2002/5/31
A good piece on how CD copy-denial mechanisms work, why they can be easily defeated, and why the "stopping MP3 piracy" argument made for them doesn't make sense, and is a smokescreen for their true purpose: recording companies extending their control to the way customers access their music, with a view to forcing them onto a pay-per-play or rental model. Which would be the holy grail of late-capitalism; driving up profits by giving the customer less and otherwise compelling them to pay more for it, or what K.W. Jeter called the "turd in a can". (via bOING bOING)
Scare meme of the day: How you can build a cruise missile for US$10,000 in your garage, using only off-the-shelf components; and if you can, so can Osama, Saddam, or next week's international supervillain. Though I'd be more worried about the $400 EMP bombs, myself. (via Plastic)
Eric Raymond has written a smug Libertarian critique of Iain Banks and Ken MacLeod, rooted in the fundamental notion of the total bankrupcy of socialism and indeed the undeniable supremacy of the Free Market. No Ayn Rand quotes though. And here's Charles Stross' rebuttal.
(IMHO, the Randian/Propertarian argument of the supremacy of the Free Market is somewhat naïve, for the reasons Charlie describes (markets are good for some things but not all); the recent fashion of defining everything as being, in its basic sense, a market is rather daft. OTOH, I don't think the future belongs to any variant of Marxism (which was, after all, constrained by its 19th-century backgrounds).)
And then there's the "Cowboys vs. Eurotrash" subtext that usually emerges in the whole recurring argument, with predominantly American Libertarians making smug digs at the bankrupcy and impending collapse of Eurosocialism (usually coming down to how the ultimate oracle of the Market has shown that Big Macs and Britney Spears are inherently superior to baguettes and Johnny Hallyday, and any argument to the contrary is just the elitism of sore losers in the global cultural marketplace), and left-leaning Europeans pointing at rampant obesity, firearm deaths and other aspects of the Ugly American stereotype in response.
Oh yes, and this piece on the appeal of depressing music; pretty much hits the nail on the head. (via Cos)
I just found in my SpamCop held email a spam from some outfit claiming to sell a spam blocking system. At the end was the usual "this is not spam, you have opted in" disclaimer; the thing that struck me about this one was that the group claiming to be responsible called themselves the "Coalition for Responsible Internet Marketing". A fine piece of acronymic serendipity there...
A big welcome aboard to Kristin, who has recently taken up this blogging lark. Currently just about books, though maybe if you ask her nicely she might mention swing dancing or Discordianism or something. Meanwhile, Graham has joined the Circle.
Pedro Carolino may be long dead, but his spirit lives on in automatic translation engines. I was searching on Google for information about the PMA-5's chord transposition feature, and found this document, which seems rather informative. Unfortunately for me, it's in Portuguese, but Google's translation engine can translate it to English as She is Spoke.
2002/5/30
A recent survey, taken among Catholics in Italy, has found that devoutly religious people are more likely to suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder than less religious people. It is as yet uncertain whether OCD predisposes people towards extremes of religious devotion, or whether a strict religious upbringing or lifestyle can induce obsessive-compulsive behaviour.
The researchers compared people, such as nuns and priests who worked in the church, with committed lay Catholics and others with virtually no religious involvement. Each subject was asked to document mild OCD symptoms, such as intrusive mental images or worries. The more devout Catholics reported more severe symptoms.
This sounds interesting: Sabbatum, an early-music tribute to Black Sabbath... in Latin, too. (via Found)
A new anti-cloning bill being debated in the US could be used to outlaw abortion, by defining life as beginning from conception. Then again, the two issues seem rather closely related; isn't the entire moral panic about the evils of cloning firmly rooted in a Fetus People fetishisation of the religious significance of the embryo?
As Japan's economy declines and jobs are axed, many young salarymen, unable to cope with the shame of being laid off, are becoming hermits, locking themselves in their rooms and shunning all social contact. Known as hikikomori in Japanese, some remain isolated for years, usually supported by their parents. (via Plastic)
Neo-Dadaist musician/prankster John Trubee gives his account of his opus Peace & Love (better known as the Blind Man's Penis Song). And there's also a MP3 of the anti-music classic on the site. Praise "Bob"!
I picked up Hefner's The Hefner Brain EP today (PolyEster happened to have a copy). It's pretty good, in a geeky sort of way; three songs of squelchy synth-driven electro-pop (including a mix of the excellent When The Angels Play Their Drum Machines, which 3RRR had been playing quite a bit), a tongue-in-cheek country number and a touchingly sincere, if perhaps slightly too sentimental, love song.
Oh yes, and Jeremy Dower's Music For Retirement Villages circa 2050 sounds a bit like Múm.
Could lowercase sound be the new quiet-is-the-new-loud?
Recent compositions include a bubbling symphony of boiling tea kettles, the gentle hiss of blank tapes being played through a stereo and the soft bumps of helium balloons hitting the ceiling. One recent album was so quiet, listeners wondered whether it actually contained any sound at all.
2002/5/29
Religious merger creates 900 million Hinjews. However, not all has gone to plan; instead of forming a super-religion to fight off the common Islamic enemy, they have instead created a race of 900 million people who, no matter how many times they are reincarnated, can never please their mothers. (via Reenhead)
The Tinseltown Club, a pretty cute Flash animation from the EFF taking the Mickey out of Disney and Hollywood's recent push to take away our digital rights. (via bOING bOING)
Dance music culture is a funny thing. In most places "garage" music is just another originally gay dance/club music genre, and is harmless in a fluffy, camp, pill-popping sort of way; in Britain, however, it's the home-grown equivalent of gangsta rap, with guns, bling-bling and hardcore attitude. British garageheads, it seems, are more likely to pop caps than Es, or so the press suggests.
Did the FBI deliberately suppress information that could have disrupted the 9/11 terrorist attacks? A new memo suggests that this was the case. This is starting to look more and more like Bush's Reichstag.
2002/5/28
A study by German geneticists supports the controversial theory that human intelligence is the product of sexual selection, or evolved primarily as a courtship device (much as the peacock's tail). Furthermore, the study argues that women are responsible for the evolution of intelligence by selecting intelligent mates (though some might well argue that they are responsible for stupidity by selecting dumb, brawny meatheads over the scrawny, brainy geek types).
Aren't you glad we live in a liberal democracy? The director of Australia's Office of Film and Literature Classification has revealed that there were no more than two complaints from filmgoers about the banned French film Baise-Moi, confirming that the unprecedented retroactive ban was a result of political pressure from busybodies in government and government-favoured lobby groups.
Isn't it about time someone sued the Liberal Party for misrepresentation and false advertising, because of their name. A party which stands for legislatively imposing a narrow set of moral values on everybody should not call itself "liberal".
