The Dalai Lama can't go to Seoul, either.
Asiana confirmed it had denied the Dalai Lama a transit flight but said it did so for security reasons.
``We had respectfully asked the Dalai Lama to take a route that doesn't stop in Seoul for his and other passengers' safety,'' said Kim Haeng-seok, an Asiana spokesman.
Well the old bloke's been travelling about the world for a good number of decades without bringing doom and destruction to all he meets. Wherefore the paranoia now?
7:12 PM | link
Bangladesh and New Zealand named respectively most and least corrupt countries in the world.
6:52 PM | link
Jackie Mason denies ditching his opening act for being Palestinian.
Earlier, Mason's manager cited recent Israeli-Palestinian violence and delayed peace talks in explaining the decision.
"It's not exactly like he's just an Arab-American. This guy's a Palestinian," said Jyll Rosenfeld, Mason's manager. "Right now it's a very sensitive thing, it's just not a good idea."
Yeah, heaven forbid a Jew and a Palestinian be seen working together. People might get the idea they can peacefully co-exist or something. Mason's denying he ordered the other guy to take a hike and claims the club made the decision. Either way, something about it stinks...
6:33 PM | link
Racially insensitive clothing pt 2.
Sportswear manufacturer Umbro tonight promised to review its procedures after a pair of trainers was given the same name as a deadly gas used by the Nazis to kill millions in concentration camps.
Jewish groups expressed outrage after it emerged that the leather training shoes were called Zyklon, prompting Umbro to drop the name and express its “regret” at any offence caused. [...]
Umbro, which makes kit for the England football team and other high-profile sides in the Premiership, insisted the use of the name was “purely coincidental” and not intended to have any connotations.
Nick Crook, from Umbro, said: “We regret that there are people who are offended by the name.”
Yes, but do you regret that six million people were killed by the stuff you named your shoes after? This is just head-spinningly ignorant.
6:29 PM | link
Hollywood marketing types abuzz over quadrants.
The movie audience has been reduced, for marketing purposes, to four identifiable groups. They are: males under 25, males over 25, females under 25 and females over 25.
That's it. You are a member of one of these groups, whether you like it or not. No one can escape the inevitability of being in one of these groups. Only death excludes you from being in one of four quadrants, but give the marketing geniuses in Hollywood a little time. They'll figure a way to make movies for dead people.
You wonder why they even bother reducing their audience's demographics to just four categories. Why not just reduce it to one and call it the lowest common denominator? Many people reckon Hollywood tends to aim for that often enough as it is...
6:22 PM | link
The stars are lining up to endorse the system. Stevie Nicks is said to have cried when she heard the revived Rumours; that old curmudgeon Neil Young is pro; and David Gray will mix his new album for five speakers.
One word: quadraphonic. The four-speaker format failed in the mid-70s. Why is everyone now getting excited over five? What difference does the one extra actually make? And how do we know it also won't go the way of quad?
6:21 PM | link
Video store which likes editing tapes for family consumption asks to be declared legal.
6:15 PM | link
Tex rips Mark Latham a second arsehole. He also gets stuck into the bloke who won that $50,000, albeit at much shorter length. I like the man's style.
5:40 PM | link
And the answer would appear to be about two minutes. Cunt of a thing. I don't think I can be arsed doing any more tonight. Come back tomorrow.
10:04 PM | link
Christ Almighty. Just when I was almost starting to get used to Blogger operating without problems for quite a while, it decided to stick its head up its arse there for a little while. Let's see how long it lasts.
9:39 PM | link
The World Summit just gets funnier. First it's someone being mugged by one of the poor people the summit's supposed to help, now it's reporters being doped and robbed by hookers.
8:59 PM | link
Michael Bolton receives star on Hollywood Walk Of Fame. Buggered if I can work out what for. I would have thought you actually had to make a significant contribution to filmmaking to get your star there, and I don't think appearing as yourself in Snow Dogs constitutes that.
8:57 PM | link
Man gets it off with frozen chicken. Contains one of the greatest tabloid news moments ever as the man's wife recounts her discovery of her husband's fondness for white meat:
My jaw just dropped. I said, ‘You dirty b*****, that’s my Sunday lunch’. He was calm as you like and said, ‘It’s all right—we can still eat it’
Palestinian press union bans photos of armed children.
The Palestinian journalists union declared yesterday that news photographers are "absolutely forbidden" to take pictures of children carrying weapons or taking part in activities by militant groups, saying that the pictures harm the Palestinian cause.[...]
"We have decided to forbid taking any footage of armed children, because we consider that as a clear violation of the rights of children and for negative effects these pictures have on the Palestinian people," the chairman said.
What's the greater violation of children's rights, though? Taking photos of them carrying guns, or giving the kids guns and making them take part in the militant activities being photographed? Leave the fucking kids out of it altogether.
8:29 PM | link
Robert Hilburn ponders the music of September 11, as it were:
It's understandable that successful songwriters (as well as scores of aspiring ones) feel compelled to express themselves in a time of trauma. They have been blessed with the ability to communicate and feel it is their duty to make music, the same way a firefighter feels it's his or her duty to go into a burning building.
In the process, it is easy to lose artistic discipline and judgment. The biggest mistake is trying to write an anthem that addresses the topic head-on rather than with a poetic distance.
Tom Maurstad, meanwhile, ponders whether Sept. 11 had that much of a pop-culture effect at all:
The effects – or lack thereof – from Sept. 11 are something Michael Madsen has noticed. The actor known best for his portrayal of cool-creepy bad guys in violent movies such as Reservoir Dogs and True Romance says he has seen signs of September's tragedy.
