2002/1/31
"Won't you ever ask me / who's going to make this night / the loneliest night of the year:" Valentine's Day, that celebration of the essentiality of coupledness to human self-worth and the essentiality of conspicuous consumption to the maintenance of coupledness, is approaching. Already the signs are appearing, just like shop-window Christmas paraphernalia in early November: pink, fluffy ads for romance-related goods and services are hung in shop windows, and spam reading "VALENTINE MUST: VIAGRA ORDERS MADE EASY" is flooding into inboxes.
From The Onion: Judge Orders God To Break Up Into Smaller Deities, finding the Judeo-Christian Deity to be an illegal monotheopoly. Of course, whether or not it'll actually happen is another matter; didn't the defendant contribute heavily to the Bush campaign?
And there's also this amusing look at student radicalism.
Tonight New Order played in Melbourne, and I went along with a friend to see them. We lined up outside the Metro (a former theatre, which is now a teeny-bopper nightclub of some sort) with other fans; one contingent had an English flag (that's the red-and-white Cross of St. George, not the Union Jack) with "NEW ORDER" inscribed upon it.
Once inside, we made it to one of the tables in the "corporate box" area above the dance floor. This afforded a good view of the stage (considerably better than my seat at the Cure concert in 2000); however, as I later found out, the sound in the glassed-off balcony was a bit muffled (not to mention people there talking through the set, as if it was background music in a shopping centre or something).
The support band was local outfit Underground Lovers, who played a set, mostly of rock numbers; they weren't bad. Then came a DJ set from Arthur Baker (who worked with New Order in the 80s).
Finally New Order came on. (Their line-up had changed slightly, with Gillian staying home to take care of a sick child, and some young bloke (either the guy from Smashing Pumpkins or the one from Primal Scream, I think) taking over her duties on guitar and keyboards. They played for just over an hour, and played mostly old songs (doing a spirited rendition of Temptation at one point). They played a number of Joy Division numbers, and quite well (though Barney did mix up the lyrics to Transmission a little), and various New Order classics (including True Faith, which they did with the true lyrics that don't appear on the recordings). Barney (who, strangely enough, looked like a middle-aged version of the Bernard Sumner in the old videos, his hair either bleached or greying) made comments between the songs, showing his sense of humour; at one stage, he said that he thought that the lyrics of Joy Division's Atmosphere were about golf.
And they played with much energy. Peter Hook almost stole the show with his bass-playing, crouching to play the instrument at ankle-level, and leaping onto a podium at various stages in a heroic pose. (If someday the city of Manchester commissions a statue of Peter Hook with bass in hand, it will probably look like he did during the show.) Barney played a guitar, mostly strumming chords, and sang; when he wasn't doing either he bounced around the stage, doing funny little dances.
(One thing to notice about the music of New Order: most of the melody comes from the bass; the guitars typically just play chords.)
Towards the end, they gave the audience a choice between one of the new songs and Joy Division's Isolation; everybody chose the latter, which they performed with a more dance/drum & bass-style beat; it was interesting to see them reinterpret the old standards as they did. And just after they finished and left the stage, just as people were asking themselves "where is Blue Monday?", they came back on, the lights turned blue, and they performed a version of their classic single. (Parts of it were pre-sequenced or prerecorded, of course, but the bass and various keyboard lines (not sure about the squelchy one at the start) were live, and so were various of the drum sounds, triggered from pads.) The crowd went wild.
All in all, it was a great show. Their recent songwriting may not be up there with the classics, but they can still rock and tear the roof off a venue.
Looks like we're off to war with Iraq, Iran and North Korea next.
"For too long our culture has said `if it feels good, do it'," Mr Bush said. "Now America is embracing a new ethic and a new creed: Let's roll."
Actually, "if it feels good, do it" sounds a lot like waging war, finding your approval ratings soaring, and then declaring war on three more states, don't you think?
2002/1/30
I've been looking around AudioGalaxy (with the Linux client) and it's brilliant. For instance, I just found out that there's a lot of Field Mice stuff listed, including long-deleted vinyl-only gems (songs like Humblebee, Song 6 and so on); not to mention live Slowdive tracks (albeit some let down by dodgy MP3 codecs), Lush rarities and even some Paradise Motel (other than their cover of Drive, that is). The range is much wider than on KaZaA, which is mostly widely available things. Which is good if you're a teenage mook wanting to pirate the latest rap-metal hit, but not so good if you're a dedicated trainspotter looking for obscure old singles and mixes.
According to this, I am scheduled to die on Saturday February 26, 2067, aged 93. Which makes me feel a bit better about having passed the big two-eight. Actually, it's more precise, saying that I'll snuff it at 10:16:23 AM of that fateful day. Which, given my sleeping patterns, means I'll die in my sleep; could be worse. (Though how it got that time without knowing what hour I was born on, or which time zone for that matter, is a bit dubious.) (via Gimbo)
Cyberspace: The multiplayer online game EverQuest has spawned an economy almost as big as Russia's, through players buying and selling game items on eBay.
2002/1/29
The World's Oldest Multinational Corporation: Speaking of unswerving religious sanctions, Pope John Paul II has instructed Catholic lawyers to refuse divorce cases. How binding is his decree? Are Catholics still absolutely required to subordinate their consciences to the Church in all matters or face excommunication?
(This reminds me of how the Catholic church has been taking over hospitals, often dominating entire regional markets, and eliminating services which the Vatican doesn't approve of, for patients of all cultural persuasions.)
In the Great Hall of the Justice Department building in Washington DC, there stand two Art Deco statues representing the Spirit of Justice and the Majesty of Justice. The Spirit of Justice is represented as a female figure, draped in a toga-like garment with one breast exposed. Now the US Attorney General John Ashcroft, a hardline Christian Fundamentalist, has ordered the statue to be covered up and made chaste, with US$8,000 worth of drapes manufactured for the purpose. Well, at least he didn't have it dynamited like those other religious whackos. Though you'd think that covering up nude statues was a cause that only attracted doddering crackpots.
2002/1/28
The latest trend among Generation Xers: starter marriages; an increasing number of first marriages lasting fewer than five years. A sign of a society conditioned more to short-term gratification? (via Plastic)
(Also, Generation X seems to be moving, remaining constantly the mid-to-late-20s demographic; given that the GenXers in Coupland's novel would be approaching middle age now, and no longer in the lifestyle-product target demographic (or as The Onion once suggested, having passed 36 and fallen into the target market for lawn-care products and foot powders and such), and a new crop of people have become the new Xers. Perhaps you start off in Generation Y, and graduate into Gen X as soon as you lose your interest in extreme sports and MTV and replace your Limp Bizkit records with Yo La Tengo or the Dandy Warhols or somesuch, and your Big Yellow Shorts with a black turtleneck or possibly an ironically-worn 1950s gas-station-attendant shirt or somesuch.)
Abandonware news: Desqview/X released into the public domain (though without sources). I recall that it looked pretty impressive; it could run remote X11 applications and multitask DOS/Windows apps, all in a tiny amount of RAM. Not sure how useful it is these days, though. Anyway, there's a mirror here, and a Slashdot discussion here.
An interesting article about the physiological effects of television. In short, TV can be physiologically addictive, acting as a depressant, and the edits used in TV programmes, and particularly ads, induce a Pavlovian "orienting response", which grabs the viewer's attention involuntarily, and causing physical tiredness in the viewer by overworking this response. Also, families who become dependent on TV as a primary recreational activity find it difficult to cope with TV deprivation:
Nearly 40 years ago Gary A. Steiner of the University of Chicago collected fascinating individual accounts of families whose set had broken--this back in the days when households generally had only one set: "The family walked around like a chicken without a head." "It was terrible. We did nothing--my husband and I talked." "Screamed constantly. Children bothered me, and my nerves were on edge. Tried to interest them in games, but impossible. TV is part of them."
