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Peter Nixon
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Monday, 31 October 2005
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Bill O'Reilly called himself a Coward!
That's right, it's not only me that thinks Billie boy is a coward after he refuses to confront Media Matters while he attacks them. He admits as much himself. Let's read what he has to say from the Nit Picker: January 5, 2004
"Finally, the mail... John Wright, "The Herald Journal," Logan, Utah,
"I graduated from one of the best journalism schools in the country,
the University of Florida. You, Bill, are not a journalist. You spew
propaganda.
"For example, you said the journalism professors
from Rutgers and Lehigh were cowards because they would not come on THE
FACTOR. That's not true. Maybe they simply didn't want to appear."
Well, I'm sorry, Mr. Wright. If
you attack someone publicly, as these men did to me, you have an
obligation to face the person you are smearing. If you don't, you are a
coward. Wise up, sir.
The NP has many more
of Bill lampooning himself. Good job. What say you Bill, are you a
coward, a liar or does your logic only apply to other people? Am I
smearing you or are you smearing yourself? [Crooks and Liars]
11:37:24 PM 
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Tenor sax player Ralph Franke has joined Gumbo Ya Ya, replacing Terry Jones.
Ralph is a great player I first met in 1979 or thereabouts. He has a history with some Gumbo members who were Rhythm Willie alumni, Charli Holoubek and John (Johann) Coultas. He also played in the Z-Brass, the horn section for the highly influential Vitamin Z for which Eric Stevenson was the singer.
11:23:08 PM
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The anti-smoking lobby group Quit says it is disappointing that South
Australians will have to wait another two years for total smoking bans
in pubs and clubs.
I hate smoking. Having said that, I've waited all my life for a smoking ban; I can wait two more years if I have to.
[ABC News: Health]
10:56:24 PM
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Cory Doctorow:
Bad Mags is a website companion to a forthcoming (?) book of the same
name, which catalogs gross-out girly, drugsploitation, true-crime and
biker mags from the golden age of such things:
 The
main reason I wrote Bad Mags was because I wished I had had something
comparable when I started looking for and collecting these magazines--a
guide if you will. Because Bad Mags attempts to cover such a large
selection of subject matter any chapter included in it could have been
its own book. Bad Mags is not a complete listing of the magazines and
tabloids covering these particular subjects (if such a thing were
possible), but is an attempt to give a more complete picture of what
was published concerning them at the time.
Beyond that Bad Mags is a book devoted to strange, bizarre and
peripheral magazines because the back alleys of the publishing industry
have been little explored in print. In most cases there isn't any
information readily available, limited only to the information given in
the periodical itself.
Oh, yeah, this is bad - or good.
NSFW Link
(via We Make Money Not Art) [Boing Boing]
10:49:48 PM
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Microsoft founder Bill Gates has pledged $US258.3 million ($A343.7
million) for research and development to combat malaria, including new
cash to test the world's first vaccine against the mosquito-borne
disease.
Onya Bill.
[ABC News: Health]
10:37:12 PM
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Sunday, 30 October 2005
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David Pescovitz:
NASA has developed a "robot skin" embedded with sensors so robotic
devices can react to their environment. To demonstrate the technology,
engineer Vladimir Lumelsky orchestrated a bizarre performance piece
starring a ballerina and a robotic arm. The result is phallictastic.
Link to video, Link to NASA article (via Gizmodo, thanks Sean Ness!) [Boing Boing]David Pescovitz:
Truly bizarre.
Link to video, Link to NASA article (via Gizmodo, thanks Sean Ness!) [Boing Boing]
12:41:52 PM
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Elvis is still the king when it comes to earning royalties, according to Forbes magazine, but Shakespeare could have given him a run for the money.
So even though Elvis has long gone to the baby Jesus, he's still making a significant quid.
Forbes is here.
[ABC News: Offbeat (with Mpeg1)]
12:30:26 PM
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A short period of psychological stress in infancy can lead to impaired
learning and memory and a decline in cognitive abilities in middle age,
according to research conducted in rats.
Of course, I think of myself as no longer reproductive, and with my current partner that is absolutely true.
But partnerships, even old comfortable ones such as mine, do fall apart.
I certainly have acquaintances/friends who, at my age have bred. So I may need info such as this in the future.
I have to say, I'm a little more self-centred about this report, in that I wonder about my own mental decline.
[ABC News: Health]
1:46:02 AM
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The Live 8 series of 10 free concerts in July have generated a surplus
of more than $A16 million to be put toward relief projects in Africa
despite not being a fundraising event.
Surely a decent whack. I had not realised the gig was not intended to profit.
So, what?
Raise awareness I suppose.
That amount should achieve something anyway.
[ABC News: Entertainment (with Mpeg1)]
1:18:12 AM
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Increases in particles polluting the air are associated with an
increase in the number of strokes caused by a blood clot in the brain
but not the type caused by an artery rupture in the brain, new research
shows.
