The Null Device
2001/4/20
Separation of Church and State: Canmore, Alberta is too small to support a separate Catholic school, so Catholic students have to go to the secular public school. Now some Catholic-education advocates have come up with an ingenious solution: build a wall through the school, dividing it into secular and Catholic sections. The Christ the Redeemer Catholic Board insists that there be no physical connection between the two groups of students, presumably to quarantine Catholic students from dangerous secular memes during their formative years.
Well, I finally got my office at work. Now that I have a space that is my own, I have set up a radio, and tuned it to 3RRR. I'm listening to Far and Wide for the first time in months; some observations: (a) Depeche Mode are starting to sound like Radiohead; tempering their 1990s antidepressant guitar-ballad sound with some contemporary-electronica beats and bleeps. (b) Radiohead's new album, Amnesiac, won't be the alt-rock return to form expected, but more like "Kid A on acid". (c) the new New Order track, "Crystal", sounds pretty much as you'd expect a New Order track to sound; somewhere between Barney's Electronic project and something from the time of Low-Life or so.
Imagine that you're an aging folk-pop singer, in need of a liver transplant but unable to afford one. What do you do? Well, you could always hire out your 20-year-old girlfriend to an interested millionaire.
A piece interviewing Mark Mothersbaugh, former member of Devo, SubGenius minister, and film-score composer:
To resolve some of the contradictions between his earlier band and his current line of work, Mothersbaugh said that for a while he would slip subversive messages into his advertising music. He claimed to have inserted a subliminal voice saying ``sugar will rot your teeth'' into a commercial for Gummi Savers. He said he also added ``avoid conspicuous consumption'' to a campaign for BMW and ``biology is destiny'' to a cosmetics commercial.
(He's now making ring tones for Nokia?)
George Hersee, a former engineer at the BBC, passed away last week. You probably haven't heard of him, but he was responsible for Test Card F, the (in)famous TV test pattern with the little girl playing noughts and crosses with a sinister-looking toy clown. The model on the card was his daughter Carole, whose photo he used for testing the calibration of skin tones. The BBC decided to keep it, adult fashions tending to date too rapidly (especially in the Swingin' Sixties). Carole, now grown up with two kids, soon grew sick of her 15 minutes (or, more precisely, 70,000 hours) of fame, and of people constantly asking her about the test card.
What do you do if you live in America (where they don't have such Communistic schemes as state-funded medical care), are poor and need medical treatment? get yourself arrested, that's what.
Causey, 57, called the FBI and told them he was about to rob the post office in West Monroe, La. At the post office, he handed a note to a teller demanding money, then left empty-handed and sat in his car until officers arrested him.
(via Unknown News)