The Null Device

This is clever: Stanley Kubrick's The Shining reedited into a trailer for a romantic comedy, à la Nora Ephron.

Update: here is a New York Times story about the trailer, which was produced for a competition, and got its editor the attention of people in the industry. And other entrants in the competition include: Titanic as a horror movie and West Side Story as a zombie flick.

(via bOING bOING, lj:jwz) ¶ awesome horror mashups stanley kubrick the shining titanic west side story zombies 2 Share

It turns out that habitual and pathological liars' brains have more white matter than those of normal people. It could be that the extra white matter gives them the ability to keep track of different versions of stories or the mental states of those being lied to, or, indeed, that telling a lie a day will help to bulk up one's brain. In contrast, people suffering from autism, a condition which impairs the ability to lie (and, indeed, awareness of others' mental states), have less white matter.

Also in neurological news, a new study looks at how the brain sleeps:

When we're awake, different parts of the brain use chemicals and nerve cells to communicate constantly across the entire network, similar to the perpetual flow of data between all the different computers, routers and servers that make up the Internet.

In the deepest part of sleep, however, the various nodes of your cranial Internet all lose their connections.

"The brain breaks down into little islands that can't talk to one another," said study leader Giulio Tononi of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

¶ lies neurology sleep 0 Share

The BBC's H2G2 project (which is sort of like a parallel-universe Wikipedia or something) has a wonderfully informative piece on the history and use of British swear words:

Legend has it that in the 1950s, construction kits like Meccano would be sold in boxes of various sizes. The list of contents which came with the standard size box would be headed 'Box, Standard' (which elided into 'bog standard' when spoken) and the larger box was the 'Box, Deluxe' which was spoonerised to create the phrase 'The Dog's B******s'. This is such a satisfying explanation for two common forms of British English usage that one really wants it to be true.

The word would appear to have entered the English language during the early Middle Ages; in 1230AD, both Oxford and London boasted districts called 'Gropecunte Lane', in reference to the prostitutes that worked there. The Oxford lane was later renamed the slightly less-contentious Magpie Lane, while London's version retained a sense of euphemism when it was changed to 'Threadneedle Street'. Records do not show whether it was a decision of intentional irony that eventually placed the Bank of England there.

In 1999, Conservative Future - the youth wing of the Conservative Party - started using the logo 'CFUK'. Sadly, this got them into trouble with the clothing company French Connection UK, who had recently rebranded themselves 'fcuk'. It is strange to think that there may be an entire generation who, like Norman Mailer, cannot spell the word.

In 1987, the American soul group The Tams had a Top 30 UK hit with a song called There Ain't Nothing Like Shaggin'. They were probably rather puzzled to hear that what they regarded as an innocent little ditty about a dance craze was having trouble getting airplay in Britain.

The poet Robert Graves wrote a very odd little book called Lars Porsena, or The Future of Swearing and Improper Language. Writing in the 1920s, he claimed that there was an definite class difference in the use of the words 'bastard' and 'bugger'. He claimed that in the working class, people might well be sensitive about illegitimacy, but were often unfamiliar with homosexuality, and so bastard was a mortal insult and bugger was a much milder term. The severity was reversed in the upper classes, who had nice traceable bloodlines and a boarding-school education. He claimed that bugger was a much more serious insult in upper-class circles, where people were more likely to believe it.

(via alecm) ¶ class fuck language society swearing uk 0 Share

From this week, anybody wishing to use an internet cafe or public telephone or fax machine in Berlusconi's Italy will have to produce their passport or identity papers. Furthermore, the managers of internet cafes and communications centres will be obliged to keep records of the times customers enter and leave the premises and which computers or telephones they use.

¶ authoritarianism italy silvio berlusconi surveillance 0 Share

A streaming radio outfit named Flat Four has a series of 3 programmes about 1980s home computer music. I just listened to the Commodore 64 one, and it's pretty interesting. It has interviews with various game-music composers (including Rob Hubbard and Benn Daglish, who now participates in the chiptune-party scene), fragments of the original music and various reworkings thereof (from club/dance remixes to heavy metal and acappella vocal covers), and some examples of new music made using Commodore 64s.

(via c64music) ¶ benn daglish commodore 64 computer music retrocomputing rob hubbard 2 Share

Salma Qureshi, a thirtysomething computer programmer and British Muslim, is studying to become Britain's first female imam:

"I'm quite religious but at the same time I'm quite a liberal person myself," she says.

She said that when she was younger, she could not "differentiate what was religion and what was culture," and that she thought Islam imposed "too many restrictions" on women. "It's only afterwards I realised that this is all cultural - religion doesn't really stop women doing anything," she added.

¶ islam religion society uk women 0 Share

The FBI's War On Pornography draws its first blood before it even begins: purveyor of nekkid-goth-chick-pictures Suicide Girls has taken down some photographs, preemptively, in the hope of avoiding a FBI raid. (Because we all know the devoutly religious types Ashcroft had appointed would love to take those darkness-worshipping punks down with maximum force.)

We have received no formal government notice to remove these images, however, in the course of our involvement, as witnesses, in a federal criminal prosecution that does not target SG, we have been made aware of the risks posting such content poses the owners of the company. Given the U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' new war on porn task force and it's intent to bring obscenity charges against their loosely defined "Deviant" imagery, we have removed any images with fake blood and any images we felt could be wrongfully construed as sadist or masochist.

I wonder how long until the War On Porn spreads to Australia. (Given the Family First presence in the Senate, the government's paternalistic style, the lack of US-style constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and senior Tories' periodic thumping of the wowser-moral-values tub, I wouldn't rule it out.) Perhaps one day soon we'll wake up and read in the Age or hear on RRR about the Australian Federal Police raiding I Shot Myself and impounding their servers or something.

(Warning: some links in this post may contain erototoxins.)

(via bOING bOING) ¶ censorship porn suicide girls 8 Share

Time Magazine has an interview with Neil Gaiman (who has a movie, made with Dave McKean, coming out) and Joss Whedon (who did some rinky-dink TV show about valley ghouls in California or something):

JW: I find that when you read a script, or rewrite something, or look at something that's been gone over, you can tell, like rings on a tree, by how bad it is, how long it's been in development.

NG: Yes. It really is this thing of executives loving the smell of their own urine and urinating on things. And then more execs come in, and they urinate. And then the next round. By the end, they have this thing which just smells like pee, and nobody likes it.

(via /.) ¶ commercialisation hollywood neil gaiman 0 Share

A video game simulating being a graffiti artist is in the works. Titled Getting Up, it was developed with the involvement of hip-hop streetwear mogul Mark Ecko and various veteran graffitiists and urban artists (including Shepard Fairey of Obey Giant fame). (I wonder whether Banksy approved of the rat-shaped stencil that's visible in the Flash site.) It's said to be an accurate simulation of the activity of tagging/doing pieces and avoiding the police, and has a story line about an evil, megalomanic mayor (which sounds like Turk 182 meets Rudy Giuliani). No word on when it's coming out or what platforms on.

(via moebius_rex) ¶ getting up graffiti hip-hop mark ecko videogames 2 Share

Congress Abandons WikiConstitution:

"The idea seemed to dovetail perfectly with our tradition of democratic participation," Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said. "But when so-called 'contributors' began loading it down with profanity, pornography, ASCII art, and mandatory-assault-rifle-ownership amendments, we thought it might be best to cancel the project." Congress intends to restore the Constitution to its pre-Wiki format as soon as an unadulterated copy of the document can be found.

(via The Onion) ¶ humour politics the onion usa wikiconstitution wikipedia 0 Share

Forget spin doctors: the latest in public-opinion management is "strategic communications" firms, who will, for a fee, use psy-ops techniques to control public reaction to anything from disease outbreaks to coups:

A shadowy media firm steps in to help orchestrate a sophisticated campaign of mass deception. Rather than alert the public to the smallpox threat, the company sets up a high-tech "ops center" to convince the public that an accident at a chemical plant threatens London. As the fictitious toxic cloud approaches the city, TV news outlets are provided graphic visuals charting the path of the invisible toxins. Londoners stay indoors, glued to the telly, convinced that even a short walk into the streets could be fatal... While Londoners fret over fictitious toxins, the government works to contain the smallpox outbreak. The final result, according to SCL's calculations, is that only thousands perish, rather than the 10 million originally projected. Another success.

