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!
Enough of the politics! Just answer me this, boys and girls: Who’s the greatest pop band in the history of music?
Go to the website to vote. Your choices are limited. Problem with that? Explain yourself in the comments!
[poll id=”9″]
Last week’s results: By a very slim margin, most voters would prefer to see Senator Natasha Stott-Despoja sing Samanta Fox’s Touch Me.
While digging out the videos for the Perfect Lists I stumbled across another fave from LFO: this wonderful video for Freak. The music isn’t as good as the more famous LFO but man, that video! Nothing to do with the Silverchair song or Daniel Johns.
I’m pleased to report that despite the scary “one of our cats might have a tapeworm” news last week, the pathologist reports that my stool sample was perfectly normal.
Just think. Someone’s job is to spend all day working through a rack of little plastic jars full of people’s poo, pulling it apart and looking at it carefully under a microscope. Now what sort of perspective on life would that give you?
My cholesterol’s up a bit though. There go the chocolate biscuits…
I have chosen not to illustrate this post with a photo.
“On the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog,” says a classic New Yorker cartoon. True, perhaps. But we do know who owns you and where your kennel is.
The Prime Minister’s office denies that one of their own edited the Wikipedia article about Peter Costello to remove the nickname “Captain Smirk”. But IP address 210.193.176.115 belongs to the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet — at least it did until the reference was changed a few days after the accusation.
If you dig through all IP addresses starting with 210.193.176 you find that most of them for which data is available are front ends for a pile of government agencies — everything from innovation.gov.au and biotechnology.gov.au to coagbushfireenquiry.gov.au and search.investaustralia.gov.au. Sitting right on 210.193.176.19 is the PM’s very own website.
Assigning an IP address in the middle of this block to anyone but another government agency doesn’t make sense — from a network engineering or an administrative point of view. You reckon someone’s telling porkies?
Wikipedia has since nominated the Peter Costello article as their Australian Collaboration of the Fortnight. “Please help improve it to featured article standard,” they ask. Anyone at the PM’s office wanna lend a hand? Woof.
[A more detailed version of this article was originally published in Crikey a couple of days ago.]
’Pong has started photographing The Great Wall of Sydney which descended with the start of APEC — naturally bringing his own “urban abstract” eye to the game.
Police have been deleting photos from cameras, so it’ll be interesting to see what happens when ’Pong returns to The APEC Zone tonight now that GWB has arrived.
When I phoned the police media liaison unit today, I didn’t get a very clear message about what was and wasn’t permitted. It all seems to be at the discretion of the officer on the ground. To me that just says “arbitrary” and “unaccountable” — and combining that with arrest-without-charge and the suspension of habeas corpus spells “danger”.
Anyway, check ’Pong’s images — and don’t forget to click through for the full-sized beauty.
