The Null Device
2000/12/5
All these moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. This afternoon, I went to Monash University, the institution where I had spent 8 years (on and off), to pick up some things I had left there. This being the university holidays, it was almost deserted. It was a funny feeling, walking into a place I have been countless times before; thinking of all the nights I stayed back there, and all the people I had known there throughout the years and knowing that most of the people I knew there (from various times and milieus) have moved on, and all there is is a set of empty buildings at the end of an unreliable bus route.
Those valiant G-men of reason, CSICOP, have blown open another pseudo-scientific fraud: this time, Rupert Sheldrake's "psychic staring" experiments have been found to be inherently flawed and misleading. Shame on New Scientist for disseminating such rot to impressionable students!
Biological warfare in the news: First the dastardly French plot to run rabid foxes through the Channel Tunnel to spite perfidious Albion, and now the Israeli occupation authorities are allegedly dropping boars from helicopters to destroy Jordanian and Palestinian farms. Or so those wacky Marxists at indymedia.org say, at least. (thanks, Mitch)
A (unfortunately incomplete) page dedicated to the Doug Anthony Allstars, a brilliant (and long-defunct) comedy trio. (Was their song Sadfuckers of the World a Smiths parody?)
Some enterprising artists have created a fictionalised comic book biography of outsider artist Henry Darger. Should be interesting. (via Psychoceramics)
A map of the London Underground with station names replaced by those of famous people (or people famous in 1992, at least) is being auctioned, and is expected to go for as much as £15,000. Wouldn't it make for an interesting conversation piece for your Mornington Crescent parties?
Another dodgy Hollywood remake of a non-US film is in the works, this time transforming the Sophie Lee outer-suburban comedy The Castle into something entirely different. Um, I don't know about this...