The Null Device

2001/4/4

Ooh, Meg has somehow acquired a copy of the upcoming Radiohead album. Judging by her comments, it sounds promisingly interesting; let's hope they haven't entirely gotten Kid A out of their system and returned to puristic alt-rawk. Speaking of Meg and Radiohead, she also has a list of bands who should not cover Karma Police.

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In Vietnam, they apparently take parental discipline a lot more seriously. When a Bac Ninh woman caught her stepson lying, she allegedly made him sew his mouth shut. Unfortunately for her, the 10-year-old's teacher didn't share her belief in firm discipline, and told the police. The woman faces three years in prison if convicted.

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An entertaining social history of the San Francisco real estate boom, in the form of an over-the-top rant:

And in the place of those squat hovels they, the Irish bastardos, built like these weird Disney-esque pretend warehouses, with shiny corrugated metal sides and earth-tone-colored stucco walls and security gates and covered parking. And like Ben Franklin said, break a deal, spin the wheel: here were residents residenting in business areas, again, albeit desperately faux. But still! Mapping onto the torus of time and urban planning, it's quite weird. People living in pretend businesses pretending to be people pretending not to have businesses in old business buildings. The weird thing is that by statute they were supposed to be doing business there, to qualify as live-work!

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Genetic tests show that British Celts and Basques are closely related; apart from both having obscurely fashionable languages and a fierce pride in their ancestry and traditions, the two groups have statistically indistinguishable Y chromosomes; it is believed that both of these populations are genetically representative of European aborigines from before the rise of agriculture (at least on the male line).

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Tonight I went to see The New Scum, a play by a local outfit named Theatre In Decay. (One of the people behind it is one Robert Reid, who was also in the vaguely D.A.A.S-esque music combo God's Little Accidents during the late 1990s.) It was rather entertaining, in an anarchic, dadaistic way; the play took part all around the Empress Hotel, with actors emerging from amongst the audience. The play took the form of several interleaved stories; among them, the zombie invasion of a town named Wolverine, the story of the girl who lives in the Coca-Cola sign above St Kilda Rd., and the somewhat uneasy tale of two garbagemen, one dying of cancer, who find a dead 13-year-old junky.. or so it seems. These stories were interleaved with musical numbers and readings of news stories. The central theme of The New Scum is one of anxiety on the margins of a corporate-ruled, globalised world (Naomi Klein's book No Logo and Warren Ellis' Transmetropolitan both appear to be influences); we are the New Scum. As you might imagine, this isn't comfortable, apathetic entertainment; don't expect Puppetry Of The Penis or something; on the other hand, it isn't earnestly humorless Marxist-fundamentalist street theatre either.

Along with the show (and the performance afterward by Dandelion Wine), there was a small zine, titled Scum on the Wall, on sale at the venue, and consisting of writing, poetry and underground comics by various members of the New Scum, or people of a similar bent from the Melbourne fringe arts scene.

Anyway, excuse the semi-coherent rambling tone of this entry. The gist is, I enjoyed The New Scum, and you may as well (or not).

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Buzzle, the company which runs Australia's Apple dealerships, has gone into liquidation. This may be because with the Australian peso's steep decline, it is no longer cost-effective to import Macintoshes to compete with cheap PCs. In future, those Australians who actually need Macintosh hardware may have to FedEx it from the US themselves at their own expense.

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