"But they haven't been in the scripts I've been reading," Mr. Madsen says. "As far as movies go, I haven't seen any difference between now and before Sept. 11.
"Where I have seen a difference is in the way people act toward each other. I think people since then have started being a little nicer to each other. They don't want to see any of this stuff in the movies. That's why people go to movies—to get away from it."
A pair of interesting articles. There will no doubt be much more of this sort of rumination over the next couple of weeks.
8:06 PM | link
Just when you were already confused enough by new audio formats like SACD and DVDA, here comes yet another one...
HERE'S the proposition: The record industry wants you to buy your music on a new kind of disc. Unlike a CD, the format will greatly restrict your ability to make digital copies. It will cost more than a prerecorded CD. And it will require you to invest a few hundred dollars in a new player.
If the appeal isn't immediately apparent, you have some idea of the salesmanship task ahead.
I somehow don't envy the poor bastard having to sell this to the world. Can't wait to see how it'll turn out, although I can't imagine turning out very well somehow...
7:56 PM | link
Norman Lebrecht ponders our "catastrophic failure of cultural renewal", or why no performers have arisen over the last 25 years to take over the public imagination like Elvis and Maria Callas have done.
7:54 PM | link
Magician wins reprieve for the rabbit in his hat.
Martin Duffy, of Seaton Delaval, was told Sapphire the rabbit contravened Newcastle City Council's policy on the use of performing animals.
Council officials say the banning letter was sent in error and the pet should have been allowed to feature in all performances.
Last week the council apologised for banning a Punch and Judy show in case it was seen to promote domestic violence.
Ayyy. Newcastle seems to be lacking in clue slightly if this is any indication. Next they'll be letting people take coal to them.
7:46 PM | link
Waverley Cemetery offering advertising space. Sort of. When I read the blurb on the Ananova site for this one I looked at it and thought "God, I hope that's not Waverley doing that"... and it was. I actually used to work there, hence I have some feeling for the place... however, it's not actually as bad as the blurb makes out; Martin (proprietor and my former boss) is actually calling for companies to contribute to restoring and maintaining the graves, for which they'll receive a small plaque noting the good deed. If that's what it's about then I'm all for it, cos I remember how poorly maintained most of the graves were cos the cemetery just doesn't have the money. If it's still like it was three years ago when I worked there, the majority of work they do is probably the search requests, which pull in next to no money for them...
7:44 PM | link
Target yanks that "white supremacist" clothing. Apparently the giveaway is the "eight eight" reference, written that way, i.e. two eights next to each other rather than the number 88. I still don't know what to make of it and I still don't see anyone offering actual proof of these being some "Heil Hitler" statement, though I suppose they've got to cover themselves...
7:36 PM | link
There's a new Dali exhibition coming to Sydney. Apparently a huge thing with about 350 works; though I'm not always convinced by Dali either (amusing though he can be), I was planning on going to see it, although now that I see Customs House is charging nearly twenty bucks to get in I'm less certain...
7:22 PM | link
Francis Ford Coppola finally to make On The Road. Eh. I can't really see it working well anyway—I just can't imagine the book translating very well to film—and apart from that I'm not convinced by Joel Schumacher as a director (Coppola is presumably just producing this one). Quite a few people spoke highly of Tigerland a year or two ago, which I haven't seen and know I really should try and do, but on the whole I have my doubts. And though Billy Crudup and Brad Pitt are no doubt fine enough actors, aren't they about ten years too old to be doing Jack and Neal?
7:19 PM | link
Phil Robinson talks about The Sum of All Fears. Saw the trailer for that two days ago at the cinema; looks like not a bad film, and I'll probably see it for the show next week, although the review in today's Telegraph suggests it goes downhill once the nuke goes off. I suppose it is kind of hard to recover from something like that...
7:12 PM | link
Via Don Arthur: Kenneth Davidson suggests political parties should pay more attention to their rank and file members. Don is less convinced, and says "These days the kind of people who join political parties are a bit weird." I'd go further and suggest that anyone who actually wants to become a member of a modern political party have some sort of mental problem. It's bad enough we have to vote for the bastards these days without encouraging them further by joining them...
6:49 PM | link
Man jailed for branding neighbour's genitals. The first thing I thought when I read that headline was, naturally, "YOWWWWWWW...", and then wonder at what on Earth would make a person do that. Then I read the article and kind of understood why...
6:37 PM | link
Drunk teen breaks into nightclub, gets shit beaten out of him by proprietor, wins $50,000 compensation. And the insurance premiums continue to rise thanks to fuckheaded decisions like this one.
6:34 PM | link
I got an email from my friend in England, Richard, who I hope will forgive me for quoting him here. He was in his local McDonalds and for some reason started thinking about that French journalist with the odd theory about what happened at the Pentagon on September 11...
Though there are plausibility holes in it—why do it, for instance?—it was a bit troubling, until my mother accidentally solved the internal argument for me.
She looked at me questioningly, and asked, surprised, "have you finished your burger?"
"Yes," I replied.
"Oh," she continued, surprised, "I just didn't see you eat it".
And there you have it. My Mum genuinely did not notice me eat that burger, yet it did happen (made me quite sick later on that day, in fact). No-one saw the Pentagon aeroplane, but it doesn't mean it didn't exist. A trite and some would say offensive comparison, I suppose, but as an analogy it worked perfectly for me.
Works fine for me too. Kind of hard to argue with the logic of the situation, which reduced me to a state of something approximating hilarity the first time I read it. Hope Richard won't hate me for quoting him there without his permission, but it was far too good not to share.
6:28 PM | link
Photo of the day! "We welcome ethnic diversity between people, so long as they're all Aryan"...
5:35 PM | link
Target: retailers of race hate-related goods, or victims of paranoid fuckwits?
