They of the bushy eyebrows and general swarthy appearance. The usual answer when someone says you look like a famous rockstar is ‘I wish I had his/her money’. Somehow, Larry can’t say that. link » tags: [lookalikes] posted via Wists: permamark
Boo.com is relaunching in June. They have a fantastically witty strapline, presumably created by the people that Pajamas media originally hired, wait for it… “The Boo is Back” That’s right, the Boo is back, cos Boo.com was so successful the first time it was called ‘the Boo’ – boooolshit. You can almost hear the distant rumble of discount Aeron chairs. Boo.com
“Haderer published a 40-page book titled, The Life of Jesus. The book contained a cartoon of Jesus, depicting him as …a binge-drinking friend of Jimi Hendrix and naked surfer high on cannabis. Unbeknownst to him, the book was published in Greece. He found out when he received a summons to appear in court in Athens in January, having been charged with blasphemy.” Of course there is absolutely no resemblance between Jesus and a pot smoking hippy. Cartoonist Faces Jail in Greece Over Jesus Cartoon – TalkLeft: The Politics of Crime
There is a difference between blasphemy and the worship of false prophets. Islam fobids images of Muhammad, lest the images themselves become icons, taking away from the real person or idea. The religion supports iconoclasm by definition. A cartoon is designed to be just that, an iconoclastic image, so it is hardly likely to encourage worship of false prophets. The cartoon issue is blasphemy enhanced by a general taboo of figurative images. A similar kind of taboo, for example, would mean that if you were brought up in a ‘Judeo-Christian’ environment the idea of a manual depicting someone like Moses or Jesus performing various sex acts, which would be acceptable in less prudish Asian religions, would shock you. In fact it may even make reading the above statement slightly irritate you. I suspect that the irritation that is felt by people who inherit the Muslim meme is the same but…
After Carter first warned about energy problems in 1977 he installed solar panels on the White House roof. When Reagan took office, he removed the solar panels. 29 years later and the looming energy crisis is finally in the hands of both parties. In last night’s SOTU speach Bush said: “To change how we power our homes and offices, we will invest more in zero-emission, coal-fired plants; revolutionary solar and wind technologies; and clean, safe nuclear energy.” Perhaps the solar panels should go back up? As it happens, Carters’ original panels were on a roof at Unity College, less than a year ago: “1992 when a Unity College administrator named Peter Marbach drove our old school bus down to Franconia, VA, to liberate them from a General Services Administration warehouse under the government surplus donations program. “ In February, they posted a message saying to call them: “If you are…
The UK is trying to enact a very stupid and logically farcical law, which guarantees to increase religious hatred by outlawing it. The problem is that religion is not without its own hatred. Religion is also not based upon the same logic as the secular law, being based upon belief rather than reason, so good people ignore the passages in religious texts that include incitement to hatred. The law would prevent this loose interpretation. Under the proposed law almost any practitioner of any of the word’s major religions could be charged with religious hatred, either for threatening infidels with the ultimate torture, an eternity of hellfire, or for explicit threats within respective texts. Laws within a tolerant society are based upon logically consistent arguments, such as the existing UK laws against race hatred, which protect groups such as Sikhs and Jews not because of their ideology or belief, but because…
Over the last six months I have kept meaning to switch to outline style blogging. For all the hoo ha about OPML as a standard for reading lists – you might reasonably ask why not use RSS – after all RSS is often used for playlists so what could the difference be? The difference is really fairly subtle, but also very important, and the real answer has nothing to do with syndication, but the process of writing and what people who evangelize outliners have been trying to persuade people for years. The comments on Anil Dash: Outlining a Blog are a really clear illustration of the problem. Later generation blogging tools were designed with the influence of RSS which in turn was influenced by news headline syndication. This meant that every post had a headline and with only one default template for post styles post templates tended to look like…
First store in Manhattan to open in Union Square in 3 months – all hail Trader Joe’s. Considering that we hired a car and spent 4 hours going to Trader Joe’s and back again, only last weekend, I am, as they say – stoked. Even better news is that they are opening a separate wine store next door to get round the stupid New York license laws which are a throwback to prohibition. Trader Joe’s to Open in New York – New York Times
In the UK in the late 80’s British Telecom carried out one of the single biggest acts of design vandalism when they systematically removed the famous red telephone boxes designed by Gilbert Scott et al. The justification for this was that they were not accessible to people in wheelchairs. This argument was impossible for people to counter and yet hid the truth – there were other ways of making phone boxes accessible that would not have required a complete change. People argue, quite rightly, for web accessibility, but what are the results? If you pass some of the top web sites’ front pages to the W3C validator: Yahoo – does not validate Ebay – does not validate Amazon – does not validate Google – does not validate. These have all been around for a while, however. What about the newer breed of online services? Flickr – does not validate Digg…
Tom Foremski reports on the irony of America’s most famous investor buying Business Wire, a company that flourished under web 1.0 but is entirely obsolete in web 2.0. Online press releases will be part of an open infrastructure rather than a walled garden service. Which means no long term room for Business Wire, period. 5 other companies that Buffett could buy to match his most recent acquisition: Xerox Siebel Kodak Sun Silicon Graphics Buffett acquires business wire
We wait till people reach maturity before we allow them to choose their political affinity and vote based upon it. As Dawkins points out, labelling a small child a neo-marxist is absurd. So why don’t we let people choose their own religion when they grow up? Religion is traditionally passed from adults to children. The second part of Dawkin’s documentary on religion was shown in the UK last night – thankfully torrent files are already available. This tackled the dirty little secret of all religion – that it requires people in a vulnerable state of mind to infect. Of course the best place to find vulnerable minds, as a matter of course, among the healthy is in schools. The program suggested, perfectly reasonably, that religious teaching in schools is a form of child abuse. In the UK: “The number of faith schools is increasing. More than half the Government’s proposed…
I just noticed that Google add automatic Map Links when something that looks like an address appears within a message in Gmail. This kind of on-the-fly detection of metadata to create searches could be used for auto-dialing phone numbers or adding appointments to a calendar – but I guess we’ll have to wait for a Google Calendar product for that. “Gmail makes it easy for you to keep track of your packages, and map out directions to your destinations; when you open a message that lists an address or package tracking number, Gmail shows you handy links to maps and directions, or your package’s delivery status.”