E.J. Dionne ponders how to get more young people to vote. Personally I think giving them someone actually worth voting for would be a better first step...
6:29 PM | link
Iraq suddenly happy to have UN weapons inspectors prowling about.
United Nations officials reacted cautiously, saying that as in the past, Mr. Hussein might be trying to head off disaster, not signal new cooperation.
I find it hard to imagine there being any other reason for it. What with all the talk of impending invasions, after all, the timing is undeniably right on...
6:27 PM | link
George Kelly, in the unlikely event you're reading this, and in the even less likely event you don't already know, there's something wrong with your website, i.e. it seems to have vanished into the ether.
6:20 PM | link
Bill Clinton apparently happy to die in combat for Israel despite refusing to serve in Vietnam for the US.
6:16 PM | link
Strip club to replace McDonalds in Houston?
It's enough to make McDonald's founder Ray Kroc spin in his grave, and cause a group of clergy and community leaders to stand up and holler.
"Acres Home has a history of fighting back," said Chris Wright, pastor of Grace Ministries. "We will find you. We will come to your home in large numbers and picket."
Yeah, and you obviously put up a real good fight against McDonalds too, didn't you...
6:12 PM | link
Iran lets girls remove veils and scarves in school, religious nuts complain about "encouraging nudity".
6:08 PM | link
Alaskans take a run at the sun down on the beach. Decidedly unusual. 76 degrees (about 25 Celsius) is perhaps not hugely hot given what summer can be like here, but I suppose up in the far north it must be just about unheard of...
6:00 PM | link
Man caught with stolen jewellery up his arse.
Kennedy became ill at the police station and was taken to Boca Raton Community Hospital, where X-rays showed he had inserted the necklace into his rectum and swallowed the loose diamonds, Kelly said.
Kennedy told police he could retrieve the necklace.
"He pulled it out on his own," Kelly said. Kennedy later passed one of the two loose diamonds, Kelly said.
The article doesn't say whether the cops were glad they didn't have to go in and get it themselves, but I suspect they probably were.
5:37 PM | link
World champion belcher fails to break his own record. Still, a 110 decibel burp is pretty impressive. I shudder to think what his farts must sound like.
5:24 PM | link
David Messer laments the increasing irrelevance of music critics these days. Not that I can ever remember Messer being particularly relevant...
5:16 PM | link
Now George Pell still thinks abortion is worse than abuse. Bit of a switch from yesterday's remarks.
5:15 PM | link
Matt Price from The Australian reckons Natasha Stott-Despoja's ready to quit the Democrats too. Matt from A Bright Cold Day In April strenuously disagrees.
5:05 PM | link
Hotmail is deleting your messages without warning. What a pack of cunts. Is it not bad enough them selling your address to a million spammers that they have to do this to you now too? Thank Yog I'm not stuck having to use their services...
4:56 PM | link
I am 24% Tortured Artist
I should be happy. I have a normal life. I have no artistic ability and I am not cursed with the realiztion that everyone is an idiot, because I am one.
Take the Tortured Artist Test at fuali.com
I really should've resisted that one after all, eh.
10:00 PM | link
Once more with the weekly Blogger cuntish behaviour and the typing of links and stuff into NoteTab while we wait for Blogger to get its fucking head out of its arse...
Pauline Hanson contemplates moving to Western Australia to restart her political career. She has a political career to restart?
Richard Baillie blasts surveys. Damn right. The sorts of surveys and polls and things that get media attention like the one discussed here are complete and utter bullshit, and it clearly pains him as much as it pains me that people continue to take them seriously.
George Pell denies saying abortion is worse than murder.
Dr Pell called on the community to take the issue of abortion as seriously and compassionately as the church took the issue of sexual abuse by its priests.
"The church has accepted the challenge to respond in this way to sexual abuse.
"It is important that our community should do the same on the issue of abortion," he said.
I think it's still arguable just how seriously and compassionately the church is handling the child abuse business. With all due respect to the good Archbishop, this defence of his looks to me more like he wants to deflect attention from the abuse than to seriously stir up debate about abortion. Let's look after the living first, eh George? We can worry about those who never lived later.
Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras goes down... er, under. This saddens me. Not so much for Mardi Gras itself, which too often struck me as merely an exercise in excessive tackiness, but because now people like Fred Nile will get to gloat about it.
NSW Greens speak out against Vegemite. Sort of, anyway.
Wife of Hamas leader refused to let their son go on a suicide bombing trip. Clearly it's OK for other folks' kids.
Cat receives $1500 credit card bill.
96-year-old man hoping for a son after having 30 daughters.
Masked gunman apologises to man for shooting him by mistake.