"If your definition of propaganda is framing communications to do something that's going to save lives, that's fine," says Mark Broughton, SCL's public affairs director. "That's not a word I would use for that."

Government deception may even be justified in some cases, according to Michael Schrage, a senior adviser to the security-studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "If you tell the population that there's been a bio-warfare attack, hospital emergency rooms will be overwhelmed with people who sincerely believe they have all the symptoms and require immediate attention," Schrage says.

The problem, he adds, is that in a democracy, a large-scale ruse would work just once.

(via Mind Hacks) ¶ manipulation paranoia persuasion psy-ops public opinion strategic communications 0 Share

A day after several animal-rights militants were arrested for stealing the corpse of the grandmother of a guinea-pig farmer, others have firebombed an Oxford University sports centre and attempted to assault a GlaxoSmithKline employee, and then issued a chilling communique:

It said: "We are stronger than you, we have more resolve than you and we never give up.

"If we have to destroy every bit of property you own we will, in order to stop you inflicting your profit-driven cruelties on defenceless creatures.

"You cannot stop us, we are free to attack you at will, whenever and wherever we choose."

¶ animal rights animal-qaeda extremists terrorism 0 Share

A new study has shown that, far from being essential to a healthy society, widespread religious belief is socially corrosive, and correlates strongly with a range of social ills, from violent crime to sexually-transmitted diseases:

Published in the Journal of Religion and Society, a US academic journal, it says: "Many Americans agree that their churchgoing nation is an exceptional, God-blessed, shining city on the hill that stands as an impressive example for an increasingly sceptical world.

"In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies. The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so."

The report seems to be mainly about religiosity in the US, where evolution is seen as a litmus test of theological correctness, which causes it to read somewhat strangely elsewhere. (The phrase "pro-evolution democracy" sounds a bit like "heliocentric-astronomy democracy" or something.)

"The non-religious, pro-evolution democracies contradict the dictum that a society cannot enjoy good conditions unless most citizens ardently believe in a moral creator," he says.

¶ atheism crime religion secularism society usa violence 0 Share

First there was the extraordinary biodiversity of the Korean no-man's land and the abundance of radioactive wildlife near Chernobyl, and now it emerges that penguins are flourishing in minefields in the Falkland Islands. The mines, laid by Argentine forces during the Falklands War, have rendered pristine beaches and grasslands off-limits to tourists and sheep. (These sanctions are backed up with hefty fines for any tourists afflicted by the warning-signs-are-for-sissies gene.) The penguins, fortunately, are too light to set off the mines, and have the beaches to themselves:

Argentina, which puts the number of remaining mines closer to 15,000, is offering to help clear more fields to adhere to an international treaty on land mines.

Falkland Islanders, however, are not pressing on the issue, and most believe it is better not to fiddle with the fields.

"There is a risk that only 95 percent would be removed," said Falkland Islands Gov. Howard Pearce. "You would bring a sense of complacency to the community and increase rather than reduce the chance of injury."

Besides, he noted, "The environmentalists like them."

(via bOING bOING) ¶ environment falkland islands involuntary park landmines penguins 0 Share

Some highlights from a new book of nuance-laden foreign words:

• "backpfeifengesicht" - German for "a face that cries out for a fist in it"
• "bakku-shan" - a girl who appears pretty from behind but not from the front (Japanese)
• "drachenfutter" - peace offerings made by guilty husbands to their wives (German; literally "dragon fodder")
• "koshatnik" - A seller of stolen cats (Russian)
• "Kummerspeck" - weight gained from emotion-related overeating (German; literally "grief bacon")
• "uitwaaien" - walking in windy weather for fun (Dutch)

(via bOING bOING) ¶ culture language words 0 Share

Australia passes new terror laws, which will give the government the power to hold "terror suspects" without charge for 14 days and track them for up to a year. Given the Australian government's record, "terror suspects" presumably include Greenpeace banner-raisers, refugee advocates and anybody who has ever attended a demonstration or voiced an opinion critical of US foreign policy, at the government's discretion.

¶ australia terrorism the long siege 3 Share

Faced with a ban on tobacco advertising, cigarette companies are turning to increasingly subtle forms of marketing, such as redesigning bar decor to subliminally suggest their brand identities:

These 'installations', as they were called, created lounge areas by placing comfortable red sofas in front of video screens showing scenes redolent of Wild West 'Marlboro country' to convey the essence of the cigarette brand while circumnavigating sponsorship bans.

'All that former advertising money has to go somewhere,' said one industry insider. 'The tobacco firms are looking to create extensive "design languages" in bars and clubs and other venues through the use of particular types of furniture or material which will make people think of their brands.'

(via MindHacks) ¶ advertising big tobacco design marketing subliminal 0 Share

First there were zombie sharks swimming down the main streets of New Orleans; now, it emerges, there may be US Navy hunter-killer dolphins on the loose in the Gulf of Mexico, waiting to start picking off unsuspecting surfers with toxic darts:

Dolphins have been trained in attack-and-kill missions since the Cold War. The US Atlantic bottlenose dolphins have apparently been taught to shoot terrorists attacking military vessels. Their coastal compound was breached during the storm, sweeping them out to sea. But those who have studied the controversial use of dolphins in the US defence programme claim it is vital they are caught quickly.

(via /.) ¶ dolphins risks us navy 1 Share

The famous photograph of The Smiths outside the Salford Lads' Club, taken by rock photographer Stephen Wright and seen on the The Queen Is Dead album and countless bedsit walls, is about to take its place in the National Portrait Gallery. Which, I suppose, is what happens when yesteryear's teenage bedsit tragics grow into positions of cultural influence.

(via cos) ¶ culture indie music national portrait gallery salford lads' club the smiths 0 Share

Sociologists attempt to answer that most baffling of questions: why do we have Goths?

"Sometimes you'll find that people who were low status in the school environment will suddenly find this new group in which the things that they do are considered much more high-status, credit-worthy things," he said.

And he added that particularly noticeable was the role of relatively feminine men in the goth scene.

"At school they were either bullied or just not really noticed too much," he said. "Suddenly they discover goth music, and they find themselves in an environment where actually, to be feminine as a man is rather valued, and suddenly girls are rather interested in you. "I think it's an alternative set of values which renders people - who previously didn't have status - desirable."

¶ culture goth society subculture 0 Share

An Australian study has found that drivers of four-wheel-drives (SUVs) are often obese, reactionary, intolerant and aggressive, and have crew-cuts and rottweilers named Winner:

A new study has found that city owners of large four-wheel-drive vehicles are less community minded than other drivers, less charitable, more likely to be homophobic and have a low opinion of indigenous culture.

The Australia Institute study has also found they are more likely to use force to get their way.

Two thirds of their drivers in the city are overweight or obese. They also had a lower regard for the welfare system than the general population.

¶ aggression australia culture obesity survival values suvs values 4 Share

Tonight, I saw Belle & Sebastian at the Barbican. The performance was one of several in the ATP Don't Look Back series, in which bands perform live renditions of their classic albums. For their turn, Belle & Sebastian did If You're Feeling Sinister.

The support band for this gig was Broadcast, who were excellent. They played a combination of new material and old (including Come On Let's Go), and played like a tight, finely-tuned groove machine. One got an impression of retrofuturism, as if their music (with its analogue fuzz, live drum grooves and clunky bass) was something out of a 1960s-vintage view of a shining, stylish future. Anyway, they're doing a gig at Koko in Camden on Wednesday as well.

Then Belle & Sebastian went on. They had 12 musicians on stage and an astonishing array of kit (including a xylophone or similar, an electric piano and a PowerBook they seemed to play software instruments on); one can see why they might need their own trucking company just to get all their stuff to gigs. They started off playing a few random songs (mostly from EPs, though including a rare live version of Electronic Renaissance, with two drummers), then went into If You're Feeling Sinister. There was a rather fitting muted trumpet solo at the end of Like Dylan In The Movies, and after The Fox In The Snow, Stuart recounted a dream he had about Isobel agreeing to play this gig if they kept a taxi running for her outside throughout the gig, before confessing to missing her, to the audience's sympathy. For Judy and the Dream Of Horses, the band got a number of people who had been dancing in the audience to dance on stage; afterward, they proceeded to play about half a dozen other songs, including a rousing version of The Boy With The Arab Strap. In total, they played for almost two hours.

