A ban on actor Tang Wei by Chinese authorities has been lifted, a friend tells me. Chinese censors, uncomfortable with the fact that Tang's character in the Ang Lee blockbuster movie Lust, Caution fell in love with a collaborator with the Japanese, stopped her from being chosen for new roles.

They also stopped her from being interviewed by the media in China. They stopped her from receiving commercial sponsorships.

China's relationship with Japan continues to be plagued by bitter memories of WWII atrocities carried out by Japan's troops, most notably in Nanjing, the ancient Chinese capital. Chinese authorites can count on popular resentment against the Japanese to support its policies, even to the point of whipping it up at will in order to make a point when the relationship happens to become strained.

The effect of the ban on Tang was that her life was completely "sealed" - sealed off from any exposure at all. Now, it seems, the seal has been officially broken.

"Everybody knows" about Tang being "sealed", my friend says. "It's very common in China."

News reports in Western media have mostly been less explicit. Writing for the Minneapolis-St Paul Star Tribune, journalist Min Lee says Lust, Caution was

a politically sensitive production that reportedly prompted officials to ban her in her home country.

The Entertainment Daily blog echoes this line:

But even though the edited version of the movie [Lust, Caution] was cleared for release, Chinese officials still wanted to punish Tang, ordering TV stations to pull ads featuring the actress and to stop covering her, according to news reports.

In March 2008, The Times was predictably less indirect:

China’s newest film star, who shot to fame in the director Ang Lee’s sexually explicit spy thriller Lust, Caution, has been blacklisted by Beijing authorities.

Television stations in Beijing and Shanghai were told to stop reporting on the actress Tang Wei, 28, and to pull any advertisements featuring her. The move followed an internal purge of officials associated with the film.

Presumably, the Times report was the one the others were referring to when they qualified their statements with words like "reportedly". The Times article is featured on Tang's Wikipedia page.

The article does not name its sources, who remain "Chinese sources" and notes that the "sealing" (ban) of Tang "has not been announced officially".

And while the ban on Tang has now been lifted, it is possible that she remains something of a liability in China. At the premier of the new film, Crossing Hennessy, at the Hong Kong International Film Festival, a Wall Street Journal blog reports, co-star Jacky Cheung was "a no-show".

Pic credit: Associated Press.

Review: Crabwalk, Gunther Grass (2003)

Coming to terms with who you are often means explaining how you got there. For the characters in this novel, living in Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall, explanations will always hit upon things that cannot easily be revealed.

It's no surprise, then, that the book deals with a single family. The mother was an enthusiastic supporter of the Third Reich until the Russians overran her east German town. She would end up working in a furniture factory, becoming an enthusiastic barracker for the Soviet Union.

She's an interesting character, full of whimsy and mischief. She seems to revel in her lack of education and her low-brow interests, chief among which are men. And she doesn't like her son, the protagonist, very much.

He's a west German and a journalist. By this stage he's worked for many years and comes across as tired and world-weary. He's possibly Grass's least-interesting character. To underscore the banality of the 'middle age' trope, he's divorced from his wife, who lives even further west, with their son.

The boy emerges slowly in the narrative, which begins as a rumination on the fate of a ship that was built and employed by the Nazis as a pleasure vessel for the Romanticised and virtuous workers of the ascendant state.

The journalist-father has a special stake in the vessel because he was born on the same day it was sunk, by a Russian U-boat, in the closing days of WWII. His mother escaped from the boat at the last moment, giving birth at sea.

So the boat - which is depicted on the book's cover - has a special claim on our attention. This element of the narrative becomes supremely dominant as we learn about the way it was named. It was named after a functionary of the state who was assassinated, in Switzerland prior to the outbreak of hostilities, by an impoverished, Jewish medical student.

The Romantic possibilities of the vessel appeal to a young man who operates an internet site dedicated to chronicling and discussing the boat and the attendant narratives of pride and identity. The logic of the book demands, however, that the young man in question be the journalist's son. And he's being encouraged in his pursuit by the mother, lurking like a ravening, sportsfield-sideline parent in a crumblig factory in the downtrodden east.

Ineffectual, alienated dad has no way to influence the way the son's activities escalate from chatroom linguistics to something far less innocent.

The logic behind the drama is rooted in the country's shame. Concerns are not aired in public but are debated in a lively fashion behind closed doors, or are masqued by apparent indifference.

This sideways view is amplified by the way the narrator is forced, in retelling the tale, to backtrack constantly to fill in gaps in the historical narrative. The history is both his own and the country's.

Hence the title: 'Crabwalk'.

In the realm of newspapers, innovation is still in short supply. Australia has seen less disruption than they've had in the US, but there's plenty of pain Down Under. No big changes, tho. We've seen The Australian buff up their print edition with a sleek new redesign. And there have been some minor adjustments at Fairfax in their web masthead configurations.

But nothing to really rock your boat. As usual, we've had to wait for the pain in America to reach levels of crisis so bad that editors actually listen to what the experts say.

This now seems to be happening.

Leading up to the SXSW Tech conference in Austin, Texas, Jay Rosen of New York University, posted on his blog about what he planned to discuss in front of delegates. The narrative, he says, is important. "Why are we serving people the news without the background narrative necessary to make sense of the news?" he asked.

Suppose your laptop continually received updates to software that was never installed on your laptop. If you can imagine a situation that absurd, then you are ready to partake in the Future of Context panel that I’ll be part of at the South by Southwest festival in Austin next week.

It seems some people have been listening to Rosen. But trust a geek to be the first to respond with the type of enthusiasm entrepreneurs - not the mainstream media - are known for.

John Temple is the editor of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s new Peer News site, based in Hawaii. Temple has just hired three "hosts" who will do reporting for Peer News.

The site won't have comments, which editors don't like. But it will have something better and more revolutionary.

Peer won’t have “reporters” in the classical sense, it will have “hosts” who help facilitate this civic square answering questions for the community.

Sarah Lacey at Tech Crunch talks about Temple's plans for the structure of content.

On content, the most interesting thing Temple talked about was doing away with “articles” as we know them. He criticized the static, episodic nature by which journalists have traditional [sic] covered news, challenging readers to hunt through archives for the information they want. Instead, Peer’s “building block” will be a page that’s always updated almost like Wikipedia, or as he put it, “something closer to a living history on a topic that changes as it develops.”

This echoes Rosen's 7 March blog post:

Another way of putting the problem, though I admit this is kind of abstract: why are Wikipedia (which specializes in background knowledge) and nytimes.com (which specializes in newsy updates) separate services? Why aren’t they the same service, so that the movie still makes sense, even if you come in during the middle of it, as most of us do?

The guys with the big money are the tech entrepreneurs. But they're also the guys with big dreams. That's how they got where they are. Another eBay founder, Jeffrey Skoll, has set up an organisation to help nurture the next generation of social entrepreneurs - people who want to do business and make the world a better place simultaneously.

It strikes me that Pierre Omidyar wants something similar.

Pic credit (volcanic activity on Mauna Loa): Hawai'i Magazine.com

It seems that nobody bothers - not even journalists bother - to read the NT News website which, I reported yesterday, told us that 22 asylum seekers had been transferred to the mainland.

Today, The Age reports that another boat, with "more than 90 passengers", was intercapted north-west of Christmas Island on Friday.

The opposition immigration spokesperson, the doughty Scott Morrison, complained:

"If we have another boat arrive in the next 24 hours, which is quite possible, then it's full," he told AAP on Saturday.

"We'll very, very soon be at the stage where they'll be transferring people to the mainland."

Too late, Scott! But at least the story tells us that the Darwin facility is a "550-bed facility" so we know now that the 22 new residents there will be feeling a bit like the last slice of crust in the breadbag until - as seems increasingly likely - the next bunch of asylum seekers are shipped over to Darwin to await their fate.

Pic credit: Vegan Community blog.

Interesting story on seaborne asylum seekers in today's NT News, which informs us that 22 men were transferred from Christmas Island to Darwin because of two boats approaching Australian territorial waters.

The 22 men were shifted to make room for the expected arrivals.

None of this appeared in newspapers in the south-east of Australia. Residents of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and other capitals heard no news of these developments.

There are currently 239 asylum seekers living on Christmas Island. With the numerous occupants of the "two large refugee boats heading for Australian waters" to hit land soon, the island's available 140 places will be quickly filled.

