Pic of the week is here because the blog needs a bit more colour.

However, the venue staging was awful, in terms of its accessibility. High, and only accessible by temporary stairs, the stage was off-limits to anyone in a wheelchair, anyone in an electric scooter and anyone with a significant mobility impairment. This included one recipient in a mobility scooter who – ironically – won an award celebrating how much she’d given to the local community through her participation over decades.

This should not be acceptable to us as a community in the twenty-first century.

People with a disability should have the same opportunities to participate on-stage as everyone else. I’ve seen it several times in the last few years, so it’s not a problem confined to Western Australia. Far from it. These sort of things are primarily controlled by the venue, not the convention committee, and can’t be fixed unless addressed a long way out. That’s why we need to talk about it as a community now.

We wouldn’t for a second tolerate a sign saying: “No red-heads or women allowed on stage” and we shouldn’t tolerate staging that says exactly same thing to people with a disability.

Ultimately, it’s sensible on many levels. Proper access for people with a disability is also better access for older members of our community who also face mobility challenges too.

I raised the issue with Damien Warman and Dave Cake after the ceremony, both of whom are on a sub-committee that helps run the awards process. They understood my concerns and gave a commitment to undertake steps to help address the issue. But ultimately they can’t fix it. They can’t force a convention committee to do it, and they shouldn’t have to. We should insist upon it as a community.

If it means staging the awards differently – we should do that.

If it means committees asking someone with a disability to walk the space with them before setup – we should do that.

If it means tougher negotiations with hotels – we should do that.

If it means everyone pays $5 extra on their membership to allow for improved staging – we should do that.

These things are important to us as a community, and we should fix them.

Pic of the week is of my daughter waiting in LA Airport ahead of a flight to New York. Oh, to be eight again and lost in the power of an interesting ceiling. 

Thanks Yuri.

I’ve writtern about space before but the section below from this piece I did after the death of the Space Shuttle Challenger crew in 2003 still captures well my thoughts about the grandest of achievements.

I believe there are myriad reasons for people to meet the continued challenge of exploration in space: scientific, technological, economic and finally, perhaps, simply because it is there. The same reason we climb mountains and sail seas. It enriches our spirit.

That is not the only reason. But for mine, it is the best. Look at the names of the shuttles: Enterprise, Atlantis, Discovery, Endeavour, Challenger and Columbia. These are not just names of historic sea-going vessels; they are also the names of some of the strongest elements of the human spirit.

That spirit did not die when Columbia broke up. Even if the public had become complacent about the hazards of travel into space, the Columbia crew had not. They knew the risks, and they accepted them. Throughout their training, during the mission and on their way home, they embraced the contradictions. As should we.

Yuri Gagarin died before we conquered the Moon. But he took a small step and a giant leap too.

Yesterday I saw my first roller derby match. The rules of the game are pretty simple. Two teams of five players skate around a small circuit with one attacking “jammer” from each team trying to score points by lapping opposing defenders. It took me a while to follow the intricacies of the game but as I got a handle on it I started to realise the game had a lot to teach me about writing.

Go hard or go home

I expected the skaters to ease into the match; maybe take a few laps to warm up and find their wheels. No. As soon as the whistle blew the jammers were speeding ahead pushing their way past defenders from the opposing team and scoring points.

And so it should be with your writing. Doesn’t matter what you’re writing, if you wait to grab the reader’s attention, you’re gone. Get in there early and deploy whatever tools you have at your disposal to engage the reader. Early points on the board matter.

Fall down

Speed-skating around a circuit not much bigger than a tennis court with nine other people just waiting to bump into you, means you’re going to fall down. The roller-derby girls know this and practice falling onto their knee guards instead of their hands. They fall to their knees and slide for a little bit as they slow down. It’s kind of poetic after a while.

Safe writing is boring writing. Everyone knows safe writing when they see it. It’s the sort of stuff you see on the social pages of newspapers and in government reports. It might be competent and occasionally, might even border on engaging. But how much did the writer learn along the way? Think about the last time you stretched your writing muscles and aimed a bit too high or went a bit too fast. Even when you were shovelling up the crap left behind, didn’t it feel kinda good going fast then falling down?

Get up again and keep on skating

After sliding on their knee guards for a while the roller derby girls get back up and keep on skating. I even saw one jammer fall to her knees, slide for a bit then get back up and keep scoring points.

Once you’ve monumentally stuffed up a piece of your writing so badly even your cat refuses to have shredded bits of the manuscript in its litter box get back up again. Too often writing suffers from an author’s failure to stretch their skills or their refusal to keep on pushing the boundaries when they stuff up. Push your writing hard, fall down, learn, get up. Repeat.

It’s okay to have nice things

What I wasn’t expecting at the roller derby were the costumes, the almost compulsory fish-net stockings, the mad hair-cuts and the dance routines. The whole evening was full of spectacle. Whether it was Amber “Eva Brawl” Lee tearing up the track, girls in outrageously short shorts or team managers in bright yellow suits, there was no shortage of entertaining things to engage with.