It wasn't too unlike their Melbourne gig; at first it started with people sitting quietly in the seats and watching them, but ended up with people dancing in their seats and the aisles, clapping and singing along. Towards the end (in the middle of If You Find Yourself Caught In Love, Stuart paused the song and revealed that he could see many familiar faces in the crowd; he compared this to the end of episodes of The Simpsons. And, towards the end of The Boy With The Arab Strap, the line about "the cool set in London" was followed by applause.

Anyway, it was a brilliant gig. They were in fine form and put on an excellent show.

¶ belle & sebastian gigs indiepop 5 Share

I recently picked up the new Broadcast album, Tender Buttons. It's an impressive return to form.

Their earlier work, Extended Play 2 and The Noise Made By People, caught attention with its combination of experimental sounds and swinging-60s-style psychedelic pop. (I haven't heard Work and Non-Work, and so can't comment on it.) With the album that followed, Haha Sound, they seemed to lose the plot a bit; the first track/single sounded like an attempt to jump on the electroclash bandwagon à la Goldfrapp, with much of the rest of it sounding like a mediocre Sound Of Music cash-in. With Tender Buttons, they've found their direction again, and it sounds like early Stereolab only made using a GameBoy; stripped down to a tightly focussed krautrock-esque angularity, with their trademark melodious vocals. And the presence of a track that seems to be a rant about US military oil imperialism or something of the sort similar probably won't hurt their chances (except perhaps of playing at any of Clear Channel's festivals or venues).

¶ broadcast electronica indie music 0 Share

In the latest round of H.P. Lovecraft adaptation: A Shoggoth On The Roof: the Musical, featuring songs like Byakhee Byakhee and If I Was A Deep One, and a gay-themed horror film titled Cthulhu.

(via bOING bOING, substitute) ¶ camp cthulhu fiddler on the roof gay jewish kitsch lovecraft satire 0 Share

Melbourne's Astor Theatre, the splendid, anachronistically grand art deco cinema in St. Kilda, is being sold. The Astor is famous for its decor, 70mm projector and combination of recent films, vintage classics and arthouse/cult movies, and its calendars are a fixture on the toilet doors of inner Melbourne. The owner hopes that the new owner will keep him on as a consultant to run it; though it may well go the way of the Valhalla in Westgarth, a former cult/arthouse cinema which now runs populist schmaltz like disnannies and romcoms, or else be turned into boutique lifestyle apartments or a designer shopping complex. If so, it will be a great loss for Melbourne.

¶ art deco astor theatre cinema heritage melbourne 0 Share

I'm currently listening to a time-delayed copy of this week's Local and or General. Mick Harvey's Demon Alcohol sounds just like like Nick Cave's Loverman, only without the smouldering Old Testament wrath of Cave's vocal. Not that that's a great surprise, mind you.

¶ music 1 Share

This article debunks some myths about absinthe, the fabled madness-inducing demon drink. If is to be believed, there is no such thing as "real absinthe". Oh, and what you heard about modern legal absinthe being so lacking in thujone as to be nothing more than overpriced yuppie liqueur is only half-true. It is true that thujone is limited, but apparently vintage absinthe contained much less than the myths would suggest, and thujone's psychoactive properties were largely mythical; then, as well as now, the absinthe mystique was born mostly of self-delusion and pretentiousness:

Drinkers of today's absinthe who expect a unique mind-altering experience usually are disappointed. Yet recent tests indicate that absinthe contains at least as much thujone today as it did during La Belle Époque: Turn-of-the-century Pernod Fils absinthe had six milligrams of thujone per liter, substantially less than the 10 milligrams permitted by current European Union rules in countries where absinthe is legal.

King of Spirits Absinth boasts "100mg of psychoactive thujone," the sort of claim that is mocked on La Fée Verte, which dismisses the "glorious descriptions of absinthe highs in 19th century literature" as "so much flowery hot air." Although "thujone is assumed by modern-day druggies to lend some sort of buzz," says the site, "it does not."

(via ALDaily) ¶ absinthe alcohol drugs thujone 3 Share

An interesting article on the psychology of suicide bombers:

The kind of would-be suicide bomber I have known thinks to himself:

They have accused me of what I have done.

What I have done is no crime.

Therefore those who accuse me are the corrupt of the earth.

Those who accuse me are truly representative of the society from which they come.

The destruction of the corrupt of the earth will be rewarded appropriately. Therefore it matters not which individuals I destroy.

The belief is therefore not in representative government, but in representative guilt.

(via ALDaily) ¶ psychology suicide bombing terrorism 0 Share

If you think you've had a bad week, spare a thought for Kate Moss. 48 hours ago, she was a supermodel; now, her career is over (three sponsors have dumped her like a hot potato; most recently, Burberry dropped her from their campaign, presumably to keep the evil of cocaine from being associated with the wholesome chav/townie culture), and now it looks like she stands to be prosecuted (after all, there is photographic evidence of her committing a crime, and not prosecuting her would send the message that celebrities are above the law, or at least above the drug laws), and possibly lose custody of her daughter. And now that the party's over, Pete Doherty is apparently no longer interested; I wonder if he helped himself to a few valuables on the way out the door.

Of course, the argument for not treating Moss leniently is that celebrities, being role models, should be held to a more exacting standard of conduct, and those who fall from this standard should be made examples of to deter impressionable youths from following in their errors. Of course, the current scheme, which depends wholly on tabloid newspapers sneaking in to studios to take surreptitious photographs, is somewhat patchy and inadequate. I modestly propose a better solution: random drug testing of celebrities.

Under this scheme, anyone who is a celebrity (defined by making more than a number of media appearances in a certain period) would be subject to random drug tests, much as athletes are. The tests would be administered by a new agency, which would be called something like the Celebrity Drug Authority or the Public Conduct Authority or somesuch. Testing positive for drug use, or failure to show up for testing, would result in disqualification from a number of professions, including top-tier fashion modelling, acting in films over a certain budget or performing in venues over a certain size; additionally, any recordings by those disqualified would be struck off commercial-radio playlists, and the press would be prohibited from giving publicity to them (so now, if the NME editors ran another piece on Pete Doherty, Dionysiac Genius of Rock, they could be prosecuted for contempt of court). Which sounds harsh, but it may be the only way to protect impressionable youth. Won't someone think of the children?

¶ a modest proposal celebrity drugs kate moss pete doherty society 7 Share

From the Fly (a monthly free street press publication in London, with a bias towards populist NME/Carling/Xfm new-wave/garage rock; The Wire it ain't), and specifically, its review of the next Franz Ferdinand album:

"And yet, there was no warning in pre-Franzworld that artrock was just about to grab the world by its neckerchief and force it to put its dancing shoes on."

¶ artrock carling-indie culture the fly 3 Share

Today's hack of the day: Turn your ham(p)ster into a fighting machine:

(via jwz) ¶ comics hamsters 0 Share

Apparently a key difference between the British and the Americans is that Britain has eccentrics where America has exhibitionists:

The British enjoy eccentricity. Americans do not, because it is a quieter state, and to be quiet is to set oneself on the road to anonymity--arguably the condition from which Americans shrink most sharply. A good place to note this difference is in literature. I can think of no memorable eccentric character in American literature; yet from Ahab to Huck Finn, from the Cat in the Hat to Tom Wolfe's Rev. Bacon, there is no dearth of exhibitionists.

(via ALDaily) ¶ culture eccentrics exhibitionism self-promotion uk usa 0 Share

The anarchic, anyone-can-edit model of Wikipedia may soon be tested in court; the Council of Australian Jewry is considering suing Wikipedia for allowing a vandalised article to be published on its site. The vandalised article, on recently deceased Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal, contained unsavoury sexual accusations.

If it does go to court and their case stands up (and the idea of an anonymous wiki with no personal responsibility does not feature in most defamation laws), it could be the end of the wiki, or at least of the pseudonymously editable one. Wikipedia could continue on either being moderated or requiring all contributors to have verified identities kept on file and assume legal liability for their edits. Which would be somewhat of a chilling effect, though it could be argued that that's how the real world works, and the present Wikipedia is no more legally sustainable than the original Napster was. And so, another piece of the utopian anarchy of the internet (you know, that ungoverned interzone that interprets censorship as damage and routes around it) may soon fall to the encroaching tide of harsh reality.

