Well what are we afraid of this week? Bird flu? Meteors? Terrorism? WMDs? George W.? Global warming? Super volcanos? Hard landings? Jeez, there is so much hysteria around I can't believe it. And those tough, hard-nosed kiwi business-people seem the most lily-livered of the lot.

The "cult of the CEO" must be a celebration of spinelessness. Boo! Look at them run for cover!

Anyway, for any readers not cowering under their kitchen tables, here are our weekly items of interest. First one for you CEOs out there. Via Boingboing, William Gibson explains how when the world didn't end, as expected, in 1962 his trust in science fiction began to.

Chris points to the Penguin Podcasts. These have a feature at the end called ‘Penguin Remixes’, excerpts from existing audiobooks mixed with dance music. The latest episode is Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey, the bit where the narrator is musing that the picture will never grow old, repeated in dance music fashion.

Chris absolutely promises this will be his last Mixed Lolly on Russell Hoban "Britain’s most singular genius" for at least three months. One fan sold everything she owned to record Squeeze’s Glenn Tilbrook reduced to touring by camper van. And what the hell’s a site called Butt hat snot all? From reader Chris McBride, a site designed to damage your employer’s productivity: Pop Cult Mag.

Fight fight fight! Russell Brown says The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is on its way here, but Fiona Rae says it most certainly is not. It can only end in tears.

Stephen is tres excitement, if you’ll pardon my French, about DGM Live, it’s the future of rock and roll all over again. So that makes it the future and the past. Sort of ... He reckons it is a new model for how bands might connect with their audience – downloads, photos, diaries, fan reviews, even free downloads from very recent performances.

Finally, from Stephen, a very good joke.

Pictured: “Bunny Rigold, the NZBC Home Handy Man, demonstrates a point in front of the keen-sighted cameras.”

In 1972, New Zealand only had one television channel and it broadcast everything in black and white (a second channel and colour transmissions weren’t expected until October 1973). Jason King, Please Sir and Dr Finlay’s Casebook were the big shows of the day, and a bush kangaroo called Skippy was insured for $1 million to make the trip over from Sydney. From the same cache of old newsprint that brought you the Slackliner comes the 1972 New Zealand Television Annual (thanks to the Bowman Family). A bargain at 75 cents, with fascinating features such as “Television Stars Who Visited N.Z. this year” — Derek Nimmo! Marty Feldman! — and the fact that Morecambe and Wise were making “about $200,000 a year each”, the magazine is a monochrome trip back into a century that never invented blogging, podcasts or bro’Town. It was a year in which “Television Programmes Produced in England” exceeded those from the United States by almost two to one, but Australia had only a couple (Contrabandits, along with the aforementioned ’roo) and the N.Z.B.C. just eight programmes with which to woo its captive audience. More…

Edward Jay Epstein is an American investigative journalist with 13 books under his belt. His latest, The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood, sees him regularly guest on Slate whenever they need a commentator on the convoluted and probably nefarious deals of Sin City. Epstein studied government at Cornell and Harvard. His master's thesis was on the search for political truth, about The Warren Commission, which investigated JFK's shooting, and his doctoral dissertation concerned the decision-making process of TV news. Both were published as books. He is currently researching a book on the 9/11 Commission. NZBC sat this hard-working New Yorker down for a virtual java with a side order of healthy scepticism.

By John O'Neill

The Editor [err Director-General, thanks, Ed], in the grand tradition of delegating his irresponsibilities, asked me out of filial duty to review The Great War for Civilisation by Robert Fisk which will, I'm sure, become more familiar by its cogent subtitle The Conquest of the Middle East.

I will do so gladly when I have read it which means that I may be gone for some time. Action cannot be completely deferred. The book is too important. It should in fact be recalled and republished with a red DANGER flag on the cover because it is likely to fracture the serenity of the many who choose to live in the certainty that all things Western/European and their derivatives are right and just and civilised by comparison with deranged Eastern subcultures.

I am taking the unusual step of reviewing the book twice: right now before the reading and again afterwards. Other reviewers forgo step two completely but I, unlike number one son, am completely responsible. Be glad they do not sell great writing by the kilo otherwise it would cost you more than $40. Grab the bargain at 2.928 cents per page for Allah's sake!

First, a taste of Fisk - relating his ambitions when he was first appointed as a new correspondent in the Middle East thirty years ago:

How innocent, how naive I was. Yet innocence, if we can keep it, protects a journalist's integrity. You have to fight to believe in it.

