Last Friday’s return of Collectors on ABC1 made for uncomfortable viewing. Three uncomfortable-looking co-presenters sat round a large table trying to pretend they weren’t feeling uncomfortable. There was no announcement of the Rove-post-Emmett variety – no mention of the show’s 6-season-long host whatsoever. When Adrian Franklin, Claudia Chan-Shaw and Gordon Brown had done trying to guess the Mystery Object (sans hints), they turned to a monitor and were put out of their misery by a punter.

So what happened to presumption of innocence? With Andy Muirhead reported to be due in court in less than a month on ‘one count of using a carriage service to access child pornography’, why not just leave the show (and the ident) on hiatus for the time being? A few months ago, ABC management was desperate to give us Sleuth 101 in that timeslot. Now they’re desperate to give us a bastardised Collectors. Under the circumstances, the fair and reasonable thing to do would have been to rest the show – if necessary, long-term. (They should rest shows more often – a Spicks and Specks break could breathe new life into it.)

Media treatment has been restrained to date, as you would expect pre-trial. Most articles have been short and factual. The public interest argument for publishing is still questionable, though. ‘In the public interest’ does not mean the public will be interested; it means it is in the overall interest of society to make information public. And this ‘mud’ is the type that sticks worst – for someone in the public eye it’s likely to be devastating, no matter the trial outcome.

Given the sub judice minefield, it’s also not surprising that most news reports online are closed for comments. A notable exception is the Defamer post, which has over 125 comments. Jess McGuire’s post uses the word ‘busted’, which means ‘caught out doing something wrong’. Sounds like defamation to me. (I know the site’s called defamer.com.au, but defamation is actually illegal, and something the site normally tries to avoid.) She apologised for using it in the comments, but the word remains in the post.

The comments represent a robust discussion of the charge, some nasty net realities, such as pages that open others faster than you can close them, shortcomings of a law that charges ‘sexting’ 17-year-olds with child pornography, as well as accounts of serious sexual abuse. This is certainly a debate we ought to be having, and you have to hope we’ll finally start doing something about the obscene sexualisation of children.

The ident thing has been an accident waiting to happen. When corporate sponsors back a celebrity, you can bet they have a contingency plan, should, say, clean-cut family man Tiger Woods turn out to be a womanising sex addict. You suspect Aunty was a bit too naive for that. And jeez – has this lot of idents ever passed it’s sell-by date! If I hear Geraldine Doogue say “sparkle-arkly” one more time...

So here we are, one year on from ‘Black Saturday’. Many of those most directly affected still feel unable to take part in the many events set up to mark the day – it’s all too raw still. Even the sound of media choppers overhead has an unwelcome association with that day.

For others, attempts to use memorial services, music, art and media to process the horrific events of that day began early. A televised memorial service was held 15 days after the disaster. This seemed a very short amount of time to allow – the body count was still being established, and communities were being threatened with new bushfires. However, it was sensitively done and hosted with sober empathy by ABC News Victoria anchor Ian Henderson.

An art exhibition was put together from melted remnants just 7 weeks after the fires. Way too soon. And the image, below-left, of the artist curled up atop a burned-out Holden must have been deeply upsetting to many. Ali Griffin had lost her home in the fires. But the subject matter she was dealing with was loss of life, and that’s something else again.

A wander round Borders turns up no shortage of coffee table books on Black Saturday. Commerce. It can immediately sully things. Original intent can be lost in the translation to a retail commodity, the sale of which nets several parties a profit. The print, above-right, is available right now from tradingpost.com.au. 20% of proceeds go to charity, so I guess that’s one up on most of the books. But I find it hard to get my head around the concept of choosing to be reminded of Black Saturday every time you walked past it.

Aftermath is a song penned by StellaQ just three days after the fires. An acoustic guitar backs Stella’s poignant lyrics, as she sings of her brother’s fight to save his home from the flames. I found it on the Contribute section of abc.net.au, which is full of posts, images and video relating to the February Bushfires. You can hear the track in full on Stella’s MySpace page. Continuing a tradition spanning human history, folk music transitions events into folklore.

Images: ABC, Channel 7, and as linked

On the days of extreme fire danger around Black Saturday 10 months ago the CFA website was frustrating people across Victoria by listing fires from across the State, from the most serious wildfires to small domestic fires, on the same Incident Summary page. It’s true that you could click the Region heading so all incidents in your region (still a vast area) would appear together, but as soon as you refreshed the page you’d be back to the view below.

