2000/12/31
Odd coincidence of the day: mp3.com ethereal-ambient artist Sara Ayers has, on her web site, a page on outsider artist Henry Darger.
Ye gods; Adrian Mole, the Harry Potter of the kitchen-sink socialist-realist 1980s, is still around at 37, a father and celebrity chef, and still pining for his childhood sweetheart Pandora:
Mangan added: "I want Adrian and Pandora to get together in their 80s. He can change her incontinence pants and wipe dribble from her chin." "It's the only way he'll ever get near her, when she's completely ga-ga. I can tell you that," retorted Sue Townsend.
Something to think about: Has the pace of technological progress slowed in the second half of the 20th century? Yes, the Internet and computers are very exciting, but have they had as much of an effect as electric light and the internal combustion engine? As the author of the article argues, life in 2000 is a lot more similar to life in 1950 than life in 1950 was to life in 1900.
31/12; 7 hours remaining (cont.):
Favourite CDs of 2000:
- Cocteau Twins - Stars and Topsoil
- A collection of some of the Cocteau Twins' best material from 1982 to 1990. Has some great songs, like Aikea-Guinea and Heaven or Las Vegas
- Radiohead - Kid A
- Yes, it was over-hyped; the press wouldn't shut up about it and your local Sanity/HMV had stacks of it. And yes, others said it was a load of wank. But once you get past that, you have an interesting album. Some have compared it to The Cure's Pornography, perhaps fairly, only with more of a Warp influence and some odd time signatures. Favourite track: probably How To Disappear Completely.
- Minimum Chips - Freckles
- An EP from a local act, in a sort of Stereolabish vein; hope they do a full album soon.
- Baxendale - You Will Have Your Revenge
- Electronic pop (though not synthpop) with tongue firmly in cheek. Some of the songs get boring after a while, but I Love the Sound of Dance Music is a classic.
- Stone Roses - The Remixes
- Some great reworkings of the Stone Roses, ranging from Rabbit in the Moon's acid-rave remix of I Wanna Be Adored (which sounds as if they could have done most of it with ReBirth) to Kinobe's mellow reworking of Elizabeth My Dear.
- FourPlay String Quartet, The Joy Of
- Their second album, with some great tracks, including a dub/klezmer two-part and a vicious-sounding PWEI remake. Their remix CD, slated for early 2001, will be something to look out for.
- Piano Magic, Artists' Rifles
- Arty and understated and hard to describe, though something I've been listening to a lot.
With honourable mentions going to Broadcast, Extended Play Two, Björk, SelmaSongs, Beulah, When Your Heartstrings Break, Deepchild, Hymns from Babylon, LTJ Bukem, Journey Inwards, Yo La Tengo, And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out and Black Box Recorder's various EPs (mostly for the B-sides), (Note: this is counting only CDs I acquired this year.)
The rock stars of the new millennium: A researcher at Hewlett-Packard in the UK has created a program which simulates a club DJ, well enough to fool more than a third of clubbers.
"I muck around as a DJ myself, and I became aware that some of the DJing I was doing was quite mechanical"
If this evolves into a system that consistently passes the DJ Turing test, we may have a wee crisis on our hands; i.e., who will front up for electronic dance music. The unphotogenic back-room geeks who make the stuff generally aren't rock-star material, so the mantle has been passed down to mediagenic wideboys who play the records, and who have achieved rock-star status by just playing and mixing discs. If a computer program obsoletes human DJs, what will happen to electronic music performance? Will the rock star of the new millennium be the person who starts the computer, or who dances to the mix on the podium? Even if such a dancer is wired up with motion-capture sensors to provide feedback to the mix, does that make them a star, or a human component of a machine?
31/12: So, you ask, what has happened in Your Humble Narrator's life during the past year? Well, it all started when the world didn't end, and my plans of becoming Warlord of Post-Apocalyptic Melbourne were dashed yet again; oh well, I went back to living in a first-floor flat in Carnegie, subsisting on the dole and casual tutoring work and playing around with music and writing in my spare time.
In the past year I have (in no particular order): started working full-time at Melbourne University, stopped hanging around Monash University, moved from a one bedroom flat in a rather ordinary suburb to a shared house in the inner city, travelled to Sydney (where I hung around with Peter and saw an ultradoovy live band named Prop), caught a train to Seymour (a smallish, fairly typical country town) and back one Saturday afternoon (because I had a concession card due to expire soon), uploaded some music I created to various MP3 services (here, here and here, if you're curious; mind you, that's all about 6 months old (except for vmunix, which is from 1995 or so)), played with some Aibos, appeared on 3RRR (in an interview about Grouse), shaved my head, saw The Cure play live, met a number of people, including some I hadn't seen for years, worked on various projects (more about which in due time), read books, saw live bands, saw a few plays, and picked up an electric guitar, a (mostly) new Linux box and too many CDs to list here without boring the non-trainspotters in the audience. Well, that's the first 365 days and 4 hours of 2000; though I will probably be spending a goodly chunk of the remainder asleep.
Death Disco: Is Hillary Clinton a key investor in a Nazi-themed disco near Auschwitz, or did someone along the way forget to take their medication? The mind boggles indeed. (from the Psychoceramics list)
2000/12/30
In the Philippines, where cars sport "NO To Contraception!" bumper stickers, the largest Internet service provider is none other than the Catholic Church, who have made it a mission to extend the Net to those who would not otherwise have it. All filtered and censored, of course (attempting to visit a proscribed site gets a "Thank God you were not able to enter that bad site. CBCPNet suggests that you access wholesome sites instead. God Bless You." message). Pragmatically, though, while adult content is blocked, violent first-person shooters are tolerated, because their adolescent male fans make up much of the custom.
30/12. Looking at those digits brings home the realisation that another year is drawing to an end; that soon 2000 will join 1999, 1998, 1997 and so on in the vaults of history; dead things, ever receding and growing only dimmer. All that happened receding into the distant past, every day becoming fossilised, bit by bit; gradually transformed from recent events to the halcyon memories of distant youth.
At such times, one sometimes tries to summarise what happened in the past year, and all that. It's funny, but it's hard to think of a year as a coherent whole, when it's something you experience piece by piece.
On another note, I've still got no idea how I'll be seeing out the old year (and the old millennium, for that matter), except that I will most probably remain in Melbourne.
A typically insightful look at the facts of CPRM hard disk copy control from The Reg.
If CPRM-compliant hardware is the de facto standard in the marketplace, then media producers will be able to switch to disseminating only restrictive-copy content overnight, and they'll be able to do it as easily as flicking a switch. They will need the connivance of software applications, but it only takes a CPRM-compliant Internet Explorer to achieve this and the vast majority of desktop personal computers will have been assimilated. By this stage, you may well be living in a CPRM-free world, but the bets are that your neighbors won't be. Are you confident you'll be able to dissuade them, then?
I recently received in the mail Issue 1 of a self-published comic titled The Warstorm, by an outfit calling themselves Chrome Fetus. It is about a God-fearing old man named Henry Carver, whose passion is writing and illustrating a lengthy book he calls Tales of the Lillian Girls (if that sounds familiar, it is because it takes a lot from the story of real-life outsider artist Henry Darger, of Vivian Girls fame). The preview issue of The Warstorm looks pretty interesting; the graphics and writing are impressive (though don't expect Vertigo gloss), and the story itself looks quite interesting. It will be interesting to see how this evolves in future issues.
(Aside: I like the way a bug in the JavaScript implementation of Nyetscape 6 puts those GeoCities ad boxes at the bottom of the page, where you don't even waste consciousness on them.)
Director of facile sentimental schlock Steven Spielberg is to receive an honorary knighthood, putting him among such great men as George Bush and Norman Schwarzkopf.
Madison Avenue, Graham? How about the Teen Queens? Girlfriend? Peter Andre? (I heard that Dannii Minogue's Coconut Song is a contemporary Australian classic too...)
2000/12/29
Welcome to the Digital Millennium: An outfit named icopyright.com, perhaps heartened by draconian new directions in copyright law, has come up with a new business model: web link licensing. That's right; they charge you US$50 to link to any article licensed through them. But that's not all: under their agreement, you may not criticise the article linked to or its author. There's one minor hitch: they may have no legal foundation for their power grab, though that may well change over the next few years. Galambosianism, thou art vindicated.
