The crowd wanted tears and, of course, they got them. An hour into the filming of Surprise Oprah! A Farewell Spectacularin Chicago, the talk show queen's mascara was dribbling down her cheeks. Between the tears, screeches, hugs and ''oh my Gooooouuurds,'' celebrities declared their passion for Oprah Winfrey. Some said it with words (''She has balls,'' gushed Madonna) and others with song. Rosie O'Donnell, flanked by dancers, sang Fever with Oprahfied lyrics. Winfrey's enduring message to her fans is that nothing heals emotional wounds like airing them before a salivating crowd. Maria Shriver learnt the lesson well, sponging up the sympathy of the 13,000-strong crowd one day after her husband Arnold Schwarzenegger announced he had fathered an illegitimate child. For all the hysteria, there is one more episode to go after the farewell special airs over May 23 and 24 in the US.
IN THE NAME OF A LABOR SCANDAL
There was a time when the NSW Labor Party confected its own scandals. A time when ministers sought out their own internet porn, and slept with their own mistresses, and allegedly cavorted in their own underwear on their own Chesterfields in their own offices. And so it was with a little nostalgia yesterday that The Diary received a dirt sheet on the opposition spokeswoman on this and that, Cherie Burton. It was like the good old days when she lost her licence and embarrassed the then premier after refusing to take a breath test when stopped for drink-driving. It appeared from the carefully highlighted photocopy that she had again been stopped by police. An officer detected the ''strong odour of an alcoholic beverage'' before giving Ms Burton a sobriety test. And, like old times, she failed. Except the Ms Burton in question was from Richmond Hills, New York, which is nowhere near the seat of Kogarah. And she was a 46-year-old African-American woman. ''I've got no knowledge of that,'' a spokesman for the Premier, Barry O'Farrell, said of the documents. ''I can't really comment on it. The Labor Party have been known to do these things against their own. It's not necessarily come from us.'' The real Cherie Burton did not return the Herald'scalls. No blood sample was requested.
QANTAS IN THE GUN
Ordinarily when an airline misplaces a passenger's luggage it supplies a pair of emergency knickers and an oversized T-shirt. There was no such courtesy for the champion Australian shooters Russell and Lauryn Mark when Qantas lost their $30,000 worth of guns and 150 rounds of ammunition. Flying from Melbourne to Serbia to compete in the European Grand Prix, the pair told Qantas that European regulations required them to recheck their weapons when changing planes in Frankfurt. Airline staff confidently assured them this was not the case and checked them all the way through. At last report, the guns and ammunition were somewhere in Frankfurt airport - perhaps. ''Three hours ago they got in touch to ask what colour bags they were in,'' Russell Mark told us yesterday. ''That's three days after we reported they were lost.'' While a couple of guns floating around an airport might seem a security concern, Mark has more pressing matters to mind. Unless the guns arrive soon he will miss his competitions - Olympic qualifying events. ''Lauryn is already out of her competition,'' he said. ''When we fly home on Saturday, they'd better upgrade me to the pointy end of the plane.'' Qantas, a long-term sponsor of the Australian Olympic team, released an apologetic - perhaps even sheepish - statement last night. ''Our staff will be working through the night to find the baggage,'' a spokesman said. ''The correct baggage procedures were followed by Qantas staff.''
BY THE BOOK
If not for the cunning of about 500 Sydney University students, such titles as Catalogue of Vases in the British Museumand the 1972 Calcutta-produced Unpublished Records of the Government might have been lost to storage or destroyed. With undercover library staff, the students have staged a mass book-borrowing event in response to the university's plan to remove half of the stack in a library renovation. The university librarian, John Shipp, had said a ''dust test'' showed that not only were 58 per cent of monographs not borrowed, most were unread. Books neglected for five years would go first. Armed with dusters and library cards, book lovers converged on the sandstone's main library to thwart the removal process. An organiser, Jo Ball, said post-colonialist magazines from Papua New Guinea, titles on deer stalking, Bedouin justice and old copies of Lesbians on the Loose were hastily plucked from the shelves. ''One woman brought a shopping trolley into the library and filled it up. She said to me, 'I went and dusted half of level four, down the back.' '' While Shipp diligently handed out information pamphlets outside, Ball said his staff inside declared themselves subversives. ''The whole foyer was filled up with people lining up and those who were reading. We're not being dictated to by the bureaucracy.''
A BOOK, A GLASS AND IF THAT FAILS, A LAUGH
IT IS a common malaise for the black-skivvied crowd at literary festivals. A few days in, the bag of new books begins to drag at the elbow and the names of speaking authors begin to blur.
Was that Fatima Bhutto we saw on opening night? Or was it Ingrid Betancourt?