How can a reader walk away from a writer, an old and sorely experienced writer who has seen so much of man's inhumanity, and can yet write such a line and mean it. I certainly will not.

Our readers: the lazy bastards
A survey by US trade magazine Advertising Age says one in four workers reads weblogs, losing on average nine per cent of the workweek or 551,000 years of work in 2005 alone. The Atlantic has more details here.

Woody by name ...
From Popbitch, Scarlett, our eternal muse, reports : "The moment Woody (Allen) would yell, 'Cut,' he'd turn to me and ask, 'So how old were you when you lost your virginity?' "

Both from Stephen, thanks very much.

Well, it's three weeks into January and we've finally managed to do a Mixed Lollies on a Friday again. Scarlett, our eternal muse, is looking ravishing as always. She don't half scrub up well.

Chris reckons you should check out The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick featuring brilliant drawings by R. Crumb. It's a graphic interpretation of a series of events in 1974. He spent the remaining years of his life trying to figure out what had happened to him. Also, via Arts & Letters Daily, some morbid amusement. Chris also has more on Russell Hoban, who we hope to have a chat to soon, and notes Marcel Duchamp's Urinal recently survived another attack.

The humble semicolon appears to be the literary equivalent of the Urinal, at least according to Kurt Vonnegut.

"They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college."

NZBC had its own discussion on the topic in comments here.

Stephen likes Mark Steyn's take on Sgt Leslie Turner's racial discrimination case against Scotland Yard. He claimed he was over promoted because he was black.

The big day out looms, and Mark warns everybody to beware glam-rock shoulder. He also offers this on being at the blunt end of a bad review and this on the vitally important political skill of being able to function while drunk. Finally two pieces on the future of the newspaper.

FOURTH AND FINAL INSTALMENT

By now, I was anxious to know what had made Stan Tooprig leave London, but it was some weeks before he felt sufficiently at ease with me to disclose exactly what happened to him after he discovered Shem-el-Nessim.

It had become the essence of his being; a poison undoubtedly, but one without which he could apparently no longer function. Read on...

Spirit of 76 uses Deborah Coddington's musings about blogging to spring into an attack on leftish bloggers for accusing rightish bloggers of racism.

This phenomenon is the readiness of leftist commentators to refer to right wing commentators as racists, particularly when they start to get a bit heated. It arises time and time again and is always complete and utter baseless nonsense.

Sorry Spirit, but the left has no monopoly on that. Here a Mr A. Lemur, from a site called Sir Humphrey's says criticism of the Iraq war in New Zealand comes from people who are anti-American, "approaching chronic racism really". Mr Lemur extends his charges of racism here. If you don't support the war on Iraq, you are a racist, apparently.

If you consider yourself a 'social democrat' but you aren't supporting the Iraqi people and United States Government in creating a democratic Iraq then you are a traitor to your movement and you are effectively siding with the theocrats of Iran, the fascists of Syria, and the various anti-democracy groups within Iraq itself. I also detect an element of racism amongst these leftists - as if they consider Arabs somehow inadequate as a people to create a democratic society.

Talk about using charges of racism to try and shut down debate! Jeez, imagine what would happen if you criticised Israel!!

Personally I think all bloggers are racist. That's because I think all people are to some extent racist. To some degree I distrust people who deny this. I think what we call racism is hot-wired into us. To dislike and distrust outsiders as a survival instinct (I'm sure there'll be some research out there somewhere supporting this view ...). The trick is we have to fight against it because we have free will, morals, intelligence enough to know that our animal instincts are not necessarily our best guide any more.

For some reason while making this post Blogger went all German on me. Did you know "Edit Post" translates as "Bearbeiten" in German? But don't get me onto the bloody Germans ...

PART THREE

It was several days before I ascertained that Stan Tooprig had booked himself a cabin on a steamer at the Port of London. From my later research I found out it had been on a French-registered vessel named Cachous which, once she had left British coastal waters, sailed past Gibraltar into the Mediterranean and on to Alexandria, where Tooprig boarded a felucca — one of the small, lateen-rigged sailing boats that plied the Mahmoudieh Canal and the Nile — to Cairo. There was a train that transferred passengers from Alexandria but, strangely, Tooprig preferred the slower water route; it was as though he had been impeded by his sense of foreboding. By the time Tooprig arrived in Cairo, he was emaciated and his skin had the leathery appearance of the mummified corpse of Sethos I in the Cairo Museum. When I first set eyes on him, I wondered whether he was a morphine addict or was dying of some other terminal disease, but I didn’t like to ask. Read on…