A 12-year-old boy in Russia has hired hitmen to kill his parents because he disliked having to tidy his room, brush his teeth and do his homework. Seems like they do things a bit differently over there. (via rotten.com)
This coming Saturday at Pony looks like being another great electro-pop night, with quite an impressive lineup. New Buffalo, Letraset and Laura McFarlane of Ninetynine are all playing on the night.
The US military has developed what could be the ultimate Viridian weapon: fuel-eating bacteria, which devour oil and petroleum supplies, leaving humans unharmed. And to further realise the dream of a kinder, gentler, fluffier form of warfare, they're also experimenting with bombing enemy troops with Valium. Come to think of it, why not just bomb them with MDMA, and make everybody feel all loved-up and not at all in the mood for fighting?
2002/5/27
Tonight I went down to the Empress Hotel, to see Letraset, Sister Cities and Jeremy Dower. It was quite a good night, in an electro-pop/ambient sort of way (and connected, promisingly enough, to the Chapter Music label). When I got there, the room was quite full, with people sitting on the floor. Letraset were doing their set with a bunch of modular synths, a Casio keyboard (run through one of them), an old Yamaha organ (also seen in Minimum Chips sets) and a trombone, and played much the same sort of music as on their Snowy Room CD.
Next up were Sister Cities, who were very good. They started with some ambient noodling on an iBook (apparently mostly applying effects/mixing in ProTools), and then went on to play some quite pretty pop with toy keyboards, jangly guitar chords and ba-ba-ba vocals. Apparently they're recording now, and I look forward to their CD when it does come out.
Finally, Jeremy Dower went on, playing some synths and a mixing deck, launching his CD "Music For Retirement Villages circa 2050". It was much as the title sounded like; glitchy easy-listening ambience with fragments of recorded birdsong and the occasional slightly familiar-sounding riff. Needless to say, I picked up the CD.
It's interesting to see the convergence of electronica and garage/indie pop, with computer music software and cheap synths lowering the entry barrier, and electronics having lost the stigma of MOR overproduction that led the yoof into the arms of three-chord grunge. It's about time someone took electronic music away from the twin realms of pill-popping, mindlessly muscular dance music and more-obtuse-than-thou experimentalism, defetishised it and reclaimed it as an equally organic approach to making music. Not that that's a new idea, mind you.
2002/5/26
I'm starting to realise that The Particles' Apricot's Dream is pretty much the epitome of the perfect 2 1/2-minute pop song. In its sparse, understated form, there's nothing that can be added to (or taken away from) it that could improve it.
And this was a song recorded by a Sydney indie band in 1979, which would have remained unknown to me were it not on the Can't Stop It! compilation. Perfection hides in the most obscure of places.
"We have control of the mind." While research into human cloning and anything to do with embryos is watched with suspicion, and laws are debated to ban it, neuroscience is slipping under the radar, when in fact, such research without scrutiny might pose more of a threat to humanity than cloning, resulting in technologies such as electronic brain control. Computer God Frankenstein Controls may soon be a reality.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, those fierce defenders of liberties in the online world, have just made it easier to be heard: they have opened the EFF Action Center, a one-stop web site where you can check out the issues and send mail to relevant parties telling them why you think something is wrong (or right).
Want a Hello Kitty laptop, but can't find one? Here's how you can make your own. (via Reenhead)
After destroying KaZaA, the RIAA has marked AudioGalaxy for death. The AudioGalaxy file sharing service attempts to filter copyrighted songs, but that won't save them, as the RIAA's modus operandi is to throw lawsuits at the target, Scientology-style, until they run out of money and die (or are bought out by a RIAA member and emasculated). In short, AudioGalaxy is, for all intents and purposes, on death row. If you've got some out-of-print rarities you want, you'd better snarf them now.
2002/5/25
Score! I just picked up a Roland PMA-5 at the Northcote Smack Converters. (That's the device which looks like an extremely chunky PDA and contains a GS sound module and sequencer.) Now to find a manual for it...
Hollywood's next power grab over your computer and digital rights: requiring watermark detectors in all analogue-digital converters; i.e., a gatekeeping mechanism ensuring that the digital domain is securely locked down. Needless to say, if they get this through (and they stand a good chance of doing so), it could mean the end of actually useful general-purpose computers and technologies which can be creatively adapted to new purposes. (They can't have that, you see, in case someone adapts them to a purpose that violates their (new, expanded) copyrights, or otherwise puts them out of pocket.)
Which could be disastrous. The technology of steam power was discovered in ancient Greece, but not developed because it didn't fit with the mores of the time, and remained unknown until the Industrial Revolution. Several hundred years ago, the Chinese came close to sailing to Europe and the New World. They had the technology, but turned back by Imperial decree. And now our corporate emperors want to kill off innovation to protect the valuable conditions of scarcity on which their power and wealth are founded.
In short, such a régime has the potential to impede technological development by decades if not centuries. (And the consequences will be felt all over Earth, especially if backed up with US military power, which is backed up with US economic power, which depends on "global stability". If the New Zealanders or Indonesians or someone develop an unencumbered bit-shuffling device industry, watch the high-energy particle beams from Fort Kissinger, high earth orbit, vapourise the offending facilities as if they were Iraqi penicillin factories.)
</RANT>
2002/5/24
Today I went to a talk on a rather interesting piece of software named Circle. This is a new, experimental peer-to-peer communication system with no central servers or points of control whatsoever, organised along the lines of a distributed hashtable. It was designed by a PhD student at Monash University (where the (centralised) Goofey messaging system originated a decade earlier). The Circle client, which is written in Python, includes instant messaging, a decentralised news service based on trust metrics and file sharing/searching using the distributed hash table; it seems pretty interesting.
Maybe Vivendi Universal aren't entirely evil. They're now offering a song for sale in unprotected MP3 format. No proprietary DRM schemes, spyware-enhanced ad-showing players or Microsoft dependencies. (Sort of like what atomicpop.com did with the 4AD back-catalogue some years ago.)
I suspect this may be part of a power struggle within Vivendi, between the copyright hardliners (i.e., Bronfman's Universal Music Group, who have been pushing copy-restricted pseudo-CDs) and moderates in the new media division (i.e., mp3.com, emusic.com). If this succeeds, the absolutists' position may be weakened, and we may see copy-restricted CDs shelved or even unencumbered MP3 downloads become a regular feature. Whereas if this fails, the hardliners will just say "I told you so", and redouble their zeal.
I don't know much about Meshell N'degeocello (though with EBTG's Ben Watt doing the remix, it could be good), but I'm tempted to buy the MP3 anyway. Though it happens to be for US residents only at the moment. (via Slashdot)
Seen on St Kilda tram, 9:43pm:
- A ponytailed guy carrying an acoustic guitar with a purple "MAGIC HAPPENS" sticker on it. Mercifully, though, he didn't start playing (unlike the other ponytailed geezer with a guitar who kept following me a few years ago.