American performers won't go to Canada these days either.
Roger Norrington declares war on vibrato.
TV Guide's top 50 cartoon characters. Wonder if Steve Irwin made this list or if their definition of cartoon character excludes live people.
And placing Bugs Bunny on top is a step towards recognising verbal wit over slapstick cuteness. But, in doing this, the judges have missed an opportunity to redress the decades of humiliation the wascally wabbit imposed on a little black waterfowl.
In the end, Bugs is just a wisecracker with unshakeable self-confidence, while Daffy's body of work was described by a New York psychoanalyst in these terms: "He began as a simple manic depressive but developed over the years into a fully fledged paranoid schizophrenic."
The Tolstoys hold their family gathering... all 90 of them.
Poetry competition judge resigns over bias claims.
Mr Donaghy, 2000's winner of the top best collection prize, announced his resignation this week after publisher Neil Astley claimed the award propped up an elite literary clique.
Jesus Christ, is there any literary form more elite than poetry these days? It's not like a poetry prize can prop up much apart from a literary clique...
Failing all your classes is not necessarily an obstacle to getting into high school.
Moronic typo foils $125b fraud scheme.
FBI passes on prime propaganda opportunity.
Mob attacks babysitter caught beating her charges on camera. It says something, I suppose, about the world these days that when the police can't be bothered dealing with your tape of someone beating the crap out of your kids, you take it to a TV station.
Vampire rapist accidentally masturbates to death.
Gated community bans schoolbuses. Much as there are times when I think gated communities have something going for them in theory, things like this demonstrate the reality is not always something to be proud of.
Man sells penis for advertising space.
Suburban "terrorist" deported.
But instead of the usual probation, this time Kaplan ordered Costa jailed until Friday afternoon, taken to Kennedy International Airport on Saturday morning and put on a plane bound for her native Portugal.
"We just needed to put the Atlantic Ocean between Mrs. Costa and her neighbors to promote lasting peace in the community," Assistant State's Attorney Charles Stango said later. "This has been a long-standing blood feud between this woman and her neighbors and her lawyer, Adrian Rebollo, and the judge should be commended for bringing it to a conclusion."
Maybe if the old bitch had actually been locked up a few times instead of just getting probation every time she hassled someone, that might've discouraged her from doing it again? As it stands, this just sounds like a belated overreaction. Meanwhile, speaking of overreaction, these likely lads have also been deported, this time for stealing a print of Attack of the Clones.
Viagra producing unexpected results for some.
The doctors said they had also seen another Viagra patient who suffered the same fate though his nosebleed was stopped after only two days.
Only?
Man sues another guy for not selling his car to him for $14.
The Earth's putting on weight.
Fast food culture responsible for creating a plague of rats in Britain.
Army murders take new twist. There's been a spate of returned soldiers killing their wives at this US army base lately; this one also happened there, but this time it's the wife who seems to have helped do in the husband. All very odd.
Threatened baseball strike comparable to September 11 attacks.
English language defeats France in the European Union.
Want the master tapes from the Woodstock Festival? Buy them here. "These tapes have been authenticated by Capitol records as to originality, condition and have received the highest quality care and storage possible." What the fuck is Capitol Records doing letting these things slip from their grasp? I'd say this was a scam if it weren't for the fact that Shel Talmy did auction the master tapes of The Who's first album a few years ago, and there's a PDF with a list of the tracks involved. It's a head-scratcher, to be sure.
The Lefty Directory. What it says. A directory of left-leaning blogs for those of you fearing the conservative takeover of the blog realm.
Chris Textor ponders the impending remake of Red Dragon. Personally I think calling Hannibal "a load of shit" (why did I keep trying to write that as "loaf of shit" there? Damn stupid fingers) is letting it off lightly. Elsewhere he says he's looking forward to Scorsese's Gangs of New York whenever it finally comes out (end of the year, I believe), which is more than can be said for me. I've seen the trailer so many times now and been less than thrilled by the accents therein that I don't know if I want to sit through the whole thing. Especially not if it's going to run 160 minutes.
And that'll do for now. I'm really fed up with Blogger's more than occasional inability to do the bare minimum you'd expect a properly functioning website would be capable of. This is such an inelegant solution, but unless the Blogger people can make the fucking thing behave and play when I want it to, this is clearly as much as I can do...
9:51 PM | link
I swore never to discuss Big Brother-related news here, especially not the celebrity version Ch. 10's currently running, but this was too good to entirely ignore. Does it really take that little to get booted out of the place? And is it just me, or does anyone else think it's odd that Warwick's getting booted for flashing his fellow inmates, yet Ch. 10 never had any problem with putting nudity and stuff on air in their "adult" versions of the show featuring some of the allegedly hotter stuff cut out of the prime-time edition? Me no savvy.
