With a sheet around his neck…
Ridiculous Bullshit
Skatepark with an iPod Dock
(Photos and quote stolen from Max’s blog)
One of the best features of the park is piped music coming out of speakers all over the place. When we first arrived, the Velvet Underground was playing and I thought, that’s pretty good. Turns out you can just plug an ipod in and broadcast it. Genius! The park’s cruisy street sculpture vibe was accentuated by the music. I imagined I was in a skate video a bit.
Just as everything in the world seems to come with an iPod dock these days, so too does a new skate park in Geelong. Awesome.
R.I.P. iPhone
In a few short hours, I have an appointment with one of Apple’s so-called Geniuses in which I am told they will replace my iPhone. Apart from the fact that it’s pretty heavily scratched, there’s nothing much the matter with it. The volume button on the side fell off over the weekend, and as I happened to be walking past the Regent St. Apple store last night, I figured I’d go in and see what they could do.
I’m not exactly sure what will happen to it from that point—will my phone be crushed up into little bits and be sent to landfill in that town in China where technology goes to die? Or will it be torn up and re-sold as component parts? Will the metals from its various chips be melted down and sold as scrap, the plastic casing recycled to make new park benches commissioned by ‘green’ municipal councils?
It seems like a big waste to replace the whole phone just because of a broken volume button (which still, kind of, actually works if I press it in with my fingernails.) Aside from any of this, I’m reasonably attached to my iPhone: I queued up on release day in July last year, outside the Optus store on Collins Street in Melbourne with a band of other true believers for five hours in the cold! (That said, I could have been there a lot longer. I showed up at around 3am, still a bit drunk after my last DJ set at the now recently deceased St. Jerome’s, but the girl in front me had been there since 8pm.)
So, while I’m a bit torn, the lure of a new phone is too much:
I’m going to trade in my old, worn, scratched iPhone that I bought on the day it came out for a brand new one, fresh out a factory in some horrible coastal part of China and I really hate that I’m going to do that.
Wikileaks, Australia and the Paedophile Proof Fence
From The Sydney Morning Herald:
The Australian communications regulator says it will fine people who hyperlink to sites on its blacklist, which has been further expanded to include several pages on the anonymous whistleblower site Wikileaks.
Wikileaks was added to the blacklist for publishing a leaked document containing Denmark’s list of banned websites.
The move by the Australian Communications and Media Authority comes after it threatened the host of online broadband discussion forum Whirlpool last week with a $11,000-a-day fine over a link published in its forum to another page blacklisted by ACMA - an anti-abortion website.
The page in question at Wikileaks is rumoured to be a compilation of sites to be blocked by the Government’s (proposed?) Internet filter.
The idea of punishing individuals for linking to sites—and, indeed, the idea of blacklisting and filtering at all—strikes me as so astonishingly old media and out of touch with the nature of many-to-many communication that I’m actually surprised that our own government would be so foolish in either case.
The Herald again:
[A]bout half of the sites on the list are not related to child porn and include a slew of online poker sites, YouTube links, regular gay and straight porn sites, Wikipedia entries, euthanasia sites, websites of fringe religions such as satanic sites, fetish sites, Christian sites, the website of a tour operator and even a Queensland dentist.
I haven’t lived in Australia for about the last eight months, but when I was last there it seemed like the Rudd government was generally reasonably switched on and progressive (by the admittedly low standard set by the Howard regime), so this whole thing comes as something of a surprise.
Here’s that link again: eat a dick ACMA.
Flimsy Internet research and the Temper Trap
Apparently the Temper Trap juggernaut keeps rolling along; funny to see that this Guardian article appears to owe a certain debt to my post here after seeing the band play in London in October.
“These hopefuls are being talked up as the best band to come out of Australia in 10 years”
Which seems to rather miss the point that it was their manager talking them up, but anyway.
Mista Savona makes Aussie Dancehall history
From the Northside mailing list:
- RESPECT - Jake Mason, who made the Melbourne Meets Kingston 2LP comes out with the FIRST EVA AUSSIE RIDDIM!!!!! Pressed on three different 45’s and pressed in JAMAICA!! All featuring a little Kangaroo on the label!! The riddim is called the Fire Dragon but it is essentially the Drum Song riddim (rhythm) with some extra keys and dope samples through it!!. Vida Sunshine is a local girl who sang with Jake on his record - here she tears it up. Man she’s got soul!!…also Burro does he bit on the flip!!
While I must confess, I’m not mad about the riddim itself (which sounds a bit like the kind of stuff that was coming out circa-2003 with Oochie Wallie-esque “eastern” string sounds like the Egyptian riddim and Coolie Dance, etc.) and I think the kangaroo on the label is a bit twee… but nevertheless, this really is a fantastic step for the nascent Australian dancehall scene.
I really hope this record does well and that we can see some more Aussie/Jamaica pairings in the future. It’s sold out at Dub Vendor but Ernie B’s has copies… Good on ya Mista Savona!
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