South Koren YouTube hit

Park Jae Sang, who sings under the name of “Psy,” admits that he is gobsmacked by his abrupt global fame. The 34-year old rocketed up the YouTube ratings when his song “Gangnam Style” and the accompanying “horse dance” went viral, notching up almost five hundred million views.

Asked how he felt to have topped music charts throughout the world, he said, “Well, this is unbelievable. I was not ready for this.”

Who would be?

Three Aussie authors nominated for premier children’s book award

Australian children’s book author Jackie French, who has published over 100 books, including the classic Diary of a Wombat, has been shortlisted yet again for the world’s largest children’s literature award.

She is joined by two compatriots, Ursula Dubosarsky and Melina Mrchetta, who are among the 207 candidates from 67 countries shortlisted for the 2013 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award.

The list of nominees was announced at the Frankfurt Book Fair on Thursday.

Julia Gillard's misogyny rant goes viral

US bloggers are saying, “GO JULIA!”

And prominent social media are saying the same.

On Tuesday, Aussie PM Julia Gillard launched herself into an “impassioned 15-minute smackdown” of opposition leader Tony Abbott, during a fiery parliamentary debate.

She accused Abbott of a history of misogyny and sexism that dates back to his student days. The ABC video of her tirade, posted on the ABC news website and YouTube, has had more than 300,000 views, trending up and upwards under the hashtag #smackdown

And it is getting huge applause from bloggers in America, who say that US politics in general – and the presidential campaign in particular – would benefit hugely from a similar dose of vitriol.

Everyone, it seems, agrees that US politicians are too damn polite. Indeed, US entertainment site Salon says that the US should borrow Australia’s Julia, “to take on Congress’s misogynist caucus” after she “skewered” Abbott for “a career’s worth of patriarchal comments.”

Amelia Lester, in the New Yorker, said she wished Barack Obama had displayed the same temper and tenacity in last week’s presidential debate.

“Supporters of President Obama, watching Gillard cut through the disingenuousness and feigned moral outrage of the opponent to call him out for his own personal prejudice, hypocrisy, and aversion to facts, might be wishing their man would take a lesson from Australia,” she wrote.

How many books have to sell to make a profit?

An item from Digital Book World I cannot resist reposting, as I find it so pertinent and amusing.

Dunham's $3.7M Payday and What It Means


Even when self-published works can climb to the top of best-sellers lists, we're still in the era of the big book. Despite there being more manuscripts up for grabs than ever (at discount prices), publishers are still making big bets for certain titles.

Random House paid a reported $3.7 million for the U.S. and Canada rights to Lena Dunham's upcoming book, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's Learned. At, 26, Dunham is a relatively new member of the New York glitterati but already has several impressive credits to her name, including the feature film Tiny Furniture and the HBO series Girls, both of which she created and stars in.
How many copies of the confessional will RH have to sell to make a healthy profit? The math is complicated but the simple answer is "a lot."
How many copies of On Dublin Street, the self-published hit, does Samantha Young have to sell to make a profit? Well, it's not a completely fair comparison, but you get the idea.

Aussie radio personality condemned to go ad-free

Face book, 1, Aussie radio shock-jock, zero



It began when controversial radio personality Alan Jones blamed “female leaders” for political mess-ups. Females were “destroying the joint,” he claimed.

Listener Joanna Price didn’t like what she heard, so she started up a Facebook page to complain about it, called “Destroy the Joint.”

Then Alan Jones remarked at a Sydney University Liberal Club fundraiser that the father of recently bereaved Australian Prime Minster Julia Gillard “died of shame” because of her lies.

In common parlance, the fertilizer hit the fan. There was a huge and immediate public backlash, fanned, of course, by “Destroy the Joint.” Panic in the corridors of Mr. Jones’s employers, The Macquarie Radio Network, led to a press conference where the radio personality apologized for having misspoken in such an outrageous fashion, followed by an “unambiguous and unconditional” apology on air.

It didn’t work. 85,000 people signed a petition calling for him to be fired, while the “Destroy the Joint” Facebook page urged its 11,000+ followers to write to advertisers and “destroy Alan’s joint.”

More than a dozen (“Destroy the Joint” say 74) sponsors, including Woolworths, Coles, Mercedes-Benz and ING Direct, paid attention, and pulled advertising worth about two million Aussie dollars a month. The network’s share price dropped 14%.