A horror and science-fiction fan with youthful tastes, Rodriguez was immediately attracted to a blood-red pair of shorts he spotted in the racks, emblazoned with a collage of images and symbols including skulls.
“I just thought they were cool,” Rodriguez says. “But when I saw the 'EIGHT EIGHT,' I couldn’t believe it.”
Rodriguez had been clued into the meaning of “EIGHT EIGHT” just a few days earlier, when he watched “Turn It Down,” a VHI documentary about the rise of racist rock music in America. When he saw the “Heil Hitler” code, quite popular among young neo-Nazis, Rodriguez “recognized it immediately.”
Of course, he saw it on TV, therefore it must be so. The article doesn't seem overly concerned—at least as far as I can see—with providing evidence of any sort that the manufacturers of said goods actually are white supremacists.
“White supremacists frequently use these kinds of codes as a way of communicating with each other under the radar screen of the public,” notes Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, which tracks white-power activities in the U.S.
But Target’s shorts and caps, which will appeal mostly to young buyers, bring those codes out into the open. And that, Potok says, can be dangerous.
You know, back in primary school I had to recite the times tables in class. Funnily enough, if you multiply eight by eleven you get 88. Does that mean the school was secretly pushing cunningly concealed Nazi propaganda all that time?
5:26 PM | link
Via George Kelly: Pepsi's efforts to reach minorities as well as the mainstream. George has some particularly biting comments here. Personally I think if they just made their damn product taste better, I wouldn't be so disinclined to drink it...
4:58 PM | link
Rugby player goes to hospital, finds other player's tooth in his arm.
Ainscough and Gleeson had clashed in the Wigan-St. Helens match on July 30 but just how the tooth ended up in Ainscough's arm during the match is a mystery. There is no suggestion Gleeson deliberately bit his opponent.
Well if you can come up with a better suggestion, I'd like to hear it...
4:49 PM | link
Woman decides she's "complete" after 15 bouts of plastic surgery. Good, I'd hate to think you felt incomplete in any way after all that. Still, if the accompanying photo's anything to go by, it may be considered an improvement. If you like that sort of thing.
4:47 PM | link
Motorcyclist falls off bike, is run over by truck. That helmet of his protected him real good, obviously.
4:39 PM | link
RIP Sony Betamax. The Betamax VCR is no longer being produced by Sony in Japan after the end of overseas production four years ago. News to me, I didn't know they were still making them at all. End of an era time, I suppose.
4:34 PM | link
Landlord demands $27k back rent from Sept. 11 victim's estate. Apparently the woman, who was killed in the WTC attack, committed the heinous sin of not giving three months notice of her intent to leave. Well, it's not like she was intending to get killed by terrorists that particular day, I'm sure. Good fucking grief but Sept. 11 unleashed some evil, and not all of it from the Middle East. Surely there's no court could be mad enough to uphold this maggot's claim... then again...
4:25 PM | link
KKK business cards found in Wal-Mart book display. Fuck, I thought the little ads they put in magazines and things were noxious enough...
4:21 PM | link
Government may finally offer 68 year old woman aid after she gave birth aged five. Yes, she was five and a half years old back in 1939 when to the surprise of no doubt everyone she gave birth to a bouncing baby boy. She is the youngest mother in history, and was apparently fully sexually mature when the baby came out Caesarian-style. No one's been able to explain how she got pregnant or who the father was. As I said, you learn something new every day...
4:20 PM | link
Who'd have thought musicians would have ghost writers too? But it seems they do, and the ghost in this tale is claiming he's been dudded out of credits and a shitload of money for composing music for Xena and Hercules.
"With today's hectic production schedules and short deadlines, more and more composers are delegating work to ghostwriters," says Mark Northam, publisher of Film Music magazine. Northam, who has worked as a music ghostwriter himself, says the practice is common but rarely talked about.
"It's definitely one of the dirty little secrets of the film and television music industry."
Dirty and secret being the operative words. I had no idea such a practice even existed until just now. You do indeed learn something new every day...
4:09 PM | link
Drug dealer accidentally calls police to arrange deal. Whoops. Another glorious one for DumbCrooks.com...
3:59 PM | link
Opera House stung by Internet ticketing scam.
The thieves copy official Web sites of premier venues to almost every detail, including theatre layouts and restaurant information, and constantly update shows. The crucial difference is the scam site has its own credit card booking set-up, so your money goes directly into their account.
The bogus site for Sydney appears on the Net as www.sydneyopera.org - as opposed to the genuine site, www.sydneyoperahouse.com. But the outfit has created 23 sites mirroring opera houses in Europe, including Paris and Vienna's.
It's bad stuff for the people caught this way, and yet I can't bring myself to feel entirely sorry for them. If I were going to order tickets to something over the Net, the very first thing I'd do would be to confirm that the site I was buying them from was actually the official one...
3:55 PM | link
Two men missing since Sept. 11 found alive. Extraordinary.
3:49 PM | link
I'm sure I'm not the only person grossly disappointed by this.
The Catholic Church will hold a closed-door inquiry into sex abuse allegations against Sydney Catholic Archbishop George Pell.
Releasing the inquiry's terms of reference, the Catholic Church's National Committee for Professional Standards (NCPS) announced all hearings related to the case would be conducted in camera.
Information obtained during the hearings will also remain secret, unless both parties give written permission for it to be released or they are compelled to release it by law.
But the final report of the inquiry could be made public if the NCPS co-chairmen, Archbishop Philip Wilson and Brother Michael Hill, deem it appropriate.
And that seems like a rather big "if" to me. Good grief. I suspected the Pell case would end in a whitewash, and this does nothing to reassure me. I take it we will at least be told whether or not the inquiry considers uncle George to be guilty... or is that being presumptuous?