It's an interesting scenario, and one that must fill the Rudd government with dread. They must be relieved that news of these developments has not filtered through the blogosphere into the living rooms of the majority of Australian houses. But why didn't News Ltd, which operates the website, bring this information into other websites it owns?

About 300 asylum seekers in the latter stages of the approval process will be shifted to Darwin when the larger boats arrive.

That will make a total of over 320 people who will be on mainland Australia - within its legal jurisdication - in the near future. As the article informs us,

[Christmas Island] was excised from Australian territorial law by the [previous, conservative] Howard Government.

But of course Rudd has done nothing about reincorporating the island into the legal framweork by which everyone else is judged. Not being in control of the Senate might be one reason this has not been attempted.

Being beseiged by new boats, that are arriving like clockwork from regions riven by civil strife, might be another reason the Rudd government does not want to make asylum seekers an issue. The federal election will be held this year, probably in November.

So it's finally happening after weeks of effort and worry. My chilli story is being published in the April issue of Good Fruit & Vegetables.

There were many questions to answer before sending it off. Will the story work? Did I do enough interviews? Am I going too far in my summation?

The answer to the first question is not up to me, it's up to my readers. The second question can probably be answered with a brief 'yes'. It's about 1700 words long and there are seven interviews. That's not bad.

The third question has to do with intent but more with the interview subjects themselves. In terms of what I wanted to achieve - the intent - the story took shape fairly quickly at least in its first section, which is mainly concerned with how chillies were quickly adopted in Asia when they had been ignored in Europe after being brought back from the Caribbean by Christopher Columbus.

I quickly adopted the Asian angle as the primary force that would determine what questions I asked interviewees. Once I had this anchoring the article's trajectory, it was easy to move into the second, more problematic phase.

After discussing why chillies were so quickly adopted in Asia, I talk to two chilli growers to get their side of the story. Then I transition to ethnic cuisine in Australia.

The main anchor in the final section of the story is Tammi Jonas, a PhD student at Melbourne University who was very helpful in making me understand about ethnic food and the ways people use it in their lives.

Tammi's discussion of her specialty - ethnic 'foodways' - enabled me to talk about chillies in a specific way. I could take a position vis a vis chillies by saying that the way they are used in ethnic food has helped Australia become a better country. The word Tammi gave me in this context is 'cosmopolitan'.

I'd like to thank all of the people I talked to for this story, for enabling me to create something interesting and factual that my readers can - hopefully - enjoy.

Anyone ever tell you your emails suck? I felt like this today and so here's a brief rant on companies that 'capture' your email address (opt-in) and spam you with tripe for the next few years. Or as long as they can get away with it.

Until, of course, you get sick of your 'refresh' yielding up simply another collection of self-interested rubbish promoting seaside vacation rentals or home PC help. Once too many times and you eventually take the step of unsubscribing.

To you, it's only a click. I wonder how those companies feel when someone - YOU! - drops their mindlessly dull and venal feed into the trashcan of their existence.

On Twitter, an unfollow can seem like a kick in the guts, as Dee at tremendousnews.com tells us in delicious detail. But we rarely spare a thought for the guys and gals behind corporate email spam.

But we shouldn't, anyway, because if it weren't so bloody irrelevant we might still be receiving their boring and misplacedly-earnest emails. I hate to see any animal suffer, and so I'm taking pity on myself. I unsubscribed to four email feeds today and will feel no remorse if more of the lamentable stuff falls into my inbox tomorrow.

Corporates: you've been warned.

Postscript - The moment I published this post an email arrived from LinkedIn advertising a dinner with an eminent person at my alma mater. This is a sign of the times. Seeing how email spam is shunned, the corporates are infiltrating other spaces. It's happening in Facebook but this is the first time LinkedIn has been used this way to contact me.

Iconoclastic magazine Crikey says over half your news is spin.

As usual, there's more in the story but they don't spell it out. Now that the survey of news stories conducted by students at the University of Technology, Sydney, is out there, it's probably time to go into more detail.

The study "found that nearly 55% of stories analysed were driven by some form of public relations". This resembles a story a couple of months ago about how broadcast journalism takes content from print, and repurposes it. But it's in the repurposing that the devil detail lies.

What does "driven by" mean? Does it mean that a PR person contacts a journo and tells them about a story that the journo subsequently goes out and investigates? Does it mean the journo copies whole slabs of text from the press release? Or does it mean that the journo picks up names of people the PR provides (in the original email or on the phone) who are willing to talk, and talks to them?

I think there is a bit of difference between these scenarios.

This is what we need to know. If, for example, the journo simply copies whole slabs of text from a press release, and then talks to people lined up conveniently by the PR, then there's a problem.

If, on the other hand, a journo picks up the story and then goes and does a bunch of original research using his/her own contacts, or even searching out people to interview, then that's a slightly different proposition.

The UTS study does not make such a distinction, and it's a shame.

What's interesting in the Crikey story, tho, is the difficulties faced by the journalism students when trying to discover more information by talking to journalists.

Many journalists and editors were defensive when the phone call came. Who’d blame them? They’re busier than ever, under resourced, on deadline and under pressure. Most refused to respond, others who initially granted an interview then asked for their comments to be withdrawn out of fear they’d be reprimanded, or worse, fired.

Asking "hard questions of the media" is sort of the point, however. It's like for a journalist working on a contentious story where there are many important entities - government departments, large corporations - who are contacted repeatedly but refuse to answer questions.

Sometimes they refuse by simply not replying to emails. Follow up emails can also be totally ignored. Phone calls get routed through a media office where professional communicators are stationed whose sole purpose is to protect the corporate brand.

These things are frustrating, and probably have a lot to do with why journalists rely on PRs to summon up reliable, approachable contacts who will talk - today, now, immediately - about the subject at hand. Many won't.

So it's hard to feel sorry for the students, because the kind of obfuscation they faced while doing the survey is the kind of problem journalists can face in an average day at work.

Review: Mediated, Thomas de Zengotita (2005)

Ever wonder why there are so many fashion/ideological/attitudinal options? Have you even been surprised by one of your own statements, so that you said to yourself, 'Where did that come from?' Thomas de Zengotita, a contributing editor for Harper's Magazine and a teacher at New York University may just have the answer.

I've certainly wondered about these things. In fact, back in February 2009, I made a post here about what I called 'The Age of Reinforcement'. Irony, I said, was dead because these was no core belief against which to rank any judgement/opinion/viewpoint.

Every option is indeed available, says de Zengotita.

Best of all, tho, is the author's amazing reach. He possesses a protoplasmic credibility - in other words, he can reach into any area of human endeavour and find signs of the Blob.

Maybe an explanation is required. The Blob is de Zengotita's word for the plastic modality that subsumes everything we do, and makes these things resemble itself. You may be completely sincere when you strive for originality and exceptionalism, but as soon as the Blob comes along, you're likely to find that what you've done is merely another element within the commonwealth of ideas.

You're likely to be Blobbed when you least expect it.

"Whatever," is the catch-word of the Blobby generation. We perform our lives, says de Zengotita. We are enacting one role among many in the snowstorm of available roles. I just happened - today - to choose this one.

But don't believe me, read the book. You won't regret it.

We respond in a positive manner to attention. I know because I had an old school friend on my website looking for information on old buddies he wants to invite to a reunion in July. He told me he'd found one guy's phone number on my website.

Today I revisited the website, adding links to profiles of friends and then, inspired by the attention I'd gleaned, worked for a couple of hours on the forbears pages.

I added an 1892 wedding photo of my great-grandfather and -mother. They're formally arranged, as befits a young, up-and-coming couple. His dad was a Victorian gold miner. Her mother, as far as I know, worked on a South Australian farm. But John Henry was a school teacher and his starched shirt and her lacy dress befit their status as members of the gentry.

He ended up as the principal of a Melbourne primary school but died in 1922, before my mother was born. Alice outlived him by 28 years and both are buried in Brighton cemetary under a single headstone. That was the way then, and probably still is.

His father emigrated from Lancashire in 1852, a couple of years after gold was discovered and after penal transportation ended. William Warren and Henrietta were married in the Church of St Peter (C of E) at Ashton under Lyne, Lancashire.

In 1852 Elizabeth MacGugan made the voyage out to Portland, in the colony of Victoria, alone with five children. Her husband Archibald had died in 1850. I don't know anything else about this branch of the family.