In short, withdrawal symptoms. However, the good news is that only heavy users become addicted, and they actually enjoy TV less than those who watch it occasionally or in moderation. (via those liberal elitists at Plastic)
2002/1/27
This afternoon, I got a message from Cos, saying that he picked up the new Neil Halstead album at Second Spin in Balaclava. So I caught a tram and a train down there, and picked up a copy, as well as second-hand copies of:
- Ivy, Apartment Life (which I had had my eye on for a while)
- Lush, Gala (the early EP compilation; now I've got everything Lush ever released, save for some obscure remixes*).
Being on a tight budget, I didn't pick up everything I found there; I didn't get The Sundays' Reading, Writing and Arithmetic (which didn't sound too bad, in a slightly Cocteau Twins-ish sort of way), the last Mojave 3 album, an album by Bandulu (who did a good remix of Slowdive's In Mind, though their own work sounded like fairly standard dub/electronica), or Ryuichi Sakamoto's 1996 compilation.
* such as the DJ Spooky mix of Undertow, which I'd love to get my hands on.
TV broadcasters are using a new technology to trim the length of programmes without removing scenes, making room for extra ad spots. The patented technology uses a process called "microediting", in which duplicate frames are removed and the audio is compressed in synchronisation. This process can reduce programme length by 30 seconds per half hour, giving an extra lucrative ad spot. Some networks have even been applying it to "live" sports broadcasts, running them through a buffer.
(They can claim a patent for that? It seems like a rather obvious process; both the frame deletion and the audio doctoring.)
Stranger than fiction: Ambulance crews in the Polish city of Lodz have been deliberately letting patients die, in return for kickbacks from funeral companies. In some cases the ambulance crews even hastened the deaths of their charges by administering muscle relaxants. In return, the funeral homes paid the ambulance crews over US$300 for each stiff sent their way.
Backpacker advisory: Vending machine owners in Europe have found that unscrupulous customers have been using Thai 10 baht coins in place of two-Euro coins. The Thai coins are very similar to the two-Euro coin in size and weight, but worth only €0.26.
2002/1/26
Enron chairman quits to join Nigerian firm, asks for your confidential assistances, bank account numbers.
Tonight, I went to the Czech Club to see some bands: The Grey Daturas, Sir and The Bird Blobs. The Grey Daturas were a sort of wall-of-noise outfit, playing one very lengthy instrumental piece with lots of feedback, flanging, delays and such, and some drums kicking in towards the middle; a little What Is Music?, or perhaps like Mogwai only not quite so melodic. Sir were good as always, though played with a reduced lineup (as bass-player Matt Bailey was in Tasmania). The Bird Blobs were sort of drone-rock, like a post-Nirvana Joy Division or something.
Most impressive was the synchronicity between the bands and the movies being projected behind them, which was mostly accident. Sir played in front of Buñuel and Dali's Un chien andalou and Jean Cocteau's Le Sang d'un Poète playing behind them, which was most appropriate for their music; they should play more soundtracks to old silent films of fraught relationships and troubled lives.
Oh yes, and the beer wasn't too bad either. I had a bottle of a Czech lager named Kozel, which was quite flavoursome. I also was going to try another beer called Radegast, but they didn't have any. (I wonder whether Tolkien ripped off the name for one of his wizards, or vice versa.)
2002/1/25
US citizens, now is your last chance to comment on the Microsoft settlement and why it's a bad idea.
3RRR just played the long version of The KLF's America: What Time Is Love?. That's not the neat acid-house/trance version you're probably familiar with, but nine minutes or so, with an intro, grinding guitars (apparently a Motörhead sample) and a middle bit which goes into Wagnerian operatic territory. Very cool. Now if only I could find a MP3 of it somewhere.
Scientists at the improbably named Kinky University in Osaka, Japan, have created pigs with spinach DNA, in order to create pork that's healthier to eat. Can square meal farm animals be too far off?
A two-bedroom terrace house at 77 Barton Street, in Macclesfield, near Manchester, is up for sale. The house, listed as "ideal for first-time home buyers" is on the market for £64,950. It is also the house where Ian Curtis, frontman of Joy Division, committed suicide in 1980. (via Lukelog)
(It's funny, because a friend of mine lived just around the corner from there at the time. He says it's a nice area.)
The High Court in Britain has found PlayStation "mod-chips" illegal, in a ruling which has far-reaching implications. One of the implications is that importing out-of-region DVDs and playing them at home is now illegal.
2002/1/24
If it wasn't for George W. Bush, we'd all be speaking Afghani: After wiping the floor with the Taliban and making Osama Bin Laden look "haggard", Bush's war cabinet has decided that Saddam's next, and intend to have him ousted in as soon as six months. And once that's done, there's no need to stop there. Gaddafi is still thumbing his nose at America in Tripoli, and Castro's still in Cuba; perhaps we can expect to see these rogue leaders of "outlaw states" brought down with daisy-cutter bombs next, as part of a campaign to clean up the global streets?
(And, of course, the Australian government has promised unconditional military support to the US "war on terrorism", so Aussie diggers will be fighting in Iraq within the year, and perhaps making Havana safe for McDonalds in a year's time or so.)
An amusing article on how to seem smarter without reading any of them book things. Now someone should do one on how to appear congenially stupid, as that tends to attract more empathy and goodwill. (Or, as "Bob" said, "act like a dumbshit and they'll treat you as an equal.")
Here's an idea for your bookshop, Lev: A shopkeeper in Poland has come up with a novel way of deterring shoplifters: by caging them until police show up, or alternatively giving them the option of having their identity photograph displayed on a gallery of shame.
2002/1/23
In an ABC interview, Robert Putnam (author of Bowling Alone) asserts that "More Americans watch Friends than have friends". (via FmH)
An article on the development of artificial wombs; it's by neo-Luddite Jeremy Rifkin, and as such warns darkly about the evil and dehumanising consequences of such technologies. Though, as the Plastic thread about it points out, one thing the development of an artificial womb would do is forever end the abortion debate, or marginalise it to the lunatic fringes.
Bizarre story of the day: A man who showed up at a Vancouver hospital two years ago suffering from total amnesia may in fact be a French porn star.
When you pirate software, you're downloading communism terrorism:
According to Microsoft, software pirates are funding terrorism. Coming up next: Hillary Rosen, with how each ripped MP3 you download helps Osama Bin Laden kill Americans.
Ever wonder why bestselling novels all read the same way? It's because they're written in the No-Style, a writing style designed for snappy, easily digestible McNovels for today's stim-hungry TV-conditioned audiences. Successful exemplars of the No-Style include the likes of Stephen King, Tom Clancy and Janet Evanovich. Are Strunk & White to blame?
A secular humanist look inside Christian Rock, in cartoon form, by ex-Suck cartoonist Peter Bagge.
Ever wondered what ultra-violent young malchicks do when they grow up and reform? How about writing an advice column... (via Found)
Dear WORRIED
Your little malchick is doing a yumyumyum bit of the ol' in-out in-out and I don't see why you are so oh-oh-oh about it. It's nature, baboochka, remember it? You can teach him about Bog and the Good Book all you like, but when a malchick sees a fine devotchka, he gets a pan-handle and he wants to do some lubbilubbing with her. At least he's not a gloopy prestoopnik, always in trouble with the millicents and being dragged off to the Staja. Let him and his little ptitsa do the in-out in-out. Next you'll be all razdraz about him smoking a cancer.
