2001/9/30
A good article about why banning crypto wouldn't work. Print it out and give it to your favourite politician.
Rule of law: Mormon church uses the DMCA to suppress an embarrassing report (something to do with "curing" homosexuality or something like that).
An interestingly geeky piece from USENET about those video screens at Melbourne railway stations, and how they were designed back in the late 70s/early 80s. Turns out that they displays are driven by custom 8080-based microcomputers, and that the font rendering was all put together by hand:
The characters were not scanned, they were made by choosing the largest available Letraset, sticking each character on a piece of graph paper, tracing the outline, ruling lines every eight columns, getting a secretary to type the resulting 0's and 1's into the source file as data statements. Then an architect... flew up from Melbourne and told GEC to add or remove bits until the letters looked just right to him. Perhaps it really was worth all the fuss if people still think that they look good.
They just don't do things that way anymore...
2001/9/29
Last night I went to the Fringe Festival performance of Anorak of Fire, a one-actor play about a Northern English chap named Gus Gascoigne, and his lifelong passion for spotting trains. The actor playing Gascoigne was Richie Akers, who had played him two years earlier; he went on attired in an anorak and a woolen hat and talked about how he got the passion for trainspotting and about the particularly English subculture of trainspotters and their traditions, capturing the tone of wild-eyed enthusiasm quite well. It was very funny. The play was performed at the North Melbourne Town Hall; not a bad space, except for the lack of real trains passing (as they had two years ago at the Yarraville café). Highly recommended. (Tomorrow (Sunday) is the last night, though, so you'll have to be quick.)
Rock over London, rock on Chicago: Frank Chu has become famous for wandering around San Francisco with a sign accusing the President of treason against "12 GALAXIES GUILTIED TO a ZEGNATRONIC ROCKET SOCIETY". But now, in this monetised age, he has succumbed to the lure of capitalism and started selling advertising space on his sign. The back of the sign now advertises a sandwich shop as selling "the galaxy's best sandwich", for which the shop pays him US$25 per week. Perhaps this is the sign of a new trend: commercial psychoceramic marketing. (Via Portal of Evil)
Welcome to the new world order: A history professor in New Mexico has been charged with treason after saying in a class that anybody who can blow up the Pentagon has his vote. It's doubtful whether they can convict him (the first amendment is, I believe, still valid), but he is likely to be dismissed from his position, which could start a new purge of tenured leftists and peaceniks from US academe, replacing them with God-fearing patriots.
Meanwhile, a newspaper columnist has been fired for accusing Bush of cowardice.
2001/9/28
Far and Wide on 3RRR just played a long and interesting interview with Peter Hook; he talked about the recent New Order album (which is actually not bad, if you ignore the lyrics), and recounted some funny anecdotes about going to the filming of 24 Hour Party People, a film about the Manchester music scene, for which the filmmakers rebuilt the Haçienda (which was torn down two weeks earlier) and got actors to play the members of Joy Division/New Order. (Hook said that the guy who played Ian Curtis looked uncannily like the real one, so much so that seeing him was spooky.) He also said that they're working on a more electronic EP, and that the next New Order album may be more like Power, Corruption and Lies; that will be interesting to see whether they recapture the greatness of it.
(And remember kids: if you drink and drive, you're a bloody idiot, but if you take Prozac and write lyrics, you're Bernard Sumner.)
CHOGM meeting postponed. Which will not only rain on the Nu Marxist love-in planned for October 3, but also allow the Australian government to call an early election to capitalise on John Howard's illusion of wartime statesmanship.
Euphemism of the day: Old computers are, among certain politically correct circles, "mature computers", as seen on a "community garage sale" flyer found in a Northcote organic grocery:
... has kitchen gear, books, mature computers, fabric and lots more.
If you're happy and you know it: add the word "sex" to all your
search engine queries...
(...thus ending up with things like "linux usb scanner support sex",
"springfield bus timetables sex" and so on.)
A thought-provoking article: who will notice when you die?
Three weeks before Christmas 1993, Wolfgang Dircks died while watching television. Neighbors in his Berlin apartment complex hardly noticed the absence of the 43-year-old. His rent continued to be paid automatically out of his bank account. Five years later, the money ran out, and the landlord entered Dircks's apartment to inquire. He found Dircks's remains still in front of the tube. The TV guide on his lap was open to December 3, the presumed day of his death. Although the television set had burnt out, the lights on Dircks's Christmas tree were still twinkling away.
Which brings me to something I was speculating about: the possibility of developing new methods of fulfilling fundamental human needs, which evolved in tightly-knit hunter-gatherer societies, in a way that works more economically in a post-communitarian age. Perhaps like the robots that are being developed in Japan to take care of the aging population. Perhaps someone will develop devices (machines, software, or even drugs) to satisfy psychological need such as affection, belonging and social status by entirely synthetic means, allowing people to remain in their cubicles, fitter, happier and more productive.
Researchers in the US have found that many of the areas in the brain stimulated by the euphoria of sex or food are also stimulated by music; in particular, when people hear personally selected pieces of music which gives them "chills", they experience increased activity in regions of the brain associated with sexual or gastronomic euphoria.
(Isn't it interesting how profoundly music can affect you; for example, from the first time I heard it, I found Dead Can Dance's Persephone (the gathering of flowers) (the last track of Within the Realm of a Dying Sun) profoundly moving. With no words that I could understand, it nonetheless spoke volumes to me about the fleetingness of life, and everything that means anything to us against the vastness of eternity, and the desperate, passionate intensity of each moment, among other things. It's hard to describe adequately in words.)
2001/9/27
Whoever fights monsters...: The US has been eager to establish the broadest possible alliance against terrorism, and as such has called in many allies who are less than perfect champions of the values this war is supposed to be defending. (Saudi Arabia and Pakistan as defenders of liberty?)
Maybe we can justify these compromises, and maybe we can't. But we can't even have that debate until we stop deceiving ourselves about what we're doing. We're not building an alliance for democracy, pluralism, or freedom of speech and religion. We're setting aside those principles in order to build the broadest possible alliance against terrorism.
If anti-terrorists twist the definition of terrorism so that they can continue to use it while slaughtering civilians in the name of fighting it, they'll be the ones who have obliterated every value except the will to power. Like Joe McCarthy, they'll become the enemy they set out to defeat. They'll be the ones who end up in history's grave. Or worse, they won't.
And then there's the issue of Russia being given free rein to do what it likes in Chechnya, free of the criticism of Western human-rights busybodies ("Silence on Chechnya is the price for this new solidarity", as a German politician is quoted as saying), and the possibility China wanting tit-for-tat support in bringing to justice its own Bin Laden, the Dalai Lama. (Perhaps the FBI could arrest him at a Hollywood function and ship him off to Beijing?) (via Satisfaction Refunded)
The Universal Music Group, the largest and arguably most rapacious recording company, has vowed to copy-protect all of its CDs by the first quarter of 2002. So if you want to listen to your new PJ Harvey or Eminem album on a computer, you'll have to lease it from PressPlay, and you'll have to run a proprietary Windows-based secure player.
Personal: Today I went down to Synæsthesia and picked up the Angels of the Universe soundtrack, by Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson and Sigur Rós, and have been listening to it. It is beautiful; very evocative and atmospheric. I'll probably write it up for RAN soonish. (I also picked up a copy of the Models' early recording compilation, Melbourne, which I won from 3RRR, who were giving it away. It's the first time I have won anything from 3RRR.)
