antiminke

Just when you were worried about how stupid David Beckham is... Dubya can't even stay on his pushbike.

"Mr Bush was shouting "Thanks, you guys, for coming" when he lost control and collided with an officer". (BBC)

"Europe's "Little Ice Age" may have been triggered by the 14th Century Black Death plague, according to a new study." (BBC)

I really hope this is a joke:

"England football captain David Beckham confessed he is befuddled by his six-year-old son Brooklyn's maths homework.
...
"I find that if I follow a routine ... it gets to the stage where you are thinking, 'Right, was it the left side ... the left boot I put on first, or the right side?'

"There are so many things that can go through your mind."" (Age)

I've been typing up some of my travel writing, and it's inspired me to try and get in contact with hostelworld.com about the Paradise Hotel and Hostel/brothel I accidentally stayed in in Riga. I really should get around to scanning in the 'massage menus'.

"At the time I couldn't get the contact form on your website to work but
I'd like to make a complaint about the Paradise Hotel and Hostel.

I had a two night booking for a single room with private bathroom there,
but I only stayed one night as not only were there no single rooms with
private bathrooms available, but somewhat more importantly, the place is
basically a brothel. The only private bathrooms are in the "massage
rooms" and it looks like they prefer to rent them out by the hour.

There's a 24 hour bar downstairs, with a "free drink with a beautiful
woman" if you bring in their brochure, and a 24 "erotic massage" saloon."

This Bono-led Red campaign worries me.

He's hooked up with brands like Converse (owned by Nike) and GAP (of sweatshop fame) to produce a few limited edition token items, some of the profits from which go to 'fight poverty in Africa'.

So the companies get to spruce up their image without impacting the vast percentage of their profits, and Bono gets to look like a saint, again. Seems a small price to pay for priceless positive spin that counters their 'evil, exploitative multinational' image.

Is it me or is watching big business co-opt and subvert the ethical and fair trade movements incredibly depressing?

If you give the music map site the name of an act you like, it will show you acts also liked by people who like the first name.

While not as good/comprehensive as Pandora or last.fm, the interface is easy to use and it can throw up some nice connections and lead you down some interesting musical paths.

It's been interesting reading the reactions to Kerry Packer's memorial service:

"So how did we come to the conclusion that a life spent turning an inherited fortune into an astronomically bigger one is a life well lived? We didn't. Rather, as Orwell showed in 1984, those who control the means of communication control the language itself, and can assert, and have a large enough number of people actually believe, that freedom is slavery, war is peace, or that a life spent gorging oneself, squandering amounts on blackjack tables that could help solve, say, the global malaria epidemic, avoiding one's civic duties and speaking to everybody with barely concealed contempt, is a life of generosity and grace.
...
Beazley and Hawke are both Rhodes scholars. It's more likely they know that their party now stands for nothing, and think it's better to be present at the memorial service of a devout enemy of working people (despite Packer's love of sport, pies and swear words), than risk offending the owners of a vast media conglomerate whose "opinions" hold more sway over elections than any well-formulated policy.

The memorial service was broadcast without advertisements. Thus viewers could experience, for once, what it is like to watch a program on Channel Nine for an hour without fools screaming at them for 15 minutes to buy things. The only people who protested against this disgraceful, taxpayer-funded event - four members of the noble Kerry Packer dis-memorial society - were arrested." (Age)

I was amazed to read of the arrests. The BBC said: "Six people were arrested outside the Opera House, for protesting against the memorial service because it was funded by taxpayers' money." Arrested? Charged with what? Don't they have the right to protest?

Sometimes it feels like the Australia I left five years ago was a completely different Australia.

I've been struggling a little with my intention of reducing the number of flights I make each year, but this unintentionally ironic sales email from EasyJet helped:

"Snow time like the present...
Catch the white stuff before it melts!"

I'm sure they didn't mean to make an unintentional reference to global warming, but it does remind me of these Greenpeace Olympics videos about the impact of climate change on the Winter Olympics.

"A fairly nondescript piece of stone could have an impact on the future of the Parthenon Marbles dispute. Last month Heidelberg University decided to return its small fragment of the frieze to Greece." (Art Newspaper). I wonder if the British Museum is watching.