7:33 PM | link
"There were so many people coming into the club we were afraid we couldn't safely deal with all the people," Whitmire said. "If we had waited longer, we could have arrested 300 people."
Police said it took more than three hours to arrest and put the 45 females and 70 males in jail Saturday night and early Sunday morning. All were charged with disorderly conduct.
Shit, just as well they didn't take any longer than that, otherwise all the other criminals in town would've had less time to go out and rampage while the cops were sitting there watching the sex show...
9:38 PM | link
"Al Qaeda Scotland". I'm mystified as to why no one has beat the shit out of this guy yet.
9:32 PM | link
A site for lovers of Japanese prints. Looks like a great introduction to the form. A site which I'm definitely going to have to explore in greater detail later.
9:28 PM | link
Tunku Varadarajan not convinced by advertisers cutting their own services back for September 11.
By contrast, a wholesale evacuation from TV's commercial space on Sept. 11 this year would be purely, and hollowly, symbolic--and even self-indulgent. Whatever the explanation being put out by the companies in question, the reason they will not air their "spots" on the day is not reverence for the occasion, but a fear that ads would harm their commercial prospects.
FORTEAN TIMES IS BACK! God, took them fucking long enough to sort out their registration or whatever the problem was. They can go back in the links section now...
9:01 PM | link
British DJ censured for joking about having sex with Charlotte Church. Quite right too, cos goddamn that's low. Sex with Charlotte Church. Couldn't he get it from someone other than her? Was that the best he could manage?
8:45 PM | link
George Michael's commercial potential seems to have gone down that same toilet where he was caught soliciting.
8:43 PM | link
Saudi Arabia goes WWW-censorship happy.
The Saudis are also open about its censorship of the web. If a site is blacklisted, the user is directed to a page that explicitly informs him or her that access to the site has been denied.
This contrasts to other countries like China, where a surfer simply gets an error message. It means they do not know if the site if blocked or if there is something wrong with the connection.
Which makes all the difference, doesn't it.
8:39 PM | link
US state saves money by no longer advising residents that its fish are unsafe to eat. The fish have not stopped being unsafe, of course.
8:33 PM | link
Alabama finally gets all those dead people off its voter registry. Only took them 13 years to do it.
8:30 PM | link
As a followup to his Velvet Underground feature of a few days ago, Eric Olsen presents this appraisal of John Cale. Incidentally, if you haven't taken his offer of free CDs then you're too late, as he's closed applications. I'd have signed on myself, but the fact that he and I inhabit entirely separate countries could make it a bit expensive. And I don't have enough room for the CDs I already have without having them added to this way; indeed, I managed to acquire no fewer than nine new CDs yesterday, two I bought (Peter Gabriel's third album and The Birthday Party's Prayers On Fire) and seven from a friend in the US with whom I'm engaged trading, three straight dubs of albums (Musik von Harmonia by Harmonia and a couple of old 4AD compilations, plus four of his own formidable mixes). If Eric's offer had included space to keep all the freebie discs I might've taken him up on it...
8:17 PM | link
French porn producer claims porn is a "cultural asset".
And he argued that the economic damage to pornography producers resulting from a ban would force them into more extreme film-making.
"In Germany, where porn is outlawed on television, the sex video output is by far the most voluminous and by far the lowest grade in Europe.
"Porn is one of the fruits of the youth uprising of May 1968, and it is a precious cultural asset."
Ah, so that's what all the rioting was about back in '68. Here I thought it was something to do with communism, not porn. Mr John B. Root, for it is he who speaks here, also writes children's books.
7:48 PM | link
Shock horror! The Globe Theatre's staging new plays!
There are plenty who question whether the attempt should even be made. Shakespeare's Globe is not configured for kitchen-sink drama. With its stage thrust out into a roofless auditorium, where punters blithely chat and chomp crisps, and with two marble pillars smack in the middle of the playing area, it puts very physical obstacles in the way of dramatists who wish to transport their audience.
Well, shit, Meyerhold didn't even have a stage in the 1920s when he was staging plays and things in Soviet factories and similar places. I don't recall that having been a very physical obstacle to him.
7:25 PM | link
Benedict Nightingale argues against the reintroduction of an official theatre censor in the UK.
7:22 PM | link
What the fuck is up with that blogrolling.com site? I can't get into a number of blogs using it cos the site chokes on the blogrolling.com link.
7:12 PM | link
The war film without any battle scenes. Man, I want to see this film. It sounds like such a hack job...