After the revelations over CFA senior management incompetence and lack of information reaching people in high-risk areas, you’d think that on the top of the list of things to overhaul for this fire season would be the CFA website. Yet, on the first day of extreme fire danger, the Incident Summary and Warnings & Advice pages are down!!!

Which may leave some people resorting to Twitter for news on the wildfire on the Great Ocean Road.

If the CFA resource has gone down due to the volume of hits from concerned residents across Victoria that shows a truly shocking level of incompetence. That, after all, is the site’s purpose!

If all those vows that the likes of Black Saturday must never be allowed to occur again are to be anything other than empty rhetoric, the authorities are going to have to get with the program. Step No. 1: sack operational Chief Officer Russell Rees – the man who, on February 7th, didn’t even know there was a fire ecologist on-site making accurate maps projecting the movement of the fire heading for Marysville; the maps were never utilised. Co-ordinated Headquarters? Yeah, right!

Update: Well, after several hours, the Incident Summary page came back up late-pm and it’s the same mess of irrelevant, unsorted information: Region 14 structure, Region 24 false alarm, Region 8 ‘Other’, Region 22 structure. Do the CFA really think people are going to go to their website to see whether the house they’re in has a chip pan fire?!

The Great Ocean Road fire and many others were brought under control by the excellent work of the CFA volunteers, who do their best in the face of normally unseen frustration with the senior management.

Well last night’s Race Relations ep was pretty full-on. I have a tough skin, but seeing 4 inch nails get driven into John Safran’s hands was confronting even for me. But hey, nothing wrong with that. If TV was all Smurf collectors and peony pruning it’d be a very lacklustre medium. (There are whole channels like that, so I guess lacklustre floats some people’s boats.)

The episode’s rating, though, was questionable: M – adult themes and course language. M is generally considered to mean that it may be unsuitable for people under the age of 13. There’s a higher AV 15+ rating, and that’s the highest rating on Australian free-to-air TV. There’s no rating for content suitable only for those 18 and over, and in practice this means a lot of non-violent content that should be rated 18 gets an M rating and violent content gets M or AV 15+. Every show gets rated, which would lead you to think that we care about what content developing minds are exposed to. Yet the lack of an 18 rating demonstrates that we clearly don’t!

Anyway, practising Jew, Safran, flies off to Bulacan in the Philippines to take part in a Christian crucifixion ceremony as the ultimate way to burn his Jewish bridges so as to be free to date a Eurasian! (It might also have something to do with getting good TV ratings.  )

As a religion that sets itself apart by having had its prophet uniquely nailed to a cross, it seems odd that this festival should do this to around three men every year. But then odd and religion go together like hammer and nail...

Safran is certainly pushing the boundaries. Let’s hope he doesn’t get crucified by the critics...

► John Safran’s Race Relations encore, tonight at 9pm on ABC2

Image: ABC

Well, having given you a twitter teaser I should probably be penning something insightful about this evening’s Race Relations ep, in which John Safran gets a head-to-toe makeover in order to become a (trojan) proud black brother. But instead, I’ll borrow the words of The Age’s Michael Lallo:

Tonight, thousands of Australians will tune into Race Relations with the sole intention of getting offended. Yes, it’s the episode in which John Safran paints his face black – and on our government-funded broadcaster, no less! Left-wing hypocrisy alert! After all, what’s the difference between Safran and those blokes who did the blackface skit on Hey Hey, It’s Saturday? No doubt our conservative columnists and AM talkback hosts will have plenty of theories, most likely involving some combination of chardonnay, political correctness and “fancy university degrees”. But the difference is actually quite simple. The “blackface” look – boot polish, white lips and Afro wigs, as seen on Hey Hey the other week – was traditionally used to make black people look stupid. Safran does not do this. Instead, he genuinely tries to disguise himself as a black man to see what it’s like. There’s nothing racist or hypocritical about it. Sure, he deliberately pushes people’s buttons – but in a way that provokes interesting questions and makes us think. What’s more, Race Relations is damn entertaining. It would be a shame to see all this overshadowed by simple-minded populist outrage.

Hungry Beast did a great piece on the media’s fanning the flames of moral outrage so they can cash in on it:

And lookie there – at the end of the clip. If it isn’t the media trying to do exactly that to Safran even before the ep goes to air!