Cultivate some spectacle in your writing. Make it sing for you. Know your writing style and don’t be afraid to show off some of its best elements.

Stay close to your audience

There were about 2500 people watching the two matches with me. The farthest was probably 30m from the circuit but the closest “suicide” seats were right beside the skaters. The skaters sped by lap after lap only metres from the spectators. And after the games finishes they mingled with the audience, chatting and posing for photos. During the game the announcer declared a nearby pub as the official after-game venue for any audience members who wanted to join in the after-derby drinking.

A writer’s job is to be read. More and more, writers need to engage directly with their audience to help achieve that. Whether it’s through blogs or social media writers need to develop a platform to market themselves and their writing and increase their chance of being read and being published. But you’ve got to love the people you’re hanging around with. Authenticity is key.

Top picture: Gomisan

Disability Bitch has done a nice piece on it from the British perspective. It’s worth a read, especially given what’s going on in the UK at the moment. And lots of others have run through things like his choice of language and some of the logical fallacies inherent in his argument.

I can’t work up too much vitriol about it because mostly it just strengthens my belief that actors who play intelligent and cultured characters should not walk out their door without a script in their hand. I do however suspect Mr Irons may rethink his comments if he was confronted by a few angry people waving a saw, a few bottles of vodka and a pack of cigarettes in front of him while looking longingly at his left leg.

New Yorkers have taken to putting padlocks onto the Brooklyn Bridge with notes of affection on them. Probably my favourite pic of my 2011 New York visit. Madison and Wojtek, you crazy kids. Hope you make it.

 It is also, bad for democracy.

 The format is pretty simple – host Tony Jones leads five other people in an hour-long discussion about issues of the day. Questions can come from a live audience or from people who have submitted online.

 The problem for Q&A is how it structures its panels.

 Since it began in 2008 Q&A has aired 94 episodes. Only four those episodes have featured a panel entirely devoid of politicians. A massive 96.75% of episodes have featured one or more politicians (or former pollies) on the panel.

 And tonight kicks off in a similar vein with two prominent former politicians included.

 The messages this sends is pretty clear – all issues need political solutions. An informed citizenry can’t solve problems on its own.

 Too much of our daily lives are framed by expectations that politicians ‘will fix it.’ Too often we look to politicians – and just to politicians – to solve our problems. Q&A reinforces this.

 I wouldn’t suggest politicians don’t appear at all, or even that politicians don’t appear on a significant number of episodes. But once you invite one politician on, you invariably have to invite someone from the other side on to balance things out. And political dialogue is a very particular kind of dialogue that isn’t always suited to illuminating a topic inside the space of an hour.

 So here’s a humble suggestion, Q&A. Instead of only having one episode out of every 25 as a pollie free zone, how about you aim for one in every four. I’m sure people would watch the show if the episodes featuring politician panellists dropped from almost 97% of the total to just 75%.

 It’s important to hear from our political leaders, and that we get to question them about the issues of the day. But Q&A could play a bigger role encouraging broader social discourse if it refrained from taking the easy option when putting together its panels. Let’s hear from more business leaders, more young people, more writers, more internet entrepeneurs about their thoughts on solutions to our problems. It will actually help imp[rove our democratic discourse.

Rat Girl had a rat she kept down her top and Bangle Boy had… bangles. I’m thinking of pitching a graphic novel series about the two of them.

In no particular order, they are:

• content aggregators care much about Rupert Murdoch putting content behind a paywall,
• increasing the amount of media content in controlled spaces (ie the iPad) could significantly undermine Google’s business model,
• it will become easier to stop people breaking DRM and other copy-protection measures in the future, not harder, and
• the implication that radio stations, TV channels and other internet sites don’t read newspapers and re-use the content.

They’re all worth having a laugh at for various reasons. I’m surprised a technology writer doesn’t make more about how Google structures its search algorithim. I’m also surprised a technology writer thinks the golden age of copy protection is apparently ahead of us, not behind.

But the most interesting thing in Farrer’s piece is that citizen journalists, bloggers and tweeters have more to fear from News Ltd and other old media organisations locking up content than the other way around. Farrer makes the not unreasonable comment that if traditional news content was successfully locked away, tweeters, bloggers and citizen journos would have to go elsewhere for content to ‘riff’ off. It’s a big if but even if he was right in saying it could be done successfully, it doesn’t matter. News Ltd, Fairfax and other big media outlets should be more afraid of citizen journos having reduced opportunities to riff off their content than the other way round.

People are already paying less attention to traditional media, they’re digesting less traditional media and diversifying their sources when they do. They’re paying more attention to their Twitter feeds and Facebook updates than ever before because they feel that the content is relevant and that it matters. Locking conternt up further encourages more of that, not less. News Ltd and Fairfax et al should do everything they can to encourage bloggers and tweeters to hang off their every word.

To do otherwise risks speeding up a virtuous circle that has already begun and risks leaving old media out in the cold.