Mandarin Mashup April 23, 2012
- Chinese Memes: I speak Chinese… ~ Chinese music videos...
- How tweet it is for Rudd - Brisbane Times
THE DIARY
Kevin Rudd and Therese Rein ... last Wednesday the Mandarin-speaking former prime minister joined the Chinese social media site Weibo, and, in three days, he had attracted more than 100,000 ''fans'' from its 300 million-strong user-base. Photo: Michel OSullivan
You remember K-Rudd? Course you do. Little bloke. Shiny hair. Happy little Vegemite. As calm as a millpond, absolutely no volcanic rumblings way below the surface, always happy to delegate - wait, no, hang on. Anyway, if there is one thing that does come to mind with Kevin Rudd it is that he was always big on China: and it turns out he's big in China, too. Not only that, they're encouraging him to stage a coup. Last Wednesday the Mandarin-speaking former prime minister joined the Chinese social media site Weibo, and, in three days, he had attracted more than 100,000 ''fans'' from its 300 million-strong user-base, flaunting his Chinese language skills by posting more than a dozen comments in the complex Asian characters. ''Thank you, my Chinese friends. I love the opportunity to read and write Chinese characters. It has just dawned on me that I have forgotten so many characters already and your language is certainly the most difficult language in the world,'' says Rudd's latest post. He also expressed his desire to hone his language skills further and travel to China more often. ''Since I have left my old job as the foreign minister, I have got more time to develop some of my long-term hobbies such as the Chinese language and I am also excited by the prospect of going to China more frequently.'' He signed off as ''Lao Lu'', or ''Old Lu'', an intimate and yet deferential way of addressing senior workers in China. A measure of Rudd's continuing popularity in China is that his initial post was re-posted more than 3500 times and more than 2000 people commented on it. A further measure is that one of his fans urged him to seize control of the state: ''[The] Chinese people support you to start another coup d'etat and bring down that old woman.''
BEDLAM PLACE
It has been a week since One Direction left the country. Ears are still ringing and lozenges are still being popped for those sore throats. Many, including The Diary, are still shaking their heads in bafflement. Next up to rally the screamers, jostlers and handmade sign makers, albeit a possibly older lot, is Gossip Girl'sChace Crawford. The US actor, who plays Nate Archibald in the series, is heading to Australia as the mouthpiece for Diet Coke. The 26-year-old will pose for photos with fans at Martin Place today from 2pm as part of his duties spruiking the brand. So is Martin Place ready for another onslaught? The Diary spoke to Alice Coffey who works on the busy pedestrian mall and was on her way to work as One Direction made their appearance on Sunrise. ''It sounded like someone had installed a roller coaster in Martin Place and it was going round and round,'' she said. ''It was the loudest thing I've ever heard.'' From Lego forests (which came and went last week) to the Sydney Fashion Festival, Martin Place is no stranger to big events, corporate promotions and celebrity appearances. Crawford may gather a crowd, and there might be some screaming and marriage proposals via poster, but it'll be hard to top that One Direction mania.
Advertisement: Story continues belowSpecial awards ... the Charles Dickens statue in Centennial Park. Photo: Peter Rae
SCENT OF A MAC
There are certain smells with an undeniable appeal - freshly baked bread, clean clothes dried in the sun, coffee (even if the taste, by comparison, is a perpetual letdown). But the packaging from a computer? Three Melbourne artists have had the scent of a freshly unwrapped Apple laptop created, bottled and atomised for an exhibition at West Space in the southern city's CBD. Gavin Bell, Jarrah de Kuijer and Simon McGlinn, aka the Greatest Hits collective, worked with the scent-marketing company Air Aroma, setting it the challenge of replicating the smell of a new Macbook Pro. The purpose of this artistic endeavour? To explore the idea of ''new''. ''There's a massive sense of enthusiasm around 'new' in our culture,'' de Kuijer said. To create the scent Air Aroma had fragrances with the aroma of glue, plastic, rubber and paper sent over from France. A blog post on the company's website says it managed to encompass ''the smell of the plastic wrap covering the box, printed ink on the cardboard, the smell of paper and plastic components within the box and, of course, the aluminum laptop''. The Diary called the gallery for a verdict. Kelly Fliedner, its program co-ordinator, was impressed. ''When I first smelled it myself I thought, 'I wonder if that's toxic','' she said. The Diary checked with de Kuijer. ''It's not dangerous in any way,'' he said. Next: Eau de iPad.