A film which looks worth seeing: Quills. A film about someone like the Marquis de Sade, and starring Geoffrey Rush, Kate Winslet and Sir Michael Caine, would have to be interesting.
Today I went out and did a spot of shopping, buying (among other things) two CDs: Broadcast's The Noise Made By People and Piano Magic's Artists' Rifles, both at Heartland. The former is on Warp, though has a swingin'-60s retro feel, as if afflicted by Carnaby Street Syndrome (sort of like Jerusalem Syndrome, only instead of wearing hotel bedsheets and believing yourself to be John the Baptist, it involves riding an Italian motor-scooter and thinking it's 1967, and predominantly afflicts indie kids and the likes of St Etienne). The latter CD is a very subdued, enigmatic and atmospheric work; I have no idea what to compare it to that would give a fair idea of what it sounds like, though traces of it were reminiscent of Electronic, Slowdive Dead Can Dance and The Paradise Motel, albeit in the most fleeting of ways. Ignore the fact that the band name sounds like a naff K-Tel compilation CD, (or that their label's name, Rocket Girl, sounds more like they should be releasing punky three-chord power pop, possibly of Japanese origin), this is a band worth keeping an eye on.
(I also bought some other things (not CDs), but I can't tell you about them just yet.)
In the future, Microsoft will own your ass, or at the very least everything you do with your trusted-client computer. Or so the Reg says.
The New York Times has an article on the blog phenomenon, quoting some known bloggers, including Rebecca Blood and Graham the Happy Scum.
Newspeak in action: In time for 2001, the International Year of Volunteers, Australia's ranks of "volunteer" firefighters are set to be swelled by an influx of young people conscripted in on the expanding "work-for-the-dole" scheme.
The last thing a CFA commander needs in a bushfire crisis is a resentful young person on the team who is there only because she'll have her dole cut off if she doesn't show up.
<SARCASM> Of course, the real problem in this case is not conscription but the culture of individualism and rebellion among young people that leads to such antisocial attitudes; it's all that gothic grunge techno rap music they're listening to, turning their brains to mush. None of this would happen if that Communist Whitlam hadn't lifted the ban on the importation of electric guitars back in 1972... </SARCASM>
2000/12/28
Madonna to star in Guy Ritchie film. I'm not sure if that's such a good idea; the films she made with her previous husband (Sean Penn) were apparently atrocious. Then again, what are directors' spouses for, if not iffy casting decisions?
Is Nintendo buying Sega? The latter hasn't been doing too well (its Dreamcast console sold disappointingly, despite being technically quite capable), and both have been coming off second best to the PlayStation (and with the conquering hordes of Microsoft set to ride into the market, things aren't likely to get easier). Though one problem Nintendo have had in the past was a bland selection of games (perhaps exacerbated by their censorious licensing policies, designed to ensure "family-friendly" content).
2000/12/27
WIRED have posted their roundup of 2000's vaporware, i.e., hyped products which failed to show up:
"I've been hearing about [Intel's Itanium CPU] since 1997 and I actually think new, whole Amigas are going to ship before this ever sees the light of day,"
Kibo isn't the only one to have a Christmas special: Tanya has one as well, and a most mean-spiritedly entertaining one at that.
A lot of people give and receive books at Xmas. However, one of the great unspoken truths of our day is that a lot of these books are never read; some are ponderous, impressive tomes, chosen to reflect well on the giver and receiver (Joyce, Rushdie and Stephen Hawking are favourites for this); and others are opened but never finished, victims of declining attention spans and the age of multitasking:
In America, efforts have been made to measure the unread book phenomenon. In 1985, Michael Kinsley, then editor of New Republic magazine, hit upon the idea of slipping coupons redeemable for $5 in the back pages of 70 selected books in Washington bookstores... It could have been a costly experiment, but thankfully for Kinsley not one coupon was returned.
Increasing numbers of those of the Christian faith are adopting the "consecrated single life", the calling of devout hermits. However, rather than sitting in caves in hair shirts or balancing on the tops of poles, these latter-day hermits are sequestering themselves in their suburban homes, giving away belongings and avoiding secular pursuits, whilst not joining convents or monasteries. (via Leviathan)
More on the CPRM hard-disk copy control spectre: now Sun veteran and known cyber-libertarian activist and free software stalwart John Gilmore has posted a rousing email calling for a boycott of hardware that is not certified free of such copy control mechanisms. His letter also mentions encrypted video displays (think of what that will do to your laptop's battery life) and BIOSes, and other scary stuff that's probably just over the horizon.
2000/12/26
Kibo's in fine form with the 2000 Christmas story, Potsie: The Motion Picture (and here's part 2). (via Robot Wisdom)
Skylab all over again: The Russians have lost contact with Mir, raising the prospect that a controlled descent into the Pacific Ocean may not be possible, and the aging space station may come down where it damn well pleases.
Researchers in Italy have discovered that dementia affects musical taste; to whit, people suffering from dementia can start to appreciate musical genres they have always detested, such as pop music.
About two years after his diagnosis, he began to listen at full volume to a popular Italian pop music band. Formerly a classical music listener, he had once referred to pop music as "mere noise".
There are several theories as to why this is so; some conjecture that some forms of dementia cause an attraction to novelty, by increasing the dominance of the right frontal lobe over the left; others that dementia and certain forms of brain damage can bring out previously latent artistic inclinations.
(I wonder what Tanya would make of this...)
In Britain, there is a minor tradition of giving Xmas gifts to the family doctor. Though some of these gifts tend to be really odd ones, like stuffed ducks and musical kitten calendars.
The World's Greatest Democracy: As the media pores over the ballots from Florida, in the wake of the US presidential election fiasco, one ally of president-elect Bush wants to seal the ballot boxes for 10 years, to prevent mischief-makers in the press from undermining the authority and legitimacy of the Presidency (an argument which could be summed up as "he stole it fair and square"). By then, nobody may care whether Gore would have been the true winner of the election, other than perhaps the Oliver Stones of 2010, and so there may not even be a need to have the errant ballots "mislaid" somewhere along the way.
A biographical piece on oddly-named game designer American McGee, creator of the entertainingly goth-as-fuck take on Alice in Wonderland. Not surprising that this guy's a friend of such pillars of the teen-angst industry as Trent Reznor and Marilyn Manson.
2000/12/25
RMS weighs in on the proposed hard disk copy control system. As you can imagine, he does not have many kind words to say about it. Meanwhile, IBM's spin doctors try to dispel concerns about the draconian new technology, and come off quite unconvincing.
In Australia, Overwork is overtaking unemployment as the number one labour-market problem. The working week has been growing longer each year over the past 17 years; thanks to deregulation and job insecurity, workers are competing to put in more time to avoid being turfed out into the dole queues; after all, there's someone waiting in line right behind you who would be more than happy to put in a 50-hour week if you're not.
"Christmas celebrations will be dampened by exhaustion as millions of workers try to recover from a year of laboring harder and longer than ever,"
The author of the Australian Bureau of Statistics report said that the Federal Government should introduce schemes to encourage people to work less. What, and reduce productivity, the one absolute, quantifiable good that exists in the economic-rationalist world-view? Somehow I don't see it happening with the current government in place (especially now that with the mythical "level playing field" we have to compete with countries where they don't have weekends or holiday leave).
A piece on Sarah Kane, who was sort of the Ian Curtis of contemporary British theatre. Apparently a collected edition of her plays is coming out soon too.
In Japan, which doesn't have the Christian/Pagan traditions underlying the annual orgy of consumerism, Christmas is all about bootywhang.
2000/12/24
Darwin awards in the making? Pumped up on TV pro wrestling, heavy metal music and adolescent hormones, teenage wrestling fans across America are staging their own matches, beating each other senseless with bodyslams and barbed wire just like their costumed heroes on TV, only without the extensive training required to do so safely. Unsurprisingly, serious injuries are common, and it is common for participants to leave the ring covered in their own blood. Could this be a spontaneous Fight Club-style solution to the lack of legitimate outlets for violent impulses?