7:08 PM | link
Not one but two odd funeral stories.
7:06 PM | link
No one seems to want to play to Israeli audiences any more. Well, surely this is nothing new either. Wasn't there a spate of American bands in the mid-80s developing a sudden fear of travel and cancelling tours and performances overseas because there was a lot of plane hijacking going on around that time and they were scared then too?
7:00 PM | link
Barrett Hodsdon reckons Australian critics go soft when reviewing Australian films. Go on with you. What else do you reckon that most people who care haven't already guessed or known for some years?
6:50 PM | link
Alleged Oz Taliban man David Hicks to be tried in Cuba?
The South Australian, along with two British inmates, lost an application to have their cases heard before an American court after a Federal Court judge in Washington ruled they had no right to trial.
The judge ruled she had no jurisdiction in the case because they were not being held in the United States, but were detainees in Cuba.
I honestly don't get this. It's the US military who are holding the guy, yet the US say they don't have jurisdiction? Where then does that leave all the other Taliban members the US have rounded up and are keeping in Cuba? I really don't get this at all.
6:31 PM | link
Jack Roberston's still not making any sense. This is about the most sensible thing he's said all week. Anyone know what the hell is going on in Jack's corner of the WWW?
6:24 PM | link
How one Job Network agency's trying to keep in the game. Fucking Mission Australia, who were responsible for lumbering me with the Salvation Army on a Work For The Dole project back in '98. If they're in danger of going down the tube and being booted out of the network, I'm afraid they'll have to forgive me if I don't weep for them.
6:18 PM | link
24 comes to Australian TV at last. Cool. I've been reading about this on the Net for some time, so I'm looking forward to seeing it at last. Hopefully it won't wind up being the disappointment Six Feet Under was for me.
6:09 PM | link
Man blames Bible for inspiring him to go gay-bashing with a machete. Funny how when movies or music get blamed for inspiring violence, people go on the warpath against them and want them banned or restricted, and yet when the Bible gets named as the source no one seems to get worked up the same about it. Always thought there was a certain inequity there.
6:06 PM | link
Robert Hughes to face court. Is there actually any good reason why it's taken three years for this case to come this far, and why it'll be February before anything further happens with it?
6:01 PM | link
Oh, and the person from the UK who buzzed past the site looking for "nazi uniform porn": terribly sorry that I couldn't provide for you. And I may add, there's another service I unfortunately also can't provide which you could possibly also do with.
Blessings upon Jim Henley and Andrea Harris for recent linkage. You'll both find yourselves in the select company of my links column shortly.
9:51 PM | link
Dr Martin Kilson takes down Randall Kennedy's Nigger.
It should also be noted, by the way, that Kennedy's core purpose in producing Nigger was to assist White Americans in feeling comfortable with using the epithet "nigger," once they understood from his text how the epithet was used among African-Americans in their interpersonal tete-a-tete. Here Kennedy has a theory—one quite idiotic I believe—that the more freely Whites employ the epithet "nigger," the better they'll be able to purge Negrophobia from their souls. This, I suggest, is as idiotic as the suggestion, say, that the more today's citizens of Germany employ anti-Jewish epithets the more effectively Germans will finally purge anti-Semitism from their souls.
I don't buy Kennedy's argument either, if only for the reason that there are enough white people in the world comfortable enough using the word as it is. Scroll down to the "war on drugs" story I posted earlier today and see what I mean.
9:39 PM | link
Malaria: it can really fuck up your child's academic performance. It can kill them too, of course, but the author of this item seems more concerned about what it can do to their grades...
9:26 PM | link
New book claims spam mail isn't that bad after all. And yes, the author of the book is the same Herschell Gordon Lewis who more or less invented the splatter subgenre of horror in the early 1960s. I was staggered to read his name next to the book's title, but a quick check of his IMDB entry reveals he is indeed the man responsible; seems he went into advertising in the 1970s after he quit making gore films. Wonder how many of his clients know what a, well, colourful past he has...
9:24 PM | link
A project studying the effects of waste water on fish.
The sewage-raised trout emerge clean of all the nasties, including significant levels of cholera and fecal bacteria, Brenneman said.
Indeed, research by graduate student Andrew Jensen found steelhead hatchlings raised in wastewater filtered through the treatment center's marshes grew significantly larger, were more likely to survive and had fewer abnormalities than those raised in Arcata's drinking water, which picks up higher copper levels while passing through pipes.
Wastewater, by contrast, "is very high in nutrients," Brenneman said.
Surely the "waste" prefix seems to indicate that that's not all it's full of, though? And is it just me, or does anyone else find nothing appetising about the idea of "sewage-raised trout"?
