June Callwood on CBC's Ideas podcast

I just listened to the April 23rd podcast - June Callwood's 2002 Dalton Camp lecture. Get it on the Ideas podcast site here while you can, it's only archived for about a month. I was only vaguely aware of June Callwood, which is rather shocking considering my university education had a lot of social awareness stuff in it, and even more shocking considering I studied in a school of communication and journalism. Just a bit of an oversight there, I suppose.

Anyway, it's a funny, penetrating, and moving lecture; one of those that sets aflame the passions of social justice in a cold, dead corporate soul. Many of the stories she recounted I am familiar with - such as the young woman who was stabbed to death in New York over a period of twenty minutes, screaming the whole time, the good burghers who heard her screams, but remained uninvolved in their apartments, and the reporter who interviewed every last one of those burghers, and got the story published - but in the retelling she somehow makes the stories mean something just a little bit more than they used to.

Even for non-journalists her counsel is achingly simple: every good, kind act diminishes the evil in the world just a little bit.

Beautiful stuff. Ms Callwood passed away on April 14th, and she still had her pilot's licence.

35 degrees today. Whew

It's been a while since I've been in front of the ol' Blogger dashboard. Looks just the way I left it.

Finally got a bit of a break from work - 10 market international study, things going wrong, working in Indian, GMT, and AEST timezones means being online from about 8 am until 3 am. That sort of sucks, but after three weeks of it, it's all over. Director's gone and presented the findings and recommendations while I take a couple of days off in lieu of something else, like say overtime pay. (Being on salary has its downsides.)

I did read a few books during the past few weeks, but I can't remember what they were, and I've thrown out the library receipt too, so no joy there. They clearly didn't sink in.

What I do remember is that there are heaps of interesting podcasts over at the ABC's Radio National. The Science Show is good, though a little stodgier than Quirks and Quarks, and Counterpoint is a delightful forum for battling viewpoints and ideologies. (Psst, Gov't? Stop spending money on innovation, and just cut taxes to let people have more money to be innovative with. Innovations are driven by the market, you know.)

Anyway, also started posting pictures on Flickr and the Goog's Web Album thingy. Should be here and here.

And now it's lunch time.