I just rediscovered the joys of the Pornolizer. At the risk of attracting even more weirdos than I already get, here's a sample of what I got when I Pornolised Instapundit:
PAUL WRIGHT ASKS what happens if the spewing weapons assfucks, by some miracle, actually find smacking? His rather fomping answer suggests that either (1) the unclefucks-that-be have no real expectation that licks will come to motherfucks; or (2) they haven't thought about this hard enough. I'm guessing it's (1).
wanked at 04:10 PM by Glenn "Mount" Reynolds
A sample of Tim Blair:
Phil muff sniffs at one point to ponder how it is that US television felchs liberal titty fucks (on shows like Cheers and ER) but America elects George W. Bush. Why? Why?
deep throated by Tim "Big Cock" Blair at 2:26 AM
A bit of Gareth Parker:
Consider this: At around 10pm on Monday night I paid an overdue spanking fine to a debt collector. The spewing reason a pecking debt collector became smooched was that it was too hard to get to the office of the relevent authority and pay the fine in the sex fighted 14-day period.
But the letter from the debt collector squirted with a entering BPay number on it. Beauty! Sorted through Netbank in a spanking minute or two. Sure, it cost an extra eight cocksucks in late fees, but I would have at least broken even when you consider the cost in petrol, parking barfs and time that it would have taken to pay the cuntlicking original fine in person.
I'm not going to say what happened to mine in Pornolizer, except that it suddenly changed its name to Hot "Bitch" Deepthroated Death. And Don Arthur's secret identity is apparently "Mistress Shiva". I think that says it all.
11:55 PM | link
Big greetings to a certain former employer of mine! Thanks for the email, Martin... though I feel I must challenge you on this point:
By the way your NIN opinion is just plain wrong - its always been crap. A cheap rip-off of the good stuff from Siouxsie Sioux and Bauhaus and Death in June. All made worse by the insidious and idiotic "Mansonite" trend of the current generation of lost youth.
While conceding the annoyance factor of the Mansongoths, and that there is a certain amount of crossover between the goth and industrial genres, I'll be buggered if I can see those precise influences in NIN. Especially that of Death In June. Of course, if uncle Trent has recorded a cover of "Giddy Giddy Carousel" and I'm just not aware of it, then I retract that...
9:08 PM | link
You could say the Rapture index is a Dow Jones Industrial Average of end time activity, but I think it would be better if you viewed it as prophetic speedometer. The higher the number, the faster we're moving towards the occurrence of pre-tribulation rapture.
The current index indicates we are in "Fasten your seatbelts mode". Weird. I'd like to think this was merely satirical, but the rest of the site seems to indicate otherwise.
8:55 PM | link
The decline of Western magazine design. Lamenting how ugly magazine covers have become in recent years, largely through a constant stream of celebrity mugshots and vast swathes of text. The article offers some compare and contrast examples, and it is indeed striking how the older examples chosen have next to no writing on them apart from the magazine name and date...
8:49 PM | link
Via Jason Rylander: Arnold Steinhardt on the power of music in difficult times. The umpteenth meditation on Sept. 11 I've read lately, but one of the more interesting and eloquent ones.
8:20 PM | link
German army bans battlefield sex. "Captain! The Iraqis' nuclear supply dump is over there! Shall we attack?" "In a minute, sergeant, my love. Let's fuck first, shall we?"
8:11 PM | link
Sheriff's deputies use Mexican corpse as hood ornament.
Last week, three sheriff's deputies strapped the body of a young Mexican woman to the hood of an SUV, drove her through Bisbee, and stashed her in the CCSO parking lot. There she remained until a Douglas mortuary arrived to take her body to the medical examiner's office. [...]
"Oh, my God. What kind of human beings are they?" said Isabelle Garcia, attorney for Coalicion De Derechos Humanos.
Garcia said she still has one unanswered question: Would the sheriff's department have treated an Anglo-American woman the same way? Or was Mendez treated with less respect because she was an illegal immigrant from Mexico?
Sheriff Dever said he is "deeply offended" by the question.
"Shame on anybody for thinking that for a moment," Dever said. "I won't even take my time to honor or respect a question like that."
Well, your boys seem to have problems respecting dead bodies, so I suppose there's no reason why you should respect a not unreasonable question...
8:09 PM | link
Tennessee religious group tries to raise the dead, fails.
They called on God to raise 15-year-old Jessica Crank from the dead at her funeral Wednesday. Jessica died Sunday at her home from a rare form of bone cancer.
Her mother and the man who heads the New Life Ministries religious group are facing child abuse and neglect charges in the case. They allegedly failed to seek treatment for Jessica after being urged to do so by workers at a walk-in clinic.
I honestly cannot understand people who would evidently prefer to die (or, as in this case, let someone else die) rather than seek medical treatment. Much as I try to understand other people's religious beliefs, something appalls me about people like this.
7:58 PM | link
The next President of the United States could be the winner of a new Pop Idol-style reality television show.
US trade newspaper Variety reports that plans are under way for an ambitious series which would climax with the US public choosing a "people's candidate" to run for president in 2004.
I like the idea. After all, the last election had to be decided by a court case, so, if we extend the premise a little, why not have the next one solved by a TV show?
7:41 PM | link
Who said W. doesn't want to rule the world?
In a 33-page document, published overnight Sydney time, President George Bush says the US will never allow its military might to be challenged the way it was during the Cold War.
It says "the President has no intention of allowing any foreign power to catch up with the huge lead the United States has opened since the fall of the Soviet Union more than a decade ago". [...]