2002/1/22
Here it comes: hip-hop goes patriotic; "Fight the Power" is out, and now the only colours are the stars and stripes (which dissident rappers The Coup, incidentally, call "violent gang colours", but they're not getting any MTV airplay, so they're irrelevant). Even former gangsta personnel are lining up behind Dubya's Crusade, with Dr. Dre (whose "F*** Tha Police" caused much uproar in the early 90s) toying with a track named "Kill Bin Laden", Death Row boss Suge Knight stating that there is no place for protest lyrics or disunity, and Canibus (whose name, apart from being a marijuana reference, is Latin for "His Doggness") releasing a song titled "Draft Me", about his desire to fight for America. Even radical Black Muslims such as Wu Tang Clans, formerly militant critics of the US establishment, have been getting on the bus. Meanwhile former rapper turned cable-TV salesman MC Hammer has used this as an opportunity to make a comeback with an album titled Active Duty, presenting himself as the patriotically-correct spokesman for hip-hop.
David "Davey D" Cook ... puts the blame on disproportionate reporting. "The whole point of propaganda is to eliminate voices of dissent," he says. "If you tell everybody that 90% of people are pro-war, then people who don't really feel that way think, 'Well, maybe it's better to keep my mouth shut.' There are opinions across the board, but it's really a question of who gets the most time on the microphone."
Curiously enough, the only major dissent, other from the usual suspects such as Chuck D, comes from a niche subgenre of hip-hop, known as "backpacker hip-hop", and marketed predominantly at white left-liberals.
An article on the fast-growing new subculture of train hoppers; mostly young people who stow away on freight trains, crossing America like the hoboes of yesteryear. Except that they coordinate their hopping through web sites, which they access from public terminals wherever they stop. Needless to say, the train companies are none too pleased.
"Hobos call a boxcar a wide-screen TV," says Snyder, dressed in a dusty pair of black overalls and layers of sweatshirts and jackets. "I just like traveling. That's why I do it."
Older, more experienced hobos hold conventions. Younger ones such as Snyder meet in places such as New Orleans for extended Halloween parties. But no one has a solid grasp on how many people hop trains these days. "Nobody's done any field work. Everybody is just guessing," says Daniel Leen, the Seattle-based author of an underground book called The Freighthopper's Manual for North America: Hoboing in the 21st Century.
(Another book to look out for when visiting PolyEster.) (link via bOING bOING)
2002/1/21
Musical Genres That Should Exist: According to Google, the word "casiopunk" appears in only one place on the web, in an article in what looks like Swedish or Norwegian about a band called the Russian Futurists.
An interesting criticism of Civilization 3, the computer game, and in particular, of the rather Western-centric way in which cultural development is modelled therein (i.e., everyone progresses through building cathedrals and stock exchanges, and even if, say, the Aztecs become a dominant civilisation, they start to look a lot like 20th-century America):
In other words, the game lacks a critical element of imagination that would have allowed players to see what a modern world might look like if, 400 years earlier, the Aztecs had repelled the Spanish invasion, developed their own powerful ships, and successfully overrun the Iberian peninsula. Or if the Iroquois had defeated the European migrants trying to settle their land. Chances are they wouldn't be building cathedrals, or researching chivalry, and maybe they'd figure out the secrets of 'ecology' before they even got around to developing a code of laws.
Amazing: A look at the folklore of homeless children, as handed down from child to child in streets and homeless shelters in Miami, kept secret from adults. The stories show a dark world of cosmic war, where God has been forced into exile by hordes of demons, Satan and the terrible Bloody Mary are at large, and outnumbered legions of angels are hiding in the Everglades; an angel named the Blue Lady is on the side of good, but can only help you if you know her true name, which nobody does. Very archetypal, and existing in very similar form.
No one knows why God has never reappeared, leaving his stunned angels to defend his earthly estate against assaults from Hell. "Demons found doors to our world," adds eight-year-old Miguel, who sits before Andre with the other children at the Salvation Army shelter. The demons' gateways from Hell include abandoned refrigerators, mirrors, Ghost Town (the nickname shelter children have for a cemetery somewhere in Dade County), and Jeep Cherokees with "black windows."
There is no Heaven in the stories, though the children believe that dead loved ones might make it to an angels' encampment hidden in a beautiful jungle somewhere beyond Miami. To ensure that they find it, a fresh green palm leaf (to be used as an entrance ticket) must be dropped on the beloved's grave.
Research by Harvard's Robert Coles indicates that children in crisis -- with a deathly ill parent or living in poverty -- often view God as a kind, empyrean doctor too swamped with emergencies to help. But homeless children are in straits so dire they see God as having simply disappeared. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam embrace the premise that good will triumph over evil in the end; in that respect, shelter tales are more bleakly sophisticated. "One thing I don't believe," says a seven-year-old who attends shelter chapels regularly, "is Judgment Day." Not one child could imagine a God with the strength to force evildoers to face some final reckoning.
Folklorists were so mystified by the Bloody Mary polygenesis, and the common element of using a mirror to conjure her, that they consulted medical literature for clues.
Darkness, despair and street violence. I'll be surprised if this isn't picked up as a Vertigo comic (or butchered into a dire Hollywood popcorn flick). (via Rebecca's Pocket)
A big list of fallen popstars of the 1980s, from Steve Strange and the recently institutionalised Adam Ant to the likes of Rick Astley and Jason Donovan, along with whatever happened to them. (Thankfully, 80s pop stars don't seem to share the 1970s-glam-rocker tendency to molest children.)
First there was the Kazakhstan hobbit crackdown, and now, Italian neo-fascists are getting really into Tolkien, running "Hobbit Camps" for young fascists. What's going on?
For the fortysomethings of Alleanza Nazionale (AN), the right-wing party in government, J R R Tolkien and his cast of elves and hobbits are as much a part of their political property as Che Guevara was for the left-wing. So much so that AN members of parliament and sympathisers held their own private première of the film.
2002/1/20
Surprise, surprise: A Boeing 767 refitted in the US to serve as China's presidential aircraft has been found to be full of listening devices. Extremely sophisticated ones, too, that can be triggered from satellites.
Apparently, Saudi Arabia has tired of its onerous role as the premier defender of truth, justice and the American way in the Arab world, and told the US to bugger off. Given that the House of Saud is essentially paying protection money to extremist zealots (of a similar stripe to Saudi native son Osama bin Laden), US bases in the country have become a liability to the beleaguered dictatorship.
This looks potentially scary: AOL Time Warner to buy RedHat? For one there's what happened to Nyetscape; and the question of whether an AOL-owned RedHat's priorities would not be drastically different. (One possibility is RedHat dropping support for the Linux kernel, and replacing it with a proprietary, DRM-centric kernel, perhaps based on SCO UnixWare, transforming RedHat's Linux into an unhackable SSSCA-compliant appliance OS.)
Thanks to Cos and his ultra-doovy digital camera, some pictures from Friday night's Ninetynine gig. (I'd have linked to it yesterday, but the server was down.)
2002/1/19
Tonight I went to the Ninetynine CD launch at the Corner Hotel. It was excellent. The first support band was Baseball, a side project run by Ninetynine's drummer, the mad-haired Cameron Potts. It was an interesting set; with Cameron, another guy and a girl who looked a little like Laura from Ninetynine (but wasn't), playing an eccentric assortment of instruments, including an accordion, a small drum, a violin and various shakers, and performing a number of quirky songs and melodies. Baseball are certainly a band to look out for. Then came a punkish band named Flesh Vs. Venom, which apparently features members from defunct punk-popsters The Vivian Girls. They were OK (one of the songs they played sounded like Joy Division's Interzone, albeit with different lyrics, and in other places they sounded a bit like PIL or someone).
Finally, Ninetynine came on, and put on a characteristically brilliant show, swapping instruments in between shows, and playing with much energy. Not surprisingly, Cameron stole the show, flailing about behind the drums like a man possessed. The audience loved it, and at the end, called for more. (And Ninetynine obliged, playing one of their older songs (the one with the bleepy Casiotone drum loop that probably comes from a pencil-case-sized toy keyboard.)
