Mirrors Of Obsidian - some seriously talented Irish mates of mine. Check ‘em out….
Via Doctor Who Official on TumblrThe Doctor’s Facebook Wall (BuzzFeed)
Click through to embiggen.
Education.
Random thought of the day - in the Potterverse, do the kids at Hogwarts do regular subjects as well as Potions, Defence Against The Dark Arts, etc? Who teaches geography, maths and English at Hogwarts?
Someone go ask JK Rowling, quick.
Underexposed.
I regularly read a couple of British expat message boards, keeping tabs on what other people in my situation are doing with themselves, how they’re feeling about being away from home, how they find their new situation and, in some cases, what their plans are for going home.
One thing I was reading earlier on one of these forums which interested me is that apparently younger people are finding it harder to fit in in Australia these days, moreso than older people of my generation. I think I know why this is.
Back when I was a teenager, there was loads of Australian stuff on TV - Sons And Daughters, The Flying Doctors, Prisoner Cell Block H, The Paul Hogan Show, Blue Heelers, and, of course, Neighbours and Home And Away. Not to mention the surfeit of Australians on mainstream British TV at the time, such as Rolf Harris, Dame Edna, and even the execrable likes of the Neighbours alumni who turned their hands to pop music like Kylie Minogue, Jason Donovan and Natalie Imbruglia. In other aspects of popular culture, there was also more Australian stuff to be seen back then - in music there was AC/DC, Midnight Oil, Men At Work and the aforementioned abominations that were Kylie and Jason, Castlemaine XXXX, silly ads for Foster’s lager, Muriel’s Wedding, the Sydney Olympics and so on.
Apart from Neighbours and Home And Away, which have been demoted to the televisual dusty broom cupboard that is Channel Five, they’ve all gone and haven’t been replaced by anything else. I was at least hoping that the Australian version of Top Gear might get an airing - it’s quite good, if not quite as good as the original. But alas not.
What it boils down to is that, basically, most younger people just aren’t being exposed to anything Australian any more. There’s plenty of Australians working in films these days, but, with the exception of Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman in Baz Luhrmann’s Australia, none of them ever get to use their real accents or to bring anything “Australian” to the mix.
And this is in the UK - Australia’s parent country. You never see anything Australian in the US, apart from Outback Steakhouse, and other than boomerangs and pictures of kangaroos and koalas on the walls, there’s nothing Australian about that. I’m not sure you can even get a Bloomin’ Onion in Australia. Most Americans aren’t even aware that the likes of Hugh Jackman, Nicole Kidman, Chris Hemsworth, Guy Pearce and Karl Urban are Australian, and have never heard of any Australian TV shows. They know about kangaroos, “those cuddly bears with the big noses”, spiders and not a lot else. And yet, Australians are surrounded by British and American culture. All the big British and US TV shows are shown there, they listen to all the same music, read about all the same celebrities, watch all the same films…
Not sure who to blame, but Australia should definitely work harder to export their culture - for most people these days, it’s a big, hot and almost empty country on the other side of the world that they don’t know much about, and I think it’s Australia’s responsibility to correct this. Australia deserves better. It’s a great, vibrant place with a strong cultural identity and more people need to know about it outside the confines of the goings-on in Ramsay Street or Summer Bay.
Disconnected.
One of the things that made life that little bit more bearable being 3500 miles from home was the fact that I could get BBC Radio 1 on Sirius/XM in the car. To be honest, I dislike most of the music that’s played on Radio 1 (with the exception of Dan Carter’s rock show), but I listened for the radio personalities, the UK news, the silly contests and that little extra connection to home.
And, last week, Sirius/XM decided to remove the channel from their programming.
Not a good move. Not least because some of us were listening for the news of friends and family back home who were surrounded by rioting. My home town (Croydon) was the epicentre of some of the worst of it. Plus, having R1 was like having a friend in the car with you, and now it’s gone.
So, in this day and age, what do slighted customers do? After complaining directly to Sirius and receiving nothing more than a crappy form letter reply, they head for social media to vent their spleens. There is a Facebook group demanding the return of R1 that is currently over 4200 members strong, a very active Twitter hashtag and plenty of blogs criticising Sirius/XM over their unfortunate decision.
This has had an effect - Sirius/XM have announced that they’re going to bring Radio 1 back, but only to their online service. What they seem to forget is that all BBC radio stations can be listened to online for free, and they want their users to keep their SXM subscriptions, and pay an additional $3 a month more to listen online! This simply isn’t good enough - many, many subscriptions have been cancelled because of this - not just those of British ex-pats, but of Anglophile Americans and Canadians who have grown to love the radio personalities, the features and the news coverage. And yes, for some of them, the music. Personally if I ever have to hear Swagger Jagger by Cher Lloyd again, it’ll be a thousand years too soon. Many people have found alternative ways to listen, either via smartphone apps or by downloading and timeshifting the shows themselves on their computers (this was my solution). It works sufficiently well, but it’s not what we should be having to do.
Anyway, if you’re American or Canadian and come across this blog, and you have a Sirius/XM subscription, please consider joining the fight by reblogging this, posting to the Twitter hashtag I linked to above or joining the Facebook group.
