Reid Stott on "warbloggers" and why do people feel a need to label themselves that way. With some interesting discussion and links.
6:02 PM | link
Sgt Stryker: stop calling it friendly fire. All the way on this one. "Friendly fire" is one of the most noxious euphemisms to have emerged in the last decade or so, and the good sergeant takes a proper swipe at it.
5:51 PM | link
Planetary alignment to produce peaceful feelings. Unfortunately, although one astrologer claims this will mean "shorter supermarket queues, quieter roads and people getting on better", there's no word on whether or not this will affect the Middle East peace process.
4:08 PM | link
George Lucas to add even more footage to the original Star Wars? (And for the record I refuse to call it "Episode 4" or "A New Hope".) Harry Knowles claims uncle George has shot brand new footage to be inserted into yet another special edition of the 1977 film. Yes, entirely new, not just stuff he left on the cutting room floor in the first place. If this is true, and I'm not always inclined to believe H. Knowles, then I'm very sad indeed. I know it's Lucas' film, he can do what he likes to it, but this is going beyond the needs of keeping the film fresh. Memo to George: THERE WAS ACTUALLY NOTHING WRONG WITH THE ORIGINAL FILM AS RELEASED IN 1977. IT DIDN'T, AND DOESN'T, REQUIRE THIS SORT OF TAMPERING TWO AND A HALF DECADES AFTER THE FACT. If kids today can't accept films without CGI digital effects, as you apparently believe they do, then that's their fucking problem...
3:59 PM | link
"What you can learn about a president from how he chooses to deceive you": a look at the lying methods of Presidents Dubya, Clinton and Bush the Elder.
3:53 PM | link
And a Romanian couple go to hospital after an accident with oral sex. Bizarrely, this is the second such accident in recent times...
3:41 PM | link
James Inhofe: the September 11 attacks were God's retribution for the US' attitude towards Israel. I don't even know where to begin with this. The amount of religious fundamentalism which is now clearly operating with the US government is a distinct worry.
3:31 PM | link
I'm kind of surprised that pundit bloggers don't seem to have picked up on this story. I don't know if it's too early for the story to have sunk in—though the date on this story is Wednesday—or they're more interested in the Middle East now (after all, the Tora Bora fight was oh so last December), but I'm surprised folks like Glenn Reynolds and other pundits I've looked at in the course of this evening's blogging (apart from Tom Tomorrow and Mac Thomason) haven't said anything about it that I can see. I don't know. But is anyone honestly surprised that the US lost Osama at Tora Bora? Is it really that big a revelation?
Meanwhile, there's another Al Qaeda video doing the rounds. And I was driven by the news of this video to think this morning—believe me, thinking in the morning is not my forte—why the hell do we actually show these things on TV here? I know they're propaganda for the folks over in the Middle East, and I know they're supposed to frighten us over here as well... but since no one here believes them, why do we run them at all? It just strikes me for some reason that giving the Al Qaeda tapes airtime here is not unlike giving publicity to Tokyo Rose or Lord Haw Haw. I don't know, maybe it's just me, but in any case it doesn't make sense... so, yes. Well, I never said it was a particularly profound thought or anything, I was just impressed at having any remotely useful thought that early in the day...
8:18 PM | link
Also, my jokes tend to be bitter and personal and not even that funny, so I’m filling an overlooked market niche: the bitter, personal, unfunny blog. People were screaming out for this. Too many sites were entertaining and witty.
I still haven't worked out if he's being ironic here or not.
7:39 PM | link
Texas airport goes into panic overdrive when photo of Osama bin Laden is found in an overhead locker. What, did they think the photo was going to hijack the plane or something? There is justified caution and then there is paranoia; I'll let you decide which was which here...
6:56 PM | link
RIP Thor Heyerdahl, 1914-2002. Goddamn but people are dropping off these days. I heard something about him being sick for the first time just a day or two ago, they weren't kidding when they said he wasn't long for the world...