9:18 PM | link
Miss America contender booted out over nude pictures of her. This is despite the fact that, according to her, the photos were taken without her consent. The Miss America organisers are saying she resigned of her own accord, but she says they would've dropped her anyway. Who'd be a beauty queen, eh...
9:01 PM | link
Man tries to kill himself by jumping off a cliff, then calls police for help when he gets stuck.
8:58 PM | link
Greek man in Cyprus gets drunk, serenades Turks in Greek, goes to jail. I didn't even know there was a line dividing the Greeks from the Turks there. Knew there was strife between the two parties, but never knew about the formal separation.
8:48 PM | link
Another new music blog. Only just started, but there's potential there. Hell, they've already sent me to this site, which I can see myself spending some time at in the near future...
8:20 PM | link
Man held in South Africa over anally disembowelling a woman. You can tell I got this from the Rotten.com site, eh? What I love is the comment about how the disembowelment led to the woman's death; if I'd had 90% of my guts pulled out my arse, I'd be mightily surprised if I didn't die...
7:58 PM | link
I'm surprised that other bloggers covering the NZ elections haven't mentioned this story yet.
7:55 PM | link
The Indian aeroplane with the stench of death. I'm mildly astonished by this claim:
An Indian Airlines spokesman said: "Somehow the strong stench must have infiltrated into the air channels without anybody realising it at all."
This is formaldehyde we're talking about, formaldehyde that emanated from coffins being carried on the plane. Unless the people flying had even less sense of smell than me (and I basically have none; insofar as anything about me actually interests people, my lack of a sense of smell is usually it), I find it hard to believe they could've missed it...
7:39 PM | link
Slipknot know how to show their fans they love them. Nothing says "I love you" like a bucket of animal entrails, after all.
According to Glasgow's Evening Times, animal rights activists are behind the plan saying the sight of a pig's heart would remind people where bacon comes from.
Yeah, cos in the middle of a Slipknot gig some guy's going to be hit in the face by some pig remnant and think "My God, that poor innocent animal died to make that bacon & egg breakfast I had this morning; I'll never eat pig meat again"...
7:35 PM | link
Not one but two odd tales of religion and furniture.
7:28 PM | link
The latest victory (?) in the US' War On Drugs™: how to get 300 years in jail for not dealing in the stuff.
7:18 PM | link
Bin Laden junior takes over Al Qaeda. Saad bin Laden's been running things for a while, apparently. Which means either that daddy actually is dead, or he's going to be pissed if he's not. Maybe we should actually all start hoping Osama's still alive and that internecine strife will accordingly overtake Al Qaeda or something...
6:48 PM | link
Democrats continue to fall to shit. I really don't get the point of Andrew Murray and his whole "Democrat in exile" spiel. If he wants nothing to do with the party, why doesn't he get out of it like Meg Lees did?
6:46 PM | link
South Australian MP demands apology from Britain's Channel 4.
South Australian independent MP Nick Xenophon has demand a retraction and apology from Britain's Channel 4 after it described Adelaide as the murder capital of the world.
"It is an injurious falsehood that could damage SA's tourism industry, potentially cost the state millions in revenue and with it jobs," he said.
Next: North Korea demands apology from the US for being named as part of the Axis Of Evil™ and compensation for damage to the country's tourism industry after the Korean War...
6:29 PM | link
Australia Post threatens to fire overweight employee. They're really not helping themselves in the PR stakes at the moment, are they?
6:24 PM | link
Chris Textor's not interested in your family values. Stanley Gudgeon has a longer post here on the subject. That's all the world needs is another fucking professional moralist telling me what I as an adult of sound mind should or should not be allowed to watch. I'm in a bad mood at the moment and mother Biggins is not improving it.
10:00 PM | link
Unfortunately Jack Robertson seems to be having Blogger problems so permalinks aren't working, but click the link for his site (over in the column at right) and look for his entries for July 28 and 29. Then, if you can tell me what drugs he must've been on while writing those items, let me know so that I know to steer clear of them. Either that, or fighting the good fight against the Old Left and/or Tim Blair has gone to his head. *shudder*
9:43 PM | link
Gareth Parker points to a story on Radio National from this afternoon, a half-hour feature on blogging. He was disappointed, and having listened back to the audio of the story, I have to admit I was too... seemed uninterested in the news/pundit side of blogging apart from a token mention of that sort of thing in the intro, focusing almost entirely on the online journal type of thing; makes you wonder why they didn't just do a feature on Livejournals or something. Still, there's a link up there if you want to listen in. Just be warned, though, the site advises that the audio stream is updated every Monday, so I don't know if that link will be valid after this week.
