Muslim insulted by something shocker
In a shocking piece of news some parts of the Islamic world have been insulted and outraged at something. Yes, I know, I didn't see that happening since they it is such an easy going religion of laid back and tolerant people. Actually this looks like one of those completely manufactured stories where someone with an agenda has whipped up a media outrage, laughably over the designer Apple 5th Avenue story in New York which is a similar shape to the Ka'ba, but the report the Register had gave me a giggle today because you can so easily believe that some bunch of numpties in green headscarves would march about shouting over something like this and burning an effigy of an Ipod. In fact they may even be offended that I infered they might be offended. And that last statement is no doubt offensive to certain sections of Islam too. And that one. Hmmm, better stop now.
Conservative small towner outraged shocker
Meanwhile over in the land of the free some small towners in America have been outraged by that insult to deceny which is freedom of expression. One total eejit demanded the removal of a book which was full of bad language (no, of course he didn't read it). The book was ... wait for it... Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. For added irony he wanted to ban a book about banned books while the American libraries were running their Banned Books promotion (because everyone in the booktrade believes solidly in freedom of expression. Except perhaps on blogs). Meanwhile I mentioned an ongoing story on the FPI blog about yet another bunch of small-minded, small town yokels who are demanding their local library stop peddling porno filth in the form of two adult graphic novels, Fun Home by Alison Bechdel and Blankets by Craig Thompson.
Both are critically acclaimed works aimed squarely at adults but apparently 'children might read them' Yeah, and kids might find Uncle Fred's S&M Donkey Shagging porno stash too. Or sticking with the library they might find books on sex in the health section.They aren't in the kid's section, so what is the problem? If you are letting your tiny tot wander round picking up and reading anything don't blame the librarians (or booksellers as I have had personal experience of this crap here too myself) it's your job as a parent to look after your little sprog, not to police other adults. Alison's book I haven't had a chance to read yet, but Blankets is a fabulous book and far from being pornographic is actually very touching and sweet. And these people are outraged that the library spent public money buying these books. Well guess what? The public libraries buy religious books which I don't approve of and mind-rotting inane potboiler thrillers and slushy romances too, all of which I think are a waste of paper but I don't go round demanding the libraries stop buying them. I'd just poke fun at the braindead morons who find these things intellectually stretching.
Thursday, October 12, 2006
Cameron video spoof
Labour MP Sion Simon has posted a YouTube video spoofing Conservative leader David 'photo opportunity' Cameron's laughable 'spontaneous' video blog from his home, complete with yelling child. It's more interesting than funny - I had no idea our politicians had managed to get so technologically advanced as to post a YouTube vid; my MP doesn't even had a website and you need to really hunt to find an email address for the bugger (and even longer to get a reply). But I'm pleased to see someone lampooning Cameron's gag-inducing web video, especially another politician:
Labour MP Sion Simon has posted a YouTube video spoofing Conservative leader David 'photo opportunity' Cameron's laughable 'spontaneous' video blog from his home, complete with yelling child. It's more interesting than funny - I had no idea our politicians had managed to get so technologically advanced as to post a YouTube vid; my MP doesn't even had a website and you need to really hunt to find an email address for the bugger (and even longer to get a reply). But I'm pleased to see someone lampooning Cameron's gag-inducing web video, especially another politician:
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
Album Cover Wars
My friend Chris who runs the Collected Comics Library podcast sent me a link to this; it's a great animation based around classic rock album covers (admit it, how many of these covers have you seen used for skinning up on at parties?). It seems quite Python-era Terry Gilliam in places, both style and the sometimes sick humour (got to love it!):
My friend Chris who runs the Collected Comics Library podcast sent me a link to this; it's a great animation based around classic rock album covers (admit it, how many of these covers have you seen used for skinning up on at parties?). It seems quite Python-era Terry Gilliam in places, both style and the sometimes sick humour (got to love it!):
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
The Ten Commandments of Web 2.0
I picked this up from AU Interactive via the Atlanta Media Bloggers site (which was running a piece on bloggers who had been fired because of their posting). It's not perfect, but some of it is pretty funny and right on the money - the First Commandment is especially timely:
1. I am the Lord thy Google, which have brought thee out of the land of Web 1.0, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other search engines before me.
G knows when you are sleeping (Google Calendar), G knows when you’re awake (Google Alerts), he knows if you’ve been bad or good (Google Desktop), so be good for Google’s sake. Google has more power than God. If you don’t believe me, check out the results: “Google”: 114,000,000 vs. “God”: 40,600,000.
2. Thou shalt not take the name of Apple in vain.
The music of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the RIAA and the tyranny of MSN. Blessed is he, who in the name of iTunes and 99 cents, shepherds the weak through the valley of “The Darkness,” for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of “Lost” children. And I will Digg down thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who would attempt to poison and destroy my Macbook. And you will know my name is Steve Jobs when I lay my DRM vengeance upon thee.