6:54 PM | link
War criminals refused lawyers, predictable human rights outcry issues forth. I don't know. It's tempting in cases like this to say that the accused never took their victims' rights into consideration so why should we consider theirs, but my inner bleeding heart tells me this is not really right. Once you've decided these characters don't deserve lawyers, who do you next decide has no right to one either?
6:51 PM | link
Theodore Dalrymple: why Britain sucks and Australia doesn't. Still, he does admit his positive local impression is primarily based on the qualities of the north shore of Sydney; if he looked a bit further about he'd find problematic things here too...
6:41 PM | link
Experts: teenagers sleep in because they kind of have to. Can I use that excuse too? I haven't been a teenager for some time, obviously, but my sorry carcass is prone to spending too long in bed, plus I always had daytime sleepiness issues at school and will never be a morning person.
6:24 PM | link
Dubya: Ariel Sharon a man of peace. Takes one to know one, I suppose...
6:16 PM | link
Pesticides cause male frogs to develop multiple sets of male & female genitalia. Is that what you'd call a hermafrogdite?
5:03 PM | link
Missouri grandmother allowed to keep her ARYAN-1 licence plate, insists it doesn't mean she's racially prejudiced.
5:03 PM | link
Deutche Bahn sues Google for linking to website with instructions on sabotaging railways.
4:57 PM | link
Another unsent letter... from 2000 years ago. And people complain about Australia Post?
4:25 PM | link
A real life version of The Dice Man, sort of, only done over the Internet. Weird.
4:22 PM | link
Man tries to patent "iron radio". What's wrong with ordinary radios?
3:57 PM | link
Candidate for sheriff of Kentucky town charged with assassinating present incumbent at a political rally. As, indeed, you do.
3:57 PM | link
Girl gives birth without being aware of pregnancy. Not bad, especially considering she was born without a cervix and had been told by doctors that if she ever did fall pregnant she would inevitably miscarry.
3:51 PM | link
More stuff on that William Bennett character: here he reckons gay men's life expectancy is about 30 years less than that of hetero men. Well, someone better tell William S. Burroughs off for having lived to be 84, especially when he was not only gay but a junkie for a number of those 84 years...
3:48 PM | link
US media and why they stopped showing images of September 11.
NBC ran a single clip of a man plunging to his death and then admitted it was a mistake. “There was so much stuff coming in, and I understand how it got on once,” NBC News Vice President Bill Wheatley told the Times. “But once it was on, we decided not to use it again. It’s stunning photography, I understand that, but we felt the image was disturbing.”
That’s the point. The networks shouldn’t be protecting us from being disturbed when being disturbed is what we need to be.
I'm actually with the guy from NBC on this one. I was up most of the night on September 11, the attacks started around 11pm our time, and the TV stations just kept showing the fucking things over and over again, planes flying into buildings, buildings collapsing, people dying, there were pictures of people falling from windows in the papers the next day. It was inescapable for that time, and it was fucking appalling. I could barely sleep that night for visions of collapsing towers. I neither want nor actually need to see that footage ever again. If it wasn't horrendous enough to etch itself into your memory the first time around, then I don't think any number of re-runs long after the fact will do it.
3:23 PM | link
Small investor wins $1m damages from "irresponsible" stockbroker. Times like this I'm kind of glad I actually don't have money to invest, cos if I did, with my luck I'd probably wind up investing it with the help of this mongrel bastard.
3:03 PM | link
Woman takes a month to realise her husband died, even though they live in the same house. "They had some issues," quoth the police officer. "No shit," quoth your humble scribe.
2:54 PM | link
Easter Islanders offended by forthcoming Laverne & Shirley special episode. You can't leave any show alone these days, eh? Always seems to be another reunion special or something on the horizon...
2:48 PM | link
Dutch government resigns after a report blasted Dutch peacekeepers over the Srebrenica massacre in 1995. Apparently, though, elections were due next month anyway, and might not have gone well for the hitherto ruling coalition in any case.
2:44 PM | link
Damn fool wants people to sit, not stand, at rock concerts. "There has got to be no worse experience than being packed into a sweaty rock club like sardines, facing the stage for the privilege of watching musicians ply their craft." You honestly don't get it, do you?