In London's Oxford Street shopping precinct, Westminster City Council is planning setting up a fast pedestrian lane, and fining dawdlers who hold up traffic. Perhaps an idea whose time has come; one thing the Newtonmas shopping brings home is how irritating it is to be stuck behind human walls of slow-moving pedestrians, dawdling along at a slovenly pace, oblivious to the fact that those behind them may actually be wanting to go somewhere, rather than out for a leisurely stroll in the crowd. (link taken from Rebecca's Pocket)
This Friday, humanity came this >< close to being wiped out by a killer asteroid. Well, in astronomical terms, anyway.
What do you get when you cross Craig Shergold and Monica Lewinsky? The Claire Swire meme-virus has made another leap; there are now porn spams claiming to have pictures of the hapless woman (though naming her as "Claire Swires"; probably a "Greg Shergold"-style mutation). (No, I don't have the URL; anyway, SpamCop says that it has already been nuked, but that probably won't stop more from trying this trick.) Anyway, it looks like this meme is in the ideosphere for good; if your name even looks or sounds like "Claire Swire", you should probably change it, and forget about ever changing it back.
2000/12/23
Greek Orthodox monks, aghast at some of the things young people are into, make music videos about the evils of technology.
The video features a gold-garbed man who represents an evil computer user, armed with personal data. The bearded monks belt out the lyrics to "Tsipaki," or "Little Computer Chip": "I'm a chip, so small, that will lead you to slavery."
Linux kernel second-in-command Alan Cox disses the proposed hard-disk "pay-per-read" standard. Quite rightly, too.
A new online company is looking to streamline the manufacturing of boy bands and other machine-generated pop music. Pickthehits.com will allow visitors to listen to and rate songs, and sell the information to recording companies, so they can more accurately put together pop groups tailored to move CDs with unprecedented efficiency. Now all they need to do is replace the web site with neural polling implants and it starts to imitate a Greg Egan story.
And while we're on the subject of US spy agencies, The tree at the CIA's Christmas party is apparently quite a sight to see, festooned with ornaments designed in the agency's spy-gadget labs.
A dragonfly ornament's wings move at hummingbird speed when the tree lights are clear. The wings are made of sheer material that could be used to construct a microphone that would be almost impossible to detect... And if you put on a pair of special cardboard glasses, the words "happy holidays" appear dancing around the star, showing off a way to conceal messages.
One straggler with perky short brown hair and black-frame glasses snapped into a sandy-haired corporate type by shedding her disguise. Agents in the field can don a new look in two minutes, she said.
Myself, I wouldn't mind some of those compact speakers that can produce the sound equivalent of a 50-foot woofer.
Dispatches from a strange world: The NSA (yes, the US spy agency) have developed a secure version of Linux, and released it under the GPL, no less. Just the thing if you're really paranoid about hackers/users. Of course, if you're really paranoid, you'll want to verify each and every line to make sure there are no sneaky back doors there.
2000/12/22
Just listening to Slowdive's I Saw The Sun (an unreleased demo track; you may be able to napst it); I am struck by how much it sounds like a Cocteau Twins song, right down to Rachel's vocals sounding very Liz Fraseresque.
The street finds its own uses for things: In South Korea, where Internet usage is growing rapidly, a number of suicide web sites have appeared; these allow suicidal people to advertise for "suicide partners", or even pay people to kill them. One man has been arrested for failing to prevent a double suicide arranged through one of the sites, and another for stabbing a man to death at his request.
"I killed him like he asked," The Korea Herald quoted Yoon as telling police. "I thought it was a way of helping him."
The pillar of moral rectitude known as Australian PM John Howard has defended the practice of branch stacking, i.e., enrolling cronies (often from overseas or interstate) into political party branches to control the vote.
Signs that the dot-com bubble has burst: Not that long ago, Australian mining (what else?) company Timor Sea Petroleum decided to ditch the rustbelt old-economy stuff and become a shiny, high-tech dot-com, and so sold off its mining interests and changed its name to escape3d, no doubt impressing investors already. No word what they actually wanted to do on the Internet, though back then a snazzy name and a cool-looking web site were enough to make you a mint (at least on paper). Now that the bubble has burst and nobody in their right mind would put money into anything that ends in '.com', they've sheepishly reinvented themselves as "Methanol Australia" and gone back to archaic business models which involve extracting actual atoms from the ground.
I don't think Timor Sea were the first Australian mining company to ditch their existing business and reinvent themselves as a dot-com either; I recall that some mining company reinvented itself as 'ehyou.com' and bought up a number of startups (including mp3.com.au) to go with the name. ('ehyou.com'? What on earth were they thinking? And to think that if the NASDAQ had not so fortuitously crashed through the floor, we'd be seeing Yet Another Web Portal companies named YooHa.com, EeYah.com, HeeHah.com, OoHey.com and other equally silly attempts at coat-tail riding.)
N*pster search string of the day: slowdive demos. (It finds a number of interesting tracks which don't appear on albums, EPs or live bootlegs.)
Yes! The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, an agency known for its integrity, is considering an attack on DVD zoning, the practice which prevents titles from playing in markets other than those they were made for. Perhaps this will lead to a New Zealand-style law banning the sale of zone-enforcing DVD players on the grounds that they are intentionally defective. (Until, of course, the DVD cartel push for French-style zone-enforcement laws/treaties.)
2000/12/21
A chap calling himself The Human Calculator has a plan for the betterment of humanity: replacing the calendar with a 13-month "Human Calendar" with 28 days per month. Once it is in place, the improvements in efficiency will be great: weeks and months will be finally synchronised, with paychecks and holidays falling on predictable dates, and schedules and calculations will be a lot simpler. He has tried to sell this idea to the authorities who wield influence over the way we keep track of time (i.e., Hallmark and Microsoft, and not popes and emperors), but they haven't returned his calls. Perhaps he should talk to Swatch, and hope to get it accepted as an extension of Swatch Internet Time (then again; maybe it's not daft enough an idea for that).
The Queen's English: By analysing recordings of the Queen's Christmas speeches, researchers at Macquarie University in Sydney have discovered that her accent has become considerably less "posh" over the past few decades, drifting from the "cut-glass" upper-class English accent that was once de rigeur towards the standard non-upper-class southern-English accent. In particular, her vowels are now similar to those of female BBC announcers. (accompanying RealAudio piece)
...imagine a boot disk stamping on a human face, forever: An industry cartel is planning to put copy protection into all new hard disks. Under this scheme, disks will be encrypted and serialised, with keys stored in a hidden sector. This will make it impossible to copy protected files from disks (by keying them to the disk), and incidentally will make backups either impossible or a bureaucratic nightmare. As you can imagine, the movie and music industries are rubbing their hands with indecent glee at the idea, and hoping that the consumers are sufficiently docile and sheeplike to buy this and not realise how bad it is until it's too late.
There goes the separation of church and state: Under Bush, the US Government will promote religion, with an Office of Faith-Based Action and $8bn being spent to promote organisations which "save and change lives" (which probably involves indoctrinating people to suspend critical thought and believe in dogma). Wonder how long evolution will remain on US school curricula...
It's official: mobile phones don't cause brain tumours; well, at least not in two or three years.
Interesting rumour heard: You know those wireless networking devices (WaveLAN/802.11) that allow users to network their laptops anywhere within a building without cables? Well, apparently quite a few of them leak well out of their intended areas, and don't use any means to prevent outsiders who happen to have appropriately equipped computers at hand from connecting, looking around and accessing the wide open Internet. According to an anonymous anecdote seen on an unidentified mailing list:
I was riding the bus around downtown Stockholm to get home after a pretty late evening and I was too tired to read. I fired up my laptop and started to detect networks. I found six or seven... during 30 minutes. A week later a friend from Canada visited us. He stayed at a hotel in central Stockholm. He had a working network in some spots in his room. Apparently it belonged to a law firm.
Of course, unlike the golden age of hacking, the 1980s and earlier, such curious explorations are probably illegal these days, so Don't Do It, Kiddies.
Oh yes; the latest Fontomas font
2000/12/20
Pop singer Kirsty MacColl has died after a powerboat accident. MacColl has had hits on her own, and has also sung backing vocals on a number of others' songs, including The Smiths' Ask.