So, I have a genetic
predisposition to heart and vascular problems. Already this has shown
up in the form of high blood pressure. While this is pretty much under
control, partly through medication, a large part of that control has
been through exercise, in particular, in my case, until a decade ago,
running in the streets, but more recently, by cycling through the
streets, both of which mean I'm out there sucking in that pollution
which is threatening me with strokes. I think I should just gas myself
now.
[ABC News: Health]
1:07:54 AM
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Mark Frauenfelder:
This is one of the neatest optical illusions I've ever seen. Viewed up
close, Mr Angry is on the left and Mrs Calm is on the right. If you
back up, they swap places. Even works if you print it out.
However did the originator of this image come across the concept and technique?
Link (thanks, suckup!)
[Boing Boing]
12:46:31 AM
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Friday, 28 October 2005
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I just did this US 8th grade maths test.
I got 100%! How cool am I?
I failed first year Uni maths.
Well, actually, I just stopped going. Even so I got a supp, but I
failed that. I blame the ridiculously boring and ineffective teaching. My brother says I'm full of shit.
12:08:52 AM
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Monday, 24 October 2005
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Cory Doctorow:
In this video segment from Attack of the Show, Eric Pratt from iSuppli guts several consumer electronics/IT devices and analyzes the cost of their components, calculating the profit margin on each:
The Mac mini which retails for $499 is actually worth $283 in parts and labor.
The 2 Gig iPod Nano retails for $199, but is actually worth $103 in
parts and labor. The most expensive component is actually the iPod
Nano's 2 Gigs of memory.
Eric finished up with a G4 exclusive teardown of the Game Boy
Micro which retails for $100. The actual cost of the Micro is only $44.
The screen on the GB Micro is actually the most expensive component.
Of course, the unfair thing about this attempt to make these products look like ripoffs, is that any product needs transport, marketing, some profit to be earmarked for development and improvement, etc.
Link
(via Make Blog) [Boing Boing]
10:16:22 PM
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Sunday, 23 October 2005
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The antiabortion group that celebrated Katrina's toll on New Orleans is begging God to punish Florida next.
Just when you think the Christian right can't get any loonier...
You'll need to click on an ad to get a day pass to Salon, which is worth it, and I do it almost every day, but this particular article doesn't really say much more than the above.
[Salon.com]
9:24:17 AM
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Saturday, 22 October 2005
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ACLU Applauds Unanimous Kansas Supreme Court Decision Reversing
Conviction of Gay Teen Unfairly Punished under "Romeo and
Juliet" Law...
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Friday, October 21, 2005
TOPEKA, KS - The Kansas Supreme Court today unanimously struck
down part of a law that sent a gay teenager to prison for over
17 years, when a heterosexual teen would have served only 15
months for...
Why jail at all for any of them?
Give them some condoms, and tell them to be careful and have fun, I say.
[morons.org headlines]
2:46:43 PM
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I've
worked at Salisbury TAFE since 1994, part time until 1997, full time
since then, with a break of a few months at the beginning of 1998. The
TAFE is 30 km or so from my home, depending which route you take.
At first I always drove, because I was usually leaving from another job
of some kind or other. When I went full time I started to play around
with public transport.
The Grange train goes to Adelaide, and a change of train goes to Salisbury. The connection is not always convenient, and Grange Station is 2 km from my house.
So sometimes I took the bus to the city. The stop is seconds from my front door, and there is a stop just outside the Adelaide Railway Station. This was a convenient compromise, although the connections are often more frustrating.
Buses are a bit of a pain compared to trains. Trains are more spacious,
stop less frequently, almost never turn at all, much less take corners,
and are generally much faster. The cost is the same.
Then I put the bicycle into the mix.
For a concession ticket (and at non-peak times for free) you can put a bicycle on a train. So I could ride to Grange, train to Salisbury, ride to work.
I began to ride home from Adelaide, or, if the train was not an
express, from North Adelaide, a distance of 11-16km depending again on
the route. I found this the best way to travel to and from work, but,
because of times and items I may have to carry, I could only do it two
or three times a week at best.
I began to think I might be able to ride all the way home from Salisbury.
I was a little afraid to try for a long time. I was fairly sure I could
make the distance, but how wrecked would I be? Would I be stiff and
useless the next day? I thought I would be all right. But then there
was the traffic.
Home from Adelaide was pretty straightforward. One route was a dedicated bike and walking track. To ride from Salisbury
would involve a very busy highway. I had to be confident I was fit
enough to be attentive the whole way or it would not be safe. I used my
recent holidays to get used to the distance.
Tonight I finally did it. I rode home all the way. Piece of cake. It
took me a little over twice as long as in the car, about twenty minutes
longer than the train/bike combination, about fifteen minutes less than
the bus/train combination, and much less than two trains.
12:43:12 AM
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Friday, 21 October 2005
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A rare form of cancer could soon be detected with a simple blood test, after a key discovery by Western Australian researchers.