► John Safran’s Race Relations, tonight, 9.30, ABC1

Clip: ABC

If you sat through this evening’s rather sycophantic Howard Years on ABC1, you may have noticed that, according to Costello, John Howard was all for preferencing Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party in the 1998 Federal Election. Nice. Well, were their policies really so different? “We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.” The reason Howard’s line became infamous, of course, is that refugees were treated like prisoners – and in fact had, in many instances, less rights – and many were returned to regimes where they faced almost certain death.

On Wednesday, SBS is screening a doco which promises to be anything but sycophantic towards the Howard government. A Well-Founded Fear follows the fates of some of those political refugees and their families. It is reviewed in The Age’s Green Guide (13/11/08) by Jodie Pfarr:

There are even claims that the Government used false passports to deport detainees to their or other countries. A report into the treatment and fate of over 250 deported refugees is to be presented to the Government and the United Nations. That will not be our finest hour.

But how many of us will actually watch A Well-Founded Fear? Rather less than the 21 million Jodie Pfarr would like, I suspect. There’s plenty of US pap on offer – Criminal Minds, The Mentalist, House – and the trend is towards custom video channels online, where any news is likely to be of the E variety and the choice for hot doco perhaps a behind the scenes with The Veronicas.

One person I can pretty much guarantee won’t be watching is John Winston Howard.

► A Well-Founded Fear screens Wednesday, 19th November at 8.30pm on SBS.

Image: The Age

Hey, did anybody check out the list of the best 100 Australian web 2.0 apps?

Interesting to see Gnoos on there. I’m surprised the site was up long enough for Ross to rate it. Also, I’m not going to name names but some of the other sites on the list have already closed down. Go click through and have a look at some… be mindful of the ones that probably wouldn’t call themselves Australian unless you were buying a round.

Anyway… I think that’s a sufficient dose of abrasiveness for the moment. After all, the many people who put hours of hard work into ausculture.com every day are undoubtedly just insanely jealous.

Still, I was looking at the list and noticed a few other sites that had simpy whacked a crappy theme on top of Pligg. I say “other sites” because that’s exactly what ausculture.com did. As I was looking at these sites though, I noticed that 95% of the links were straight into the websites for major Australian newspapers. Honestly, I think that is kinda missing the point. Part of the reason people liked Digg in the first place was in the charm of sending truckloads of users to small and obscure sites to look at really interesting content. That the Digg effect usually brought those sames sites to their knees was part of the fun.

It’s not so much fun when your social news aggregator is just giving you an alternative top ten articles on the major online newspapers. Those sites already have most popular lists.

Of course, this causes me to ask the question “Is there any room for an Australia social news aggregator?” - particularly one that is aggregating more that four sources and concentrating on Australian content?

I’d have to say that so far, it’s looking like a no from where I’m sitting. Anyone have a different opinion?

Maybe there is, but that such a site would have to do more than reskin pligg (or reddit.) I notice, however, that perthnorg isn’t just a reskin and their traffic looks less-than-stellar.

Possibly related stuff elsewhere

• Nielsen: Digg Traffic Sucks. Mashable: That’s What She Said
• The 30 Top Social Bookmarking Web Sites on ebizma.com.

18th of May, 2008. The erudite (yeah, right) Corey Worthington is interviewed by Kyle Sandilands and Jackie O’Neill:

Jackie: “You preferred Bec. What about Bianca?”

Corey: “Oh, she was alright, I guess.”

Kyle: “Bit dopey though, Jackie, don't you think?”

Jackie: “Bianca? You think she's – You're talking about Brigitte?”

Kyle: “Oh, Brigitte – sorry, I get them confused.”

You get them confused? You get Brigitte and Bianca confused? Perhaps try looking up at their faces. It’s just a suggestion.

25th of May, 2008. Sandilands has had a week to remember to take his pills and try to grasp the most basic information relating to the Eviction shows he’s supposed to be co-hosting. For instance, the public votes for their favourite Housemates and the least popular three are put up for the HMs themselves to nominate for eviction. This week, they have a choice between Nathan, David and Rory. That’s three people, you see? The kind of maths even Corey would be capable of.

It’s a double Eviction, so Bianca (that’s the one who does know what ‘illiterate’ means, Kyle) has to vote out two of the three who are up. She nominates David for two points and Nathan for one, the latter being because she was close with Renee before Nathan came along and whisked her away to a quiet corner of the garden. And when she has finished:

Kyle: “That's a bit of an odd choice.”