3. Thou shalt not make copies of any Flickr image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth without first checking the creative commons license. Thou shalt not download it thyself and serve them from your server.
While YouTube plays the “Copy? Right!” game, and fair use is getting stretched wider than America’s waistline, the idea of intellectual property still exists and is enforceable. If nothing else it’s good karma – don’t steal other people’s art, photos, or video without permission, attribution, or at least a little “Thanks XXX, whoever you are”, muttered to yourself.
4. Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.
Get the hell out of the house Sunday. Seriously. The world will not end if you don’t blog for 1 day out of the week. Go take a walk in the park or streak a football game. It will give you something to blog about on Monday.
5. Honor thy fathr and thy mothr: thy website names may not be long.
Avoid all vowels. At all costs. At all times. Also, give your mothr some props and put her in your top 8.
6. Thou shalt not kill your comments.
Only Seth Godin and Satan have blogs without comments. If you’re going to have a blog, let people interact with it.
7. Thou shalt not commit adultery (if you have an AOL account.)
The AOL data leak showed us all the dangers of search histories and large companies releasing large amount of semi-personally identifiable information. If you’re going to get some cookie, delete your cookies. And if you can, cancel your AOL account.
8. Thou shalt not steal successful ideas and lame them out.
If you’ve always wanted “School Your Way” or you want to “Let Your Page be Your Stage”, then check out the really hip Wal-Mart and AOL social networks. Tubular! Or you can always create clones of Digg (Netscape) or YouTube (MSN Soapbox) if cloning MySpace seems a bit too daunting.
9. Thou shalt not bear false witness against Wikipedia.
I’m looking at you Steven Colbert. We can’t have just anyone modifying the sum of all human knowledge at will. Not unless we live in Washington and/or our last names start with O’Reilly.
10. Thou shalt not bookmark thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not bookmark thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor’s.
It’s called tagging now and you should covet it like crazy. And you must put it in a cloud – it’s most angelic. Here’s a way to tag that wife, ass, house, and maidservant properly:
big house AOL cheating donkey manservant maidservant neighbor wife hot ox Oregon trail sweet wheels spinnin maiden oxen you have just died of dysentery synonyms donkey ass what don’t get it web2.0 digg how covet really want more ye olde scurvy
Supergroup Video
I do like BBC Radio 2's damned smart trailer which shows an imaginary supergroup fronted by Elvis Presley, with the Sugababes on backing vocals, Keith Moon on Drums, Noel Gallagher on rhythm, Jimmy Paige on lead , Stevie Wonder on piano and Sheryl Crow on bass. Okay, some of those folks aren't my favourite musicians, but this video is just so well put together. As well as the inevitable YouTube (or should we say GoogleTube - caution, this is not available in China) you can also see it on the BBC's megasite. And on BBC Breakfast News today as they talked to the guys who put it together they also mentioned that it's got more people thinking, hey, not listened to Elvis in a long time...
I do like BBC Radio 2's damned smart trailer which shows an imaginary supergroup fronted by Elvis Presley, with the Sugababes on backing vocals, Keith Moon on Drums, Noel Gallagher on rhythm, Jimmy Paige on lead , Stevie Wonder on piano and Sheryl Crow on bass. Okay, some of those folks aren't my favourite musicians, but this video is just so well put together. As well as the inevitable YouTube (or should we say GoogleTube - caution, this is not available in China) you can also see it on the BBC's megasite. And on BBC Breakfast News today as they talked to the guys who put it together they also mentioned that it's got more people thinking, hey, not listened to Elvis in a long time...
WoolamaGoogle-oo
Wow! Google are in negotiations with the board of directors of the Woolamaloo Gazette (that's me, the cats and Ariel has an honorary directorship) and are offering $450 million for a controlling interest in the Woolamaloo, which shall then become the WoolamaGoogle-oo.
Okay, not really (sigh), but come on, not any madder than some of what they buy (p.s. Google, much as I love my dear blog, if you do want to invest I am open to decent offers. It's a known, international brand and not currently being sued by TV or music companies, although I doubt you'd get much advertising revenue from certain bookstores).
Sunday, October 8, 2006
For Your Protection
Reading my friend Anthony's blog (Anthony is the writer of Shooting War) at GNN recently I noticed a post about the illegal detention of people at Gauntanamo. Alas, nothing new, you may sigh; despite the fact that the US has now been holding hundreds for up to five years with no trials, no legal process and, most damingly, no solid evidence being presented to back up the assertions levelled at prisoners most citizens in the West really don't think much about it. Sure, it gets the occassional large piece in the news or a documentary, but nothing which changes the policy and I worry that people just come to accept it as a 'normal' background part of our world, like the nightly reports of mass killing in Iraq we just numbly now accept.