John Henry and Alice, mum's grandparents, were married not in the Anglican Church, but by a Presbyterian minister at Archdale, Branxholme, Victoria. I don't know what caused the switch in religion, but it may have been due to Alice, whose family name was Scottish.

Her first child became a supreme court judge. His brother, Harry, my grandfather, became a socialist, although he was married within the Presbyterian Church. The two brothers apparently fell out over the politics. Arthur had fought in WWI and was very 'establishment'. Harry was a bit of a rebel, an invented a dispensing device - which was patented - for birth control pills.

An interesting bunch, anyway.

If it's true or movie actors, why not for journalists? We watch what the actor takes on, assess their character and ethics, judge them. But not only us. The directors and casting agents are watching too. Each new film registered on the board helps add up to something bigger, more meaningful, than itself. It's cumulative persona crafting.

As a journalist, I am judged in the same way. Each story I write adds up to a bigger whole in the eyes of editors, who seek out writers they think are suitable for their publications. So every time I choose a story to write, I'm choosing my future career path.

Beyond the headline, too, there's a trend. A headline indicates something about your preferences. But the story itself tells more, for those who take the time to read them.

In my case, I put a link to each story I write on my website. Maybe this is not such a good idea. I notice other writers simply list the publications they've been associated with. I go a step further, but maybe I shouldn't.

Then again, it may be paying off. For example, I pitched a story about sustainable tuna to a magazine that focuses on ethical investing. They weren't interested. But the editor took the time to visit my website and read some of the stories linked there. I may be in line to receive a new commission.

For me, it's early days. Commissions are hard to come by. At this point, it seems judicious to help myself develop a following by broadcasting my portfolio as far as possible.

Commissions are dreadfully hard to come by. But the other thing is that I want to be writing stories I'm personally interested in. Specialisation, we're told again and again, is the way to go. It may be too early for me to be known as an expert in environmental issues, for example, but you've got to start somewhere.

It may be too early for my Oscar - my Walkley or whatnot. But the only way to get there is by writing. And the only way to be published is to keep editors interested.

Finally, I get the energy and time - having tripped down to Brisbane and back and worked slavishly on a quote for editing and journalism services - to do a post. "Post every day" is a great mantra but sometimes you need to concentrate on other things. Like, things that pay the bills.

Brisbane was fine but the food at The Rendezvous Hotel on Ann Street is over-rich and the servings on the small side. Which means you end up eating an entree and dessert as well as a main.

I mention the food because yesterday I felt awful, starting with a sick headache in the morning which lasted until early evening. I took a couple of naps to try and shake it off, and I can only assume it had something to do with the rich fare at the hotel restaurant.

Getting paid work is a priority right now, although I'm still writing for some vehicles for free in order to benefit from their editorial input and to build my portfolio.

I found a nice surprise on my return home, in the shape of bottles of chilli paste. They were sent by a grower I interviewed for a story which had me worried for a while as the editor who had commmissioned it left to do other work in the company. Finally I got an email from the new editor saying he'd be glad to have a story on chillies. It also looks like it'll be the cover story, just like for the peach story last time.

So I did one last interview for the chilli story yesterday and I'm gearing up my resources to finish it by Monday. Not sure about the ethics of naming the chilli paste in the story, tho.

Then there's the tuna story. This one's more problematic because I just got a bunch of new stuff from a valuable source which could change the storyline significantly. Which means a major rewrite. In fact, I'm even thinking of altering the story's structure a lot.

The tuna story has been challenging because of the world limit. They only want 600 to 700 words, so I'm constantly reassessing the value of every paragraph hoping that I'll be able to combine economy with comprehensiveness. The new material could wipe out half of what I've written, so I'm preparing for a brief struggle. Luckily it's not due for almost two weeks.

Overall I'm feeling good about things. The weather has helped by turning to rain again. More of those broad sheets of drenching rain this morning, which always cool down the air. The crows can be heard, their cries echoing across the football field with its bright green grass.

"Burn the boats," says Net maven - and now much-sought-after tech co board member - Marc Andreessen, advising old media ('MSM' - mainstream media) companies facing continued disruption due to falling revenues as advertisers switch to vehicles other than the traditional newspaper.

In Tech Crunch, Erick Schonfeld writes up an interview he did with Andreesen last Friday in New York. The gist is simple. By way of an analogy, the Mosaic developer and Netscape founder advises media companies to ditch their print editions.

The analogy would resonate for North American readers. In the 1500s, writes Schonfeld, Hernando Cortes landed on the shores of the New World. He "ordered his men to burn the ships that had brought them there to remove the possibility of doing anything other than going forward into the unknown", says the legend.

Fairfax CEO Jack Matthews said a similar thing during his opening remarks while launching the (now annual) Media 2010 conference in Sydney on 19 February.

The previous year, said Matthews, while "deep in the throes of the GFC"

I think we were wondering how, or even if, many of us were going to make it out of that environment. Those of you who were here will recall, at the time, I used the analogy of Joe Simpson's [1998] book, 'Touching the Void' when, you recall, Simpson, while descending from a very difficult climb in South America fell deep into a crevasse and shattered his leg.

He realised, as he was in that crevasse, that he simply couldn't climb back out the way he came. And, counterintuitively, he climbed deeper and deeper into the crevasse and found, ultimately, a way out of the situation. And obviously he made it because he wrote the book. Made a little bit out of the [2003] movie, as well.

And at that time I argued that, we too, as media companies, needed to find a new way out of the circumstances that we found ourselves in, that simply going back the way we came wasn't going to get us there. And as I see it today, we all feel better today, I think. We all feel like we're kind of - not to mangle my analogies too much - but we all feel like we see light at the end of the tunnel.

Bu I would argue today that the risk we now face is the view that everything is back to normal. Because I don't think everything is back to normal and, in fact, I think it's fair to say that the is a new 'normal'.

The thing is that Andreessen's remarks touch on the same chords Matthews is striking here. The "singularity", that Matthews goes on to mention, is now upon the news. Not only is there no turning back, there is no way to know how to go forward.

So then why did Fairfax announce, after doing a minor tweak to its masthead websites recently, announce a "new website"? Why should a few new boxes on the already-overcrowded Fairfax masthead websites constitute a major change?

Matthews may be aware of the situation facing the mainstream media today, but the steps his company are actually taking do not match that conviction. If there's a new 'normal', the website tweak does not demonstrate much commitment to that new model of proceeding.

Translation is a specialised practice that requires a high degree of human intervention. Like making a bed or pouring a cup of coffee, there are some things that machines just cannot do effectively. Maybe Google will find an answer, but going by the results on the Koto Ward page on balance you'd have to say that automated translation sucks.

Big time. Here's a sample news story from the Tokyo City ward's home page:

This year, a horsetail, one after another♪.

A horsetail has also begun to call on an alameda in a Yokojyukengawa water park (Toyo 6-Chome frontage) this year.
　
The horsetail checked on this day is about 30. The thickness of the part of height about 2-15cm and a head is about 3-7mm. The size and the shape are various something NYOKKIRI overhangs from the small one which has just taken out a head from earth.
　
location is the spot which is about 100 m to the east from a plain dwelling bridge in the promenade in about 400 m of east and west between four TSU eye street (from city government office, about 150 m north side)-plain dwelling bridge (HIRAZUMI, when, with the selling point of). I grow around the shrubbery, and when I often strain my eyes, it's possible to find it.
　
A horsetail has also come out this year for the female of the residence in city who came along by a walk, has not it? I'm looking forward to it every year,", and, it was the state which speaks and appreciates a visit in spring.

Thank log they included a picture, which shows some sort of spring vegetable emerging from the earth - presumably in Koto Ward.

Admittedly, the Koto Ward administrators were aware of the shortcomings of their site. Before being able to see any "English-language" content on the site, they show you a disclaimer. But in the light of the above, it's fairly humorous to read what they advise:

Please keep in mind that the translation system doesn't guarantee 100% accuracy. It's possible that some words, including proper nouns, might be translated inaccurately. Thank you.

Well, that's a relief! But "doesn't permit comprehension" might be slightly more accurate that "doesn't guarantee 100% accuracy", I think!

Last night, the ABC's Hungry Beast scored a coup because my 80-year-old mum watched it for the first time after having been informed by me, on my way out the door after I'd eaten the dinner she'd cooked, that it was on later.