Some good news: Dutch multinational Philips plans to require warning logos on copy-protected CDs, and forbid claims that the non-Red-Book-compliant discs are CDs; Philips also plan to make CD-R writers capable of copying them (whether making straight binary copies or actually removing the intentional damage is unknown). It's not clear whether Philips could legally require such CDs to bear a warning logo (other than the Universal Music logo or marques of any other corporations which follow suit, of course).
How to disappear completely: Police were called to Ronald Huff's apartment after he hadn't shown up for work; they found him dead, and partly eaten by seven monitor lizards, which he had kept as pets.
2002/1/18
On the bus today, an overweight, baby-faced man with shaggy brown hair and green canvas drawstring pants was accosting passengers, walking right up to them, holding a piece of paper, and asking "What temperature do you like the weather to be?". Some answered, and others told him to go away; in the latter case, he persisted in following them around saying "Sorry. Sorry." I wonder whether perhaps he wasn't perchance one of those Transport Victoria Association survey-takers I keep hearing about.
I downloaded the AtheOS boot disks today and tried playing around with it under VMWare. It boots, loads up the graphical interface (which looks rather Amiga-inspired) and gives me a shell, though I haven't had any luck installing it to the virtual hard disk yet.
AtheOS so far looks like an interesting little OS; probably no less practical than BeOS would have been had it not died. The design seems more clean and modern than Linux (or any other classic UNIX), and there are certainly more new ideas in AtheOS. It could have potential, at least as a hacker toy. (Though I don't think it'll replace Linux for a while.)
Remember when ProDOS wasn't just a Randroid loony? Retrocomputing hack of the day: One enterprising hacker is working on a CompactFlash IDE adapter for the Apple II; one which will give up to two 32Mb ProDOS volumes per CF card. (Or IDE hard disk for that matter.) (Via Slashdot)
The Welsh city of Cardiff is experimenting with what could be the future of public transport. The ULTra system is somewhere between tranways and taxis, and consists of autonomous cars (large enough to carry several passengers and a bicycle) travelling on a dedicated track and taking their passengers to a destination of their choice. Meanwhile, Melbourne's airport rail link has been scrapped, because a study revealed insufficient patronage to justify the expense.
Protecting the community: A man has been sentenced to nine months in jail for jogging naked through Shepparton. Thank God the police are able to protect us from dangerous felons like him.
Possibly the cock-up of the year: A plaque intended to honour black actor James Earl Jones at a Florida celebration of the life of Martin Luther King instead paid tribute to James Earl Ray, the man who assassinated King. The plaque reads "Thank you James Earl Ray for keeping the dream alive." The mistake is believed to have come from a typographical error at the manufacturer of the plaque. (via Plastic)
This evening I went for dinner with two old friends (whom I hadn't seen for some years, as they had been in the UK); we went to the Curry Café (formerly the Salamander, and before that the Seven Sisters) in Northcote. A good time was had by all.
One minor annoyance: the café was out of chai masala, and thus unable to serve chai tea. Which is a step down from the usual situation of them having chai but being out of honey. Though the curries were quite good (as they usually are at the Curry Café), and they didn't play the Kenny G CD they had on on a few earlier occasions, so it's not all bad.
Life, liberty and the pursuit of bootywhang: Chicks don't dig Libertarians, or conservatives of any stripe. Unless the chicks in question are characters from an Ayn Rand novel, of course. According to this article, the dating scene is not kind to neo-liberalists, libertarians, neo-conservatives and such. (via Reenhead)
(Which is funny, really, as the dating game is the oldest form of laissez-faire market capitalism in history; I guess a dreadlocked Nu Marxist in a Rage Against the Machine T-shirt just makes a better capitalist than a polo-shirted Young Liberal.)
2002/1/17
And if you thought the XOR cursor drawing patent was absurd, here is a list of absurd actual US patents. They include things like 3-dimensional pie charts and the use of training manuals. Some of which are almost up there with the Russian bottle patent.
Now this is interesting: a statistical analysis of voting patterns from US congresses, plotted on a graph. First thing to notice is that the votes fall into two clusters, one o nthe left and one on the right. However, interestingly enough, the two axes (X and Y) are not based on "left-wing" vs. "right-wing", or any ideological classification, but purely on being the "long axes" shown by factor analysis. Quoting from a mailing list:
No other axis is anywhere near as big as these two, so a 2-dimensional map truly is a faithful visualization of what US politics is about---not because some pundit says so, but because the statistics of actual congressional votes say so. The secondary axis can be variously described depending on the era: in the late nineteenth century it amounts to Yankee/black against Southern/Catholic, while by the mid-twentieth it is mostly about segregation (even though, again, the votes that define it may have nothing obvious to do with that issue). In recent decades the secondary axis has a strong "family values" component, but the distribution of votes says it's still "the same" axis as it was fifty or a hundred years ago.
Some conclusions drawn from this are that the two parties are real, and that during the mid-20th century, the southern Democrats were virtually a third party.
The Beast of Redmond: Microsoft buys SGI's graphics patents; penguinheads concerned they may be used to crush OpenGL, or cripple 3D graphics capabilities on non-Windows platforms. Meanwhile, if you use Windows Media Player to download content from sites, the sites can keep track of you, using a convenient global ID number. Apparently this is not a bug but a feature. (via Slashdot)
Tonight I went down to the Empress to see New Buffalo. The supports were various former bandmates of Sally's: one Lara M., who played keyboards and guitar, accompanied by a Roland PMA-5 and a sampler, and an outfit named Friendly Injun. The New Buffalo show was quite good, and probably the last one for a while, while they work on a full-length album.
I also ran into Libby from Sir there; she mentioned that Sir are going overseas (touring the US and Europe) soon, so their last show before they leave may be next Friday's, at the Czech Club in North Melbourne.
Bad news (though not unexpected): Palm rules out opening BeOS code, essentially burying one of the more innovative fringe OSes of recent years. Though some people are imploring them to accept a plan to allow interested hackers pay to work on a fork, which remains property of Palm. Umm, OK... Though there is some good news: someone is working on a free BeOS clone, which already runs some binaries.
And then there's AtheOS, which already has pretty screenshots and succeeds in making Linux look conservative. (Which it is, in a sense, being for the most part a variation on the 30-year-old UNIX model.)
(Note to self: play around with AtheOS once you have access to spare PCs again.)
2002/1/16
The Death of Brunswick St. (an ongoing saga): This week's issue of the Melbourne Times has a section on the transformation of Brunswick St. into an upmarket gated community and shopping mall. There is an article about a plan to dig a tunnel from the housing commission blocks to Sunshine, to provide residents with "access to affordable consumables and appropriate social activities"; the article has a photograph of the public housing block surrounded by a high wall, keeping all the riff-raff in. Then there is the section on the "bigger, brighter and better" Brunswick St., with photographs of the Punters Club Photoshopped into a Country Road, the new Planet Hollywood, and a Starbucks.
Planet Hollywood, which replaced Flowers Vasette in December, is now the hottest nightspot in town. "It is amazing. The young professionals from their designer apartments, and even people from the eastern and southern suburbs, are flocking to this vibrant venue," Ome said.
Yes, it's a parody issue, but it's (unfortunately) too close to the truth.
An archæological dig is underway in the CBD of Melbourne, on the site of a notorious 19th-century brothel. Some believe that the dig may finally solve the mystery of the lost parliamentary mace, believed to have been lost in a brothel during an orgy/mock parliament attended by the state's politicians. (via Reenhead)
The Onion's back in fine form, with pieces like Area Man Not Exactly Sure When To Take Down American Flags:
"I don't want to be the first to take one down and look like an ass," Wenger said. "When I put the flags up, I was saying, 'I support America.' If I take them down, some people will probably think I'm saying, 'I no longer support America.'"
And then there's this ever-helpful collection of Dating Tips:
- Ladies: Your date's salary divided by your own equals the base you should let him get to on the first date.
- If you are overweight and socially awkward, consider "online dating." You can go on a dragonslaying adventure instead of to a movie, play games on Pogo.com instead of dancing, and masturbate instead of having real sex.