A breakthrough a day keeps the health scare away.
[ABC News: Health]
11:17:30 PM
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David Pescovitz:
Researchers from the University of Southern California report that
pathological liars and cheats actually have differently-structured
brains than people who don't. Adrian Raine and Yaling Yang report in
the British Journal of Psychiatry that liars they studied seemed to
have 22 percent more white matter in their prefontal cortex than
"normal" people. From Reuters:
The new study suggests that because grey matter consists
of brain cells, while white matter forms the "wiring" or connections
between these cells, pathological liars may have more capacity to lie
and fewer moral restraints.
"They've got the equipment to lie
and they don't have the disinhibition that the rest of us have in
telling the big whoppers," Dr Raine said...
While the findings have no practical implications at present, if
confirmed they could be useful in clinical diagnoses of whether a
person is pretending to be sick.
They
could also help in criminal justice settings by helping police
determine if a suspect is lying, and in pre-employment screening.
Lying interests me. I don't tend
to do it. It doesn't suit me, I'm not good at it, it's quite a bit of
effort, and usually unnecessary. The truth can be uncomfortable, but in
the long run I'm always happier with it.
Having said that, I realise that just about anyone, including myself,
will lie if the lie is to their advantage and if it will not
particularly harm anyone.
But I have known a few people who would rather lie than tell the truth.
Think about that. The lie they tell may harm someone. They don't care.
The lie may not give them any advantage or gain. They lie anyway.
This is either evil or pathological.
Link
[Boing Boing]
1:22:55 AM
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The Australian Nursing Federation (ANF) says the Howard Government's
proposed industrial relations (IR) changes will turn nurses away from
the profession.
I have it on good authority that if nurses get shifts they don't want, it is fairly common that they just don't turn up.
No one's going to sack them. If there is no incentive to work particular shifts many nurses will leave the service.
Of this I'm sure.
[ABC News: Health]
1:05:23 AM
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Warren Zevon songs have become earworms for me. They have virally infected my brain. In a good way.
A few weeks ago I taped the movie Things to do in Denver when You're Dead. I plan to watch it over the weekend.
I'd forgotten that the title is a Warren Zevon song; the song does feature in the movie, which, from all reports, is crap. I'll watch it anyway.
Then today I read where Dave Winer,
exactly my age, has had his regular medical tests because of a health
scare a few years ago, and half expects one day after these tests to be
told to get his affairs in order.
He quotes a Warren Zevon song to express what he hopes his reaction will be on that day.
12:49:20 AM
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Doctors are calling for the Federal Government to subsidise a new
breast cancer drug after research found that it dramatically cuts the
chances of relapse.
The government must do this; the old male buggers'd jump fast enough if the drug worked on prostate cancer.
[ABC News: Health]
12:22:42 AM
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Wednesday, 19 October 2005
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Tuesday, 18 October 2005
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Xeni Jardin:
A cancer survivor who had a mastectomy writes about knitting a breast prosthesis for herself:
When I got home, I put on my new titty and bra and promptly broke into
tears. The titty reminded me of raw liver, while the bra resembled the
suspension system of my 1995 Volvo.
To cheer myself up, I rummaged through my stash looking for
something luxurious to knit up. Then it hit me that I could knit myself
a new titty; in fact, I had so much yarn I could knit myself a
different titty for every day of the week, month, year!
I finished my first knitted titty an hour before the party and
wore it with one of my favorite lacy underwires. When a friend, who had
been following the whole titty saga, saw me she remarked, "You really
did a great job! Your left breast looks almost as good as the right one
-- a bit lumpy but very realistic."
"You know," I replied, "It was my right breast that was removed."
Link to story
and knitting pattern, with caveat: "Do not wear a Tit Bit with a weight
onto an airplane, as it may be confiscated as a dangerous projectile."
The designer also sells readymade "Tit Bits" here.
It would be easy to belittle this piece, but, given the prevalence of breast cancer, this is actually pretty important.
(Thanks, B) [Boing Boing]
9:38:58 PM
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A prominent South Australian marine biologist says a rise in the number
of shark attacks on humans over the past 80 years could indicate sharks
are starting to see humans as a food source.
Freak me out brussel sprout!
I want to go in the water!
Don't tell me sharks are picking my ample buttocks to chew!
[ABC News: Science and Technology]
9:29:20 PM
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Monday, 17 October 2005
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Cory Doctorow:
Clive Thompson's written an excellent
piece for the NYT about life-hackers, academic and amateur, who
approach the ever-increasing craziness of high-tech life and its many
interruptions as an engineering problem to be solved:
On the bigger screen, people completed the tasks at least
10 percent more quickly - and some as much as 44 percent more quickly.
They were also more likely to remember the seven-digit number, which
showed that the multitasking was clearly less taxing on their brains.