Update: I have been informed that any such lawsuit would be a non-starter. For one, one cannot legally libel, slander or defame a deceased person, and secondly, the Scientologists have already tried this sort of thing and failed.

¶ law wikipedia 0 Share

Novelty cake seen in Tesco supermarket in London:

¶ breasts culture kitsch tesco uk 0 Share

Blogging ambulanceman Tom Reynolds on how to tell if someone's faking unconsciousness:

The easiest, and quickest way to see if someone is faking unconsciousness is to lightly brush your finger against their eyelashes. If their eyes flicker, then they are almost certainly faking it. Also if they try to keep their eyes closed when you try to open them, they are definitely faking it. Another way of checking is to hold their hand over their face, and let it drop. People tend to be reluctant to let their hand hit them on the nose, and so the hand will instead magically drop to one side.

My favourite tale of how to uncover a pretender in a hospital setting was a doctor, who would loudly ask for the 'brain needle', to draw off some brain fluid from the unconscious patient via the ear. Of course, he would continue, the patient needed to be unconscious because otherwise they might flinch and the needle go into the brain itself. This was normally followed by the patient 'waking up' and asking, "Doctor, where am I?".

¶ consciousness deception howto medical 0 Share

NME darlings The Libertines tried to organise an anti-drug concert last year -- but pulled out to avoid being sued for slander by Pete Doherty, the band's drug-addled, bandmate-robbing former frontman and/or the first great primal rock'n'roll hero since Iggy Pop/Sid Vicious:

"At that point, Pete was embroiled in drugs and they assumed it would be on the offensive regarding his drug-taking so his lawyers contacted us and said no.

(via xrrf) ¶ carling-indie pete doherty 0 Share

An artist in New York has pasted 50,000 blank speech bubble stickers to ads and posters, waited for the public to fill them in, and then photographed the results. The results included political commentary, existential angst, ribald humour, self-promotion and personal messages.

(via jwz) ¶ advertising détournement ipod new york 0 Share

The 13th of October has been designated John Peel Day; there will be more than 300 tribute gigs to Peel across the UK. (It remains to be seen what proportion of these carry on the spirit of Peel's eclecticism and championing of novelty more than, say, last year's "Future's Burning" compilation of "tight", "angular" NME/Xfm-formula "new-wave" "indie" "garage" "art rock", which was, perhaps rather opportunistically, dedicated to the then recently deceased Peel.) There will also be events in Europe, North America and New Zealand on the day.

The day before, there will be a tribute concert in London featuring New Order, The Fall, the Super Furry Animals and a reggae outfit named Misty In Roots.

¶ carling-indie john peel 2 Share

This just in: psychological studies find that differences between men and women are, for the most part, negligible. This includes in areas commonly considered to be gendered, such as communications, spatial reasoning and assertiveness.

Dr Hyde said gender differences accounted for either no or a very small effect for most of the psychological variables examined. She said only throwing distance and physical aggression showed marked gender differences.

Dr Hyde highlighted one study where participants were told that they were not identified as male or female nor wore any identification, which led to neither sex conforming to a stereotyped image when given the opportunity to act aggressively.

They actually did the opposite to what was expected - they did not stick to the stereotype of aggressive males and passive females.

¶ gender nature vs. nurture psychology society 2 Share

More details of Tony Blair's special relationship with another superpower -- namely, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation -- have emerged. On Thursday, Blair was heard telling Murdoch that their mutual foe the BBC's coverage of Hurricane Katrina was "full of hatred of America and gloating.

"Tony Blair... told me yesterday that he was in Delhi last week and he turned on the BBC World Service to see what was happening in New Orleans, and he said it was just full of hate at America and gloating about our troubles," the chairman and chief executive of News Corporation said.

It must be a different BBC than the one I've seen. Perhaps Blair tuned into the Baghdad Broadcasting Corporation, the al-Zarqawi-boosting, freedom-hating fountain of anti-Western propaganda that only Little Green Footballs readers seem to be able to see?

It's a good thing that the Beeb has won its 10-year charter; otherwise, it would look like Blair and Murdoch were sharpening their knives.

Also in the same report: an extract from the diary of one of his former spin doctors claims that Blair gave News Corp. the power of veto over Britain's European policy. Or, "the things we do to keep The Sun onside".

An entry in a diary kept by Lance Price, who worked for the PM between 1998 and 2000, said: "We have promised News International we won't make any changes to our Europe policy without talking to them."

¶ bbc murdoch thatcherism-blairism tony blair 0 Share

Mulleted and mustached Molvanian pop idol Zladko "ZLAD!" Vladcik, tried to enter last year's Eurovision contest with his catchy retro synthpop ditty "Elektronik Supersonik", is back. His 2005 entry (also disqualified) is much darker, hearkening back to the perplexing 1980s European trend of minor-key synthpop songs referencing obscure religious heresies and points of theology. It is titled "I am the Anti-pope", and the video featured an ecclesiastically-garbed Zlad being whipped in slow motion by a goth chick in a nun's habit, who is also seen playing a keytar. Some sample lyrics:

I am the Anti-Pope.
I am the Anti-Pope.
Like a lion kills an antelope.
Like a hammer hits a cantaloupe.
Like a neck in a hanging rope.
Like a germ in a microscope.
Like a witch reads a horoscope.
Like a cutter stabs an envelope.

(via MusicThing) ¶ antipope bdsm eastern europe eurovision heresy humour molvania religion synthpop zladko vladcic 1 Share

An Age piece on the Scott Parkin incident:

"For me, some of the really disturbing aspects of this situation have been the way that the authorities have come to conflate activism and terrorism," Dias says. "It basically means the end of freedom of expression, the end of being able to question the policy of the current government."

With state premiers preparing for the Council of Australian Government's summit on terror powers, Parkin's treatment led Victorian Premier Steve Bracks to sound a note of caution. "Without a proper explanation of why Scott Parkin was detained, there is the potential for the public to question the necessity of the law and whether it should be in place," Bracks said.

Joh Bjelke-Petersen would be proud, if not envious; compared to the present state of affairs, to say nothing of the new anti-terrorism laws being drafted as we speak, 1980s Queensland was a veritable Interzone of freedom.

And details have emerged of Parkin's extremist politics and dangerous history:

Too often physical confrontation becomes the story of a protest rather than the issue that drives the protest. Parkin teaches what Hollows calls "de-escalation techniques" to defuse potentially violent situations, and to avoid provoking police. He also advises on non-violent physical blockading methods.

A spokesman for Attorney-General Philip Ruddock said ASIO had not opposed the original visa application, but its understanding of his intentions had changed during his trip. Parkin was detained for "encouraging spirited protest".

It has been pointed out that the reason for this extraordinary action (which, incidentally, the Labor opposition fully backs; don't look for troublesome questions there) is that Parkin is a thorn in the side of Halliburton, who, as a contractor to the Australian military, are a matter of national security (a phrase Australians will be hearing a lot more of in future).

And more here:

Asked what advice he might give other travellers, he replied: "Be careful where you go and what you say, and look around at who's following you. We have to be careful, but we still need to stand up for what we're doing."

The bill for his Australian adventure will top $11,000, including $777 for his imprisonment, $4235 for his air fare to Los Angeles, and $6675 in fares and accommodation for his two minders, whose tasks included accompanying Parkin to the toilet. The account will be presented to him should he return to Australia, which he says he has been forbidden from doing for three years.

So just leave. [Australia] doesn't deserve you. Walk away. [Australia] doesn't need your talent, your creativity and your intelligence. Or rather, it needs them desperately, but it will never acknowledge that. It's too stupid to understand that. If it calls for you, it will call for you for the wrong reasons. It will call you up as a soldier. It will call for you as canon-fodder in some spurious and unnecessary war that serves the interests of 1% of its population and an even smaller percentage of the world's population. Even if it lets you live in relative peace as a mere civilian, it will force you to live in ways that destroy the world's weather systems and its environment. It will use your tax to fund pre-emptive wars of aggressive imperialism against impoverished nations with energy resources.

