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Archive for April, 2007

business plan

27Apr07

sheep
+
insane Japanese women
=
yen
Instructions here.
(thanks KO)
Update: it appears that Mark Twain was right:
To create man was a quaint and original idea, but to add the sheep was a tautology.

someone showed me a picture and i just laughed

26Apr07

It’s with a mixture of fear and incredulity that I discover that Cate Blanchett is to play none other than Bob Dylan in a film about his life and times. A suitably disturbing full-sized picture is can be seen here.
The film is called ‘I’m Not There‘ and it sounds rather odd, to say the […]

one more cup of coffee

24Apr07

Coming soon: soap which stimulates you in the shower. No, not like that, you pervert - for people too lazy to make a cup of coffee in order to get their caffeine fix, the option may soon exist of just rubbing caffeine all over your naked body.
There is evidently no limit to how hard […]

be careful not to touch the wall, there’s a brand new coat of paint

23Apr07

News.com.au reports on Canberra politician Steve Pratt, who managed to spend several hours destroying a commissioned mural in a stunt about reducing graffiti. The MP described the work as an
obnoxious piece of vivid graffiti vandalism
and proceeded to painstakingly scrub it off the wall on which it was painted.
Unfortunately for the well-named Pratt, it […]

going through all these things twice

20Apr07

Looks like I wasn’t the only one to notice The Australian’s little effort yesterday: Crikey ran a similar piece here.

i’m not lazy, i’m just phase-delayed

20Apr07

This is a great example of a new approach to an old problem: an alarm clock that literally jumps off your bedside table, rolls away and hides, and then goes off again a few minutes later, forcing you to get up and rummage around looking for it, and helping you to wake up in the […]

a standing army of newswriters - today’s australian

19Apr07

Australia’s only national broadsheet, The Australian, is one of the best sources of real news and analysis in the country. Unfortunately it is also utterly biased, not only in its editorial section but also its news and features.
Today’s effort however, a vicious hatchet-job on Labor’s industrial relations policy as announced yesterday, goes above and […]

an atheist’s point of view

17Apr07

This first blog entry by Atheist’s Wager contains a very interesting take on religion.

with your hands on your head or on the trigger of a gun

17Apr07

The latest shooting spree in the US is invariably going to turn into a debate about guns (it must be gun week on this blog), so here are some relevant statistics to assist in wading through the emotional and political non-sequiturs:
Murders with firearms per capita, by country.
Firearm-related deaths per capita, by country.
Correlation between changes in […]

just another broken heart, another barrel of a gun, just another stick of dynamite night after night

16Apr07

Interesting little article here about the portrayal of torture in popular culture, and the program 24 in particular. 24 has had 67 torture scenes in its first five seasons, mostly ones in which the ‘good guys’ use violence and intimidation to get information out of the ‘bad guys’.
The Washington Post calls 24 “a conservative […]

hard-core pawn

13Apr07

“Chess is very sexy game,” breathes Miss Manakova, in heavily accented English. “When two people make moves, like in sex, like in love, they do some moves to win. Yes, not only he, but she, the woman. There are very close parallels between these two things: chess and sex. No, I don’t mean sex. I […]

talk about a life of brotherly love, show me someone who knows how to live it

12Apr07

This blog post is a fantastic comment on something very mysterious: why so many Christians spend so much time ranting and raving about homosexuality and abortion, which are barely mentioned in the Bible, and so little time doing something about the central challenges identified in the New Testament, such as poverty, and ignoring other major […]

oh the history books tell it, they tell it so well

11Apr07

This was in the Oz today: British teachers are allegedly avoiding teaching their students about the Holocaust and the Crusades because this might offend Muslim sensibilities:
These kids are told at home or by Muslim preachers that the Holocaust never happened. Teachers aren’t challenging that misinformation, they’re shutting up so as not to disturb a world […]

but I would not be convicted by a jury of my peers

05Apr07

Two people are detained in a war zone. Both are alleged by the military force which detains them to have been somewhere they shouldn’t have. Both are held captive, without proper charges or any prospect of genuine legal process. Both confess, seemingly under duress and in possible fear for their own safety, […]

we remember the light on the hill

03Apr07

An Australian singer once sang this song:
So you cut all the tall trees down, you poisoned the sky and the sea
You’ve taken what’s good from the ground
But you’ve left precious little for me
You remember the flood and the fall, we remember the light on the hill
There should be enough for us all, but the dollar […]