Creepy old ads is exactly that, with scary zombie kids, prompt control of senile agitation, scary meat ads and the lovely 'Mabel is unstable'.
June is Goat Trauma Awareness Month!
I especially recommend the posters.
"Civil unions between male couples existed around 600 years ago in medieval Europe, a historian now says.
Historical evidence, including legal documents and gravesites, can be interpreted as supporting the prevalence of homosexual relationships hundreds of years ago, said Allan Tulchin of Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania.
If accurate, the results indicate socially sanctioned same-sex unions are nothing new, nor were they taboo in the past."
MSNBC
At a first glance the could apply to anyone but if they're based around what women have been bad at doing, they're worth posting. Seven Rules for Women in IT
1. Expand your frame of reference. Get technology experience in a variety of areas, such as sales, consulting, customer service and operations.2. Work for standouts. Work with name-brand companies or on important, high-impact projects.
3. Choose projects with weight. Don’t work solely in support roles or the “people” aspects of projects. Work on at least one project that is operationally oriented.
4. Speak clearly and with integrity. On risky or troubled projects, break through political correctness and be forthright.
5. Soften the edges. Be hard-charging and results-oriented, but also develop people skills and a relationship orientation.
6. Raise your own flag. Publicize your team’s successes.
7. Reflect. Assess your leadership qualities, style, values and what you want your career to look like.
Most striking of all, a few days before the end of the experiment I realised that I had stopped worrying about global warming. For the Mail, it barely exists an issue - and certainly not as something to frighten us with - and this, surely, is the secret of the paper's success. Phantom menaces are given prominence over real ones. The anger it stirs requires no action, no moral or intellectual effort, but simply confirms existing prejudices. By painting the world as a dystopia, we cling to our own cosy certainties.Guardian
Australians to lose the right to call for a boycott?
So if you're asking Australians not to buy lipstick tested on caged rabbits, rugs woven by Pakistani slaves or suits made with mulesed wool, then pray your boycott calls don't succeed, for the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is about to be given the power to sue you out of the water if they do. ... But Costello's bill is designed to protect businesses of any size - all the way up to BHP Billiton - not by outlawing intimidation, but by punishing persuasion.Hurt a business simply by arguing that it's ethically repugnant to buy its products and the commission will be able to step in and sue to recover the company's lost profits.
...
No free-speech defence is immediately available. You won't be able to go to court to plead the pros and cons of open-range chooks or gentler methods than mulesing to save sheep from fly strike.The new law will catch lone campaigners, community groups, NGOs, lobby groups and even the media - anyone whose campaign for what the law calls a "secondary boycott" actually hits the mark and causes financial pain.
The emphasis in the quote above is mine, and thanks to DD for the link.
Because I know the issue had been concerning you all too...
The in-depth Cheese & Dreams study, a first of its kind, reveals that eating cheese before bed will not only aid a good night’s sleep but different cheeses will in fact cause different types of dreams."Sweet Dreams Are Made Of Cheese"
Two classic quotes from the Kevid Rudd strip club thing:
Greens leader Bob Brown said the issue should be kept in perspective. "Four years ago Kevin Rudd got drunk and took himself into a strip club," Senator Brown said. "Four years ago John Howard, sober, took Australia into the Iraq war. I think the electorate can judge which one did the more harm."...
Premier John Brumby said his last visit to a strip place would have been in the 1970s when he was a student. "It was probably in Sydney, three decades ago with a group of mates, male and female," he said. "That's the main reason people go to Sydney, isn't it?"(The Age)
Damn it. I really hate that I can't fly whenever I want to, but there's just no way to justify it.
Two degrees of difference: the science that backs the protest
Air travel really is in the front line of the climate change debate. But instead of tackling it we’re planning new airportsIt is vitally important that we stabilise global temperature rises below the danger line of 2C – and the aviation industry stands in the way.
Probably the single most polluting thing that you or I will ever do is step on to a plane. Take that tempting return flight to, say, Thailand and you immediately become responsible for about six tons of greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere – three times more than is likely to come from any other activity that you do in the year, including driving and heating your house. This is why aviation is the most bitter and divisive issue in environmental politics today.
A cynical ha!
all software and all data are simply complements to Google's core business - serving advertisements - and hence Google's interest lies in destroying all barriers, whether economic, technological, or legal, to all software and all data. Almost everything the company does, from building data centers to buying optical fiber to supporting free wi-fi to fighting copyright to supporting open source to giving software and information away free, is about removing those barriers.
And yes, this probably sums it up:
Web 3.0 involves the disintegration of digital data and software into modular components that, through the use of simple tools, can be reintegrated into new applications or functions on the fly by either machines or people.
From Rough Type.
Another perspective on indigenous issues in The Age: "Can Archie Roach teach the rest of us what he taught British actor Pete Postlethwaite: how to see Australia through Aboriginal eyes?"
Too long apart
Historic changes for Northern Territory Aborigines have been signed off by federal parliament, ushering in a new wave of intervention in indigenous communities.The laws - which are discriminatory, by the government's own admission - were passed on an unusual Friday sitting of the Senate after a marathon 27 hours of debate.
They include the controversial commonwealth takeover of indigenous township leases, removal of the Aboriginal land permits system, quarantining of welfare payments for neglectful parents and bans on alcohol and pornography.
...
NT Chief Minister Clare Martin said some aspects of the federal intervention were not about tackling child abuse, as Mr Howard has claimed."We support many of the measures put forward by the commonwealth, including welfare reforms to get children to school, and securing additional doctors and police," Ms Martin said.
