The Null Device
2006/5/12
For those of you who read Rip It Up And Start Again, Simon Reynolds' excellent history of the explosion of musical creativity in the wake of punk and wished that there was a companion CD with some of the artists and tracks mentioned in it, there is now:
01 The Fall - "Fiery Jack"There's only one CD there, so a lot of stuff had to be omitted. However, it does look like an interesting collection of non-obvious songs, rather than a compilation of the key bands' signature hits. There's an amazon.co.uk page here.
02 Devo - "Praying Hands"
03 Pulsallama - "The Devil Lives in My Husband's Body"
04 Cabaret Voltaire - "Sluggin' for Jesus Part 1"
05 Josef K - "Sense of Guilt"
06 Scritti Politti - "PAs"
07 The Slits - "Spend Spend Spend"
08 Fatal Microbes - "Violence Grows"
09 Robert Wyatt - "Grass"
10 Siouxsie & the Banshees - "Slowdive"
11 The Raincoats - "Only Loved at Night"
12 Young Marble Giants - "Choci Loni"
13 The Human League - "Dancevision"
14 Thomas Leer - "Tight as a Drum"
15 The Associates - "White Car in Germany"
16 The B-52s - "Give Me Back My Man"
17 John Cooper Clarke - "Beasley Street"
18 The Specials - "Friday Night, Saturday Morning"
19 Heaven 17 - "I'm Your Money"
20 The Blue Orchids - "Dumb Magician"
A US television station blows the lid off "leetspeak", and the paedophilic menace lurking behind its innocent-sounding acronyms:
"LOL" for "laughing out loud" and "TTYL" for "talk to ya later" sound innocent enough, but if you look behind some other acronyms, there could be something sinister.
Apparently the instruction to get one's pants off is so common in the seamy teenage underworld of online chat that there's a four-letter acronym for it.
- "KPC" means "keeping parents clueless."
- "POS" means "parent over the shoulder"
- "GYPO" means "get your pants off."
- "TDTM" means "talk dirty to me"
The article also includes links to helpful websites with names like "Teen Angels" and "Parents' Edge", which specialise in listing the telltale signs your children may be being preyed on by satanists paedophiles via Dungeons & Dragons online chatrooms.
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Britain's High Court has ruled that the government acted unlawfully when it expelled the inhabitants of the Chagos Islands to make way for the US base in Diego Garcia; the court also struck down a decision, made under the Royal Prerogative, preventing the islanders from returning:
"The suggestion that a minister can, through the means of an order in council, exile a whole population from a British overseas territory and claim that he is doing so for the 'peace, order and good government' of the territory is, to us, repugnant," the judges said. "The defendant's approach to this case involves much clanking of the 'chains of the ghosts of the past'."
"The British government has been defeated in its attempt to abolish the right of abode of the islanders after first deporting them in secret 30 years ago," said Richard Gifford, the lawyer representing the islanders. "The story of their forced removal, their sufferings in exile and their desperate struggle to return are described in detail in the judgment. The responsibility of our present government for victimising its own citizens and its subservience to the demands of a foreign power are all too obvious."
Mr Bancoult, who was displaced as a child, said: "Although we are a small people, we always had faith in our struggle. What the UK has done to us is unlawful and our aim is to return as soon as possible. We will look for help from everyone to go back. We had been living there for many generations and we now have the right to return to our birthplace. I personally think that the Queen should apologise."The Foreign and Commonwealth Office has 28 days to appeal.
In his blog entry today, Momus complains about the declining quality of Japanese porn, thanks to the tendency of the girls to have their eyes surgically rounded:
Japanese women -- at least as they appear in the Japanese pop media -- are turning into bug-eyed monsters. I first noticed it in pop and porn stars; these days, the free movies page of a Japanese porn site like CPZ is a freak show of Photoshopped, fish-eyed and scalpelled eyes mooning at the visitor. These girls no longer look like real people, so they're no longer sexy.Momus goes on to discuss whether this phenomenon is a desire to emulate Caucasian ideals of beauty (he argues it is not). And in the comments, an anonymous poster cites an interesting factoid about another Japanese cultural phenomenon that seems to have been adopted from the West but wasn't:
The Japanese attachment to baseball has nothing to do with the West, either: if you look back into Japanese fuedal history, it was a popular sport for shoguns to bat around the severed heads of defeated leaders with wooden sticks and matching uniforms.