The Spectrum was the first computer I was ever paid to program, and it was a delight in its own small way - just a z80 chip and some RAM, and the programmer gets to figure out the rest.

There's no love like your first love...

A friend of a friend asked for Monty Python's "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" to be played at her funeral. It was a nice thought, but apparently didn't work so well in practice - lots of people breaking down into tears while trying to sing a cheery song.

Perhaps the old New Orleans funeral marches have the right idea - first a sad part to cry to, then a joyous part to remind you the world's still there.

morehumanthanhuman at #26 writes:

> It is also worth noting that if a fast process for synthesizing diamond could be discovered, it might be cheaper to make things out of diamond than plastic.

Giving us a world of virtually indestructable mounds of diamond garbage - dimaond highchairs and spoons and chopsticks and fenceposts and shoe-heels. Somewhere J.G. Ballard is nodding sagely.

Looking on the bright side, if climate change whomps us all, it lets all of the singularity mad techno-utopians off the hook - no one's going to call them on it in 30 years time when Microsoft's "Clippy" still hasn't been surpassed.

I nominate Tatjana van Vark as Empress of the Solar System.

All in favour?

Around 1990 at the Royal Melbourne Show (Americans: think "State Fair") I noticed that the crafts sections had a classification for "Best Lard or Margarine Sculpture" - a classification which has sadly dissapeared in recent times. All of the great skills of the past are being lost...

The very existence of a margarine category probably shows the age of it - I think all modern margarines have been manipulated so far in the direction of "spreadability" that you'd be hard pressed to sculpt a decent equestrian victory scene out of them.

--
What's the link between Bonnie Tyler and Black Flag?
http://covertrek.com/findLinksBetween.html?perf=bonnie%20tyler&orig=black%20flag

> #48 posted by Bernbaum , May 19, 2008 9:16 PM

> Her Sydney accent was spot on. In fact, that accent could represent most of the eastern states, as I'm a Brisbaner, and we sound a lot like that.

Yeah - I don't really think there's much differentiation in Australian accents, except for rural ones being stronger. Only exception is that people from Adelaide sometimes sound a bit English to me.

> Her non-specific "Australian" accent however, was way off. Sounded like an American actor taking the piss out of Australians.

It was rubbish - surprising since here "Sydney" accent was ok.

Her accent from ${MY_LOCALITY} was appalling - a foolish caricature of our noble accent. Her accent from ${YOUR_LOCALITY}, however, was absolutely spot on.

Many jobs and many years ago my company was looking at some software which generated very informative error information when a program crashed. As a promotional tools, they shipped "Mission Critical Software", a solitaire game which would play normally for a few minutes, then crash leaving an excellent crash dump.

They explained in their documentation that solitaire was the one critical computing application the modern world could not do without. And if you bought their software, they threw in a workig copy of the solitaire game :)

> Despite agreeing with all the pro-liberty posts on boingboing, I must agree they're getting old.

Well, at least it's a change from "Look! Another goatse!"

wrybread at #43 writes:

> I'm surprised anyone who reads boingboing would actually use the term "elitism" as spoonie did in the first sentence of his post.

As a regular BoingBoing reader, let me add a shout of "elitism!", in support of Spoonie.

I love the net, I've been using it since long before the web, and it's changed a lot about my world, mostly for the better - but I think Shirky, and quite a few other people tend to overstate the benefits and wonders of the net.

There is plenty of rubbish on the net, as well as a smattering of excellent stuff. There is excellent television produced, as well as heaps of drivel. For my part, I hardly watch any TV, spending most of my time on the net - and often enough I realise I've missed something pretty interesting on TV because I was idly flipping through blogs and cruising comment threads.

> Aren't we beyond that Newt Gingrich-era method of dismissing all critical thought? Who am I kidding, of course we're not.

Sure we are - we're all wonderful now. BUT I wouldn't automatically associate being on the net with critical thought, nor watching TV with being a sessile couch potato.

On a similar note, have a look at the typographical animations by an old work buddy of mine, John Lycette, at: http://www.lycettebros.com/notmytype/

They're pretty sweet.

alisong76 at #17 writes:

> One of Australia's foremost music gurus (at least at the time) Ian "Molly" Meldrum, predicted that Cyndi Lauper would be a bigger star than Madonna.

He also thought Kllatu were either a) going to be bigger than The Beatles or possibly b) were The Beatles. Good old Molly.

Back in the early days of the net - many years before the birth of the WWW - I remember thinking that buying a domain name for your company was a silly way to show off and a foolish way of wasting money - much like buying vanity plates for your car.

I may have been wrong.

> In a related story, check out the Chinese "Green Brothers", high-tech environmental activists who "do monthly, explainer-style documentary pieces on wind power, biomass engineering, and solar water heaters (?!) in China.

Why do hot water heaters rate a "(?!)" ? They're a very well established and straightforward technology, already in use in a lot of places. They're certainly nothing new.

ps - got hit by that bug where my post was refused because "the text was wrong" or whatever. It seems to be happening more often.

It'a a weather balloon. Or possibly a flock of geese.

As others have said above, that's not much of a news story - this used to happen on every flight coming in to Australia.

