Journos finding out they’ve wont a Pulitzer. Pretty much the cutest thing ever (in news land). Original story at http://jimromenesko.com/2012/04/16/newsroom-smiles/.
Have a lot of love for these collages at benpell.tumblr.com
Perhaps collages are speaking to me even more as I try and fit a few projects into my days and make sense of all their textures. I’m writing a piece for The Reader (2012) as well as working on another data-based project for the Emerging Writer’s Festival.
After receiving a pleasing wad of submissions (over 1000) for Going Down Swinging, Geoff and I are now in the process of wading through them.
Last but certainly not least I am about to go full time at the Melbourne Writer’s Festival for five months, and while it’s not necessary for me to read all the texts by artist we’re featuring, I am doing my darndest.
We Asked: When Have You Changed Your Mind On A Fundamental Belief? →
I like the idea that people really can change their minds about things. This would make a great essay topic I reckon.
npr:
On Morning Edition, three of NPR’s science reporters, Jon Hamilton, Alix Spiegel and Shankar Vedantam set out to find out why inconsistency is such a big deal in politics and what it really says about a candidate.
And last week, we reached out on Facebook and Twitter to seek out your stories of changing beliefs. Here’s what we asked, followed by some of the responses, sorted into loose categories.
Piggies!
When I first started looking for work three months ago, I told myself there would be perks to this: I would have more time for cooking, exercise and writing. Of all of these, but one came true, and even then only barely (the cooking, obviously). After hours of writing brain-draining cover letters and responses to Selection Criteria, the idea of doing more typing at night was loathe to me. Maybe even more so than when I was a full time student writing research essays and had part time office jobs.
So, now I have a new theory. Whether you’re Looking For Work (which, if you’re doing it right is a job in itself) or Working, the likelihood of fitting in freelance or extra writing projects in around those activities is probably the same.
Hopefully my theory stands up because I’ve got days of work to put in before my essay submission for the Voiceless Writing Prize will be ready. The Prize, as it states on the website is “to advance public understanding of animal sentience, human – animal relationships and the ethical treatment of animals.” Pretty lofty stuff.
As part of my research, I was lucky enough to visit my friend @tammois and her rare breed happy pig farm out near pictueresque Daylesford, aptly named Jonai Farms. Tammi’s a food activist and scholar amongst other things. She has an incredible wealth of knowledge on matters of ethical eating, food sustainability and agriculture, as well as first hand experience now, which she happily shared with myself and my lovely driver for this assignment, one @sumudua.
The picture above is of two of her sows grovelling for some lunch. They were pretty wonderful to watch, very social with one another and with the humans around them. Jonai Farms is just starting out and has one (very happy, wallowy) boar and five sows (they think two are potentially pregnant). Tammi told me that because the pigs are not the standard breed that are farmed in Australia, there will probably be some guessing and learning involved for them, especially leading up to the first pigs being taken to the abbatoir. I know I’ll be watching their blog, The Hedonist Life with interest.
Back at my desk in suburban Melbourne, the essay is piecing together very slowly. One gem I’ve found as part of my research is Meat Paper, a magazine about meat culture. It’s an incredible idea, and because it’s editor by former vegetarians has a great variety of angles and interests (think an essay about killing a pig in rural italy and then some musings on eating placentas).
So for now there’s a lot of ideas and not much cohesion. My compulsion to write about pigs came from the fact that after seven years of vegetarianism, pork was the first kind of meat I ate. Suckling pig, no less. This was more out of circumstance than a considered choice, but the experience sparked my interest. There’s millenia of ideological and emotional significance about pigs too. For example, I think it’s safe to say that pigs have long held a controversial place in religion. They are are a metaphor for human greed and/or filth. The Bosnian expression for feeling uncomfortable is “feeling like a pig in Tehran”. Babe was the first movie I ever saw at the cinemas. See, millenia? I’m not sure how this essay is going to capture much or any of this, but I reckon it’s worth a crack.
The Voiceless Writing Prize is due on March 16. It includes fiction and non-fiction. Details here. You should all enter!
I know this is supposed to be about WRITING and JOURNALISM but really this is much more important.