A senior White House official said Mr Bush had edited the document heavily "because he thought there were sections where we sounded overbearing or arrogant".
And the finished result doesn't? Good grief.
7:33 PM | link
Via Scott Wickstein: Phillip Adams reckons apartheid was in force in S. Africa for only 20 years. That so? I wonder what those laws enacted there in 1948 were supposed to be, then, unless Phillip reckons apartheid ended in 1968 and was replaced by something else...
7:29 PM | link
Paul Wright comes over all Steve Earle in this item. Look, everybody, how brave Paul is for dissing Nelson Mandela. Why, he might even be called a terrorist for daring to not toe the official line. He might even be kicked out of the country.
7:19 PM | link
Via Angela Bell: Why are English departments still fighting the culture wars?
The usual explanation for the divisiveness in English is twofold. First, starting with the invasion of French poststructuralism in the 1960s, advanced literary interpretation changed from being formalist in method and traditionalist in ideology to a brand of French theory whose major distinguishing characteristic seemed to be that it required you to spend more time reading the theorists than reading the canonical texts of Western literature. The second major explanation for the culture wars is that they basically have been about politics, set off when '60s radicals took their battles from the streets into university departments.
This actually holds true for my experience of film studies too, both in that one of my lecturers had taken part in the May 1968 riots in Paris, and also because we spent a lot more time talking about what someone else had said about the films instead of watching the films themselves. Still, if there'd ever been a war over it, it had long since been fought and theory declared the victor. I've nothing against theory per se if it adds to one's understanding of the artwork under discussion, though unfortunately I doubt that it does so often enough...
7:14 PM | link
Australians happier about immigration... sometimes, anyway.
Australians are far more supportive of immigration than they were a decade ago, but the dwindling pool of people who reject a higher intake are increasingly likely to cite social tension as a key reason.
Like the guy who wrote to the Telegraph today warning somewhat shrilly that we need to get harder on boat people because there could be Al Qaeda members in there. Feel like writing in myself, saying we should obviously stop all immigration to this country, legal and otherwise, so we don't have to live in terror like that...
6:44 PM | link
Via Ted Barlow: Ginger Stampley unconvinced by Saddam=Hitler equation.
9:11 PM | link
CNN pleased with its new look. I still think it looks like shit and their printer-friendly pages are still lumbered with insane URLS. Apart from which, the average full-size CNN page is probably still 100+ Kb in size even without graphics. If anyone can tell me where that 100Kb is on the page, I'll be glad to hear it...
8:56 PM | link
Mo Mowlam: fight terror by legalising drugs.
From my experience of being responsible for drugs policy in the previous government, I came to the conclusion that legalisation and regulation of all drugs was the only way to reduce the harmful effects of this unstoppable activity. There are many reasons why I reached this conclusion, which are too extensive to go into here.
One of those reasons, though, is that we need to detach the international drugs business from criminality - not least because it would further isolate international terrorism by removing the finance and other resources, such as places for training, and money laundering facilities. It would be a big step forward in reducing criminality in the world's financial system.
That's right, Mo, the World Trade Centre attack would never have occurred if only we'd let Al Qaeda push stuff in those territories where the late Pablo Escobar and his ilk used to ply their trade. Good grief.
8:52 PM | link
Airline safety goes nuts again. There's a reason why I don't intend to be getting on any aeroplanes in the near future.
8:48 PM | link
Police hunting woman caught beating child. The woman and child now seem to have disappeared and the family basically seem to be covering for her. Maggots.
8:46 PM | link
The government may ban the sale of sexually explicit magazines and videos on military bases, a three-judge panel of a federal appeals court in San Francisco has ruled.
The panel, of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, unanimously upheld the Military Honor and Decency Act, enacted in 1996, which requires the Department of Defense to ban such materials.
"The act is reasonable in light of the Supreme Court's longstanding deference to military regulations in the First Amendment context, and because the act seeks to restrict the sale of materials at odds with the military's image of honor, professionalism and proper decorum," Judge Michael Daly Hawkins wrote for the panel.
Yeah, porn can make you do crazy things like blow up innocent Afghan civilians at wedding parties or Canadian soldiers...
The board has prohibited Penthouse, Hustler, Playgirl, Naughty Neighbors and Mature Nympho. It has allowed Playboy, Esquire, Cosmopolitan and Celebrity Skin.
Only for the articles, I'm sure.
8:35 PM | link
Reznor says he's been listening to country greats like Williams, Patsy Cline and Johnny Cash on his iPod MP3 player while walking his dog around town. "I'm not going to be singing blues in a country format," he assures me, "but this music has been making me appreciate simplicity and directness."
He's even been contemplating a tour in Europe with a string quartet. It's another way to challenge himself to not lose sight of his craft. "Just because you can buy a box of software now for a couple hundred bucks that can make a great-sounding album," he says, "that doesn't mean you're going to make a great record. What matters are the songs."
As fearsome as the idea of NIN with strings sound (have we forgotten Metallica's S&M already?), it might not be entirely bad. I've got the two-disc version of the last NIN album with the new songs and things, and if that's any indication of what Trent's planning next, I'm not going to worry just yet...
8:23 PM | link
Russian pop star enters slavery in England. Regrettably it's not the red-headed chick from Tatu, I wouldn't mind having her as my indentured slave... ahem. This story is bizarre in almost every respect, right down to the semi-literate telling of it.