I also went to Babble (the spoken-word night) again this evening; they had some kind of special night where they had people who weren't regulars speaking, and a lot of iffy pieces. There was the woman who read out a short greeting-card-grade poem about being loved (or something like that), prefacing it with a 2-minute, rambling autobiography, and then appending an autobiographical anecdote which had nothing to do with the poem as such. And the poem itself was pretty trite, with the most obvious and banal rhymes; though it wasn't quite as bad as the proud-to-die-for-my-country doggerel in the letters page of mX today; perhaps the author of the latter should be made a News Corp. poet in residence? (Rupert Murdoch as patron of the arts: now there's a scary thought.)
A piece on anti-American sentiment across the world. Another one? Yes, but this one is in BusinessWeek, a publication I doubt is known for its bleeding-heart politics.
Doom and gloom roundup: The spooks aren't the only people using the Current Situation to get all the things they've wanted for so long: various corporate interests are trying to as well, from opening up oil drilling in Alaska ("screw the caribou! what have they done for us lately?") to groups trying to rush through everything from tax cuts for the wealthy to expanded free-trade zones, with minimal debate, as Matters of National Urgency. Meanwhile, a librarian at a Florida university has been suspended without pay for 30 days for ordering the removal of "Proud to be American" stickers from the library's public desks. The treacherous Commie ratfink in question said she did it as "not to offend foreign students", and that "librarians should be neutral and not express opinions". A likely story. Meanwhile, closer to home, apparently Bin Liner's terrorist networks are active in Australia, and things can only get more dangerous in this part of the world. (Or so a terrorism researcher says, anyway.) Not only that, but those Taliban fiends are preparing to flood the market with cheap heroin. Is there any low to which they will not stoop?
A US high school student's sketch of a gun-toting Statue of Liberty has become a mass phenomenon, appearing on T-shirts, on cars and at truck stops across the country. And to think that, three weeks earlier, it would have probably gotten her kicked out of high school for drawing guns.
2001/9/26
Dying throes of the belle epoque: This evening I went to the launch of Ampersand #5, a typographical zine/book. This book makes a map of a kilometre of the Melbourne central business district, in terms of the typefaces seen in it, concluding that 76% of typefaces seen are sans serif, and just over half of those are Helvetica or variants thereof. Then it goes into a rant about typographical homogeneity and the marketing of the "Helvetica lifestyle", at one point comparing it to corporate globalisation. The book is printed on sticker paper, and the publishers will send you free stickers with anti-Helvetica slogans if you promise to put them up and send photos back to them.
Anyway, the launch was in an inner-city bar, of the sort that's probably full of graphic designers even when there isn't a launch. A DJ was playing dub and various Prahran-style techno, and a projector was playing what looked like a Flash movie of the booklet; processed live video and letterforms and text moving around, presenting a diatribe on endangered typodiversity.
The new Onion, the first since 11/9/2001, is in, and it's not the terminally ironically detached Onion of yore; no sirree, this is a patriotic, flag-waving, God Bless America-singing Onion, for now at least. Don't expect anything as blasphemously flippant as "Terrorism matches obesity as top killer of Americans" (no, for that you have to go to that scurrilous convict rag the Chaser). The "hijackers surprised to find selves in Hell" story reminded me of a Weekly World News piece about great villains like Lee Harvey Oswald being tortured in Hell.
I just got news that a CD of the (very atmospheric) score to Angels of the Universe, featuring Sigur Rós, has been released outside of Iceland through Fat Cat Records. I'll have to go down to Synæsthesia and pick up a copy.
2001/9/25
News has emerged that in the early 70s, Australia's hip soft-lefty PM Gough Whitlam asked Burt Bacharach to write a new national anthem for Australia. Whitlam was a fan of Bacharach, who penned a great many hits of the Swingin' 60s, and asked him to enter a contest to write a new Australian national anthem, half in jest. Bacharach declined.
An article on the naming of military operations, from WW1 to the spin-conscious present day. (via Rebecca's Pocket)
An article claiming that terrorists had stolen the identities of Western-educated Arabs who were murdered in Kuwait during the Iraqi invasion, and destroyed or modified all record of their existence:
Their homes were not looted, but carefully ransacked to eliminate any personal trace that they had been there. Passports vanished, along with driving licences and bank books. Nobody thought it suspicious at the time that there were no photographs left of the victims nor books with their names inscribed on the cover. Security chiefs now fear they were erased so somebody else could take their place.
(via one.point.zero)
2001/9/24
An Argentine man has tied himself to his sheep, in protest against systematic discrimination by landlords who won't let him keep the sheep in a flat. The man, who had moved from the country to Buenos Aires, is also carrying a sign declaring "down with the discrimination" to highlight his cause.
"I don't really see why I shouldn't be allowed to live with my sheep, as I did for all of my life. She's very tranquil, the ideal companion to share a flat," he said.
Read: Bruce Sterling on the end of the Belle Epoque: Very much worth a read.
You have likely already seen a lot of earnest commentary consigning the period 1989-2001 to history. We are suddenly in a turbulent and violent time, and in a burst of harsh martial virtue, our immediate past is being written off as squalid, and overindulged, and pampered, and fatally innocent, and possibly somewhat effeminate. This is exactly what happened the last time a Belle Epoque collapsed.
The Net looks bad. The status quo ante is not going to cut it. Unless I miss my guess, the Net will be moving away from the flaky amateurism and sordid tragedy-of-the- commons that was its pride and joy, right past that totally imaginary commercial nirvana, and straight into a paramilitarized, ARPANET-friendly, Nervous System of the Coalition phase. We Viridians may be rather squeezed for room and oxygen in there.
Money, toys, and time may get tighter. We Viridians will no longer look much like What Happens Next (because we're not), and our abiding interests are likely to look a bit flaky and antiquarian for a while, like some guy leafing through Beardsley's YELLOW BOOK as the zeppelins hum above the searchlights.
Like Where's Wally, only much more violent: Looks like Osama Bin Liner has buggered off, and may not even be in 'Stan. Which may be just as well, judging by this article on the pitfalls of war in Afghanistan, from Soviet veterans:
"When I hear people talk about terrorist 'bases' I have to laugh," said Vyacheslav Izmailov, who commanded a battalion in Afghanistan. "Terrorists don't sit in bases waiting for bombs to drop. They live in houses. They live with families. . . . If America begins to drop bombs, all they will do is convince the anti-Taliban population that the United States is their enemy."
The weekend was quite relaxing; Saturday was a beautiful spring day, with a gorgeous sunset, the sky a riot of colour (it's amazing what can be done with some water vapour); and Sunday was the Fringe street party in Brunswick Street. Spending the weekend offline, one can almost forget about the bad things happening in the world outside; but to no avail, when you log in, the rest of the world is still there, and still going to hell. And so continues my grim duty as recorder of the apocalypse...
Updated: Today was the Fringe Festival Parade/Street Party, the day in the year when Brunswick St. starts looking like a street scene from Transmetropolitan. I went along and took some photos.
Happy birthday, Graham... Cheer up, it could be worse; you could be working two jobs to pay off a mortgage and put your kids through school or something.
2001/9/22
Some heartening news in Australia: The Liberals' 20-point lead in polls lasted all of one week, with Labor now leading by a nose. Not that Labor are perfect, by any means, but at least they're not petty-minded reactionaries like the Lyons Forum mob currently running the country.
You scratch my back...: Will China demand US cooperation against Tibetan "terrorists" such as the Dalai Lama in return for helping the US capture Osama Bin Liner? these people believe they will.
I just heard that celebrated Melbourne poet, performer and raconteur Adrian Rawlins (i.e., the laughing guy in the top hat whose statue stands on Brunswick St.) passed away recently. (I only met him once, but he seemed like quite a character.)
2001/9/21
The global economy: As the US is seized by patriotic fervour, China's flag industry is cleaning up, with Chinese factories working overtime to sew American flags for export.