From Signum, an interesting essay about the history of vaudeville, a form of mass entertainment from the days before electronic media.
We are McWorld. Don't fuck with us. Human-rights groups and other commie-mutant-traitor-scum have been criticising the US's treatment of Taliban prisoners held at the Guantanamo prison facility. The US insists that the prisoners are not POWs but "unlawful combatants", and thus not subject to the Geneva Convention. Mind you, the Geneva Convention asserts that prisoners are POWs unless judged otherwise by a court, and says nothing about any "unlawful combatant" category. Then again, this is the US, a world power too powerful and important to allow itself to be bound by inconvenient international treaties.
For the moment, the US doesn't need treaties to ensure its security, as it has unchallenged military might. They don't need to treat others with respect to command respect; they command respect through fear, because they can rain death from above on anybody who gets in their way. (Though wait until, in the Sino-American War of the 2020s, the Chinese start taking US POWs; then they'll probably wish they hadn't torn up the Geneva Convention when they had the choice.)
The strange but true story of the reindeer smuggled aboard a submarine from Russia to Britain during WW2.
Fitter, happier, more productive: A look at the phenomenon of online dating, and its effects on human interaction:
And that's what's fascinating about online dating. It reflects the human propensity for choice and classification, and the fact that technology is being molded to meet those propensities. By online dating Darwin might have been disturbed, but he would not have been surprised.
Morever, the truly innocent are often truly hoodwinked, according to the anonymous author of Saferdating.com, a site with extremely detailed advice and gruesome online dating stories, started by a woman who met her husband through the Internet, but "went through hellish experiences" beforehand. Online dating anecdotes posted on Saferdating.com have titles like "Determining Honesty Is Like Military Intelligence" and "A Horror Story of Cons and Scams."
"Our study showed if people are communicating with someone they believe to be attractive, they edit and rewrite more than if they don't care whether they are impressing them." Walther's chief concern is that email correspondence can lead to a dangerous wish fulfillment for the perfect love. "It is nearly impossible for people to live up to such an artificially high, idealized range of expectations," he noted.
This evening, some friends and I got together at SubTerrain (a rather nice vegetarian café in North Fitzroy), for a sort of belated birthday celebration. All in all, a pretty good time was had all round. (Some photos were taken by various people, which will probably appear around the traps. I'll neither confirm nor deny that I was the guy with the paisley shirt, jester's hat and J.R. "Bob" Dobbs-style pipe.)
The UK domain registry has just launched the me.uk domain, intended for personal domains (sort of like the id.au domain, only without the silly rule about everything being under subdomains named after native plant species, which is perhaps why you haven't seen too many .id.au addresses). Not surprisingly, things like bugger.me.uk have all been snapped up pretty much straight away (probably by vanity free-mail services or somesuch).
2002/1/14
America speaking with one voice is un-American: An interesting article about the EFF, its history and opposition to the sweeping expansion of surveillance of recent times. Bravo to the EFF; we need people like them in these days.
Via Stumblings in the Dark: Monty Python's Terry Jones on the War on Terrorism, in a critique that's at once Pythonesque and insightful:
However, finally the 'War on Terrorism' is achieving its policy objectives. Osama bin Laden is looking haggard. We may not have caught him or brought him to justice but, at the cost of thousands of innocent Afghan lives, billions of dollars of US citizens' money and the civil liberties of the Free World, we have got him looking haggard.
(And that was the sound of the USA's cable-TV networks cancelling Monty Python reruns.)
They're all coming back; Lev has resumed blogging, and so has Peter; check his site for some righteous dissent, and some interesting music-related content.
An interesting interview with Richard Dawkins, in which he asserts that the tendency towards group identity (and, as an example of such, religion) is to blame for war, terrorism and other such things:
There does seem to be a strong biological tendency in humans to identify with a team or group to fight against another team or group. This is one thing that religion does, even in cases like Northern Ireland, where the hostility is not actually about theological disagreement. I mean, when a Protestant terrorist throws a bomb into a Catholic pub they are not saying, "Take that you transubstantiating, nationalist Tridentine bastards."
I think that Sept. 11 has cleared the minds of people like me who had hitherto been against religion, but nevertheless polite and respectful (toward it). I now no longer feel polite and respectful. I think it has (steered me toward) the direction of wanting to come out into the open and be actively hostile to religion.
I am not surprised, and that is another aspect of the situation. In America, they held various days of prayer, which actually made me quite sick. It seemed to me that, on both sides, the same evil was being revered with neither side realizing that this kind of faith was fundamentally responsible for the attack in the first place.
(via FmH)
McRadio: A look inside the commercial radio industry in the US, and how programming formats are manufactured and automated. In other words, why commercial radio will invariably be machine-regurgitated lowest-common-denominator crap, and why you're unlikely to hear anything that's actually interesting on it:
"High concept" and "cool" do not sell ads. While listeners profess to hanker for cutting-edge esoterica and diverse programming, advertisers don't buy into this. There are numbers in safety, if you will. Consider B-101, the station that actually advertises that it plays such mainstreamers as Celine Dion and Michael Bolton. Last year, that station - a locally owned independent - generated an estimated $26 million in ad sales; it is far and away the top-rated music station in Philadelphia. "People gravitate toward hit music," Milkman says. "This is broad-casting."
(via Plastic)
Green energy: A wind farm planned for off the coast of Ireland will generate 10% of the country's power, and be three times the size of all other existing wind farms put together.
The Jewish Museum of New York has courted controversy with an exhibit of Holocaust-related art; the exhibit consists not of reverent memorial pieces, but of pieces exploring the ideas of evil and consumerist popular culture; they include Zbigniew Libera's Lego concentration camp sets, and images of emaciated concentration camp inmates with product placements for Coke digitally added. Holocaust survivors' groups are not amused.
A US congressman has introduced a bill banning space-based mind-control weapons. Rep. Dennis Kucinich's Space Preservation Act of 2001 (H.R. 2977) proscribes a wide range of space-based weapons, including "psychotronic" devices "directed at individual persons or targeted populations for the purpose of ... mood management, or mind control." The bill has been hailed by a group of victims of mind-control experiments.
(I can't see it passing though, in the current mood; especially how useful the future ability to rain Death From Above on recalcitrant oil-rich states would be to stability and the preservation of the non-negotiable American lifestyle. (For examples of the utility of space-based weapons, see Ken MacLeod, The Star Fraction.))
2001: the consensus was that it was an awful year, an annus horribilis, mostly because of That Thing. But it was also an uncommonly weird year; the Fortean Times' Weirdness Index went off the scale, with everything from religious cults to frogfalls to weird creature sightings going up. Hail Eris!
Ah yes, the BloggerCode thingy: I'm B7 d t++ k s+ u f i o x e- l c, or approximately that. (I blog between several times a day and less than once a day, for example, depending on whether I've got something to blog.)
The youngest of the late Princess Diana's children, Prince Harry, has been committed to a drug rehabilitation clinic, after it emerged that not only had he drunk alcohol on several occasions, but had also smoked the evil weed Marihuana.
It was hoped he would meet heroin addicts and get a glimpse of the dangers of drugs.
Yes, of course. Marijuana is a gateway drug, and those who do it are likely to go on to harder drugs such as heroin. Also, masturbation causes blindness, and the hair of a seventh son cures warts. I'm sorry, but that has been debunked, and nobody other than William Bennett believes that anymore. Though, then again, we're talking about the Royal Family here...
(Then again, if you were in his shoes, wouldn't you be getting smashed regularly?)
The World Wizarding Foundation Magical Smackdown: Gandalf vs. Dumbledore. Gandalf wins, as you might expect, with a nod to Ursula LeGuin's Ged (about whom I haven't read, though perhaps it's one of those things I should read if I could fork() into an unlimited number of selves and be done with prioritising things). (via Making Light)
2002/1/13
Finally, after a long absence, Lev's back, and posting more weirdness, scandal and various gangsterism.
