A few days ago I favoured you with my thoughts on the ABC’s poll on Australia’s favourite books. Now there’s a discussion over at Crikey about what the hell happened. Two choice quotes:
In the SMH we are told there were 15,000 voters and 5,000 different book titles. An average of 3 votes per book.I’d just thought I’d let you know, although it’s probably un-provable, that members of the My Favourite Book production staff went around the ABC getting staff to fill out votes. I personally voted twice and one staff member was asked to vote 10 times for A Fortunate Life so it would make it into an appropriate placing.
Are there lots of Falun Gong devotees working at the ABC?
Survey says: Australia irrelevant to Scientologists, Randroids
Wednesday 8 December 2004
The ABC’s published the results of its poll of Australia’s favourite books. It supposedly started out as a poll on the greatest books of the 20th century like everybody else was doing a few years ago, but it took this long for the idea to work its way through ABC ‘development’. I guess they figured it didn’t matter either way because no matter how they defined it some morons out there would just keep voting over and over for the Bible.
You can guess the results: a vast mass a people voting for the only book they’ve read (a high-school chestnut like To Kill a Mockingbird, or the Bible), spotty computer geeks (so much sci-fi it’s all over your screen!) and ballot-stuffing religious zombies. No surprises so far – same as every other dodgy book poll ever run in the whole world.
The one thing unexpected is the low-rent quality of said religious zombies: usually you can expect the top two places of the poll results to be taken over by a meaningless pissing contest between the glassy-eyed acolytes of Atlas Shrugged and Dianetics. This poll was evidently too piddly for any of the larger and more oganised cults to either notice, or care to stack. The best the ABC could attract was Falun Gong, who did wonders for their credibility by ensuring that everyone now honestly believes that Zhuan Falun is the 14th most popular book in Australia; so popular in fact, that the ABC website misspells it. And even that was beaten out by the literary oeuvre of Col Stringer, an obscure and self-proclaimed mouthpiece of god from Queensland (but you’d guessed that last bit already).
To add insult to injury, Peter Phelps’ magnum opus, Sex Without Madonna, didn’t make the list. Rigged!
Burning with procrastination
Friday 5 November 2004
“You have a down on life – it’s no good!”“I am an artist.”“Yes I’ve heard that before!”
-Wyndham Lewis, Tarr
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