The Null Device
2000/7/8
Apparently there are only thirty-six dramatic situations, from which most or all stories derive. (via Found)
Decline of an institution: Today I met a friend at an old haunt of mine, the Salamander Café (now the Curry Café) in Northcote. As suggested earlier, the place is a shadow of its former self, with the funky decor and mismatched teacups replaced by uniform, upmarket tidiness. The clientéle also was more mainstream; not one bohemian or raver, but mostly middle-aged yuppie types.
And now for the crowning horror: they had Kenny G on the stereo. Whereas the old Salamander would play an eclectic range of very doovy music (I stumbled across a Not Drowning, Waving album there), the new establishment seems partial to vat-grown, soulless corporate-wallpaper pseudojazz, calculated scientifically to not offend bourgeois sensibilities.
This is not a good sign.
Thanks to an outfit named DotWap, Australians will soon be able to be online all the time from their Palm Vs, paying only for bytes sent/received. Or so The Register says.
These days it's so hard to please anyone; take, for example, recent Hollywood slaughterfest The Patriot. First the Brits got all uppity about being portrayed as the original Nazis (which, granted, is quite a leap from the usual "effete, cowardly, villainous aristocrat" stereotype), and now Black nationalist director Spike Lee (of Malcolm X fame) condemns it for, not unexpectedly, whitewashing the issue of slavery.
Who is the mysterious "Quova", and why are they attempting to scan the entire Internet with ICMP packets? As you can imagine, the penguinheads have some interesting conjectures.