Afternoons for Monday 3 May 2010
1:10 Best Song Ever Written
Delicious Hot, Disgusting Cold by the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band chosen by Chris Hinton of Auckland
1:15 8 Months To Mars - what would well-known people do on an trip to Mars?
He was born near London and studied at Birmingham University before embarking on a 23 year long career in Opera. He worked as a freelance international stage director and for 15 years took senior artistic positions with notable international opera companies and festivals, principally as Associate Director at Glyndebourne Festival Opera.
Opera has taken him all over the world in a variety of roles, but almost four years ago he came to New Zealand and took up the position as General Director, The NBR New Zealand Opera. Next week marks the opening of the New Zealand Opera season; The Marriage of Figaro plays for four nights at Wellington St James Theatre, before moving to Auckland's Aotea Centre in early June. Aidan Lang joins us on a trip to Mars.
2:10 Feature stories
History will be made when the All Whites play in the soccer World Cup finals next month. Celeste Geertsema will be the first female team doctor to attend the World Cup finals. She's been with the All Whites since 2003.
Four team finalists went head to head with their ideas over the weekend in the New Zealand Imagine Cup Finals. Team One Beep from the University of Auckland emerged the winners. They've come up with an inexpensive way to send educational content to kids in third world countries participating in the "one laptop per child program. There are 1.4 Million laptops in the hands of kids in poor schools in the program. But too often the kids can't get educational programs because there are no phone lines, let alone internet access.
2:30 Reading
In today's episode of Maurice gee's novel Crime Story we meet a new character - Leanne, sister of the burglar Brent Rosser.
Stuart Devenie continues Crime Story.
2:50 Feature Album
Love is an album by the English rock band The Cult, released in 1985 on Beggars Banquet Records. The record has been released in nearly 30 countries worldwide, and sold an estimated 2.5 million copies. It gave The Cult commercial success in the UK and abroad.
The album was recorded at Jacob's Studios in Farnham, Surrey, in July and August 1985.
Many European CD pressings, as well as Canadian and Australian pressings, include two bonus tracks: Little Face as track four, and Judith as track eleven. Various other foreign pressings have several other bonus tracks. For unknown reasons, the Korean vinyl and cassette tape editions omitted the songs Big Neon Glitter and Revolution. Also inexplicably, in the Philippines a considerably shorter version of the song Brother Wolf Sister Moon was used; it lasts only 5.18, omitting most of the guitar solos in the second half of the song.
3:12 Author Slot
Isobel Coleman is senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Council of Foreign Relations. Her new book, Paradise Beneath Her Feet: How Women are Transforming the Middle East argues that Muslim women are using the Koran as an agent of change. And change will never happen for women in the Middle East unless they're based on religious beliefs .
3:33 This Way Up
Peter Griffin's looking at URL shortening services. Their the quick and easy way to reduce all those unwieldy web addresses down to a size you can easily text or email.
3:47 Science story
New Zealand's sand dunes haven't always looked like they do now. Introduced marram grass has transformed our coasts, creating steep sided dunes, quite different from the naturally lower dunes we used to have.
And most of the native sand-binding plants have lost their battle against the very successful marram, and simply disappeared.
Bridget Gibb is leading a Department of Conservation effort to restore at least some Chatham Island sand dunes to their former glory. She takes Alison Ballance to Wharekauri Beach to look at progress to date.
4:06 The Panel
The Panel today are John Bishop and Dita de Boni, discussing mining on the conservation estate, new revelations about credit agencies like Moody's and Standard & Poors - how good were their assessments of finance companies? What is it about King Lear that has the Exclusive Brethren down on it? It's the 3rd anniversary ...of the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, and an update of the problem of our disappearing bees.