3:47 PM | link
Ken Parish declares John Howard worst Australian PM ever. Well, I suppose the guy deserves some sort of credit for retaining his job while presiding over the country during some of its most divisive times (consider the various rifts over One Nation, the republic referendum and the illegal immigrants), though equally he deserves some blame for not doing very much if anything to try and bring the nation together over those issues and stop the squabbling. Whether or not Howard is the worst one we've ever had, history will at the very least not record him as one of the best...
3:38 PM | link
Via Don Arthur: McDonalds is pissing people off in Norway.
"It's inappropriate and distasteful to launch a hamburger called 'McAfrika' when large portions of southern Africa are on the verge of starvation," says Linn Aas-Hansen of Norwegian Church Aid.
She stood outside a McDonald's restaurant in downtown Oslo this week, passing out free "catastrophe crackers" to passersby in protest. "This is a special, protein-rich cracker that we hand out to people in the hunger-stricken areas," she said.
The hunger-stricken areas of where, Oslo? As Don notes, the crackers might've been better used somewhere like southern Africa itself. Still, an interesting way of calling McD on one of its products...
3:30 PM | link
Kylie Minogue for St Trinians remake?
Ealing Studios want to revive the classic comedies with [Rupert] Everett playing headmistress Miss Fritton, the role immortalised by Alastair Sim.
They also want Kylie to don a skimpy uniform and join the cast as one of the rebellious schoolgirls.
Oh for fuck's sake. This isn't a film remake, it's some geezer acting out some bizarre fetish for the sight of Kylie Minogue in a school uniform. I just can't imagine Kylie playing a teenager any more than I can imagine myself playing one, and I'm chronologically closer to my teen years than she is to hers...
3:16 PM | link
Victorian government to consider banning machetes, etc.
The Victorian government will consider prohibiting the ownership of machetes, swords and crossbows.
Police Minister Andre Haermeyer today said moving the weapons from a restricted to a prohibited classification would reduce their availability.
The proposal follows reports they were being sold at a Melbourne market.
Well, yes, prohibiting them would likely reduce their presence on the open market, although that won't necessarily reduce their presence in general. Banning guns hasn't exactly stopped people being killed in shootings. Anyway, people will find other things to use as weapons (look at the popularity of blood-filled syringes) if they can't get to the traditional items...
3:12 PM | link
The famous river has struggled under degradation since most of its water was diverted for use in the Snowy Hydro-Electric Scheme in the late 40s.
It currently flows down to between one and three per cent of its original level but the joint NSW and Victorian initiative worth $300 million is set to change all that.
Snowy River flows will eventually be increased to 21 per cent of the original level over 10 years and ultimately raised to 28 per cent.
I'm presuming the river and surrounding areas will actually be capable of standing up to this increase. Not that I really know much about the engineering aspect of it, but I imagine that much as reducing the flow of a river to about three percent of its original levels must've had some bad environmental effects, increasing the flow again could do something similar...
3:07 PM | link
Singer asks lesbians not to show affection at her shows.
Someone on Mayfield's original list emailed it to someone else, and the letter took off. From a look at the reactions, few people had actually heard of Mayfield, but she quickly developed a brand new base of never-to-be-fans to add to her other categories.
"As a huge music fan," wrote one woman, "I have never heard of you and doubt my life will be unfulfilled by skipping your fledgling work."
If nothing else, it's not a bad way to shoot a budding career in the foot, although you could say it's given her a degree of publicity she was having trouble attaining otherwise. And of course she's met the ironic fate she really deserves, i.e. having her own sexuality called into question...
10:07 PM | link
Via Mac Thomason: DNA evidence clears man of crime he spent 17 years in jail for. Remarkable tale, though I'm more astonished by the judge's remark that the man has to accept some of the blame for it because he never said he didn't commit the crime. Apparently there's over a hundred people been exonerated thanks to DNA evidence, though as Mac says, what about the people in jail for crimes they didn't commit who don't have the DNA evidence to back them up?
9:48 PM | link
Gary Kemp insists Spandau Ballet were about more than just the velvet pants.
This was audacious stuff for a couple of likely lads and their mates from north London. "We had arty aspirations," explains Kemp, who soon found himself despised by certain sections of the music press for the vague air of Nietzschean self-glorification about him and his bandmates, made more palpable by 1981's notorious Musclebound video. Not for nothing did they title their debut album Journeys to Glory. "We'd all been taught at the school of [Malcolm] McLaren, and we were into creating myth and legend. We read Sartre. We played clubs in St Tropez surrounded by mime artists. We had our own lighting guy who knew about German expressionism and wanted to light us from underneath - you know, like Fritz Lang."
I don't know, Gary, sometimes a pop band is just a pop band. And I enjoyed Spandau back in the 80s, I've no problems admitting that, but I'll be damned if I can hear Sartre in there anywhere...
9:40 PM | link
British Hindus want to create a British Ganges.
The site proposed by the council—a piece of waste ground beneath Apperley Bridge on the outskirts of Bradford—is far removed from the ancient wonder of Varanasi. The muddy brown river littered with refuse, a used car lot, and the training ground for the city's soccer team are the only views.
But Gupta is optimistic. "It is a nice site. ... it is easy to get to."
And it's not like the actual Ganges is the world's cleanest river, either...
9:24 PM | link
Philosophers through the ages have pondered the nature of Schadenfreude. Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote that its presence in a person's heart was a clear sign of evil. R.C. Trench, a 19th-century British archbishop, wrote that even having a word for such a damnable emotion was evidence of a culture's corruption. But scientists who study Schadenfreude take a more charitable view. However contemptible Schadenfreude may seem, they say, we are programmed to feel it. As Smith said, "It's human nature."
