Afternoons for Monday 3 February 2014
1:10 Best Song Ever Written - I Want to Marry a Lighthouse Keeper by Erika Eigen, nominated by Gillian Mayo of Devonport
1:25 Eight Months to Mars - Sir Gordon Tietjens, New Zealand's Rugby Sevens coach - he's travelled across more of the earth than most most of us - but we're sending him to Mars.
2:10 Old Moa Bones - A few years ago Mike Dickison - bored with the IT industry - went back to university and did a PhD on giant flightless birds. And a couple of months ago he was employed by the Whanganui Regional Museum to curate its huge - and largely unknown - moa bone collection. The bones - which were extracted from a swamp just a few minutes' drive from Whanganui in the 1930s and 1960s - have been kept in boxes in the museum's basement ever since.But now the museum has funding for a natural history curator and Dr Mike Dickison hopes to have the bones on public display by the end of the year.
2:20 Master's Games winner - Roger Kan - Dunedin is cementing its growing reputation as the salmon hatchery of the southern hemisphere. Two years ago, 15-thousand young salmon were released into Otago Harbour. And this year the number will grow to 280-thousand. This success helped a member of the Dunedin Community Salmon Trust earn a gold medal at the New Zealand Master's Games at the weekend. 80 year old, Roger Kan was the only competitor in the off-shore saltwater fishing category to land a salmon.
2:30 Reading - Under the Huang Jiao Tree: two journeys in China' written by Jane Carswell.
Jane spent a year as an English teacher in in China. It was, for her, a life-changing experience.
The year has turned, patches of blue sky begin to appear and Chongqing seems less secretive and less possessive. Jane begins to see her visit to China is about understanding herself, not the Chinese culture.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
MUSIC DETAILS
Barnaby Taylor: 'Descendants of the Dragon' (Taylor) rom the Production Music CD 'Chinese History' [Bruton Music Ltd BR470]
Miao Xiaoyun: 'Moon Birds' (trad) from the Production Music CD 'China, Mongolia and Tibet' [Atmosphere Music Ltd]
2:45 Feature album - Broken Bells - debut album from Broken Bells, who are James Mercer of indie rock band ,The Shins with producer and multi-instrumentalist Brian Burton (aka Danger Mouse) (2010.)
3:10 Feature Author - Greg Grandin - Author and historian Greg Grandin talks about his book, The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World. It's the story of a revolt aboard a Spanish slave ship in 1805. West African slaves took over a ship and attempted to sail back to their home. Greg Grandin says slavery's now an aberration… but the impulses behind it remain.
3:30 Voices - The Cambodian Monk - Lynda Chanwai-Earle - Lynda meets the Cambodian community's beloved 78 year monk who escaped the Killing Fields and came here to build a sanctuary for his people, over three decades ago.
4:06 Mai Chen and Josie Pagani are on The Panel today: We'll be discussing the ACT ascendancies, the new guys in charge, the intractable problems with Telecom email and what Telecom should now being doing for its long-suffering customers; the problems that investors in David Ross' ponzi scheme are having getting tax refunds on the interest they paid on investments that they say didn't exist; Auckland's scruffy berms - yes we will return to the berms topic if there's time; otherwise sometime this week. Cycling is safer than rugby, new findings which suggest that it may be media which have made our streets seem like danger zones... and the question again too of ACC injury coverage of sport that you know will result in injury sooner or later, but not of other ailments that often are not your fault but which can ruin your life financially just as much.