5:52 PM | link
I don't know who Lee Greenwood is, but goddamn I want to know what he did to merit this smackdown.
5:02 PM | link
Richard Branson takes the demand for greater corporate disclosure a little further than strictly necessary.
4:52 PM | link
Arab boycotts of US goods only hurt Arab businesses. That's the claim here, anyway. Economics is not my strong point so don't know the truth of it or otherwise. Still, I can't imagine the US businesses being hurt that much; they got the rest of the allegedly civilised world to keep them rolling in it...
4:48 PM | link
Sacramento Bee journalist belatedly discovers the phenomenon of teen binge drinking. Next she'll probably find kids these days swear and take drugs too.
4:32 PM | link
Eric Olsen presents this lengthy, fine appraisal of the Velvet Underground. You should read it and should also have the albums. Except Loaded. I never liked Loaded much.
4:19 PM | link
Lawyers advise sex offenders against seeking therapy in jail, on the assumption that they may say something compromising. I don't know, I'm sure there are many people out there who reckon jail is exactly where they should be, so if they let slip something that keeps them in there, then well and good... I don't know. And I really don't envy the poor bastards who have to defend them in court too; that's the very definition of a thankless task...
4:13 PM | link
The rise of cutting in the US. I'm kind of at a loss to understand the whole self-harm thing, and that's despite the fact that I've given serious thought to harming myself in the past. Not that I ever carried through on it, but the thought was there... but despite that I still don't entirely understand it. That probably doesn't make much sense, but that's the way of it...
4:07 PM | link
DJ suspended for joking about child kidnapping.
After a sidekick read the news item Wednesday about the girl, shock jock "Mikey" Esparza of KSJO-FM said, "That's why I don't use duct tape. That's why I use nylon rope."
Esparza continued after a commercial break, suggesting kidnappers buy tarps and use lye to dispose of murder victims.
The station suspended Esparza Thursday for a week and broadcast a formal apology to listeners.
Yeah, cos some potential pervert out there's really going to listen to that and think, "ooh, rope, I didn't consider that as an option"...
4:01 PM | link
They surely do like their lolitas in Japan. This is kind of nauseating.
3:59 PM | link
Mother loses custody of morbidly obese 3 year old.
"I was doing something wrong, but I'm really not sure what," Redmond said Friday. "He started growing fast at 3 months and just kept going. He really isn't a big eater."
The kid weighs 120 pounds, dear. If he's not a big eater then I don't know what the cause of the problem is.
3:56 PM | link
"Ecstasy as cheap as a bar of chocolate for children." Funny, I didn't realise drug dealers operated student concessions...
3:47 PM | link
Brad Pitt brings his beard to Sydney.
Pitt blamed production delays in Australia for the unruly growth of his beard, which he is sporting for his role in The Fountain.
"We were supposed to go [to Australia] and then we weren't," he said. "Then we were supposed to go again, and we weren't. Next thing I know, I've got this bin Laden on my face."
Am I the only person who actually likes the beard? Or that at least it actually doesn't transform him into a hideous monster?
3:41 PM | link
Top British Tory MP comes out. Wonder if he's trying to beat someone else to the scandalous revelation and defuse it. Unless I'm mistaken, there were a few of them caught in compromising situations in the last few years, maybe he just wanted to avoid being the next one. Otherwise I don't see much point to it...
3:39 PM | link
This man is a bit of a fuckwit too.
England's most senior judge has defended the release of the killers of toddler James Bulger, saying everyone has rights and people should not forget that they were children when they committed a crime that shocked the world.
"Children can do things when they are children which they would never do in their later life," says Lord Woolf, the Lord Chief Justice, in an interview to be broadcast by BBC radio this week.
In it Lord Woolf says: "What we have to realise is that everybody, except those who commit the most, most serious crimes, are eventually going to be let back into society."
His Lordship doth miss the point, I think. What's appalling about the Bulger case is that the killers were children. Venables and Thompson were clearly capable of doing something most children couldn't. And sure, if the law says they have the right to re-enter society, there's not much people can do about it. Nothing, though, says people can't still be appalled by it...
3:34 PM | link
The problem of how to deal with swearing on TV.
Sometimes networks cannot win: when they "bleep" or edit bad language they face the ire of viewers. When the Mod Squad's Michael Cole said "shit" at the Logies in 1973, Channel Nine received 300 complaints on the night, but the next day when the program was repeated with the incident edited out, it was bombarded with 700 complaints.
George Pell, you are a complete fucking moron.
The paper said Dr Pell told his audience that abortion was a worse moral scandal than priests sexually abusing young people.