7:45 PM | link
Town celebrates 250th anniversary with one-ton ham biscuit. Ham biscuit? Am I entirely misconstruing something, or is a ham biscuit what I think it is? And is it as revolting as I imagine?
7:36 PM | link
Arise, Honorary Sir Alan Greenspan. Next: Pope gives honorary sainthood to Ayn Rand.
7:33 PM | link
For more than a year, Brian Andrew Newman carried on a friendship, then a relationship, with a Hillsdale County girl.
She was barely 14 years old. He said he was 16. At one point, Brian even lived with the girl and her family.
It took the police and a routine well-being check for the family to learn that Brian’s story was full of deceit. He was not what he seemed - not 16, and not a boy.
"Brian" was really a 22-year-old woman - Valerie Charles from nearby Addison. She used a back brace to hide her body, three socks rolled up in a condom to have sexual contact with the teenage girl.
Now you're telling me, this woman posed as a teenage boy by rolling socks into a condom, they did this for a year... and the other girl never even noticed? I find that harder to believe than anything else about the story...
7:08 PM | link
Ukraine: some of our nukes are missing.
"Out of 2,400 nuclear warheads which were on Ukrainian territory, the withdrawal of only 2,200 warheads has been verified. The fate of the remaining 200 warheads is unknown," Simonenko told Pravda.ru.
And his charges were backed up, Pravda.ru writes, by a member of a Ukrainian parliamentary investigation who admits that some of the warheads have been "lost."
Of course, the story comes from Pravda, so it must be 100% authentic. Rumours that a man variously described as resembling Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein had purchased the nukes at a garage sale in Kiev have not been confirmed.
7:03 PM | link
Peter Chernin from News Corp decides a bit of content might be nice.
"What the hell were we thinking?" Chernin asked in a speech to civic organization Town Hall Los Angeles. "Where did (we) get our grandiose ideas the media business was on the way to complete and utter re-invention?"
Chernin said media companies must now re-learn the old lesson that consumers want them to create fresh and exciting entertainment, not a gadget for delivering entertainment.
What does that mean? Sequels to Hollywood shitbusters that haven't had sequels yet as opposed to pre-existing clapped-out franchises?
6:55 PM | link
Groovy Net/text abbreviations spilling over into the real world. Or should that be "in2"?
Deborah Bova, who teaches eighth-grade English at Raymond Park Middle School in Indianapolis, thought her eyesight was failing several years ago when she saw the sentence "B4 we perform, ppl have 2 practice" on a student assignment.
"I thought, `My God, what is this?' " Ms. Bova said. "Have they lost their minds?"[...]
But Montana Hodgen, 16, another Montclair student, said she was so accustomed to instant-messaging abbreviations that she often read right past them. She proofread a paper last year only to get it returned with the messaging abbreviations circled in red.
"I was so used to reading what my friends wrote to me on Instant Messenger that I didn't even realize that there was something wrong," she said. She said her ability to separate formal and informal English declined the more she used instant messages. "Three years ago, if I had seen that, I would have been `What is that?' "
Actually that sort of thing annoys the shit out of me too. Something within me has always distrusted people on the Internet who seem able to write only in Netspeak...
6:53 PM | link
Elusive fifth Harry Potter book may actually be out by Xmas. Possibly having plagiarism accusations thrown out of court is spurring her on...
6:43 PM | link
Austrian town divided over Schwarzenegger statue.
The 80ft statue in the centre of Graz will be a tribute to local boy Arnold Schwarzenegger and will tower over more traditional statues of Mozart and the Austrian Emperor Kaiser Franz Joseph.
But many locals believe the tribute is not in fitting with the town's image as it takes up the mantle of European City of Culture next year.
The giant steel Terminator will cost £3.2m and be built next year in Graz City Park.
The odd thing is, it's not even Arnold, it's the Terminator machine. There's a picture of it accompanying the article. I'd just have thought if they were going to do a statue of the artist formerly known as Arnold Strong, they'd have actually made it of him and not the robotic bit that doesn't look like him...
6:39 PM | link
Snow White & the 7 Dwarves to be retooled as kung fu movie. Crouching Dwarf, Hidden Witch, anyone?
6:34 PM | link
Via Tim Dunlop: Mark Harrison cracks the best joke I've heard all day.
I’d forgotten about the classic use by the media of disgruntled family members to attack right wing politicians – the interviews with John Hewson’s bitter wife and kids on 60 Minutes after he had left them. I guess those on the left are such paragons of virtue it is just not worth the media’s effort to dig up and publicise family problems and criticisms by disgruntled family members.
60 Minutes left-wing! Yes, the Packer empire's flagship piece of chequebook journalism is apparently really all for the worker and progress! Good thing Mark spotted that, cos I'd sure as shit never have noticed it myself...
6:29 PM | link
Conservative governments: a mental health hazard? If I'm to be honest, I suspect there's some slightly spurious logic operating here, but I love it anyway.
6:16 PM | link
Former deputy PM admits to getting it on with his secretary in 1975. Although the Jim Cairns & Junie Morosi affair was apparently the Cheryl & Gareth story of its day, I thought this belated admission was an absolute non-story when it broke earlier this week, except I now discover Jim & Junie actually sued the National Times and the Mirror in 1977 and 1982 over claims they'd been in each other's pants; he lost, but she won, collecting $17,000 from the Mirror and another ten grand from 2GB the following year (you know, back in the days when $27,000 was actually worth something; for comparison, the house we live in cost $43,000 in 1978, and we could probably get five to six hundred thousand for it now). This could lead to interesting things...
