Poem by TS Elliot, To Walter De La Mare

In my head-in-the-clouds mood of late, I spent time before and after some shifts in the library in Radio New Zealand. Among the books is a collection of TS Elliot poetry, and one in particular struck me. It's called To Walter de la Mare.
Not meaning to infringe copyright, I'll just quote some of the parts which I think talk perfectly to those of us in radio:

When the familiar scene is suddenly strange
Or the well known is what we have yet to learn,
And two worlds meet, and intersect, and change;

…

By whom, and by what means, was this designed?
The whispered incantation which allows
Free passage to the phantoms of the mind?

By you; by those deceptive cadences
Wherewith the common measure is refined;
By conscious art practised with natural ease;

By the delicate, invisible web you wove –
The inexplicable mystery of sound.

Leaving RNZ

I've left Radio New Zealand: it's been fun!

T'would be silly to start naming the names of who I'll miss, who's been good to me – they are a lovely bunch. I've fulfilled most of my goals in Radio NZ, which is most satisfying. I've made features with Jack Perkins, I've seen Sadie in action – unfortunately not had the chance to learn how to use it – and I've worked in Radio New Zealand International! Getting back on shortwave was fab I have to say.

I must also admit that for about the last week in RNZ, I was getting into a more features frame of mind. Shame every shift I did was news then! So I managed to use phrases like "kneck and kneck", and, I suspect, put through a few more, well, "entertaining" stories than usual. It's not much of a revelation to say I'm more of a features man than news.

In the two weeks since I left, I've been travelling around New Zealand's South Island. It's been a surprise to find how there is no FM coverage of Radio New Zealand in many of the tourist settlements, and only poor mediumwave – sometimes none at all.

However, contrary to the situation in some other countries, the commercial stations do provide coverage, where the state broadcaster doesn't.

Assumedly, they see the commercial benefits of local advertising and programming mixed in with the networked output.

Wouldn't it be fair to expect that enough people to constitute a "market" also deserve to be served by a service paid for out of taxes? I expect the RNZ response would be that the money is limited – it certainly is, and they do an exemplary job with that they have – and that providing the best possible content is a priority. It is available on DTH satellite over basically the whole country after all.

Can't access blogger at home!

Added to RNZI.com, it's just not working at home! So I have to use a proxy…

London Huayu on the Olympic flame in London

If you want to hear what it was like on the ground in London when the Olympic flame visited, then London Huayu Chinese Radio's page is excellent.

The blue text in the middle is a selection of audio links.

Some of it is lovely, some of it is sad.

There are no pictures of Konnie Huq but it's still worth a listen!

Antarctic hydrophone

Forget my paltry attempts with a hydrophone – this is awesome!

PALAOA - Transmitting live from the Ocean below the Antarctic Ice


Overview PALAOA area
You can listen to the underwater sound of the Antarctic Ocean with a delay of a few seconds here.


Please note, this transmission is not meant for entertainment primilary, but for scientific research. It is highly compressed (24kBit Ogg-Vorbis), so sound quality is not perfect. Additionally, sounds may be very faint. The amplifier settings are a compromise between picking up distant animal voices and not overcharging the system by nearby calving icebergs. So please beware of sudden extreamely loud events.

Providing an acoustic live stream of the Antarctic underwater soundscape is a formidable challange. After all, more than 15000 km lie between Antarctica and our institute in Germany. Underwater sound is recorded by means of two hydrophones by PALAOA, an autonomous, wind and solar powered observatory located on the Ekström ice shelf (Boebel et al., 2006). The data stream is transmitted via wireless LAN from PALAOA to the German Neumayer Base. From there, a permanent satellite link transmits the data to the AWI in Germany. A constant hiss pervading the signal is the natural, isotropic background noise made audible here through the use of ultra sensitive hydrophones. Additional broad band noise caused by wind, waves and currents adds to it on occasion. Due to the limited bandwith of the satellite link, jamming of the WLAN link due to storms, or energy shortage, the connection might temporarily be down or scrammed. In this case, please dial in later!

The Takeaway – new US morning Current Affairs show

A new breakfast news show goes on air three weeks from now.

As the news release says:

New morning drive news program to be produced in editorial collaboration with The BBC World Service, The New York Times, and WGBH Boston

There's a full FAQ that's worth a read. Here's one snippit:

The Takeaway will be broadcast live, rather than featuring pre-recorded interviews and long pre-produced features.
It will deliver all the journalistic depth and excellence that WNYC listeners expect, while offering a dynamic and conversational tone.
It will feature two hosts talking together live in the studio, interviewing guests and responding to listeners on-air and online. Listeners will hear the day’s news and cultural stories — as they are happening — with live reports from the field, along with commentary and analysis from a range of contributors around the table and around the world.

They're promising lots of listener interaction too.

I'm looking forward to this, and I'd love to see behind the scenes too!