The program also scored points for showing, on national TV at 9pm on a weekday, female genitalia in its uncensored, unadorned form. Lips and all. Pendulous labia. Protruberant clitoral hood.

The works, in short. But it was all revealed in a good cause because what Kirsten Drysdale - the reporter leading the story - and the Hungry Beast crew had in their sights was the unnecessary and shameful practice of labiaplasty.

It's not a new topic from my perspective. Back in April 2007, I blogged about labiaplasty on this blog. To give the post impact, I included a discrete photo showing a young woman shaving her pudenda.

Needless to say, the post is consistently among the top-scorers for this blog, in terms of hits. Plenty from the Middle East as well as those created by the routinely deviant boys in the West.

You know who you are, fellers.

Labiaplasty is a medical procedure inolving the removal of flesh that constitutes part of the labia minora, or inner lips of the vulva. It may be painless and it may be covered by medical benefits - I'm not sure on this part, actually - but it sure as hell seems like a step down the wrong path.

The right path, it seems to me, is to allow soft porn magazines to show the labia even of women who do not conform to an unnatural stereotype. There's nothing 'wrong' with big lips, and there are plenty of 'specialty' porn sites that celebrate this characteristic of the pudenda.

Drysdale took the fight up to the Australian Classification Board, which is based in inner Sydney, by offering to show them photos of vulvas and asking them to inform Drysdale if any of them would be banned under current guidelines.

The Classification Board member interviewed looked distinctly uncomfortable at times.

Hungry Beast also interviewed a graphic artist employed by a magazine, who described the process of "cleaning up" photos.

Women, it seems, are starting to express their shame about the deviant - in their minds - appearance of their private parts in concrete ways. In addition to labioplasty, we've got the recent practice of vajazzling.

Far less severe, because entirely cosmetic, vajazzling involves removing all the pubic hair and applying rhinestones in a pattern on the mons pubis. A specialist beauty consultant is responsible for performing the procedure, which is entirely painless and does not cause a permanent change in the woman's physical appearance.

It's purely X-rated bling, in fact.

Nevertheless, it's a sign that we've airbrushed this part of the human anatomy out of the public square so efficiently that entirely artificial means are now sought to offset insecurities that are completely undeserved. It's not fair that women have to feel like this.

I can cope with vajazzling. I can't tolerate the conditions that contribute to the reality of labiaplasty.

Is the news that Spider-Man is to lose his job really news? His alter-ego, Peter Parker will undergo a trial nowadays common to many journalists, says Marvel.

Peter Parker, official photographer of the mayor by day and New York City crime fighter by night, is going to face new challenges, including unemployment.

"He's going to struggle with unemployment and trying to save the city while he can barely afford to keep a roof over his head," said Steve Wacker, Marvel Comics senior editor.

But is this really something altogether new? Back in late January, the ABC's Hungry Beast TV program alerted us to the dangers faced by those fabled, overachieving citizens who protect us from giant, flesh-eating spiders, as the video reveals.

Reading a feature article by Gabriel Sherman in New York magazine. The topic is how Rupert Murdoch has captured The Wall Street Journal and turned it rightwards in a febrile attempt to bring down The New York Times. Large, flat TV screens in the Journal's newsroom ahowing Fox News feed are not the only way this is happening.

Not surprisingly, warnings about the legacy of a respected newspaper once it had fallen into the hands of a right-wing capitalist with a long history of remaking newspapers in his own image, have come true. The problem with the Journal is that, because it sits behind a paywall, few people comment on it. For bloggers, The New York Times remains the paper of record.

We know all too well that the business of news is undergoing a historic transformation as both content and vehicles online proliferate. The bulk of revenues still come from printed ads, and falls here are not being offset by online ad sales.

Is it possible that a newspaper such as The Sydney Morning Herald could collapse? What would that mean for the media? What would that mean for us?

Would people in the community step in using blogs to write and research complex, in-depth stories that would "keep the bastards honest"? I'm not sure they wouldn't. The problem is, I'm not sure they would.

Which brings us to the low esteem in which journalists are currently held.

If newspapers died and there was no longer a living to be easily made from making news, would journalists gain in reputation what they lost in comfort? Is a purge required to kill off bad feeling in the community about reporters and their products?

And what about stories that are easy to write, and that people read, but that do not contribute anything to the public interest? Is the newspaper to blame for the story, or the consumer who pays to read it?

They may not pay, nowadays, but they do click. Attention, we're told, is the new scarce resource. What you click on today determines, to some extent, what you'll be given tomorrow.

And then, there's the idea that there are too many newspapers. Maybe Murdoch is right, and competition is the way to go. I spoke with Fairfax Digital CEO a little while ago and he told me that by setting up The Brisbane Times, his company had actually increased the total number of clicks commanded by the newspaper and its print rival, The Courier-Mail.

When we launched that site, a little over two years ago, the Courier Mail had about 300,000 unique browsers per month and they were basically the only game in town. Today between the two of us, we have two million. So the expansion of that market has been one of the great benefits of competition going in there. It’s helped the Courier-Mail too, frankly. They’ve lifted their game.

Of course, this doesn't take into account the fact that the number of clicks available has escalated arithmetically in two years, as well.

Nevertheless, it may be that conventional ways of understanding the media market no longer apply. The notion of committed citizen journalism is beginning to enter the minds of columnists. It may be that, as the news process migrates from the bureau to the suburbs, a lot of other things will enter the minds of individuals with nothing more than a blog account and an internet connection.

Ah me, you live and you learn. Seems I've been underestimating my abilities in the copy delivery department. But the fault's not mine entirely. Something has to be laid down to inexperience. When are those stories going to be ready again?

I thought that story C would be complete by mid-March, just after I take mum to Brisbane for her consultation with the eye doctor. Then I promised story D by the end of March, so giving myself two weeks to achieve the ultimate perfection that I demand from everything I produce.

It's not just that I'm flattering myself. The fact that I've already written most of story D is also due to being unused to the "process" of preparing copy for delivery to the publishing vehicle.

The big stumbling block was always story A, which I finally filed yesterday. After returning from Sydney with a computer stuffed to the screen bezel with interviews - the raw materials of the writer - I sagged for two days to recuperate. Then I went online and, because it was a weekday, got sidetracked by the tweetstream.

The interviews sat, ever more pungent and impatient, waiting to be transcribed.

I got into it, finally, near the end of the week. There followed two days of frenetic activity as I completed story A and knuckled down to complete the transcription for story B, an interview.

I blogged about the ins and outs of transcription yesterday.

Now, A and B have been filed and D - the 600 to 700 story due at the end of March - is almost written. There's still plenty to do with story C, but it looks as though that will be done in plenty of time for a mid-March filing.

Barring another slothful Twitter interlude and cataclysmic tsunamis out of Chile.

Transcription is a journalist's most painful task - or is it? Let's see ...

OK, so you've got two 20-minute conversations that you recorded on your trusty magic electronic recording device. It's a piece of equipment without which you cannot do your job. Even if you've got shorthand, there's nothing like having an electronic file that can be safely stored on your computer and consulted when the time comes to reviewing materials. Say, for example, someone tries to sue you.

I don't have shorthand, but that's beside the point. Right now I'm talking up the importance of accurate transcription. Don't bother me with quibbles!

You connect your USB lead to the PC and download that precious volume of digital excellence - the sound file - to your workspace - your desktop computer. You might think that you could use software to transcribe it into text. But no. That won't work. The guy at the Dragon software reseller shop told me that you have to train it to understand your own voice. Even then, it's not infallible. Asking it to recognise the intricacies of a third party's voice is just unreasonable, it seems.

Darn.

Well, then. You could ship it off to a person who earns a living purely by making transcriptions.

Unfortunately, you're not that wealthy. But, in any case, I'll tell you why it's a good idea to spend the time to do it yourself.

Not everyone has perfect English, for a start. For these interview subjects, it's sometimes necessary to edit speech while transcribing by using the correct word in square brackets. To train another person to do this might take time, which you probably don't have.

Then there are those elements of speech that serve no purpose other than to fill up space or to close a gap between ideas. I'm not just talking about "umm" or "ahh", either. There are a whole lot of "buts" and "and thens" that do nothing to improve comprehension. In fact, if you listen to the way people speak, you'll find that the idea of a perfect sentence is unikely even for the most accomplish master of the spoken word. People speak in chunks, not sentences.