"We're against measures which have no link to the protection of children, in particular the removal of permits and the compulsory acquisition of land."
She warned the alcohol restrictions were impractical.
Democrats senator Andrew Bartlett said the government's failure to consult with Aboriginal people about the changes had rendered the laws "fatally flawed".
"The government's insistence on politicising this issue and taking such an aggressively divisive approach where there is almost universal public support for helping Aboriginal people has been destructive and unhelpful," he said.
"The approach the government has taken deliberately attempts to destroy the middle ground, dramatically increasing the likelihood that this will turn out to be yet another government failure."
In honour of Soho Pride, and because I love that an article about the issues around lesbian weddings was published in the mainstream press, The Lesbian Bride’s Handbook (called 'My big fat gay wedding' in the Observer Woman magazine).
I have a new intellectual crush. It's partly because of the way she didn't let the interview be derailed by stupid questions, and partly just her sheer enjoyment of her area:
Math Book Helps Girls Embrace Their Inner Mathematician
"The actress who played Winnie Cooper on The Wonder Years, Danica McKellar, is a self-proclaimed math advocate for girls who might otherwise shy away from a subject that Barbie once famously described as "hard.""
I also admire Beth Wilson's personal courage:
"Health Services Commissioner Beth Wilson has revealed her own emotional experience with abortion in a bid to persuade MPs to support a push to remove abortion from the Crimes Act."
Health chief tells of abortion experience
Ha ha ha haha ha. Melbourne vs Sydney, booze-style:
"In NSW, you get bogan-style drinking because bogan-style venues are encouraged."
"We aren't barbarians, but we don't want to sit in a hole and drink chardonnay and read a book."
It's one of the top whinges about Macs in mixed environments, so hopefully this will help hush the whinging: Wired How To Share Files Between Windows PCs and Macs on a Network.
Subject: to mia
Is the moon to grow
Covering the land^×
Again awaken from your being gone to find
What I have in my hands, these flowers, these shadows,
Onto my frozen fingers.
Sought to contrive, intending to express
I seek, above all, in the wandering
Of the matter of snow here. Both of us have grasped
The earth beneath his feet, in its dark cape,
In realms of dingy gloom and deep crevasse
Thinking of your abiding spirit brings
XX. To the Pole
XIII. The Route to the North
That patch of white at the very end of the road
Lucky the bell^×still full and deep of throat,
The edge of that other square cut from the right
Toward . . . that seems to be the whispered question
Two of us, Docteur and Madame Machin, who stand
Sculpting each tree to fit your ghostly form
Both via the filesystem and with third-party applications: Get Your Music Off of Your iPod / Wired How To's.
Why I am a feminist, reason 867: "women who work full time and have never taken time off to have children earn about 11 percent less than men with equivalent education and experience."
Ok, so women should just get better at asking for money, right? But wait, it's not that simple:
"...men and women get very different responses when they initiate negotiations. Although it may well be true that women often hurt themselves by not trying to negotiate, this study found that women's reluctance was based on an entirely reasonable and accurate view of how they were likely to be treated if they did. Both men and women were more likely to subtly penalize women who asked for more -- the perception was that women who asked for more were "less nice".
...
"This isn't about fixing the women," Bowles said. "It isn't about telling women, 'You need self-confidence or training.' They are responding to incentives within the social environment.""
"Vivendi's Universal Music has said it is to test the digital sale of songs from artists without the customary copy-protection technology." BBC
This is great news - I can buy tracks from a mainstream publisher without worrying about whether I've got it on my home or work computers and without being slightly illegal.
Sums up recent legal immigration policy for me:
Shadow immigration minister Damian Green said: "The underlying problem is that the government has lost control of the immigration system, so has been reduced to making superficially tough gestures.
Tougher migrant rules 'illegal'
Excellent article from John Tusa of the Barbican Centre:
"If the government is truly serious about the arts, it would first restore the Olympic theft. Then it would aim to keep up arts funding overall in real terms as the base of the next three-year settlement. Only then should it start to consider what extra new money it should put into the arts to showcase to the whole world how healthy, vibrant, vigorous, original, creative and dynamic the national arts scene is.
To do so requires some big ideas. Here are a few. Set the arts world the challenge of commissioning, for performance in 2012, new works in all its major fields. We deserve a 2012 portfolio of works that will be looked back on as artistic landmarks - the next great British opera, drama, sculpture, installation, public event, painting, novel, film, TV drama, TV documentary, exhibition. That would be worth funding. It would create a true legacy. It would stimulate the run-up to the legacy, the 'pre-legacy' as the cant has it."
A Cultural Olympiad? Great idea - now give us the money
Gay couples face overseas adoption ban
"For a government to deliberately set out to stigmatise same-sex couples and their children to win a few votes in the lead up to an election is beneath contempt".
Also, Gay lobby hits out over adoption bill.
I didn't think I could hate or despise John Howard more, yet it turns out it's possible. What is his problem? I can't believe he can be so callous.
Sensible girls! "Managing money and safe-sex practices are among the main topics in which British Girl Guides aged 14 to 26 want more instruction, a Girlguiding UK survey of more than 1000 guides has found." From the Age OddSpot.
Also a good article "Archaeologists locate possible Aztec tombs" in Mexico.
I know, I was naughty, no posts here while I was away. So in retropsect, it was very hot, dusty. And while a commute that takes in the Blue Mosque and Aya Sofya is lovely, any journey that takes 30 hours is a bit horrendous by the end.