Short animation of the day: More. It's atmospheric, Kafkaesque, and uses a New Order instrumental (Elegia) as the score; what more could you ask for? (And there's an article about it at WIRED.)
Oh yes, and if you're in Australia and near a radio, be sure to tune in to ABC Radio Natonal tonight to hear Antlerland's new track.
A Canadian psychologist estimates that 1 in every 100 people is a psychopath. The vast majority of psychopaths, mind you, are not serial killers, but ordinary people like you and me, only incapable of differentiating between right and wrong or feeling any remorse for their actions. This trait makes them ideal predators:
He calls them "subclinical" psychopaths. They're the charming predators who, unable to form real emotional bonds, find and use vulnerable women for sex and money (and inevitably abandon them). They're the con men like Christophe Rocancourt, and they're the stockbrokers and promoters who caused Forbes magazine to call the Vancouver Stock Exchange (now part of the Canadian Venture Exchange) the scam capital of the world. (Hare has said that if he couldn't study psychopaths in prisons, the Vancouver Stock Exchange would have been his second choice.) A significant proportion of persistent wife beaters, and people who have unprotected sex despite carrying the AIDS virus, are psychopaths. Psychopaths can be found in legislatures, hospitals, and used-car lots. They're your neighbour, your boss, and your blind date. Because they have no conscience, they're natural predators. If you didn't have a conscience, you'd be one too.
While psychopathology may be considered a defect by most, it can actually be an advantageous mutation in the cutthroat world of business; advantageous, that is, for the psychopath and nobody else.
How can you tell if your boss is a psychopath? It's not easy, says Babiak. "They have traits similar to ideal leaders. You would expect an ideal leader to be narcissistic, self-centred, dominant, very assertive, maybe to the point of being aggressive. Those things can easily be mistaken for the aggression and bullying that a psychopath would demonstrate. The ability to get people to follow you is a leadership trait, but being charismatic to the point of manipulating people is a psychopathic trait. They can sometimes be confused."
While theprevalence of psychopaths is 1 in 100 in the world in general, one researcher maintains that the figure is 1 in 10 among executives.
Because psychopaths are neurologically different, they cannot be cured, though they can learn to fake remorse and spout insincere words of contrition, in order to get out and reoffend. As such, there is controversy on how to deal with them; whether to execute them (in the US, diagnosis as a psychopath is an argument for the death penalty), to lock them up even when they have not committed a crime (as in the UK), or to attempt to cure them by appealing to their self-interest. Wonder whether they've tried Clockwork Orange-style aversion conditioning. (via Plastic)
Another person I know has bitten the bullet and started a blog. And it's not a bad start. Keep it up, Richard.
Love meat but don't like killing animals? A scientist in the Netherlands has announced a way of creating artificial meat. And not just meat substitute, but actual vat-grown steaks, grown in tanks of nutrient solution from muscle cells collected from otherwise unharmed "animal donors". The process is similar to that used to grow artificial skin, and could be used to grow ethically-sound meat of a number of species, common and exotic.
The Australian government has launched its latest high-tech initiative: an online map of public toilets around Australia. The National Public Toilet Map, at www.toiletmap.gov.au, is a serious government project, and is designed to help the incontinent (believed to number one million).
It appears that there are more civil-liberties rollbacks planned for the United States in its state of siege, including a ban on flag burning. Will banning commie pinko traitor scum from burning their own copies of Old Glory make America safe from terrorism? Probably not, but it fits in with the shift towards right-wing authoritarianism, so let's have it anyway. Remember, citizens: in a state of war, dissent is treason.
In the wake of Nauru's acceptance of the Tampa refugees, Australian Prime Minister John Howard has struck a new deal with the small island nation to take our Aborigines as well. (The Chaser)
And now some lessons on dealing with terrorism, from the British (who have had quite a bit of experience):
Ask now of any action you mean to take -- bombing, assassination, ground war -- whether it means there will be more or fewer terrorists when the children who are now in preschool grow up to fighting age. ... The state has to become as good at theater as its enemies. There's a short version of this lesson: "Don't shoot the boys throwing stones."
Torture is the crack cocaine of anti-terrorism because, for a while, it works. The terrorists will certainly use it. But everyone tries it. ... But the price is higher than a democracy can pay.
Not long after the alleged death of fugitive businessman Christopher Skase, a low-budget film about a vigilante mission to bring him to justice has gotten positive audience response at preview screenings. Let's Get Skase opens nationwide on October 18. (I get the feeling that, had Hollywood been making the film, they would have shelved or severely modified it after his death. There's something to say for the Australian larrikin spirit.)
2001/9/20
For all the no-good commie ratfinks out there, here is a guide on how to get out of the US Army, from a former Army legal specialist. Basically, it's not hard if you know how, and one of the easiest ways is to come out the closet and say that you're gay, and hopefully not get bashed to death by homophobes in the process.
2001/9/19
Now this is doovy: Periodical Historical Atlas of Europe, with political boundaries, states/regions, cities and such every hundred years from 1CE to 1700CE (with 1800 and 1900 being worked on). And if you like it enough, you can buy a high-resolution CD-ROM of it. (via Found)
An interesting report on conscription law in Australia, which suggests that the Howard government did commission a study of whether conscription would be viable for increasing troop numbers in East Timor, and concluded that it wouldn't be. Mind you, WW3 (and an increased Liberal majority in the Senate) could well change this. However, Australian conscientious objection law is (currently) more liberal than in the US.
During its coverage of the terrorist attacks, FOX News in the US showed a
message advertising something called "National Mental Health Assistance",
and giving
a phone number belonging to the Church of Scientology. The message has been
withdrawn after concerns were voiced by Psychlo
psychiatric groups. Scientology opposes the discipline of psychiatry,
instead preferring to go to the real core of the problem, and dealing with the
ghosts of dead aliens or something like that.
Parking Nazisinspectors in Southend have come under fire for wearing Nazi-like
SS insignia on their lapels. The badges in question contain the postal
code for Southend, which happens to be "SS". In response to complaints, the
Southend Council will change the badges.
With the cyber-liberties movement's eyes focussed on cryptography bans and a new focus on national security above all else, the SSSCA looks set to sail through Congress, all but unopposed. The SSSCA is, of course, the bill which makes copy control mechanisms mandatory in all digital devices, and makes manufacturers of copy-controlled systems exempt from antitrust laws (essentially guaranteeing a monopoly to Bush campaign donor Microsoft). And once it's law in the US, it will affect the rest of the world. Even if it's overturned five years later, the damage will be irreparable, with the probable extinction of non-trivial free software on widely-available platforms and the "de-commoditisation" of Internet protocols. If you're in the US, call your congressperson -- for your only hope for a future!
Alas, it appears that the USB audio box I have been playing with doesn't work perfectly with my Mac, as it's an older Mac with an add-on USB card, and it doesn't like that. It works sometimes, though goes silent at other times (probably due to unavoidable extension conflicts). Hopefully they'll fix that sometime soon.
(And while Linux sort of groks it, it is impossible to actually change its configuration from Linux (including mixer settings), making it not particularly useful there.)
Conspiracy theory of the day: Russia's Pravda reckons that Fidel Castro was really pissed off about the WTC bombing -- because now he won't be the first to strike at America, Or was he?
in 1983, Castro ordered Cuban MiG 23 pilots to program their computers to attack targets in Florida. Among the selected targets was the Turkey Point nuclear plant, which Castro said had the potential of producing a nuclear disaster larger than Chernobyl. According to Gen. del Pino, Castro's words were: "I don't have nuclear bombs, but I can produce a nuclear explosion." The plan included the possibility of suicide attacks, crashing Cuban planes against American nuclear plants and targets in Washington D.C.
