Llareggub

After Morais' lesson in Anglo-Saxon last week, I gave him a lesson in Welsh inspired by Dylan Thomas' Under Milkwood (which I saw narrated in Bangor when I was a teenager) set in the village of Llareggub.

Day to Day Life Goes On

We have two Nigerian clients here at work - "Day to Day" and "Life Goes On". 

Surely they are twins?

Aphorisms XV!

"Whenever people are certain they understand our peculiar situation here on this planet, it is because they have accepted a religious Faith or a secular Ideology (Ideologies are the modern form of Faiths) and just stopped thinking."

Robert Anton Wilson

SOPA & PIPA - Jan 18 Day of Action

In this post on boingboing Cory Doctorow writes everything I have thought about the SOPA and PIPA legislation currently before the US Congress. I quote in full ...

"On January 18, Boing Boing will join Reddit and other sites around the Internet in "going dark" to oppose SOPA and PIPA, the pending US legislation that creates a punishing Internet censorship regime and exports it to the rest of the world. Boing Boing could never co-exist with a SOPA world: we could not ever link to another website unless we were sure that no links to anything that infringes copyright appeared on that site. So in order to link to a URL on LiveJournal or WordPress or Twitter or Blogspot, we'd have to first confirm that no one had ever made an infringing link, anywhere on that site. Making one link would require checking millions (even tens of millions) of pages, just to be sure that we weren't in some way impinging on the ability of five Hollywood studios, four multinational record labels, and six global publishers to maximize their profits.

If we failed to take this precaution, our finances could be frozen, our ad broker forced to pull ads from our site, and depending on which version of the bill goes to the vote, our domains confiscated, and, because our server is in Canada, our IP address would be added to a US-wide blacklist that every ISP in the country would be required to censor.

This is the part of the post where I'm supposed to say something reasonable like, "Everyone agrees that piracy is wrong, but this is the wrong way to fight it."

But you know what? Screw that.

Even though a substantial portion of my living comes from the entertainment industry, I don't think that any amount of "piracy" justifies this kind of depraved indifference to the consequences of one's actions. Big Content haven't just declared war on Boing Boing and Reddit and the rest of the "fun" Internet: they've declared war on every person who uses the net to publicize police brutality, every oppressed person in the Arab Spring who used the net to organize protests and publicize the blood spilled by their oppressors, every abused kid who used the net to reveal her father as a brutalizer of children, every gay kid who used the net to discover that life is worth living despite the torment she's experiencing, every grassroots political campaigner who uses the net to make her community a better place -- as well as the scientists who collaborate online, the rescue workers who coordinate online, the makers who trade tips online, the people with rare diseases who support each other online, and the independent creators who use the Internet to earn their livings.

The contempt for human rights on display with SOPA and PIPA is more than foolish. Foolishness can be excused. It's more than greed. Greed is only to be expected. It is evil, and it must be fought.

SOPA Strike is compiling a list of sites that are also going dark for Jan 18. If you want an Internet where human rights, free speech and the rule of law are not subordinated to the entertainment industry's profits, I hope you'll join us on it.

Thank you."

 We have also opted to "go dark" tomorrow (if the code on the SOPA Strike site works).

Travel size paper city Paris

This miniture paper cut-out model of Paris, featuring the Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe, Notre Dame, a boulangerie and patisserie as well as people and cars ... it only lacks a pissoir!! I made one at work last week and everyone thought it way cool!

See Made by.Joel

I hope he creates some other cities.

Aphorisms XV

"Disobedience was man's Original Virtue"

Oscar Wilde

A new species

We believed that our common octopus here probably belonged to the genus Octopus. However, the Directorate of Livestock, responsible for issuing phyto-sanitary certificates, informs us that we have discovered a new genus Octofius.

Algebra

My algebra is not what it was in my school days ... but this is very funny!

From the Futility Closet:

"Faced with the simultaneous equations

and

a lazy student ignored the second equation and solved the first in this way:



and hence x = 5 and y = 6. As it happens, that’s the right answer.

In Mathematical Circles Revisited, Howard Eves tells of “Hapless Harry,” who tackled

by writing

and

Psychogeography

I'm not a great fan of the term "psychogeography" but it has a pedigree and there seems to be a lack of a suitable alternative to describe human effects on the environment.

So I will now stretch the definition a little bit as Peter Karzil is doing with his observations of the colours of clothes ...

Fashion Observation experiment and Boring fashion colors

Jane Heap in a 1917 Little Review essay wrote:

"You can talk about or write about or paint or sculpt some parts of the body but others must be treated like the Bad Lands. You can write about what you see that you don't like, what you touch, taste or hear; but you can't write about what you smell; if you do you are accused of using nasty words. I could say alot more about the geography of the body, and how its influence goes all the way through until the censor makes a geography of your mind and soul."

The smell of shit.

Fuck and Bugger ... Bugger and Fuck

Fuck CST (our telecomms provider and only ISP) with a redhot poker/crowbar, fuck the power company, fuck this or that client who hasn't paid, fuck you Angus and fuck you Morais ... that's how the conversation goes between me and Morais.

So after a recent spat with my estranged wife, one of us said "Fuck Nanda" to which I responded "No you don't want to do that". I looked for the appropriate word  ... "bugger her"  ..... just taught Morais a new word Bugger! 

(Although I'm not sure either of us want to do that ...!)