The Null Device

2000/7/8

Apparently there are only thirty-six dramatic situations, from which most or all stories derive. (via Found)

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Decline of an institution: Today I met a friend at an old haunt of mine, the Salamander Café (now the Curry Café) in Northcote. As suggested earlier, the place is a shadow of its former self, with the funky decor and mismatched teacups replaced by uniform, upmarket tidiness. The clientéle also was more mainstream; not one bohemian or raver, but mostly middle-aged yuppie types.

And now for the crowning horror: they had Kenny G on the stereo. Whereas the old Salamander would play an eclectic range of very doovy music (I stumbled across a Not Drowning, Waving album there), the new establishment seems partial to vat-grown, soulless corporate-wallpaper pseudojazz, calculated scientifically to not offend bourgeois sensibilities.

This is not a good sign.

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Thanks to an outfit named DotWap, Australians will soon be able to be online all the time from their Palm Vs, paying only for bytes sent/received. Or so The Register says.

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These days it's so hard to please anyone; take, for example, recent Hollywood slaughterfest The Patriot. First the Brits got all uppity about being portrayed as the original Nazis (which, granted, is quite a leap from the usual "effete, cowardly, villainous aristocrat" stereotype), and now Black nationalist director Spike Lee (of Malcolm X fame) condemns it for, not unexpectedly, whitewashing the issue of slavery.

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Who is the mysterious "Quova", and why are they attempting to scan the entire Internet with ICMP packets? As you can imagine, the penguinheads have some interesting conjectures.

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