The network has responded by making the Alan Jones breakfast program advert-free. They’re not happy about it, of course – a spokesman said that the Network had been subject to “21st century censorship, via cyber-bullying.”

Joanna Price, on the other hand, is delighted. “We are ordinary people speaking back to the big guys who have never had anyone speak back to them before,” she said.

Go Facebook.

James Bond tops music charts

Moody theme tune wins bigtime

From the BBC

Skyfall, the new Bond theme sung by Adele, has topped the iTunes chart after being released online in the early hours of Friday morning.
It was number one within 10 hours of being released, overtaking last week's official UK number one Gangnam Style.
The full single was released at 00:07 BST, after a 90 second clip was apparently leaked online this week.

The 23rd Bond film, Skyfall - Daniel Craig's third outing as 007 - is released in UK cinemas on 26 October.

Adele ended months of speculation over her involvement on Monday, when she posted a picture on Twitter, featuring the cover page of the sheet music for the Skyfall theme, bearing her name alongside that of longtime producer and co-writer Paul Epworth.

Epworth told BBC 6 Music that the "dark and moody" theme was intended to echo the narrative of the film.

"The [Bond theme] songs seem to fall into groups, in terms of subject matter," said Epworth. "Some of them have a romanticism to them, and some of them are very much about the narrative of the film.

"We went very much with the narrative of the film. We talk a lot about Bond's relationship to the country... and to MI6.

"There's a little bit of that in the lyrics, and I guess we were trying to find a way to almost make that romantic, you know?

Facebook counts its billionth user

And Mark Zuckerberg had this to say:

Facebook isn’t the first thing people have made to help us connect. We belong to a rich tradition of people making things that bring us together. Today, we honor this tradition. We honor the humanity of the people we serve. We honor the everyday things people have always made to bring us together: Chairs, doorbells, airplanes, bridges, games. These are all things that connect us. And now Facebook is a part of this tradition of things that connect us too.

With a string of metaphors like that, he should write a 50-shades-style book...

Damon Runyon, born October 4

The short story writer who defined the Prohibition Era

Distinct and idiosyncratic, Runyon's New York underworld characters will live forever.

He spun humorous tales of gamblers, hustlers, actors, and gangsters, few of whom went by "square" names, preferring instead colorful monikers such as "Nathan Detroit," "Benny Southstreet," "Big Jule," "Harry the Horse," "Good Time Charley," "Dave the Dude," or "The Seldom Seen Kid."

Never heard of him?  He was the guy behind Guys and Dolls.

Born 1880 in a family of newspapermen, Runyon (originally "Runyan" until a newspaper report misspelled it) had a flamboyance of his own.

At the age of 18 he enlisted in the US Army to fight in the Spanish-American war.  Somehow, he emerged as a newspaper columnist, specializing in covering baseball matches for several papers, starting 1911. His knack for spotting the eccentric and the unusual, on the field or in the stands, is credited with revolutionizing the way baseball was covered.

One year, while covering spring training in Texas, he met Pancho Villa in a bar in Texas and later accompanied the unsuccessful American expedition into Mexico searching for Villa. It was while he was in Mexico that he met the little girl he eventually married.

Gambling, particularly on craps or horse races, was a common theme of Runyon's works, and he was a notorious gambler himself. One of his paraphrases from a well-known line in Ecclesiastes ran: "The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that's how the smart money bets."

A heavy drinker as a young man, he seems to have quit the bottle soon after arriving in New York, after his drinking nearly cost him the courtship of the woman who became his first wife, Ellen Egan (who was NOT the girl he'd met in Mexico). He remained a heavy smoker.

His best friend was mobster accountant Otto Berman, and he incorporated Berman into several of his stories under the alias "Regret, the horse player." When Berman was killed in a hit on Berman's boss, Dutch Schultz, Runyon quickly assumed the role of damage control for his deceased friend, correcting erroneous press releases, including one that stated Berman was one of Schultz's gunmen, to which Runyon replied, "Otto would have been as effective a bodyguard as a two-year-old."

I guess you're wondering about that Mexican girl. She resurfaced in New York about 1928, when she called the American seeking him out. Her intention was to take him up on a promise he had made -- to find her a dancing job in New York, once she had finished the education he had paid for back in 1916.  He was instantly infatuated, leading to the break-up of his marriage.