- Various deranged-looking people in paper hats and such; a tanned woman in a pink fluoro pullover, camouflage top, woolen cap and plastic jewellery kept walking up and down the tram, carrying an opened bottle of beer and a large plastic bag full of papers, and talking to various people. A male companion of hers wore a blue windcheater and a Burger King cardboard hat over unkempt hair.
Later I saw the same woman walking down Fitzroy St., though she looked more fashionable than deranged. Sometimes it's hard to tell the trendies from the crazies.
The Issues that Matter: The Vatican, the world's oldest multinational corporation, has issued a media statement criticising celebrities for wearing jeweled crucifixes. Then again, mentioning celebrities by name is good for publicity, and right now, any publicity not connected to child sex scandals is good news for them.
Could this be the future of advertising? An ad agency in the US has started giving signs to the homeless. The signs are branded with the ad agency's identity and carry slogans such as "At Least I'm Not Spamming Your E-Mail" and "The Market Sucks/ But I Offer a High Return On Your Investments: Good Karma."
2002/5/23
Research at New York University claim that semen is an antidepressant absorbed through the skin, and that women who engage in unprotected sex are consequently less likely to suffer from depression. I can see this giving rise to a million dodgy pick-up lines already... (via rotten.com)
There goes another one: Multinational recording company EMI buys up Mute, the more-credible-than-most independent label and home to the likes of Depeche Mode, Nick Cave and Einstürzende Neubauten. Mind you, they're also behind the last two Moby albums, so their glory days were probably behind them. Mute, which was founded by Daniel "The Normal" Miller in the glory days of punk and New Wave, now becomes an imprint of Virgin (another once credible label and current home of the Spice Girls and Robbie Williams).
Quelle surprise: FBI gets more powers to hunt terrorists, uses them on home-grown dissidents and miscellaneous people on the wrong side of the Culture Wars. It's like the Hoover era all over again:
"If it's your job to hunt Islamic fundamentalist terrorists," said Rafael, "Then it's your job to know that they don't hang out with Jewish lesbians in San Francisco."
(via the Horn)
Egads; for some reason, people keep lending me Casio keyboards. Not that I'm complaining, mind you...
A package from Twee Kitten arrived today; in it were two Northern Picture Library CDs today (their album Alaska and the Still Life compilation of EP tracks). They're very good, containing lots of lush, layered, skilfully crafted tracks, ranging from pop to ambient soundscapes to electronica. There's a real sense of progression there from the fey pop of the Field Mice, and an increased sophistication and maturity. (As opposed to the later Trembling Blue Stars material, which is mostly boring and weak.) Also, Annemari's voice really shines in this material, more so than in the earlier material. (Hmmm; I may well have to revise my list of favourite female vocalists.)
I also got a copy of Fosca's On Earth To Make The Numbers Up, but am not as yet overly impressed. It's mostly 80s-retro synthpop production (with extra cheese!) and too-clever-by-half, vaguely self-deprecating lyrics; a bit like Baxendale, only somewhat flatter and less varied, and it starts to grate after a while. Maybe if they made their chord progressions and sequences a bit more varied, or just made their songs shorter...
2002/5/22
In today's Onion: Pope forgives molested children for their misdeeds:
"The pope has shown great love and compassion, much as Jesus did when he ministered to tax collectors and whores," said Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston. "Despite all they have done to jeopardize the careers of so many priests--to say nothing of imperiling the priests' immortal souls--the church embraces these underaged seducers and tempters with open arms. The pope's words and actions prove that the church is willing to put an end to the suffering and let the healing begin."
also, Handlers Desperate To Prevent Tara Reid Political Awakening:
"There was a lot of concern when she was cast in Dr. T And The Women ," Braterman said. "[Director Robert] Altman is known for his subversive, countercultural views, and [co-star] Richard Gere is a passionate advocate for Tibetan independence. It was a dangerous situation to put her in, but by keeping Tara's trailer far away from Richard's and by frequently pulling her off the set for premieres, press junkets, and racy pictorials for Stuff magazine and Maxim, we managed to shield her from any potential indoctrination."
"It is just so unfair," Pressly said. "Because of her control-freak handlers, Tara will never learn of the joys and rewards of political awareness. Since my own awakening last year, I feel so much more full of knowledge and awareness, and I think celebrities should use their fame to educate the public about important issues. Like, for example, did you know that women in Pakistine have to be buried alive with their dead husbands, whether they want to or not? That is so wrong."
A former waitress at a Torquay hotel talks about the real Basil Fawlty, a chap by the name of Donald Sinclair:
"He went up and down the tables like a policeman, questioning the guests. He came across a set of teapots at a table for two. He realised because of their size they were meant for a table for four, and he asked the guests for a description of the waiter.
This happened when John Cleese and his wife Connie Booth were staying at the hotel, and the rest is history. Mrs. Sinclair, however, is none too happy with how things happened.
Pitchfork Media eviscerates the new Moby album. Apparently it's a load of formulaic tosh, calculated to inoffensively pander to the widest possible demographic. Not only that, but Moby's one redeeming feature -- his earnestly idealism, as expressed in his ranting liner notes -- has been similarly homogenised:
Before Play, Moby had earned a reputation for the well-crafted, often persuasive essays he included with each album. He damned cultural conservatism, cigarettes, celebrity and fundamentalism, while promoting an agenda of conservation, vegetarianism, and animal and prisoner rights. 18 has merely two essays: one about the difficulty of writing essays and the process of creating the album at hand, the other politely suggesting that everybody be nice to each other. Can someone please explain to me why, in a time when Moby's voice is louder than ever, and when cultural conservatism and fundamentalist dogma aims to destroy what few freedoms we as a nation have left, Moby would choose to back down?
Somehow I don't think I'll be giving it a listen anytime soon. (via VM)
Biotech companies use algorithmic music composition tools to convert DNA to music; not for artistic reasons, but to take advantage of the virtually perpetual terms of music copyrights (95 years, but extended by law every decade or so), as opposed to 17-year patents. Sounds like post-cyberpunk fiction, doesn't it?
(There we have it: the very concept of "art" is now a weapon of copyright fascism. It doesn't bode well for when the pendulum swings back.) (via bOING bOING)
2002/5/21
April is the cruelest month: Staying in the morbid vein for a while, statistics have shown that spring is the peak season for suicides. Apparently the popular notion about the Xmas-New Year period being peak suicide season is just an urban legend. (via Plastic)
The latest fashion among teenaged girls in Britain: self-mutilation as a fashion statement or assertion of identity.