You've heard of video games contributing to shortening attention spans? Well, a new video game, developed using neural feedback technology used by NASA to train astronauts, allegedly improves players' attention spans. The game, named Attention Trainer, uses a bright yellow plastic helmet fitted with brainwave-measuring sensors to monitor the player's attention, and responds according to how well the player is concentrating. One game involves a bicycle race, with the performance of the cyclist on the screen being determined by the player's level of concentration.
Myself, I wonder whether it works, or whether it just looks like it works. This also ties into the question of how much the perceived shortening of attention spans is pathological, and how much it is a natural adaptation to the more information-rich environment of the modern world (sort of like multitasking in computer operating systems).
Far-out rumour of the day: Is Saddam buying up PlayStation 2 consoles to convert to supercomputers and missile guidance systems, neatly bypassing the UN embargo on computer sales (which doesn't count video game systems) and striking the infidels where it hurts -- with a pre-Xmas video game shortage? (via Slashdot)
2000/12/19
For all of George W. Bush's stellar achievements, Europeans will always see him as the Texas Death Machine.
A front page cartoon in the British newspaper the Guardian on Thursday showed a stockbroker with the message "Bush wins" on his computer screen sending frantic investment advice to clients: "Buy Lethal Injections!"
Just in case Celine Dion's Frankensteinesque reproductive hijinks didn't freak you out enough: the singer of syrupy ballads, currently pregnant with a child made with her husband's surgically-extracted sperm, has had an embryonic "twin" of her unborn child placed in cold storage, co that she can bear it at a later stage. Some day, Dion's story will be looked upon for inspiration by writers of sci-fi horror fiction.
Vivendi may fold Canal Plus into Universal Studios. Say it isn't so; and I was hoping that a French acquisition of Universal (who bought European film/music company PolyGram some years ago; which is why all those BBC costume dramas appear to come from a Hollywood studio) may lead to the resurrection of a strong European film company, independent of the businesslike tyranny of Hollywood formulaicism. What would J. Arthur Rank have thought?
Shoplifters wanted: A doctor in Minneapolis is looking to test a drug treatment for kleptomania. Dr. Jon Grant is looking for compulsive shoplifters to test whether Naltrexone, a drug which blocks various neural receptors and has been used to treat alcoholism, can be used to treat clinical kleptomania, and possibly other compulsive conditions.
Some lefty troublemakers staged an unusual protest outside the Melbourne Magistrates Court, throwing cream pies at the court building and each other. (Could the fabled Groucho Marxist Party be behind this?) Inside, one Marcus Brumer was on trial for throwing a similar pie at State Premier Steve "Jeff" Bracks some months earlier, this being in protest of Bracks' vocal praise of the police's heroic use of violence against dangerous enemies of the Australian Way, including kids and little old ladies, at the S11 protests.
Common sense in the most unlikely of places: an Italian Jesuit magazine, vetted by the Vatican no less, has called for prostitution to be decriminalised, with state-regulated brothels established, in order to alleviate exploitation, slavery and the involvement of organised crime in the sex industry. (via Unknown News)
Internet advertising is about to get more intrusive. Since nobody clicks on the annoying Buy Now! Shop Here! banners, it appears that they are not annoying enough, and thus will make way for interstitial ads which interrupt your web browsing, in a similar way to TV ads.
Statistic of the day: MS Internet Exploiter is the most popular browser on Slashdot? (At time of writing it was leading with 39%, with Nyetscape having 35%.)
Is the forwarding of the Claire Swire email, often accompanied with vicious comments, an act of machine-mediated sadism, the depersonalised nature of the target allowing participants to submit to the mob mentality and take part in the age-old human witch-hunt ritual for finding No-Good Shits and dumping on them, whilst still retaining the belief that they're decent, fair-minded people?
2000/12/18
Mysteries revealed: The after-image of a graffito on a wall in Northcote: "Cabbage is not really a vegetable at all."
European Internet carrier KPNQwest recently called for bids for backbone routers, asking in the request whether vendors supported a number of standards, including RFC2549. Several vendors obviously had no idea what the standards cited were, and said that they would support them all, even RFC2549 -- "IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service", a standard for transmitting Internet traffic by carrier pigeons and other birds. Networking giant Cisco said, appropriately, that their equipment would support RFC2549 "only on April 1".
In the wake of the election fiasco, The Guardian asks the question: why is the US so divided?
When faced with the dilemma of what to do with the two young lads who bludgeoned a toddler to death (just because he was there, or perhaps because they had never bludgeoned a toddler to death before and wanted to know what it felt like) at the age of 10, the British government has turned to an age-old solution: ship them off to the colonies.
The British government would fund the operation, arranging new names, paying travel expenses, start up accommodation costs and provide a Home Office-appointed counsellor to oversee their rehabilitation. They would be under constant supervision. Their parents would be offered the chance to join them overseas, at their own cost.
The Australian and New Zealand governments have not been informed of this, and don't seem too keen on the plan. Though if spiriting them in without telling the local governments is not an option, a word with John "I but saw her passing by" Howard should teach the recalcitrant Aussies some proper deference to the Mother Country.
The light that burns twice as bright... Do married people live longer, or does it just feel that way?
Real-life mad scientists: The parents of an autistic boy are suing the estate of a neuropsychiatrist, claiming that he attempted to erase their son's brain with drugs and hypnosis. Dr. Donald Dudley, who died in October, allegedly intended to "train an army of killers"; his unorthodox techniques included telling a chronic fatigue patient to train in martial arts and the use of guns for his cause (presumably a form of occupational therapy?); he had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and sometimes claimed to be from another planet and one of the 100 secret rulers of the earth. (from Psychoceramics)
Not much else to report, other than that I seem to have caught a case of the flu (or some similar condition), and am presently feeling like death warmed over.
2000/12/17
Everyone loves a girl who... Unwitting celebrity fellatrix Claire Swire, who got her less-than-flattering 15 minutes when her boyfriend Bradley Chait forwarded an explicit mail from her, now has a lot of fans, all of them unwanted; her flat in London has been bombarded with sexually explicit postcards and phone calls from horny males (including a British Army officer in Kosovo, via satellite phone); meanwhile, one fan has set up a web site dedicated to Ms. Swire, and "to swire" has become current slang for the act of performing a particularly enthusiastic Lewinsky. Ouch; she should probably look at changing her name after this. No word on whether Mr. Chait will have more than the usual difficulty in finding a replacement girlfriend, or whether "to chait on someone" will enter the language.
Seeing government-backed anti-white riots in Zimbabwe, South Africa's tiny, privileged white minority are feeling understandably nervous, and as such have launched a preemptive reconciliation campaign, acknowledging the damage caused by apartheid and pledging to donate money or time to help blacks, before the blacks decide to use AK-47s to help themselves. (I wonder whether Australia's back-to-the-50s Prime Minister would be as cocky as he is now if Aborigines made up 90% of the country's population.)
A group of Catholic priests have branded anti-Catholic views in the media "the new anti-Semitism", and established the Catholic Priests' Anti-Defamation League. The fact that they consider criticism of the Catholic Church's regressive social policies and reports of paedophilia and abuse in the Catholic Church as "defamation" is somewhat disturbing (sort of like equating criticism of Israeli military actions with anti-Semitism).
Bandwagon-jumping: Am I Grouse or not? (Something I was driven to code last night; god only knows why.)
Macromedia buys AtomFilms; we can probably expect AtomFilms' content to be locked up on the proprietary, Mac/Windows-only Shockwave format.
2000/12/16
And what name did Skinny Boy Tubby end up giving his new shortie? Timothy? Cedric? Nigel? Of course not; Woody. Still, that's pretty conservative for a swaggering wideboy like ol' Normie; I was expecting him to call his son something like Mojo, Guido or Tiny.
They do things differently in Britain: Claire Swire, the young London woman who wrote the email, forwarded around the world, about fellating her boyfriend, has opted not to take the Monica Lewinsky road to celebrity, and has gone into hiding. Wonder how long this will follow her around ("aren't you the one who.."). Meanwhile, the employees, including Ms. Swire and her (presumably now ex-) boyfriend, may be sacked under the "racist and/or sexist" email clause.