Some of the volunteers were so enthralled with the huge screen that
they begged to take it home. In two decades of research, Czerwinski had
never seen a single tweak to a computer system so significantly improve
a user's productivity. The clearer your screen, she found, the calmer
your mind. So her group began devising tools that maximized screen
space by grouping documents and programs together - making it possible
to easily spy them out of the corner of your eye, ensuring that you
would never forget them in the fog of your interruptions. Another
experiment created a tiny round window that floats on one side of the
screen; moving dots represent information you need to monitor, like the
size of your in-box or an approaching meeting. It looks precisely like
the radar screen in a military cockpit.
In late 2003, the technology writer Danny O'Brien decided he was
fed up with not getting enough done at work. So he sat down and made a
list of 70 of the most "sickeningly overprolific" people he knew, most
of whom were software engineers of one kind or another. O'Brien wrote a
questionnaire asking them to explain how, precisely, they managed such
awesome output. Over the next few weeks they e-mailed their replies,
and one night O'Brien sat down at his dining-room table to look for
clues. He was hoping that the self-described geeks all shared some
common tricks.
Fantastic article! You may have to register with the New York Times to read it. Don't worry; it's free, and they don't bug you.
Link [Boing Boing]
11:00:18 PM
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Image copyright Time; all rights reserved.
The other day, as I was musing idly, one foot in the remainder bin, the other on a banana peel, Time
came calling, out of the blue. They were interested to know if I'd be
willing to play a walk-on role as fringe futurist in their "What's
Next" issue (October 24, 2005, on newsstands now). A few days later, I
found myself in the standard-issue characterless conference room,
playing brain pong with Tim O'Reilly, Malcolm Gladwell, Clay Shirky,
David Brooks, Esther Dyson, and Moby. (What were they thinking?!?) I have next to nothing in common with them, but it was fun nonetheless, a real thought-rattling kick in the head. Transcript here. [Shovelware]
10:48:40 PM
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Sunday, 16 October 2005
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Cory Doctorow:
The Guardian has an amazing interview with my hero, Brazilian culture minister and jazz legend Gilberto GIl:
And in one small development that none the less sums up the mood, the
left-wing administration of President Luiz Inacio da Silva, or "Lula",
has announced that all ministries will stop using Microsoft Windows on
their office computers. Instead of paying through the nose for
Microsoft operating licences, while millions of Brazilians live in
poverty, the government will use open-source software, collaboratively
designed by programmers worldwide and owned by no one.
"This isn't just my idea, or Brazil's idea," Gil says. "It's the
idea of our time. The complexity of our times demands it." He is
politician enough to hold back from endorsing the breaking of laws, for
example on music downloading, but only just. "The Brazilian government
is definitely pro-law," he grins. "But if law doesn't fit reality
anymore, law has to be changed. That's not a new thing. That's
civilisation as usual." (He is not a hi-tech person himself, he says,
but readily concedes that his children have "probably" done a fair bit
of illegal downloading.)
Gil is a great composer in
his own right; he knows the value of letting go, the greedy insistence
on rights sometimes being counterproductive.
Link
(Thanks, Robert!) [Boing Boing]
11:40:30 PM
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Canadian researchers have discovered that smoking marijuana could improve a person's memory and mood.
There isn't a musician I know who
wouldn't welcome positive news about dope, but somehow I'm pretty sure
their experience would lead them to doubt this. The memory part, not
the mood bit, obviously.
[ABC News: Health]
10:42:00 PM
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Cory Doctorow:
Master
game designer Greg Costikyan has posted the PowerPoint deck from his
Future Play conference presentation, titled, "Imagining New Game
Styles." The presentation introduces the concepts of game styles, which are related to the fundamentals of play and not to be confused with game genres.
Examples of game styles include "The Chess Family," characterized by
"capture by replacement; bilateral symmetry and equality of material;
functionally differentiated pieces; play by movement & capture, not
placement and victory through capture of a single piece."
The most fascinating part of this is the catalog of game styles that
have seen little development to date -- if you want to think about the
future of video-games (and games in general), start to imagine how
these fallow styles could be made to bear fruit.
636K PowerPoint Link
(via Games * Design * Art * Culture)
[Boing Boing]
9:38:53 PM
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Over the last few days I have had
lunch with two people (one at a time) whom I hadn't seen for over
thirty years. These were experiences about which I have very mixed
feelings. Mostly, it was pleasant.
I've tried, unsuccessfully, to order my thoughts about these meetings.
I've ended up with a collection of nonsequiturs, and logical dead ends,
that even I don't follow very well now.
One person I met was a woman I don't want to describe too closely, but
the bare facts are [I wrote some stuff here originally, about who she
is and what she is to me, but thought it better not to publish; I'll
leave it at this]. This complicates things somewhat for me, but of course means nothing to her. Obviously, even I went on to have a life.
One thing that surprised me was that she has gone on to be exactly the
person I imagined she would be. Bully for me and my judgement. She was,
of course, utterly lovely.
When I saw Felicity the next day, she too was predictable in her insecure possessiveness.