"A Nigerian court has ordered oil giant Shell's local operation to pay $1.5bn to the Ijaw people of the Delta region.
The Ijaw have been fighting since 2000 for compensation for environmental degradation in the oil-rich region." (BBC)

I wonder if that'll set a precedent.

This quote from an article about Britain's plans to switch to metric road signs made me laugh: "The UKMA says conversion of road signs was originally intended as part of metrification when it started in 1965 and should have been completed by 1973.

But it was put on hold in 1970 and never restarted." (BBC)

I haven't yet tested whatshouldireadnext.com but I hold out great hopes for it.

I wish I'd had this information when I arrived in the UK: TNT's letter of the week was all about how to get an NI number. It took me three years to get a National Insurance number in the end.

"A new search engine for programmers promises to alleviate that problem by making it easier to find and share code. That in turn could increase programmers' productivity and give a fresh boost to the open-source movement.

Krugle, which launches officially next month, indexes programming code and documentation from open-source repositories like SourceForge and includes corporate sites for programmers like the Sun Developer Network." (Wired)

"British workers are adding up to 14 days' unofficial holiday a year, emailing and browsing online. Other studies suggest this is a conservative estimate."

And also, "When the laws against sexual discrimination were being put in place the kind of things that people were doing was putting Playboy posters up or leaving magazines open in full view," she said. "Now it is electronic, so it is a little less obvious but it is no less offensive or difficult for women." (Age)

"In a recent study of 30 undergraduate students, researchers from the University of Chicago and New York University said the tone of an email message was only correctly interpreted 50 per cent of the time.
Psychologists Nicholas Epley and Justin Kruger paired the students off and gave each a list of 20 statements about general topics such as campus food and the weather and were asked to e-mail the statements to a partner introducing either a serious or sarcastic tone.

The senders of the messages expected their partners to correctly interpret their tone nearly 80 per cent of the time, but in fact they only scored just over 50 per cent, said the report in Wired.

Those attempting to interpret the message believed they had scored 90 per cent accuracy, according to the results which have been published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology." Age

"The Bush Administration has made an emergency request to the US Congress for a seven-fold increase in funding to mount a huge propaganda campaign against the Tehran Government.
...
Ms Rice told the Senate foreign affairs committee that Iranian leaders "have now crossed a point where they are in open defiance of the international community." Age

Gosh, imagine being in open defiance of the international community. So, nothing like this, then? UN human rights investigators have called for the immediate closure of the US detention camp at Guantanamo Bay.

I keep meaning to try this:

I probably shouldn't laugh, but ha ha!

"The Age's report on the greenhouse row, in which leading scientists assert they have been muzzled for trying to lay their science and their expert opinion before the public that funded them, is the latest development in an alarming trend in which our science is being taken away from us - because somebody deems we ought not to know of it.

This trend is pervasive in our scientific institutions today. For various reasons, including political influence, commercial influence, managerial pressure, institutional control, publisher influence, stakeholder pressure, national security and bureaucratic interference, scientific findings and opinion are increasingly withheld. The consequences could be grave, both for Australia and for science." (Age)

And a very belated post, a comment from the Turner Prize 2006 at Tate Britain: "My cat could draw better than this lot and I haven't even got one."

This article is practically tofu pr0n. Seven types of tofu, anyone?

Just another Friday night in (south) London:

This article on Radia Perlman as the 'Mother Of The Internet' starts with a situation familiar to lots of women in IT, but her work (and her perseverance) is really inspiring.

"Radia Perlman had a solution for an information routing problem. Unfortunately, no one was listening.

It was the mid-1970s, and Perlman was a software designer for computer network communication systems — and one of the few women in the field.
...
"At the end of the meeting, the organizers still called for a solution after I had just given them one, which really irked me," she said.
...
Perlman, now a distinguished engineer for Sun Microsystems specializing in network security, has helped speed up and protect data that move along computer network systems. Her spanning tree algorithm — software that helps direct information traffic on the Internet — earned her the nickname "Mother of the Internet.""

Sadly, this doesn't seem to be a joke:

Abortion will lead to Muslim nation: MP

"Australia could become a Muslim nation within 50 years because "we are aborting ourselves almost out of existence", a Government backbencher says." (SMH)

Even if it mattered that Australia became a 'Muslim nation', her argument doesn't make any sense.

I've just been reading the second verse of the British national anthem. I wonder if they'll ever use it again?

