Saturday Morning for Saturday 6 September 2008
Guest details for Saturday Morning , 6 September 2008
8:12 Grant Morris in New Orleans
Grant Morris is a New Zealand writer who has been living in New Orleans for 17 years. He has just returned to the city after it was evacuated in advance of Hurricane Gustav.(You can follow hurricane progress here and here.)
8:30 Simon Winchester
Simon Winchester was a foreign correspondent for more than thirty years, and is the author of many non-fiction works, including the Map That Changed the World. His latest book is Bomb, Book & Compass: Joseph Needham and the Great Secrets of China (Penguin, ISBN: 978-0-670-91379-4), about the life of the Cambridge scientist who unlocked the closely held secrets of the world's most technologically advanced country. (The title of the book in the United States is The Man Who Loved China.) Simon Winchester will visit New Zealand for events in Auckland (10 September) and Christchurch (12 September).
9:05 Kate Atkinson
Kate Atkinson won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award for her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum (Corgi, ISBN: 9780552996181). Her new novel, the third to feature former police inspector Jackson Brodie, is When Will There Be Good News? (Doubleday, ISBN: 9780385608015). She is visiting New Zealand for the Christchurch Writers Festival from 4 to 7 September, and will appear in conversation with Lynn Freeman for an hour on Saturday 6 September from noon in the Christchurch Town Hall. She will also speak at Hedleys Bookshop in Masterton on Sunday 7 September (from 4:00pm), at a Dominion Post Writers Series in conversation with Sue Greene in Wellington on Monday 8 September (from 6.00pm), and at a Dymocks Herald lunch in Auckland on Wednesday 10 September (from noon).
9:50 Nic Twaddle
Nic Twaddle and his Whakatane friends Phillip Anderson, Jeremy Gray and Julian Kardos set off in July 2006 to cross the length of the African continent by motorcycle, documenting the six-month journey on a borrowed HD camera. The resulting documentary, African Odyssey, is now being screened on cinemas nationwide, and is available on DVD.
10:05 Playing Favourites with Mike Banks
Detroit-based music producer "Mad Mike" Banks formed the musical collective Underground Resistance in the late 1980s with Jeff Mills. Underground Resistance are the most militantly political example of electronic techno music, with an anti-mainstream business strategy, producing uncompromising music geared toward promoting awareness and facilitating political change. Underground Resistance with DJ Skurge visited New Zealand for gigs in Christchurch and Wellington (30 August and 5 September), which will help fund UR's participation in a mentoring programme for at-risk teenagers in the Wellington region.
11:05 Brian Cox
Dr Brian Cox is the Royal Society University Research Fellow at the University of Manchester, and is contributing to one of the largest collaborative efforts ever attempted in the physical sciences: the Atlas Project at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva to build the Large Hadron Collider, which will begin operating on 10 September.
Below is the CERN rap by Alpinekat and Will Barras.