"Do you still find her attractive?"
I couldn't lie. I said,
"Oooo, yeah."
In every possible way.
The other was a man I knew as a class member in high school. We were
never best friends, but were, at various times, as close as teenage
boys allow themselves to get. He was always a straightforward lovely
bloke I always felt I could trust. We certainly shared musical
interests. Even in his case, there was a really trivial incident that I
regret, that put a cloud over the prospect of meeting him. The matter
was so trivial that he had no recollection of any such thing, so it
wasn't a problem for anyone but me, as is so often the case.
I really enjoyed meeting both of them, in spite of some reservations,
most of which were just the residue of an ongoing shyness I've had all
my life.
But, due to my social ineptness, I think I was hard work for my more confident and gregarious companions.
I'm never sure of what is appropriate to ask, or to say, so I end up
silent. I think this makes me come across as:
(choose one or any
combination)
- aloof and uninterested
- dumb and boring,
- melancholy and morose
- self-centred and self-important
- mad and delusional
- suspicious and paranoid.
I'm really quite a nice, normal person. Just a bit slow sometimes, and overwhelmed by the chaos of human interaction.
I can't help thinking that I have missed some kind of important
opportunity. I'm pretty sure I blew any chance at an ongoing friendship
with at least one of them. Guess which?
In the words of Peter Green -
Oh well.
9:33:39 PM
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Cory Doctorow:
Wal-Mart called the police on a high-school student who brought in a
pic of a homemade anti-George Bush poster for photo-finishing. The
Secret Service went to the kid's high-school and confiscated the
poster.
Jarvis had assigned her senior civics and economics class "to take
photographs to illustrate their rights in the Bill of Rights," she
says. One student "had taken a photo of George Bush out of a magazine
and tacked the picture to a wall with a red thumb tack through his
head. Then he made a thumb's-down sign with his own hand next to the
President's picture, and he had a photo taken of that, and he pasted it
on a poster..."
An employee in that Wal-Mart photo department called the Kitty Hawk
police on the student. And the Kitty Hawk police turned the matter over
to the Secret Service. On Tuesday, September 20, the Secret Service
came to Currituck High.
"At 1:35, the student came to me and told me that the Secret
Service had taken his poster," Jarvis says. "I didn't believe him at
first. But they had come into my room when I wasn't there and had taken
his poster, which was in a stack with all the others."
I'm speechless.
Americans, of course, are now free-speechless.
Link [Boing Boing]
9:27:27 AM
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Friday, 14 October 2005
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A handwritten, working manuscript of one of Beethoven's most
revolutionary works had been rediscovered after 115 years by a
librarian in Pennsylvania, triggering fevered excitement among music
historians.
Fantastic stuff, the thing of
great interest to composers (me for example) is that this piece has
Beethoven's own corrections on it, so it shows his compositional
process, not just the product. Invaluable.
It is a very mature work from late in his life, being a transcription
of a movement of one of the great string quartets for piano duet.
[ABC News: Entertainment (with Mpeg1)]
5:43:37 PM
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Thursday, 13 October 2005
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David Pescovitz:
A scientific team led by the University of New England in Australia has
discovered parts of at least nine Homo Floresiensis skeletons. The
meter-tall people lived on the Indonesian island of Flores as recently
as 18,000 years ago. Last year, one partial skeleton was found and Homo
Floresiensis was quickly determined to be Boing Boing's long-lost
mascot. (Previous posts here, here, and here.) From the BBC News:
"The finds further demonstrate that (the first skeleton found) is not
just an aberrant or pathological individual but is representative of a
long-term population," they write in Nature.
The team contends that Homo floresiensis, with its 380-cubic-cm-sized
brain, is the outcome of a phenomenon known as endemic or island
dwarfing.
This sees isolated species, released from the pressures of
predation but constrained by limited resources, evolving either smaller
or larger forms than would otherwise be the case.
Link [Boing Boing]
10:17:10 PM
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Wednesday, 12 October 2005
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Archaeologists have raised the massive anchor of King Henry VIII's
flagship Mary Rose from a silt-filled channel off southern England, 460
years after the ship sank in front of the monarch.
The whole Mary Rose story is an
amazing one. I've recently seen two documentaries about her. The more
recent described how she was found and restored, including what was to
be the final dive to salvage the last pieces before a channel was
dredged dangerously close to her resting place. There seemed to be no
more time or money to find any more of the Mary Rose, so the finding of
the anchor is wonderful news
The earlier documentary tried, successfully I think, to solve the
mystery of her sinking. Excess carpentry building "castles" to hold
marines and extra loading of cannons high up the body, made her top
heavy, so a wind catching her sideways sent her lwer guns ports below
the waterline. All over.
[ABC News: Science and Technology]
11:58:15 PM
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I don't know how i am doing it to always stumble above quirks, bugs or weird things. This one is a cool one though.