But you don't want interminable sentences corrupting your prose.

So you edit all these perculiarities out of the script. You can see that this is a good reason to do transcriptions yourself. You want to ensure accuracy - so you don't misquote - but you also want to be kind to the reader by presenting crisp, clear prose.

Another reason to do it yourself is that it provides an opportunity to think up follow-up questions. It also helps to remind you of the contents of the interview. This is great for when you're struggling with the finished article and you find that you need a certain type of quote to fill a glaring gap in the flow.

All in all, I'd say to journalists: put up with it, at least for the more important conversations. There are other interviews, of less import to your story or done near the end of the process of composition, that do not need full transcription. In these cases, you may find that you can get by just by listening to the conversation and extracting the bits that you really need.

Not all interview subjects are of equal value. And those you talk to near the beginning of the process are probably more likely to need a full transcription.

Transcription is an essential part, for me, of the writing process.

Today's post is about nature. Swifts, to be precise. There is a family of swifts living in the underground carpark of the building where I live and they've developed a curious strategy that allows them to go in and out through the entrance, which is generally shut securely by a roller door.

If you take the car out in the morning, they're waiting nearby so that they can shoot out the entrance as you drive through. They wait somewhere in the cieling space just opposite the door. The nest seems to be located away from the door at the far end of the garage.

At other times, they apparently listen to the sounds your car makes as you move from your parking slot to the entrance. If you're lucky, they shoot out past the windows as you're driving.

They're neat little creatures. So fast. So self-contained.

They make no noise. All you know is that, suddenly, a small, dark form careens around the car as it heads into the open space beyond the driveway or, obversely, as it returns to the nest that is secreted inside the garage.

Either way, it's a treat. I feel privileged to know there are swifts inhabiting the building.

Anything to get roof insulation off the front pages, it seems. That's what the Rudd government tells us by releasing a "white paper on counter-terrorism" "that was originally promised at the end of last year", according to the ABC. The Age tells us:

The paper warns that since 2004 there has been an increase in the threat from home-grown terrorists - people born or raised in Australia who have been influenced by violent jihadist messages from overseas.

But in response to the threat from home-grown terrorists, the government has announced that it will "will target people from 10 countries for stringent new visa checks in a push to prevent terrorists getting through the security net".

The government will spend $69 million over four years to bring in biometric checks for visa applications from high-risk countries.

There's a list of countries in existence, but they won't release it to prevent keen plotters scurrying into Australia before the necessary technology is in place at airports.

It's all quite craven, when you think about it. Despite the fact that interested individuals living in Australia can easilly glean tons of info about terrorist techniques using the Internet, the boffins have decided that to prevent home-grown plots hatching it's necessary to put in place additional immigration checks.

"The nations will be announced over the next year," reports The Age without asking any difficult questions about the timing of this bizarre, confusing announcement. Not only does the story contradict itself - home-grown terrorists to be combated by screening arrivals - but the timing of the announcement should send shivers up the spine of any self-respecting journalist.

To combat Tony Abbott's poll rise, federal Labor is turning to the divisive tactics of Howard. Shame.

Back home, the energy expended over the past week is taking its time returning. There's a batch of ten interviews to transcribe and emails to send out. More importantly, there's the angle for the first story to consider.

I've been reading other journalists' accounts of the Media 2010 conference and so far there's been a few summations but little in the way of appraisal. Not sure how I'll handle the detail, but my feeling is that the piece should be a combination of the two approaches.

Maybe I'll lead with a quote from one of the main speakers and develop the theme of confusion among media operatives as to what to do in the face of dramatically falling revenues. Then there's the announcement that Fairfax had a lift in profits for the first half of the financial year. That story came out today.

Another thing that happened today is that Fairfax redesigned its web pages. The changes may warrant a video describing what's happened, but I think the average user will feel that it's more of a tweak than a redesign.

I can work that into the story, too. It's not that I'm deliberately focusing on Fairfax, but News didn't comment on the conference, as far as I can see. So it's a matter of using the material I gathered and doing my best.

Wait a few days and there should be something new. Right now I need a nap to recover from the rushing around of the last few days. It's good to be home.

Fairfax Media's headquarters is a bustling beehive of activity situated, comfortably, opposite the Sydney CBD's western margin near the water. Approached from the front, the building offers a spare, windy aspect to the viewer or visitor. Once inside the lobby space, however, the steady stream of journalists who pass through the automated security gates reassures you: this is a place of business.

My business, today, was to interview a senior executive of Fairfax Digital, which operates the digital assets of the company including its masthead websites.

To reach the pretty aerie where Jack Matthews, Fairfax Digital's CEO, works during the day you first have to present at the front counter, give your name, and secure a security pass. This neck-worm item can only be signed over once you've initialled the part of the register that references a fairly long statement detailing health and occupational safety guidelines.

Antisocial behaviour is not tolerated at Fairfax HQ. The list is instructive, and gives you an idea of the atmosphere that can develop between a journo and his or her subject when the chips - as they say - are down. No shouting or threatening conduct, for example. Fair enough.

There was nothing of this nature in the air as I met with Jack, a wiry middle-aged man with a narrow, open face and an air of good physical fitness. We sat down in the large conference room overlooking the city. I turned on my recording device.

I worried about the blog post I had made in relation to an interview Jack had given a week or so before. The post took issue with some of the things he said. Jack assured me that, although he had read the post, there was no problem on his part.

It was an ineresting interview, and the article I write in the next two weeks will contain a lot of what transpired. The main point of interest for me is how newspapers are fighting falling revenues.

After the interview, I scooted outside and caught a cab to take me across town to the Shangri La Hotel in The Rocks, where my next subject was waiting. Nic Fulton is Reuters' chief scientist and is based in Sydney.

After Nic, I spoke for about 17 minutes with an interesting man from Associated Northcliffe Digital, and English media company. Richard Titus also has a deep and abiding interest in solar vehicles.

Regular readers of this blog should be aware that I'm currently out of town and busy with research for a number of new stories. I plan to be back with new posts by the middle of next week.

I'll be posting a new story on the state of the digital media and newspapers generally some time toward the end of the month. The story will appear in Anthill magazine, which regularly carries my work.

Another story in the offing is on sustainable tuna, which has just been put on sale at Aldi in Australia. Most tuna in cans you see in the supermarket is sourced from - we aren't told. Tuna stocks in the Atlantic are severely depleted and the huge fishing boats that once harvested tuna there are now active in the Pacific - our local area. Some people think it's important that we suport sustainable fishing. Not just sustainable, but selective, so that non-target species are not killed unnecessarily.

I'm also working on a story about chillies, which is slated to appear in the April edition of Good Fruit & Vegetables.

Just to mix things up a bit, there's a young Philippina living in Tokyo who has agreed to let me ask questions about the social entrepreneurial Stitch Tomorrow initiative she's launched.

Finally, there's a story I've been working on for a long time on the prevalence of problem gambling among members of the ethnic Chinese community.

Thanks for visiting and see you then.

Google has reversed the method you use to follow people in Buzz, but the change may already be too late for this newcomer to the social media space.

In the blog post linked above, they outline a complete reversal from the auto-follow method initially deployed in the software. Behind this decision are howls of protest that echoed through cyberspace as people got some nasty surprises. One blog, which since I read it seems to have been placed in protected mode on Wordpress, contained a post titled 'Fuck You, Google'.

Many people, like me, entered the interface, decided it sucks big time, and left - never to return again. I'm afraid that Google's eagerness to "leverage" its major-league Gmail subscriber base into another site ripe for ad placement and eyeball-collection has backfired in spectacular fashion.

I'm afraid that an auto-post function for blog posts from blogs hosted on the Google-owned Blogger are just not going to be sufficient inducement to make me change from the trusty Facebook interface. I can tolerate having to make a few clicks when posting a link from here to there.

What I can't tolerate is the greed that underlies Google's decision to start Buzz. With profits last year of US$23 billion, Google's got enough clout already. I feel no compunction to support their business model. I think their search and mail are adequate for my needs - this is, after all, why I switched to Google as soon as I discovered it in 1998. I opened up a Gmail account as soon as it began to be offered. I got hold of a Wave account as quickly as possible, too.

Wave is a tool. Buzz wants to be everything to you, and I resent that Google thinks that their current grasp of my attention justifies their reach for yet more of my time. A friend on Facebook posted a comment on a link I put up: "Google needs to adopt a 'don't be stupid' policy."