Yes! Electronics giant Philips, owners of the "Compact Disc" marque and patents, stands up against copy-denial mechanisms. Philips may refuse to license the CD marque to copy-restricted discs (on the grounds that, technically speaking, they are not legitimate Red Book audio discs).
(Ironically enough, up until the late 1990s, Philips owned the PolyGram music group, whose elements now comprise the bulk of copy-denial zealots Universal.)
2002/1/12
For the first time in history, more people are living alone, or as single parents, than in traditional families (in the UK). Which means that now, living alone, is the height of normalcy, and living in families (or presumably other shared household arrangements) has become "alternative".
Plunderphonic artefact of the week: Public Enemy vs. Dexy's Midnight Runners (~350k MP3). (via bOING bOING)
2002/1/11
You know you're growing old when you're in a band venue, along with a bunch of fresh-faced kids sitting/standing around in their social groups, and start to wonder what the hell you're doing there among them, a stranger in a strange land.
The latest business model from Japan: Wakaresaseya, or "breaker-uppers", who work for firms with names like Office Shadow, and, for a fee, specialise in breaking up people's relationships, using various cloak-and-dagger tactics:
The person a client hopes to banish--the "target," in industry parlance--often is lulled into a trap through a seemingly chance meeting in a bar, at a party, on a flight. A moment of weakness captured by a camera hidden in a cigarette box or behind a lapel is enough to upend his or her life. Though breaking up is hard to do, these firms boast 95% success rates.
One of the toughest cases for Daiko Research Office involved a husband who refused to leave his mistress despite repeated efforts at discrediting her. Finally, after two years, the firm lured the pair into a promising business deal using dummy offices, business cards and secretaries. It saddled them with $160,000 in debt and presented him with a choice: Give her up or pay the debt in full.
A Turkish publisher is being prosecuted under anti-terrorism laws for publishing a translation of several lectures by Noam Chomsky. The government alleges that the lectures, which criticise Turkey's treatment of its Kurdish minority, constitute separatist propaganda, which is illegal. (via Plastic)
War on Economic/Copyright Terrorism: Jon Johansen, who published DeCSS, has been charged with computer crime for bypassing DVD access-control mechanisms. The law under which he is charged has been used to prosecute crackers breaking into banks; there is no precedent applying it to copy-control mechanisms, but Hollywood and the US Government are pushing hard for one. (And you don't want to get in the way of the US Government; just ask the Afghans.) If convicted, Johansen faces 2 years in prison. (Though presumably he should be thankful he is not going to be extradited to the US; Norwegian prisons are probably more humane than US federal prisons.) The usual pirasymps are lobbying for the charges to be dropped.
Swiss game theorists have found that wrath makes the world go 'round; in particular, anger, and the tendency to punish cheats (even if it costs one personally), contribute greatly to social cohesion, and allow people to cooperate without being exploited by freeloaders.
According to New Scientist, the recording racket are having second thoughts about copy-restricted CDs, with BMG abandoning research into such technologies. Though they still have the chutzpah to assert that levies on blank media are not linked to consumers having any right to copy music.
2002/1/10
Scare meme of the day: E-bombs -- high-power electromagnetic pulse weapons which can destroy even harrdened, shielded devices -- and can be built for US$400.
The next Pearl Harbor will not announce itself with a searing flash of nuclear light or with the plaintive wails of those dying of Ebola or its genetically engineered twin. You will hear a sharp crack in the distance. By the time you mistakenly identify this sound as an innocent clap of thunder, the civilized world will have become unhinged. Fluorescent lights and television sets will glow eerily bright, despite being turned off. The aroma of ozone mixed with smoldering plastic will seep from outlet covers as electric wires arc and telephone lines melt. Your Palm Pilot and MP3 player will feel warm to the touch, their batteries overloaded. Your computer, and every bit of data on it, will be toast. And then you will notice that the world sounds different too. The background music of civilization, the whirl of internal-combustion engines, will have stopped. Save a few diesels, engines will never start again.
Given that the US military has a highly advanced E-bomb programme, they may also prove useful for sending rogue states (i.e., anybody whose politics we have problems with) back into the 19th century. Or, when the time comes, making the rigth to use electronic devices dependent on signing a treaty mandating universal copy-protection and/or surveillance, and reserving the right to EMP non-signatories (who must be dens of piracy and terrorism).
The Writers' Guild of America's website has an interesting article about how Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy was adapted into movies; the article interviews the three writers (Peter Jackson himself, his partner Fran Walsh and co-writer and Tolkienophile Philippa Boyens), and goes into some of the technical problems faced in adapting such a project into a viable movie and keeping the spirit of it (largely) intact.
A big list of blogging tools; if you've been tempted to start a blog but didn't know how to go about it, this site may be of help. (via Meg)
Common sense, at last: US congressman Rick Boucher, who has claimed that copy-restricted CDs may be illegal, now plans to introduce a bill repealing the anti-circumvention clause of the DMCA, thus allowing users to break copy-prevention mechanisms in the interests of fair use (remember that?). Not that this has a hope in hell of becoming law; if it doesn't get shot down in committee (which it probably will, with all the influence the copyright-hoarding racket wields), it's unlikely that Bush (or indeed any other president) would sign it into law. But still, it's a good sign.
Search requests: I just got a search-engine referral from someone looking for "I'm not dead but I'm not well". It sounds like a song title. (The Smiths, perhaps? Or possibly some old country singer?)
(Oh, and if you're the person looking for "erotic furries", stop it. Right now.)
2002/1/9
The latest issue of Computer Music magazine comes with a VST drum-sampler plug-in (SR-202, by the Muon people). Unfortunately, the Mac version of this plug-in can crash the entire machine, which renders it rather useless. Hopefully they'll fix this in a future issue (as it looks like quite a doovy plug-in; potentially better than LM-4).
(Yes, MacOS's nonexistent memory protection is to blame; I'll be glad when they start making native audio software for MacOS X, and compiling VST plug-ins for said platform too. Mind you, I'll also need a new Mac then, as my beige toaster doesn't want to boot MacOS X (probably because of the CPU upgrade).)
In other plug-in news, Roland have a VST version of their Sound Canvas module out; I'm thinking of spending the A$135 (with 3RRR subscriber discount) and buying it (I do have an ancient SC-55 module, but this is internal and VST-based, and thus more convenient; and you never know when you'll need some GM sounds).
The onward march of technology: Now there are viruses in Shockwave/Flash files. Mind you, they only work when run explicitly (so far).
Surprise, surprise: Australia's federal government rides to the rescue of beleaguered multinational media cartels, vowing to lift the onerous cross-ownership and foreign-media-ownership restrictions they have been struggling under, within a few months. Rupert and Kerry will be happy.
An interesting piece about the dominance of English, and the efforts made to preserve other languages from its encroachment:
In Hong Kong, by contrast, the new, Chinese masters are promoting Cantonese, to the concern of local business. And in India some people see English as an oppressive legacy of colonialism that should be exterminated. As long ago as 1908 Mohandas Gandhi was arguing that "to give millions a knowledge of English is to enslave them." Ninety years later the struggle was still being fought, with India's defence minister of the day, Mulayam Singh Yadav, vowing that he would not rest "until English is driven out of the country". Others, however, believe that it binds a nation of 800 tongues and dialects together, and connects it to the outside world to boot.
(Psychoceramic speculation: perhaps someone should try something like that in Australia; what's the point of becoming a republic if we still speak the tongue of our colonial oppressors? It may be politically correct to adopt and adapt an Aboriginal language (as has been done with Hebrew and Icelandic) as "Australian"; a committee of fashionable academics, bureaucrats and special-interest groups could be appointed to supervise the development of the language.)