Margot Waddell of the Tavistock Clinic, author of Inside Lives, a book about adolescence, says there are 'cutting schools' and 'anorexia schools', so strong is the tendency to mimic behaviour. And Sue Sherwin-White, a therapist who has studied the phenomenon, agrees: 'In some schools, it is fashionable, exciting and even rather competitive - and it has the added advantage of scaring teachers and parents.' What starts as an experiment can become a perverse gratification that is hard to give up.
Wonder whether there will be pro-self-mutilation websites in the way that there are pro-anorexia web sites (and Trent Reznor fan pages and such don't count).
'Adolescents,' says Wilson, 'do things that disturb us, by definition. There's something morbid about adolescents. Look at the imagery of the pop music they listen to. They are drawn to death. It's not surprising that the second most common cause of death in this age group is suicide.'
Do you suspect that your neighbour may be a terrorist? Take this test and find out if your suspicions are true. (via Charlie's Diary)
Take a stroll down your street. Which houses are missing the appropriate decorations for the time of year? Which are missing a well-decorated Christmas tree and lights? Which do not have Fourth of July decorations? Which are missing an American flag? (this is an obvious sign of a terrorist's house.)
(How to determine if your co-worker/neighbour/spouse/brother may be a terrorist (Australian version): ask them which football team they barrack for. If they answer, ask them to name the team captain and several players. If they are unable to provide answers, they may be a terrorist sleeper agent.)
Famous paleontologist and evolutionary scientist Stephen Jay Gould has passed away. He was best known for his theory of punctuated equilibria (which, some say, paralleled his youthful Marxist beliefs in the impossibility of reform and the necessity for sudden revolution for change, though you won't see CNN mention that for some reason). He was also a key critic of Dawkins' "selfish gene" theory. (via VM)
There was a rather odd film on at Splodge tonight: The Bed Sitting Room. Directed by Richard Lester (of Hard Day's Night fame) and starring various members of the Goon Show, it was set in Britain after a nuclear holocaust. in landscapes of rubble (some of the locations included a still-running London Underground, a mountain made entirely of crockery and various ramshackle buildings made of rubbish), and full of oddball characters, dressed in rags and yet carrying on with their lives in a peculiarly English way. Oh, and some of them started turning into houses and furniture. The design was pretty doovy, in an improvised way (especially things like the police balloon). It could probably be described as being somewhere between Eraserhead, Delicatessen and Monty Python, with perhaps a touch of absurdist theatre.
The US Department of Justice has sent a warning to Europe's antitrust authorities: "leave Microsoft alone".
Oh dear: Gwyneth Paltrow to play Sylvia Plath. Oh well, at least they didn't get Nicole Kidman or someone for the part.
2002/5/20
2002/5/19
Here come the Brave Ones again? As East Timor approaches the finalisation of its status as an independent state, swearing in its first popularly-elected president, six Indonesian warships have entered East Timorese waters and refused requests to leave. Is it merely simple intimidation from the Indonesian military, or the vanguard of a new invasion?
Here comes the next big pharmaceutical thing: Melanotan, a.k.a. the "Barbie pill", a drug which promotes skin tanning and weight loss whilst enhancing sex drive.
Yesterday's drugs were about need; today's are about desire. The unlocked human genome opens even our innermost passions to scrutiny and tinkering, blazing the way to an entirely new class of pharmaceutical. A more conservative, more religious culture than ours might want "doubt blockers" or "gnostogenics" to empower their spiritual side. But for better or worse, Americans who pay for quick-fix drugs will want beauty, happiness, and the illusion of wealth.
The future will belong to the tanned, slim, buff and oversexed; the Shiny Happy People will inherit the earth.
Is consciousness (or, precisely, the integration of dispersed neurological phenomena into a central awareness) the product of the brain's electromagnetic field? Two researchers put forward an interesting argument for why this may be the case.
Anyone learning to drive a car will have experienced how the first (very conscious) fumblings are transformed through constant practice into automatic actions. The neural networks driving those first uncertain fumblings are precisely where we would expect to find nerves in the undecided state when a small nudge from the brain's em field can topple them towards or away from firing. The field will "fine tune" the neural pathway towards the desired goal. But neurons are connected so that when they fire together, they wire together, to form stronger connections. After practice, the influence of the field will become dispensable. The activity will be learnt and may thereafter be performed unconsciously.
(via blogdex)
Inquiry of the day: Why is it that you sometimes hear men talking about their feminine sides, but never hear women talking about their masculine sides?
Looks like Napster will live on (as a brand-name of media giant Bertelsmann, and possibly as some kind of pay-per-play music rental service). And, it goes without saying, it will undoubtedly suck, whatever form it takes.
Looks like Curve have a new album out, The Adventures of Curve, and this time they're self-publishing and self-distributing, after the recording company dropped the ball with their last release. That's what to get when you sign to a major label and you're not Limp Bizkit or Puddle of Mudd or some other fashionable yoof-metal outfit, I suppose.
Meanwhile, further down on the page, it appears that the new CD from Californian swirlygoth-turned-drum'n'bass outfit Love Spirals (formerly Downward) is out, and the description sounds somewhat interesting. I may have to give it a spin next time I'm near Heartland. (via Cos)
2002/5/18
This was good enough to plagiarise in its entirety: Charlie Stross on copyright fascism:
- The key feature of the political system known as Fascism is that the State is more important than the individual -- your body does not belong to you, it belongs to the State.
- The key feature of the ideological system known as Copyright Fascism is that the Rights holder is more important than the consumer -- your experiences don't belong to you, they belong to the Distributor.
You can identify copyright fascists because they're the guys who say things like "skipping advertising breaks on TV is theft", and apply emotive words like "piracy" (armed robbery and murder on the high seas) to having an unauthorised copy of a piece of software (shoplifting).
There's an agenda at work here, folks. Learn to recognize it.
(NB:I'd use the term "creator" instead of Distributor, except that there are precious few musicians, programmers, authors or editors who'd take such an extremist position. As usual, the ones who are least creative are the ones who are most anxious to defend totalitarianism.)
(link)
Presiding over a memorial service commemorating the victims of the attack on the Death Star, the Emperor declared that while recent victories over the Rebel Alliance were "encouraging, the War on Terror is not over yet."
"We will continue to fight these terrorists, and the rogue governments who harbor them, until the universe is safe, once and for all, and the security of the Neo-New Cosmik Order ensured."
And then there's this analysis of Star Wars, in which the Empire is good (if somewhat heavy-handed in places, though never without justification) and the Rebels are "an unimpressive crew of anarchic royals who wreck the galaxy so that Princess Leia can have her tiara back".