Surprise, surprise: "Clean" versions of records with indelicate language don't sell all that well. The "clean" versions are a US phenomenon, versions of the records with naughty words edited out (often crudely), and only exist because of the clout that conservative corporations like Wal-Mart have. Our old friend Hilary Rosen of the RIAA has a suggestion: artists should make the censored versions "more compelling artistically". (via Unknown News)
2000/12/15
The Designers Republic's merchandising division The People's Bureau is opening soon, and will have a free screensaver for the downloading. (PC and Mac only; you can't bung it on your Linux box, unless you want to run it in a VMWare window or something equally pointless.) Unfortunately, the site seems unreachable at the moment.
Another UL debunked: The word "chad", as seen in the press recently in light of some dubious events in the US, is not back-formed from a Mr. Chadless, inventor of the chadless key punch, as the Jargon File suggested. It now appears that Mr. Chadless never existed (no more than the legendary inventor of the brassière, the renowned German engineer Otto Titzling). The latest theory is that 'chad' comes from the Scottish word for gravel.
(I wonder whether, once facts are forgotten and selectively rediscovered a few times, theories will emerge that the term "chad" originated in the year 2000, as a reference to St. Chad, the patron saint of disputed elections.)
Welcome to the New World Order: Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it may be illegal to read aloud from electronic books in Adobe's GlassBook format, including Alice in Wonderland. (JPEG screenshot)
This blog looks potentially interesting. Then again, I don't understand Spanish so I can't read it. Though it's interesting how much you can pick up from a few words here and there and a collection of links. At the very least, the author of the blog has interesting taste in music.
(Correction: It has since been pointed out that it's in Portuguese, not Spanish. Though I can't read Portuguese either.)
US law enforcement agencies will soon have a spray which makes envelopes transparent, allowing them to read mail without a warrant and capture more of those nasty drug-dealing paedophile terrorists.
Coming to film festivals next year: MacArthur Park, a Blair Witch-style mockumentary about the assassination of Bill Gates, and the subsequent cover-up.
Justice in action: Some time ago, Tom Bourke registered the domain baa.com, dedicated to "sheep and woolly resources". A few months ago, the British Airports Authority sued him to take over the domain. Now, unable to pay the legal costs of standing up to corporate bullies (expected to be £100,000 by the conclusion of the case), he has settled, handing it over. The moral of this story: if someone with more lawyers than you wants your domain, it's theirs.
The power of the Internet: Today's words of advice: if your boyfriend is an asshole, don't send him steamy email, a mistake one Claire Swire made, and which may catapult her into the realms of near-Shergoldian infamy.
A US Superior Court judge has ruled that airlines are within their rights to demand that obese passengers buy multiple tickets, should they not fit into one seat. (via Leviathan)
Speaking of the music press, just weeks after britpop magazine Select closes its doors, NME and Melody Maker merge. The apparent rationale is the declining market for music magazines.
Oh dear... According to the local street press, Boy George is working on a stage musical about the New Romantic movement of the early 80s. It is rumoured that Marc Almond may star in the musical. Actually, weren't the Pet Shop Boys working on a musical as well a while ago? Whatever happened to that?
Now that Dubya is President, we can expect to see more censorship in the US; a new Meese-style inquiry into the evils of online pornography may be on the cards.
2000/12/14
I saw Chicken Run today; though not in the cinemas, but rather on a DVD quietly imported from the UK and played on a Power Macintosh at work cunningly modified to turn a blind eye to the Divine Order of Things (as manifested in region coding). It's quite a cute film, and the making-of mini-documentary at the end is pretty interesting. It is a bit Hollywoodish in places (the character development and plot, for example, appear to follow Hollywood feature-film formulae more than the usual Aardman short does). Still, it's worth checking out.
The Jingu Shrine in Ise, Japan, is destroyed and completely rebuilt every 20 years, in a tradition which has been going since 690. Not surprisingly, the Long Now Foundation regards it as an inspiration.
The latest Fontomas font looks like one of Neville Brody's FontFont geometric faces. Take ye and snarf.
Future Music #102 is out here now, with a new design. The new logo looks very mid-1980s-electronic-hobbyist-magazine, and the spine-line quotes are gone; inside, the new layout looks quite good, though may date rapidly. Issue 102 also has a bonus CD of copyright-free samples, with some not-bad loops and sounds taken from SampleNet.
It's official: Al "Thul" Gore has conceded the Texas Death Machine is the next US President, despite losing the popular vote and getting in through a highly dubious technicality. The Republicans have won control of both houses of Congress, and will appoint three Supreme Court judges in the next four years. Anyone want to bet on when the first abortionist will be executed for murder in the US?
Future Ig Nobel contenders? Following up to the story about nihilistic children's novels, a team of Canadian developmental paediatricians has come to the conclusion that all the characters in Winnie the Pooh are mentally ill. Pooh is obsessive-compulsive, with ADHD, at risk of developing Tourette's and possibly having suffered brain damage from being dragged down the stairs, Eeyore is chronically depressive, and Roo is likely to become a juvenile delinquent.
"Sadly, the forest is not, in fact, a place of enchantment, but rather one of disenchantment, where neurodevelopmental and psychosocial problems go unrecognized and untreated," the pediatricians said in the Christmas issue of the Canadian Medical Association Journal.
The obvious solution? Dose 'em all up on psychiatric drugs. (via Found)
Scenes from a bizarre world: The Church of England magazine Celebrate has hailed silicone-filled pop tart Britney Spears as an ambassador for virginity. Meanwhile, the government of devoutly Catholic Ireland (aren't condoms still illegal there?) has launched a "Do a Britney" campaign. I can see a lot of people getting into that; at least until they discover that it's really about staying a virgin.
(Incidentally, I don't see what's so attractive about Britney Spears; she looks like a plastic doll. Then again, I don't see anything attractive about Pamela Anderson either. Maybe I'm just strange.)
Geek Girl Services; no, not an Educated Escort for the Slashdot set, but a service for the ladies. Give Mike your money and he'll make a true geek of you. Go on; indulge yourself.
(Wonder how long it'll last before Rosie X sues it into oblivion and/or persuades WIPO to hand over the domain.)
2000/12/13
In the US, the majesty of the democratic process triumphs again, as the Supreme Court overturns the recounts, and rules that there isn't enough time to properly count the votes. Well, of course there's not, seeing how Bush's legal teams managed to stall recounting into oblivion. In any case, it looks like Bush will be the next President, with a Republican-controlled Congress behind him.
Quote of the day:
"Computer games don't affect kids. I mean, if Pac Man affected us as kids, we'd all sit around in a darkened room, munching magic pills and listening to repetitive music."
(seen on a mailing list; origin unknown)
While midnight on 1/1/2001 may be the true start of the New Millennium, most people couldn't care less. There will be no big parties, mostly because the media reinforced the naïve popular view that 1/1/2000 is the start of the new millennium, and possibly partly because the people who know/care enough to know better aren't exactly wild party animals. A case of the majesty of democracy in action, or ignorance becoming truth through sheer force of numbers? Depends how you look at it...
2000/12/12
The party may be over (or, more accurately, may be postponed indefinitely) for Ogg Vorbis; firstly, the webcasting company supporting the file format has collapsed, and now Thomson (the licensers of the MP3 patents) are making threatening noises. Mind you, the threats may be baseless, and merely intended to make potential adopters afraid of a possibly illegal or expensively licensed technology.
Only five Obey Jakob T-shirts remaining. Get one today before someone else does, and your blog-scene cred will be assured.
Oh yes; this week's Fontomas font is interesting, if you like teletextish fonts. It won't be around for long, so you know what to do.
Postmodern irony from the most unlikely sources: Anti-American Islamic fundamentalists in Pakistan are selling T-shirts praising explosive statesman Osama Bin Laden -- alongside a Nike logo. As being associated with international terrorism may be harder to gloss over with slick ads than using sweatshop labour, Nike are not amused.
A memory you have probably repressed: Tanya gets stuck into the Band Aid 2 Xmas record; you know, the Stock/Aitken/Waterman remake of Bob Geldof et. al.'s charity project. And to think I had forgotten most of the interchangeable S/A/W acts (Brother Beyond? Sonia?) that existed in the 80s.
