THE MEANING OF OZ - All you need to know!

Another big fan of audio books, here, djjd. Last thing I do most nights after getting into bed & turning off the lights.

Currently listening to My Life as a Traitor. (Zarah Ghahramani) A memoir of her life in Iran. Fascinating. Currently (at my stage of listening) she's locked up in prison for "subversive" activities. (Not exactly guaranteed to bring on sleep, though. )

just finished listening to The City & The City by China Mieville
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_%26_the_City
Amazon Review

The city is Beszel, a rundown metropolis on the eastern edge of Europe. The other city is Ul Qoma, a modern Eastern European boomtown, despite being a bit of an international pariah. What the two cities share, and what they don't, is the deliciously evocative conundrum at the heart of China Mieville's The City and the City. Mieville is well known as a modern fantasist (and urbanist), but from book to book he's tried on different genres, and here he's fully hard-boiled, stripping down to a seen-it-all detective's voice that's wonderfully appropriate for this story of seen and unseen. His detective is Inspector Tyador Borlu, a cop in Beszel whose investigation of the murder of a young foreign woman takes him back and forth across the highly policed border to Ul Qoma to uncover a crime that threatens the delicate balance between the cities and, perhaps more so, Borlu's own dissolving sense of identity. In his tale of two cities, Mieville creates a world both fantastic and unsettlingly familiar, whose mysteries don't end with the solution of a murder.

Whomever wrote that Amazon Review has never heard of spoiler alerts?!

what's the spoiler?

or maybe i don't get spoilers

That sounds great, djjd.

(Searching for the spoiler now. )

In his tale of two cities, Mieville creates a world both fantastic and unsettlingly familiar, whose mysteries don't end with the solution of a murder.

An open ended mystery is fine. But I rather find out when I get to the end of the book. Knowing the mystery is unsolved makes the whole thing sound even more anticlimactic and less alluring to start the read in the first place.

okay, i can see that, but as you get into the story,the murder investigation is just the vehicle to drive the story of the cities and their relationship to one another

Please pardon this indulgence. I was looking for something else on YouTube & came across heaps of old Clarke & Dawe "interviews " from the ABC.
If you're not from Oz you might find them a bit bewildering, I don't know.

Basically the format of their short, weekly skits on the ABC go like this: Brian is the hapless, earnest media interviewer, who struggles to get anything like real answers from John Clarke, who can be anyone in the news from Kevin Rudd, a US president, a high-flying corporate wheeler & dealer ... it all depends on that week's big political news stories. John Clarke, being who ever he is that week, is generally evasive, answering with made-for-media spin, as he negotiates his way through each interview.

I just adore Clarke & Dawe. They are very clever & usually make me laugh quite a bit. Unfortunately most of the clips on YouTube are not recent, but worth a look, anyway.

First: pre-Beijing Olympics interview on a smoggy day.

(Oz is one of the main exporters of brown coal to China. And that is the Oz national anthem that John C keeps humming.)

very funny guys, first became aware of them with the oil tanker sketch

A quick quiz on the achievements of the (previous conservative) Oz government:

Hey, djjd!

You mean you've had the Clarke & Dawe experience?

yup, another fave of mine

One last one. The David Hicks trial. For those of you who don't know who David Hicks is, he was an Oz detainee at Guantanamo Bay & ended up there for quite a time! (We had an A2K thread on his situation, which also ran forever -see link below.)
In this interview Brian interviews "Alexander Downer" minister for foreign affairs in the previous Howard government ... which was not exactly forthcoming (to put it politely) in extracting Hicks from Guantanamo:



Bring David Hicks home (from Guantanamo) before Christmas!:
http://able2know.org/topic/87880-1

Sometimes you amaze me, djjd. Have you left any media stone unturned?
I imagine that Clarke & Dawe would be rather an acquired taste, if one is not Australian, or familiar with Oz politics. I just love them. Fantastic stuff!

dj...

Thanks for this - I've really enjoyed listening to them.

You really are amazing.

Off to re-listen to Clarke and Dawe

non english things elude me

but everything else is fair game, listening to a rather funny radio comedy from ireland lately



Radio Ulster Comedy Presents Stranded
Stranded is Radio Ulster’s new comedy series about a banker from Northern Ireland who is called home unexpectedly. He’s home to close down his father’s radio station which is based on a remote island. But when he arrives he finds himself drawn into the island’s life " and then he loses his job in Hong Kong...

A thought, djjd.

Tell me what you think.

Do you think it would be a good idea to create a thread for all the great radio links, from various countries? So that they're all on one thread?

There seem to be quite a few of us who are heavily into radio. I now have a variety of great links located on a variety of threads ...)

(Of course, to contribute, I'd have to learn how to do the radio link downloading thing first. Yes, yes, I know. Luddite!!! )

I adore the front fell off! "We towed it out of the environment."

There is a DVD of Clarke and Dawes available now. It's on my list.

Are you still as deeply in love with John Clarke as I am, Deb?

Isn't he fantastic?

I get hot and breathless whenever I think of him.