The festival offers a cure for the mid-festival droop: alcohol. A drink or two at the Festival Cafe at Pier 2/3 should put some life into listless book lovers. This year is the first time the festival has hosted free after-work social events.
Tonight, the Festival Cafe transforms into a cyber lounge called the Dissident Cafe, where the audience can quiz writers in Egypt and elsewhere. Waleed Aly, Anna Perera, Farid Farid and chairwoman Sara Haghdoosti will lead the Twitter feed.
When that ends, stay where you are, have another drink, and watch The Chaser team encourage belly laughing among guest authors.
By then you should be light enough on your feet to stroll down to the Quayside wine bar where a bunch of bards - Toby Fitch, Kim Cheng Boey and Kate Lilley - put voice to verse in a session curated by poetry promoter The Red Room Company.
Don't forget that bag of books.
SEEMINGLY more dog than beaver, Mel Gibson's hand-puppet rich comeback film has had a difficult few weeks. Wittily titled The Beaver, and based on a mentally ill Gibson communicating through a toy mammal, it pulled about $US100,000 ($94,000) in its US opening weekend. Based on The Diary's rough calculations, that means not even all of Mel's kids turned up to see it. There was some promise when it opened in Cannes this week, with Reuters reporting a warm crowd. ''An audience of critics … laughed loudly several times during a screening and applauded at the end,'' the wire service wrote, ''with one spectator even whooping in delight.'' But by morning, the view was less rosy. In The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw managed a single star for the ''rodent'' of a film. ''To paraphrase the old saying: career-death is easy but comedy is hard,'' he began, continuing: ''The Beaver might have been interesting if it was boldly, defiantly, autobiographical - with Gibson holding a toy Adolf Hitler puppet. Or if it was about a stressed beaver with a Gibson puppet.'' In The Independent, Geoffrey Macnab gave it two. But the review's flavour was remarkably similar: ''Gibson and his co-stars upstaged by a puppet.'' It's a shame, but it sounds like a film most people would never watch through to the credits. And so we may never know if tape-happy ex-girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva - or, as Gibson once called her, that ''f---ing pig in heat'' - was responsible for the sound engineering.
WITH SMELL OF SCIENCE
FROM the innovators who gave the world clogs, comes smell. Researchers at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands have been developing odours to enhance dancing and improve the mood of clubbers. They were apparently inspired by the need to cover the smell of sweaty bodies and spilled beer that was once masked by the (now banned) cigarette smoke in nightclubs. Instead of reproducing the smell of smoke, the scientists, led by Dr Hendrik Schifferstein, tested orange, peppermint and neutral seawater and found each scent increased the levels of dancing. The various smells also improved how subjects rated their evening and the quality of music played, but the similarities with ecstasy ended there.
GOT A TIP?
IN THE NAME OF A LABOR SCANDAL
There was a time when the NSW Labor Party confected its own scandals. A time when ministers sought out their own internet porn, and slept with their own mistresses, and allegedly cavorted in their own underwear on their own Chesterfields in their own offices. And so it was with a little nostalgia yesterday that The Diary received a dirt sheet on the opposition spokeswoman on this and that, Cherie Burton. It was like the good old days when she lost her licence and embarrassed the then premier after refusing to take a breath test when stopped for drink-driving. It appeared from the carefully highlighted photocopy that she had again been stopped by police. An officer detected the ''strong odour of an alcoholic beverage'' before giving Ms Burton a sobriety test. And, like old times, she failed. Except the Ms Burton in question was from Richmond Hills, New York, which is nowhere near the seat of Kogarah. And she was a 46-year-old African-American woman. ''I've got no knowledge of that,'' a spokesman for the Premier, Barry O'Farrell, said of the documents. ''I can't really comment on it. The Labor Party have been known to do these things against their own. It's not necessarily come from us.'' The real Cherie Burton did not return the Herald'scalls. No blood sample was requested.
QANTAS IN THE GUN
Ordinarily when an airline misplaces a passenger's luggage it supplies a pair of emergency knickers and an oversized T-shirt. There was no such courtesy for the champion Australian shooters Russell and Lauryn Mark when Qantas lost their $30,000 worth of guns and 150 rounds of ammunition. Flying from Melbourne to Serbia to compete in the European Grand Prix, the pair told Qantas that European regulations required them to recheck their weapons when changing planes in Frankfurt. Airline staff confidently assured them this was not the case and checked them all the way through. At last report, the guns and ammunition were somewhere in Frankfurt airport - perhaps. ''Three hours ago they got in touch to ask what colour bags they were in,'' Russell Mark told us yesterday. ''That's three days after we reported they were lost.'' While a couple of guns floating around an airport might seem a security concern, Mark has more pressing matters to mind. Unless the guns arrive soon he will miss his competitions - Olympic qualifying events. ''Lauryn is already out of her competition,'' he said. ''When we fly home on Saturday, they'd better upgrade me to the pointy end of the plane.'' Qantas, a long-term sponsor of the Australian Olympic team, released an apologetic - perhaps even sheepish - statement last night. ''Our staff will be working through the night to find the baggage,'' a spokesman said. ''The correct baggage procedures were followed by Qantas staff.''