Where to start with ‘The Young Faces of Parks and Rec’? Rob Lowe’s lips? The adorable face of lil’ Rashida Jones? The a-dork-able face of teenage Adam Scott? Rob Lowe’s lips?!?!?
‘scuse me, very busy cutting out Adam Scott’s picture and sticking it in my English folder.
Yeah. I am actually way into Nick Offerman here. And Chris Pratt. Can I have them both? I want them to kiss.
(Source: plays-with-squirrels)
Would be interested in comparative stats for Australia.
good:
Boys Will Hire Boys: The Media Is Male and Getting Maler
Women are still highly underrepresented in media both on and off the screen.
The good news: In 2011, women held 40.5 percent of newsroom jobs, compared to the 36.6 percent they occupied in 2010. The bad news: By almost every other measure, media remains overwhelmingly male, and it’s getting maler.
God love Annabel Crabb. For someone whose job it is to drag politicians through the mud each day, she comes out squeaky clean and infinitely optimistic. Kitchen Cabinet, the ABC’s new six part series where politicians invite Crabb into their homes to cook for her, won’t hurt that image at all.
In an interview with Epicure yesterday Crabb said “One of the best things about making it right now is that politics is at a pretty difficult point. In Australia, there is massive cynicism about both sides and a lot of really heated disputes and mutual suspicion, so I found it almost spiritually refreshing to go and talk to people about who they are, why they do what they do.”
If anyone can bring spiritual refreshment to the table, Crabb is probably the woman for the job. It’s a new kind of television and I’ll be curious not only to see what the pollies can cook but also what kind of production treatment it gets.
Speaking of production, plans are underway to bring some kitchen-y goodness to this blog pretty soon. I’m hoping to do a regular segment called Cooking with Pals where I will interview the awesome people in my life about what they like to cook and eat and get them to show us a recipe. It’s what I am doing 78% of the time anyway, as evidenced on my Twitter stream, so I’ll be glad to have a proper outlet for this data. Until then, we’ll have to see what Ms. Crabb cooks up.
Kitchen Cabinet airs on ABC2 on February 22 at 9.30pm.
If there’s one thing I wish I’d learned at 18, it’s that it’s okay if a crazy person hates you. Everyone else will understand in time. Meanwhile, let them expend that energy. Go work on your novel or whatever.
—
Some Advice for Young People
(via TheAwl)
(Source: molls)
A cousin from Canberra has been to visit recently and as usual, we’ve been getting little updates on life in his hometown. For example, I learned that our capital city is now plastic bag-free. Not all plastic bags of course, just the ones you get your groceries at the supermarket in.
It’s a great initiative and one that probably would work well in Canberra, which is a proportionally small city and has a pretty high average salary. It’s also been a long time coming. I have to really stretch my memory to remember a time when we didn’t have plastic bags in the boot of the car, or under the sink.
As effective as that campaign has been, it might well have made us complacent about the other plastic pollution we put out. See, another thing I’ve learned recently is that millions of tiny pieces of plastic waste from our lives are still finding themselves in our oceans. It’s like that famous story about the yellow duck shipments, except far less adorable. That’s because these tiny bits of plastic are finding themselves in the bellies of Australian wildlife, particularly sea birds like the mutton bird of Lord Howe Island off the coast of New South Wales.
The plastic is being consumed by the poor birds at an extraordinary rate too. One bird was found with 275 pieces of debris in its belly, the equivalent of a human carrying 12 kilograms of extra weight in the form of plastic bottle caps and balloon ties. Watch a great 7.30 Report about the birds here.
This all brings me to a local anti-plastics project combining the tradition of letter writing with environmental direct action. Return to Sender is the effort of one guy who wants “companies that sell me things to figure out how to get them to me without me having to keep pumping albatrosses’ bellies full of plastic chips.” Whenever a piece of household rubbish cannot be recycled by civic services or won’t disintegrate in garden soil, he mails it back to the company demanding an explanation. The focus is small, like apple stickers that have no purpose other than branding. The project is young and the results aren’t spectacular yet, but it’s the kind of project that will rely on power in numbers, both in terms of the number of people involved and in terms of the number of companies contacted. At the very least this project has made me suddenly much more aware of what I put in the recycling bin. We can’t all live in Canberra, you know.