Agree. And I won't be using Buzz. Period.

The Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI) is a proposal being drafted by parliamentarians living in the small, island nation. They include Birgitta Jónsdóttir, who entered parliament in April 2009 and prior to that "worked as a writer, artist, activist, web developer, designer", says her website.

IMMI seems to offer a way to both prevent the kind of economic problems Iceland has experienced recently, and to boost the economy. But what sort of legislation is being talked about?

Wikileaks members talk about assembling best practices from around the world including, for example, the US Constitution's First Amendment. By combining the best ways to encourage fearless journalism from a variety of countries, Jónsdóttir and Wikileaks hope to make a Shangri-La for journalism -- a place where reporters can write without the threat of damaging or unpleasant consequences exercised through legal instruments by parties interested in events being described.

As Wikileaks activitist Julian Assange points out in the YouTube video posted on the Nieman Journalism Lab site, the idea of creating a journalism-friendly jurisdiction in Iceland came to Jónsdóttir after Wikileaks members appeared on a TV talk show, where they introduced the concept.

The BBC has also covered the developing story.

Wikileaks is a non-profit organisation that aims to make information public that governments and corporations do not want to see released into the public sphere. It is funded by donation.

Icelandic parliamentarians who've taken on the project see economic opportunity in a world, which is quickly evolving, where the cloud will perform many of the tasks we currently carry out on our computer desktops. Software applications located in a cloud environment are served remotely and users sign in with a password.

Other options include hosting news sites under Icelandic domain names.

Coupled with Iceland's attractions for companies looking for cheap, non-carbon cycle electricity and cooling for their internet server farms, such legal protection could be very attractive to "cloud computing" and publishing services.

Riots took place in Iceland last year following the 50-percent devaluation of the currency in the wake of massive banking losses brought about by speculative banking conducted on the back of laws which attracted many overseas banks to do business in Iceland.

Icelanders are now looking for a way to both prevent a repetition of the troubles through better reporting, and to encourage overseas investment in their tottering economy.

Jack Matthews, Fairfax Digital CEO, was interviewed by MarketingMag.com.au yesterday and it's a very interesting recording that, in about 17 minutes, covers a fair stretch of new ground. He spoke with Sean Greaney.

JM: Clearly, social media is no longer a phenomenon. It's a basic part of the media landscape and we need to have a way to utilise that to our benefit. We're not going to do that by trying to replicate Facebook.

SC: So the future of Fairfax Media is to become more niche?

JM: I've said for some time that the advantages of big news organisations like Fairfax -- and News Ltd would fall into this category as well -- is that we have the ability to be both broad and deep. The old portals, you know, the walled-garden type portals, were very broad but not very deep, because those portals didn't actually create content themselves.

This underscores the fact that social media has got news companies on the run. I wonder if anyone else felt that Matthews' voice went a bit husky at this point under the strain of its own momentum? Do you feel a sense of frustration?

Let's just return to what Matthews said immediately after the above.

Clearly, the rise of search has led to the atomisation, or the disaggregation, of information. That has given rise to depth - you know, very narrow, deep sites. I think that companies like Fairfax can combine the best of both. We can have big networks of lots and lots of people. But when you're in our network we have the capability of delivering to you very, very deep, kind of more niche, or micro sites built around a specific community.

It seems that Fairfax doesn't actually know how to monetise content in the context of social media platforms, especially considering the way people on them select what they want to read. The flexibility metaphor he uses contains a breath of whishful thinking.

And I wonder what are those "micro sites built around a specific community" he talks about? Are they bulletin boards - a technology and a social media solution that has been around, more or less, for 20 years? Will Fairfax set up moderated BBs to cater to those "like minded" individuals? Surely not.

Does this mean social media has to do with like mindedness? Isn't microblogging site Twitter about talking with real people in real time.

Greaney's next question, about monetisation, lets us know exactly where Fairfax stands. It's all about protecting transaction revenues. Matthews says in the interview that royalties from transactions are actually higher than those coming from display ads. This is the main reason why Fairfax has said nothing about paywalls, unlike noisy News Ltd.

And in future? Matthews says that most of the company's present development effort is being channelled into mobile devices. I wrote a post about the Fairfax iPhone app announcement a few days ago.

Is it just Queensland that names roads after fat-cat public servants and politicians grown rank with patronage and stiff with institutional slough? The sunshine state has done it again, naming the massive Gateway Bridges after Sir Leo Hielscher.

This is the state with the Bruce Highway - named after a politician - and the Nicklin Way (a Sunshine Coast road) - ditto.

Hielscher's bio says he was born in 1819 and joined the public service at the age of 12, starting out as a runner in the department responsible for writing receipts in the early colonial administration. The young Sir Leo was an excellent receipt writer, the bio goes on. Soon, he would rise through the ranks to become a key player in all legislation and every administrative determination made in the state.

It makes for fascinating reading. Apparently, the great Sir Leo was once chastised by an under-clerk for making too many copies of a Very Important Document. Instead of the usual triplicate, the energetic young man decided to add value by making a third copy - not for the records, but to impress a particularly gamine lass who worked in the printing shop.

Fortunately, this misdemeanour didn't mar Sir Leo's inexorable rise to the top of a competent and dedicated cohort of administrators working in a number of different departments. It was this breadth of experience that enabled Sir Leo, toward the end of his career, to generate support for difficult-to-implement legislation and policies that he, himself, helped to develop.

Rah rah rah - Cheer the jolly fellow! Cheer and cheer and cheer!

Fairfax will launch iPhone apps for news "within six months" reports the Pacific Area Newspaper Publishers' Association. PANPA has published a video transcript of an interview with Darren Burden (pic), Director of News and Platforms at Fairfax Digital. Burden says:

The key benefits of applications over a mobile site is that [with] an application you can use the native part of the phone, and you can get into things like address books and things like that if you use apps. And you can also really control the look and feel, whereas if you're building an optimised iPhone site you're sort of dictated [to] by the browser.

Marc Frons, New York Times CTO of Digital Operations, says there is no silver bullet to reverse the slide in advertising revenues among media companies.

There have to be many, smaller silver bullets. I do think the iPad will be a very important device in the portable reader category. I think it has the potential to redefine that category and help build it. I wouldn't sell Apple's marketing muscle or ability to create an ecosystem short. They do an excellent job as they've proven with the iPhone.

I would expect the iPad to have a similar trajectory. I think it would be one more thing. I think it'll be the iPad, it might be the Kindle, it might be the Plastic Logic device, it might be the Sony e-reader, or the Barnes and Noble e-reader, [even] e-readers that haven't been created yet.

Durden points out that one advantage an iPhone app has over a masthead website such as BrisbaneTimes.com.au is that it may attract readers who don't read their news through a browser.

Fairfax is looking at different ways of paying for the news app, including a one-off payment for the app, a subscription type service, and a software upgrade.

Frons says that The New York Times is looking at the unique properties of the iPad, in terms of delivering news. "You can imagine all sorts of applications that we haven't even build yet in addition to the ones we have.

Our goal is to have full functionality on all of these devices, to have the level of portability and personalisation that you have in a newspaper. To me, the beauty of the iPad and devices like it that [haven't] yet been born, is that they really speak to the needs of doing what a newspaper does so well now.

[It's] portable, inexpensive, convenient, highly personal with all the advantages of the web, you know [like it's] instantaneous, great updating facility, ability to play video, ability to share [and] communicate.

That's a really unbeatable combination. It just has to be cheap enough and fast enough and portable enough to really take off. I don't think we're that far away.

PANPA says that Fairfax has looked at demonstration software for how their apps appear on the iPad. Durden thinks iPhone apps are "fantastic" because people are comfortable using their phone to browse for information.

Frons will join other global media-tech experts at the Media 2010 conference - which is presented by Fairfax Digital - in Pyrmont on 19 February.

Here's a bit of German TV tabloidism to get your Tuesday arvo juices pumping. An 'alien' baby was found in Mexico by some ursine farmer who proceeded to drown the frackin' thing. Anyway, the little creature's corpse eventually ended up in the capable hands of a bunch of scientists who proceeded to "run tests" on it.

The Sept 2009 video clip has, not surprisingly, been filtched by many and placed on pages loaded with crap ads. This site is the website of news publisher Bild, so it should stay there for a while.