BY THE BOOK
If not for the cunning of about 500 Sydney University students, such titles as Catalogue of Vases in the British Museumand the 1972 Calcutta-produced Unpublished Records of the Government might have been lost to storage or destroyed. With undercover library staff, the students have staged a mass book-borrowing event in response to the university's plan to remove half of the stack in a library renovation. The university librarian, John Shipp, had said a ''dust test'' showed that not only were 58 per cent of monographs not borrowed, most were unread. Books neglected for five years would go first. Armed with dusters and library cards, book lovers converged on the sandstone's main library to thwart the removal process. An organiser, Jo Ball, said post-colonialist magazines from Papua New Guinea, titles on deer stalking, Bedouin justice and old copies of Lesbians on the Loose were hastily plucked from the shelves. ''One woman brought a shopping trolley into the library and filled it up. She said to me, 'I went and dusted half of level four, down the back.' '' While Shipp diligently handed out information pamphlets outside, Ball said his staff inside declared themselves subversives. ''The whole foyer was filled up with people lining up and those who were reading. We're not being dictated to by the bureaucracy.''
A BOOK, A GLASS AND IF THAT FAILS, A LAUGH
IT IS a common malaise for the black-skivvied crowd at literary festivals. A few days in, the bag of new books begins to drag at the elbow and the names of speaking authors begin to blur.
Was that Fatima Bhutto we saw on opening night? Or was it Ingrid Betancourt?
Tonight, the Festival Cafe transforms into a cyber lounge called the Dissident Cafe, where the audience can quiz writers in Egypt and elsewhere. Waleed Aly, Anna Perera, Farid Farid and chairwoman Sara Haghdoosti will lead the Twitter feed.
When that ends, stay where you are, have another drink, and watch The Chaser team encourage belly laughing among guest authors.
By then you should be light enough on your feet to stroll down to the Quayside wine bar where a bunch of bards - Toby Fitch, Kim Cheng Boey and Kate Lilley - put voice to verse in a session curated by poetry promoter The Red Room Company.
Don't forget that bag of books.
STAY IN TOUCH . . .
WITH LEAVE IT TO BEAVERSEEMINGLY more dog than beaver, Mel Gibson's hand-puppet rich comeback film has had a difficult few weeks. Wittily titled The Beaver, and based on a mentally ill Gibson communicating through a toy mammal, it pulled about $US100,000 ($94,000) in its US opening weekend. Based on The Diary's rough calculations, that means not even all of Mel's kids turned up to see it. There was some promise when it opened in Cannes this week, with Reuters reporting a warm crowd. ''An audience of critics … laughed loudly several times during a screening and applauded at the end,'' the wire service wrote, ''with one spectator even whooping in delight.'' But by morning, the view was less rosy. In The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw managed a single star for the ''rodent'' of a film. ''To paraphrase the old saying: career-death is easy but comedy is hard,'' he began, continuing: ''The Beaver might have been interesting if it was boldly, defiantly, autobiographical - with Gibson holding a toy Adolf Hitler puppet. Or if it was about a stressed beaver with a Gibson puppet.'' In The Independent, Geoffrey Macnab gave it two. But the review's flavour was remarkably similar: ''Gibson and his co-stars upstaged by a puppet.'' It's a shame, but it sounds like a film most people would never watch through to the credits. And so we may never know if tape-happy ex-girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva - or, as Gibson once called her, that ''f---ing pig in heat'' - was responsible for the sound engineering.
WITH SMELL OF SCIENCE
FROM the innovators who gave the world clogs, comes smell. Researchers at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands have been developing odours to enhance dancing and improve the mood of clubbers. They were apparently inspired by the need to cover the smell of sweaty bodies and spilled beer that was once masked by the (now banned) cigarette smoke in nightclubs. Instead of reproducing the smell of smoke, the scientists, led by Dr Hendrik Schifferstein, tested orange, peppermint and neutral seawater and found each scent increased the levels of dancing. The various smells also improved how subjects rated their evening and the quality of music played, but the similarities with ecstasy ended there.
GOT A TIP?