WARNING:
what i am about to describe is technically a bug. I don't have the
faintest idea if the data which has been accumulated in the way i am
about to describe is correctly saved with the movie or not, nor if it
screws up your presentation, so to do this at your own risk.
You want to hide data in a director movie. There are several ways, here is one i just stumbled upon.
Steps:
*****
- Get some media data to be hidden - let's say for demonstration purposes this is going to be an image and a sound file (MP3)
- Open up a castlib, and import the first media element at the last position of the castlib - that's right, member(1000).
- Put it up in the score, as you will not be able to refer to it later on (?)
- Drag and Drop another media member right on top of it - e.g. drag a sound file onto your image file
- What happens is that the former
image file is pushed onward one slot (in order to preserve it, which is
a good thing) - now being member 1001
- Repeat previous step until all your media is hidden.
- You can still see the media member by resizing the castlib window.
The media is still there, any
reference to it in the score will still hold true, you can reference it
by using it member number (e.g. member(1001)) and/or its name (e.g.
member("myMedia")).
HINT:
You can scan the true number of members in a castlib by issueing
put the number of members of castlib 1
-- 1001
[undocumented Lingo]
3:26:59 PM
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Tuesday, 11 October 2005
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Sunday found me at the Beer Garden at The Brickworks Market, to see Steve Gower.
I usually go to the Bacchus Wine Bar at Henley Square, but I'm not that fond of the band that was on.
I remember Steve Gower as a student at Salisbury TAFE,
around the time I started teaching there part time. He had a rhythm
& blues/rockabilly thing happening which was infectious and
swinging.
Here, he was playing solo. He was excellent, playing (mostly) acoustic
guitar, sometimes resonator guitar, one of the best sounding stomp
boxes I've ever heard, and was singing beautifully.
He knew that he knew me from somewhere, so he came to talk to me. When I told him that it was through TAFE,
he said, no it wasn't that, but that he used to come to see me playing
at Little Moby's, 16 years ago! I was amazed that he remembered that!
The band was a kind of acoustic pop trio with Rodney Wade (Harpo), John
Bienvenue, and me. Coincidentally, Little Moby's is the place that is
now Bacchus. I think the same woman still owns it. Naturally she is the mother of an ex-student of mine from Henley High School!
I'll definitely see him again, but maybe not at this venue. On a cold evening, it is very uncomfortable.
6:17:15 PM
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Home after gig at 2.30 or so,
feeling pretty buzzed about how it went, I watched videos until 4.30.
Woke at 10.00, pottered around, spent the day and the night home alone.
Normally I love being alone, but, maybe because of the post-gig flat, I
was feeling a little lonely and pensive.
Oh well.
Reflecting on the gig, I still feel really good about it artistically, and technically.
What the band needs is the momentum of regular gigs - not too often;
the stuff's just too difficult - but regularly enough to build the
audience.
4:43:44 PM
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Grammy Award-winning singer and Grease star Olivia Newton-John is still
holding out hope that her missing boyfriend will be found.
Hadn't heard anything about this story for ages!
The bloke's been missing since June.
[ABC News: Entertainment (with Mpeg1)]
4:17:40 PM
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Monday, 10 October 2005
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Cory Doctorow:
Soapdetectives is a podcast of golden-age radio plays about private
eyes and other hard-boiled types, including Sam Spade, The Saint and so
forth.
Check these out!
They are excellent!
Link
(Thanks, Andreas!) [Boing Boing]
12:41:33 PM
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Mark Frauenfelder:
The Jamaica Star reports that a 40-year-old barber styles his hair to look like a hat.
 Darain
Housen has not taken off his hat for the last 20 years. He bathes, he
sleeps and does everything possible in it. It is a perfect fit. But
unlike other hats, his is not made of cloth but from the very hair on
his head...
...Housen said that he was once stopped by a
policeman while coming from a dance early one morning who insisted that
he removed it. "Him shine di light pon mi an' look. When him see it seh
a mi real hair him frighten an' seh mi mus come check him a di station
di following morning. When mi go him shake mi han' an' seh mi have
talent an' mi fi keep it up.
One
thing I love about this post is the use of the Jamaican dialect. I love
the verb "fi". I wish English had such a useful verb.
Link (via Christopher Porter) (thanks, rev rob murray!)
[Boing Boing]
12:27:50 PM
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A film festival for movies shot on mobile telephones has opened in
Paris, aiming to take cinema a technological and creative step forward
in the country that gave birth to the art.
I don't want to sound like a wet blanket (although I know I am one), but people send me photos and movies taken with mobile phones quite a bit, and frankly, they're mostly rubbish.
Sorry, the mobile phone is one technology I haven't embraced on any level.
[ABC News: Entertainment (with Mpeg1)]
12:20:51 PM
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Sunday, 9 October 2005
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How could people in their right minds oppose a vaccine against a
virus that could cause cancer? I'll tell you: they can't, but
people in their wrong minds can...