6:12 PM | link
Seems that no one, and I do mean no one, likes being compared with the Nazis.
5:54 PM | link
If you've never been to Mark Harden's Artchive before, may I suggest you do so? I'd actually forgotten about it almost entirely, not having looked near it for literally years, except one of my fellow students was browsing it between classes today, which reminded me of it. So there's the link. Follow it.
5:48 PM | link
Hello to Leesa Patterson with thanks for the link, glad you find the name of the blog so amusing...
7:31 PM | link
Remember the story I linked a few days ago of the Italian coffin maker using sexy models to advertise his coffins? Ted Barlow has the pictures. Surreal stuff.
7:27 PM | link
Rittenhouse tear strips off that Coulter woman.
Our advice to Miss Coulter: Stop. Now. Take a breather. Take a vacation. Take a powder. You’re embarrassing yourself.
Unfortunately shame does not seem to be one of this charming Ann's character traits, otherwise I doubt she'd say most of the stuff she says...
7:20 PM | link
Also via MeFi: Snoop Froggy Frogg? The artist formerly known as Calvin Broadus is to appear in the new Muppets TV movie. This caused a minor bit of righteous indignation at MeFi until someone mentioned Alice Cooper appeared on the TV show back in the 1970s...
7:17 PM | link
The producer of "Mortal Kombat" films, who also worked with "Terminator" director James Cameron to create production company Lightstorm Entertainment, has a big vision for Blackbelt TV, which will telecast fights, movies and even some Japanese animation.
"We want to do the same thing for the martial arts that MTV did for music," says Mr. Kasanoff, who expects the Los Angeles-based channel to hit the market with at least four million cable and satellite subscribers.
So in other words you're planning to create a second channel to actually show the films and things while the original channel disappears up its own arse creating its own original content. My So Called Kung Fu, anyone?
7:10 PM | link
W. orders Area 51 to be kept secret. God, George, if you're going to take time out from declaring war on Iraq, why not turn your attention to something actually important?
7:07 PM | link
Via Metafilter: The pig-Latin Google interface.
7:05 PM | link
Via Mac Thomason: The Lefty Libertarian. I didn't think such a beast existed, though our brand-new author avows he/she is out to "present a libertarian take on the world but not the usual crypto-republicanism". Sounds like it could be interesting; I'll keep an eye on this one to see how it develops.
6:28 PM | link
James Brown sued by daughters over songwriting royalties. Apparently the fact that the oldest kid was only six (and the other only three) when one of the songs in contention was written isn't proving a barrier. Those must've been some prodigious kids James had.
6:20 PM | link
Oktoberfest bans "Sept. 11" mural.
The German city of Munich has told a fairground operator to take down a mural of New York's World Trade Center in flames decorating his horror ride before the city's beer festival opens Saturday.
The painting on the front wall of the "House of Horrors" ride depicts both towers billowing black smoke, echoing the hijacked-plane attacks of September 11 last year. [...]
The operator of the ride could not be reached, but the spokeswoman said the apocalyptic mural had been painted long before September 11, 2001.
Based on the horror film "Godzilla," it also features another New York skyscraper, the Chrysler building, exploding near the top and collapsing as fighter jets fly nearby.
Is it just me or is anyone else wondering why, if it's been deemed that offensive, it wasn't removed for Oktoberfest last year? Meanwhile, some other directly Sept. 11-related artwork is causing a more understandable stink.
5:52 PM | link
Scientists mass-produce antimatter. Shouldn't that be anti-mass-produced?
5:38 PM | link
Holocaust denier in Adelaide ordered off the Internet. Frederick Toben's done jail time in Germany for the same thing; what a shame the courts here are too chickenshit to order anything like that...
5:36 PM | link
Cemetery bans windchimes after complaints from mourners. Well I'd hate to think they were getting complaints from the residents...
5:12 PM | link
Also via bailz: scientists discover why some sheep have big bottoms; male population of NZ gets extremely excited.
5:00 PM | link
Via bailz: Russell Crowe fights like a girl! Or at least needs a girl to do his fighting for him...
4:59 PM | link
And Bruce Hill has indeed left the building, with this slightly cryptic message on his blog:
In the meantime, my brother Murray and mate David Bisman will continue the struggle at a new blog, Silent Running, which is located in a completely diferent national jurisdiction. I may pop up there from time to time, who knows? Stranger things have happened. [...]
Anything those two totally separate individuals write in a blog utterly unconnected to me, in an entirely different country, cannot possibly come back to bite me in the bum.
And I mean that in a very real, and legally binding sense.
Wonder what that's about. Maybe the idiot Alley Writer got to him or something...
4:36 PM | link
Dannii Minogue's delusions of stardom.
But Dannii, 30, said Kylie had graciously decided to step aside to let her "take the baton".
"She will be chilling in Australia. She's been working really hard lately," Dannii told London newspaper the Evening Standard.
"So she said to me, 'okay, you take the baton now, it's your turn to run with it and do your best'.
Isn't that sweet? She's not cracking under the pressure, she's just giving little sis her turn in the spotlight.
"But it's good-natured stuff and there are no catfights. We give each other a break when we need it."
And you've been giving Kylie a break to get on with her music career for how many years now? Could you have been more specious and stupid in this article?
4:31 PM | link
I got someone from Microsoft flit by the blog today looking for this. Frankly I think Bill Gates needs to give his drones better things to do with their time...
4:20 PM | link
Inside the Rolling Stones, Inc. Or, how Mick and co. made, and make, their millions.
