam, the fascinator is best seen in 
the morning. By the end of the day they're teetering on the edge like the drunk on high heels who is probably supporting this elaborate construction.
the morning. By the end of the day they're teetering on the edge like the drunk on high heels who is probably supporting this elaborate construction. 
The wave of style washes in early as punters are keen to find their place in the carpark and flush away a few bets on dead certs. Somewhere in the balancing of headgear (when does a fascinator beomce a hat?) there's a horse race, but mostly it's about drinking. After a long day of waiting to not be invited into a celebrity tent, most stagger home or shout at cab drivers. Some take time out to vomit in local resident's letterboxes so we can all share the excitement of the big day. It's quite a feat to keep your headgear when all inside you is let loose. 
Vigilante Virgin: a review in progress
This week Fairfax opened its new Media House building in Melbourne's CBD. There was much back slapping from the premier and words like 'bold', 'exciting' and 'future' were thrown around. But is Fairfax really ready for the future - bold, exciting or otherwise? Based on the technology they've put behind Text Tales: Vigilante Virgin, the present is challenging.
A couple of other bloggers have already made the point that this isn't really an m-novel. Adam Ford makes the point that it "might be the first password-protected Australian-authored online-story-in-instalments accessible via mobile-phone-delivered subscription" because you only get sent a text that directs you to web page. Essentially you'll need a web-enabled mobile to read the story. And the main advantage to this seems to be that the story can be bookended by a big picture of author Marieke Hardy and an ad for Borders. Gully Bogan is less kind pointing out that this is "the same business model that allows you to subscribe to bikini-girl wallpapers, as advertised on the back of certain magazines". Again given the Marieke Hardy in Your Hand promo, perhaps this was the intent.
And the weird thing is that the web page that you're delivered to from your mobile is the same everyday. So subscription seems pointless if you can just return to the same page when new content is delivered. Unless you just like being woken at 7am by a text.
But perhaps Fairfax don't even want you to subscribe. After the first week they published an edited version of the first five episodes in the newspaper and online. This ruined any exclusivity readers might have felt about getting a story sent to their mobile. Plus it came with illustrations and easier to read layout. Why would you prefer to read it on your mobile when the print and online versions offer a better experience?
This is a review in progress. Next time I'll look at the writing itself as the story will have concluded by then.
Holiday in Lemuria
Way back in the 1990s a group of musician pranksters called the KLF pranced across stages and charts declaring themselves The Ancients of Mu Mu. Most people thought they meant the baggy dress-like outfits preferred by the overweight and fill-in arts teachers. But it wasn't just one of the most interesting big-ups in hip hop at the time. Mu was actually an abbreviation of Lemuria, a land created to explain the travels of the indescribably cute lemurs.
Zoologist Philip Sclater couldn’t work out how fossils of the cuddly critters from Madagascar could end up in India, Malaysia and the Middle East without clocking up some serious frequent flyer miles. In 1864 he came up with a solution: a continent that must have once joined these separate continents, so lemurs scurried overland until Lemuria sunk into the ocean. It became Atlantis for baby ewoks.
With the benefit of theories like continental drift, the fossils are easily explained and the disappeared landmass seems hokum, but the idea held water until well into the 19th century. Some thought that the sunken continent hid the ‘missing link’ between humans and apes. Wilder theories stretched the underwater continent so it covered most of the Pacific and islands discovered there were just peaks of mountain villages from a much bigger civilisation. Could Pacific Islanders be survivors from an earlier and weirder society?
The smidge of evidence was more than enough to excite slightly nutty occultists. The mysterious Madame Helena Blavatsky claimed to have seen a fantastical book that explained it all. According to Blavatsky, Lemurians weren’t cuddly, but seven foot tall reptilian creatures who once had the earth to themselves until the meddling gods created mammals. When Lemurians began interbreeding with mammals the cranky gods sunk the continent as punishment for their inter-species randyness. Or was it that the ‘dragon men’ had started playing with black magic that threatened the gods themselves? Madame Blavatsky changed the story to keep selling new Lemurian books.
Some folks just couldn’t let the Lemurians go. In 1894 Frederick Spencer Oliver wrote a book A Dweller on Two Planets that said the Lemurians moved among us and appeared through a series of tunnels beneath California’s Mount Shasta wearing white robes – a little like those favoured by the KLF or maybe actual muumuus originally worn in Hawaii. Later fabulists decided that Lemurians were aliens or humans modified by aliens.
But to get to Lemuria today you won’t need a snorkel. Easter Island’s moai have long been seen as evidence of another civilisation or an alien drive-bys. Further west in the Pacific, Nan Madol on the isle of Pohnpei makes a better case for a submarine civilization. Called the Venice of the Pacific, it’s a series of artificial islands complete with megaliths and downright spooky temple-like structures. Rumours of an escape tunnel under the island’s reef into the ocean fuelled speculation that residents may have been amphibians who fled as men approached. Most of the ruins only date back as far as the 12th century but the imaginative can still perceive a lost kingdom there.
Geeks have kept the idea of the lost Lemuria alive. The continent survived in the imagination of HP Lovecraft and made cameos in comics like Namor the Sub-Mariner and Hellboy. It was even mentioned in the voiceover introduction to the original 1978 Battlestar Galactica TV series. And then there was the KLF. At the end of the video for Justified and Ancient the dance music pioneers board a submarine to head to off to the mythical land. So if you get there you can be assured of an awesome soundtrack.
