The Null Device
2001/2/6
Signs of the blogocalypse: Looks like Herbert Kornfeld's younger brother now has a weblog. It reminds me of the GLOCK 3 incident a few years ago. A young aspiring prankster, inspired by some of Joey Skaggs' media pranks, decided to create an Internet-based "gang" named GLOCK 3, playing on paranoia about gangs in school. (This was back in 1996; gangs were the equivalent of gun-wielding goths back then.) Of course, one joiner took the while thing to extremes...
Anyway, 'Our-J' is "the realest blogger alive", who "tells it like it is", and "just fucked your bitch" too, and he's preparing for "blogger war". I'll bet the A-list are quaking with terror.
The 1967 film of Joyce's Ulysses -- the only one ever made in the English language -- has finally been approved for screening in Ireland, a country with a history of puritanical censorship and social repressiveness:.
The fortunes of Strick's film, which has finally been passed for release in Ireland with a 15 certificate, are a measure of the enormous distance that Ireland has travelled in the past 30 years from what Brian Moore called "a nation of masturbators under priestly instruction".
Strick finally returned to Ireland last year, to direct a bawdy comedy by Aristophanes in Cork, and says he found the country "transformed". He decided it was time to resubmit Ulysses. Women he had encountered in pre-Mary Robinson Ireland were "fearful", he says. "When I returned I saw that they were barristers and doctors."
I wonder how Ireland's current censorship regime compares with Howard-era Australia's increasingly draconian one.
Ecstasy will be approved for medical use in five years in the U.S. Or that's what some, who are pushing to have it approved by the FDA for the treatment of terminally ill patients, say. Mind you, whether the DEA or the White House will take that lying down is another matter.