Interesting article, though methinks the study is basically just saying things that should be obvious, i.e. the bigger they come, the harder they fall, and the more fun they are for those watching them.
9:08 PM | link
Minnesota townsfolk have name problems, i.e. not enough different surnames to go around.
9:04 PM | link
Dubya decides he doesn't need Congressional approval to attack Iraq. Of course not, why should he seek legal justification for something like declaring war? I wonder sometimes if him and that Ashcroft character are trying to outdo each other in the worrisome declaration stakes...
8:46 PM | link
Taxpayers fund local airport authority for ten years, despite there being no airport.
8:44 PM | link
Liberal MP auctions self off for charity.
Mr Haase offered to be slave-for-a-day to raise money for a local Rotary Club.
Local Labor MP John Bowler made an early bid of $150, suggesting the Liberal politician could spend the day campaigning for the Labor Party.
But brothel madam Mary-Anne Kenworthy was the successful applicant, paying $1,000 for Mr Haase's labour for the day.
Ancient Roman armies went to war with pizza for dinner. And went to the lavatory in pairs. These are the findings of an archaeological survey of Roman army toilets near Aberdeen in Scotland. I wonder how the guy in charge of that operation reacts when people ask him what he does for a living...
8:41 PM | link
Texas church wants to scare the Hell out of people.
Each Halloween, members of the Trinity Church in Cedar Hill, Texas, put on a haunted house. But instead of ghostly howls and skeletons in coffins, "Hell House" depicts what the Pentecostal church considers to be sins: a girl having an abortion... another taking drugs at a rave, getting raped, then killing herself... a boy committing suicide in a classroom. In each elaborately staged scene, Satan taunts the sinner, and then drags him or her off to hell. The aim is to save souls through fear.
About 40 people at a time are shepherded through a dozen such scenes. At the end, the sinners are shown suffering their eternal damnation. Then visitors are asked if they want to accept Jesus and join the church. About one in five do.
So what do the other four do, say "no thanks, I'll go on worshipping Satan if it's all the same"? Doesn't sound like the church is trying hard enough somehow...
8:31 PM | link
Delaware police compile database of possible future criminals. That could be a big one, since theoretically anyone's capable of committing some sort of criminal act. It's a little known fact that I, for example, once shoplifted two books from a certain bookshop that will remain nameless. It was back in 1992, I have since bought many books to a vastly greater total value from the same shop than the value of the two books I liberated, I've never done it since and have no particular notion of doing it again. Which is not to say that at some point I won't. Does that make me enough of a potential future criminal to put me on the database? Of course, in practice, most of the people on the list reportedly "have been minorities from poor, high-crime neighborhoods", which should surprise no one, since minorities like that are easier targets for this sort of thing than middle-class suburban white boys like me.
"We should enforce the existing laws, but not violate them, to catch the bad guys," said Theo Gregory, City Councilman and public defender. "We've become the bad guys, and that's not right."
Mayor James Baker called the criticism "asinine and intellectually bankrupt."
"I don't care what anyone but a court of law thinks," he said. "Until a court says otherwise, if I say it's constitutional, it's constitutional."
Dunno where exactly in the US Delaware is, but brother Baker presumably thinks it's somewhere in the frontier west in the 1800s. Probably if he tried hard enough he could get the court of law to come round to his way of thinking too...
8:28 PM | link
The tomato paste of death! Here's a definite contender for Fortean Times' bizarre deaths page...
8:16 PM | link
Man vandalised statue to prevent civil war.
He says he was recently divorced after 20 years of marriage, has two teenaged children and lives in his vehicle, an '86 Ford Bronco. He says he does not currently have a job. He is earnest. He clearly believes what he says about pagans running the government and about his desire to "drive them from power." He says he is neither paranoid nor delusional but concedes mental health personnel have judged him as such.
I'm sure I can't imagine why they'd say such a thing like that. Hacking a bronze statue of Pan to bits in order to stop Protestants and pagans declaring war on each other is a perfectly rational thing to do.
8:15 PM | link
There are 6½ million people in America's jails right now. That apparently works out as one in every thirty-two adults in the US. Next: states propose to cut this overcrowding by calling for mandatory death sentences for everything so they can start clearing all those jailbirds out.
8:12 PM | link
City to tax rainwater. Yes, apparently the good people of Winona are to be charged—somehow—for the rain that falls on their property. It sounds like something from The Onion but the ring of truth is too disturbing.
8:10 PM | link
Schoolboy wins bog-snorkelling championship. Now there's a title you can be proud of, eh.
7:56 PM | link
Dunlop vs. Rittenhouse: the battle rages on! Also sprach Tim:
I doubt that Jim would have even considered the possibility of my own ethnic origins as he has already reached his conclusions about me based on a little bit of stereotyping about my Australianess, land of insensitive convict types. Then again, I suppose it will not make any difference to the clearly very prickly Jim to know that my mother's full maiden name is Anita Maria Katrina Bombelli, her father hailing from Milan, most of our family fluent in the mother tongue. No, this will no doubt just render me a self-hating wop.
Malaysian tourism minister wants cheating cabbies shot. WOW. A little harsh, maybe, but I daresay his heart's in the right place. If nothing else, pain of death might actually encourage cabbies to learn where everything is and how to get there; maybe we should try something like that with some of Sydney's cabbies...
7:45 PM | link
Talking of the Jo'burg bash, I didn't realise the Dalai Lama had been told not to come. Heaven forbid the South African government should make the Chinese angry...
7:39 PM | link
Via Matthew Bates: that Jo'burg environment conference looks like being a riotous assembly.
