Wellywood or what?

What sign should be put on the hillside at Wellington International Airport?

This one?  Or something more local?  A whimsy?  Or a symbol?

Eighteen months ago, the powers that run Wellington Airport announced they were going to put a huge sign on a steep, barren hillside on their land.

It was going to read WELLYWOOD.

International outrage.  Truly.  I wrote about it myself.

Such was the backlash, that our newspaper, The Dominion Post, took a hand.  Suggestions were solicited for alternatives, with various spot prizes offered, and ideas poured in.

Now the suggestions have been culled down to five, and the public is invited to vote for their favorites.

Here are the five suggestions.  Why not have a vote?  And you can like the page on facebook, too, if you wish.  Just remember that voting ends on November 9, when the winner will be faced against that infernal Wellywood proposition.

Which will win?  Only time will tell.

VOTE NOW

Happy birthday Statue of Liberty

Friday marks the 125th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty's dedication.

Slideshow
The statue was a gift of friendship from France, entitled "Liberty Enlightening the World."

"The statue has evolved in meaning since she first graced our shores 125 years ago," said David Luchsinger, superintendent of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, in a release. “She began as a symbol of friendship between France and the United States, evolved into a symbol of our great country, and is known today as an international symbol of freedom for people everywhere. This coming Friday is an opportunity to celebrate her complete legacy.”

Between 1820 and 1920, approximately 34 million persons immigrated to the United States, three-fourths of them staying permanently. For many of these newcomers, their first glimpse of America was the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor.

The statue, sculpted by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, had been conceived of as a gift of friendship from the people of France marking the two nations' commitment to liberty. France provided $400,000 for the 151 ft 1 in. (46.05 m) statue, and a fundraising drive in the United States netted $270,000 for the 89-foot pedestal.

The Jewish American poet Emma Lazarus saw the statue as a beacon to the world. A poem she wrote to help raise money for the pedestal, and which is carved on that pedestal, captured what the statue came to mean to the millions who migrated to the United States seeking freedom, and who have continued to come unto this day.
–The U.S. Department of State

“The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles.
From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

I wish a few politicians could be forced to read that poem.  And think about it.

Spin-off for Icelandic literature

An unexpected benefit from being Frankfurt Book Fair's guest of honor, 2011

Each year, the organizers of the great Frankfurt Book Fair nominate a country to be their "guest of honor."

It's a huge opportunity, with immense potential -- one that innovative Amazon Publishing has taken, creating yet more headlines to make traditional publishers nervous.

Amazon Crossing, one of Amazon Publishing's six imprints, has teamed up with the Icelandic Literature Fund to publish ten titles by Icelandic authors.

See their press release, below:

AmazonCrossing

With translations of foreign language books from around the world, AmazonCrossing makes award-winning and bestselling books accessible to many readers for the first time. All AmazonCrossing titles are also available on Kindle.

Spotlight on Iceland

AmazonCrossing has teamed up with the Icelandic Literature Fund to release 10 Icelandic titles over the next year, ranging from crime thrillers and historical fiction to award winners and coming-of-age stories. See our first five selections and visit each book's page to download an excerpt.

Lessons from Novels

Self-help from classics

Bookshelves groan with self-help books, from diet for arthritis to how to learn Zen, and Body Mind and Spirit books abound.  If we read them all, we'd be better, healthier people, for sure.

Why not take an easier way, and get advice for life from classic novels, instead?

So posits the renowed Politics & Prose Bookstore and Coffeehouse in Washington DC, with this very funny facebook slideshow.

Enjoy!

Code of ancient secret society cracked

For three centuries a manuscript called the Copiale Cipher has kept its secrets 

Now a computer program has helped to reveal its hidden mysteries     


US and Swedish researchers have cracked the code of the 300-year-old Copiale Cipher with the help of a new computer program that may help to decipher other legendary secretive manuscripts.

"This opens up a window for people who study the history of ideas and the history of secret societies," computer scientist Kevin Knight of the University of Southern California (which provided the image, above) said in a statement Wednesday.

"Historians believe that secret societies have had a role in revolutions, but all that is yet to be worked out, and a big part of the reason is because so many documents are enciphered."

The 75,000-character Copiale Cipher describes the rituals and political leanings of an 18th-century German secret society, which bound the manuscript in gold and green brocade paper, the USC statement said.

The rituals, encoded in a series of abstract symbols interspersed with Greek and Roman characters, indicate that the secretive group had a fascination with eye surgery but that members were not actually eye doctors.

From the Lebanon Daily Star.

Read more

New Wiki Coffin story

The April issue of Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine is coming out in January 2012

Well, that is mysterious, but very pleasing for me, as the latest Wiki Coffin story will be featured.

Called "Salt," it takes place in the Bay of Islands, New Zealand.

Wiki's flamboyant Yankee father, Captain William Coffin, sails into the Bay with a very strange cargo -- complete with a buried corpse.

