Supply the right synonym for each clue below, and your four answers will reveal the chief characters of a world-famous children’s book.
Hassle
Traitor
Wretch
Spy
SOLUTION NEXT WEEK
BB181 SOLUTION: Ocean’s Eleven, Runaway Bride, The Departed, Two Hands, Changing Lanes, Taxi Driver, Great Expectations, Stranger Than Fiction, Die Another Day, Minority Report, Cold Mountain
There should be a word for it.
You know the feeling – the morning after a data overload. Mine came courtesy of a an all-day seminar called The Future of Journalism, and right now my brain is semi-concussed. Like a sharp one-two from a media 2020.
Dazed, I won’t try to delineate each session. Rather, a few sharp impressions of the onslaught, with some distilling slated for future postings, no doubt.
Local seems the new black. As many papers reel in their roaming reporters, dismantle the foreign desks, the emphasis falls on the reader’s home patch. Where’s that speed bump going? Not just who won the Cup – that’s available on your iPhone – but who was who at the Cup, etc.
Pulitzer winner Jan Schaffer, via satellite, calls it reporting from the inside out. In fact she shirks at the word reporting, opting instead for media providers. Engaged locals, these writers are embedded enthusiasts who spurn the old journo tenets of balance and conflict. Rather than covering communities, these scribes help build them.
What’s the pay model? Lousy. Hence the other buzzword, philanthropy.
Take a peek at ProPublica, and you start to glimpse the future. Here’s an alliance of experienced reporters, many the refugees from downsized mastheads, funded by believers in what journalists do best. Paid by a civic purse, these writers lift rocks, open wormy cans, knock on doors and investigate.
Not that stories live and lurk on the site alone. The ProPublica model is also geared to garage their work across legacy media – traditional outlets such as TV and press prepared to foot the tab of solid work.
Of course, the idea of charity and industry saints seems less probable in our own culture, yet several public sectors – arts and health are two – have thrived on such life support. Crikey writer Margaret Simons and colleagues aim to establish a kindred alliance in the rubbery future, where readers allocate funds for specific stories to be written.
Zigging, zagging the day veered on. In many ways the seminar’s speed reflected the haste of the trade’s shifting horizon. We covered new toys (sorry – tools) for journalists, RSS Readers, blogs, the ad world, new media demands and pitfalls, what’s waxing and waning overseas, the Jimmy Olsens among Gen Y, and the enduring romance of paper.
Sponsored by the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance, the gabfest was bruising and very worthwhile. You can glean more about the molten future via Life in the Clickstream, a busy and readable report compiled by the MEAA after several reps went on a global safari. Though read it quickly, as the alliance’s secretary Christopher Warren urged, because in 6 months the report could well be outdated.
“Phew, that kitty litter is downright olid!”
No, I’m not talking Siamese, but endangered English, our mother tongue with an inbuilt caducity – or perishableness.
In order to make room for some 2000 new words (like wii and wiki and frappuccino), Collins English Dictionary is facing a reluctant spring-clean – in with the new, and out with the outdated.
Yet any old-fashioned lexicographer has a shine for calignosity (or darkness), and can’t bear to discard exuviate (or moult). Hence the latest scheme to encourage well-known scribblers such as columnist Stephen Fry and poet laureate Andrew Motion to adopt a pet archaism.
Poetically, Motion has opted for skirr, a sound effect of birds in motion. While Fry has plumped for fubsy, describing a human being with the opposite physique of his long-limbed self.
Given the list presented by Lingua Franca, the lingo show on Radio National, I’d be too niddering to handpick malison, favouring the philosophical charms of compossible, describing the possibility of one thing coexisting with another. In other words, disco and good taste were hardly compossible.
Have you encountered an underused word in danger of becoming recrement?
If CAE BLNCHETT = The Aviator, can you deduce these other movies, where each featured actor has their film’s initials (in order) missing from their name?
GERGE CLOONY
JULIA OERTS
MAT AMON
HEA LEDGER
TONI OLETTE
ROBER E NIRO
ALEC UINNSS
DUIN HOFMAN
ME JUI DENCH
TO CUISE
NIOLE KIDAN
SOLUTION NEXT WEEK
BB180 SOLUTION: Ma is a nun as I am
Q: Why did the scientist install a knocker on his door?
