Category: Random

Does anyone know the URL of the weblog called >>access afr? I’ve tried looking for it on blogger, but the URL provided there doesn’t seem to go anywhere. Any ideas, anyone?

Brief thoughts on the UK petrol crisis (now thankfully ended):

• British Petrol (“gas”) costs a hell of a lot (comparatively).
• Some people whose work depends on using a lot of petrol rightly view this as compromising their profits or indeed resulting in their businesses folding (haulage companies, taxi drivers etc).
• These people have every right to protest, and protest they have.
• A lot of other people use cars when they could or should be using public transport.
• The high levels of tax to be paid on petrol reflect the desire of the government to limit pollution by getting people to use public transport.
• The high levels of tax also provide considerable revenue for the treasury to spend on public services such as the National Health Service.
• Many members of the public have supported or participated in these demonstrations despite the fact that they have also wanted greater spending on the National Health Service, less pollution and better public services.
• If they want these services maintained, then the money has to come from somewhere.

Quotes from “No Logo” by Naomi Klein (1):

“Nineties marketers, being on a more advanced rung of the sponsorship spiral, have dutifully come up with clever and intrusive new selling techniques … Recent highlights include these innovations: Gordon’s gin experimented with filling British movie theatres with the scent of juniper berries; Calvin Klein stuck “CK Be” perfume strips on the backs of Ticketmaster concert envelopes; and in some Scandinavian countries you can get “free” long-distance calls with ads cutting into your telephone conversations.

“And there’s plenty more, stretching across ever more expansive surfaces and cramming into the smallest of crevices: sticker ads on pieces of fruit promoting ABC sitcoms, Levi’s ads in public washrooms, corporate logos on boxes of Girl Guide cookies, ads for pop albums on takeout food containers, and ads for Batman movies projected on sidewalks or into the night sky. There are already ads on benches in national parks as well as on library cards in public libraries, and in December 1998 NASA announced plans to solicit ads on its space stations. Pepsi’s ongoing threat to project its logo onto the moon’s surface hasn’t yet materialized…”

For the libertarian in all of us, the BBFC (British Board of Film Classification) has set out it’s new guidelines – and they are much less invasive than they have been before. In films specfically targetted at children, the guidelines have been strengthened, but for films for adults, the consensus seems to be that people now firmly believe that they should be free to choose for themselves what is an appropriate level of violence or sexual content. And about bloody time.

News from Apple: The MacOS X Public Beta is now finally available for testing. Confession – I’m a bit scared of OS X – I’m a relatively recent convert to Macs (and I haven’t regretted it in the slightest), but I hear that there are many features of the new operating system that are similar to Windows. Frankly, I just don’t get it. It does however look wonderful. [OS X]

Apple have also released a couple of new iBooks in new colour schemes. I mean – they look nice, but there’s not much of a leap there. [iBook]

If you are sane and therefore want Anna to win Big Brother UK then ring 09011 980 101 immediately. If you need further reason than that, I could mention that there is a rumour going around London media circles at the moment that Big Brother have made a deal with The Sun to edit the TV footage to make sure that Craig wins. He is apparently considered very good Sun-fodder. This may very well be a load of bollocks, so concentrate on this simple message: Anna is GOD and commands you to vote for her.

There’s some astonishingly good – and extraordinarily strange – high quality Flash work over at nosepilot.com [via metalog]. It reminds me a lot of those strange five minute cartoon pieces that you sometimes see on BBC2 in between some late night talk show and the third repeat of V. Only it’s of infinitely higher quality. If you haven’t seen this quote yet, then you are nowhere near the end:

“I think I see it, that evil robotic duck.”

Many more days of holiday and I fear I might actually reach that fabled limit of Buffy saturation. Then again…

I read this interview with Radiohead in Q the other day, and thought to myself – if only they weren’t so torturous about what they do; perhaps then they’d have more fun with it. And then I thought about how long it took me to get a tiny little website rebuilt, and how much horror that generated for me, and then I shut up.

In this interview was a reference to the book No Logo by Naomi Klein, which the various band members said had clarified for them what they wanted to talk about on the album (if indeed they were talking about anything). So I thought to myself – “No Logo” – that sounds like the kind of book that interests me – it’s got that counter-cultural vibe going on; I think I’ll buy it.

So I went to lots of shops and couldn’t find it and returned home grumpy and forlorn. And then last night I spilt a glass of beer on my desk and had to grab about a ton of stuff off it and throw it on the floor so that I could mop up the mess. And what do I see at the bottom of the pile, but a copy of the book itself in full burning technicolour. Nick had bought it for me for my birthday and I’d completely forgotten.

The two activities that I had down on my list as “to be done” today were: 1) Sign up with new GP, 2) Get cable television. Since I have not managed to leave the house all day, the first one seems rather unlikely, and unfortunately the people who supply cable television are resolutely refusing to talk to me. Which leaves this day as rather a dead loss. I have played quite a lot of Quake III though – that’s got to count for something, right?