The Null Device
2002/1/6
The latest hobby for the obsessive: Making paper models of Macintosh computers; more "insanely great" than spotting trains:
"To make sure that Caitlin grew up with the right priorities, I created huge padded rainbow apples, the early Apple logo, to go at each end of her cot," she said. "My Mac is not a tool," Dragon Tongue said. "It is a lifestyle, a friend, a place, a home, sometimes a pain, never a 'thing.'"
(Apparently this article will be adapted into a book about the fanatical devotion Maccies have to their computers and the Apple brand; which should be amusing to read, in much the same way that Trekkies was amusing to watch.)
How to disappear completely: Filipo Falcone, 80, of Prince Rupert, in the north of Canada, was recently found dead in his home by burglars. It is estimated that he had been dead for nine months before anybody noticed:
"His pension cheques just kept coming and were deposited directly into his bank account and bills like his Hydro were paid by direct debit."
The time of death was estimated from the date of disconnection of the phone service; the post office stopped delivering mail to Falcone after concluding that he had moved overseas, as he said he might do.
"You can have all the programs in the world, but if people keep saying, "Keep away, keep away," there is not much you can do."
(via rotten.com)
The story of how Afghanistan's artists and curators hid artworks and films from the Taliban's largely illiterate morality police out to destroy them. Well, they saved some of them, at least... (via Unknown News)
No, not a sequel to Sexchart: The Geek Hierarchy, from Brunching Shuttlecocks, showing who considers themselves less geeky than whom. (In this case, "geeky" being used in the pejorative sense, and being roughly synonymous with "pathetic".) Published science fiction authors are at the top, and, unsurprisingly, "erotic furries" are near the very nadir. (via Reenhead)
An amusing article about the history of band naming (written by a chap from Monash University, too):
After about a decade of "definite article-noun" - a period that produced much of what has become the rock canon - there were signs in the late '60s that the genre was getting stale. We can point to two developments - first, the definite article was becoming increasingly less definite about what it was specifying (The Band, The Groop, The Who); second, it was beginning to specify particularly wacky things (The Velvet Underground, The Electric Prunes). These developments are partly attributable to the interesting interface that existed at the time between English language use and widespread recreational substance use.