Make no mistake, as emperor, Palpatine is a dictator--but a relatively benign one, like Pinochet. It's a dictatorship people can do business with. They collect taxes and patrol the skies. They try to stop organized crime (in the form of the smuggling rings run by the Hutts). The Empire has virtually no effect on the daily life of the average, law-abiding citizen.
I wonder whether such an article would have been written before September 11 2001. Or whether the problematically Al-Qaeda-like nature of the Rebel Alliance will bite into the Star Wars franchise's profitability. (via bOING bOING)
The Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory Diagram showing how everything's connected. But who's this Toni Blair bird? (via Charlie's Diary)
Interesting: DNA explained in computer science terms, with analogies to everything from program comments to makefiles. (via bOING bOING)
Actor Garry McDonald's eulogy for Ruth Cracknell, the veteran actress who recently passed away (and whose middle-aged son he played in a long-running comedy). She had dignity and grace, right to the end.
2002/5/17
Research has shown that six-month-olds are better at recognising individual monkeys than adults. Proof that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, and that children are more like monkeys than adults, or just that specialisation for human face recognition develops later?
A piece on how to work a room, successfully schmoozing for well-connected contacts. Whether or not you find the advice useful, you have to admit, the isometric illustrations are très cute. (via Reenhead)
There's a new Chaser online; among the stories: Psychiatric patient successfully reintegrated into homeless community, World awaits 'Iraq Wars II: Attack of the Clone', and the somewhat off-colour Images of baby Christ arouse US bishops.
2002/5/16
An interesting article by an American Jew in Germany, about cultural identity, history, bootywhang and wacky Germans in films (including The Big Lebowski, Graham). (via Reenhead)
Canada's legislators debate decriminalising or legalising marijuana; in response, U.S. Government threatens to impose trade sanctions, which would devastate the export-oriented Canadian economy, unless Canada toes the line.
"To antagonize government leaders and grass roots leader because you insist on having a radical drug policy that we will not ignore in the long term, then its going to have adverse consequences and I hope we would be able to rectify it before it comes to blows," explains Maginnis.
(via Plastic)
Love in the Time of Marketing: The inimitable Polly Esther (who, it appears, has a blog of sorts) sets her sights on the phenomenon of online dating, and the streamlining of the sexual marketplace into the age of brands. And then there are gems of cynical insight such as:
Strange how easy and familiar this process is to us; but then, most relationships are at least 30 percent imagination. Without a fantasy-driven notion of themselves as a pair, most couples' relationships would collapse under the weight of years of compromise and self-sacrifice.
(via Plastic)
Clearing things up: George Lucas has stated that Jedi knights are not celibate, and may have active sex lives. Note that this only applies to the Jedi knights in the films, and not the self-styled variety you see on the net.
Factoid of the day: Japanese has a word for the concept of slack. The word is "yutori" - to take it easy. It means having room or a surplus of something, be it time or money. (ta, Toby)
Americans Cannot By Definition Be War Criminals: Recently several nations (with the exception of the US and lackey states like Australia) voted to establish a permanent International Criminal Court to try war crimes. In response, a US congressional committee has voted to authorise the use of force to rescue US servicemen held on war crimes charges in that new Baghdad, The Hague. (And while the US troops are there they can put those recalcitrant Dutch into line with the War On Drugs too.) (via Reenhead)
2002/5/15
French videogame giant Infogrames (who now own the Atari name) and some other outfit plan to relaunch the Atari 2600. Only it will fit in a joystick, plug directly into a TV, and contain 10 classic Atari 2600 games. No news on whether it'll be emulated or whether they'll actually reconstruct the Atari's crippled 6502-based architecture in hardware. (via Slashdot)
How do we know we're not in the future? Because we don't have flying cars, or jet packs or food pills, or indeed submissive housewives. (via Found)
Too many hits from the bucket bong? An 18-year-old in Brisbane has appeared in court and been fined $300 for borrowing his housemate's credit card and going on a spending spree, buying among other things a mail-order penis enlarger and hotel accommodation on the Gold Coast. I'll bet he feels like a right idiot now.
Our Furry Masters: A psychology researcher at Cornell University has found that domestic cats' meows have evolved to hook into human perception, and better communicate with (or manipulate) humans, over the millennia of domestication. Recordings of the calls of wild desert cats (believed to be closely related to domestic cats' wild ancestors) were found by test subjects to be harsher and less pleasant-sounding than those of domestic cats.
"I think cats have evolved to become better at managing and manipulating people."
(via Techdirt)
Napster is dead. As in "dead" dead, not just "terminally lame" dead; the CEO has stepped down and remaining employees were offered severance pay. Probably just as well; this way the Napster name remains synonymous with a short-lived, quixotic temporary autonomous zone on the Net, rather than becoming a brand of corporate pay-per-play services.
2002/5/14
According to the 4AD newsletter, the new Piano Magic album, Writers Without Homes, is coming out on 10 June. Given how good their last one (Artists' Rifles) was, it should be something to look forward to.
New research shows that virtually all Europeans are descended from Charlemagne, not to mention Muhammad, Confucius and pretty much every prolific historical figure. Don't believe it? Do the math... (via TechDirt)
Felt-tip pens and Post-It(tm) notes as copy-prevention circumvention devices. (void where prohibited by law) (via Slashdot)
My poor long-suffering credit card:
It seems that the Northern Picture Library stuff is
still in print; as such, I've just ordered their two CDs from a US outfit
named Twee Kitten (mostly because it's
cheaper than buying from the UK), along with an album by an act named
Fosca, whom I've heard interesting
things about.
(The graphic is from the Twee Kitten ordering page. What is it about indie types and naïve drawings of children?)
2002/5/13
The laughing stock of the cultural world: After Howard's morality police banned Baise-Moi, various agencies, from Melbourne's Lumiere cinema and the film's distributor to the premier of New South Wales, have announced their intention to challenge the ban. However, as the ban was the result of a final appeal, there is believed to be no legal means for overturning it, unless they decide to take it to the High Court or something like that, so it's exceedingly unlikely that the film will be legally seen in Australia for the next few decades; or until its anachronisms and quaintly two-dimensional format makes it a harmless curiosity piece.
Amusing site of the day: We Made Out in a Tree and This Old Guy Sat and Watched Us, a compedium of odd found words from many places. (via Charlie's Diary)
I spent part of today listening to some Northern Picture Library MP3s I found on AudioGalaxy. I must say they were good; somewhat more sparse and experimental in places than the Field Mice's output, and going to some interesting places (from the ambient trance of The Way That Stars Die to Love Song For The Dead Che, an excursion into Dubstar/Single Gun Theory territory, to the various exercises in Humblebee-style noise), along with some very nice soundscapes (Catholic Easter Colours comes to mind). There's a real sense of evolution there; it's interesting to imagine what may have happened had the crash not put paid to it.