A Big Day for ... Honouring our Heritage
The IKEA store in Tempe. Photo: Jon Reid
AS YOU'D expect there are some impressive and worthy projects nominated for the National Trust Heritage Awards, to be handed out at the Westin Sydney, Martin Place, at lunchtime today. There's the completion of Francis Greenway's original design of the 1819 Hyde Park Barracks, which has seen the original domes over the guard houses restored. Or there's the project that saved the Charles Dickens statue, now standing near Dickens Drive after two decades away from Centennial Park because it had been vandalised. But there are a couple of unexpected ones too. For example, Central Station, which has been scrubbed, polished, reshaped and all but shampooed in pursuit of restoration, the centrepiece of the work being the repairing of the station's 86-metre sandstone clock tower, untouched since the 1920s. But perhaps the most surprising of the 60 nominees is the IKEA store and head office at Tempe. Surprising because although the building looks like a humungus, determinedly patriotic (that blue, that yellow) version of one its own charmless flatpacks, the site, which contained the 19th century Tempe Brickworks and the old Bayview Asylum, from 1865 until 1946, has been redeveloped with apparently the sort of tender sensitivity and respect usually reserved for nursing an elderly monarch (The IKEA head office, for example, is actually housed in the 1959 Penfold's Tempe Cellars showroom). The awards will recognise 14 winners, including the special awards for lifetime achievement. The National Trust of Australia (NSW) chief executive, Brian ScarsbrickAM, said that a number of heritage buildings are in real trouble. "The awards are a vital opportunity to recognise those who are so actively contributing to the protection of our state's heritage."
STAY IN TOUCH THIS WEEK ...
With interplanetary mining
Central Station's polished-up clock tower. Photo: Jennifer Soo
FORGET the gold rushes of the Wild West, the next grab for natural riches could eclipse anything that has gone before it, The Daily Telegraph in London reports. Think instead about sci-fi action adventures such as Armageddon or Total Recall, both of which had as their central premise interplanetary mining. That's right, a new company backed by Eric Schmidt, the Google chairman, and James Cameron, the film director, pictured, is planning to mine the final frontier: space. They are among the backers of a new venture that will reach for the riches lying elsewhere in the solar system. Planetary Resources will be a ''space exploration company to expand Earth's resource base'' according to scant information released before the start-up's launch in Seattle tomorrow. ''The company will overlay two critical sectors - space exploration and natural resources - to add trillions of dollars to the global GDP,'' was the bold claim. ''This innovative start-up will create a new industry and a new definition of 'natural resources'.'' Schmidt and Google's co-founder Larry Page are listed alongside Cameron, the director of Titanic and Avatar, among the venture's investors and advisers. The company was founded by Eric Anderson and Peter Diamandis. ''Since my childhood I've wanted to do one thing, be an asteroid miner,'' Diamandis told Forbes earlier this year. While the costs of space travel are high, the hope is that riches contained in asteroids would make the sums worthwhile. Studies suggest gold and other metals in the Earth's crust originated from asteroids that collided with the planet in its early life.
With Hitchens' last word
UNSURPRISINGLY it was Christopher Hitchens who had the funniest and the most apposite words with which to describe himself at his own memorial in New York on Friday, The Guardian reports. He was, he said of himself in posthumous film clips and readings, a "radical freelance scribbler" who had devoted his life to curiosity, irony, debunking, disputation, drinking, love and hate (though of all those things, it was hate that got him out of bed in the morning). But for Martin Amis - ''Little Keith'' as Hitchens - called him the most enduring quality was friendship. Amis, delivering the eulogy, recalled the 16 or 17-hour sessions that they would have together, fuelled by food, drink, tobacco and conversation. "Who could be more agreeable than Hitch?" Amis asked. At times, Amis said, he tied himself in knots, getting into difficult places over his support for the impeachment of Bill Clinton and the invasion of Iraq. But Hitchens ''suffered very much from these isolations that he brought on himself.'' Stephen Fry recalled there were few pleasures in life as great as having a disagreement with Hitch. They agreed on heir love of W.H.Auden and P.G.Wodehouse but disagreed on cricket and opera. Hitchens' insistence on there being no afterlife was also celebrated: ''I will never change my mind on that. Never change my mind,'' he was shown saying in a short film. ''But I do like surprises.''
With Depp-felt condolences
JOHNNY DEPP has paid tribute to one of his childhood heroes, the actor Jonathan Frid, who has died aged 87, London's Daily Telegraph reports. The Canadian actor is best known for playing the part of Barnabas Collins, the lead in a popular American gothic soap opera Dark Shadows, which ran from 1966 to 1971. Depp, who plays the Collins role in a Tim Burton remake of Dark Shadows due out next month, released a statement about his sadness at the loss of a ''true original''. "Jonathan Frid was the reason I used to run home from school to watch Dark Shadows," the actor said. "When I had the honour to finally meet him, as he so generously passed the torch of Barnabas to me, he was as elegant and magical as I had always imagined. My deepest condolences to his family and friends. The world has lost a true original." Frid took a cameo role in the new movie, which also stars Michelle Pfeiffer, Jonny Lee Miller and Helena Bonham Carter. Frid meets Depp's character in a party scene which also features two other actors from the original show.
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