Undoubtedly, the suicide bombers were familiar with the structure of the buildings, and knew exactly where to crash their planes to cause maximum structural damage. Short of a computer simulation model, only a close inspection of the WTC towers, or to a building with similar characteristics, would have allowed them to discover the weak points in the building's structure. Did Fidel Castro bring with him some of his highly trained army demolition engineers to study the structure of the Petronas towers?
Though, given that the author compares Castro to Hitler, I suspect that he may have a slight chip on his shoulder.
An interesting comment on Plastic, speculating on how a war would affect popular culture. Basically, during war, escapism and propaganda become dominant, with dystopian sci-fi/serial-killer films and gothic rap-metal likely to be replaced with feel-good light comedies and syrupy torch songs, alternating with rousingly black-and-white propaganda and stirring patriotic anthems (picture Celine Dion singing God Bless America across the airwaves on heavy rotation; yes, I know she's Canadian, but so's most of the US entertainment industry), and anything edgy and uneasy would not be well received (does this mean that Radiohead's career will come to an end?). In short, the Top 40 of tomorrow will be your grandkids' ironic retro kitsch.
Another idea for preventing hijackings, without the added cost of Israeli-style armed air marshals: letting armed police fly for free. It could work, you know; if there is an armed out-of-uniform cop on the plane, a hijacking is much more likely to fail; if there might be (and who's to say there isn't?), the odds of success may be sufficiently reduced to make suicide attacks less desirable. (Do you still get the 72 virgins in the afterlife if you're gunned down harmlessly in the aisle, and if that was the most likely outcome?) Though armed air marshals (or at least flight staff trained in hand-to-hand combat) could still be a good idea.
A new study has shown that cigarettes may have antidepressant-like effects among those prone to depression, which goes some way towards explaining why smoking is so common among depressive people (not to mention shedding light on the study which showed that, in the US, almost half of all cigarettes are smoked by the mentally ill.)
2001/9/18
A big list of songs blacklisted from US radio after the WTC attack. These include obvious choices (songs like "Wipeout", "Hit Me With Your Best Shot", "Crash and Burn" and "In the Air Tonight"), as well as anything by Marxist rockers Rage Against The Machine (whose online message board has been shut down after pressure from the Secret Service), and antiwar anthems (because dissent is now tantamount to treason in the court of public opinion). Some notable omissions from the list are The Cure's Killing An Arab and Public Enemy's Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos.
As America joins in prayer, the nihilistic young hellions of Portal of Evil News have put their misanthropic barbs on hold and replaced their page with a memorial for those killed in the WTC attack, and now the Onion is suspending its next edition, and doing some soul-searching. Some commentators are saying that the age of irony is over:
"Look at Congress singing 'God Bless America' on the steps of the Capitol" Tuesday night, he added. "That would have seemed ridiculously hokey 24 hours earlier, but when it happened, it was a mesmerizing display of unity."
It will be interesting to see whether the age of irony is truly over, whether the detached hipster cynicism that permeated the 1990s died on 11/9/2001, to be replaced by a new Organization Kid earnestness and sense of responsibility, just as America's innocence is said to have when Kennedy was shot, or whether it is merely on hold for the moment. It will be interesting to see whether, when the Onion resumes publication, it will be as detached and faithless as before, or whether it will develop a new wholesomeness and sense of communitarian identity, and if the former, whether its circulation will drop off as a result of changing public tastes. Also, it may be interesting to observe whether underground countercultures continue to flourish (after all, when everybody is singing God Bless America in unison, what sense is there in defining oneself outside of the greater whole), whether authors like Douglas Coupland and Chuck Palahniuk will keep being published, and whether low-budget disaffected-slacker comedies will keep appearing in cinemas.
We may soon, if not now, be living in a true post-ironic age; only this time the "post-" isn't short for "postmodern" and a symbol of still further detachment, but is used in its literal sense; A neo-Rockwellian earnestness without the blasphemous self-awareness of kitsch.
This just in, via Portal of Evil News:
Judging from the loud music, banging and screaming coming from inside a first-floor apartment of 3118 Pleasant Ave., the officers thought it could be a domestic assault. What they discovered was a mentally ill man who was agitated and had been throwing himself against his living-room walls after getting hyped up about a "WWF SmackDown!" television show.
One of your TVA colleagues, Lev?
2001/9/17
Ominous development: Bush uses the word "crusade" to describe the anti-terrorist campaign. No word on whether he has urged troops to "kick some Saracen ass".
You've probably seen this, but in case you haven't, here it is: Mike Moore on the WTC bombing:
Will we ever get to the point that we realize we will be more secure when the rest of the world isn't living in poverty so we can have nice running shoes?
Democracy is not a spectator sport: A good Slashdot feature about the coming crackdown on freedoms and civil liberties in the US (and elsewhere too, most probably), and more importantly: how you can fight for your rights:
Rep. Rivers says phone calls "...have a sense of personal contact to them," and this makes them the most effective grassroots lobbying tool. "Stick to one issue," she advises. "Don't come up with a laundry list."
"The House [of Representatives] is ruled by brute force." ... the "unanimous" vote that got DMCA through the House was not really unanimous at all; that the bill got through a committee dominated by a powerful chairman (which is how bills generally get to the floor for a vote) and that the Speaker called for a voice vote. "Most yelled 'Aye,'" Rivers said, and some yelled 'Nay.'" The voices yelling "Aye" were the loudest, so DMCA passed by acclamation.
If you live in the US and are concerned about the erosion of your remaining rights (both in terms of privacy/crypto and in terms of things like the SSSCA), read it and, for the love of "Bob", act on it. If you don't live in the US, read it anyway as it's bound to be relevant soon if not now. (And if you aren't concerned, wake up and look around you.)
The US (and, consequently, NATO and ANZUS) may be at war with up to 60 states believed to be supporting terrorism. Now this is starting to look a lot more like World War 3.
2001/9/16
Richard Dawkins looks at the WTC attack, and puts the blame on religious delusion:
If a significant number of people convince themselves, or are convinced by their priests, that a martyr's death is equivalent to pressing the hyperspace button and zooming through a wormhole to another universe, it can make the world a very dangerous place. Especially if they also believe that that other universe is a paradisical escape from the tribulations of the real world. Top it off with sincerely believed, if ludicrous and degrading to women, sexual promises, and is it any wonder that naive and frustrated young men are clamouring to be selected for suicide missions?
To fill a world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are used.
(via Stumblings)
The WTC attack: Intelligence consultancy Stratfor believes that clues left behind by the terrorists were red herrings, designed to throw investigators off the trail and buy them time.
The attackers knew how to avoid detection by the National Security Agency and other technical intelligence outfits while organizing outside the United States. They also knew how to avoid suspicion once in the United States. That means they had a sophisticated understanding of how U.S. intelligence works and the discipline to avoid triggering suspicion. It is nearly unbelievable that an organization capable of carrying out such a complex operation would leave behind relatively obvious evidence.
There are also unconfirmed reports that pictures of Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden, widely viewed as a prime suspect in the attacks, and copies of the Quran were left in rental vehicles used by the suspects. For intelligence operatives who earlier exhibited remarkable skill, such theatrics do not make sense.
I thought that the car full of Arabic-language flight manuals seemed a bit too obvious.
2001/9/15
Good news for audiophilic Penguinheads: I've just discovered that Linux (2.4.x, anyway) works quite well with USB audio devices; which include studio-grade digitisers and such. (Given that USB audio is a standard protocol, unlike high-end PCI cards, means that they don't need special proprietary drivers for which there's no Linux market; which means thay you can now MP3 your live concert tapes/rare vinyl without incurring consumer-soundcard lossage.)
I just got my hands on a Egosys U2A USB/audio box, and it works under Linux. I just have to figure out how to select inputs (the default seems to be one of the digital ones). Oh, and licq sounds funny as the box doesn't do sample rates below 32k or so.