I'm up in Jagger's suite in Boston's Four Seasons hotel just before the Stones kick off their worldwide Licks tour. Mick turns down the volume on a boom box, packs off two of his young kids with their nannies, and then holds forth on product pricing, economics, and business models. Jagger is eloquent and informed, but he has a disclaimer: "I don't really count myself as a very sophisticated businessperson," he says as he leans back on the couch. "I'm a creative artist. All I know from business I've picked up along the way. I never really studied business in school. I kind of wish I had, kind of, but how boring is that?" he says with a grin.
So what were they teaching you at the London School of Economics, Mick? Handicrafts?
4:12 PM | link
Via Eric Olsen at BlogCritics: The pseudonymous return of Boston.
I had this song, 'Corporate America,' and I wanted to get it to colleges. And experts told me that there was no way Boston was gonna get on Internet file sharing or on the modern, progressive rock charts. So I decided that what we would do is, we'd release this song to the Internet, got it onto MP3.com under the name 'Downer's Revenge.' Of course, it was a shock to me that it went from zero to Number Two on the Progressive Rock Chart in, like, four days--but a pleasant shock.
Boston, progressive? I downloaded a bit of it just to hear what it sounded like... the answer to which is, frankly and literally, shit. "More Than A Feeling" this is not. Which is actually not a bad thing, it doesn't sound terribly like them (keyboards, electronics and programming) until it gets to the chorus bit... but my God the production is terrible (muddy and indistinct with a fairly unpleasant bit of fuzz most of the way through), and the song itself is pretty average. I'm wondering if the mp3 they've put up has been deliberately roughened up and the album release will be nice and clean and Bostonish...
4:00 PM | link
Oh, and the bloke from the US who dropped by earlier in the day looking for this: if you find any, be so kind as to pass them on, OK?
11:00 PM | link
Via Rob Corr: Lindsay Tanner vents about the republic. Much of it is a personal attack on Malcolm Turnbull,
The republican cause has been fatally damaged by its association with the celebrity driven ARM. It has been a plaything of the rich and famous, suffocating under a stampede of self-indulgent celebrities anxious to identify with a fashionable cause.
The 1999 referendum campaign was built on a strategy that resembled celebrities marketing dog food. Ordinary Australians were alienated by the glitz and glamour republic, and unimpressed by naughty-chic slogans such as Give an Australian the Head Job.
Actually, Lindsay, this ordinary Australian here was alienated by the division within republican ranks about the republican model we should or should not vote for. I was alienated by the divisiveness of the occasionally absurd nationalist rhetoric. I was alienated most of all by the incessant carping in the media about the inevitability of the republic and the way discussion of the republic only ever turned on why we wanted to be one, never why we should be one (this is actually where I do agree with Tanner, who says the republican push needs to explain why we should become a republic) or the practical as opposed to the emotional benefits of becoming one. That's what alienated me. I still voted yes to the republic, but I did it with misgivings, none of which had anything to do with any individuals associated with the cause.
10:42 PM | link
Sporting scandal! Well, maybe...
If I know anything about web coding of forms, the Ten Poll on the AFL website is a sham.
I checked out the code on the page, and the percentages are "hard coded" into the page, i.e. no matter what anyone might vote, the numbers don't change.[...]
Perhaps if you know someone who is a real web programming head you might want to get them to check it out. But I reckon that the AFL website is publishing the numbers that it wants to create the impression that it wants to.
Maybe... still, I'm not 100% convinced. To be sure, I know next to nothing about real coding and scripting (basic-to-moderate HTML and very limited CSS is as far as I go), but going on my experience with Blogger, I know that if you view the source of any given blog it looks like the entries have all been hard-coded into the HTML. Of course, nothing of the sort is really going on; if you dig about in a Blogger template you discover the sundry bits of Blogger code behind it that actually generate the page from their database. Maybe something similar's the case with the AFL poll. Maybe it's just broken. Or maybe they really are just fiddling the figure. Why am I even talking about this, it's fucking AFL, for God's sake...
10:20 PM | link
What's up with Bruce Hill's blog? I just read Tex's site and there was a farewell message to him there. When I went to the blog I only found a blank template, though oddly enough a different blank template to the one I indicated this afternoon. What's going on? Certainly never got any indication that I can remember (unlike Matthew Bates) that the end was nigh...
10:06 PM | link
Via Mac Thomason: Marie from Roxette in hospital with brain tumour.
Swedish duo Roxette was due to launch its new single, "A Thing about You" in three weeks and start a European tour in late October.
As Mac says, it's this reference to the band's continued existence which is the most interesting thing about the story.
8:05 PM | link
Graham Hancock and his ilk must be livid.
With audiences watching on live television, the miniature robot - dubbed the Pyramid Rover - crawled about 65 metres (71 yards) up a narrow tunnel to explore a mysterious shaft blocked by a limestone door.
When it got to the door, it drilled a hole and inserted a fibre optic camera to film what lies beyond.
But the crafty pyramid builders have kept their secrets from prying eyes because the chamber was blocked by yet another door - not seen for more than 4,000 years.
It must be hard to be one of those Hancock/Alford/Collins types, operating on the assumption that thousands of years ago there was a now-lost civilisation and that the latter hid their secrets somewhere in the pyramids, probably behind that great stone door that's frustrated them for years... and they finally get to see through it and what do they find? Another door! How let down would you feel?
