The Null Device
2010/9/19
Internet memes (once described, perhaps unkindly, as "like in-jokes for people who don't have friends") aren't purely an American or Anglosphere phenomenon. Cracked has a list of seven quite peculiar internet memes from foreign countries.
The Russians have two entries: PhotoExtreme is an offshoot of live-action role-playing games, as one would expect in the sort of hardcore place that Russia is fabled to be. In this meme, one person comes up with a bizarre scenario, and others act it out, take photos and post them online. The scenarios are acted out in public, without anybody being informed in advance, so bystanders are likely to be confronted with surreal, often violent (ontologically, if not literally) spectacles.
The other Russian meme is a more innocuous one, not unlike LOLCats, which originated from a rather naïve American drawing of a bear, and involves photoshopping said drawing into images. In Sweden, meanwhile, they do something similar with an image of a guy with a horse's head; this meme is named "Snel Hest" ("Nice Horse") and often involves horse-related puns. Meanwhile, the French go in for sarcastically 'shopping their self-aggrandising president Sarkozy into various historical scenes (it seems to be akin to the "Al Gore invented the Internet" meme of the 1990s) and in Australia, a video of a racist bogan chick went viral (the great Australian public doesn't really go for highly conceptual, it seems). The Kenyans, meanwhile, have a supercool tough-guy hero named Makmende, whose name comes from a mangling of Clint Eastwood's famous line "make my day".
A new study has raised the possibility of a high-speed railway connecting Melbourne and Sydney in three hours The study, commissioned by a lobby group named Infrastructure Partnerships Australia (not connected with the right-wing thinktank of the same initials) and undertaken by the consultancy also involved in France's TGV network and Britain's HS2 plans* claims that the train link, built with state-of-the-art technology, could achieve the time by running at 350km/h, at which it would become competitive with airlines (Melbourne/Sydney is one of the world's busiest air routes), and forecasts an 86% chance that such a link would be needed by 2030 (presumably the end of cheap oil would make $60 Virgin Blue flights a thing of the past). While such a route would take a while to build, starting with a line from Sydney to Canberra would be immediately economical, as it would save the $15 billion cost of building a new airport for Sydney.
The government has made noises about being supportive of a high-speed rail link, having committed $20m to a study. The question is whether any action will emerge from it. The report strongly suggests safeguarding land corridors now before the price of the land rises.
In any case, I can't say I'm confident anyone alive today will see a high-speed rail link between Melbourne and Sydney; Australian politicians and planners have a tendency to take a lackadaisical, short-term view and muddle through with band-aid fixes, so it wouldn't surprise me if nothing happens until it's too expensive to build the link, and when air travel becomes unaffordable, the bulk of Melbourne-Sydney traffic is taken up by convoys of 11-hour trains saturating the current (low-speed) rail link. But hey, perhaps they'll at least install power points and WiFi on the trains once they're used by business travellers and not just backpackers and the rural elderly.
* Presumably they mean the New Labour HS2 plans, which have now been scrapped, to be replaced by an as yet undrafted plan which doesn't adversely affect wealthy Tory boroughs and which terminates at Heathrow.