But of course, it didn't go on like that. She left him and he put out four (and counting) Prozac-bland albums about it, never again approaching the aesthetic level or heartfelt sincerity of earlier projects.
I wonder whether any of the Northern Picture Library material is still, by any chance, in print...
2002/5/12
Two Python bits: Deadly Bloody Serious about Python, a new Python-related blog. (via gimbo) And Bridgekeeper, a program for translating Perl code to (variously odd-looking) Python code. (via NtK)
Speaking of bootywhang-obsessed French musicians, Serge Gainsbourg cops a bucketing from Tanya Headon, who sums him up as "the Benny Hill of pop". Touché.
Protecting Our Values: After pressure from the paternalist Liberal Government, Australia's film censors have banned Baise-Moi, overturning the R rating previously granted. More than 50,000 people have seen the film while it was legal; the ban is believed to be the work of a board stacked with religious conservatives and political appointees, and advice is being taken on how to challenge it.
(Wonder what they'll do next; how about bringing back the ban on the importation of electric guitars, just like in the hallowed Menzies Era, in case this rock'n'roll thing corrupts the morals of our youth.)
I saw Baise-Moi last week. I'm still not sure whether it's a work raising serious questions or an adolescent tantrum of sensationalist violence (more likely, it's somewhere in between; the question is whether the crux of its difference from all the by-the-numbers post-Tarantino films is in its message or in the fact that they have actual sex in it). I don't think it should be banned though.
2002/5/11
A mysterious face found in an Aphex Twin song; yes, in the actual song (the frequency spectrum, to be exact). Demonic influence? Not quite...
2002/5/10
A NYTimes article on the bootleg remix subculture, mentioning the KLF, Negativland, Plunderphonics, the sampling aesthetic of hip-hop culture and the scene's obsessions with Eminem and Missy Elliott.
From the ancient world to Enron, one thing is clear: destroying information is harder than you think.
A letter from Jane Welsh Carlyle concludes, "Pray read all this unto yourself and burn the letter." A scholar has added this gloss: "Such an injunction is one of the surest methods of guaranteeing that a letter will not be burned."
Fragments of the works of Sappho have come down to us because someone in antiquity, wanting to get rid of papyrus copies of Sappho's poetry, threw them into the trash in the Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus, where archaeologists found them. Certain works by Archimedes have survived only because his words were scraped off by medieval scribes; the scribes re-used the parchment for a sacred book, whose sanctity ensured its survival into an age when a different kind of eyes could tease out the underlying original. The mosaics of Hagia Sofia, in Istanbul, were inadvertently spared degradation when the Ottoman Turks covered them with plaster. The early Christian writer Irenaeus spent a lifetime denouncing heretical books; many of the books were lost (burned), and yet the ideas survived through extensive quotation in his own fiery writing.
The ultimate weapon against ideas is indifference, not opposition; with "repressive tolerance", or the capacity of a laissez-faire society to bury ideas by not reacting to them. (via Techdirt)
Time Cube "Truth" is HOAX!!!! Time Pyramid is the true Nature of the 3-Dimensional Universe of Reality. (via Psychoceramics)
Protecting Our Children: Alarmed that perverts may be getting off on pictures of children which are not technically pornographic, a US congressman has introduced a bill banning all pictures of children not used to sell a product.
The text of CMEPA says that anyone who "displays" or "offers" to sell the image of a minor under 17 years old -- "without a purpose of marketing a product or service other than an image of a child" -- would be fined and imprisoned for up to 10 years.
Of course, if creeps and deviants start paying a lot of attention to ads featuring children, and hopefully buying lots of products, that Helps The Economy, and is thus a Greater Good.
2002/5/9
Some nutter has been placing pipe bombs in mailboxes in the US midwest, along with letters about why death is an illusion perpetuated by the government to instill obedience. Now it turns out that the bomber may be the frontman of a grunge band named Apathy. Perhaps it's a case of terrorism being the last true form of performance art, to paraphrase Laurie Anderson.
The Ninetynine show tonight rocked.
They played mostly new material.
Their first song was in three parts, with an instrument swap in the middle of the song. Kind of like Stereolab, only without the pretentiousness.
Other new pieces showed a more layered, textured sound, though with no lack of punk-rock energy. (During one of Cameron's intense, violin-based pieces,
I was reminded of Fourplay's Gypsy Scream.)
And they successfully managed to make Casiotone keyboards sound unironic, which
is quite a feat.
It looks like the next Ninetynine album (hopefully out before they set off for
their tour in October) is set to be quite doovy.
Oh, and Preston School of Industry weren't bad either. They played a tight wall-of-noise rock/pop, with driving basslines and jangling guitars, and the odd My Bloody Valentine moment or two. Since this was at the Tote, Collingwood's premier hardcore/metal venue, someone in the audience kept calling out "PLAY SOME SLAYER" and such.
2002/5/8
It's the little things... I was in the RMIT Bookshop today, looking for some work-related titles, and noticed that Lush's Split was playing. That made me smile.
Ooh, Moby has a new album out. He's on the cover of today's issue of InPress, posing in a spacesuit, captioned with "I am a space alien". No you're not; you're a boring geezer who makes bland pinkboy techno.
(I did buy a copy of Play when it came out, though it was one of the CDs liquidated in my most recent CD recycling sweep, and is now probably in a secondhand CD shop. I listened to it about twice.)
Extreme marketing in the new millennium: Here come the banner ads which install spyware, disable firewall software; the rogue pop-up ad in question uses a Shockwave applet and an Internet Explorer bug to surreptitiously download and install the software onto the user's PC. Needless to say, it only affects the 99.999% of users who use Windows; Maccies and Penguinheads can look smug.
Splendid reviews the most recent retrospective EP by Ninetynine (who, I think it can now be announced, are supporting Preston School of Industry at the Tote tonight; Shhh! it's a secret...)
2002/5/7
The Axis of Evil grows: Cuba, Libya and Syria are now officially Evil, according to our leaders.
Only in America: A petition to rename "The Two Towers" to something less offensive.
Those of us who have seen The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring know what an amazing director Peter Jackson is. When I learned that there apparently was to be a sequel, I was overjoyed. However, Peter Jackson has decided to tastelessly name the sequel "The Two Towers". The title is clearly meant to refer to the attacks on the World Trade Center. In this post-September 11 world, it is unforgiveable that this should be allowed to happen. The idea is both offensive and morally repugnant. Hopefully, when Peter Jackson and, more importantly, New Line Cinema see the number of signatures on this petition, the title will be changed to something a little more sensitive.