Tibet etc

I try not to go on about nationalism here – because if your memories of teenage life in Ireland involve going to peace rallies with strangers in town, and the shock – hundreds of kilometres away – of the Omagh bombing, then you'll probably not think nationalism is the best thing ever.

Anyway, good aggregative blog post on nationalism and media, in China, from Cam at Zhongnanhai.

Complaints to Radio Lab

A recent interviewee of Radio Lab's has contacted them to complain about… um…

Actually I think he just wrote in to grumble. Maybe he was having a tough day or something. Part of it was grumpy-old-man stuff "they put music under someone speaking that's dreadful". Another part was something I have more sympathy for. It's the misalignment that sometimes happens between academics and broadcasters. Ok so let's discount the trivial aims and staff that (not to put a tooth in it) are too common in TV. Let's stick with radio.

Plenty of academics hate having their work edited, they hate having their stamp removed. And a colleague being media-friendly can be a handy outlet for academic snobbery.

But we love them all the same!



And my do I love Radio Lab.

Have a look at the comments.

One in particular put it well, I thought:

I’m a Czech women, musicologist, musician, and for 20 years, a former radio executive producer-author at the French public radio station (France Culture) in Paris. I came in US recently, for my husband’s work. I listen to KPBS and NPR very often, every day; I love radio, I need it. Here in US, I try also to learn English by listening to it. In a very general way, I appreciate considerably the quality of NPR/PRI/KPBS shows. I pitched incidentally upon this particular program, my attention was immediately caught, I stayed with it until the end and - I was literally enrapt: I didn’t know until this moment that it was possible to do & to present such a good, fine, sophisticated radio work in this country. I wanted to know more about the Radio Lab I had never heard before.
Then I discovered this unbelievable letter from Mr. Fox. First I thought I had made a mistake… This is the reason I dare to write you, to express my thanks to the authors of this excellent radio piece (almost a sort of Hörspiel), and to give my contribution to the discussion.
The main (only real) issue here is, in my opinion, the question of a common preliminary agreement. If the purpose and the way of intended use (editing, fragmenting, contextualising) of the interview was exposed and explained to Mr. Fox before his interview, there is no reason to complain. So my question is, was it explained to him beforehand ?
In any case, his reaction is completely inadequate, ugly, obnoxious.
Thank you for your attention.
Daniela Langer

Yes, I think this is almost a sot of Hörspiel, but it's more than that, as it's a different genre. Radio Lab has broken the moulds. It'll be remembered. I'm well-chuffed to be of its generation!

Oops!

Just now I accidentally deleted my iTunes library, so when I re-loaded the files, the played tatus of my Podcasts was reset – this just a week after I backed-up and deleted the first five months worth. So the figure would be higher, but…

Radio Taiwan International Cyber Museum

This is really cool! Lot's of interesting technical stuff (in Times so not very easy on the eye unfortunately), cool design, and a really funky play studio – some parts are more entertaining and intriguing if you can speak or read Chinese – they seem to have a bit of a Chairman Mao thing going on there – well I suppose it is a museum.

Anyway, it's really cool!

The Radio Taiwan International Cyber Museum.

I feel like such a fraud.

When I lived in Auckland, I would watch the Pheonix News & Info bulletin relayed in the evenings on WTV's terrestrial Chinese channel. It felt nice and homely – not that I'd ever watched it before*, and sure, the political stuff was… not very inspiring. But I quite liked the presenter. And ok she was cute but I did convince myself that was just a small part of it.

I thought though that I was also assessing her as a news reader, based on her sense of authority, how engaging she was, her presence, and the stodgier qualities like voice and diction.

But it would seem I was deceiving myself.

Oh, the presenter's name? Jiang Xinrong. Didn't mean anything to me. But maybe it should have, given that in 2003, she (aged 19) became the first ever Miss China.

And here's a nauseating TV show including her, in her diamond tiara, saying how winning a beauty contest changed her life.

Ok so I just based it on cuteness. Poo.


* Never say never. I think it was on one of their bulletins on Pheonix CNE, when in Ireland, that I learned about the Hemepl Hempsted fire in December 2005 – together with a Chinese speaker from London, that took us off guard I'll say.

The Diary of Leanne Wolfe

Gut-wrenching documentary from December.

It's wonderful. I hope it wins awards.

It's on the RTÉ website here.

It's the diary of a girl who was bullied.

My own time being bullied seems very meagre now.

Mark Mardell and complaints

Revisited. He's doing, again, what I consider to me model responses to complaints to the BBC. Lord knows they get a ton of them – when I was there on a quiet late shift I'd go through the listener logs on the intranet for a giggle. It's interesting to see how people can love and loath the same things, and enlightening. But it can get tiresome sometimes too, the things people complain about. I mean, I try to listen to six hours of radio a day, but I still
know I can't say "you didn't cover this"!

Anyway, well done as ever Mr Mardell.

Fab podcast

Facebook is funny. I waste my non-working life on it. So sometimes, just to spite Facebook, I waste my non-working like on the Public Radio Exchange, which is far less of a waste.

