Word-whore. I write 'em. I talk 'em. Information, politics, media, and the cybers. I drink. I use bad words. All publication is a political act. All communication is propaganda. All art is pornography. All business is personal. All hail Eris! Vive les poissons rouges sauvages!
If you’re writing for the web, get to the point! The average home user spends only 52 seconds on a web page.
Other useful facts from Nielsen/NetRatings’ June 2006 figures:
Despite working an exhausting 65 hours last week, somehow I found time to knock off two books, both thrillers. One thrilled, one disappointed.
Hypocritical drug laws, as demonstrated by a UK parliamentary committee. This drug danger league table courtesy of New Scientist magazine shows the relative danger of various drugs, legal and illegal, based on scientific evidence covering dependency and physical and social harm based on a survey of people’s opinions of their relative harm.
This week’s spat between John Howard and Peter Costello over the prime ministership is all over the media, so no need for me to comment. But, thanks to Crikey I was reminded of one of Costello’s wond’rous snarky interviews — from 2003, again on the subject of the Liberal party leadership…
This week’s website which simply had to exist: Cats that look like Hitler. (Courtesy of Tim Bray.)
Whatever you think about the political issues, Australian David Hicks, currently a long-term guest of the US government at the exclusive Guantanamo Bay health resort, does seem to have a sense of humour.
As reported in Crikey today (though not included on the free-to-view website), Hicks has been stirring the pot in a typically Australian fashion.
Hicks obviously speaks some of the language of the people with whom he’s lived, trained and fired weapons, but many of his comrades had little or no English when they arrived at Guantanamo. So they begged Hicks for knowledge of suitably dark and vicious curses they could hurl at their infidel American jailers, something that would really annoy the Servants of Satan?
The guards were subsequently met with an enraged chorus from the “worst of the worstâ€: “Gidday mate howareyergoin’, gidday mate howareyergoin’, gidday mate howareyergoin’“
I wonder what the guards made of that!