(via Anton Sherwood's blog)
In Defense of Scarcity: The printer industry has taken a cue from the copyright industry, and started embedding features in their cartridges whose only purpose is to prevent third-party refilling. Some cartridges now contain chips which authenticate the cartridge to the printer and invalidate it, or shut down the printer, if an attempt is made to refill it. And under proposed US laws, the chips may be "authentication features", whose circumvention carries criminal penalties.
Looks like Australia is getting its own "anti-terrorist" legislation, giving sweeping powers to intelligence agencies and the authorities, including the power to jail people for possession of any artifact used in terrorism. The legislation will also be useful against dissident groups (such as anti-detention-centre protesters). If you want to do something about it, see this page and contact your local ALP senator. Hopefully Labor will have been sufficiently stung at the polls to not unquestioningly parrot the dogma of "national security" in the hope of not being "unpatriotic".
Remember WIRED Magazine; that MONDO 2000 for the masses? Well, they've now got an issue on the future of music, in which they got various musicians to talk about how they work with technology. Malcolm McLaren comes across as pretentious, Jean-Benoit Dunckel (of Air fame) seems obsessed with bootywhang, while Björk sounds, well, Björkish.
2002/5/6
Simon Reynolds on 80s revivalism:
This last microtrend -- effectively a re-revival -- highlights one of the ironies of the 80's resurgence, for the 80's were the first era in pop in which recycling and retrospection became rife. There were vogues for ska, rockabilly, psychedelia and other musical antecedents. "With 1980's retro, we have reached the point of second-order recycling," said Andrew Ross, a cultural critic who is the director of the American studies program at New York University. "It's the equivalent, God forbid, of double quotation marks."
Modern digital technology is so sophisticated that producers make electronic music that sounds almost as if it were played by a live band, full of subtle rhythmic irregularities that create a humanlike feel and jazzy swing. But just as punk rockers embraced a raw, elemental music, rejecting the overproduced sound of 70's rock, today's electro groups use old-fashioned synthesizers and drum machines. They prefer cold tones and stiff beats because they evoke a period when electronic music seemed alien and forbiddingly novel. They are making machine-music and proud of it.
For many clubgoers, the 80's were a time when rock and dance music were in lively conversation with each other. Club music then was full of punky attitude and personality, a stark contrast to the functional music and faceless D.J.'s who dominate today's post-rave dance culture.
(There we have it; New Wave's Big Comeback.) (ta, Toby!)
Crikey gives May Day protesters a bucketing.
In Sydney, protesters attacked police horses, throwing marbles and firecrackers. Funny. OK, so the horses were asking for it by working for the pigs, man - as the SMH reports, one protester shouted "Police are abusing horses!" - but these people are probably vegans, too. Don't vegans like horses? They also staged a protest against the only country in the Middle East that can be called a democracy. Stick that in your bong and smoke it.
(via The Fix)
The Bush administration vetoes a UN declaration on children's rights, refusing to sign it unless provisions for sexual health services are removed, replaced with abstinence-based programmes. The US is supported by the Vatican in this (and possibly the Australian government as well). It is predicted that if the US gets its way, it will exacerbate the AIDS crisis in the third world, not to mention the other consequences of unwanted children being born. But hey, think of all the souls that will be saved...
2002/5/5
To the person who came to this blog looking for "online dating": sorry, but this isn't that sort of site. The Null Device won't help you meet someone special, but it will provide something to read and think about as you sit in your bedsit listening to your Morrissey records.
And to the person who came here searching for "Athens GA blog"; I'm not in Athens, GA (though perhaps I can see how one can make that mistake...)
Tonight I went to night 2 of the 555/Red Square/&c popfest at the Empress. It was perhaps even better than night 1; for one, the music was a bit more diverse. There were also fewer people there, perhaps because something else was on.
First up, Guy Blackman and Mia Schoen played
a set (of which I missed the start); with Guy (who also co-hosts Untune The Sky and runs local indie label Chapter Music) singing and playing guitar, and Mia playing piano.
Then Fog and Ocean came on; they consisted of people from various bands (including Stuart and Jen, and Kellie from Sleepy Township) singing, and noodling (or miming) on toy instruments over a MiniDisc of prerecorded electropop. They had a lot of fun doing it, and pulled it off with style. (At one stage, Kellie pretended to play a Casiotone keyboard (which had "WE DON'T ROCK" written on the back in black marker) with a piece of paper on the keys.)
Julian Teakle played overdriven electric guitar riffs and sang about timeless themes such as parties being over; his style sounded very pub-rawk.
Even As We Speak, Sydney's contribution to the Sarah Records fey-indie-pop sound of the early 90s, were scheduled to play next, and did, with a drastically reduced lineup. (Only Mary, the vocalist, made it down to Melbourne.) She had a go at playing the guitar lines and singing, and then enlisted another guy to help her on acoustic guitar. Her set was very lovely indeed; nice chords and melodies and touchingly sincere lyrics delivered in a mellifluous voice. It's good to know that Even As We Speak are still around; apparently, they're working on new material; their Peel Sessions CD is about to be released, and they're negotiating with the Sarah Records people to rerelease their back catalogue. I look forward to hearing more from them.
They were followed by Minimum Chips, who played a very tight and groovy set of their brand of retro-styled pop.
They played mostly new, as yet unrecorded, songs (though one does appear on the souvenir CD that was given away at the door).
It was then that the crowd started gathering in earnest.
When they finished, they lent their Yamaha organ to Huon.
Finally, Boyracer came on (this time consisting of Stewart and Jen, with the guy from Bend Over Boyfriend on drums) and tore the roof off the house; seriously rocking out with some frantic power-pop. As usual, Stewart (who, in his Lambretta shirt and red-and-blue-target-logo boots was more Mod than Damon Albarn and both Gallagher brothers put together) jumped around like a maniac and thrashed the hell out of his guitar.
(Once again I ended up buying too many CDs, as one does at these sorts of events. Tonight I picked up the retrospectives from Boyracer and Minimum Chips, a rather nice guitars-and-bleeps pop record from an outfit called The Love Letter Band and the new Tracey Read album. I've spent a ridiculous amount on CDs this weekend. Though, upon listening to some of them, I'd say it was money well spent.)
Anyway, it was a great night. For those who missed it but wish you hadn't, Boyracer, Mary of Even As We Speak and Ashtrayboy are playing at Pony tomorrow (Sunday) night.
2002/5/4
Welcome to the Digital Millennium: In the spirit of the AOLTW executive who described skipping commercials as theft, here's a list of 10 new copyright crimes for the new millennium; these include things such as inviting friends over to watch pay-per-view and changing radio channels during commercials (which will probably be automatically disabled by legally-mandated standards when digital radio arrives anyway). And, of course, blocking pop-up ads. (via rotten.com)
I just came back from the 555 Recordings/Red Square Records (i.e., Stewart and Jen's respective labels) popfest at the Empress. Some 7 acts played there tonight, playing everything from jangle-pop to electro-pop, with a definite indie slant. (I.e., none of the dross that passes for "pop" in the wasteland of commercial radio.)