2000/12/11
Another piece from Signum 6: Recovering digeratus Douglas "Cyberboy" Rushkoff on cyberculture in the late 80s/early 90s:
Even if the Internet has not yet become altogether ubiquitous, it has certainly been absorbed by the same mainstream culture that denied its existence and resisted its ethos for an awfully long time. True, cyberculture has inalterably changed its co-opter, but in the process has become indistinguishable from it as well.
There's a new issue of Signum, looking again at the '90s cybercultural revolution and whatever happened to it. It contains some interesting articles, including one from Brenda Laurel on Purple Moon, the company she ran to create computer games for girls:
Everyone knew that girls simply didn't like computer games and wouldn't play them. Examples would be trotted out as proof. My favorite was Barbie, published in 1985 by Epyx for the Commodore-64. Barbie was at the mall, shopping for the right outfit to wear on her date with Ken. Now, "everyone knows" that girls aren't good at shooting games, so the designers reasoned that the game should make it easier for them. The brilliant solution: make projectiles that move slowly. And so it was decided that the action component of the game would consist of throwing marshmallows. "You see," the game execs would say, "they did everything right, but sales were dismal."
Melbourne's homie gangs have upped the ante; no longer satisfied with crashing teenage parties and robbing those in attendance, a gang of four enthusiastic gangsta rap fans allegedly bashed a 51-year-old man unconscious outside his home in McKinnon (which is somewhere in the general vicinity of the teenage gangland of the Frankston railway line).
Police are looking for four males in their late teens who were seen in the area wearing baggy clothing and baseball caps.
Scientists at Aberdeen University have discovered a way to make cannabis soluble. This will allow cannabis-based medicines to be manufactured. Of course, patients taking them will be legally obliged to take drugs (currently under development) to block the "high".
Professional curmudgeon Julie Burchill on John Lennon, on the anniversary of his death and the resulting outpouring of sentiment. (via Pearls)
A survey of acclaimed Australian teenage novels, conducted by three child psychiatrists, has suggested a disturbing trend towards nihilism. The survey has found that 64% of novel characters have experienced severe trauma such as rape or a life-threatening car accident, 87% suffered a severe loss such as the death of someone close, and 2/3 of books mentioned psychiatry, though few characters benefitted from it. A case of progressive realism run amok, an attempt by the authors to be relevant to NIN/Limp Bizkit-listening young rebels, or just some official "experts" keeping themselves in a job?
Hong Kong-based educational toy manufacturer V-Tech has had to change the programming of a talking keyboard toy, after some customers feared it could be teaching racism. The old toy said "A is for Ape, B is for Black, C is for Crack", a sequence V-Tech say was chosen for phonetic blends and rhyming qualities. V-Tech are offering to replace any of the 305,000 old Alphabert toys with new, non-racist models. (Wonder whether, now that this has made the news, white-supremacist rednecks will start bidding on eBay for the old ones to instruct their kids.) (via Leviathan)
2000/12/10
The World-Wide Mall: Jakob Nielsen on how the web is turning into a low-trust environment, as the utopian visions of community from a few years ago gave way to models based on "eyeball herding", lock-ins and a passive, consumerist dominant culture.
Meanwhile, a Missouri legislator has introduced a bill which will legalise violence against the longhair commie scum who desecrate the flag. Under the proposed bill, those rescuing flags from said longhairs would be allowed to use force, and could not be charged with theft or assault. (via Unknown News)
In the US, being black is often seen as probable cause, enough to justify police searches, interrogations, even pre-emptive shootings. In some counties with a particularly bad problem with racial profiling and police brutality, black parents are buying their kids pre-paid legal services and warning them not to stand out.
"Some of my students have said my generation has failed them," said Woods. " . . .They wonder to what extent there is progress when you have to beg for your life on a random encounter with a public servant."
(via Unknown News)
Is the Internet a fad which has had its day? It seems that growing numbers of people who have tried the Net are abandoning it, turning their computers off and going outside into the sunlight. This raises some interesting issues. If 1994, when the influx of Internet users began was "the year September never ended" (September being the start of the US academic year and the traditional influx of newbies), could the Great September be said to be over, having lasted some six years? Will ordinary, non-technical people generally keep using the Net casually, or will they completely abandon it (as CB radio was abandoned after the late-70s boom)? Will what remains go back to some semblance of the halcyon days of yore before spam and "Me Too" posts from AOL, or will it dwindle away into an all but dead medium?
2000/12/9
I really want to see this: Little Ayse and the Magic Dwarves
"The Turkish Wizard of Oz" is, without debate, the single stupidest production in the history of motion pictures...and also the most entertaining... Not unlike the rediscovery of "Reefer Madness" in the 1960s and the Ed Wood oeuvre in the 1970s, this is a buried treasure which comes to light with unparalleled dizziness and deserves to be hailed as a new cult classic awaiting popular coronation.
2000/12/8
The Christmas/New Year holiday season is nigh upon us; and with it comes the traditional epidemic of seasonal depression, as people compare their own miserable lives, unfavourably, to idealised images of Yuletide bliss. Not surprisingly, the suicide rate peaks in late December and early January; while some open their presents, others open their wrists. Also unsurprisingly, Christmas is the traditional release date for violent action films:
Watching wrathful murders makes depressed people feel strong. They walk home in the cold to their empty apartments, hopped-up on the sexy pump of rage, hoping some asshole will say something obnoxious to them so they can feel justified in kicking the joker until he doesn't move anymore. "Howdya like that, heh?" one can leer as the perp squirms in the gutter. "Merry f---ing Christmas." This violently escapist conclusion is less painful for both parties than staying home and watching "It's a Wonderful Life" and crying hot, piteous tears for oneself when everything turns out OK at the end. "When will I get my happy ending?" one sobs between chicken nuggets. Not this Xmas.
Fortunately, suicide, drunken stupor and impotent hatred aren't the only options: you can always subvert it into an occasion to play pranks.
Another fun one is to rip up cotton balls and throw ketchup on them, in front of the fireplace. That way, when everyone comes into the living room for Xmas morning, you can say, "Uh-oh. White hair and blood. Looks like the dog got him. Poor Santa."
Writing in Salon, critics compare Kid A to DOGMA 95, Joy Division and Aphex Twin, to name three.
New Scientist on mate copying, or the scientific reasons why single people are considered less sexually attractive than the non-single.
<RANT> How, you ask, can Sony Music and Universal Music crush the Internet to shore up their business model, Graham? Well, imagine if, in a few years time, your ISP put a box into their network which cut off all bulk downloads after, say, 200K, unless they were accompanied by a cryptographic licence certificate; and all other ISPs did the same to avoid legal liability for copyright infringement. Or if your ISP blocked peer-to-peer connections from customers' machines to anything not on a list of legitimate servers (after all, legitimate consumers have no business connecting to each others' computers without going through a central server; only pirates and hackers would want to do that). Sony have the technical expertise to implement something like this (and as senior VP Steve Heckler suggests, are working on it), and they and Universal (who have been most aggressive in the offensive against the Net) have literally billions of dollars to spend on lawyers, lobbyists and the odd crooked politician. A lot of US ISPs already automatically delete MP3 files on users' web sites to avoid legal liability; automatically filtering content using a easy-to-install box from Sony isn't that far removed from this. (And then there's the operating system issue; a secure SDMI-like audio player, like a legal software DVD player, will never run on Linux or anything open-source, as the SDMI model assumes that the customer is a potential thief, and under Linux the customer could alter the system to steal Sonyversal's jealously guarded content.) They are willing, and quite probably able, to push in an Orwellian revenue-protection régime; and that's reason enough to not buy anything from them. </RANT>
Scary right-wing paramilitary organisation The Salvation Army may be expelled from Russia, under new laws which force "militarised" organisations to spend a lot of time and money wrestling with the bureaucracy. (via Leviathan)
Mozilla 0.6 is out; it's basically bug-for-bug identical to Netscape 6.0, except less bloated, not quite as sluggish and without the advertisements in the menus. (via Slashdot)
French computer-game giant Infogrames is buying Hasbro, the game conglomerate whose properties range from Atari and Microprose to the classic Parker Brothers board games.