7:55 PM | link
Via Gary Farber and Jim Henley: Margaret Atwood on Ursula K. LeGuin. She's in praise of LeGuin, though remarkably sniffy towards SF in general. Sample:
It's too bad that one term—"science fiction"—has served for so many variants, and too bad also that this term has acquired a dubious if not downright sluttish reputation. True, the proliferation of sci-fi in the Twenties and Thirties gave rise to a great many bug-eyed-monster-bestrewn space operas that were published in pulp magazines and followed by films and television shows that drew heavily on this odoriferous cache. (Who could ever forget The Creeping Eye, The Head that Wouldn't Die, or The Attack of the Sixty-Foot Woman? A better question: Why can't we forget them?)
An even better question: has Margaret forgotten her own Handmaid's Tale is usually lumped in with the science fiction genre? Or does she just not want to be reminded? Genre is still supposed to be genre irrespective of an individual work's supposed quality, isn't it?
7:36 PM | link
The Tapestry Of Delights. Online version of Vernon Joynson's book on 1960s British psychedelia. Looks like being a fantastic resource. I don't think I realised until reading this just how close to an outright bootleg my long-beloved Circus Days compilation was; the presence of Peter Cook & Dudley Moore's "Bedazzled" always mystified me, and of course I later discovered a couple of the other bands there made it to album stage as well, but I'm shocked to realise just how many tracks there had evidently been booted from legitimately released singles and things. If only the frigging Rough Guides would get their own books online again like this...
6:47 PM | link
Breaking the speed of light using basic laboratory tools. Well, sort of...
While the peak moves faster than light speed, the total energy of the pulse does not. This means Einstein's relativity is preserved, so do not expect super-fast starships or time machines anytime soon.
What damn good is it, then? I want my TARDIS!
6:33 PM | link
NZ film censors get special stress allowance.
The allowance, and an entitlement to eight counselling or supervision sessions a year, helped staff deal with the "psychological pollution" they encountered in their work.
"It's based on the whole premise of the legislation which is that objectionable material has the potential to harm," Mr Hastings said.
"We're not machines. We're humans. Given that we have to do this job, we have to take some steps to negate the harm.
"Some people have more stressful jobs than we do, for example police or paramedics. Maybe that's something their union could put to their management."
Cunts. Why should they get an allowance when people like me have to review films and we don't get shit for suffering through the ones we hate?
6:27 PM | link
Anti-piracy tactics get desperate.
A US record company has issued reviewers with portable CD players that are glued shut to prevent two new albums from being pirated online before their official releases.
Epic Records Group has taken the drastic step of sealing CD players shut and gluing headphones onto them to stop digital copies being made from promotional albums. The albums involved are Riot Act by Pearl Jam and Scarlet's Walk by Tori Amos.
Desperate but hardly original. Radiohead did this five years ago with OK Computer, putting promo tapes in walkmans and sealing them shut. Still, I suppose Radiohead weren't trying to beat piracy in doing that. Wonder how many hundreds of live albums will follow the new Pearl Jam studio disc, too...
6:18 PM | link
Iraq temporarily screws up W.'s invasion plans. I can't see this holding off the war too long, though. W. will have his fight come hell or high water, and sadly I don't think anything will stop him...
6:15 PM | link
Sex sells everything... even death.
The page featuring the firm's "Madonna" coffin shows a pouting woman in zebra shorts and high-heel boots kneeling next to the casket, while in "Empire Style", a blonde donning a black G-string leans on a coffin and turns her backside to the camera.
6:10 PM | link
The problems of intellectual property law.
There was a time when countries could go their own way on intellectual-property rights, and introduce legal protection for creators whenever they thought it appropriate. For most of the 19th century, America provided no copyright protection for foreign authors, arguing that it needed the freedom to copy in order to educate the new nation.
Actually American publishers were still bootlegging books well into the 1960s. I discovered today, during the course of a class exercise, that Ace Books pirated Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings in paperback form circa 1965/6 until Tolkien himself used the One Ring (or at least Allen & Unwin's legal department) on them. Was there some pressing need to educate Americans in Elvish or something back then?
6:00 PM | link
Tom Gorman skewers W. Or at least his recent speech to the UN. Wish someone would skewer George, though I fear you'd only get someone even more worrying in his place...
5:52 PM | link
New survey purports to discover why people go to classical concerts.
The study suggests understanding why people come to concerts - and more important, why they don't.
The answer may be disconcerting for some: Audiences don't always come for the music.
They often come for social reasons. Their friends are there. It's a good date or a spousal night out. They're entertaining visiting friends and family. Someone asks them to go.
This is a revelation how? Haven't classical concerts always had an at least partly social aspect to them? Evan Eisenberg notes that in 18th century Italy, people used the opera for socialising. Bugger the show, the opera was just where you went every night. Pierre Boulez said something similar years ago about how what we applaud at a concert is not the orchestra playing but ourselves and our eminent good taste in being there.
5:42 PM | link
French author sued over Islamic insult.
Prize-winning French novelist Michel Houellebecq is to stand trial on Tuesday on charges of making a racial insult and inciting religious hatred. [...]
In an interview given last year to the French literary magazine Lire, the author was quoted as saying "the dumbest religion, after all, is Islam".
"When you read the Koran, you're shattered. The Bible at least is beautifully written because the Jews have a heck of a literary talent," he told Lire.
Yeah, shame about those Christians who wrote that latter part of the book, eh. Completely ruined the ending.
5:32 PM | link
Russian composer plans "erotic musical" based on Bill & Monica.
But the action would be switched to the Kremlin and the main characters would be Vladmir Putin and secretary Masha Lewinsonova.