A: He wanted to win the No-Bell Prize
Doing the maths, that riddle came at a cost of 8 and 1/2 cents. Compared to the lavish 22 cents of this rib-tickler:
Q: What do you get if you cross a stereo with a refridgerator [sic]?
A: Cool music
Crunching the numbers, measuring the seismic impact of each punchline, the No-Bell gag is the better value. (The first comes from a Safeways 8-cracker pack at $1.98, while the music monstrosity was stuffed in a deluxe dozen at $13.95.) Though in the grim light of day, neither riddle would qualify for the Nyuk-Nyuk Olympics.
Such applied research is linked to an upcoming feature with Sunday Life, my in-depth probe of the lame-arse puns hiding in Christmas crackers. Why are they so bad? And where the hell did this groan-some habit start?
For those answers, you’ll need to read the story closer to silly season. In the meantime, how bad can bad get? What’s the corniest, queasiest, try-hardest two-liner doing the Yuletide rounds? Below I nominate three of the worst, but would love you to trump them in the anguish stakes. Post your poorest, with these as your miserable bar-setters:
Which fish go to heaven?
Angelfish
What’s sweet and swings through the jungle?
Tarzipan
What does minimum mean?
A very small mum
Times crossword 8222, appearing a few weeks back in The Australian, had some majestic clues. Among them, I’m tempted to nominate the year’s best:
Lands round front of green: God! About seven feet for an eagle (8)
For those daring to solve the clue, here’s a letter breakdown:
__ __ N __ S __ __ __
Solving the puzzle in real time, I relied on the answer’s initial (a stronger letter) to make the right leap. It’s an elegant piece of verbal engineering, and a gold-plated niblick if you can crack it.
Any other nominations for best cryptic clue of 2008? I realise we’ve a month yet to burn, but thought I might begin amassing the shortlist from my squirreled grids. Feel free to post your own pearls for considering.
Met an old friend at the school reunion who’d become a Sister of Mercy. Equally surprising, her mother had chosen the same sacred path. Can you compose the palindrome (2,2,1,3,2,1,2) she uttered to describe this new vocational twist?
SOLUTION NEXT WEEK
BB179 SOLUTION: Wedge/wood (Wedgwood pottery)
Mumbai gigolo on the road waiting for their customer
Jeez that phrase went close to making the Gold-Class Googlers for 2007/2008. However, after close consultation with the snickometer, the umpire has plumped for this lot. Howzem?
The Ten Weirdest Key-Words To Lead To This Blog
Canyon Country Dental Insurance
Preloved organs
Jamie Oliver Taree police
Stonehenge replica wallpaper
Zabaglione pregnant
Fatality stilts
Psychic monkey of ancestral crest
Fleet constipation
Ouch winced
Stoat droppings
Rodential
Aardvark
Unshaded
Nonirritant
A random sample of some single keywords that have unlocked this blog over the last calendar year. Yet none cuts the mustard compared to the following bunch of esoterica, each inquiry bringing you browsers this way.
As you can see, the last post was the Bronze Googlers, while today is the odder set of search terms. Congratulations to all of the culprits responsible - I think. Truly, what the hell was going through your heads?! Here they be:
Women milked like cows
Ruined aviator
Jellybean fabric
No good comes of eavesdropping
In wooden slippers
Headless waiter
Sculpting balloon logic
Pissing men yacht racing
Grasshopper tattoo
Mumbai gigolo on the road waiting for their customer
Kidnap skit
Smoking foxes
Fluoro pingpong ball
Just a taste of the keywords that you crazy surfers have used to chance by Cassowary Crossing over the last year. Yet none qualifies among the 30 strangest.
As you’ll see.
Today’s Bronze Google Medals are devoted to the less-than-common search terms used over the last 12 months. In coming posts I’ll be handing out Silver and Gold for the odder and oddest terms respectively, each bizarro cluster somehow arriving at this humble http. Don’t ask me how.
“Jacqueline, the envelope please…”
Taiwan waffle maker
Whitlam lunch steak
Handmade Santa socks
Meatloaf impersonator
I’m doing alright in Afrikaans
Tiptoe in love
Edible towns in Queensland
Flap closes off my nose
How to create boulders for theatre
Attractive lawyer