Ironic juxtaposition of the day: Australian avant-garde electronica act B(if)tek are holding a contest based on subversive uses of technology against mainstream cultural products. Bravo to them for that; then again, the bulk of the profits from their album do go to Sony Music, who have vowed to crush file sharing on the Internet; in the words of Sony senior vice president Steve Heckler:
"We will develop technology that transcends the individual user. We will firewall Napster at source -- we will block it at your cable company, we will block it at your phone company, we will block it at your [Internet-service provider]. We will firewall it at your PC. These strategies are being aggressively pursued because there is simply too much at stake."
While I applaud B(if)tek's subversive goals (not to mention their music), I cannot recommend buying their recordings, as more of the proceeds go to Sony and its Orwellian plans than to the band.
2000/12/7
Left-leaning British newspaper The Guardian is launching a legal challenge against two laws at the core of the British monarchy. The Guardian argues that the Act of Settlement, by banning Catholics from the monarchy and favouring male succession, contravenes the Human Rights Act, while the Treason Felony Act, which prohibits incitement to republicanism, contravenes the European Convention's guarantee of free speech.
Trainspotter's log: I went down to Heartland this afternoon, and traded in six CDs I no longer listened to (various industriogothic acts, and a few indie albums which didn't grow on me), and bought Baxendale's You Will Have Your Revenge (more on this on my CD recommendations page, though suffice to say it's fun) and Black Box Recorder's The Facts of Life CD1 single (which I bought for the B-sides; I find the top-40 sub-R&B title track quite irritating, though Start As You Mean To Go On is BBR at their ironically detatched finest. (I first found it on Napster and decided I needed a proper copy for my collection; tell that to the RIAA.)
The typefaces of Barry Deck, the vaguely punk typographer who brought us Template Gothic and Cyberotica, fonts that will no doubt play a big role in a few decades when '90s retro comes in. Via Virulent Memes. (Btw, is the thing about Eric Gill and his dog a verified fact, or just an urban legend?)
Tension, apprehension and dissension: Thanks to the on-hold music at a music shop, I now have the manufactured R&B/reggae version of Say A Little Prayer playing in my head. Perhaps it's a testament to Bacharach's musical genius that it's such a catchy tune, but why, for the love of God, did it have to be that particular remake?
Researchers at Japan's National Institute of Longevity Sciences claim that moderate drinking boosts intelligence, and increases the drinker's IQ. Wonder how that works; possibly by culling all the unfit brain cells and making room for the fit ones?
Graham: re: Synæthesia. Peter mentioned that they're moving. That's a Good Thing in my opinion, as their new location is a lot less out of my way than Prahran (I haven't actually visited them; shameful, I know). There are probably a number of things there I wish to check out, which the regular haunts (such as PolyEster) and the big online shops haven't heard of. Speaking of record shops, I'll be taking some old CDs I no longer listen to to Heartland, and trading them in, most probably for a Black Box Recorder single and/or possibly an album by a UK indie act named Baxendale. Also on my list of stuff to get is the Stone Roses remix album (which sounds pretty interesting, even to someone who didn't get into the Roses other than Fools Gold) and the new Delerium album, which features a number of guest artists including Lisa Gerrard and Kirsty Hawkshaw.
re: the BBC Theremin simulator: I just played around with it a little (under Windows 98 running on VMWare). It's pretty nifty. Somehow I get the feeling the developers of it listened to quite a bit of Portishead.
The results of the Annals of Improbable Research's investigation into the sending of odd items through the US postal service:
The balloon was attached to a weight. The address was written on the balloon with magic marker; no postage was affixed. Our operative argued strongly that he should be charged a negative postage and refunded the postal fees, because the transport airplane would actually be lighter as a result of our postal item. This line of reasoning merely received a laugh from the clerk. The balloon was refused; reasons given: transportation of helium, not wrapped.
2000/12/6
Browsing the Macromedia Flash website, I discovered this "feature" entitled "What You Print Is Not What You See." This basically means when you print a web page, that little Flash banner ad can print out multiple pages worth of advertising drivel (if the designer wants it to). This is akin to having a unseen, secret speaker on your car radio that mysteriously blabs ads when advertisers want. Hey, thanks for thinking of the users, Macromedia!
Time Warner's WIRED-for-the-rest-of-us Time Digital has a Viridian flip issue, set in 2026, and edited by Bruce Sterling.
Clerks director Kevin Smith has hit upon a novel marketing concept for his final New Jersey film Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back: seeing how lampposts and telephone poles on the film's sets need to be decorated with flyers to appear realistic, he is asking fans to send in pictures of themselves for flyers. (via Coming Attractions)
You'll never wear a striped top hat the same way again: After turning the Grinch into a merchandising vehicle, Hollywood is set to bastardise another Seuss story, with an upcoming film of The Cat in the Hat. Imagine, the production company run by Happy Days actor turned director of facile multiplex-fillers Ron Howard, is to blame for both.
I just received two CDs in the mail; Broadcast's Extended Play Two (the US release on hip-hop/dance label Tommy Boy, though licensed from Warp), which is a sort of swingin'-60s-inspired indie electronica, perhaps in a similar philosophical direction to Stereolab, and Björk's SelmaSongs, the soundtrack of Dancer In The Dark, which has some good tracks on it, and alternates between musical music (i.e., from theatrical musicals) and Björk and Mark Bell's trademark brand of ambient electronic leftfield pop.
To serve and protect: An autopsy has revealed that actor Anthony Dwain Lee, shot dead by police at a Hollywood costume party, was shot in the back, repeatedly. Of course, with his dangerously black skin colour, the LAPD were only taking the sensible precautions. (via Unknown News)
Animal cleverness: After a Saudi motorist ran over one of their number, a group of baboons lay in wait for three days to take revenge by throwing rocks at his car. (via Leviathan)
That old workhorse, the X Window System, is finally getting decent rendering capabilities, including alpha-blending and anti-aliased text (TrueType-only; not using the standard text routines). Which is a Good Thing; translucent windows and menus look pretty nifty, and before this, you had to do that kind of thing by hand, using X just as a dumb pixel-pushing mechanism; not exactly an efficient use of a networkable window system. (via Slashdot)
Why does it seem that these days, every café or similarly bohemian establishment has Air's Ce Matin La (you know, the instrumental track off Moon Safari that was in The Virgin Suicides) playing on the stereo? I heard it twice this evening, and at least once more in the past few days. (Not that I'm complaining; it's not a bad track...)
2000/12/5
All these moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. This afternoon, I went to Monash University, the institution where I had spent 8 years (on and off), to pick up some things I had left there. This being the university holidays, it was almost deserted. It was a funny feeling, walking into a place I have been countless times before; thinking of all the nights I stayed back there, and all the people I had known there throughout the years and knowing that most of the people I knew there (from various times and milieus) have moved on, and all there is is a set of empty buildings at the end of an unreliable bus route.
Those valiant G-men of reason, CSICOP, have blown open another pseudo-scientific fraud: this time, Rupert Sheldrake's "psychic staring" experiments have been found to be inherently flawed and misleading. Shame on New Scientist for disseminating such rot to impressionable students!
Biological warfare in the news: First the dastardly French plot to run rabid foxes through the Channel Tunnel to spite perfidious Albion, and now the Israeli occupation authorities are allegedly dropping boars from helicopters to destroy Jordanian and Palestinian farms. Or so those wacky Marxists at indymedia.org say, at least. (thanks, Mitch)
A (unfortunately incomplete) page dedicated to the Doug Anthony Allstars, a brilliant (and long-defunct) comedy trio. (Was their song Sadfuckers of the World a Smiths parody?)
Some enterprising artists have created a fictionalised comic book biography of outsider artist Henry Darger. Should be interesting. (via Psychoceramics)
A map of the London Underground with station names replaced by those of famous people (or people famous in 1992, at least) is being auctioned, and is expected to go for as much as £15,000. Wouldn't it make for an interesting conversation piece for your Mornington Crescent parties?
Another dodgy Hollywood remake of a non-US film is in the works, this time transforming the Sophie Lee outer-suburban comedy The Castle into something entirely different. Um, I don't know about this...
2000/12/4
Life, liberty and the pursuit of bootywhang: Microsoft's PR people have posted an ad to a PC magazine, saying that PC users were better lovers than Mac users -- and an identical one to a Mac magazine saying the opposite. Hmmm; reminds me of an amusing article I saw about how Macintoshes make better courtship devices than PCs.