There's great news for women: Merck's new HPV vaccine, Gardasil,
has been shown to be 100% effective in preventing the two most
common strains of HPV, the human papilloma virus, which is known
to cause cervical cancer. These two strains are...
This means there are serious politicians and interested parties who
don't want to ensure their daughters' safety from a painful, degrading,
fatal disease, because, in doing so, they may be encouraging them to
have sex.
As this writer says, this is like believing that many children, after a
tetanus injection immediately went out, rolled in horse shit, and
stabbed themselves with rusty nails and rose thorns!
And, by the way, sex is good! (Usually).
Stabbing with rusty nails and rose thorns, less so.
[morons.org headlines]
10:34:54 PM
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 Friday night's gig at The Eureka
Tavern in Salisbury was a cracker!
It had been nearly a year since we had had played here (or frankly,
anywhere!), and our audience is slowly growing.
But our musicianship is increasing much faster.
I am so much more confident about what I do in this band I can now
relax and fool around, doing the necessary stagey stuff that whips up
the audience, because they see the band having fun.
And we did have fun.
10:22:59 PM
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Saturday, 8 October 2005
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There is new hope for people who suffer from the debilitating stomach condition, coeliac disease.
Not really a cure, more of a convenient aid to safety at uncertain meals.
[ABC News: Health]
3:30:10 AM
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Friday, 7 October 2005
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David Pescovitz:
I just spoke with MIT professor David Wallace and grad student Barry
Kudrowitz who are both involved in MIT's Product Engineering Processes
course, a creative deisgn and engineering class. Last week, the class
demonstrated that Archimedes's Death Ray, as previously "busted" on
TV's Mythbusters (episode 16),
could have been real. Legend has it that during the siege of Syracuse
in 212 BC, Archimedes made a burning glass to burn up the enemy Roman
warships. To see if it was possible, the MIT crew built a 10+ foot long
model ship out of wood and positioned 129 1-foot square mirrors nearby.
The results:
 Flash ignition!
In an instant there is a large, open flame. The volatiles liberated from the wood ignite at roughly 1100 F.
Open, sustaining flame occurred less than 10 minutes after the sun was in a clear patch of sky!
Link
[Boing Boing]
11:21:05 AM
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Thursday, 6 October 2005
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A very interesting session yesterday, attempting to record soundtracks for two films, in an afternoon.
There was a 50 minute film and an 8 minute film. As it happened we only finished the shorter film.
The concept was to use the improvised approach, that Ralph Franke, Peter
Thurmer and I have been working on now for some months, to produce a
soundtrack in the moment, as we saw a movie open up before us.
We cheated slightly in that we watched the film once first. Well, Ralph
did. I actually saw it twice. Peter was, in fact, the film maker, so he
knew it intimately.
The film was a touching, uncomfortable, true story of a woman's teenage
sexual experience/exploitation some thirty years ago, narrated from her
own journal, and illustrated visually, but not literally.
We played scenes one at a time, and played to them, much as an
orchestra would on a sound stage. The difference was that we had no
score. We had a brief discussion as to tonality, emotional level,
whether we should go for playing with the emotion of the piece or
against it - that kind of thing - then we recorded. We did 3-5 takes
for each of the 8 or 9 scenes. It took a while.
We could have moved on to the second film but were so exhausted by the
discipline of restraint and response that we could not really go on.
Instead, we proceeded to a short blow of the kind we have been having.
Perhaps because of the tight discipline in which we had been working,
we found a great liberation in free playing, even though we mostly
restricted ourselves to addressing themes we have already discovered.
It felt so good! I'm looking forward to hearing the recordings.
We'll meet again next week to look at the other film.
11:34:10 PM
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A man who modifies Sony PlayStations to enable them to play copied games has won a four-year legal battle against the company.
I think of this as a confirmation of the ruling in the Betamax case.
[ABC News: Science and Technology]
10:49:31 PM
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Fans of non-stop drinking may soon be able to cut down on time wasted
ordering refills, thanks to a beer mat that can tell when a glass is
empty.
So what's wrong with an attentive bar worker using his or her eyes?
[ABC News: Offbeat (with Mpeg1)]
10:27:37 PM
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Wednesday, 5 October 2005
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Xeni Jardin:
In 1970, film director Randal Kleiser (website / IMDB) was a film student at USC -- his roommate there, btw, was George Lucas. One of Randal's projects during that time was a one-minute "ad" protesting the Vietnam War, created with Harry Winer. They asked Jon Voight
to do the voiceover, Voight said yes, and with a very simple set and
help from a very young actor, they shot a beautiful short which Randal
has kindly offered to share with Boing Boing readers again today.
It's as if it was produced just a day ago.
Baby Peace, directed by Randal Kleiser: Link to quicktime, Link to WMV.
(Thanks, Jeff Kleiser, and thanks, Randal Kleiser -- and special thanks to Jeff Koga for video conversion!)
My hippy heart responds!
[Boing Boing]
11:58:38 PM
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Yahoooo!