Elisa Bowman rescued a 22 May 1978 copy of New Zealand Woman’s Weekly from the recycling, along with a swag bag of other gems (watch this space). This advertisement for the ‘Slackliner’ on page 79 in particular caught our jaundiced eye. Clearly, that’s the popular David Walliams from Little Britain on the left, but we’re not sure about his mate, urgently studying the job vacancies in the Herald. Even the women in North Wales in 1978 looked more alluring than these oddly attired creatures. Were there really no decent-looking models to be had in New Zealand at the time? The branding needed some attention, too. One could hike-up a Slackliner under everything, the ad copy tells us — including, presumably one’s slacks — but the question on women’s lips must surely have been, “Do they look any less revolting in ‘buff’?” If this was the Victoria’s Secret of its day, Kiwi men probably wished that the news had never been let out. Indeed, some of them appear still to be traumatised by this 28-year-old campaign. Perhaps it was confusion over the use of the word ‘slack’ in the product name that resulted in such an ill-fated photo shoot, and which caused the photographer to focus on the saggy wrinkles above the posterior of the model on the right; rather than, for example, the dead dog on the deck in the background. Way back in 1978, $4.99 seems a high price to pay to end up looking like eight pounds of shite in a six-pound bag, but at least the Slackliner was made in New Zealand. If our readers have scans of any other advertising gems from the heyday of the NZBC, why not email them to us here.

PART TWO

Every now and then in winter, London briefly anticipates spring with an unseasonably long spell of sunlight; a patch of clear blue between the clouds; a brightening of the otherwise pale skies; and a fragrance of mown grass from the parks. On such mornings, Stan Tooprig would walk from York Street to Jermyn Street because three times a week, at eight o’clock, he had an appointment at Klinge & Schneider, the barbershop renowned for the closest shave in London. Read on...

Read Part One of Shem-el-Nessim here.

Well, after more than 40 years I finally made it to Cape Reinga yesterday. A spiritual experience? Not quite, but still very grand. It's the sort of place that helps put things in perspective - in other words it makes you feel kinda insignificant.

So, for a brief few minutes around 7pm me and the Girlie were the two northenmost people in the country, after a day that had taken in Kerikeri, Waitangi, Manganui, Matai Bay for a swim and finally the last 100k hike to the top.

And then home in time for, well, midnight. Here's a pic I took.

I have a feeling the holidays are drawing to a close, but being unemployed I'm not quite sure what that will mean or how and when it will happen for me.

Seth Godin (photographed here by John Abbott) is known as “an agent of change”. Well, that’s what those New Economy chaps call him. In the corridors of the NZBC, Seth is known simply as “The Guru”. Apparently, in 1994, Seth bravely predicted that the internet was a fad that wouldn’t last. Well, frankly we agree with him — we give it six months, tops. We’ve bought his books Unleashing the Ideavirus and Purple Cow: Transform Your Business By Being Remarkable and we like the cut of his jib: “Have your readers do the marketing for you,” he suggests. The Director-General is now thinking about “rolling out” some of Seth’s more radical ideas as part of the NZBC’s cultural change programme. Unleashing the Ideavirus, about how ideas spread, is the most popular e-book ever written and more than a million people have downloaded it digitally. His earlier (1999) book Permission Marketing was an Amazon.com Top 100 bestseller for a year. Said Jay Levinson, author of Guerrilla Marketing: “Take Leo Burnett, David Ogilvy, Bill Bernbach and Mark Twain. Combine their brains and shave their heads. What’s left? Seth Godin.” We asked this renowned blogger, public speaker and new media commentator to join us for a New Year’s espresso so we could quiz him about brown rice and squid soup. More…

Shem-el-Nessim: an inspiration in perfume
PART ONE
The Mu’ezzin of the Sultan al-Zahir Barquq mosque in the City of the Dead was calling for morning prayers when in one last rattling exhalation the Englishman opposite me expired. As his head fell forward, jangling our coffee cups and startling the clientele, his skin appeared almost translucent in the dust-dappled light. “Shem-el-Nessim!” were his final words. Read on...

I was intrigued, and a little bemused, to read local reviewers' take on two recently released films, Broken Flowers and Good Night, And Good Luck.