Get a passport, get a visa. Work a job, save some money. Come to Europe, come to Japan. Life is more civilised here. Come as you are, come to work, come to play, come to stay. Make love to foreigners, not [Australians]. Make non-[Australian] babies. Make your children world citizens, as you make yourself one.

¶ australia authoritarianism culture war scott parkin 6 Share

I just received a spam with fragments of The Master and Margarita (in English) at the end (to fool filters). It looks like the spammers are working their way forward through the Russian literary canon.

¶ mihkail bulgakov russia spam the master and margarita 2 Share

Bill Maher's open letter to the Commander of the Free World:

"Mr. President, this job can't be fun for you any more. There's no more money to spend--you used up all of that. You can't start another war because you used up the army. And now, darn the luck, the rest of your term has become the Bush family nightmare: helping poor people. Listen to your Mom. The cupboard's bare, the credit cards maxed out. No one's speaking to you. Mission accomplished.

"Now it's time to do what you've always done best: lose interest and walk away. Like you did with your military service and the oil company and the baseball team. It's time. Time to move on and try the next fantasy job. How about cowboy or space man? Now I know what you're saying: there's so many other things that you as President could involve yourself in. Please don't. I know, I know. There's a lot left to do. There's a war with Venezuela. Eliminating the sales tax on yachts. Turning the space program over to the church. And Social Security to Fannie Mae. Giving embryos the vote.

(via substitute) ¶ george w. bush politics sarcasm usa 0 Share

Reports from the UN Summit. It looks like Make Poverty History is history, with plans for poverty reduction having been blocked. Meanwhile, the UN passed a resolution calling on member states to outlaw incitement to terrorism. The exact definitions of "incitement", and indeed, "terrorism", are left for individual states to interpret, which makes it somewhat less than the sweeping victory it was painted at. Nations would be free to exempt pet groups of ideologically-allied "freedom fighters" from being classified as terrorists, whilst using the laws to crack down on all sorts of dissent; for example, it is conceivable that China would declare Falun Gong and Tibetan independence movements "terrorist" under these laws, or that Australia would classify, say, anti-war, anti-logging and refugee-rights movements as terrorist and reserve the ability to bring the full brunt of anti-terrorist laws against anyone with a copy of No Logo (incitement to protest, which in John Bjelke-Howard's Australia is seen as a national security issue), should they sufficiently annoy the right interests.

¶ dissent politics poverty terrorism un 0 Share

It looks like the Wicker Man remake is going to be rubbish:

...In the original, Woodward's character was a virgin, making him ideal for sacrifice. That element has been ditched from the remake, because it was thought that while audiences would accept the idea of an American community that practised human sacrifice, the idea of a grown-up virgin was just too farfetched.

Anyway, it looks like the Wicker Man remake will take its rightful place next to the Sylvester Stallone Get Carter (with its all-American message of redemption) and the Californian-set Italian Job. It'll probably eclipse the original more than in the previous cases, though, because of the poor quality of the surviving prints of the original.

(via alecm) ¶ commercialisation crap film hollywood the wicker man 2 Share

In response to the British government's proposed all-faiths blasphemy religious-hatred legislation, Christian satirical paper Ship of Fools has published a list of the 20 funniest and most offensive religious jokes. There are 10 of each; be warned that paedophilic priests and off-colour references to religious figures feature prominently:

Jesus came upon a small crowd who had surrounded a young woman they believed to be an adulteress. They were preparing to stone her to death.
To calm the situation, Jesus said: "Whoever is without sin among you, let them cast the first stone."
Suddenly, an old lady at the back of the crowd picked up a huge rock and lobbed it at the young woman, scoring a direct hit on her head. The unfortunate young lady collapsed dead on the spot.
Jesus looked over towards the old lady and said: "Do you know, Mother, sometimes you really piss me off."

An Indian man dies and arrives at the Pearly Gates.
"Yes, how can I help?" asks St Peter. "I'm here to meet Jesus," says the Indian man.
St Peter looks over his shoulder and shouts, "Jesus, your cab is here!"

(via Suw) ¶ humour jokes offensive religion 1 Share

Three researchers have developed a method of monitoring keystrokes by listening to the sound of the keyboard. Impressively (and perhaps frighteningly), their method does not require one to type a training text first; just drop a microphone into earshot of the keys, let it listen, and within 15 minutes or so of typing, the algorithms will have guessed which sounds correspond to which keys, by using the statistic properties of the English language and a machine-learning technique. In retrospect, it seems quite obvious (not counting the details); it would be surprising if intelligence agencies hadn't had something of this sort for some time.

(via Schneier) ¶ surveillance tech 0 Share

If you think your job sucks, be glad you don't work in a body-piercing shop where you have to deal intimately with insane, malodorous perverts all day.

(via jwz) ¶ bizarre body piercing wrong wtf 1 Share

More details have emerged on the arrest of US peace activist Scott Parkin: it turns out that the government is holding him in solitary confinement, and billing him for it, until he renounces all claims against the government, a similar tactic to that used against asylum seekers. Also, it appears that he is being held on national security provisions, rather than character provisions, which entitles the government to block the hearing of his case. Meanwhile there have been protests outside the Australian embassy in the US, and Victorian Premier Steve Bracks has protested the decision.

Which demonstrates a reemerging ugly side of the Australian Way. The legal principles of Joh Bjelke-Petersen's Queensland are alive and well. The government's message here is: if you don't conform to our model of relaxed and comfortable Australia, we have the means to make things very uncomfortable for you. The principles of pluralism and democratic debate are about as relevant in John Howard's Australia as they are in Mahathir's Malaysia.

And it looks like Australia is establishing itself as a global centre for the exporting of hard-right ideology; the New Zealand Labour party claims that Australian Tory strategists and a hard-line Christian sect are involved in campaigning for the conservative National Party.

¶ australia authoritarianism culture war exclusive brethren new zealand scott parkin 0 Share

And now something for all the moronic-cynicist fashion-goth hipsters in the audience: How to embroider skulls on your iPod socks. Because as everybody knows, skulls are, like, totally hardcore, especially when they're on iPod socks. Then all you have to do is make sure the iPod is full of Death From Above 1979 and LCD Soundsystem and post-post-ironic coolsie disco-rock.

(via bOING bOING) ¶ fashion goth hipsters ipod skulls 1 Share

30 signs of being a Londoner:

2. You have never been to The Tower of London or Madame Tussauds but love Brighton

4. Hookers and the homeless are invisible.

9. You consider eye contact an act of overt aggression.

19. The UK west of Heathrow is still theoretical to you.

24. You don't hear sirens anymore.

25. You've mentally blocked out all thoughts of the city's air/water quality and what it's doing to your insides.

29. You roll your eyes and say 'tsk' at the news that someone has thrown themselves under a tube train.

(via london-underground) ¶ culture englishness london uk 0 Share

Luke Williams from design firm Frogdesign (who designed the original Mac and the NeXT cube) talks about the design of the iPod and the way design conventions reference other objects:

"So... as I was sitting on the toilet this morning" (this is of course where most good ideas come from), "I noticed the shiny white porcelain of the bathtub and the reflective chrome of the faucet on the wash basin... and then it hit me! Everybody perceives the iPod as 'clean' because it references bathroom materials!"

The public once thought electricity was dangerous and expensive, so to change this perception, the electricity industry sought to project the image of electricity as a modern and progressive source of energy. To symbolize these qualities, designers used the conventions associated with "technological futurism"--hrome plating and streamlining. In 1955, industrial designer Henry Drefuss wrote that changes in the design of the modern kitchen had been brought about "by two things that had nothing to do with cooking a meal--the automobile and the airplane."

Although the symbolism has changed, the iPod also uses conventions to appear ahead of its time. Its surfaces are seamless and have no moving parts-- two conventions that have often been used in science and science-fiction to connote advanced technology. Remember the seamless, molten-metal bad guy in Terminator 2? Or how about the perfectly seamless, black monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey?

(via Gizmodo) ¶ apple design frogdesign ipod 0 Share

If Goths ruled the world, a Worth1000 photoshopping contest. These images will probably end up in thousands of LiveJournal/MSN user icons.