Image courtesy of Ammanuel Faivre via Wikicommons.
Zoologist Philip Sclater couldn’t work out how fossils of the cuddly critters from Madagascar could end up in India, Malaysia and the Middle East without clocking up some serious frequent flyer miles. In 1864 he came up with a solution: a continent that must have once joined these separate continents, so lemurs scurried overland until Lemuria sunk into the ocean. It became Atlantis for baby ewoks.
With the benefit of theories like continental drift, the fossils are easily explained and the disappeared landmass seems hokum, but the idea held water until well into the 19th century. Some thought that the sunken continent hid the ‘missing link’ between humans and apes. Wilder theories stretched the underwater continent so it covered most of the Pacific and islands discovered there were just peaks of mountain villages from a much bigger civilisation. Could Pacific Islanders be survivors from an earlier and weirder society?
The smidge of evidence was more than enough to excite slightly nutty occultists. The mysterious Madame Helena Blavatsky claimed to have seen a fantastical book that explained it all. According to Blavatsky, Lemurians weren’t cuddly, but seven foot tall reptilian creatures who once had the earth to themselves until the meddling gods created mammals. When Lemurians began interbreeding with mammals the cranky gods sunk the continent as punishment for their inter-species randyness. Or was it that the ‘dragon men’ had started playing with black magic that threatened the gods themselves? Madame Blavatsky changed the story to keep selling new Lemurian books.
Some folks just couldn’t let the Lemurians go. In 1894 Frederick Spencer Oliver wrote a book A Dweller on Two Planets that said the Lemurians moved among us and appeared through a series of tunnels beneath California’s Mount Shasta wearing white robes – a little like those favoured by the KLF or maybe actual muumuus originally worn in Hawaii. Later fabulists decided that Lemurians were aliens or humans modified by aliens.
But to get to Lemuria today you won’t need a snorkel. Easter Island’s moai have long been seen as evidence of another civilisation or an alien drive-bys. Further west in the Pacific, Nan Madol on the isle of Pohnpei makes a better case for a submarine civilization. Called the Venice of the Pacific, it’s a series of artificial islands complete with megaliths and downright spooky temple-like structures. Rumours of an escape tunnel under the island’s reef into the ocean fuelled speculation that residents may have been amphibians who fled as men approached. Most of the ruins only date back as far as the 12th century but the imaginative can still perceive a lost kingdom there.
Geeks have kept the idea of the lost Lemuria alive. The continent survived in the imagination of HP Lovecraft and made cameos in comics like Namor the Sub-Mariner and Hellboy. It was even mentioned in the voiceover introduction to the original 1978 Battlestar Galactica TV series. And then there was the KLF. At the end of the video for Justified and Ancient the dance music pioneers board a submarine to head to off to the mythical land. So if you get there you can be assured of an awesome soundtrack.
Image courtesy of Ammanuel Faivre via Wikicommons.
And Another Douglas Adams
Released this week in Australia is the sixth book in the increasingly innacurately named Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy, And Another Thing. It's made even more unlikely by the death of genius creator Douglas Adams back in 2001.The story has been taken up on the 30th anniversary of the original by Eoin Colfer, author of the Artemis Fowl books. It was a controversial decision and Colfer himself is frank about his reluctance to write the book because of the great legacy and the vengeful fans of the original.
Colfer begins by bringing the original gang back together. Arthur Dent is enjoying a hermetic existence on a beach, while Ford Prefect is living the dream at a ultra-luxury resort courtesy of a Dinocharge card he's fiddled last time he was in the Guide office. Random Dent (daughter of Arthur and Trillian) has gone on to become Galactic President and married a rodent - mostly to annoy her mother, Trillian. And Zaphod Beeblebrox is admiring his reflection in his ship The Heart of Gold. They're all brought together again by a bird-like droid that seems to be running low on battery.
It's reassuring to see the old characters thrown together again and there's plenty of the same playfulness of ideas that marked the original. The nostalgia ("Ha ha, Vogons!") may just be enough to swing you through the whole book or it could seem like mawkish repetition. Personally, I'm lapping it up, but still feeling a little queasey about the motivations.
Colfer seems to be writing with the reverence of a fan (he has no plans to write another) and the book was released with the approval of Adams' widow, but Penguin books seem to be talking franchise.
Part of the inspiration for this new book was Devil May Care, a sequel in the James Bond series penned by Sebastian Faulks. The book was Penguin UK's fastest seller, with readers ripping more than 44,000 off the shelves in the first four days. Marketing folks wiped a tear from their eye as they talked about the power of the Bond brand. Could the future of books be cashing in on literary legacy?
If you're feeling uncertain but curious, the miracle of globalisation means you can pop over to BBC's Book at Bedtime where they are serialising the book over the coming weeks (Update: it has almost disappeared - two episodes still available). While Adams was an advocate for micro-payments for content, he also lamented that "The world is controlled in a top-down way by large hierarchies that have control over us". Snaffling the free audio while you can could be a fitting tribute to a multimedia pioneer.