Jackie: “No, I got that. I mean, you know, he [Nathan] is spending all this time with Renee. And I reckon she's a bit different around him.”

Kyle: “Well why wouldn't she vote out Renee, if she thinks Nathan's the nicest person on the planet?”

Jackie: “No –”

Kyle: “Is she not that smart either?”

Jackie: “Rory, you mean? Why wouldn't she vote out Rory?”

Kyle: “Oh, I don't know.”

Jackie: “You don't know what's going on.”

Kyle: “She was just – she just looked like a giant bugs bunny up there, that's all I could see.”

No, Kyle, it’s true, you don’t know what’s going on. I think this is about the point that the psychiatrist would be asking you what day of the week it is and who’s the Prime Minister. (The answers, Kyle, me old pal, are Ketchup and Wa-boo, Wa-boo. Don’t mention it.)

Images: Network Ten

Aren’t these the guys overcharging me for my phone service?

This page from the National Gallery of Victoria What’s On – May-Jun 08 booklet shows visitors naively viewing the Sidney Nolan exhibition, unaware of the imminent dangers. Look closely and you see that the visitor on the left has her stiletto caught in the floor grill. Alas, we’re not shown the frame of her crashing back onto her coccyx.

In this age of interactive performance art this was a natural progression: the gallery becomes one large installation, and the toppling tourists an integral part of the piece. This is art that affects the viewer; art in which the viewer is recognised and acknowledged. The artist is saying “Yeah, this person knows her arse from her elbow – her arse is the one that’s sore.” Good on ya, NGV!

That’s how the official site of the Australian Open is billing this afternoon’s match between Russia’s Maria Sharapova, seeded 5th, and Serbian 4th seed Ana Ivanovic. But isn’t that objectifying the women and devaluing the tennis? Well, in the minds of the players probably not. Here’s what Sharapova had to say about the rise to prominence of her Finals nemesis:

“It's great to see new names coming up that are doing well, that are bringing excitement and whatever it is, glamour, to the sport. Even to bring fans that are not just tennis fans, but other fans into the sport, is wonderful.”

And both players have exhibited glamour with a capital ‘G’ off-court. Sharapova was a model for the 2007 Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, amongst many other assignments, and Ivanovic’s body of modelling work shows no shortage of body either.

Seven’s coverage, though, will doubtless be scrutinised for impropriety by one S. Collins of Box Hill North, Melbourne. In a letter to The Age’s Green Guide s/he wrote “...slow-motion technology was abused for grossly inappropriate purposes in the night match between Venus Williams and Zi Yan. Straight after one ad break, there blazing on the screen appeared Venus' backside in action with extreme close-up and extreme slow-motion cast upon it. Seconds later, Roger Rasheed stated ‘I don't know about all the other ladies out there, but to me that's a prrretty good sight’.” Thank god Seven was broadcasting in widescreen!

I saw that coverage, and actually yes, it was a bit of a visit to Wrongtown – Venus would have been appalled. But using that yardstick for this afternoon’s match, things are not the same. Perving rights have been given...

Images: youngteenidols.com and si.com

It’s reported that Chrisco will not be delivering some hampers this year due to problems with a new logistics system.

If ensurance is part of your customer experience this is the last thing you what to happen. What a shame.

We’re all still keeping in the Christmas spirit though right? I mean, there’s a few Australian based websites with their logos currently sporting Santa hats, Christmas lights and ribbons. Loath to be left off any bandwagon, ausculture.com has a Santa hat on order and expects it to arrive kinda soonish. We’ll confirm the timing when we know more.

In addition to the Santa hat, ausculture.com will also be getting into the spirit by posting or re-hashing, uninformative articles about all kinds of things, so long as there is some way we can talk about Christmas at the same time - this very post being the first instance.

Media Watch had a story about one of the recent Bonds underwear commercials (pictured above). Interesting to see the translation of the Portuguese lyrics for the commercial:

Marina Amphetamine
Marina Gasoline
Marina is on fire!!!
Hum ooh hah
Meet me after school
And I’ll beat you like a gorilla
Bite you like a whore
Come and play with my pussy

Should anybody be surprised or fussed? They are selling underwear. I suspect Bonds would be less successful at that if they made something more like the Huggie fabric softener commercial. Much like our metro newspapers would be less successful at selling “newspapers” if they didn’t have online galleries featuring porn star Jenna Jameson.

Yeah, I know there’s a reason why we pretend like we’re outraged but I can’t remember what it is.