(via bOING bOING) ¶ goth humour photoshopping 0 Share

An image that has been floating around recently:

(via Suw) ¶ amusing george w. bush humour irony murdoch unintentionally hilarious 0 Share

A US peace activist visiting Australia has been arrested by the Federal Police as he travelled to a workshop on the US peace movement. The Immigration Department has stated that Scott Parkin, of Zmag, was arrested on "character grounds", and would be deported "as soon as practicable". (This is believed to be under provisions for cancelling visas where "a person's presence is, or would be, prejudicial to relations between Australia and a foreign country", which means that criticising US foreign policy is now officially an Un-Australian Activity.) Non-Government politicians, environmentalists and refugee-loving latte-leftist terrsymps are up in arms; the Herald-Sun-reading silent majority of suburban battlers, however, is on record as being "relaxed and comfortable".

Is the Australian government abusing its anti-terrorism powers to suppress opposing voices? Shortly after 9/11 in the US, Green Party activists found themselves banned from flying and feminists in San Francisco were investigated for al-Qaeda sympathies. Given the Australian authorities' fine tradition of creativity in defending the status quo (think Joh Bjelke-Petersen's police force), I wouldn't rule out that sort of thing being the unwritten law of the land.

¶ australia authoritarianism culture war scott parkin 2 Share

A videotape believed to be from a known American al-Qaeda operative singles out Melbourne and Los Angeles for the next wave of mass-casualty attacks.

¶ al-qaeda melbourne terrorism 1 Share

An excellent rant from Patrick Farley (of E-Sheep web-comics fame) about the present state of affairs:

I'm sick of being told that catastrophe is victory.

I'm sick of being told that mythology is science, and vice-versa.

I'm sick of millionaire drug-addicts instructing me on how to live a virtuous life.

I'm sick of being told that Petroleum is the Lifeblood of Civilization.

I'm sick of being told in late 2005 that "It's all Clinton's fault."

I'm sick of Working Class Heroes who can be depended on to swallow any shit, so long as it's wrapped in a flag and served on a Bible.

I'm sick of "Christian" ministers who show up at funerals carrying signs which read "YOUR FAG SON BURNS IN HELL!"

I'm sick of being told that questioning authority makes me a traitor.

I'm sick of being told I must fear God.

I'm sick of being told that the worship of force is the highest of human virtues.

(via pfarley) ¶ oil patrick farley politics rant religion rightwingers usa 0 Share

Melbourne's love affair with the car is on the rocks; as the price of petrol continues to rise, more and more Melburnians are taking to public transport. Unfortunately for them, the underdeveloped public transport system is having problems coping:

"Trains are overloaded, trams overloaded and stuck in traffic," said Graham Currie, chairman of public transport at Monash University. "We have a skeleton bus service with no service at all in some areas and times of day. How can people use public transport when there isn't any available?"

By the time the train pulled into Caulfield station there was barely room to squeeze another person on board. "People are practically sitting on each other some days," said one traveller.

Meanwhile, the state government's A$10bn super-tunnel project has been scrapped over criticism of the road tunnel/tollway portion of it. Hopefully the rail extension part will be resurrected in some form.

¶ melbourne public transport urban planning 0 Share

I just found out that there is an entire blog devoted to Commodore 64 music; and it seems to be surprisingly busy too. Some of the things on it include C64 music nights (and there's one in Manchester this weekend; had I known about it sooner...), new music software which manages to squeeze ever more out of the C64 hardware, homebrewed MIDI interfaces, C64s grotesquely hacked into rack-mounted synths, instructions on making one's own cartridges, ways of using quirks of the C64 hardware to make sound, people selling C64 game ringtones, and links to creative projects like Casionova, an 8-bit Kraftwerk covers compilation and more.

Not to mention a Commodore-branded entry onto the media player market, which doesn't actually play C64 software or chiptunes. You'd think that whoever owns the brand would have done more than commissioning a generic media player and slapping the chickenhead logo onto it. I wonder if it's of any better quality than the "Commodore" DVD+Rs I bought last year, which burned perfectly well but failed to read afterward.

(via MusicThing) ¶ chiptunes commodore commodore 64 crap retrocomputing turd in a can 0 Share

Drivers on a heritage steam railway in Somerset are fed up with having to stop their trains to clear the cremated remains of train buffs off the tracks:

At least eight mounds of ash, most accompanied by flowers, have been found on the track since the start of the summer. They are believed to be the mortal remains of steam enthusiasts whose last wish was to be laid to rest within earshot of a locomotive.

¶ death railway 0 Share

A fascinating article from the CIA describing, in some detail, the working career of a spy in the Soviet Union, from his volunteering to help the US in the late 1970s, through his delivery of key details of Soviet aircraft technology, and ultimately to his arrest in 1985 (he was subsequently found guilty of high treason and executed), and describing points of tradecraft such as methods of covert communication under the noses of the KGB, as well as mundane details of his daily life and psychological motivations:

Another technique that was used to defeat KGB surveillance was to disguise the identity of the case officer being sent out to meet with Tolkachev. This technique was first used in this operation in June 1980. John Guilsher drove to the US Embassy building at about 7:20 p.m., ostensibly having been invited to dinner at the apartment of an Embassy officer who lived there. Once inside, he disguised himself so that when he later left the compound in another vehicle, he would not be recognized by KGB surveillants waiting outside. Checking to ensure that he was free of surveillance, Guilsher, while still in the vehicle, changed out of his western clothes and made himself look as much as possible like a typical, working-class Russian by putting on a Russian hat and working-class clothes, taking a heavy dose of garlic, and splashing some vodka on himself. Guilsher then left his vehicle and proceeded on foot and by local public transportation to a public phone booth, where he called the agent out for a meeting at a prearranged site.

The periodically heavy KGB surveillance on various case officers, often without any apparent logic, did, however, force the CIA to become more creative in its personal-meeting tradecraft. A new countersurveillance technique that was used for this operation involved what was called a "Jack-in-the-Box" (JIB). A JIB (a popup device made to look like the upper half of a person) allowed a case officer to make a meeting with an agent even while under vehicular surveillance.

Typically, a JIB would be smuggled into a car disguised as a large package or the like. Subsequently Tolkachev's case officer and other station personnel would set out in the car many hours before a planned meeting with the agent. Following a preplanned route, the driver at some point would make a series of turns designed to provide a brief period when the trailing surveillance car would lose sight of the car containing the case officer and other CIA personnel. After one of these turns, Tolkachev's case officer would jump from the slowly moving vehicle, at which time the driver would activate the JIB. The JIB would give the appearance to any trailing surveillance team of being the missing case officer. The car would then continue its route, eventually arriving at a given destination, usually the home of one of the other CIA personnel in the car. The JIB, again concealed in a large package, would then be removed from the car.

One of Tolkachev's former case officers recalls that Tolkachev would periodically brainstorm on the subject, suggesting wildly improbable scenarios, such as having the CIA fly a specially made light aircraft into a rural area of the Soviet Union, where Tolkachev and his family could be picked up. When discussing that particular possibility, he noted that the only problem might be that such an aircraft designed to evade Soviet aircraft detection systems might have trouble accommodating his wife, due to her weight!

(via Schneier) ¶ cia cold war espionage kgb russia tradecraft 1 Share

Rolling Stone is set to publish Hunter S. Thompson's final written words, written several days before his suicide:

"No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun -- for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax -- This won't hurt."

(via bOING bOING) ¶ death hunter s. thompson rolling stone suicide 0 Share

A children's story for the modern age: I'm a Cloud Factory!, By Ayn Rand A Smokestack.

I make all kinds of clouds--in all kinds of colors! Sometimes, I make white ones. Sometimes, they're gray. Sometimes, they're as brown as the grass or the trees. And sometimes, they're as green as the river.

I have other friends, too. Like the little birds. I love to watch them swoop and soar. They are so beautiful and graceful, and they bring me great joy. I'm so full of joy! I can barely hold it in! So I give them something beautiful back. Just as they approach, I pop out a great big pink cloud!

And when the birds fly straight into the cloud, they do a "rain dance" down... down... down... to the ground. Like a hundred little feathered raindrops!