When asked to clarify he said: "Because it's (abortion) always a destruction of human life," the paper reported.
Right you are, George. Heaven forfend we should allow children to be aborted before they can have the opportunity to be abused. At least the abused kids are still living at the end of it, even if their lives are in bits. I honestly cannot believe Pell was ignorant enough to actually make that statement.
3:05 PM | link
I don't know who came here looking for "george michael wag the dog video bootleg", "public nudity dares" or "smh plagiarism july 2002 monash", but I can only apologise profusely for not actually having any of the above. Hope the blog wasn't too much of a disappointment otherwise.
2:57 PM | link
They're all out. This is an astonishing thing. Mum and Dad have been out all day, and they haven't heard anything about it. Which I was kind of glad about, cos I could then break the news; actually, they came in right on 7pm just when ABC News were starting their report, so they got to see a bit of it too. Honestly, the look of relief on Mum's face in particular (Dad was kind of too drunk to really notice; it was that sort of day) would've made you think she actually knew the people personally... although mining communities are like that, in some ways I suppose she did. Anyway, it's a bit of good news in a time where good news is not always easily available.
8:40 PM | link
CIA/FBI officials claim bin Laden's probably dead. Boy, there's a surprise.
5:21 PM | link
Ayatollah threatens to make US "regret" any coming attacks on Iran. I didn't know there were any planned. Wasn't that Iraq the US is champing at the bit to beat the shit out of? Or will Iran get their turn as well eventually?
5:05 PM | link
Two New Jersey priests arrested in Canadian sex case. The timing could hardly be better, given the Pope is in Canada at the moment too.
5:03 PM | link
Hawaiian lava flow drawing spectators. Normally I've been trying to link to printer-friendly versions of pages, at least when I can do so or when I remember to, as a very token gesture towards pissing off the news sites and their advertisers, but I'm linking to the full version of this cos there's a cool photo in it.
5:01 PM | link
Indian ISPs consider blocking Yahoo, Hotmail. Not because they consider them to be evil, but so they can extort a share of earnings from them.
4:51 PM | link
New type of predatorial centipede found in NY's Central Park. How did they find it? Has there been a spate of partially-devoured homeless bum corpses turning up and these characters were the most likely suspects?
4:37 PM | link
Eric Olsen points us to this music-based blog, with various interesting-looking pieces linked from there.
4:27 PM | link
Dave Trowbridge lets his carnivorous side shine through.
Our lesson today, brothers and sisters, is from the Book of Punter, Chapter 3, Verse 1:
Yeah verily, I say unto thee, and thou shalt hear me thrice, neither once, nor twice, and four also is forbidden thee: vegetables are not food, they are what food eats.
As an avowed meatarian myself, I can only say "AMEN!" to that...
3:49 PM | link
Potentially tragic trapped miners situation looks like ending non-tragically. As I post this, the fourth miner has just been hauled out and the other five should follow in due course. My folks come from a mining area in Scotland, and I think there's a slight tendency on their part to over-romanticise it, but this is an undeniably good thing. I could've sworn when it happened that it'd end in tears, but luckily it seems otherwise...
3:41 PM | link
Man convicted of procuring sexual assault upon himself. Only in Queensland...
3:35 PM | link
Catholic Church whitening up its first Indian saint. Eh. They've been doing a good job of hiding Jesus' ethnic origins in their iconography for centuries, I don't know why people are only getting worked up now...
3:33 PM | link
Laws against bestiality revived in Illinois. Apparently when the lawbooks were redrafted in the 1970s, they neglected to re-include the bestiality laws. No doubt the animals of Illinois are celebrating tonight...
3:31 PM | link
Kindergarten kids menaced by drug-sniffing dog. That's the way! Those 6 year old crackheads gotta be taught a lesson!
3:26 PM | link
Alabama "urban warfare" training camp may have trained Islamic terrorists. "Urban warfare"? Still, though based in Alabama, the report claims the camp is British-owned. I await the extension of the War On Terror™ to the UK, then...
3:23 PM | link
Virgin Radio in trouble for playing the Sex Pistols' "God Save The Queen" after the Queen Mum's death."
The music on the programme had been pre-recorded, with the news and weather added in later.
However, the regulators ruled that the scheduling of the track had breached the station's programme code.
The Radio Authority's rules say that recorded programmes should be checked before broadcast, "to ensure that jokes or scenarios are not rendered tasteless by intervening events, such as death".
Personally I think the saddest thing about this is that the music was prerecorded, meaning there was presumably no live DJ at the other end of the radio, meaning someone's out of a job. I personally think that's more disturbing than the issue of taste here...