[T]he Icelanders have readily adopted alnaemi for "AIDS", skjar for "video monitor" and toelva for "computer". Why? Partly because the new words are in fact mostly old ones: alnaemi means "vulnerable", skjar is the translucent membrane of amniotic sac that used to be stretched to "glaze" windows, and toelva is formed from the words for "digit" and "prophetess". Familiarity means these words are readily intelligible. But it also helps that Icelanders are intensely proud of both their language and their literature, and the urge to keep them going is strong
[M]ultilingualism, a commonplace among the least educated peoples of Africa, is now the norm among Dutch, Scandinavians and, increasingly, almost everyone else. Native English-speakers, however, are becoming less competent at other languages: only nine students graduated in Arabic from universities in the United States last year, and the British are the most monoglot of all the peoples of the EU . Thus the triumph of English not only destroys the tongues of others; it also isolates native English-speakers from the literature, history and ideas of other peoples. It is, in short, a thoroughly dubious triumph. But then who's for Esperanto? Not the staff of The Economist, that's for sure
Situation comedy of the day: A particularly thick and obnoxious spammer, masquerading as a "consultant", gets his arse handed to him, several times over. Hmmm; this guy reminds me of John "DrGodF*ck" Grubor in his "Doctor of Law" heyday. (Shifman link via TechDirt)
Obscure factoid about your humble narrator: Apparently, if rotten.com's sidebar is to be believed, I was born 100 years to the day after the original Siamese Twins, Chang and Eng, died.
After the September 11 outrage, Rupert Murdoch's publishing house HarperCollins pulled an upcoming book by left-liberal gadfly Mike Moore, for having the "intellectual dishonesty" to criticise George W. Bush, the Unquestionable Leader of the Free World. Existing copies of Stupid White Males were to be pulped, and Moore was instructed to rewrite it in a more patriotically-correct fashion, with costs coming from his royalties account. However, this decision has been overturned, and the book is set to come out in March. The reason for the turnabout is a campaign by librarians. (link via Reenhead)
(Why Moore still works with an authoritarian institution such as News Corp. is somewhat puzzling; the Murdoch empire have consistently shown themselves to be enemies of free expression, from pulling the BBC off their satellites at China's request to supporting draconian extensions to "copyright" laws to being the only agency outside the Chinese government to condemn and denounce the Falun Gong movement.)
2002/1/8
Things I got for my birthday:
- From my mum: a big bag of stuff, including a book on art deco furniture, a selection of Chinese teas, and a small clay teapot of traditional Chinese design.
- From my dad: a leather wallet
- From my sister and her boyfriend: two DVDs (O Brother Where Art Thou and The Fifth Element) and a red T-shirt.
The Ultimate Fake Band List. From Autobahn to Dogs In Space, and from Mike Myers' Ming Tea to MC Skat Kat and the Stray Mob, it's all here. (via Plastic)
Miffed at bans on whaling (and the limits of how much you can write off as "scientific research"), the whaling port of Hirado in Japan is looking at establishing a whale farm. The idea involves fencing off 2,000 square metres of ocean and then netting and corraling whales from the high seas in this area.
Read: The Geeks who saved Usenet, the story of how (parts of) USENET from the dawn of time (i.e., the early 1980s) was preserved by a small number of sysadmins and researchers, eventually ending up on Google. (via onepointzero)
A woman with the euphonious name of Decca Aitkenhead has written a book about her search for the perfect E (the drug, that is). The Grauniad has published an excerpt, in which her quest takes her to America:
When manufacturers began tampering with Es, they would substitute the cheaper ingredient of amphetamine for MDMA. Then came a spell when pills were laced with a hint of barbiturate, followed by a short but nasty batch of Es containing ketamine, a devastating veterinary anaesthetic. A particularly sneaky substitute is something called MDA, a derivative of MDMA. Popular with drug dealers, it mimics the effects of its chemical cousin for the first 15 minutes but then, very suddenly, it's over - giving the unlucky clubber just enough of a glimpse to tempt them back to buy another. A typical dud pill nowadays contains little more than glucose and caffeine, but MDMA is still out there and the quality of Es varies widely, each new brand quickly acquiring a reputation on the club scene.
2002/1/7
Great comebacks of our time: German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, best known for her work on Nazi propaganda films in the 1930s, is ending a 48-year hiatus with the release of a new documentary, about underwater life. The film, Impressionen under Wasser, was filmed around Papua New Guinea, and features a score by eurodisco pioneer Giorgio Moroder (best known for all those fabulous Donna Summer songs).
It now appears that the teenager who crashed the Cessna into the Bank of America building in Florida was imitating the WTC terrorists. Perhaps backyard wrestling was getting boring and he needed a new extreme sport? Or perhaps, after 11/9/2001, high school shootings are too passé.
28.
As of now, I'm officially well into my late 20s and approaching the big three-oh. Which is perhaps a bit scary.
(And what do I have to show for my age? Not much; still no real estate or long-term relationships, and I still keep spending my spare time doing things like making weird music that probably never gets released. Perhaps the thing about adolescence extending into the 30s isn't all that daft...)
(OTOH, people do tell me I look younger than I am...)
No official celebrations today, though; the problem with having a birthday in early January -- other than it being too close to Consumermas -- is that a lot of the good restaurants and cafés are closed then; hence, I postponed the party I traditionally have for a week or so.
2002/1/6
The latest hobby for the obsessive: Making paper models of Macintosh computers; more "insanely great" than spotting trains:
"To make sure that Caitlin grew up with the right priorities, I created huge padded rainbow apples, the early Apple logo, to go at each end of her cot," she said. "My Mac is not a tool," Dragon Tongue said. "It is a lifestyle, a friend, a place, a home, sometimes a pain, never a 'thing.'"
(Apparently this article will be adapted into a book about the fanatical devotion Maccies have to their computers and the Apple brand; which should be amusing to read, in much the same way that Trekkies was amusing to watch.)
How to disappear completely: Filipo Falcone, 80, of Prince Rupert, in the north of Canada, was recently found dead in his home by burglars. It is estimated that he had been dead for nine months before anybody noticed:
"His pension cheques just kept coming and were deposited directly into his bank account and bills like his Hydro were paid by direct debit."
The time of death was estimated from the date of disconnection of the phone service; the post office stopped delivering mail to Falcone after concluding that he had moved overseas, as he said he might do.
"You can have all the programs in the world, but if people keep saying, "Keep away, keep away," there is not much you can do."
(via rotten.com)
The story of how Afghanistan's artists and curators hid artworks and films from the Taliban's largely illiterate morality police out to destroy them. Well, they saved some of them, at least... (via Unknown News)
No, not a sequel to Sexchart: The Geek Hierarchy, from Brunching Shuttlecocks, showing who considers themselves less geeky than whom. (In this case, "geeky" being used in the pejorative sense, and being roughly synonymous with "pathetic".) Published science fiction authors are at the top, and, unsurprisingly, "erotic furries" are near the very nadir. (via Reenhead)
An amusing article about the history of band naming (written by a chap from Monash University, too):
After about a decade of "definite article-noun" - a period that produced much of what has become the rock canon - there were signs in the late '60s that the genre was getting stale. We can point to two developments - first, the definite article was becoming increasingly less definite about what it was specifying (The Band, The Groop, The Who); second, it was beginning to specify particularly wacky things (The Velvet Underground, The Electric Prunes). These developments are partly attributable to the interesting interface that existed at the time between English language use and widespread recreational substance use.
2002/1/5
According to a US congressman, CD copy-prevention may be illegal, violating the terms of the Audio Home Recording Act, under which consumers are allowed to make copies for personal use and recording companies collect revenue for blank media.
New Scientist's Last Word column looks at the question of whether animals can recognise their reflections.
