Category: News and Events

Don’t Filter Me Bro!

Ah! Activist chicks!

OK, it’s again been a long time since an entry. I’ve been oscillating between not feeling like writing, or feeling like writing but being plain too tired to do so. End result? Decals for turning lego men into the Freakangels, and no blog entries.

But I’m pulling myself together today and actually getting some writing done (it’s 35 degrees outside, so it’s not like I’m doing anything apart from cowering under my air conditioner).

So anyway, yesterday there was a nationwide protest over the Government’s plans to force a mandatory net filter onto everyone. This is an absolutely terrible idea on any number of fronts both technical and social, so I figured I’d go along and make my voice heard. Ryan was also sufficiently motivated to go along, so we met up at Stirling Gardens for the rally at midday.

It wasn’t huge with about 300 protesters turning up, but that’s reasonably successful turnout for a city the size of (and apathetic as) Perth. There were a number of speakers, most of whom were pretty good once they abandoned the farcical PA system they’d bought along and switched to a megaphone (the one exception was a 911 conspiracy theorist who wouldn’t give his name and tried to tell us that the net filter is the work of the Bildenburg group, as are laws forcing children to wear bicycle helmets and restricting when you can water your lawn). I even got interviewed by a journalist and quoted in today’s paper, which is pretty gratifying on a personal level 🙂

(There were also a number of rather cute activist girls around the place, one of whom kept glancing at me. I’m not sure if she was glancing at me because I noticed her glancing at me once and kept glancing at her to see if she was glancing at me again which prompted her to keep glancing at me to see if I was glancing at her, or if she was actually glancing at me. She left before I had the chance to go over and say hi, which is convenient, as it meant I didn’t have to walk around cursing myself for being too timid to go over and say hi ;))

We also ran into Sam who I used to work with (actually I’m surprised there weren’t more people there I recognised). She and I had a quick chat while Ryan distracted one of the 911 Conspiracists who was trying to force pamphlets on us. Then we all cleared off before the riot cops arrived.

(That’s a joke by the way, we’re not quite a police state yet although this proposed filter is a good first step)

Apart from that I haven’t done much else lately. That should change as Christmas draws near, I’ve still got plenty of gift shopping to do at least. Watch this space for Astounding Tales of Holiday Commerce!

That’s about it for today. Expect more entries soon! (I know, I always say that… 🙂

The Human Condition

It’s a sad, tired world spinning around a dying star.

Watching the footage of the attacks in Mumbai on the news last night I was struck with a vision of the view from Colonial One in the Battlestar Galactica episode Exodus Part 2, where the resistance fighters start setting off bombs all over the city.

We all cheered that scene. Our guys were finally fighting back against the Cylons, and salvation (in the form of Adama and the Galactica) was on its way. Take that you evil minded toasters!

The thought that people all over the world are looking at the Mumbai footage and having the same reaction – cheering and thinking “take that you evil minded [insert whatever term you like]” – says something truly awful about the human condition.

This ‘science’ they speak of shall kill us all!!

Boo! Hiss! Hadrons!

Some thoughts…

  1. Anyone who thinks that the world will end when they flip on the Large Hadron Collider in a few hours is an idiot.
  2. Anyone who goes to the trouble of sending death threats to scientists to try and stop them turning on the Large Hadron Collider is doubly an idiot.
  3. Anyone who thinks that transposing the ‘r’ and ‘d’ to turn the Large Hadron Collider into the Large Hardon Collider is clever is triply an idiot.

That is all.

PS: Don’t even get me started on the 2012 crowd.

Sumer Is Damn Well Icumen In

Do Not Touch!

So, some brainless dickheads have apparently decided that the preservation of one of the world’s most amazing ancient monuments is less important than having a chunk of said monument to put on their mantelpiece, or possibly hang around their weedy necks.

Jerks with Screwdriver prove they’re Jerks by Vandalising Stonehenge

As I see it, the only reasonable punishment for such an act is to (once the perpetrators are caught) call in the Druids, and re-enact the finale of the Wicker Man. Evil will be punished, it’ll discourage further souvenir hunting, and the Druids will finally be able to get back to that old time religion they haven’t been able to practice since the Roman invasion. Everyone wins!

PS: Yes, I’m well aware that the historical Druids had nothing to do with the construction of Stonehenge, but their modern counterparts are always hanging round the place so why not put them to some use?

PPS:Ten years. Hardly seems possible.

Actually it’s the other Salem

The law wants to be free!

There’s a fair bit of hooha brewing at the moment in the Pacific northwest of the United States. The government of Oregon (which I’d always considered one of the better US states, what with the Decemberists, Boring, Cascadia and Miranda – although technically she was from Washington 😉 is trying to convince all and sundry that it owns copyright in the state’s laws. This apparently goes against years of legal precedents, and people are getting quite riled up about it.

Now, I’m not a lawyer – let alone an American lawyer – but it seems to me that there are two very important reasons that laws should be in the public domain.