Her name was Patrice Amati del Grande, and she became his companion after he and Ellen separated. After Ellen Runyon died of the effects of her own drinking problems, Runyon and Patrice married, but that had a sad ending too, when Patrice left Runyon for a younger man.

Runyon died in New York City from throat cancer in late 1946, at age 66. His body was cremated, and his ashes were scattered from an airplane over Broadway in Manhattan by Captain Eddie Rickenbacker on December 18, 1946.

October 3 is James Herriot's day

Those of you who are old enough will remember the hours of fun that animal-chronicler JAMES HERRIOT gave the world

He found both animals and humans funny, but displayed a wonderful tolerance and understanding, too.

James Herriot was the pen name of James Alfred Wight, also known as Alf Wight. Born 3 October 1916, he was a British veterinary surgeon who wrote a bestselling series of semi-authobiographical books of stories about animals and their owners, notably All Creatures Great and Small.

He always wanted to write a book, but his practice in Yorkshire kept him so busy that he didn't sit down at a typewriter until the age of fifty.  Like most new writers, he collected rejection slips for a while, then realized that he had to focus on something he knew really well--life as a rural vet.  If Only They Could Talk was the result, and was published in 1970, under a penname he chose after watching a Scottish football goalkeeper, Jim Herriot, on TV.

Sales were slow, but his publishers, Michael Joseph, accepted a second book, which didn't look promising, either, until the New York publisher, St Martin's Press, published both books in a single volume, called All Creatures Great and Small.  It was an instant success, leading to many sequels, and movie and TV adaptations.

James Herriot passed away in 1995, at the age of seventy-eight.

Romance still wins in the Indie stakes

Amazon Self-Published Bestsellers for the Week of Monday, October 1, 2012
(Listed by GalleyCat.  Last week’s rank in parentheses)

1. On Dublin Street by Samantha Young: “Burying the grief, ignoring her demons, and forging ahead without any real attachments has worked well for her so far but when Joss moves into a fantastic apartment on Dublin Street, her carefully guarded world is shaken to its core by her new roommate’s sexy older brother.” (1)

2. Down to You by M. Leighton: “Olivia Townsend is nothing special. She’s just a girl working her way through college so she can return home to help her father run his business. She’s determined not to be the second woman in his life to abandon him.”

3. Naked by Raine Miller: “An American art student at the University of London and part-time photographic model, Brynne Bennett’s putting her life back on track with school and lots of hard work. When ultra successful London businessman, Ethan Blackstone, buys her nude portrait, he isn’t taking ‘no’ for an answer.” (4)

4. Better Off Without Him by Dee Ernst: “Mona Berman is a best-selling Romance writer and happy endings are what she does best. So when her husband of twenty years leaves her for somebody 15 years younger, 20 pounds lighter, and French, she’s got a lot of adjusting to do.” (3)

5. Blindfold Innocence by Alessandra Torre: “Brad De Luca is incorrigible. The premier divorce attorney in town, he is a forty-year old walking hunk of sex, bedding half the town, including his own clients. Brad is used to getting whatever, and whomever, he wants.”

6. Our Husband by Stephanie Bond: “Three women from different walks of life–a doctor, a socialite, and a stripper–find out they have one thing in common: a husband!” (1)

7. The Mighty Storm by Samantha Towle: “It’s been twelve years since Tru Bennett last saw Jake Wethers, her former best friend and boy she once loved. Jake Wethers, sexy, tattooed and deliciously bad lead singer, and brains behind The Mighty Storm, one of biggest bands in the world, left Tru with a broken heart.” (6)

8. White Trash Beautiful by Teresa Mummert: “Cass lives a depressing life in a small trailer park in Eddington, Ga with her mother and abusive boyfriend Jackson. She works hard to barely make ends meet. One day Tucker White, the lead singer in the band Damaged, walks into her diner.”

9. Beyond the Veil by Quinn Loftis: “Though the Serbian pack has been brought to heel thanks to the downfall of their Alpha, the war is far from over. Desdemona, a witch of unfathomable power, has escaped the wolves’ wrath, but she will not go quietly into the night.”

10. License to Thrill by Stephanie Bond: “He wasn’t the man she wanted to trust…but when the stakes turn deadly, it’s nice to have a hard body between her and trouble!”