3:21 PM | link
Man falls into grave at funeral. And no, not the grave of the person being buried. Odd, though, that he's waited so long to sue the cemetery; the incident actually occurred two years ago and he's only now filing suit before the two-year expiry date. If he was going to do it, you'd think he'd have done it back then...
3:12 PM | link
"Creed is good." No, not the band. They suck.
3:02 PM | link
How boring became the new cool in Australian politics.
Given the above, it is not surprising that for many journalists, Howard's popularity just doesn't make sense.
The genuine hostility and often personalised "little Johnny" attacks on Howard by some media commentators, especially on issues such as refugees and reconciliation, may well reflect their frustration in being unable to understand how the voting public can possibly prefer him over more media-attractive politicians such as a Paul Keating.
Celebrating the 30th anniversary of Jethro Tull's Thick As A Brick.
In those 10 days was born a work that has endured countless musical fads and fashions. Its legacy is not so much borne out in its repeated playings. Indeed, it would be a rare thing to ever listen to it, or parts of it, on radio. Thick as a Brick pushed open the curtains to reveal a world in which anything was possible musically and lyrically.
Actually there were various radio edits of the thing, which I can remember having heard even in the 1980s. And ten years ago when I first started tuning into Triple J (long before the blandout brought on by the move into regional broadcasting), I remember them doing a request thing in the early afternoons—unlike their modern request show, they actually did play pretty much whatever was requested—and some brave soul requested the entirety of Thick As A Brick. JJJ didn't do that, but they did play the whole of the first side. So yes, it's rare, but it's not entirely unheard of...
2:26 PM | link
Democrats want their seat back. Now that Meg Lees has quit the Democrats, she's holding onto her seat as an Independent. I don't know the legalities of this, and I suppose it comes down to whether the seat in question is considered as Meg Lees' or the Democrats'. Who did people vote for, her or the party? In any case, given the Democrats' current strife, basically telling Lees to get out of politics altogether (as they're effectively doing) isn't going to help their public image much. Here's another excellent take on the affair.
2:18 PM | link
Funny how I never used to get searches like these at my old site:
piano teacher gallery porn
boomerangs hit back poster bill jones
Donald Rumsfeld biography religion
treatment of illegal immigrants debate catholic church
hot dog eating
noy thrupkaew
turkish hot sex
I never used to get searches like those at the old Pillow Book or Black Room. And I got all of those from my counter stats, which keep track of details of the last 100 visits to the site, so all of those have come in the last couple of days. Shifting the counter onto my blog page seems to have not only told me how many people have drifted past the blog, but what some of them came here for. Sorry I couldn't provide piano teacher porn or Turkish hot sex, folks.
12:33 PM | link
2SER's program of screen culture Wednesday 8pm AEST; repeated Saturday 12.30pm AEST In Sydney, tune into 2SER FM 107.3, or listen over the Internet from 2SER.com |
Operating out of Sydney, Australia since February 2002. Designed for viewing at 800x600 or more.
About this site
Amazon.com wishlist
Links
I have various reasons for linking the sites below (a link rarely constitutes a 100% endorsement, of course). I'm usually happy to link to anyone who specifically asks, or anyone who links to me. I reserve the right to remove any link at any time for any reason.
1. Local heroes
The Age
Angela Bell
Bernard Slattery
The Bitchin' Monaro Guide to Politics
A Bright Cold Day In April
Catallaxy Files
Chris Textor
Don Arthur
Gareth Parker
John Quiggin
Ken Parish
Richard Baillie
Robert Corr
Scott Wickstein
Shannon Davies
Sydney Morning Herald
Tim Dunlop
2. Strange news from other stars
Ananova quirkies
ArtsJournal
Blogcritics
Daily Rotten: Weird News
Dave Tepper
Dave Trowbridge
Fark
Fortean Times
Gary Farber
George Kelly
Jason Rylander
Jeff Cooper
Jim Henley
Jim Schwab
The Lefty Libertarian
Lynn Sislo
Mac Thomason
Metafilter
Philosophy and Literature
The Rittenhouse Review
Sasha Castel
Ted Barlow
3.Non-blog/news links
I have a very extensive collection of links not specifically related to blogging. I keep them on an entirely separate page here.
What the critics have said
"short tempered, rude, sarcastic and generally unable to cope with authority figures"
-Martin Forrester-Reid (former employer)
"formidable"
-Gareth Parker
"outstandingly quirky"
-Jason Soon
"prolific"
-Bernard Slattery
"pithy"
-Jim Henley
"excellent"
-Dave Trowbridge
"my Australian pal"
-Eric Olsen
"Who?"
-Glenn Reynolds