"The so-called 'pacifists' fall into two camps: contemptible cowards, too concerned with saving their worthless hides to fight for what's right, or sociopaths incapable of telling the difference between right and wrong." Discuss.
2001/9/14
And if the Falwell piece wasn't enough, here's another column, from a mainstream conservative paper: "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.". (Like we did to the Native Americans and Aborigines, right?)
The world's gone barmy: A MP3 file (and a transcript here) of US televangelist Jerry Falwell, speaking on the Christian Broadcasting Network about the WTC attack, blaming it on gays, abortionists, feminists, the ACLU and "Christ haters". (via Portal Of Evil News)
The ACLU's gotta take a lot of the blame for this... and I know I'll hear from them on this. Throwing God out successfully, with the help of the Federal court system. Throwing God out of the public square. Out of the schools. The abortionists have got to bear some of the burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy forty million little innocent babies we made God mad. I really do believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays, and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who tried to secularize America... I point the finger in their face and say "you helped this happen.
Beggars belief, it does...
Now here's a clever idea: a combination MP3 player/USB hard drive. Presumably it behaves like any USB storage device and thus works with anything USB-friendly including Linux, MacOS X and even weirder OSes. Unfortunately, when you read the fine print, it emerges that it doesn't actually record (i.e., digitise audio) as such, but only plays MP3s from the disk. Otherwise it would make a very nifty portable hard disk recorder.
The virtue of the vicious: As the US debates an open-ended declaration of war (which may turn out to be a Tonkin Gulf-style blank cheque), restraint has left the building:
"I say, bomb the hell out of them," Sen. Zell Miller, D-Ga., said Wednesday. "If there's collateral damage, so be it. They certainly found our civilians to be expendable."
I see... "You kill our innocent people, and we'll kill your innocent people, see if we don't". *sigh* The world is going to hell.
(And it's frightening how at times like this, otherwise rational, mild-mannered people become fanatical patriots, to the point of threatening or using violence against those who disagree with the wisdom of going to war.)
Here it comes: US Congress debates cryptography bans, mandatory back doors in all cryptography; after the attack, the balance has shifted enough for a ban on cryptography, once unthinkable, to be on the agenda. Never mind the problems in getting terrorists to comply with bans.
Chilling: A MetaFilter log of comments posted as the WTC attack unfolded, by observers, as the true horror of the incident unfolded. (via Peter as well)
Oh, and this blog hasn't become a single-issue blog; there will be posts about other topics; perhaps even less depressingly serious ones. Though, I must say that my ironic detachment seems to have left me, and I don't know when it will return. Hope you weren't expecting too much in the way of flippant commentary.
As it stands right now, the wünderkammer is temporarily closed.
A defense expert has said what the Soviet Army, and the British Army before them, discovered through bitter experience: a ground war in Afghanistan would be extremely difficult. Meanwhile, cruise missiles would not be particularly useful.
John Howard has made the first announcement that Australia could go to war. It's likely that Australia will declare that it has been attacked (under the ANZUS treaty, much as NATO has done), and Howard would be more enthusiastic than many Europeans about committing all the troops that can be raised to the war. (Btw, what would be required to bring in conscription in Australia; would it be a referendum or simply an act of Parliament?)
A thought-provoking and controversial perspective on the terrorist attack from progressive Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk: "The wickedness and awesome cruelty of a crushed and humiliated people" (via Indymedia Israel; thanks, Peter).
But this is not the war of democracy versus terror that the world will be asked to believe in the coming days. It is also about American missiles smashing into Palestinian homes and US helicopters firing missiles into a Lebanese ambulance in 1996 and American shells crashing into a village called Qana and about a Lebanese militia  paid and uniformed by America's Israeli ally  hacking and raping and murdering their way through refugee camps.
Ask an Arab how he responds to 20,000 or 30,000 innocent deaths and he or she will respond as decent people should, that it is an unspeakable crime. But they will ask why we did not use such words about the sanctions that have destroyed the lives of perhaps half a million children in Iraq, why we did not rage about the 17,500 civilians killed in Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon. And those basic reasons why the Middle East caught fire last September  the Israeli occupation of Arab land, the dispossession of Palestinians, the bombardments and state-sponsored executions ... all these must be obscured lest they provide the smallest fractional reason for yesterday's mass savagery.
It's quite tragic; and will be undoubtedly buried behind simplistic Good-Versus-Evil rhetoric as the Western world marches off to war against the crazed, evil Arabs, without considering what could motivate people to commit such horrific crimes (other than perhaps dismissing it under the broad category of "madness" or the Devil). And so, all are punished and innocents die on all sides.
(Of course, this is not to in the least way excuse the atrocity. It was an utterly evil act, in the most chillingly premeditated way.)
2001/9/13
Nato commits itself to action alongside the US, by invoking Article 5 of the NATO treaty, which states that an atack on one NATO member is an attack on all. Australia is expected to do the same with the ANZUS treaty. The support that may be required may invovle anything from use of facilities to providing troops for a large-scale ground war in Afghanistan.
The spammers have been capitalising on the WTC tragedy: already I have received two copies of a "Faces of Terror" spam (a HTML document with pictures of Bin Laden and Arafat; could it be the work of right-wing pro-Israeli/anti-Arab spammers mentioned here previously?), and an appeal for "donations to the relief effort" to be sent to a site hosted on a free web page/email address (almost certainly someone trying to con well-meaning people out of money). Opportunistic scumbags.
Voices in the Wilderness: Known libertarian fringe kook John Perry Barlow on the WTO attack, and the extinguishment of remaining freedoms that will follow:
I beg you to begin NOW to do whatever you can - whether writing your public officials, joining the ACLU or EFF, taking to the streets, or living visibly free and fearless lives - to prevent the spasm of control mania from destroying the dreams that far more have died for over the last two hundred twenty five years than died this morning.
That decided it; I just bit the bullet and joined the EFF. I had been meaning to do so to make up for donating money to the Recording Racket's total-copy-control fund by buying CDs, and to head off the SSSCA (rest assured that once copy-control policeware is mandatory in all US-market devices, it will become so everywhere else), but the unprecedented opportunity Mr. Bin Laden has handed the fascist lobby clinched it. Never mind that I don't live in the US; we all follow the US's lead sooner or later (and sooner when your Prime Minister is best buddies with the current Resident of the White House). (I'm also a member of Electronic Frontiers Australia, so I am not neglecting the home front.)
Why ve I changed this blog's design to austere grey? Because, over the past 48 hours, the world became a much grimmer place. It had been doing so for a while (witness things like the concentration of power in the hands of huge corporations, the DMCA and SSSCA bill and their ilk across the world, the appointment of George W. Bush to the US presidency), but the horrific terrorist attack in the US has taken things to a new level. The fact that we (both the US and Australia) are likely to be enmeshed in a Vietnam-level war very soon (do you really think Bush will let this slide once they hand over Bin Laden or whoever it was?) hangs like a toxic black cloud over everything. And even if the war doesn't come, or is over in days, this is likely to be used to centralise power and strip away more of the freedoms people take for granted (the FBI will probably get its mandatory key escrow laws after all; in fact, perhaps FBI-approved keystroke loggers will be built into all new computers alongside the copyright-enforcement chips). One way or another, we're all going to hell.
Yesterday I picked up the local street press (printed before news of the attack) and Fringe Festival guide; reading them has been like looking at artefacts from a parallel universe, a much more innocent, pleasant and less scary one. A world in which people thought about seeing shows and listening to music rather than whether they were to be the next casualties in an insane war. It now seems that everything before those airliners full of terrified people slammed into the World Trade Centre, all that frivolity, belongs to a different world, one forever lost to us. The time for frivolity is over.