The first is that laws define a code of behaviour that citizens of a state are expected to conform to. Placing restrictions on how citizens can access and distribute laws – say, by instance, copyrighting them – impedes citizens’ ability to know and understand their legal obligations. Worse, it makes it harder for citizens to know and claim their legal rights, which can lead to very dangerous situations (eternal vigilance et al.).

The second reason goes right to the heart of democratic government. The idea behind representative democracy is that the people elect representatives to act on their behalf in the governing of the state. Members of government are there to govern for the people – they write and approve laws for the people and on behalf of the people. This means that (by the purest principles of democracy) the laws already belong to the people. Copyrighting them is theft.

So that’s my view on the matter. Let’s hope the government of Oregon remembers who it works for sometime soon.

I’m a bad, bad man…

Tuesday roundup

The very first thing I thought when I heard Charlton Heston was dead was “I wonder if anyone’s prised the guns from his cold dead hands yet?”

*sigh*

In other news this link does a fantastic job of explaining why I don’t use instant messenger programs. And this one is a petition to stop Uwe Boll making movies. He claims that if it gets one million signatures, he’ll quit. Sign it! For the sake of humanity sign it!

News from the Briney Deep

A mystery solved.

Well it looks like they found the Sydney, and only a day after the Kormoran. Nice work!

Really that’s about all I’ve got to say. Didn’t do much over the weekend, just did some cleaning and watched five straight episodes of Stargate Atlantis so I could return the DVD box set I borrowed from Daniel at work. I also managed to hurt my shoulder somehow – it’s quite painful, I may need to get it looked at.

Oh, and Sam didn’t make it in on Friday (sick apparently, although she may have just been sick of us 🙂 so she’ll finish up some time this week. Don’t know if we’ll do the lunch thing or not.

That is all (ain’t my life just fascinating?).

I’m An Authority! – Apparently

Hounded by the press…

So, I get home from work last night and find an email waiting for me from a journalist looking for information about Urban Exploration (I could name the journalist and say what organisation they work for, but I think it’d be a bit unfair to alert all the other journalists to what one particular journalist is doing until they’ve finished doing it – if you know what I mean).

As it turned out I couldn’t help much because (as I pretty much immediately deduced given the rather unfortunate incident in Sydney the other day) they were after information on draining, which is something I’ve never done and which isn’t very big here in Perth anyway because our sandy soils mean we don’t need the big drain networks they have in Sydney and Melbourne. But it’s nice to know that when it comes to Urban Exploration I’m the go to guy for the city’s press ;D

(Yeah, I’ll just keep telling myself that…)

Oh and Perth’s own Heath Ledger is dead. I’m not really bothered one way or the other to be honest.

…Later…

OK, this morning I said I wasn’t too fussed about Heath Ledger. Well that changed as soon as the over as that best ever argument for atheism, the Westboro Baptist Church, got involved.

You see, a few years back Heath starred in well known gay cowbow movie Brokeback Mountain. This – according to the Westboro pinheads – makes him some kind of “fag sympathiser”, who (because as they like to remind us all, “God hates fags”) is now burning in the flames of hell. Where he apparently belongs.

They also say they’re going to picket his funeral, which is something they really like doing. Just show them the funeral of a “fag” and they’ll turn up with a van full of hate-mongers and loudly remind everyone in the cemetery how much God hates the inhumee, and that they’re now burning in hell. Through the entire service (yes, these are nice people).

Thankfully I imagine Heath’s family will be bringing him back to Perth for burial, which means Fred Phelps and his crew of vile bigots should encounter some problems attending (“hate crimes” generally isn’t an acceptable reason for entering the country) but it still really boils my blood. I consider myself a pacifist, but I’d be extremely tempted to use some carefully calculated violence against the kind of creeps who harass mourning families at their loved ones’ funerals.

Neither am I the kind of person who takes it on themselves to judge others’ souls, but if there’s any kind of God, and any kind of afterlife, then Fred Phelps better try really hard for some remorse before he gets there.

The Evil Empire is Dead and we have their Booze!

Gloria! Gloria! (do do-do-do-do-do-do do-do-do-do-do do-do-do) Gloria! Gloria! ect.

Well the results are in (enough of them at any rate) and Labor has well and truly won the election! Here ends John Howard’s evil reign of terror! Let Kevin Rudd’s evil reign of terror begin!

What’s more it looks like Howard may have lost his seat, which would make him only the second Prime Minister in Australian history to do so – the last being Bruce in the 1920s (by the way, isn’t it cool that one of our Prime Ministers was named ‘Bruce‘? 🙂

In addition there seems to have been quite a swing to the Greens here in Western Australia (at least that’s the impression I get from Kerry O’Brian – in between his snide comments about the behaviour of the press teams from the other networks). Not enough for them to get a seat of course, but it’s a start and might make some people sit up and take notice.

The only thing that could really make the night complete would be for the minor parties to get control of the Senate. It doesn’t seem very likely since the self destruction of the Democrats a few years back, but we can live in hope.

(Hmmm, iTunes just served up Handel’s Gloria and See the Conquering Hero Comes, and the New Pornographers’ The Laws Have Changed. Coincidence? 🙂