Just a few kilometres from Sandton begins the sprawling Alexandra township, where nearly a million people live in squalor. Organisers of the conference, which begins today, seem determined that the two worlds should be kept as far apart as possible. Tight security surrounds Sandton's convention centre and five-star hotels, where world leaders will debate poverty, the environment and sustainable development while enjoying lavish hospitality.
At the Michelangelo Hotel, where the British delegation is staying, cases of champagne have been flown in from France and no expense has been spared to meet delegates' gastronomic needs. "Whether it is caviar, foie gras or cut sandwiches, we can deliver," head chef Desmond Morgan said.
I think the aforementioned million people would settle for the cut sandwiches. That might help the debate on poverty the conference is supposed to be holding. My favourite part of the article:
Apart from criticism of the five-star location, the summit's green credentials have been undermined by predictions that the energy requirements of 65,000 delegates will create an additional 500,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide pollution—the same amount produced by half a million Africans in a year.
Ha! Matthew, meanwhile, wonders what exactly is the point of this conference. Let me introduce Matthew, therefore, to the wonders of the word "junket":
\Jun"ket\, v. i. To feast; to banquet; to make an entertainment; — sometimes applied opprobriously to feasting by public officers at the public cost.
Blogwars continues! Amir Butler "outs" Alley Writer! I hadn't even heard of this Alley Writer character until Bruce Hill took him to task over something the other day. It may be said that the situation has escalated somewhat. The precise ethics of what Butler's done may be debatable, but it's arguable that it's not undeserved...
7:10 PM | link
The ABC to investigate its own alleged biases. Of course the ABC is biased. The SBS is biased too. The commercial networks are biased. The radio is biased. The print media is biased. The blogosphere is biased. I'm biased. You're biased. Tim Blair is biased. Rob Corr is biased. Glenn Reynolds is biased. The Pope is biased. Al-Jazeera is biased. That dog with the orange fur from number 14 is biased, seemingly against everyone. The fucking world is biased. Everyone's opinions contain some degree of bias, so obviously the ABC's do as well. If they were biased toward the government they wouldn't be any less biased, although I suspect the government wouldn't be accusing them of bias then...
6:41 PM | link
The Invisible Library is a collection of books that only appear in other books. Within the library's catalog you will find imaginary books, pseudobiblia, artifictions, fabled tomes, libris phantastica, and all manner of books unwritten, unread, unpublished, and unfound.
Yes, the Necronomicon is here, as is The King In Yellow and a million other Cthulhu Mythos tomes.
10:21 PM | link
How age affects your movie monster preference. In other words, if you're in your teens, the scary thing about Scream is how all the teenagers get killed violently. If you're 50 or so, the scary thing about Scream is the teenagers themselves.
9:57 PM | link
British NUS wants to try and get students to stop drinking. I can see that working.
9:55 PM | link
FBI find remains of missing girl on property in Oregon. Despite the owner of the property allegedly describing himself in an interview as the number one suspect, and despite one of the neighbours reporting him to the FBI about it months ago, for some reason it's taken them this long to actually check it out.
9:53 PM | link
For some reason I never thought mortuary work would lead to getting many kickbacks. I was wrong.
9:48 PM | link
Church members facing massive fine for snail theft.
When the police arrived, Officer Brian Martin explained Wednesday, four members of Happy Times Church from Los Angeles said they had put the snails back in the water.
The gallon buckets were empty, but the police kept searching and found 200 pounds of black turban snails in an ice chest, he said.
“We had a discussion with them about lying,” Martin said about the church members, who reportedly came to town that morning for a day at the beach and a barbecue.
Remember kids: lies make baby Jesus cry. The Flanders kids tell me so.
9:27 PM | link
Peter Holmes argues there's too much music in the world.
While music fans are finally being liberated from an ancient record company monopoly that kept us from experiencing the kaleidoscope of exotic or "uncommercial" sounds that didn't suit their needs, we also risk a severe case of option paralysis every time we set foot into an HMV store or surf MP3 sites and online CD warehouses.
Where the hell do you start?
Well, having a reasonably definite idea of what to look for before I do any of the above usually helps me, don't know about you... doesn't preclude whim purchases, of course, but usually when I go into a shop I go in there with a specific object in mind. Otherwise yes, I'd probably go nuts trying to decide what to buy...
9:11 PM | link
I've seen this piece by Paul Wright praised around the place.
How much of “moral relativism” is simply a desire to avoid making a stand? To leave it up to anyone else to step up and make a stand. What is it about Westerners that makes so many of them reluctant to put there hand up and say “this is the greatest civilisation that the world has ever seen; we like it and we’re going to keep it. If you like it, join us.”
The amazing part is that if you pick any group of critics of the West, and offer them free passage to another culture, none will go. Offer the same deal to the people in the other culture, and you risk being hurt in the rush. We all know this to be true. None of the critics of Western civilisation want to live anywhere else, because they recognise that unless your name is Borgia, you’ve never had it so good.
I actually don't really have anything against what Paul has to say in all of this. I live in the West, I tend to like it more than I dislike it, and have no real issues about being part of it. The problem is, and I've noticed this with numerous commentators, that along with the espousal of the greatness of Western values as opposed to those of, say, Islamic societies, there often seems to be the assumption that the West is thereby somehow immune from criticism. An awful lot of shit is spouted about the horrors of Western civilisation, from the more paranoid fringes of both the Left and the Right; but if the West is that good, it should surely be capable of accepting legitimate criticism when it is made. Paul later says:
Anyone comparing Club members to non-members, and who is not willing to live in the non-Club nation, will have this inconsistency publicly pointed out. This does not preclude debate, or criticism, but the polity needs to hear about the unwillingness to practice what is preached.