Those are dangerous ideas there, citizen: In the US, deluded libertarian extremist Harry Browne has claimed that the terrorist attack was a response to "insane" US foreign policy. Which makes some sense (witness the US government's history of unilateral bombing of troublesome Middle Eastern states, overthrowing of inconvenient democratically-elected governments in Latin America, support of murderous yet friendly military dictatorships and so on; not quite the republic that Jefferson et al. had in mind, and one can see how some people could be pissed off about this). Not that that in any way excuses the horrific atrocities committed against innocent civilians in New York and Washington. Sometimes it seems like there is little hope for humanity.
2001/9/12
In the wake of the New York terrorist attack, the FBI have wasted no time in installing Carnivore at ISPs and backbones to monitor all Internet traffic.
"Hotmail officials have been receiving calls from the San Francisco FBI office since mid-(Tuesday) morning and are cooperating with their expedited requests for information about a few specific accounts," the person said. "Most of the account names start with the word 'Allah' and contain messages in Arabic."
Meanwhile, the operators of anonymous remailers have voluntarily taken their remailers offline.
Scare meme of the day: The Universe 'could condense into jelly' at any moment, resulting in the annihilation of all matter. Mind you, the odds of this happening are pretty small.
Another conspiracy theory: Was Robert Elz' deposition and the handing over of the .au domain to a private corporation part of an ICANN plot to subjugate the Internet under multinational corporate control?
The real ICANN is carrying out its mission via control of the DNS - the ability of people to have an address that allows them to do business in cyberspace. ICANN will squeeze out independent voices by raising the cost of domain name registration and turning names over to private contractors with the obligation to fund ICANN at a rate of 15% inflation per year.
The Internet revolution gives everyone a printing press. This reality makes life more complicated for those who want only to sell the alleged benefits of globalism. By the time that we can be proven right or wrong about ICANN and content, it will be too late. The battle about address space is a battle about control. Control is worth having because it gives the possessor a lever to clamp down on content. To those who say well you can still hang out a web shingle as gcook1875@aol.com or dhughes1172@aol.com, we reply under what conditions and at what expense? AOL is not a staunch defender of free speech.
(via Politechbot)
Countdown to World War 3: A survey shows that 86% of Americans want war against the states responsible for the terrorist attack. And when America goes to war, Britain, Australia and other allies follow. (Australia under Howard will definitely go to war alongside the US.) The Third World War could be weeks, even days, away.
Conspiracy theory of the day: While public opinion is that the WTC bombing is likely to be the work of Islamic terrorists, I was wondering about some of the other possible suspects. For example, what if it's the work of an extremist anarchist/Marxist group affiliated with the anti-globalisation movement. Consider the following points:
- The attacks occurred on the first anniversary of the brutal suppression of the S11 protests against the World Trade Organisation in Melbourne.
- The target was the World Trade Cantre, a symbol of multinational corporate capitalism. If the anti-globalisation movement was to choose a target it could hardly choose a better one, with the possible exception of the Nike headquarters.
- Fidel Castro has recently been vocal in aligning himself with the anti-globalisation movement. As such, the Cuban state could have lent logistical support to the terrorists.
Of course, the question comes up of whether anybody in the anti-globalisation movement would consider hijacking airliners full of innocent people and crashing them into a building full of random employees; which seems unlikely; and whether Cuba would get involved in something like that is also a bit of a stretch. Though even if this isn't true, it could be a good excuse for a crackdown on anti-capitalist groups across the Western world.
Pearl Harbour 2: The US World Trade Centre was destroyed in a horrific terrorist attack, when several hijacked airliners, packed with passengers, slammed into its towers, demolishing it and killing thousands. the US president has vowed retribution against anybody harbouring terrorists (which amounts to an open-ended declaration of war); this may well turn out to have been the opening salvo of World War 3.
Mingers of the world unite: New studies in evolutionary biology have found that, in the animal kingdom, ugly can be beautiful; that is to say, some animals prefer mates that the decided majority find decisively unattractive.
[Brooks] joined forces with John Endler, an ecological geneticist at James Cook University in Townsville, to observe how individual female guppies choose between different males. They found that although all the females liked males with bright orange spots and large tails, a minority of females also liked males with black markings.
If the same holds true for people, then it may be time to stop worrying about how closely you adhere to the Hollywood ideal of attractiveness.
A piece on some of the CIA's research projects, from spy planes to psychics and eavesdropping cats:
Another project, known as "Acoustic Kitty," involved wiring a cat with transmitting and control devices, allowing it to serve as a mobile listening post. A heavily redacted 1967 government memo released by the archive Monday suggests that cats can be altered and trained, but concludes the program wouldn't work.
Reminds me of a mind-control/conspiracy rant I saw on Psychoceramics, which suggested that, since it is possible to get video out of a cat's optic nerve and (theoretically) to control a cat's motivation with direct stimulation of the brain, then cat-owning paranoids should beware if their cat disappears and subsequently reappears and starts taking an undue interest in their actions.
2001/9/11
Music publications in the UK have received a mysterious CD purporting to be a new KLF album. Titled "The KLF Live On Stage" and bearing various telltale KLF insignia, the CD contains 13 well-known tracks, including It's Grim Up North, Kylie Said To Jason and What Time Is Love, and claims to be a response to the huge number of KLF bootlegs in circulation. An official spokesperson for the two neo-Dadaist popstars, however, has denied them having anything to do with it, and says the CD is bogus. Of course, it could be that that's just what they want us to think fnord.
Researchers at Glasgow University have found that advertisements can alter your memory, making you "remember" happy childhood memories, associated with a brand, which never actually happened:
One root beer manufacturer, Stewart's, had discovered that many adults appeared to remember growing up drinking their product from bottles. This was impossible since the company only began full-scale distribution 10 years ago. Before that, Stewart's root beer was available only from soda fountains. However, the bottles were adorned with slogans such as "original", "old fashioned" and "since 1924", which conjured up images of times gone by.
A group in the US has accused coffee franchise Starbucks of surreptitiously spiking its chai tea with ephedrine, a stimulant related to amphetamines and linked to strokes and heart attacks. Starbucks (who, incidentally, will soon be saturation-bombing Melbourne with outlets) denies the claim.
First came Brazilian artist Eduardo Kac's glowing albino rabbit, and now, thanks to the wonders of modern technology, glowing pets will soon be available to the public, with glowing aquarium fish.
While mainstream society moves away from the formal courtship rituals of their ancestors, a subculture of conservative Christians in the US is going the other way, throwing out the concept of "dating" and replacing it with betrothal, in which couples swear vows of commitment to each other, and then get to know each other.
two years ago, when Kara was 14 and Casey was 20 and heading off to medical school, they pledged their lives to each other in an improvised ceremony at their church that they called a betrothal. They exchanged matching signet rings, promised to be faithful and considered their vows as binding as a marriage. Only then did they set about getting to know each other and thinking of themselves as a couple. Last month, with their parents' permission, they decided they could start holding hands.
Leading someone on is prohibited in the Bible, he said, citing a passage from First Thessalonians that warns against "defrauding." His first book opens with a bride's nightmare in which her groom stands at the altar, holding hands with the phantoms of all his previous girlfriends.
Never mind premarital sex, this is saying no to premarital romance, or as they say, "preparation for divorce". Though it makes one wonder whether mutant strains of the subculture will arise in which casual premarital sex is considered to "not count" if you don't exchange names (much like the way that oral sex doesn't count among some fast kids in the Bible Belt).
When Australians were polled about whether US culture has too much influence on Australia, 73% said they believed it did. And the other 27% said "nah, dude". (OK, I made that last bit up.)