Am I the only person wondering what the point of this is? Has uncle Vlad been following Clinton's example and I haven't heard?
5:20 PM | link
Via Gareth Parker: Why aren't the US apologising for the death of this man?
4:59 PM | link
Don Arthur righteously skewers the kneejerk right again.
Now let's consult our gut and discover the true nature of reality. There
are 8 basic principles:
1. Some people are better than other people.
2. You are one of the better people.
3. Some cultures are better than other cultures.
4. Your culture is the best culture that has ever existed anywhere in the world.
5. Inferior people and peoples should accept their lot in life.
6. People belonging to inferior cultures should try to assimilate (it won't work but they should try anyway).
7. Superior people from superior cultures ought to take charge.
8. Sometimes when you're in charge you need to kick some butt.
4:55 PM | link
Via Tex: Gary Kasparov gets beaten again. I've never heard of the girl who beat him, though apparently she beat Bobby Fischer's record as the world's youngest grand master, taking that mantle when she was 15.
It was not just fans who applied the pressure. Polgar had no close friends on the circuit, and some grandmasters were disparaging, to say the least. Britain's Nigel Short, who has lost 11 games to Polgar, described her and her sisters as "trained monkeys".
Well, she must be a pretty damn well trained monkey if you've lost to her that many times. Not jealous are we, Nigel?
4:52 PM | link
Bruce, mate, you've got some template problems over at your blog...
4:45 PM | link
Matt from ABCDIA wonders who we're writing for.
I'm guessing there's not a huge crossover in readership between the broader Australian blogosphere (the journals, the writing sites, the teenagers) and the political blogs, and that the authors of political blogs comprise the bulk of their readership (with people like Tim Blair gaining a significant spill from overseas).
This sort of look at exactly how big a weblog audience is has been done better elsewhere, but I wonder it wouldn't be so much quicker and cheaper if we all just rented a medium-sized conference room once a month and gave everyone 10 minutes and a whiteboard.
Ten minutes? My ARSE. It takes me hours to produce this rubbish! He actually does have a good point though, and I'll post a proper response in his comments later when I can think properly again (just been lying on the couch for about 20 minutes there)...
4:44 PM | link
Alcoholic milk's getting people pissed.
Speaking on 3AW, Premier Steve Bracks said Shepparton company Wicked Holdings had crossed the line with their Moo Joose product, which would have an alcohol content greater than most beers.
"This clearly intended for young people," he said.
"Is this going to entice people to drink who wouldn't otherwise do it? I think the judgment of Licensing Victoria for young people is 'yes'," he said.
Me, I'm just distressed at the very notion of alcoholic milk. I just can't imagine anything more disgusting...
4:14 PM | link
Not one but two BlogCritics reviews from me. More film review recycling.
4:08 PM | link
Another review by your humble scribe at BlogCritics. This, and the last film review I did, are admittedly just rehashes of stuff I've written for my radio show, but nonetheless worth reusing.
9:52 PM | link
Film Directors: articles on the Internet. "This page has been created to give orientation to the cineaste looking for articles of film analysis and insight on the internet." Looks like being a very handy resource if that sounds like you.
6:51 PM | link
Test?
6:16 PM | link
US Embassy staff refusing to cough up proposed British road toll. Christ, I wouldn't want to pay the equivalent of AUS$14 just to get to work either...
4:12 PM | link
Man loses race for position of governor of Jakarta, demands city officials return bribes he paid them.
4:00 PM | link
Johnny Sharp on young people and classical music.
Maybe, but for most people under 30, classical music is like wine tasting, organised coach trips and visiting ancient ruins. You're reluctantly exposed to them as a child, but you don't appreciate them until you're older.
Violinist Julian Lloyd Webber blames television for not featuring classical music more. Which is like saying war films should feature more flower arranging. The two were never really suited. Indeed, just as a teenager gets embarrassed when their parents express enthusiasm for the new Ms Dynamite CD, there's an argument that says parents should hear alarm bells when their child starts listening to the Four Seasons in their bedroom.
3:49 PM | link
Via Tim Dunlop: Jacques Chirac now regrets having ever been nice to Saddam Hussein.
PRESIDENT JACQUES CHIRAC no longer thinks the way he did 27 years ago when, as France's Prime Minister, he welcomed an up-and-coming young leader named Saddam Hussein to Paris, invited him home for the weekend, showed him around a French nuclear installation, called him a "personal friend" and offered his "esteem" and his "affection."
In an interview here a week ago, Mr. Chirac distanced himself from the Iraqi leader. "I haven't seen him for a long time," he said. "He's probably changed since. So have I." He called Mr. Hussein "especially dangerous to his own people," adding that he personally wished for the Iraqi's political demise and would not rule out the use of force against him if it were approved by the United Nations Secrity Council.
OK... so if Saddam's changed since then, and so has Jacques, does that also mean Chirac's a menace to his own people?
3:33 PM | link
Via Jason Soon: Robert Manne on the "new racism".
On the far right of the political spectrum something sociologists have come to call "new racism" seems to be taking hold. Old racism argued that the intractable differences between human groups were rooted in biology and blood. This form of racism was discredited by Hitler and the Holocaust. A new racism took its place. It argued that differences between human collectivities were based on incompatibility not of blood and biology but of culture and religion.
Apart from quibbling over definitions, though, as Jason does, surely the most idiotic thing about the above statement is the notion that conflicts over culture and religion are somehow a "new" thing...