"You can debate and criticise all right, but if you really don't like it that much, go live somewhere like Iraq." That's the underlying subtext I read there. That's the sort of attitude I'd like to think Western civilisation and its staunch defenders should be above. The tolerance of Western civilisation is supposed to be one of its superior features, after all...
8:59 PM | link
Bishop's crook declared an offensive weapon. Airport security staff go mad yet again. What did they think he was going to do, run up and down the aisles of the plane and give everyone religion with it?
8:32 PM | link
Gary McIntyre finally quits as Bulldogs president. Given how the rest of the board quit last Friday, I think all that most people will say is "took you fucking long enough".
8:23 PM | link
Big Brother is watching Richard Baillie's penis. It's a dirty job, but someone's got to do it, I suppose.
8:15 PM | link
Blogwars! The Rittenhouse Review de-blogrolls Tim Dunlop! Some people really don't like having others speak ill of their spiritual leader, evidently. Personally I thought the criticisms were reasonably mild and mildly reasonable, but obviously brother Capozzola thought otherwise; I particularly liked this post of his where he sneers lightly at our origins as a penal colony, completely ignoring the equally colonial origins of white settlement in America...
7:48 PM | link
It's been a shit week in rugby league, too, given all the shit that's happened around the Bulldogs. The salary cap thing has had the immediate effect of knocking them down to the bottom of the competition ladder, but now they've got sundry other investigations to face on top of that (ICAC is looking into it now too, so it's gone just beyond game level) and just to end it all, they narrowly lost today's match against Canberra. It's the deduction of the competition points which bothers me. Frankly it strikes me as stupid. Put it this way.
Back in the original series of Blackadder, Edmund, Baldrick and Percy go on trial for witchcraft. Prince Harry is the presiding judge. At the end of it all he duly finds them guilty and says the sentence is that they be burned to death. But Harry says he's decided to be merciful and instead they'll be burned alive. It strikes me that the NRL pulled something similar on the Bulldogs, it only looks like they spared the team. Look at the figures. The Dogs lost 37 points. That left them at the bottom of the ladder with four points and three games to play. Souths were already in the bottom position with twelve points. Now that meant even if the Dogs won the three remaining matches, they still wouldn't get enough points to climb out of bottom position.
In other words, there's nothing the Bulldogs can possibly do to avoid utter humiliation at the end of the day... so why even leave them in the competition? After all, one of the options facing the NRL in dealing with the team was expelling them from the competition altogether for the rest of the season, and frankly they may as well have done so. As it is, the NRL have basically ordered the Bulldogs be burnt alive than burnt to death; expulsion from the rest of the season could hardly be more insulting to them than the situation they've been left with.
[Disclaimer: I am not a Bulldogs fan; if I followed the game at all I'd probably support Souths, them being my local team, and I won't say I'm not glad to see they won't be getting the wooden spoon now. I also believe Canterbury deserved punishment for cheating like they did. I just doubt the punishment itself.]
7:45 PM | link
While I'm here, can I just register my extreme venomous hatred for this program? My loathing for this show knows few if any bounds, particularly when it comes to the reviews. I cannot stand the "It's like X meets Y" tag at the end of each review (at first I thought this was the style of the bloke doing the reviews—Andrew Curry? Adam Curry? Not even sure what his name is—but host Antonia Kidman's reviews follow the same format), as if the people responsible for producing the fucking show don't trust their audience to have enough of an idea what the film's like from the rest of the review without capping it by describing it as a cross between two other films. But it really got up my nose tonight, more so than usual, when Andrew, or Adam, said of Mr Deeds that the story wasn't terribly original.
WELL DO YOU WANT TO KNOW WHY MR DEEDS IS UNORIGINAL, EH ANDREW OR ADAM OR WHATEVER YOUR FUCKING NAME IS? DID YOU THINK TO DO THE LEAST BIT OF FUCKING RESEARCH? DO YOU WANT ME TO TELL YOU WHY? BECAUSE IT'S A FUCKING REMAKE!!!!! IT'S A REMAKE OF THIS FILM!!!!! FRANK CAPRA MADE IT IN 1936! BUT YOU DIDN'T KNOW THAT, DID YOU, ANDREW OR ADAM OR WHATEVER YOUR FUCKING NAME IS, BECAUSE YOU'RE A NO-ACCOUNT FUCKING HACK WORKING FOR A CHEAPLY FLUNG-TOGETHER HACK ENTERTAINMENT PROGRAM ON CHANNEL FUCKING TEN, TOO FUCKING IGNORANT TO KNOW THE SANDLER FILM'S EVEN A REMAKE LET ALONE WHAT FILM IT'S A FUCKING REMAKE OF! AND EVEN IF YOU DID KNOW ABOUT THE CAPRA FILM YOU PROBABLY WOULDN'T WATCH IT BECAUSE GUESS WHAT? IT'S IN BLACK AND WHITE!!!!! AM I RIGHT, ANDREW OR ADAM OR WHATEVER YOUR FUCKING NAME IS, OR AM I WRONG?
Goddamn I really need to stop watching that show. If only it weren't so damnably inconveniently programmed between Sports Tonight and The Simpsons on Sunday nights.
7:02 PM | link
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Yes, it's another selection from the id of Hot Buttered Death, also known as the Sitemeter stats. (Remember you can click on the little Sitemeter graphic in the right column; if nothing else, it'll prove I'm not inventing these things.) I don't even want to know who the people are looking for some of these things.