"O Lord our God arise,
Scatter her enemies
And make them fall;
Confound their politics,
Frustrate their knavish tricks,
On Thee our hopes we fix,
God save us all! "

Source: BBC

(Updated because I'd said English, not British)

"Archaeologists in Greece say they are examining the largest underground tomb ever found in the country." (BBC)

Saw Lady Vengeance tonight. It was beautifully styled, but it perhaps tried to do too much or needed a tighter edit because everyone I saw it with thought it was half an hour too long. The sometimes extreme violence reminded me of Audition.

Teddy girls: "A selection of over 30 of the photographs from this amazing shoot, the only known professional photo-documentation of early 1950’s Teddy Girls, most of which have never been published before."

Some belated reviews... on Tuesday I went to see one of the ""saint etienne present: popfiction" sessions at the Barbican with the fabulous Miss Jo. We saw "Three Minute Heroes" and "Ladies and Gentlemen...The Fabulous Stains".

"Three Minute Heroes" was interesting for its glimpse into life in the Midlands in the early 1980s, particularly how boring it was for teenagers. I always forget that most English people in London have also come from somewhere else, and I can see why they'd want to escape down to London. The scene set at what looked like an underage gig was almost like a social anthropology documentary - I'd forgotten how tribal it used to be. Compared to teenagers now, they seemed incredibly colourful and diverse. I'm not sure how it worked if you didn't have a group of your own, or if you were gay.

They say that anyone who saw "...The Fabulous Stains" the first time around formed a band, and I have been thinking about bass guitars lately so maybe it still works. Its tale of sudden, gimmick-led rise to fame, exploitation and even more sudden fall from grace should be shown to everyone who auditions for Pop Idol. It should probably also be shown to teenage girls, in the spirit of the Riot Grrls.

Last night I saw Beautiful Thing at the Sound Theatre. Written around the time Section 28 was introduced, it's already a period piece in some ways, but I bet there are still kids in council estates around the UK going through the same thing.

"A leading US digital rights campaign group has warned against using Google software which lets people organise and find information on their computers.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation said the latest version of Google Desktop posed a risk to privacy. " BBC

What's your nearest tube station really called?

Mr Abbott get your rosaries off my ovaries

"It's not the T-shirt that needs changing, it's the prime minister's attitude, which we are seeing increasingly is about bringing fundamentalist religious views into the parliament."

"Online reference site Wikipedia blames US Congress staff for partisan changes to a number of political biographies.

Computers traced to Capitol Hill removed unpalatable facts from articles on senators, while other entries were "vandalised", the site said." (BBC)

Looks like Google's China deal has taken effect:

Check out http://images.google.com/images?q=tiananmen versus http://images.google.cn/images?q=tiananmen

"Capitalism is not sustainable by its very nature. It is predicated on infinitely expanding markets, faster consumption and bigger production in a finite planet. And yet this ideological model remains the central organising principle of our lives, and as long as it continues to be so it will automatically undo (with its invisible hand) every single green initiative anybody cares to come up with." (Age)

"I will not talk during the film ... my mobile phone will most definitely be turned off ... In short I will be the perfect cinema patron. It's just that I will be wearing a wardrobe."

"Luxury car maker BMW has had its German website blacklisted by Google after it was caught trying to artificially boost its popularity ranking on the world's leading internet search engine." (Age)

"One of the leading lights of America's post-war feminist movement, Betty Friedan, has died at the age of 85." (BBC and SMH)

Happy Pride, Melbourne!

Via buggery.org: "The application form for an Australian passport is the latest official acknowledgment of the validity of same-sex relationships"

I really wish I could have been in Melbourne to see the Margaret Preston exhibition at the NGV.

I'll just have to make do with the exhibitions available in London instead and this education kit instead. The same page also lists some resources for one of my other favourite Australian artists, Grace Cossington Smith.

From the Orange prize site, but not necessarily this year: "to support this year's award, the Orange Prize for Fiction researched the UK's first ever living library of 50 contemporary 'essential reads'".

I've read 20 of the list, but some of them were so long ago I barely remember them. Perhaps that should be my challenge for this year, assuming I manage to read everything on the bookshelves in the flat.

It doesn't help that I went to the London Review Bookshop last night and bought The Secret River by Kate Grenville.