But here's the thing. Why wasn't this 'alien' discovery more broadly publicised? I certainly recall no mention of it in my extensive media travels. But there are signs it's a hoax.

For example, from the Bild story: "Mexican UFO expert Jaime Maussan (56) was the first to break the story." So a sky ponderer was the first to publicise the story? Hmm.

It gets worse, however.

Mexican TV revealed the almost unbelievable story - in 2007, a baby 'alien' was found alive by a farmer in Mexico.

He drowned it in a ditch out of fear, and now two years later scientists have finally been able to announce the results of their tests on this sinister-looking carcass.

At the end of last year the farmer, Marao Lopez, handed the corpse over to university scientists who carried out DNA tests and scans.

There are a lot of questions in this story. How long did the farmer wait before he handed it in? Which university did he hand it to? Where are all these scientists based who are carrying out tests on the thing?

Other websites add to one's concern about the value of truth. On the Now Public website, we find this:

According to the scientists' report, the alien baby can stay underwater for a long time, has the skeleton of a lizard, and has rootless teeth which are totally unlike humans' teeth. However, it does have some similar joints to human. The brain of the alien baby is huge, particularly the rear section, which makes the scientists believe that the creature had very high intelligence.

OK, so there are a lot of scientists doing tests on a dead body said to have been found in Mexico by a farmer. But it turns out the farmer has died, burned in his car.

According to American UFO expert Joshua P. Warren (32), the farmer burned to death in a parked car at the side of a road. The flames apparently had a far higher temperature than in a normal fire! Now there are rumours that the parents of the creature Lopez drowned were the ones who in turn killed him out of revenge.

You see, the area where the 'alien' was discovered is frequently visited by crop circles. So you've got the angry alien parents descending to earth once more and carrying out a targeted hit on the ignorant peasant who drowned their precious child to death.

Why didn't they go after the scientists? Because they - like us - didn't know where they are based?

Anyway, at least we ignorant foreigners are appraised of the quality of Bild as a magazine, because the only news outlet to cover the story in Australia was The Daily Telegraph; so that's a relief anyway. Bild is so proud of its story that it won't even let the Tele display its video on their website.

So, forget about Hobbits in Indonesia, this lil' baby was lost, found and lost all in the blink of an eye.

Crikey media blogger Margaret Simons got her nose put out of joint when she got word of a new freelance writer contract being touted by Pacific Magazines.

As a result of her ruminations, Margaret put out a call to freelancers on her blog to send in details of what they receive as compensation for their work. The results were assembled and published today. They make grim reading.

While Simons says in another post that the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (the journalist's union) recommends a per-word rate of around 90 cents, the market in reality can be a lot less bountiful for freelancers.

Freelancers on the dedicated Google Group and on Twitter continued the discussion, ruminating that the pro-blogger economy has hurt freelance fees, that freelancers should uniformly refuse to work for nothing, and that exploitation of student-journalist labour has increased as the market tightens.

It's not that long ago that I bumped into an ex-teacher from my postgrad uni days, who told me this was the worst time he'd known to be a journalist.

Readers (I know you're there, mate!) who frequent this blog will know what I've been working for lately. But things are looking up. Sort of.

Today, for example, I did a bit of biographical composition for a budding filmmaker who contacted me on Facebook. Kudos to me, but nix in the lucre department.

Then I got an email from an interviewee on a recent story telling me that my editor in the magazine had said that my article was "impressive" and that he would consider taking more from me in future.

These are seemingly insignificant signs of life, but they're not helping to load my dinner table with groceries, or even contribute toward my next carton of Marlboros.

I continue to pitch, plan, and wait for the boodle to drop sweetly in.

Pete Warden, a Brit living in Boulder, CO, has put together a visualisation of relationships between US residents on Facebook. He uses only public Facebook profiles.

Facebook allows users to choose whether to make their profiles public or private. A private - or 'locked' - profile is visible in its complete form only to Facebook friends. Therefore, private profiles cannot yield this kind of information to someone who is not a friend. Obviously, Pete is not friends with everyone in the US.

Pete has also analysed the analysis on his blog, PeteSearch.

The blog analysis includes a color-coded 'relationship map' that segments the US mainland into areas of relevance, based on the Facebook profile links. It's actually a lot of fun to read what Pete thinks about the way people living in the US link to one another.

But it's the Facebook profile link map that yields most pleasure. It has clickable nodes, for each major conurbation, that yield a lot of interesting data about friends, likes and names.

For example, by clicking on the Houston, TX, conurbation link, you can see which cities are most likely to contain friends of Houstinians. Your click also shows what Houstonians most commonly are Facebook fans of, and what first names are most popular in the city.

Looking at the entire continent, the links between east and west coast are striking, along with those between people living in the major urban areas of Chicago and Atlanta.

A similar, data-rich map of Australia would be wonderful to see.

Pete has also done an international map, but this does not take into account the precise location of the Faceoook profile, just the country. The resulting visualisation, therefore, is not very accurate in terms of locality. For countries such as Australia, where most of the population lives in the south-east corner of the continent, the result is relatively data-poor.

I urge you to go and have a look at Pete's work. You'll likely spend a good 15 minutes just mooching around the graphic. Pete's blog post is not too long and is also worth visiting and reading.

Too many updates suddenly appearing in your Twitter profile? Then you're a victim of tweetflation - the term was first used by Sydney user @smurray38 yesterday, when the phenomenon started to be reflected in the twitterfeed.

Naturally, you're upset. After all, people who view your profile apply a quick calculation to the numbers they see there. By comparing the number of updates to the number of people following you, they can gauge your popularity. A low tweet count and a high follower count is a sign of popularity.

Some of those hit by the miscalculation were demonstrably upset.

From @jessmcguire: ... lied to by the one thing we should be able to trust, a social networking site :(

From @alyssatasker: what are we going to believe in now.... :(

Others engaged in a bit of verbal sparring.

From @julie_posetti (who has a small baby at home): Breast-tweeting inflates the stats my end - but not that prolifically!

From @smurray38: Maybe Twitter is gearing up for an IPO and needs even more amazing numbers of Tweeters and tweets to impress the market

This last was in response to a challenge from @julie_posetti: So how many times have you tweeted now @smurray38? I challenge you to invent a conspiracy to accompany Twitter HQ tweetflation.

There were some outrageous hypotheses, but most were trying to come to some understanding of how the updates suddenly ramped up.

From @smurray38: @julie_posetti Yes, tweetflation is occurring across the board; doesn't seem to be confined to any one app, so must be at Twitter HQ

In any case, there was crossness mixed with consternation across the board.

From @Tzarimas: What's with the incorrect tweet count? Mine says I've done 3x more tweets than I actually have. #tweetfail

From @smurray38: I marked 5000 tweets in total a few weeks ago, now I have 19686 ... well now 19687

I saw tweets like these all day yesterday, as the scourge migrated from one account to another. Committed tweeters like @julie_posetti and @smurray38 may have been irritated and dismayed, but there seemed little alternative at hand to just getting back to business as usual.

It seems that people are very forgiving of their favourite software, especially one as important to their lives as Twitter. Patiently waiting, however, they'll all be keeping an eye on their update totals to see when the error is corrected at Twitter headquarters, and life returns to normal.

Review: The Baader-Meinhof Complex, dir Uli Edel (2008)

Ulrike Meinhof (Martina Gedeck, pic) is a journalist who becomes radicalised in the late 1960s through exposure to first-world country Cold War tactics and the friendships she forges with leftist political radicals. Even before meeting Andreas Baader (Moritz Bleibtreu) and his woman Gudrun Ensslin (Johanna Wokalek), Meinhof has been writing aggressive screeds damning right-wing hypocrisy and aggression in Vietnam, Iran, South America.

It's not difficult to see why someone like Meinhof might be attracted to the extreme activities of a group of urban terrorists.

In the beginning of the film, we're shown a motorcade that is bringing Shah Pahlavi to Bonn for a state visit. We keep in mind that Meinhof has already been shown as the author of a strong condemnation, in the press, of Pahlavi.

A group of people holding placards stands behind a row of police and a string of barricades. Then another group arrives, this time on the other side of the police and the barricades, closer to the gleaming limousines conveying the shah to the theatre. They chant slogans in support of the corrupt monarch.