If I read into them right, the first was a tour de force and the latter a smart but culturally irrelevant piece of didacticism that appeals to leftish critics allied to journalistic mores - or the reverse, perhaps.

I've followed Jim Jarmusch's odd writer-director trail since Stranger Than Paradise in the early 80s. His films are usually slight and slow, and increasingly slick, but make a more profound impression than they should because of their creator's weirdo sensibility, visual nous and cast of convincing, if thin-sliced kooks. Broken Flowers, however, left me decidedly lukewarm.

Bill Murray's faded, jaded Don Juan is about as believable as a dot-com genius. You can easily see the appeal of his louche, amusing counterpart in Lost in Translation. But his classical music-loving ex-tech whizz Don Johnston (tee bloody hee) has been dialled down to coma level. The women this bag of inert gas tries to probe for clues about a possible son seem, with the glaring exception of Sharon Stone, to be the inhabitants of some white shoe wearer's black book which should have been binned years ago. A few rare bright, inventive moments can't save this piece of flimsiness from seeming much longer than its 106 minutes.

George Clooney at least tries to do something serious and smart with Good Night. It'll have niche appeal, sure, but better the occasional work that casts an uncompromising Klieg light on our shaky democratic apparatus, and I include the media in this, than somnambulates through whimsy.

POSTSCRIPT
I've just found this quote from Pauline Kael about Stranger than Paradise: To think it "was a knockout of a movie you'd have to tune in to its minimalism so passively that you lowered your expectations. The film is so hemmed in that it has the feel of a mousy Eastern European comedy; it's like a comedy of sensory deprivation."

Last night, in conversation with a couple of buddies, I said I wouldn't be shedding any tears for Ariel Sharon. Someone responded Sharon was odd in seeming to get more liberal as he got older. Then in today's Herald, Fran O'Sullivan (sub required) took Helen Clark to task for not sending a get-well-soon card to the ailing leader:

What is it about our Government that it cannot rouse itself to extend Ariel Sharon best wishes at a time when the Middle East is once again in turmoil?

Christopher Hitchens has provided a few answers, cataloguing Sharon's brutal career for those with short memories.

Coming soon: NZBC’s short fiction series, starting Monday 9 January. NZBC’s bloggies will be bringing you short stories, short-shorts, and longer stories in instalments, all previously unpublished, to enhance your summer. We open the series with the first instalment of Chris Bell’s Shem-el-Nessim, an old-fashioned tale in the English tradition, set in 1920s Cairo and published here for the first time, in four parts, ending on Thursday 19 January.

Because we realise how important it is for you to know what we think, we asked NZBC’s bloggies to evaluate the last 12 months from the comfort of their beach towels. Those who could be roused from their summer Caipirinha stupor responded sluggishly with the highs and lows of the year that was so unforgettable you’re going to be writing it on cheques, letters and application forms for the next few months. Let’s raise a glass to 2005.

My bloggies are conspicuous by their absence. I suspect they may have rented a mini-bus and all gone away somewhere sunny and not told me. I've been left to watch endless "years in review" on the telly. Alone. I hope they're having fun. No postcards so far either, but I do get the occasional email.

For anyone else at home on New Year's, photo agency Magnum and Slate present a gallery to remind you what you missed. Slate also remembers the "unmemorialised dead", the ones who died between Christmas and New Year's after the major roundups have already been sent to press or prepared for broadcast.

Speaking of the dead, there are a few analyses of body counts in Iraq floating about. The New York Times notes a tiny decline in the American military death toll - from 848 in 2004 to 844 in 2005. Meanwhile, various pundits have analysed Iraq Body Count's numbers, which show a 15 per cent decline in civilian casualties year-on-year to around 8,000 in 2005 (via Sir Humphrey's).

It looks as if Iraq Body Count's numbers are gaining credibility. George W. Bush himself appeared to use them recently.

Chris reckons I should read Russell Hoban's Linger Awhile, reviewed very favourably here. Also, twenty-five years on from his first encounter with U2, writer Paul Morley joins the band on tour in North America to discover the ways in which they're still rewriting rock's rule book.

He also points to this (via Arts & Letters Daily). Apparently George Orwell's first wife died young. Now, writes biographer DJ Taylor, a previously unknown cache of letters has been found, shedding new light on her and on a crucial period in the writer's life.

Finally, the top ten overlooked movies of 2005 and the literary year in review.

Happy New Year, yous fullahs.

Just in: Roadworker Dodderyoldfart has his own "year in review" including his Best Pothole!