3:07 PM | link
Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock's daughter, Kirsty, feels her father's tough stance on asylum seekers is partly her fault because she could not change his mind, an ABC documentary will reveal tonight.[...]
Ms Ruddock, who was a lawyer in the federal Attorney-General's Department, spoke to the ABC before leaving Australia two days ago.
She has taken up a volunteer job with the Youth Ambassadors program, working in a developing nation.
"I'm motivated by wanting to go and live and work in a developing country but another reason behind leaving is to get away from the daily grind in terms of reading about the politics that my father is involved in on a daily basis," Ms Ruddock said.
I don't know about anyone else, but this strikes me at least as mightily sad. No doubt the more right-wing members of local Blogdom will be wishing her good riddance, and I don't entirely know what purpose fleeing the country like that serves (Ruddock pere's still here), but even so...
2:50 PM | link
Just how true are your memories of Sept. 11?
These recollections are typical, but not in the way you may think. I can't speak to where these visitors to Ground Zero were Sept. 11 and how they first heard, but their memory of what they saw is false.
"There was no video that day of the first plane hitting the World Trade Center," notes psychologist Kathy Pezdek of Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, Calif., one of many researchers studying Sept. 11 memories. "Yet 76% of the New Yorkers we surveyed say they saw it then, as do 73% of people nationwide."
This is rather remarkable. I know I only ever saw the second one hit on TV (as far as I'm aware those French fellas were the only ones to capture the first plane on tape, and that by accident). Still, I'm not sure the article really tells us anything we couldn't have already guessed, i.e. that memory is one of the harder things to figure out about our transcendently odd brain...
9:47 PM | link
Of course, when else WOULD this cunting shitbag choose to freeze on me but in the middle of putting up a new template.
I have so got to get webspace I can install Moveable Type on.
8:54 PM | link
Testing again
8:44 PM | link
Testing
8:04 PM | link
More template fuckery ahead. Let's see how long this takes.
7:39 PM | link
Private Media Group Inc., a publicly traded adult entertainment site based in Spain, offered 1 million shares for Napster's assets. Shares of Private Media, which distributes its adult media content directly and through a network of local affiliates and independent distributors, ended Thursday's session at $2.41 on Nasdaq.
In a statement, Private Media said it plans to use the Napster trademark to offer millions of adults worldwide the ability to swap adult-oriented content for free and at the same time gain access to "top-quality" content at a reasonable price.
That sounds remarkably like what a lot of porn sites using AdultCheck and the like say, only when you cough up the money for them you find the same ten naked chicks you find on ten million other free sites. I'm not buying this one either.
7:20 PM | link
Via Metafilter: Think Of The Children. Satire in particularly dubious taste, especially when you consider this story, linked by someone in the comments section with a remark on how it can be hard to separate fact from fiction at times.
7:11 PM | link
Via Jim Henley: a libertarian dating service. Actually, the dating thing is only one of the things on offer here, but it's the most striking. Personally all I can say is that if you choose your friends according to a political philosophy, or indeed according to any system, you probably deserve the friends you'll end up with...
6:34 PM | link
Man goes to bed, wakes up a week later without legs. Sounds not entirely unlike that urban myth of waking up in the bath with no kidneys, only this one seems to be true enough. Bizarre.
6:23 PM | link
Thieves break into funeral parlour, are frightened off by corpse. Um... what else would you normally expect to find in a funeral parlour?
6:22 PM | link
A tale of inaccuracies in news reports. This is quite staggering, in some ways.
6:21 PM | link
The Manchester Evening News says the EOC believes its specially-designed series of Carry On-style film posters are the perfect way of raising awareness of the need for workplace equality.
The posters, titled Carry On Sexual Harassment, Carry On Discrimination and Carry On All the Way to the Tribunal are faithful copies of real film posters.
It's hoped any budding Sid James who targets a colleague as a potential Barbara Windsor will realise there could be problems.
Alternately, it could wind up like that South Park episode where Cartman dresses as Hitler for Halloween, and they show him a video of Hitler to try and make him realise why this is bad, but instead of being horrified by it he loves it and demands to watch it again...
6:00 PM | link
Ken Parish weighs in on the below story here and here.
5:48 PM | link
Via Bernard Slattery: the bizarre tale of the kid who "predicted" the Sept. 11 attacks. Bernard's interest in this one seems to stem from the fact that the author who first reported the story got shafted for it:
Many of us heard similar stories - supposedly "urban legends" - in the weeks after September 11, but only one reporter did anything about them. Jeffrey Scott Shapiro interviewed the teacher, Antoinette DiLorenzo, and the boy's brother - they're Palestinian immigrants. The Journal News ran the piece on page seven, lest it provoke - all together now - "a backlash". The story held up, which is more than Shapiro's career did. By the end of the day, he was no longer the Journal News crime reporter.
Bernard then finds this Shapiro character began his career as a supermarket tabloid reporter who turned rat on them and went to the FBI with incriminating tapes of story conferences. Seems he got booted from the Journal News when his earlier tabloid life was revealed. Finally, Bernard links to this article from last October which, if nothing else, seems to give some credibility to the original story. Personally, I want to know what happened to the kid who made the claim in the first place, since he is obviously a terrorist... you know, like that Amira Sbbet girl who wrote to the Telegraph through the week claiming she was all in favour of that Nigerian mother being stoned to death for Sharia law. Clearly our true enemies are the young people of the world...
5:37 PM | link
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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.
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What the critics have said
"short tempered, rude, sarcastic and generally unable to cope with authority figures"
-Martin Forrester-Reid (former employer)
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