2:32 PM | link
Wisconsin town doesn't have enough cops to watch out for child molesters, hires Boy Scouts instead. Some people really don't know what they do...
2:29 PM | link
Nullsoft to charge for new advanced Winamp. Actually, at first when I heard about this I thought they were charging for all versions, but no, this is only for a proposed new model that does numerous other things. None of which I particularly need, so not a problem for me...
2:27 PM | link
Classical musician composes piece for mobile phones. Like musical ringtones aren't pernicious enough?
2:08 PM | link
Bible group targets Edinburgh Fringe Festival to spread the word. Director of the Fringe Paul Gudgin is keen, and I suppose money is money, but something about it kind of stinks to me...
2:05 PM | link
Bikini-wearing, whip-wielding man steals taxi, leads cops on a high-speed chase in South Australia. As you do.
2:03 PM | link
Count Dracula looking for an heir. Hell, I didn't even know there was a real Count Dracula. Best of all, he's a spokesman for Romania blood donor service. The irony, the irony...
1:56 PM | link
What happened to protest music since Sept. 11? Excellent article.
1:52 PM | link
Oh, you may have noticed a few changes to the linkage at the left of screen. Took out a few things I was losing interest in, such as Yellow Times, who were frankly getting monotonous, and added a bunch of others I've found in recent days and weeks.
1:35 PM | link
While I'm talking about me and my own greatness: a big shout-out and cheers to Gareth Parker for the kind words about my blog in his own ('twas he who described it as "formidable") and for the linkage as well.
Regular readers—and yes, I know I'm making a big call assuming I have readers at all, let alone regular ones— may notice a slight change around here, namely in the name of the blog. I've decided to abandon the old "None More Black" handle and adopt "Hot Buttered Death" instead. Why in God's name, I hear you ask? I reply! I was in town today, going to meet someone for lunch, and while walking down Castlereagh St on my way to HMV, where we'd arranged to meet, I was turning various thoughts over in my thick skull, and for no apparent reason that I can explain, the phrase "Hot Buttered Death" found itself among those thoughts. A connection with Isaac Hayes' great album Hot Buttered Soul is obvious, but I'll be damned if I can understand how or why. Anyway, once implanted and immovable from my head (yes, I know I probably sound like one of those people who says the government is trying to steal his thoughts, hence why he's wearing the tinfoil hat), I decided the only thing to do with that phrase was make it the new name of the blog. So there. If you've got a better explanation, I'll be glad to hear it.
7:06 PM | link
The children of Instapundit: a hyperlinked list of all the other weblog owners who've admitted they were inspired to do so by Glenn Reynolds. Something about the list strikes me as a little self-serving and self-stroking ("look on my bloglings, ye mighty, and despair!"), though even I can't deny being impressed by it. And good luck to the bloke, if he can pull off that sort of inspiration in others. If I'm to be honest, after all, brother Reynolds kind of inspired my own "formidable" blog. Let me explain.
There's a website I frequent called Three Way Action. It's a message board set-up, primarily frequented by folks in the world of online journalling, much like I used to be (let's not go there, though, eh? not the most pleasant of stories), and one day a couple of months ago someone started a thread on alternative news and opinion sources, what Internet sources could people go to if they were over the usual TV news sources. I can't find the thread any more (think it might've got wiped in a recent purge, the site has recurring problems with hard drive space), but anyway someone there recommended Instapundit.
For some reason, of all the suggestions made by the various posters, Instapundit was the one I took a random punt on. And I won't say it blew the world of blogging wide open for me, as I was already familiar with online journalling and knew of Blogger through some of those. That said, I did discover just how many people were out there using Blogger for more than just the usual day-by-day journal thing... a quick scoot through just a few of the blogs linked on Instapundit and a few more blogs linked from those blogs revealed how widespread this sort of blogging is. Hell, there were even people down here at the arse end of the world™ doing it.