British Library reinstates Amazon link

Should the BL catalogue direct browsers to Amazon online?

Many people would say, NO!  And booksellers like British Waterstones agree.  However, after crumbling to criticism, the British Library is now reinstating its link to Amazon on online catalogue records.

The link takes readers of the library's catalogue records directly to the sales page for each title on the Amazon.co.uk website.

Waterstone's James Daunt heavily criticised this in The Bookseller last Friday (14th October). He said: "It's disappointing to say the least that a very British institution is driving readers away from local libraries and high street bookshops." The link was removed from the library's catalogue records shortly afterwards.

But now it is back.

The British Library explanation for the link, its temporary removal, and its reinstatement is an astonishing example of administration-inspired-media-speak. 

Read the whole item at The Bookseller.

Jeffrey Paparoa Holman sets sail with Tupaia

Review in New Zealand Books

"One of the great virtues of Joan Druett's style of historical writing in this extensive reassenssment of Tupaia's role in Pacific history, is her ability to make poetry from maritime history, to evoke the world of 18th century sailors and their ships with a lyrical delight," writes Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, who goes on to say, "With a novelist's narrative muscle, she has crafted a readable and convincing tale of a wronged and forgotten Raiatean hero to whom the record has given precious little credit for the success of Cook's first voyage to New Zealand from Tahiti and his subsequent circumnavigation of these islands."

Jeffrey Paparoa Holman (this year's University of Waikato Writer in Residence) may not agree with some of the conclusions I drew from detailed study of the logs and journals, but had much that is good to say.  "What is exciting about this necessary and fascinating study," he writes, "is the picture that emerges of Tupaia as a kind of co-ethnographer with the Europeans, clearly seen in the imaginative placement of his artwork alongside the better-known images of Parkinson ...

"Certainly, his role as a translator and explainer of Europeans to Maori and vice versa in the early and later New Zealand encounters rank him along with Cook as our first genuine ethnographer of Maori.  For this insight alone, Druett's retelling of his life has a value beyond its reiterations of how badly he was wronged: without him, such encounters would have shown up in far less sharp focus in the record of our earliest meetings.

"As is typical of recent Random House New Zealand history titles, the book is beautifully presented and competitively priced: sumptuous would be a fair description.  Lavishly illustrated in colour, with charts and maps, it is a pleasure to behold and explore.  There are no page references in the text (the typical scholarly apparatus), but this is cleverly circumnavigated with all citations listed and discussed in a commentary section, divided into chapters, at the end of the book.  I found it quite simple to skim through these after reading each chapter.  It's a good compromise between the Michael King Penguin History of New Zealand model (no references given at all) and the rather more pointy-headed footnote system (a la Judith Binney et al). ...

"I'm no great fan of inflated book titles that tell me I'm about to read "a remarkable story": if it is one, the reading of it will let me know.  Yet this truly is, and we're the richer for Druett's being captured by its potential, and her dogged persistence in doing the hard yards tha have given us a readable and thoughtful portrait of Tupaia and his times. ..[T]he historiography of Pacific exploration needs many more hands on deck like hers."

WikiLeaks forced to suspend leaking

WikiLeaks closes down

The cause?  Simple lack of crucial funding.

Follwing a boycott spearheaded by Visa nad Mastercard, dating back to December, funding for the trouble-making operation has plunged to almost zilch.

Julian Assange (pictured) stated that, "In order to ensure our future survival, WikiLeaks is now forced to temporarily suspend its publishing operations and aggressively fundraise in order to fight back against this blockade and its proponents."
"If WikiLeaks does not find a way to remove this blockade, given our current levels of expenditure, we will simply not be able to continue by the turn of the New Year."

The influential Australian newspaper has condemned the embargo as politically motivated.

Michelle Obama to publish her first book

Inspirational, and what's more, it's about gardening

Jason Boog of GalleyCat @ mediabistro.com, reports that Michelle Obama's  American Grown: How the White House Kitchen Garden Inspires Families, Schools, and Communities will be luanched by Crown Publishers next April. The four-color hardcover is the first book written by the First Lady.

Mrs. Obama will not earn an advance for the book, and plans “to donate all net or after-tax author proceeds to a charity or charities to be named later.” Crown Publishing Group publisher Maya Mavjee made the announcement today.

Here’s more about the book: “Through telling the story of the White House kitchen garden, Mrs. Obama will explore in American Grown how increased access to healthy, affordable food can promote better eating habits and improve health of families and communities across America. Mrs. Obama will describe how her daughters Sasha and Malia were catalysts for change in her own family’s eating behavior, which inspired Mrs. Obama to plant an edible garden on the South Lawn – the first since Eleanor Roosevelt’s ‘Victory Garden’ planted during World War II. The book will be inspirational and instructive and will provide ideas and resources for readers to get involved in the movement to create community, school, and urban gardens, support local farmers’ markets, and make small lifestyle changes to achieve big health results.”