¶ ayn rand environment humour the onion 1 Share

The top 100 indiepop albums, according to an Italian website. The descriptions are in Italian, though the choices look mostly quite sound. The top 3 are C86, one of the Sarah Records compilations and Belle & Sebastian's If You're Feeling Sinister, which sets the tone and gives an idea of the aesthetic involved. The rest doesn't disappoint: The Jesus and Mary Chain's Psychocandy is #11, #13 and #14 are Orange Juice and The Pastels, Japanese pop band 800 Cherries have #21, The Hummingbirds' loveBuzz takes #55 (and I didn't think anyone outside of Australia had heard of them; perhaps the next one of these that comes out will name-check Clag or Mid-State Orange), meanwhile Lush's Split has #67, Slowdive get #89 (along with what looks like an arch comment about the decline and fall of Creation), and The Radio Dept.'s Lesser Matters comes in at #83.

(via xrrf) ¶ belle & sebastian c86 indiepop lush orange juice sarah records slowdive the hummingbirds the pastels the radio dept. 2 Share

Recently discovered courtesy of 3RRR's International Pop Underground: this gem.

¶ albums french japanese music orientalism psychedelic rock rrr yamasuki 0 Share

Guerilla Drive-Ins are a cross between a drive-in cinema revival, illegal raves and Make-style improvisational techno-larrikinism. Some people in Santa Cruz are reviving the mid-20^th-century American custom of drive-in movies, only this time reclaiming public space using a car fitted with a video projector, a FM transmitter and a movie; those in the know are notified in advance by email.

Films scheduled include cult classics (Dawn Of The Dead, Harold and Maude, Delicatessen) and worthy documentaries and dramas (The Take, The Yes Men, City Of God). It's an interesting idea, though, IMHO, it would have been more ideologically sound if they used bicycles instead of cars.

(via gizmodo) ¶ diy détournement film larrikinism public space punk 0 Share

A (possibly somewhat biased) social history of drinking in England reveals that talk of a pathology of "binge drinking" is more the product of Victorian squeamishness and snobbery than anything else:

In fact we are rather poor drinkers compared with our ancestors. Queen Elizabeth I was renowned for drinking ale stronger than any of her courtiers could take. During her reign, British beers were so popular abroad that exports were only permitted if sufficient quantities of wood to replace the casks used was imported. Elizabethan brewers were often urged to reduce the formidable strengths of their beers, one of which, Pharaoh, was so named because it "would not let the people go". James took a similar line, only to be told that the brewers would be more minded to follow his advice were he rather more prompt in settling his bills.

Expressions like "binge drinking" tell us less about our present drinking habits than they do about the neo-Puritan climate we live in. In truth the drinking habits of many have not changed greatly, but they are seen from the standpoint of a society that does not recognise that the values and attitudes of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras were the exception rather than the rule.

Meanwhile, England's drinking problems come not from an excess love for beer, but ultimately from its displacement by things such as gin.

Gin forced people to realise for the first time that it was possible to make intoxicating beverages that were not sustaining and wholesome, and from then it was but a short step to demonising alcohol in all its guises, to separate the middle and upper classes from their previous habits and haunts, and to allow them to convince themselves that their domestic consumption of wine and gin was somehow superior. This attitude prevails today, principally perpetuated by newspapers.

The author, former secretary general of the Society of Independent Brewers, concludes to say that getting smashed on good English ale can be a fine thing indeed:

If journalists would stop writing hysterical leaders about "24-hour drinking" and turn their hands instead to thoughtful drinks page features about the merits of our national drink, that would be useful in improving debate and reconnecting us with our forgotten history. Drunkenness is an attribute of those who do not appreciate what they are consuming, not of those who do.

¶ alcohol beer culture drugs england gin history society uk 0 Share

Having lived in London for a little over a year, and having access to the ubiquitous British broadband internet, Your Humble Narrator has recently been experimenting with tuning into 3RRR (an independent radio station in Melbourne), by means of its internet streaming facilities. I now have the means to more or less automatically spool various programmes to hard disk to listen to at a later time; technical details will be published here once the bugs are known to have been ironed out.

This evening, I listened to the most recent Local And/Or General, a weekly 2-hour showcase of new independent/unsigned/live music from Melbourne, for the first time since leaving Melbourne. It's good to hear some good Melbourne bands again. And there were some good things there.

In particular, they played two songs and an interview by a new project named Holidays On Ice, which sounded really good. Holidays On Ice are a project involving numerous Australian musicians, including Angie Hart of Frente!/Splendid and members of a few other bands. They have a new album titled Playing Boyfriends and Girlfriends, which sounds somewhere between Yo La Tengo and Saint Etienne, with bits of Stereolab and Architecture In Helsinki in the mixture as well. I'm probably going to order a copy.

¶ angie hart holidays on ice melbourne music rrr 9 Share

Hard Pop artist Talkshow Boy has released his most recent album in MP3 format, under a Creative Commons license. Watch Me As I Perform My Own Tracheotomy was recorded in 2004 and languished in record-label funding limbo for a while; it features some great tunes including Chiming The Descant Like I'm Thirteen Again, Freaky Teen Fashion - Time For A Makeover! and OMG I <3 LiveJournal (And My LiveJournal <3s Me). Those who liked Ice Police (which is may also be downloaded from here) and fans of the likes of Le Tigre, Kid606 and 14 Year Old Girls may like this.

¶ indie mp3s music talkshow boy 1 Share

A writer has worked out the 25 unwritten rules of advertising:

1. Men are obsessed with sex but will forego sex in order to watch football or drink beer.

2. Women are locked in a constant battle with their weight/body shape/hairstyle.

13. Both men and women find driving deeply pleasurable, never boring or stressful.

14. Men are inherently lazy/slobbish; women are the reverse.

15. Chocolate, however, will cause women to immediately fall into the languor of the opium eater.

19. Professional people have strangely trivial preoccupations, e.g. a female barrister who is morbidly obsessed with finding a healthy snack bar.

23. Women never merely hop in and out of the shower, instead preferring to act out some sort of soapy Dance of the Seven Veils.

¶ advertising culture stereotypes 0 Share

The Blu-Ray disc format, due to replace DVD, will take the War On Unauthorised Use to a draconian new level:

On top of that, consumers should expect punishment for tinkering with their Blu-ray players, as many have done with current DVD players, for instance to remove regional coding. The new, Internet-connected and secure players will report any "hack" and the device can be disabled remotely.

(via Make) ¶ architectures of control blu-ray copyfight privacy surveillance 0 Share

The residents of the Austrian village of Fucking are sick of English speakers finding treating their village as a joke (and stealing their road signs); however, the Daily Telegraph's writers obviously aren't:

"Let's just say there are plans in place to deal with this," the Kommandant warned darkly. "What they are, I am not at liberty to disclose, but we will not stand for the F---ing signs being removed. It may be very amusing for you British, but F---ing is simply F---ing to us. What is this big F---ing joke? It is puerile."

"The Germans all want to see the Mozart house in Salzburg. Italians and Russians always celebrate New Year here. Every American seems to care only about The Sound of Music (filmed around Salzburg in 1965). The occasional Japanese wants to see Hitler's birthplace in Braunau. But for the British, it's all about F---ing."

"Yet still there is this obsession with F---ing. Just this morning I had to tell an English lady who stopped by that there were no F---ing postcards."

His predecessor, Siegfried Hauppl, was equally dismissive when he was interrupted playing a game of Skat. "I am no longer the mayor so this F---ing problem is nothing to do with me," he growled, turning his back and studying his cards.

"The older people don't like being laughed at by some of the younger ones from other villages, but we are proud of our beautiful F---ing."

¶ austria fuck fucking geography language unintentionally hilarious 0 Share

A number of video game designers were posed the question of how to design games for grandmothers. Here is Keita Takahashi (of Katamari Damacy fame)'s answer:

He introduced his presentation, "I thought really hard about this one, I haven't thought this hard since I was coming up with the idea for Katamari Damacy. I decided that I wanted to get old ladies playing games and bring a little of the sunshine that they end up losing when they stay indoors all the time back into their lives." The focus of his talk began with the controller, he explained that current hardware designs are inorganic and difficult to understand. He introduced the design of his new controller specifically tailored for the Granny, and a picture of a cat appeared on the screen to great amusement. He explained, "the shape of the cat and the heat waves that it gives out really gets the old ladies going as they get quite cold. They like the cat shape. The cat is designed to be rested on the old ladies knees." The cat controller was met with rapture from the audience as Takahashi went on to explain the gameplay concept.

