Category: News and Events

Apparently he was on the Enclave payroll all along…

Change the world a little bit.

Anyone who visits this blog regularly (not that I necessarily believe such a curious beast to exist) will have noticed a lot of activity lately. This is because I am “Making an Effort”. I’m trying my best to write something every night just to keep my hand in, and to try and catch up to Helen who recently hit 600 posts despite her blog being younger than mine. Such a discrepancy cannot be allowed to stand! *grin*

That being said, I am extremely tired after a hard week’s work trying to interpret the heavily accented mumblings of a man who looks uncannily like the Vault Overseer from the original Fallout (I keep expecting him to ask me to find a water chip), and have very little stomach for writing. So this entry will be short, if not necessarily sweet.

I will say before going however that if you have any money spare (a rare occurrence in this time of economic crisis I know) or you just feel like being charitable, there are a lot worse causes to send your money to than that of Hollis Hawthorne. Rather than try and compose an explanation in my own words I shall liberally quote from the post on Whitechapel (by one Theremina) that alerted me and many others to her plight…

[Hollis Hawthorne] is a performer, cyclist, and activist who lives in SF. I only kinda sorta barely know her through mutual friends, but by all accounts, she’s just the most radiant, beautiful person. She moves in many of the same circles I do, and has donated her time to many of the same nonprofit events.

Late last month, Hollis was traveling by motor scooter in Pondicherry, Tamil Nadu, India when something terrible happened. Some sort of freak hit-and-run accident that wasn’t her fault left her bleeding out on the side of the road with her boyfriend Harrison frantically performing CPR for 20 minutes before a van of German tourists picked them up and drove them to a hospital. According to her best pal Eliza, Hollis was wearing her helmet and driving very slowly at the time of the accident. Now she’s in a coma in a rural hospital with a serious brain stem injury.

According to Harrison, who has been with her from the moment it happened, “there are huge rats scurrying around on the [hospital] floor. I am sleeping on the ant-covered floor outside her room as I am not allowed in and the water they have used for many procedures is not even purified.” When Hollis’s mom flew in from Tennessee a couple of days ago with emergency support from the US consulate to see her own daughter, the orderlies were dismissive and curt. “They are not observing her brain pressure and have done nothing to alleviate the swelling in her brain. These are things that can make or break her early on in her recovery and healing process.”

Through a series of fortuitous connections, her case has been reviewed and accepted by Stanford Medical; one of the best hospitals in the world … All we need to do is get her there. The friends and family of Hollis are reaching out to everyone they can to raise funds to get her on an I.C.U. plane (aka air ambulance) to fly her back to California.

Before that can happen, Friends of Hollis must raise $150,000 dollars. They’ve already raised approximately $40,000, and more is pouring in all the time, mostly in small denominations. Can you spare a dollar, or five, or ten? It adds up more quickly than you’d think!

Yes, I know, life is risk, and life is uncertain. Life is also precious. If, in some small way, we can help someone in our community to come back from the brink, we really should. Click here to help, and please spread the word, if you can. This is what the internet is for.

Now yes, that all sounds like some kind of more creative than normal Nigerian mail scam, but it’s all on the level and – while her situation has improved with movement to a much better hospital and she’s starting to show signs of recovery – money to get her home is still desperately needed. So, if you feel like doing something good for the world and helping out a stranger – not to mention being part of a growing group of helpers and well-wishers scattered all around the world, click on the link above. If not, whatever.

That’s my good deed for the week. Denys sleep now.

Vale Lux Interior

Another one bites the dust

I just heard that Lux Interior – founder of the Cramps – has passed away at the age of 60. Boo.

I’ve never really heard much of the Cramps, but I like what I have heard. Psycho-Billy is good stuff, even if it the name was invented as a marketing stunt.

My main memory of the Cramps is from when they appeared on some Andrew Denton program back in the early 90s. Denton managed the probably rather remarkable feat of rendering Lux speechless by informing him that in Australia “Lux” is a brand of dishwashing detergent. They then went on to perform Swing the Big Eyed Rabbit.

Farewell Lux!

So Long Mr Bush

It’s over. It’s finally over.

As we bid a fond *cough* farewell to the 43rd President of the United States, let’s all take a moment to consider his accomplishments, both international and domestic, and for one last time enjoy his plaintive version of REM’s The End of the World as we Know it.

(Now let’s just wait for Obama to screw things up…)

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.

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