It's pretty perfunctory and I remember as a kid wondering if it actually worked reliably or if - well, that was long before the phrase "security theatre" was coined.

Definitely - Total Balalaika Show is wonderful.

But describing them as "new wave"? Surely not!

technogirl wrote:

> I predict this will end badly.

then pchi wrote:

> ...possible to reemvowel all comments. Here's a site that will do it for you manually:
> http://www.disemvowelment.com/reemvowel.html

and technogirl replied:

> As predicted.
> I hope that I am wrong on the final prediction though.

I'm not sure if I'm reading you incorrectly here, but... I wrote the reemvoweler at http://disemvowelment.com and I *approve* of disemvowelment, of Teresa's moderation style, of puppies, kittens, rainbows, unicorns and much much more...

To see the existence of disemvowelment.com as a protest in the face of censorship would be a bit mistake. It's more like a pavlovian response to a technical challenge, something I'm sure most programmers will understand.

Steve

at #19 posted by slamorte:

> fwiw, ursula k. le guin proposed the death penalty for children that do poorly in school, as well as for people that fail to perform their civic duty in a responsible matter. and civic duty could mean anything on Hain... at any moment any citizen could be taped to run a school board, business, or even a government. yet somehow i still love ursula!

I'm pretty sure you're thinking of R.A.Lafferty and his stories "Polity and Custom of the Camiroi" and "Primary Education of the Camiroi" - and of course, coming up with outrageous ideas is not a sign of being a bad person - it's context and other clues which let us know how much they're a sign of the writer's own beliefs.

While I've thoroughly gone off Larry Niven since Jerry Pournelle ate his brain, I don't think he deserves any criticism some people are making of his organ transplant stories - they're legitimate SF extrapolation.

> Granted, this was in the days when Wired was predicting that push technology was the Next Big Thing, and that "The Long Boom", aka the dot-com bubble, would never end, but still.

Has there ever been a time when Wired talked anything other than rubbish?

I have such fond memories of that 'long boom' cover.

I love a lot of Disney work from their golden age, but have never figured out the adulation the Mary Blair receives. Her style incorporates such a horrific level of tweeness that my brain trys to crawl out of my skull when I encounter it.

I've ridden the "It's a small world" ride once,back in the early 90s, and think it should be preserved as a demonstration of how torture techniques need not involve physical harm.

Teresa at #48 wrote:

> Teapot(7!), if the boingers want to intervene in the threads, it's still their weblog. The principle applies to the moderator, too.

well yes - I *did* earlier say: "Obviously the owners still have a right to do whatever they want - it's their toy", so it certainly sounds like we're agreeing.

ANTINOUS at #44 wrote:

> In your mind and many others, but not in the BBers. It's their collective personal blog.

Yeah - there's a definite tension between the two views.

> Yes it has ads, but lots of personal blogs have AdSense. That doesn't mean that the bloggers have any obligation to the readers.

No - I wasn't thinking ads were significant - more the fact that it's one of the biggest sites on the net and has a readership in the trillions (approximately). I can't recall the last time I bothered to look at Wired, but BoingBoing has taken over from it in my mind.

> Besides, try arguing with Time magazine.

I'll pass.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden at #41 writes:

> Teapot7, since I didn't disemvowel that comment, it must have been one of the boingers; i.e., the people whose website this is.

Fair enough. Actually I'd assumed you'd be the only one doing moderation, now that there is such a thing as full time moderator.

Though it's not what's happening here, self disemvowelling to make moderators look intolerant could be the new troll trick for 2008. Where do I sign up for a futurist think tank?

> That said, I agree with the disemvowellment. MMBB has posted some good comments in other threads, but that one's sour, negative, and a real downer.

It raises the question of when disemvowelment is appropriate, and I think that's at least partly dependent on the nature of the website.

For a strictly personal blog, disemvoweling any comment that's even mildly irritating is fine. For something like BoingBoing which is more like the web equivalent of a big mass market magazine, I think angry letters to the editor have their place, and that "sour, negative, and a real downer" need not be disqualifying features. Obviously the owners still have a right to do whatever they want - it's their toy - but it doesn't seem such a good idea to me.

That said, the question of where to draw the line is never going to have an objective answer...

DILLINGERR69 wrote:

> It's funny because it's gross!

It's tired. Really really tired. And crass.

Can' we declare this one dead? At least 'all your base...' was kinda catchy.

So was post #1 self disemvowelled?

If not, why on earth did you guys do it? - because frankly it seems like fair comment, and correct as well, to me.

In the one and only issue of Forbes I've ever read, there was a hilarious cover article about the evils of the internet - how it was ruining lives and (sob) destroying brands.

They were referring, of course, to websites containing feedback and product reviews written by the common folk. Poor old Forbes - the author sounded like a mistreated puppy.

Are you sure that's Beatles concert footage and not a recreation?

I'm not sure myself, but Beatnix are a real Beatles covers band, and it's easy enough to make fuzzy footage.

The clip comes from the Australian TV show "The Money or the Gun" which featured a different band performing Stairway to Heaven every week. There were some treasures there.