So doing I've just stumbled on a fab podcast. The I Hate Poetry Hour Half Hour, and related funny stuff.

I've only heard a little bit, and with my unlistened podcasts up around 150, I really shouldn't add more. But this is great – it's a nice change to return to the "early days" of podcasts, when I can hear podcasts that aren't regular radio or corporate programmes.

Okay I'm possibly being a bit harsh on Nature Stories, Nature, and Open Source. I like them all (that's why I subscribe to them, duh), but they are more or less branded, I guess, in contrast to the "it's just me" early days.

This was supposed to be saying "hey listen to this podcast" but instead it's become a piece about how to me, podcasting and YouTube etc is more a way of accessing content from established providers, rather than a way of seeing the great creativity of all those "users" on the web.

And this only two days after I told myself to stop using the internet when half asleep, as it just causes trouble… sigh.

Back to Spent Cattle and the I Hate Poetry Hour Half Hour (I like saying that).

He puts music in it, which switches me out. Not being musical, I never got Flight of the Conchords or the Mighty Boosh when they went all musical. Went over my head. Missed out on being ahead of the curve there it seems. Who knows, maybe the World Service's Next Big Thing really has become the next big thing, and I haven't noticed. I can see it's a good idea though.

If you like brain-pushing stuff and tongue in cheek, check out The I Hate Poetry Hour Half Hour.

The wreck of the SS Penguin

I've had a busy couple of weeks – finishing a feature, and starting in Radio New Zealand International. RNZI is so fab – I'll perhaps write about it later. For now thought, I want to talk about the feature.

It'll be broadcast today, on Afternoons with Jim Moira (though it may be presented by Noelle again today).

In the middle of January, Diedre Wogan brought me on a tour of the graves of people who died in the SS Penguin, in 1909.

Anyway. It's the best piece I've done yet – and Jack Perkins even made me beam by describing it as "very good"!

It was edited by Gareth Watkins, of Access Radio as well as RNZ. A ridiculously nice man. And being a studio operator working on a feature in a big ol' Sadie suit, he is, needless to say, a magician. Gosh I love Sadie! I think Jack Perkins even has a poem of adoration to Sadie on his office wall.

As we were editing it, Diedre Wogan phoned me to ask when it would go out – what a coincidence! As she said herself, we were on the same wavelength.

It was the start of 12 days work for me, including a few news shifts in Radio New Zealand International – that was fab! Great to be back on shortwave. Shortwave + features = Connor in the groove. Incidentally since I replaced our wired router with a Wi-Fi one, I can't access the RNZI website. Very odd.

Anyway. HUGE thanks to Diedre, the Karori Historical Society, Gareth, and Phil who was watching as we edited (he's the fourth Phil I've met in RNZ. Like Steves in the World Service I reckon).

###
OK OK! So I'm over a week late! I'm not good at self-promotion. I apologise! Here it is, with my mistake in the cue – it should be the worst civilian shipwreck. I think I did write ninety-nine there though, not ninety.

More unfounded BBC-Bashing

I admit to being particularly interested in the work Mark Mardell does. He has a difficult role which he seems to relish, and that's a wee bit inspirational. I'm a fan.

And in this post he posts what I think is an uncommonly cogent response to criticism, by a BBC staffer.

I'm all with Mark Mardell on this one.

When an idiot acts like an idiot, and attacks you in the process, then reply. So well done Mark.

Some of his colleagues perhaps need to note though, that if they aren't able to reply as fairly to criticism as Mark Mardell does in this, then maybe the criticism is valid. Shock horror!

Radio Lab Blog

The best show on the radio has a blog, yay!

The things people complain about!

I'm not up to finding a polite way of framing this, from a group I am apart of:

BBC reporters going undercover as birders!

Today the BBC made no bones about using reporters disguised as
birders to get into Zimbabwe, illegally gaining access to areas off
limits to reporters. This behavior clearly raises the suspicion of
some government leaders against valid birders and other nature
enthusiasts. The BBC has endangered us all with their illegal behavior.

I have sent them the following letter:

"I was shocked and angered that you would have one of your reporters
masquerade as a birder to enter the country of Zimbabwe. Then, worst
of all, you published this openly on the radio. This clearly puts
all valid birders, nature photographers and recorders, and other
valid tourists at a new risk of suspicion and harm. As a nature
recordist and birder myself, I already fall under unwarranted
suspicion when I use my binoculars and recording equipment in out-of-
the-way places. Now you have validated the suspicions that should
have remained unfounded.

"You clearly owe a major apology to all the nature enthusiasts and
scientists you have now endangered. You also should make a public
statement that such behavior will never again be tolerated by your
reporters.


As you, as a nature recordists group, have now been affected, I
wanted to let you know.

Thanks,

Wow! Cool!

Very cool.

CBC Radio's Spark is making an episode on a wiki – not about a wiki, but by means of a wiki.

Exciting!

The Onion does Radio too!

Woo-hoo!