The Null Device

2004/11/20

The existence of a vast network of secret tunnels and bunkers beneath the Serbian capital of Belgrade has recently emerged after two soldiers guarding an entrance to the complex had been shot dead in mysterious circumstances. The complex was built by Communist strongman Josip Broz Tito, and was designed to resist nuclear attack (presumed to come from Stalin's USSR, with which Yugoslavia had broken off ties); up until recently, its existence was so secret that even NATO military planners didn't know about it (though Saddam Hussein might have, as he hired the construction firms involved to build a similar bunker near Tikrit). It is suspected that fugitive Bosnian Serb war criminals have been sheltered in the tunnels. Meanwhile, local civilians are calling for it to be turned into a tourist attraction.

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Don't throw away your old, featureless mobile brick phone: sell it to a hipster at an over-inflated price.

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From a Graun article on drinking culture in Britain, the following tidbits:

The timelessness of our desire to get drunk has led anthropologists such as Kate Fox, director of the Social Issues Research Centre in Oxford, to speculate about the British character. She concluded that we are all suffering from a "congenital sociability disorder", a disease whose symptoms are akin to a kind of autism combined with agoraphobia. In plain talk, the British are uniquely buttoned up and starched stiff. Animal watcher Desmond Morris says that if we were monkeys we would be picking imaginary fleas out of each other's fur, in an act of "social grooming", a pretext for prolonging social encounters. Instead we have for centuries propped up the bar.
A national characteristic has been identified in numerous scientific trials. In one, British volunteers were plied with drinks, all purporting to be alcohol, half of which were placebos. Everyone became equally loud, crude and garrulous, the technically sober behaving identically to the genuinely drunk. Similar tests carried out on volunteers from Mediterranean countries found no such associations. Scientists concluded that British people invested alcohol with "magical disinhibiting powers".

I wonder how this experiment would have run in Australia.

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According to recent research from Bush's America, pornography is not communication but a drug; the technical term for this, according to the California Protective Parents Association, is "erototoxin". The implications of this are that material that induces an erotic response may not be protected under the First Amendment, but may instead come under the jurisdiction of the War On Drugs.

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