Hence I decided that, my ultimately unpleasant experience of journalling aside, I wanted a piece of the action. Except I didn't really want to dwell on the politics as much as some of them do, which is why I fill it instead with the somewhat more frivolous stuff I find on the Net. Part of the reason is that I find the political situation in the Middle East and elsewhere at the moment so depressing and angry-making, if I did discuss it to the extent that some pundit bloggers do my always troublesome blood pressure would probably rise so high my brain would eventually blast its way out the top of my head, which is not something I need. Anyway, I don't really know enough about politics. Though I've said I traditionally lean leftwards and vote Labor, I tend to innately distrust all politics and politicians on whatever side they fall. It just doesn't interest me so much. Though I may disagree with the political leanings of certain pundit bloggers, I'm willing to assume they know more about politics than me, so let them discuss it.
On the other hand, a quick quiz through any issue of Fortean Times, for example, should demonstrate clearly that, despite the best efforts of rationalists throughout the centuries, the world I live in and the people who live in it are strange, humorous and interesting, prone to stupidity at times and to magnificence at others. I've always suffered from that slightly artistic bent which has always made me interested in the strange, clever, humorous, idiotic, etc things people do, hence why I like to discuss that sort of thing more than I do the politics. More fun. Obviously I don't shun all political content or political blogs, but it's not what I'm interested in writing about.
Anyway, that's kind of how Instapundit indirectly inspired this thing you see before you. If I'd known G. Reynolds was taking names for a list of blogs he's inspired, I'd have added mine, if only because I knew it'd probably drive up traffic round here. Maybe that's why the list bothers me, not so much because it stokes his ego but because I'm not on it and it doesn't stoke mine... oh well. I never said I wasn't vain to some extent, after all...
6:49 PM | link
And an interesting piece on Harry Knowles. Not a word said, curiously, about the fucking hideous design of Knowles' AICN site, though...
4:56 PM | link
William Bennett and self-criticism. Interesting look at the man behind that AVOT think-tank thing I recall mentioning a while ago.
4:54 PM | link
Sydney University posts $88m surplus. Wow. Wonder if they'll use those funds to demolish some of the more hideous examples of modernist architecture around campus and replace them with more attractive buildings? Wonder also if some of that surplus comes from the rationalising activities depicted in this film...
4:28 PM | link
Russell Crowe also donates brain to science. I can see this becoming a craze. Parenthetically, I went to school with Russell Crowe. OK, not actually with him, but I was at the same school. Not that this mattered to anyone when I was there (1987-92), though, since the artist formerly known as Russ Le Roq wasn't terribly famous then...
4:23 PM | link
Cracking new blog I've found. Features a gigantic screed against "that colossol old tit" Richard Neville—and calling him a colossal old tit is one of the kinder remarks he makes. This is going to be a blog worth watching, I suspect.
4:11 PM | link
Residents of Gay Road have their street name changed. Me, I love the comment at the end commenting on the new name of Green Apple Road: "I can also say I don’t know if it’s much of an improvement to go from Gay to a fruit."
3:39 PM | link
Researchers produce "nonexistent" molecule". Apparently there is some textbook with stringent rules as to why the molecule does not exist. Unfortunately, it apparently does now...
3:36 PM | link
The battle of Thomas Edison and Edward Amet. Edward who? Charles Musser says he was one of the innovators of film technology, among other things inventing a 35mm projector in 1894 and the "faked newsreel" in 1898... so how come I've never heard of him before? One wonders if we're about to get a Missing Reel-style reevaluation of history; it's interesting either way...
3:31 PM | link
Bullying by mobile phone. Now you don't even need to talk to a person to tease them, evidently.
3:26 PM | link
Cool macabre imagery from the Middle Ages. Authentic medieval demons and monsters aplenty. Features, among other things, Hans Holbein's Alphabet of Death. Just note that some of the full-size illustrations can be pretty big.
3:24 PM | link
Researchers develop pseudo-Ebola virus. Why, wasn't the real one evil enough that you needed a back-up?
3:18 PM | link
The DICK Awards. No, it's got nothing to do with penises, why do you ask?
2:58 PM | link
Memo to the folks at Disinfo: UPDATE THE FUCKING VITAL STATISTICS MONITOR PAGE. That's been nearly two weeks now with no update. And do something about the fucking archive page too; not everyone has all day to wait for a 600kb HTML file to open.