First up was Jen Turrell's act; accompanied by husband and co-organiser Stewart on bass, and a TR-606 drum machine on a MiniDisc, she played guitar and sang some rather nice jangly indie-pop, including a cute little number based on the old Twinkle Twinkle Little Star melody. Ashtrayboy were guitar-pop with trumpet and melodica (that's that keyboard thing that you blow into), and Driving Past were similar, only with an old electronic organ. Then came Bend Over Boyfriend, a gender-bending Mod/power-pop act from Washington DC, playing all three of his songs, including an encore of "The Kids Are All Gay", accompanied by Stewart and Jen. They played a tight, punchy set, and were quite impressive. Other People's Children sounded a little synthpoppy only more abstract, with electronic backing tracks, guitars, Casio keyboards and vocals. Origami were a mostly female post-punk pop with alternately sung/shouted vocals and a fair bit of jumping about. Then finally The Lucksmiths went on; they played a somewhat stripped down set, as one of the members had his arm in a sling. There was little percussion, and mostly understated vocals and folk guitar strumming, though complemented with a xylophone in places, to good effect.
Oh yes, and needless to say I spent too much money at the CD table they had there; though, to be fair, Jen gave me a discount given how many I was taking home.
Tomorrow night, the second and final night of Popfest, promises to be just as good, with Boyracer, Minimum Chips and Even As We Speak just three of the acts involved.
2002/5/3
3RRR just played Dandelion Wine's cover of Slowdive's Melon Yellow. Very nice. I like the new electronic-beats-and-dulcimer format.
This is not the Onion: The Islamic theocracy of Iran is ahead of the U.S. in sex education. Mostly because of the U.S.'s federally-mandated "abstinence-only" sex education and panic about regarding under-18s as sexual beings. (For example, the Missouri legislature, presumably taking a break from the War On Goths, recently voted to cut $100,000 from a University's budget to punish a professor who claimed that the 'moral panic' over paedophilia is exaggerated.)
Update: An AlterNet story about the issue, and about a controversial book criticising the whole notion of protecting minors from the very knowledge of sex.
(via Unknown News, The Fix)
Silly/amusing: The random masturbation euphemism generator. And the band instrument quiz tells me I'd be a clarinet. (via sex and sunshine)
One of the most contentious processes is selecting tracks for a mix CD to give to someone. In doing this, one encounters a number of dilemmas:
- The overall philosophy of song selection (by what you think they'd like, or by what you like, or some happy medium).
- Which areas of your musical taste the recipient is likely to share; do you occupy different ends of the ironic/sincere spectrum? Do you go for twee indie-pop or SubGenius doktorbands? Would a spirited gypsy/klezmer number about cannibalistic bootywhang make you look like a dangerous nutter? Would a CD full of drill'n'bass or shoegazer grab them?
- Favour vs. diversity. In your heart of hearts, you may want to make it equal parts Slowdive, Lush, The Paradise Motel and The Licorice Comfits, or whatever your favourite acts are, but what if they don't like these acts?
- How much of the CD do you reserve for semi-obscure local bands they may not hear of otherwise.
- Do you put on obscure remixes of bands you know? If the original means nothing to them, will such wilful obscurantism at best go over their head and at worst make you look like an insufferable trainspotter?
- Representation. Which songs do you choose to represent, say, The Smiths? Which version of Bizarre Love Triangle to put on: Frente's or Even As We Speak's (or even the original)?
So in the end you give up and make it a double CD.
Here comes the remote electronically controlled around corners trajection of frankenstein cyborg rats. What would Francis E. Dec have thought? Quite ingenious. Of course, the ethical question of running electrodes into an animal's brain and training it by stimulating its pleasure centres comes up. Though is that any more inhumane than training an animal to perform an artificial task by conventional means? (And it could be argued that the implanted rats have more fun than their regular cousins.)
2002/5/2
Pinkness and horror: In today's globalised, just-in-time marketplace, many IT workers are coerced into working 50-to-60-hour weeks. This is done by scheduling meetings early and late in the day (often required to teleconference with the head office), and when employees are "downsized", the work is spread around other employees. This is helped along by a high unemployment rate, and fear that if one doesn't put in 60 hours for the team, the next guy on the dole queue would be more than happy to oblige.
"A classic comment is 'you're not a team player' which means that team players work long hours and then go to the pub or the workplace social, extending the work hours even more. The twentysomething, university-educated, sports-car-driving, inner-city, one-bedroom-apartment-dwelling manager has very little understanding of why a family person spends an hour getting home, has to pick up the kids or the shopping before 6pm, and not work 60 hours a week. There's a chasm between the ones who understand and the ones who don't - the ones with a life outside work and ones without."
One consequence of this, and such employees' lack of time for a life outside of work is the rise in the popularity of online dating, now no longer confined to geeks and the socially awkward:
"Almost 20 per cent of those professionals using RSVP are IT workers," Mulcahy says. "They're used to the Internet for time-saving services and convenience, so it's natural they turn to online dating for spicing up their love life."
A Grauniad piece looking at the explosion of obesity in America, and the factors that caused it (mostly bad design and unintended consequences).
For a start, in some parts of the country, Americans have eliminated not merely the need to walk, but even the possibility of it. "I'd love to be able to walk to the store, pick up some milk and come home again, but our towns don't really allow that," laments Mary Gilmore, a dietician in Meridian. The distances are too great, the pavements non-existent. In the sprawling suburbs and small towns, public transport is often as rare as in an English village. In any case, it is almost impossible to carry the milk: it usually comes in gallon containers (a US gallon is four-fifths of a UK gallon). In a country where the cost of packaging exceeds the cost of the food, buying any other way is far more expensive.
Well, it's been another May 1; the Marching Marxists Against Everything got together and shouted slogans, reminding the general public why they'd rather be happily sold-out Herald-Sun reading, Big Brother watching citizens of McWorld. I bet the Democratic Socialist Party's Che merchandise stall did a roaring trade.
Some tolchocking ensued in Sydney; whereas, here in Melbourne, most of the marchers were unionists. (Hmm.. a 30-hour work week; I'd like to see that...)
Oh yes, the banner... actually, I wasn't planning on running it this year, but that's what happens when you don't comment out last year's blog code.
2002/5/1
Happy May Day: In a heartwarming example of notional-socialist solidarity, the Australian Labor Party seeks to establish formal ties with the Chinese Communist Party; a move which may alarm some ALP members concerned with China's human rights record.