6:31 PM | link
Jim Schwab declares Fellowship of the Ring to be an instant classic. That's an argument I can get behind. I will, however, hold off on buying the thing until the expanded DVD set comes out, partly because I reckon I may as well get the full deal if I'm going to get it at all and partly because by that time I might actually have a DVD player I can watch the film with. Alternately, I could just do what a friend of ours did back in the late 80s; even though she didn't have a CD player at that time she bought stuff on CD in anticipation of the day when she did have one. I was tempted to do something similar when Fight Club came out on DVD, and I may do it when the 4-disc Fellowship comes out.
5:33 PM | link
Via Jason Rylander: Why Dubya's anti-obesity campaign is doomed to failure.
"Verb: It's what you do." That's the slogan the Bush administration thinks is going to inspire "tweens"—kids between 9 and 13—to get off their duffs and get active. To that end, the administration has pledged $190 million to an ad campaign that's supposed to lead the charge in reducing childhood obesity.
The article goes into greater detail on why the author thinks it won't work, but surely the most obvious answer is the stupidity of the slogan itself. "Verb!" Yes, that's encouraged ME to lose weight, all right.
5:21 PM | link
Postman attacked by cat. Presumably the dog was busy doing something else at the time.
5:10 PM | link
Three shot after service for man shot at anti-violence party. The irony just piles up higher and higher with this one.
5:01 PM | link
School makes kids who violate dress code rules wear special T-shirt. Eh, they should make them go naked instead, I say. I think that'd be more likely to encourage them to wear proper uniforms and all that...
4:59 PM | link
Drug dealer claims tax deduction for money stolen during a deal.
Justice Robert Nicholson ruled that Francesco Domenico La Rosa earned his taxable income by dealing drugs so he was entitled to claim the deduction because the money was stolen during a deal directly connected with his illicit business.
While I'd like to say "Only in America" at this point, I must sadly admit this happened in Australia. Further proof that at least some of the people sitting in judgement in our courts should be taken out back of the courts and shot...
4:43 PM | link
Man jailed for beating the crap out of women when he couldn't get it up to rape them.
4:39 PM | link
How nature uses smell to discourage incest.
Mothers particularly did not like the smell of their children, and children had a strong aversion to the smell of their fathers. Children of the same sex were not offended by each other's smell, but children of opposite sex were.
Precisely where these findings leave people like me who have no sense of smell is not explained.
4:37 PM | link
Norfolk Islanders vote against allowing mobile phones on the island. Eh. The people of Norfolk Island are welcome to it; as far as I can see, the lack of income tax is about all it has going for it. I don't know why they don't just vote themselves a separate entity from Australia, cos I don't think it's like Australia is terribly interested in having them as part of the country...
4:18 PM | link
A Church of England spokesman said the inflatable could only be used for civil ceremonies. He added: "A church is its people—and you can't have inflatable people."
I don't know whether to smile benignly or vomit at that sort of gross naivete, I really don't...
4:11 PM | link
Via Tim Blair: Delegate to Sustainable Development summit in Jo'burg mugged. Said delegate receives the Hot Buttered Death Moronic Statement of the Day award, too:
The man said he was attacked in Eloff Street and robbed of his watch and $70 (about R750). He had not laid a charge because he believed the muggers were the very people who needed to be helped by the summit, he said.
"You want to help me get my sorry panhandling carcass off the streets? Then gimme the fucking wallet!" Yes, that's being helpful all right, fuckwit...
3:58 PM | link
Chris Textor's disappointed in Black Hawk Down. I wasn't, I must say; I thought it would be rah rah all-American bullshit and, to my mind at least, I was proven right when I saw it in the cinema (I particularly enjoyed the way it managed to skate lightly over the fact that the Somalia mission wound up being a pretty miserable failure by focusing on one day featuring glorious American heroics). I'd already ceased to expect that Ridley Scott would ever make anything worthwhile again, so wasn't disappointed on that front either...
3:39 PM | link
Iraqi man stabs wife, obviously thinks he'll get away with it.
Crown prosecutor Julian Leckie told the jury that Mrs Hermiz, 32, was stabbed more than 20 times and killed outside a shopping centre in Meadow Heights, in Melbourne's outer-northern suburbs. Mr Leckie said that there was a clear case of murder. "It was a conscious, voluntary and deliberate act—he knew what he was doing."
David Brustman, for Mr Yasso, said that, while Mr Yasso had killed his wife, there was no charge of murder to answer. He said that cultural differences were an issue in the case.
I could've sworn that stabbing a person 20 times and causing death would be considered murder in most cultures, including this one. Respecting cultural differences is fine, but not that fine.
3:31 PM | link
Jewish doctor caught planning to blow up Muslim school in Florida. So what's that about, trying to prove the Palestinians don't have the monopoly on blowing up innocents? Way to bring people round to your cause, fuckwit. Bruce Hill isn't impressed, either.
3:25 PM | link
Woman arrested for trying to kill husband with needles. So she damn well should be arrested, just for stupidity. Damn, woman, if you wanted to use needles you should've made a voodoo doll of your husband and stuck them in that; that would've been a bit less obvious than sticking them in hubby himself...
3:14 PM | link
More Australian political jollies: Liberals are pissing off Nationals in Victoria and the Democrats may split in two. This place really is kind of fucked on the political level at the moment, isn't it. Still, given that we have a Liberal federal government yet all the state governments are held by Labor at the moment, perhaps all of this psychosis should be expected.
3:11 PM | link
No, no posting yesterday either. I was making a mix CD for someone, spent all day on that, then it came night time and I couldn't be bothered. Anyway, I was needing a day or two away from this.
3:05 PM | link
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What the critics have said
"short tempered, rude, sarcastic and generally unable to cope with authority figures"
-Martin Forrester-Reid (former employer)
"formidable"
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"Who?"
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