It used to be said that electrons have no passports; soon, this may no longer be so, thanks to geolocation technology, which allows Internet users' geographic and political location to be identified. This, and the will to use it (two words: Senator Alston) could mean that tomorrow's Internet will be partitioned across geographical boundaries, with content restricted according to individual nations' censorship laws.
(When it becomes a possibility, if sites not implementing geographical censorship and keeping their what's-allowed rules up to date are found to be liable, it could also serve as a means to get all those pesky small sites off the Net, reserving the medium for gigantic corporations who can afford international censorship lawyers and geolocation.)
An interesting music-review site/webzine: Gravitygirl, written by Melbourne street-press journo Anthony Carew (who also hosts the International Pop Underground show on 3RRR). (Warning: the colour scheme can be a bit hard to read.)
2002/1/4
Was one of the actors in a recently acclaimed Iranian film about oppression in Afghanistan a fugitive assassin, wanted for murdering an Iranian dissident in 1980? US officials insist that he is.
Here are the ten worst corporations of 2001. The usual suspects (Philip Morris, ExxonMobil, Wal-Mart) make an appearance. It seems to be somewhat US-centric though; some of the firms don't operate outside of America, and some noted overseas companies (Nestlé for example) don't appear. (via Follow Me Here)
Does adolescence now extend into the 30s, or is that just something that powerful lobbies want us to think?
Both Hall and Erikson assumed that once you achieved maturity, you left home. Thus the end of adolescence came to mean getting a job, leaving home and having a family, and its endpoint fluctuated not because of any biological changes -- boys and girls still reach physical maturity, on average, at about age 18 -- but for reasons of the economy and social custom.
(Perhaps they need a term for the stage between adolescence, with its biological changes, and "high adulthood" or "mortgaged breederdom" or whatever one calls it.)
Law and order in the Digital Millennium: Swedish police doctored freelance video footage of demonstrations to fake evidence -- and now face copyright infringement claims, for using the amateur correspondents' footage without permission.
An interesting article about David Lynch's Blue Velvet, now considered a modern classic, though decried on its release 15 years ago. Blue Velvet is being rereleased; meanwhile, Lynch's newie, Mulholland Drive will soon appear in cinemas (there was a trailer for it before Lord of the Rings; it looks somewhat like Lost Highway in mood and tone).
2002/1/3
Python 2.2 now has iterators and generators, like some of the more outré functional languages (not to mention Ruby and SuperCollider). Here is a good tutorial.
I just got in the mail the Beggars Banquet Winter Sampler 2001-2002 CD. It has an interesting selection of tracks from forthcoming releases from artists on Beggars-affiliated labels. This CD includes tracks from the likes of Badly Drawn Boy, Tindersticks, Hefner, Tanya Donnelly and Neil Halstead; not to mention the USA 12" of M/A/R/R/S' Pump Up The Volume.
Beggars Banquet is probably one of the more interesting large indie label groups, counting among its components the likes of 4AD, XL, Mantra and Sulfur/Sulphur. One can always count on them to release something worth listening to.
2002/1/2
Spare the rod, spoil the child: Were the West's Taliban soldiers and attempted suicide bombers the products of liberal parenting? Or just, as Tyler Durden put it, the middle children of history?
A SMH piece at The Australian governments' attempt to censor the Internet, and the uniquely Australian wowserism that it stems from:
No-one censors quite like us. The general rule in Australia is that each new communications technology as it comes along - especially cable television and video games - is allowed to operate only on condition that it sticks to material suitable for children.
Essentially, Canberra does not see that the Internet in Australia has much of a future as a forum for adults.
A Wall Street Journal reporter in Afghanistan found a computer used by Al Qaeda leaders, and containing numerous files, ranging from memos on chemical weapons development to complaints about incompetent operatives, from a letter to an opposition leader whom they assassinated to video files of the WTC attack overdubbed with mocking chants and prayers. (via rotten.com)
2002/1/1
Make your own joke here: Boy band Nsync to play Jedi Knights in the second Star Wars prequel; apparently Lucas' daughter is a big fan. Though perhaps having them play ewoks would have been more appropriate.
Some predictions for 2002:
- More misery; more terrorist attacks on the west (attempted, and perhaps some successful), and massive retaliation. The US invades Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Libya or Cuba, with Australia following in lockstep. The UK is divided over whether to join.
- The US tears up more inconvenient international agreements. Emboldened, Australia follows suit. Expatriate Australian leftists start talking about pushing for South African-style sanctions against the rogue south pacific state.
- The Israeli/Palestinian situation festers on, not improving.
- White House spin doctors and US media figures try to tar Osama Bin Laden and the terrorists with the brush of atheism; expect commentary about how Bin Laden is not really religious, and the terrorist attacks are the result of Godless secular materialist ideas, and a lack of faith.
- Linux' desktop marketshare more than doubles, with it having more than 0.5% of the desktop market by the end of 2002.
- The Universal Music Group abandons its CD copy-prevention scheme after the trial turns out to be a resounding failure, with some legitimate consumers unable to play the medium at all and others being able to rip it with no problems. Nonetheless, they do kick up a fuss, threatening the authors of open-source CD ripping software with DMCA lawsuits, and resulting in some web sites being pulled, or at least moved from heavily proprietarian jurisdictions. By the end of 2002, sites for software like grip and CDex may be based in Russia or Ukraine.
- The reach of copyright laws is extended further in the favour of content corporations.
- The Punters Club closes on schedule, only to be replaced with a similarly titled Hard Rock Cafe-style venue, with rock'n'roll memorabilia (some local, some imported) on the walls, chrome tables and zero authenticity, frequented by yuppies and suburbanites. There is a stage, but the only acts that play there are crap commercial bands on promotional tours ("Friday evening: the Punters Club; Saturday afternoon: Knox City Shopping Centre"), much like what the Continental has become.
- A Starbucks opens on Brunswick St.; a McDonalds follows suit, perhaps taking over the PolyEster Books site. The more interesting places move to Thornbury, Coburg and the like, they are replaced with clothes-shop franchises.
How much has the world changed irrevocably after September 11? Not that much, according to this Times article, and most of the things that do change will do so for the better. Or so the author insists:
First and foremost, September 11 and the subsequent rout of the Taleban reminded us that religion should have no place in modern politics or diplomacy. We will all be a lot more suspicious of religious fanatics, not only of Muslims, but also of Jews who quote the Old Testament to justify their occupation of Palestine, and of Christians who claim a God-given right to attack abortion clinics.
In other words, America still lacks a President of real stature. That is another thing that hasn't changed since September 11.
A few links stolen from onepointzero: firstly an insightful essay by a Pakistani professor on how Islam lost its way, falling to extremists some centuries ago and not recovering since. Secondly, French film Amélie is big in Japan, but mostly for the props and decor. The Amélie phenomenon has spawned a subculture, and entire industries of merchandising:
"I love this red colour in her room. It looks comfortable to live there. The furniture and the objects really suit Amelie and the story. I want the same lamp and bed, and the same flat with the bathroom and the nice white mosaic on the wall."
And finally, the story of some New Zealanders who ate some chocolates that arrived in the mail, only to find them laced with ecstasy.
History in the making: I went to the Punters Club tonight, for the last ever NYE to be held there before it gets turned into yuppie apartments and a Starbucks or whatever. I didn't see the first band; the second one was the once-off reformation of a band named Little Ugly Girls, who played some kind of punk/metal thing, with the singer writhing about in a green T-shirt on which was scrawled "PHILIP RUDDOCK NEEDS THERAPY" in what could have been red lipstick. Then at midnight or just before, some dudes calling themselves Legends Of Motorsports came on, attired in monastic robes. They played some vaguely pub-rocky thing. Not usually my cup of tea, but I was too inebriated to care (having had two beers, one which I bought, and one which was handed to me by a girl whose companion didn't want it). Anyway, I ran into some people I knew there (various local musicians), which was good.
Tell you what, I'll miss the Punters...