The game would begin with the family suggesting to Granny that she wear the cat because, for example, her knees looked cold. Embedded in the cat is the capability for it to communicate wirelessly with other cat controllers (on other Grannies' knees) in the neighborhood. When the cat connects to another one, "..the onboard a.i. kicks in." This causes the cat to speak, paraphrased as "meow, meow, grandma, meow". Takahashi explains that the family are required to participate in the game by pretending that they haven't heard anything, because of this--Grandma begins to build the perception that she is able to communicate directly with the cat.

As the dialogue with the cat develops, it suggests that Granny make some soup -- but faster than the other granny down the street who has also received the instruction. A competitive element emerges and gradually the cat suggests more and more group activities that Grandma might engage in, culminating in trips to the park. "..So they all go outside and eventually they meet other old ladies with cats and they all become friends."

(via bOING bOING) ¶ keita takahashi social software videogaming 1 Share

ReBirth, the 303/808/909 emulator/music production tool/toy of the late 1990s, is now free (as in beer). Propellerheads have put ISO images of it, as well as demo songs and mods (i.e., skin/sample packs), up for downloading. The software itself is unmodified; it apparently doesn't work with OSX, it still checks for the CD every time it starts (a useless exercise in "copy protection" when the CD is a burnable image), and even shows the old EULA which prohibits use on multiple machines (though the web site tells you that the new download license overrides that).

What would be cool would be if Propellerheads released the source code. They wouldn't lose any competitive advantage by doing so, and would stand to gain good will, while hackers with more time on their hands than Propellerheads would be able to update it (from getting it to run on OSX to porting it to new platforms, from Linux to hacked PSPs). And, of course, getting rid of the pointless CD check on startup.

Incidentally, the ISO image for the PC version isn't a pure ISO9660 image but has a large quantity of 0s at the start. If burning it with cdrecord (i.e., under Linux), you will need to first strip the nulls off with something like:
dd if=rebirth_pc_installation.iso of=rebirth.iso bs=4096 skip=75

There have since been more 303 emulators; there's a commercial VST/AU plugin here which is said to be good. And then there's Muon's Tau, a free-as-in-beer 303-esque softsynth. In the open-source world, there is a rather rudimentary open-source attempt at 303 emulation, written by Your Humble Narrator a few years ago, here (it runs on Linux and uses Curses).

(via MusicThing) ¶ computer music copy protection propellerheads rebirth roland software tb-303 tr-808 tr-909 0 Share

Scientists have developed mice which can regrow lost limbs or organs (or, in fact, everything other than brains).

Professor Heber-Katz made her discovery when she noticed the identification holes that scientists punch in the ears of experimental mice healed without any signs of scarring in the animals at her laboratory.

In one case the mice had their toes amputated -- but the digits grew back, complete with joints. In another test some of the tail was cut off, and this also regenerated. Then the researchers used a cryoprobe to freeze parts of the animals' hearts, and watched them grow back again. A similar phenomenon was observed when the optic nerve was severed and the liver partially destroyed.

¶ biology mice science 0 Share

And the first cracks appear in the Melbourne road-and-rail tunnel, with its creator saying that a tunnel would be a bad idea, and he only put it in because a town hall officer demanded it. It also emerges that such a tunnel would have to be funded by private investors, who would recoup funding through tolls, and, as such, would be unlikely to include public transport. So, if it goes ahead, it looks like being an expensive road-only tunnel to appease key outer-suburban voters until cheap oil runs out and we're all screwed.

¶ melbourne public transport urban planning 0 Share

In the wake of the Hurricane Katrina disaster, a list of charities and their ideological affiliations; in particular, which charities are fronts for fundamentalist religious groups (predominantly Dominionist Christians, as this is a US-specific list), will use money donated for evangelism or pushing a political or theological agenda, or have troubling denominational biases or discriminatory practices (such as, for example, the Salvation Army).

(via kmusser) ¶ charities hurricane katrina politics religion religiots usa 0 Share

Things are getting really bad in New Orleans: more than 80% of the city is underwater, thousands are believed dead, and reports now say that New Orleans is to be abandoned. Armed looters are roaming the streets, and if these reports are anything to go by, a lot of them are New Orleans police gone rogue. Meanwhile, attempts to evacuate stranded refugees have been disrupted when shots were fired at rescue helicopters, presumably by post-apocalyptic warlords defending their turf.

And it emerges that money intended for raising New Orleans' flood defences was diverted to the Iraq war.

¶ hurricane katrina new orleans usa 0 Share

Various takes on "Home Taping Is Killing Music" seen recently:

(via rhodri) ¶ copyfight fuck parody the recording industry 0 Share

Last night, Your Humble Narrator went to Bush Hall to see Pipas and The Clientele.

Pipas were lovely as usual; it was mostly a guitar-based set (with two guitars), though with a few canned backings on an iPod. They did old and new songs, including some from their Bitter Club EP. (For those who haven't seen them, they're a melodious indie-pop duo, are signed to US twee/indiepop label Matinee, have played in Scandinavia a fair bit and Lupe is going out with one of the Lucksmiths, which should give you an idea of where they're coming from.)

The Clientele played, appropriately, in a darkened room, with video projected over them (several iterations of an art film they did the music for, with lots of footage of sunlight in water, English countryside and such, as well as Chris Marker's La Jetée). They mostly did songs from their new album which has just been released; they sounded much like their previous two albums, if perhaps a bit more animated in places. And Alasdair's vocals sound every bit as floaty live as they do on record. At one stage, Lupe joined them on stage and read out a spoken-word piece about a photograph from 1982, as they played.

As one would expect, where was a good number of international-indiepop-underground coolsie types in the audience, with their bowl haircuts, black-framed glasses and button badges; in their late 20s and 30s, the audience for these sorts of gigs is half a generation older than today's post-post-ironic electro/new-new-wave/kill-the-whiteness-inside/disco-rock kids, and the milieu around this sort of scene seems, in some ways, to hearken back to an earlier age of indiepop, when one was more likely to encounter the adjective "summery" than "angular" in record reviews, understated pop songs with wet lyrics were an authentic reaction against the macho rockism of the "alternative" mainstream rather than part of the Coldplay/Keane AOR mainstream, the kids hadn't yet gotten into hip-hop, cocaine or trucker hats, and if you wanted to make music in your bedroom, you used guitars, Casio keyboards and a four-track, rather than a laptop. Or something.

That world seems to have since superseded by punk disco, ironic chav, the New Rockism, the NME garage rock revival, the Carling New Wave, spending hundreds on brand-name fashion, and relying on one's hipster knowingness as a free get-out-of-jail card, good for all crimes of unenlightenment from casual racism to meretricious consumerism. Or not quite; the mercenary mainstream was always there, and there is also always an underground; it's just easier to see yesterday's underground than today's. Partly because yesterday's underground gets recycled into, or referenced by, today's mainstream: the UK indie explosion of the 1980s gave us Britpop gave us Robbie Williams, XTC begat the Kaiser Chiefs, The Little Band scene gave us JJJ grunge gave us Killing Heidi, and such. Meanwhile, something new is always forming on the margins; and when the margins are strip-mined to death by corporate cool-hunters, something new forms off the map.

¶ fashion gigs indie kids indiepop personal pipas style the clientele 0 Share

As expected, America's religiots are making hay of Hurricane Katrina. A "pro-life" group claims that the hurricane is God's wrath on America for allowing abortion, taking as their proof the fact that the hurricane looked vaguely foetus-like in some satellite images. And an evangelical Christian group is claiming that God sent the hurricane to stop a gay festival due to take place in New Orleans. Meanwhile, holy man Rev. Fred Phelps has his predictable hate-on over recent events; you can almost feel the spittle flying from the screen as he calls the faithful to pray for more dead bodies floating on the santorum-rancid waters of New Orleans, not to mention for US soldiers to be killed in Iraq because America is an "evil fag nation".

Soon, I imagine, statements will appear on at least two Islamist websites from hitherto-unknown al-Qaeda franchises claiming responsibility for this daring strike into the very heart of the Zionist-Crusader Infidel.

(via chuck_lw) ¶ abortion gay hate religiots usa 5 Share