Unintended consequences: A Victorian lawyer wants to change the state's stalking laws, believing that they are too broad and result in well-meaning but inept suitors being hit with intervention orders.
2001/9/10
I had my digital camera exchanged yesterday; the old one developed a fault where photos were being corrupted in memory, and as it was still under warranty, I got it replaced with a new one. So far, so good; though I've noticed that the new camera has a different colour response to the old one (for one, skies don't have the characteristic bluish-purple tinge they did with the old one, to the same extent). Perhaps it's an artefact of low-tolerance components being used in the cameras (which retail for $150), much like the way every Roland TB-303 sounds slightly different because of the cheap capacitors used in their construction...
On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog: Is fugitive former chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer anonymously playing current grandmasters on the web? Current Grandmaster Nigel Short, with whom the unnamed online player wiped the floor, seems to think so. (Or have you been up to mischief again, Lev?)
Those wacky funsters from the Feral House publishing house are at it again; run by vaguely Satanic ranter Adam Parfrey and known for tomes such as Kooks, Apocalypse Culture and Lords of Chaos, Feral House is now planning to release a book by serial child killer Ian Brady, of Moors Murders fame. Titled The Gates of Janus, the book is said to "profile the minds of serial killers" (nothing quite like getting it from the horse's mouth, is there?), and is due out in the US by the end of they ear. Meanwhile, a planned UK release, slated for November, has been stopped by a temporary injunction, and the book could well be banned in Britain. (The British tend to go in for that kind of thing, I am told. (Banning books I mean, not killing small children.))
A group at Middlesex University has found that bright children who are told they are "gifted" are more likely to have emotional problems than those told nothing. 40% of former 'gifted' children in a group surveyed were found to have had difficulties forming relationships and normally ended up in mundane jobs. (via Found)
This is fucking scary. Politicians in the US are attempting to pass a law banning computers and digital devices that do not implement copy control mechanisms, and criminalising the disabling of any such mechanisms, with penalties more severe than for rape or murder. Outrageous, but with Bush/Ashcroft and their cronies supporting it and the media corporations (naturally) behind it all the way, it stands an alarming chance of getting in. And then watch the EU, Australia, Canada et al. follow suit with their own versions, as they did with the DMCA.
To quote a Plastic forum comment:
I believe you can read the nuclear winter left behind by the Dot Bomb fallout. Did business learn from its failure to be able to make a killing selling pointless crapola on webpages? Yes: it learned that it would like the Net, like a Chinese girl, to have its feet broken and bound, the better that it be tamed and taught to take mincing, servile steps in the presence of money.
Welcome to the digital millennium, folks. Make sure you pay your way.
A Dutch computer game company has come under fire for creating a football hooligan game. In Hooligans, players are in charge of a football gang on the rampage across Europe, brawling with police and rival gangs to prove themselves as the most violent and antisocial gang.
2001/9/9
An interesting interview with the head of the Church of Satan, who talks about Satanism (of the LaVeyan variety) and various other things. Sounds quite intelligent, though sometimes I can't help but think that Satanism is just Ayn Rand in theatrical garb.
(And it's reassuring to know that the Church of Satan didn't go bankrupt and get bought out by Marilyn Manson.)
Conspiracy theory of the day: Did the US Government let Microsoft off the hook to more easily spy on its citizens? A strong Microsoft monopoly, the theory goes, would not only be able to reward its friends in government with donations and other services, but be able to put FBI-mandated secret back doors in every desktop computer in America, in one go.
The head of a clinic of some sort in Japan claims that masturbation is good for you. Not only that, but doing it regularly will make you more sexually attractive. Though, for all I know, the publication which reported it (the Mainichi Interactive) could be Japan's equivalent of the Weekly World News or something. (via Plastic)
2001/9/7
Welcome to the Digital Millennium: A medical research company has used the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to silence an animal-liberationist group's web site. Huntingdon Life Sciences, by no means the darlings of the animal-rights set, have claimed that Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty's site infringes its copyright, which gives the ISP (which provides free hosting to nonprofits) a choice of either pulling the site within 24 hours or face massive legal liability; and under the DMCA, the ISP has no discretion to judge whether the claim is valid or not. Nice; as someone else commented, when all you have is a club, everything looks like someone's skull.
It's official: software monopoly and George W. Bush election campaign donor Microsoft will not be broken up; the Bush administration has instructed the Department of Justice to drop plans to break up the company, in the interests of obtaining "prompt, effective and certain relief for consumers". Which will probably be a fine of a few thousand dollars and an absolutely binding consent decree preventing Microsoft from putting Netscape out of business again or something like that. Rejoice, free world, for your right to use Windows everywhere has been upheld.
2001/9/6
Yesterday I was at PolyEster Records where I picked up a copy of a photocopied zine named Sadness Is In The Sky. Interesting; it's all about music of an experimental/post-rock/soundscapey/shoegazey vein. Not the easiest on the lines, with about three times as many fonts on each page as there should be, and a distinct paucity of white space. The visible JPEG artifacts in some of the photos add a charmingly early-noughties-low-budget-zine feel to it.
Oh, and it came with a CD, which has some nice music on it. Haven't heard all of it, though some of it is pretty doovy; I should probably look out for Console and The For Carnation when next in the record shops.
A man in Blackpool has a rare form of synaesthesia which causes him to taste words.
"When I recited the Lord's Prayer at school it used to bring all kinds of flavours into my mouth. For instance, the word 'trespass' tastes of bacon. I've chosen and dumped girlfriends because of how their names tasted. The name Tracy tastes of flaky pastry. But the name of my current girlfriend, Jannette, is neutral and doesn't taste of anything."
Mind you the bit about few doctors having heard of synaesthesia strikes me as a bit dubious.
2001/9/5
This week's Onion has some good pieces, such as God Finally Gives Shout-Out Back To All His Niggaz, and Plan To Get Laid At DragonCon 2001 Fails,
"I imagined some girl and I talking about the new Lord Of The Rings movie," Melcher said. "Then I could say, 'Oh, I have the trailer on my laptop back in my hotel room if you want to see it."
Though a distinct minority, some females were present at DragonCon. "There was this one girl dressed up like Black Canary. She had the boots and the fishnet stockings and everything," Melcher said. "I couldn't really talk to her, though, because there was a pretty dense crowd of guys around her at all times."
not to mention this gem: Oh, Girls Are No Good At Genocide.
The Khmer Rouge picked Pol Pot because they knew he'd be good at murder and torture and all that other boy stuff. A girl probably would have planted flowers in the killing fields.
Pinkness and horror: What's the front page news in today's mX (that's the free street murdoch in Melbourne)? Well, it's all about McDonalds' exciting and "healthy" new menu. Front page news indeed.
And the new menu is "healthy". The meat has probably still been mechanically recovered from some poor steroid-pumped beast from a feedlot and the vegetable products are probably still Monsanto's Finest, but now it's "healthy". That's right, youth of today: you now have permission to no longer feel bad about eating at McDonalds.
Apropos of which, some rumours I heard about what goes into the food:
- The "hot apple pies" contain no apples, but instead contain chokos (a tasteless vegetable) stewed in apple sauce. Because it's cheaper.
- The "soft serves" and "thick shakes" are not made of milk but rather of vanilla-flavoured lard or something similar. The consistency is the same and it's a lot cheaper. Which is why they don't call them milk shakes, ice cream or the like.
No idea whether those are true or merely urban legends (like the one about earthworms in burgers), but I've heard them from multiple sources.
Coming soon: environmentally friendly 'green grenades'; just the thing for killing enemy troops in the eco-conscious 21st century.
Make your own joke: Police have been called to remove a ram found in a New Zealand hotel lift. The hotel manager believes that the ram was brought to the hotel by "someone who had a few too many to drink".