More worrying is the fact that a lot of people seem to assume that if they are being held then they must have done something wrong. This is the same flawed (il)logic which is applied also to the biometric ID cards and DNA database schemes in the UK: surely, it says, you are only opposed to this if you have something to hide (my own local MP made much the same weak argument). Persevere with an injustice for long enough and eventually your people will just accept it; that's been a credo of the bully throughout history. Perhaps there are some genuine terrorists being held; with so many from troubled areas it is quite likely, but if we cannot provide proof after five years of illegal detention and investigation it doesn't say much for our intelligence services - if they can't prove someone they have had locked up without rights for half a decade has done something wrong then how are we to trust them to find out about terrorists operating at large?
But to get back to the point of something like this, much as many of us hate it, slowly becoming a (reluctantly) accepted fact I read in Anthony's post about Sami al-Haj, the only known journalist held at Gauntanamo, a cameraman for Al-Jazeera. His story is well known across the Muslim world and yet, as Anthony notes, hardly mentioned in the West; in fact I hadn't heard of it myself. Which brings us to that gradul acceptance of thing; I like to try and keep up with events and as anyone who reads this regularly knows I like to discuss them, partly because I am an opinionated bugger but also because discussion of events is how civilised peoples attempt to raise awareness of the activities of the more barbarous elements of human society. And yet I'd never heard of this. Too easy to let these events go past us all without stopping to question, until one day we wake up and find our own citizens being held without habeus corpus and our emails intercepted without even the approval of a judge, our DNA on a database and MPs signing away the rights of the people they represent 'for their protection' while uttering bland 'statistics', the veracity of which cannot be proven to the public 'for security reasons'.
And anyone who speaks against these is accussed of being a comforter to the bad guys, a traitor. Strange, I always thought it more patriotic to stand up for the system of democracy, freedom of speech, belief and expression, protection of law applied equally for all, to defend our core values which come under attack from terrorists and those who pretend to be our leaders and protectors. Core values which generations shed blood to protect for us, so if our so-called leaders sign them away, doesn't that make them the traitors? So now, thanks to Anthony I know about this; it doesn't change things in that this man will not either be freed or given a proper fair trial but it does remind me that I should keep my eyes and ears open. The old quote about the price of liberty being eternal vigilance is true; listen, read, speak.
Reading my friend Anthony's blog (Anthony is the writer of Shooting War) at GNN recently I noticed a post about the illegal detention of people at Gauntanamo. Alas, nothing new, you may sigh; despite the fact that the US has now been holding hundreds for up to five years with no trials, no legal process and, most damingly, no solid evidence being presented to back up the assertions levelled at prisoners most citizens in the West really don't think much about it. Sure, it gets the occassional large piece in the news or a documentary, but nothing which changes the policy and I worry that people just come to accept it as a 'normal' background part of our world, like the nightly reports of mass killing in Iraq we just numbly now accept.
More worrying is the fact that a lot of people seem to assume that if they are being held then they must have done something wrong. This is the same flawed (il)logic which is applied also to the biometric ID cards and DNA database schemes in the UK: surely, it says, you are only opposed to this if you have something to hide (my own local MP made much the same weak argument). Persevere with an injustice for long enough and eventually your people will just accept it; that's been a credo of the bully throughout history. Perhaps there are some genuine terrorists being held; with so many from troubled areas it is quite likely, but if we cannot provide proof after five years of illegal detention and investigation it doesn't say much for our intelligence services - if they can't prove someone they have had locked up without rights for half a decade has done something wrong then how are we to trust them to find out about terrorists operating at large?
But to get back to the point of something like this, much as many of us hate it, slowly becoming a (reluctantly) accepted fact I read in Anthony's post about Sami al-Haj, the only known journalist held at Gauntanamo, a cameraman for Al-Jazeera. His story is well known across the Muslim world and yet, as Anthony notes, hardly mentioned in the West; in fact I hadn't heard of it myself. Which brings us to that gradul acceptance of thing; I like to try and keep up with events and as anyone who reads this regularly knows I like to discuss them, partly because I am an opinionated bugger but also because discussion of events is how civilised peoples attempt to raise awareness of the activities of the more barbarous elements of human society. And yet I'd never heard of this. Too easy to let these events go past us all without stopping to question, until one day we wake up and find our own citizens being held without habeus corpus and our emails intercepted without even the approval of a judge, our DNA on a database and MPs signing away the rights of the people they represent 'for their protection' while uttering bland 'statistics', the veracity of which cannot be proven to the public 'for security reasons'.
And anyone who speaks against these is accussed of being a comforter to the bad guys, a traitor. Strange, I always thought it more patriotic to stand up for the system of democracy, freedom of speech, belief and expression, protection of law applied equally for all, to defend our core values which come under attack from terrorists and those who pretend to be our leaders and protectors. Core values which generations shed blood to protect for us, so if our so-called leaders sign them away, doesn't that make them the traitors? So now, thanks to Anthony I know about this; it doesn't change things in that this man will not either be freed or given a proper fair trial but it does remind me that I should keep my eyes and ears open. The old quote about the price of liberty being eternal vigilance is true; listen, read, speak.
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