The Null Device

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.

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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.)

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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).

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Bandwagon-jumping: Am I Grouse or not? (Something I was driven to code last night; god only knows why.)

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Macromedia buys AtomFilms; we can probably expect AtomFilms' content to be locked up on the proprietary, Mac/Windows-only Shockwave format.

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