Against everything I expected, the best TV show ever (I've written about it before), is back on Australian television.
The Wire.
Channel 9 utterly neglected this
show for the first series and have done the same this time. It's not
advertised or promoted in any way, and it's slotted in late night
Thursdays, starting tomorrow at midnight. This means that whatever 9 chooses to show earlier in the night will toss its start time around up to two hours either way!
I believe this is the real thing, because there is no indication that
this is a repeat, and the one sentence synopsis in the paper refers to
the finding of a body by a particular character, which I'm pretty sure
didn't happen in the first series, but, from the synopsis of the second series, I gather did happen in the first episode of that series.
The theme song is the same, but this time, rather than being sung by The Blind Boys of Alabama, it is the original, by Tom Waits.
From all reports, this series moves everything up a notch from the
first, and introduces another aspect of the rotting underbelly of crime
as capitalism by other means, or is that capitalism as legitimised
crime?
We meet the flesh trade as another side of the drug trade. Politics has
split up the successful team of the first series, but pragmatism slowly
assembles it again.
I'm getting excited!
The best.
Not kidding.
11:03:49 PM
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Rather than repost the Shining remix, I dug up an Australian video clip of Don Lafontaine, aka Thunder Throat, aka Voice of God. Yep, he's in Wikipedia too. And if you missed it, check out Seinfeld's parody of Don.
Quote from the interview: "I've worked on, by my estimation, in the
neighborhood of 4,000 pictures. But it hasn't changed that much. There
are only seven basic stories. If you want to parody a trailer you go, In a world where ..." And of course he nails it perfectly.
I've often wondered who was responsible for that voice in the trailers. The Seinfeld trailer is hilarious.
[Paul Boutin]
10:32:49 AM
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Satch Boogie
The Sounds of Joe Satriani
The only Satriani tribute band in the country is back
This Friday, Oct 7
Eureka Tavern, 10 Park Tce, Salisbury
9.30 P.M.
7:36:58 AM
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I've got a couple of weeks leave, and I'm implementing plans.
Firstly, each day, I'm trying to catch up with someone I haven't seen
for a while. This hasn't worked out all that well so far, but I have
organised to see someone on each of several days, which is more than I
usually
do. One or two people I haven't seen for a few months, a couple I
haven't seen for more than three decades.
My other big plan is to use the extra time I have on each day to do
some longer bike rides than I normally can. So far so good. I've done a
couple of days of more than thirty kms, which is not much in cycling
terms, but for me, on my old steel bicycle, it's an achievement. It's
about a quarter the distance I used to motor pace my son when he was
training for national and international races.
I feel good, but tired. Even that's good, because it means I'm sleeping
better than I usually do. The big downside is, because I don't wear
knicks, I'm getting a really sore bum.
No more anal sex for a while then.
Kidding.
7:21:10 AM
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Melbourne University academic Professor David Boger has been awarded the Prime Minister's Prize for Science.
It's been a good week for Australian science, although this scientist was born in the USA, but educated in Melbourne.
He's invented a new and important use for goo.
[ABC News: Science and Technology]
7:07:25 AM
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Xeni Jardin:
Here's a lovely time-lapse
photograph of the recent solar eclipse, shot by Nils van der Burg in
Madrid. He explains, "What you see is the form of the sun when the moon
was passing in front of it, then the shadow of the moon is reflected
through the leaves of the trees." Link
(thanks, John Parres)
Reader comment: Tom Radcliffe says,
The solar eclipse photos are very cool. The projection
of images by leaves in this way is an example of a natural pin-hole
camera. The small gaps between the leaves act as "pinholes" in the
sense that they are very much smaller than the distance to the ground
(and very very much smaller than the distance to the sun!)
Reader comment: M. Merrick says:
Just a little correction: The photograph is not a
time-lapse photography. In fact, it probably had a fairly quick shutter
speed in order to catch the light cast through the trees without the
blur of them moving in the breeze. It's still a neat-o eclipse photo
though!
[Boing Boing]
7:02:44 AM
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Tuesday, 4 October 2005
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All you need to know: The Motorola ROKR actually got booed at Engadget's reader meetup last week - and this was while they were giving one away for free.
[Paul Boutin]
6:19:34 PM
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Monday, 3 October 2005
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Australians Barry Marshall and Robin Warren have won the 2005 Nobel
Medicine prize for discovering a bacterium that causes gastritis and
stomach ulcers.
[ABC News: Science and Technology]
10:14:43 PM
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Sunday, 2 October 2005
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No limit Texas Hold 'Em championship with the kids last night. Great fun.
I thought I was finished early when I went all in on two pairs, but I drew a full house on the river.
Later, I did go bust and had to deal for the others.
Then Kato went to bed and I took over his (rather large by now) stack.
I won the tournament with his money.
8:10:19 AM
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© Copyright 2005 Peter Nixon.
Last update: 31/10/05; 11:37:48 PM.
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