And a very belated post, a comment from the Turner Prize 2006 at Tate Britain: “My cat could draw better than this lot and I haven’t even got one.”
Monthly Archives: February 2006
This article is practically tofu pr0n. Seven types of tofu, anyone?
Just another Friday night in (south) London:
This article on Radia Perlman as the ‘Mother Of The Internet’ starts with a situation familiar to lots of women in IT, but her work (and her perseverance) is really inspiring.
“Radia Perlman had a solution for an information routing problem. Unfortunately, no one was listening.
It was the mid-1970s, and Perlman was a software designer for computer network communication systems
Sadly, this doesn’t seem to be a joke:
Abortion will lead to Muslim nation: MP
“Australia could become a Muslim nation within 50 years because “we are aborting ourselves almost out of existence”, a Government backbencher says.” (SMH)
Even if it mattered that Australia became a ‘Muslim nation’, her argument doesn’t make any sense.
I’ve just been reading the second verse of the British national anthem. I wonder if they’ll ever use it again?
“O Lord our God arise,
Scatter her enemies
And make them fall;
Confound their politics,
Frustrate their knavish tricks,
On Thee our hopes we fix,
God save us all! ”
Source: BBC
(Updated because I’d said English, not British)
“Archaeologists in Greece say they are examining the largest underground tomb ever found in the country.” (BBC)
Saw Lady Vengeance tonight. It was beautifully styled, but it perhaps tried to do too much or needed a tighter edit because everyone I saw it with thought it was half an hour too long. The sometimes extreme violence reminded me of Audition.
Teddy girls: “A selection of over 30 of the photographs from this amazing shoot, the only known professional photo-documentation of early 1950
Some belated reviews… on Tuesday I went to see one of the ““saint etienne present: popfiction” sessions at the Barbican with the fabulous Miss Jo. We saw “Three Minute Heroes” and “Ladies and Gentlemen…The Fabulous Stains“.
“Three Minute Heroes” was interesting for its glimpse into life in the Midlands in the early 1980s, particularly how boring it was for teenagers. I always forget that most English people in London have also come from somewhere else, and I can see why they’d want to escape down to London. The scene set at what looked like an underage gig was almost like a social anthropology documentary – I’d forgotten how tribal it used to be. Compared to teenagers now, they seemed incredibly colourful and diverse. I’m not sure how it worked if you didn’t have a group of your own, or if you were gay.
They say that anyone who saw “…The Fabulous Stains” the first time around formed a band, and I have been thinking about bass guitars lately so maybe it still works. Its tale of sudden, gimmick-led rise to fame, exploitation and even more sudden fall from grace should be shown to everyone who auditions for Pop Idol. It should probably also be shown to teenage girls, in the spirit of the Riot Grrls.
Last night I saw Beautiful Thing at the Sound Theatre. Written around the time Section 28 was introduced, it’s already a period piece in some ways, but I bet there are still kids in council estates around the UK going through the same thing.