All publication is a political act. All communication is propaganda. All art is pornography. All business is personal. All hail Eris.
You are currently browsing the monthly archive for January 2007.
The Australian Business Register, who last week had problems getting my name right, emailed me yesterday:
Your legal name now shows correctly in the Australian Business Register.
And it does.
They didn’t say why it was possible so quickly when it was impossible only seven days earlier. Maybe their programmers burnt the candle at both ends across the long weekend.
Or maybe someone just RTFM.
On Australia Day, Google Maps did a flyover of Sydney to take low-level photos. A small ISP decided to create an advertisement in the photos. So is that spam? Or as one commenter pointed out, were they just acting on Google’s invitation to “get involved”?
… that I will never be Australian of the Year.
Thanks to the ever-observant people at Signal vs Noise, I can draw your attention to Worth1000.com’s competition for fake designs for non-existent Apple products.
I can’t be the only one with infantile humour, because there’s lots of toilet-themed entries — though for my money this is the best.
It’s more than 25 years since I’ve had one name, Stilgherrian. That’s plenty of time to get with the program. So from now on I’ll name the businesses and organisations who can’t get it right — starting with the Australian Business Register.
The most commonly mis-spelt word on Australian government websites is: Australia. (Reported by an attendee of the Accessibility talk at yesterday’s Web Standards Group meeting in Canberra.)
Since I’m suffering a bad cold at the moment, I only have energy to passively wonder at the six astounding designs being put forward for a new Gazprom HQ in St Petersburg. The image below shows the proposed design by Daniel Libeskind, but they’re all rather over the top.
Thanks to Signal vs Noise for the tip.
Melbourne’s “real Christian” Father Bob Maguire reckons Richard Dawkins is peddling a furphy when he says religion causes, more than any other factor, wars and other horrors.
This culture of war and horror comes in a separate package from religion. It comes from the most primitive parts of the human mind and heart. Religion, at its best, is the ritual and practice of whatever brings us together for the common good.
Richard Dawkins, et al, have built a straw man out of the debris left when religion “pure and undiluted” expels the toxins contained in bad religion, itself an expression of bad culture.
Good religion is only able to be the vehicle of the eternal and infinite God, aka the infinite Relational Matrix.
Follow the comments on Father Bob’s blog.
Every Monday morning I struggle to make sense of running a small business. It’s not just that weekends are always too short to properly re-charge. It’s mapping out the week ahead and seeing how busy it’ll be. Again. How there’s things I’d like to change — but where’s the time? We’re already flat out working for clients the way we do now, and there’s no time left to implement the changes.
I finally understood evolution when I read Richard Dawkins‘ books The Blind Watchmaker and The Selfish Gene. But flak he’s faced for his latest book, The God Delusion — probably for telling people their cherished gods are just a delusion — intrigued me.
If you want to skip the book, try this magazine-length version from the man himself, “Why There Almost Certainly Is No God“. It begins:
America, founded in secularism as a beacon of eighteenth century enlightenment, is becoming the victim of religious politics, a circumstance that would have horrified the Founding Fathers. The political ascendancy today values embryonic cells over adult people. It obsesses about gay marriage, ahead of genuinely important issues that actually make a difference to the world. It gains crucial electoral support from a religious constituency whose grip on reality is so tenuous that they expect to be ‘raptured’ up to heaven, leaving their clothes as empty as their minds. More extreme specimens actually long for a world war, which they identify as the ‘Armageddon’ that is to presage the Second Coming.
Dunno that I’d be bothered reading all 592 comments though.
For some reason, people’s… um, private parts have popped up in my blog reading this week. Young’uns and folk of delicate dispositions should read no further. And especially don’t read the last item.
Six minutes of (anti-?)war. Superb, despite the shite MySpace video compression. Thanks, Richard.
See it in its original context, and read about its creator, Dave Tucker.
[Update 8 January 2008: The copy of Stick Guns on YouTube is better quality.]
OK, own up. Who started calling Australia’s 5-0 cricket victory over England an Ashes “whitewash”? And why couldn’t anyone, anywhere, come up with another description?
When Clover Moore, Sydney’s time-share Lord Mayor and state MP, started talking about “a city of villages”, I thought she was giving it tug. (No anatomical pedantry, thanks.) But now it’s the city’s official slogan, and a few relaxed Sundays have persuaded me she’s got it right — at least for the inner and inner-west villages which have some historical reality.
This photo ain’t art. But last night’s view from the front bar of the Warren View Hotel really does say “This is my village”.
If you’ve ever worked in a business bigger than 15 people, you’ll known that this diagram is absolutely correct.
Thank you, Gaping Void, for another brilliant observation. What a great way to start the working year!
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