2:56 PM | link
US stress expert wants a national no-grumpiness day declared. Me: fuck YOU, bitch. Aint no one telling me not to be grumpy if I want to be in a foul temper. *insert headbutt here*
2:49 PM | link
Fascinating piece on Christopher Hitchens, who is someone I've only discovered very recently. Clearly, though, I'm going to have to investigate his stuff further...
2:45 PM | link
I've taken this test in the past, thought I'd take it again for the blog, in case anyone out there is particularly interested in my mental state:
| Disorder | Rating |
| Paranoid: | Moderate |
| Schizoid: | Low |
| Schizotypal: | Moderate |
| Antisocial: | Moderate |
| Borderline: | Moderate |
| Histrionic: | Moderate |
| Narcissistic: | High |
| Avoidant: | Very High |
| Dependent: | High |
| Obsessive-Compulsive: | High |
-- Click Here To Take The Test -- | |
I don't know if it's a good or a bad thing that this isn't a professional diagnosis. Probably good, cos if it were professional I'd probably be spending a shitload more money on medications and therapy... And only moderately paranoid and antisocial? That's a shock.
12:41 AM | link
Why refusing to take sides in the current Middle East bullshit may be the best policy.
10:36 PM | link
Post-orgasmic flu: a condition I am not likely to suffer from for some time, I think.
10:32 PM | link
A nice post on media bias. This comes from a blog I've been meaning to link for a while; unfortunately Blogger seems to have eaten the blogger's archives, so they're re-establishing at the moment...
10:20 PM | link
University professor caught pirating textbook on ethics. Would've been funnier if it had been a book on copyright law, though...
10:04 PM | link
Chinese man in stand-off threatens to blow himself up if police don't give him booze.
3:24 PM | link
Richard Pells disputes claims about the influence of American culture on the rest of the world. Yeah, well, unless I'm mistaken those are mostly American movies I'm seeing in cinemas here while the film products of my own country are generally confined to arthouses at best. Whatever foreign influences the US has admittedly and undeniably taken into itself, it's still done not a bad job of exporting the result back to them...
3:06 PM | link
The rise of the nobody memoir. Everyone's got a story to tell and everyone's telling it. Very interesting article.
2:47 PM | link
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Operating out of Sydney, Australia since February 2002. Designed for viewing at 800x600 or more.
About this site
Amazon.com wishlist
Links
I have various reasons for linking the sites below (a link rarely constitutes a 100% endorsement, of course). I'm usually happy to link to anyone who specifically asks, or anyone who links to me. I reserve the right to remove any link at any time for any reason.
1. Local heroes
The Age
Angela Bell
Bernard Slattery
The Bitchin' Monaro Guide to Politics
A Bright Cold Day In April
Catallaxy Files
Chris Textor
Don Arthur
Gareth Parker
John Quiggin
Ken Parish
Richard Baillie
Robert Corr
Scott Wickstein
Shannon Davies
Sydney Morning Herald
Tim Dunlop
2. Strange news from other stars
Ananova quirkies
ArtsJournal
Blogcritics
Daily Rotten: Weird News
Dave Tepper
Dave Trowbridge
Fark
Fortean Times
Gary Farber
George Kelly
Jason Rylander
Jeff Cooper
Jim Henley
Jim Schwab
The Lefty Libertarian
Lynn Sislo
Mac Thomason
Metafilter
Philosophy and Literature
The Rittenhouse Review
Sasha Castel
Ted Barlow
3.Non-blog/news links
I have a very extensive collection of links not specifically related to blogging. I keep them on an entirely separate page here.
What the critics have said
"short tempered, rude, sarcastic and generally unable to cope with authority figures"
-Martin Forrester-Reid (former employer)
"formidable"
-Gareth Parker
"outstandingly quirky"
-Jason Soon
"prolific"
-Bernard Slattery
"pithy"
-Jim Henley
"excellent"
-Dave Trowbridge
"my Australian pal"
-Eric Olsen
"Who?"
-Glenn Reynolds