Once the shah has been escorted inside, his supporters turn and approach the protesting students, breaking the signs off their placards as they walk menacingly toward the huddled crowd. With the sticks they hold, the shah's supporters lay into the unprotected students. The police do nothing.

Then, suddenly, once a ruckus has been generated by the venal puppets of the corrupt regime, the German police rush the barricades. Instead of collaring the aggressors, however, they begin to beat the protestors with their truncheons. It's a bloodbath. Clearly, the entire scenario has been orchestrated by the German administration to embarrass the student protest groups.

Finally, a student is shot dead. A cameraman crouches over the supine form as a woman brings a bloody hand away from the man's recumbent head.

Given this form of cocksucking bullshit, it's no surprise that some students become far more radicalised than the state had bargained for. When leftist radical Rudi Dutschke (Sebastian Blomberg) is assassinated by a young fascist, the stage is set for a broader confrontation between the state and the radicals.

The Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction) - aka the Baader-Meinhof group - begins its crusade against the forces of the evil Right by setting a fire in a department store. After training at a militant camp in Jordan, however, they upscale their work and start robbing banks, blowing up military establishments, and killing judges.

The violence and the isolation of the terrorists made me think about why such groups are so attractive. The RAF inspire hundreds of followers, who go on to carry out acts of violence even when the original leaders are standing trial while incarcerated in Stammheim Prison.

Perhaps, I thought, Ned Kelly appeals to Australians so strongly because of that sense of total isolation from the protection of the world. All of us, certainly, feel this sense of isolation every day of our lives. Why wouldn't we sympathise with terrorists?

Meinhof's conversion comes when she's involved in a scheme to liberate Baader from captivity. Under the ruse that she's working with the terrorist on a book, Baader is brought to a cultural centre to meet with Meinhof - whose cover has not yet been exposed. If she wants, even after Baader has been freed, she can go back to her normal life.

Instead, she eyes the open window of the room where the two prison guards are nursing their wounds. Baader has just leapt out the window along with the friends who freed him. What will she do? Meinhof chooses, and quickly jumps over the painted sill.

The movie is tightly-scripted and well executed. There's violence and there's history. In fact, the movie provides a good backgrounding in the rise of modern urban terrorism. Baader's profetic words, when he's being interviewed by a functionary of the state toward the end of the film, echo down the years.

Things would, indeed, get a lot worse.

Like a modern-day Juliet, Kaihana Hussain did everything possible to be near her lover, Ben Brady. The question under consideration right now, in Brisbane, is whether killing her parents is to be included in that simple, harmless word 'everything'.

The jury has heard that Kaihana was caught chatting online with Brady in 2006. Following this revelation, Kaihana told her father that, if necessary, she would convert to Christianity from her native Islam. He said "you will not find me as your father" in that case, the court heard.

"I was very angry," Mr Hussain said.

But the provocation didn't stop there, as 16-year-old Kaihana was found talking long-distance with the 20-year-old Brady. The next day, Kaihana had left Adelaide to visit Brady in Sydney. The father and mother - Mr and Mrs Hussain - travelled to Sydney to fetch their wayward daughter back.

But Dr Hussain said he then gave permission for his daughter to move to Sydney to attend school.

"At that time I accepted that she wanted some more freedom ... but we told her not to be with Ben," he said.

A short time later, Kaihana and her mother travelled to their native Bangladesh for a family wedding and in early October 2006 returned to the Gold Coast where Dr Hussain had re-located the family upon his daughter's request to "start fresh".

Unfortunately, this dream was never to come to pass. Kaihana was adamant about her love for Brady and so, one night, the police arrive to find Mrs Hussain dead from knife wounds and Mr Hussain bleeding from wounds sustained by his daughter's hand - as he contends - or from his own hand - as his daughter contends.

The case certainly appears to be a crime passionnel. Kaihana says that her father killed his wife then injured himself to make it look like Kaihana attacked him. The public prosecutor says that Kaihana attacked her parents because they continually thwarted her desires regarding Brady.

The case continues for three weeks.

Freelancers are not mercenaries. Got it? But I dig the military terminology, which makes me want to shave my head, listen to heavy metal music and scream 'Hoo Yah' every time I get a new tweet.

In fact, sometimes freelancers work for nothing. Log knows, I do. In fact, I haven't been paid yet, although I've had 11 feature stories published. There's two in the pipeline, of which one is due to be delivered without payment because the editor snagged a media pass to a conference and offered it to me.

I want to be paid for the other one, but does anyone have ANY idea how hard it is to secure payment for a story when you're just starting out as a journalist?

Nope, didn't think so.

I'll tell you how hard it is. It's stand-on-one-foot-and-hop-for-five-kilometres hard. It's squeeze-a-blackhead-when-your-fingernails-are-wrapped-in-band-aids hard.

It's frightfully hard, chaps.

But I won't buckle. I just called an editor who told me that his freelance budget had been cut to zero last year. Am I going to cravenly offer the story to him for nothing but a by-line in his esteemed rag? Nope.

Good for me.

It's been almost three years since the committal hearing of Kaihana Hussain, who the prosecution at the current trial, in Brisbane, says stabbed her mother and seriously injured her father - with a knife.

When the story first hit the headlines in November 2006, Hussain was 17 years old. Now, at the beginning of the three-week trial, she is aged 20. As far as I know, in the interim she has been living with a family in Adelaide.

Hussain's family moved from Adelaide to the Gold Coast, where the attacks occurred, in September 2006.

Hussain had been corresponding with a young Sydney man, Ben Brady.

The crown prosecutor, Michael Byrne, SC, says she wanted to kill her parents because they were thwarting her desire to be with Brady. Byrne also says the parents did not want to allow Hussain to convert from Islam to Christianity.

Hussain was born in Bangladesh but went to school in Adelaide.

We say the weather "has closed in" when it pours torrentially for days, when going to the shops becomes a small adventure, and when playing board games takes over from playing superheroes in the park. For a child, this state of affairs can seem claustrophobic, constrained. For me, today, it feels comfortable, secure.

I shut the louvres in the bedroom last night and slept with a thin blanket for the first time in months. This morning, I put on a long-sleeved shirt for the first time since log-knows-when. I've got my coffee. The browser's fired up. What do I read online?

First, there's Alexandra Adornetto writing in support of Tony Abbot's call to conservatism among young women. The leader of the opposition very effectively took over the public debate last week, when comments made in reply to questions from The Womens Weekly headed like crazed lemmings for the minarets of the broadsheets. Teenagers should guard their virginity, he said. The response was cacophonic, with most female commentators telling the politician to mind his own effing business.

Adornetto, on the other hand, makes a strong case for caution. But if you read her piece, in The Brisbane Times, with care, you'll find that all she's advocating is that the girl should wait for a guy who will call her in the morning.

This seems like sound advice. The alternative, she says, is a drunken hump on the nature strip outside the house where the party had taken place. Not recommended, she says. She also says that this has happened to people she knows.

Adornetto hit the headlines back in 2006 when, aged 13, she wrote a novel that went on to be published by Harper Collins.

The soft-focus viewpoint of my day continued when I read a piece by Christian commentator Greg Clarke over at The Punch.

Clarke's nominal standpoint would be about as different from mine as chalk and cheese, but I found myself agreeing with what he wrote about artist Chris O'Doherty (aka Reg Mombassa). I'm a big fan of O'Doherty's. I own four of his paintings, for a start. When a new illustrated biography of the painter appeared at the end of last year, I snapped it up.

What Clarke says is that O'Doherty, who often depicts Jesus in his work, is more like a true Christian than many nominal Christians. The iconoclastic painter, he says, seeks the actual essence of Christ, rather than relying on received wisdom from church elders to guide him.

He has problems with the institutional church and “hopes there are better ways of doing it than by being enthralled by some authoritarian religion, which does all your thinking for you”. It’s as if he is still on a journey to find the naked body of true Christianity underneath its strange and off-putting costumes.

So what's happening today, with the rain pummelling the balcony tiles and the wind howling like a banshee through every crack and cranny it can find in my building's fabric? Is this an epiphany? Is this the voice of my mother coming to me when, aged 10, I had escaped from some dreadful childhood scrape? Is this a turning point?

Probably not. It's just that, sometimes, the universe seems to contract, become less foreign. Many seek out this state in an effort to make it a permanent characteristic of their world. For me, an unrepentant sinner, it's like a gift rather than a right.

And while I cherish it when it happens, I don't demand it everyday.