The strange little gulping noise from her throat, would ordinarily be message enough but you're revved up, and you start to tell her about the clock chipping you did last weekend and how you had to hack the DLL in order to get the IDE address to register. She starts to backpedal as you describe the ordeal of finding the correct dip switch setting for your new modem. With wild hand gestures you launch into the details for finding the secret passage from level 7 to level 8 of the game you've been playing over the net, but the object of your desire has fallen to the floor clutching her throat.
Interesting: This somewhat cryptic fragment suggests that there will be a film about the rise and fall of Factory Records. Should be something to look out for.
Like songbirds, whales have memes. When a group of Australian whales met a group of Indian Ocean whales, the former adopted the latter's (apparently catchier, or otherwise memetically fitter) song, discarding their own. (via FollowMeHere)
Conservative-conformist US chain store Wal-Mart is at it again; firstly they made it impossible for people outside big cities to buy rebellious music (which, granted, probably does cut down the frequency of high-school massacres by denying proto-goth kids access to Marilyn Manson CDs), and now they have made a "business decision" to ban emergency contraceptives -- whilst at the same time stocking Viagra. If you're in the US, you can send them a fax to protest.
Paul Maliszewski was employed as a hack writer at a business newspaper run by narrow-minded philistines, and so he did what anybody would have done in his place: he wrote Swiftian satires, under a variety of pseudonyms, and had them published. His works included a management guide derived from a CIA torture manual, and various letters taking the unwritten assumptions of the magazine and its ideal readership and maginifying them to psychoceramic proportions. (via RobotWisdom)
Canadian indiekid/blogger Kathleen Gallagher has a list of the 10 worst pop songs of all time. I'd agree with most of these. I'd add all commercial-dance, anything that Babyface or Max Martin has had a hand in, and any watered-down imitation of black musical genres performed by a pretty white girl (or a group of pretty white boys, for that matter), but that's because I live with gustatorily-challenged people who listen to that kind of dross, and are assertive about it being every bit as valid as actual music that someone was inspired to create.
A twice-divorced Melbourne man, fed up with women, has married his widescreen TV. Mitch Hallen is quoted as saying, "my telly has given me endless hours of pleasure, without fussing, fighting or backchat." Wonder what he'll do when digital TV comes in and his "wife" is obsolete.
Pataphysics in the News: In Austria, a group known as the Society of Surplus Thought is having a chindogu-esque exhibit of failed inventions, such as the roll-up zebra crossing, the heated garden gnome that melts snow and the transparent suitcase designed for easy customs inspection. And it looks like turning into a permanent fixture; the Austrian government has agreed to subsidise a Nonsense Museum to house the exhibits.
Missing the point: You know those web sites which show ads and, if you click on them, donate the revenue to charities? Well, some latter-day Einstein has come up with a a program which automatically "clicks" on the ads, without human intervention. Mr. Sachs says that with his invention, you can cause thousands of dollars to be donated each year. Well, at least until the advertisers cotton on to the scam and the whole click-for-charity concept goes belly-up.
2000/12/3
And while I'm ripping links from NtK: Some enterprising cypherpunk type has written a CGI for disguising messages in spam boilerplate. That's right; "we strike at 23:55" comes out as "Dear Business person ; This letter was specially selected to be sent to you . If you no longer wish to receive ..." and several pages of similar verbiage. It should keep Echelon busy for a while.
Sarky British email newsletter NtK are now selling T-shirts. The "memes don't exist; tell your friends" one looks reasonably doovy, and the proposed tDR-spoof sounds like an interesting idea.
The German government is to cut down a forest consisting of two types of trees planted in the form of a swastika. The forest, planted in 1937, forms a swastika clearly visible from the air every autumn. (via Leviathan)
Strange but true: There is a patron saint of disputed elections, and he is none other than Saint Chad. a seventh-century English bishop.
This just in: Britpop is officially dead, the final nail in its coffin being the closure of Select, the magazine called the Britpop bible. Maybe now the British indie/pop crowd can stop slavishly fetishising the 1960s, put aside their vintage scooters, moptop haircuts and pop art and actually come up with something new.
Run away, run away! Country music enters the web age, with "www.memory", the newest song from country singer Alan Jackson.
The ex-York Mornington Crescent server seems to have gone walkabout; and just when the game was getting interesting. Hope it comes back soon.
AIDS day feedback: Not much of it, except for a comment from a lefty doctrinaire type on a mailing list, and a link to a page which claims that AIDS is not caused by HIV, but rather by drugs, including AZT, and that the AIDS virus theory is perpetuated by the drug industry. A friend of mine knows someone who believes this -- and who has been HIV-positive for over a decade with no sign of AIDS. Curiouser and curiouser.
While I am concerned about issues of importance, I do not have time for dogmatic fundamentalists, be they of the Christian, Marxist or Randroid stripe, or any other. Guess I'll see you in the reeducation camps.
2000/12/2
Another list of amusing search engine referrals; who on Earth would be searching for "bestiality on geese", "rent a feces" or "how to become insane"? (via Leviathan)
Rabid Penguinheads post a Windows email virus which prints a pro-Linux message. Or is it an anti-Linux black-op by Darth Bill's forces? (via Slashdot, of course)
I Am Not A Redneck: Graham: I agree with your comments about AIDS wholeheartedly; though the style of the Day Without Weblogs was something I found altogether irritating. I'm no enemy of activism, but in-your-face militancy, which disrupts the ability of innocent third parties (i.e., blog readers who have no significant input into AIDS funding) is rather aggressive and unlikely to win too many adherents; it's sort of like militant pro-lifers shoving graphic anti-abortion images into the faces of passersby.
And there is a difference between boycotting evil companies such as Nestlé and shutting off your weblog for a day. Firstly, the former hurts the wrongdoers' profit margins directly (by a small amount, granted, though if enough people do it it adds up), whereas all the latter does is annoy people who are not Part Of The Problem (except in the most dogmatic Marxist/Maoist interpretation). And secondly, by buying Nestlé products, one is actively funding genocidal profiteers; by keeping one's weblog going on December 1, one is not causing any more AIDS deaths nor detracting from funding.
Has my lefty-cred(TM) gone out the window now? Guess what; I don't give a tuppenny stuff.
Well, duh! The World Trade Organisation, much reviled by the dreadlocked-Marxist set, has warned that multinational mergers pose a threat of creating huge, unaccountable monopolies which can dominate economies with impunity.
2000/12/1
Just in time for the failure of the climate conference (due to the US and Australian delegates; shame!): there is an official page for the Viridian Movement. Something to read while you wait to roast to death or be wiped out by one of the increasingly common freak tidal waves.
Linux program of the day: XMPS, a modular video player (sort of like xmms), which apparently can use Windows codecs with a plugin. Hopefully it's better than the aging xanim.
A Linuxworld article proves what we knew all along: Nyetscape 6 is bloated, and full of memory leaks. Netscape 4 performs better, though the Linux version has a tendency to lock up frequently.
Tension, apprehension and dissention have begun: Researchers look at why some songs get stuck in our heads, whether we like or loathe them.
"The mark of a good advertising jingle is that you can't get it out of your head," [Stephen Pinker] said. "The conspiracy theory is that ad writers have figured it out, that they've cracked the brain's code."
(via Pearls)
A study in the British Medical Journal reveals that terminally ill patients and their doctors systematically delude themselves of their prospects, going as far as to make plans for the future, and that their doctors collude with them in this.
False optimism often ends in regret as patients suddenly recognise that they are close to death, and felt they did not have enough time to say their goodbyes or make final preparations.
A sign of an unhealthy attitude of denial to death, prevalent in modern Western culture.
The street/own uses/things: More on the guns disguised as mobile phones that gangsters are importing from Eastern Europe.
By cranking the aerial, four high-tension springs are pulled back into the base of the phone and then each one can be released separately by pressing buttons five through eight. The spring then strikes the base of the bullet, held in the top half of the phone, and fires it out the top of the phone.
Yes, I'm blogging on World AIDS Day. Because I think that a blackout of weblogs is just petulant and silly (either way, it won't accomplish anything). You're welcome to disagree; denunciations will be cheerfully ignored.