I went to see He Died With A Felafel In His Hand tonight (well, most of it; I missed the first 10 or so minutes of it). It was pretty good; there were quite a few similarities with Lowenstein's previous opus Dogs In Space (such as the interstitial titles, the neo-pagan burning of things and the sharehouse motif), though this was done on a bigger budget. The story isn't directly taken from the book (which is a collection of anecdotes with very few recurring characters), but rather made from the anecdotes, with multiple characters often amalgamated for the sake of coherency, though it keeps to the spirit.
The music was pretty well chosen too; two versions of Nick Cave's The Mercy Seat (during a thunderstorm, no less), and an electronica remake of the Dr Who theme, and all of two Paradise Motel songs (their blandly approachable Cars cover and, not listed in the credits nor on the CD, German Girl, from their excellent first EP). One gets the feeling that Lowenstein is a bit of a Nick Cave fan; Dogs In Space has a Boys Next Door song (Shivers), and then there's this film, not to mention Noah Taylor looking rather like Cave in places in the film (such as on the promotional material).
Now if there's any justice in the world, someone will rerelease Dogs In Space on DVD to cash in on Felafel. (There was a UK DVD release, apparently, but the transfer is said to be appallingly bad.) The soundtrack, with all that early-80s Melbourne postpunk, would also be good.
Just when you think that the Recording Racket may not be totally evil, something like this comes along: Dixie Chicks sue Sony for screwing them out of royalties (which, traditionally, are a pitifully small share of the pie, even before advances are deducted). But get this: Sony wrote the contract in such a way that they cannot be considered in breach of it even if they screw the artist out of every penny.
"Even if Sony had a contractual obligation to compensate the Dixie Chicks in this instance," the letter states, "Paragraph 19.07 of the agreement states explicitly 'Sony shall not be deemed in breach of this agreement unless such claim is reduced to a final judgment by a court of competent jurisdiction and Sony fails to pay you the amount thereof within 30 days after Sony receives notice of the entry of such judgment.' "
Wonder whether if this lawsuit is successful, it will invalidate such clauses and force recording companies to stop acting like pimps. Or at the very least, inspire more artists to stand up to the companies. Wonder how Courtney Love vs. Universal is going...
Robert Elz, the reclusive programmer who ran the Australian domain name registry out of an office at Melbourne University, has been deposed, and control of .com.au handed to a private body of some sort. On one hand, Elz has been slow to put domains through (a friend of mine who worked at an ISP had US clients screaming down the phone at him because a .com.au they ordered hadn't been put through for months); on the other hand, he had principles (he refused to accept MelbourneIT stock options, for one, and his judgments tended to be Solomonically fair), and the new keepers of .com.au look like a corporate monopoly of some sinister, neo-liberalist sort.
(I worked at Melbourne University, in the same building as Elz, for a year once, and don't recall seeing him once. All I know is that he apparently has a UNIX-sysadmin beard and is rumoured to disappear even more completely when there's a cricket match worth watching.)
2001/9/4
Falco! Grand Royal, the Beastie Boys' record label and home to a great many innovative American and international indie acts, is dead. What I'm wondering is what will happen with the copyrights to artists' recordings which they own; will they be flogged off to pay debts and end up in some multinational media conglomerate's back catalogue?
Unintended consequences: In the US, the War on Drugs and resulting rise in workplace urine testing has given rise to a new growth industry: the trade in drug-free urine.
By chugging fruit juice, tea and coffee, Curtis says he produces enough urine to make 50 kits a day; he keeps another 500 gallons of his liquid waste stored in industrial freezers. "I don't waste a drop of my assets," he said.
"People do all kinds of things to avoid getting tested," Ferris said. Some borrow urine from friends and microwave it in a convenience store on their way to work. Others dilute their samples with water or Gatorade, or spike the sample with commercial products that claim to destroy unwanted toxins. In one case, a job applicant had another person's pee injected directly into his bladder.
A psychologist has claimed that these days, adulthood dawns at 35, and not 21; this is because housing is more expensive and people tend to spend more time in the education system and spending disposable income on lifestyle products rather than mortgages and children; hence the extended adolescence. (via Meg)
Harry Potter wins the Hugo award? Whilst the Potter books aren't bad (they're certainly enjoyable), they're definitely not sci-fi. Though I suppose they could be lumped in as "genre" (a euphemism for "fanboy interest" or "spotty people in black trenchcoats and ponytails like this", or something like that). Which ties in with Graham's rant about the "sci-fi" shelves in bookshops being full of naff fantasy novels.
Though it's reassuring to see that Greg Egan won something. (link via Slashdot)
Last night's Splodge film night was a good one, with a slightly psychoceramic theme. They had a 1960 documentary (produced in England with funding from drug company SmithKline) titled Seven Ages of Psychiatry, showing how mental illness was perceived by different civilisations (from primitive shamanism to mediæval witch hunts to the "modern" day, albeit one in which patients were still lobotomised regularly); this reminded me a little of Haxan, the 1920s Swedish documentary about witchcraft, which equated it with the "modern" mental disorder of hysteria. Then they had a 1963 film titled Shock Corridor, in which a journalist has himself committed to a mental hospital to track down a murderer, mingles with the patients (including a black man who thinks he's the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and an ex-POW obsessed with the Civil War), and ends up losing his grip on sanity as he gets closer to his goal. Not a bad film, with interesting portrayals of mental illness and its treatment, and commentaries on postwar American society.
2001/9/3
Don't you just hate it when...: A runner in Wisconsin is getting rabies shots after a bat flew into his mouth.
But the winged mammal did more than just strike his face. Much to the surprise of Schmitt -- and probably to the surprise of the bat as well -- the critter had swooped into what might seem an ideal bat habitat: a warm, dark nook, namely Schmitt's open mouth.
Burn down the disco, and hang the blessed DJ: A New York Post columnist has been denounced as a racist for describing recently deceased pop star of colour Aaliyah as an "undistinguished singer of forgettable pop songs". Black activist Reverend Al Sharpton is demanding that the New York Post apologise and punish the columnist in question, Rod Dreher.
2001/9/2
An interesting piece on the state of affairs in the Baltic states, a decade or so after breaking away from the USSR:
The government in Moscow is therefore running a large risk. If it stays cold towards the Balts, it may find that Kaliningrad, though still formally part of Russia, is in fact developing closer links with the rest of Europe than those it has with its old motherland.
The remaining 700,000-odd people are, in effect, stateless. They lost citizenship of the Soviet Union when it collapsed, but either from apathy or out of principle have not tried to become either Russians or citizens of their new countries. They and the citizens of Russia are barred from some occupations, and cannot vote in national elections.
Some of the Baltic Russians call themselves Yevrorussky, Euro-Russians. If only Russia itself would think along those lines a bit more.
One of the most oddly poetic search requests seen on Disturbing Search Requests in a long time: goat floats in "bag of crisps".
Hang on... the poster of that one looks suspiciously like a certain ungulate-obsessed computer-game programmer from the 1980s. Could it be?
Knives out: After finalising its acquisition of MP3.com, Recording Racket heavies Vivendi Universal have kicked out its controversial CEO, Michael Robertson, whose views on music sharing are quite out of step with Universal's. Anyone want to bet on how long until MP3.com sheds the 'MP3' from its name and switches to a "secure" (read: proprietary) file format?
In France, insurers are offering bully insurance to schoolchildren. The insurance covers stolen or damaged clothing and schoolbooks as well as hospital bills if necessary, though do not cover cash or mobile phones. I wonder how they work out the premiums; whether you'd pay extra if you wear glasses, are physically unfit, don't fit in or otherwise are below a certain point in the high-school food chain.