Calendario Romano is a wall calendar with pictures of spunky Italian priests. Proceeds from the sale of the calendar go to a British HIV charity. The 2004 calendar is sold out, but a 2005 version is expected within a month or so. If that’s your thing.
“Bluetooth Users Against Bush uses bluetooth enabled devices (mobile phones, PDA’s, laptop computers) to create moments of ad-hoc solidarity for people opposed to George W. Bush and his disastrous policies.”
The less tech-savvy might find Knitters Against Bush more to their taste.
And while we’re at it:
The editorial in today’s Melbourne Age takes a very reasonable line on the gay marriage debate:
Certainly the ban will fan intolerance, and that is a most potent reason for not proceeding with it. If the Parliament must vote on the issue (and there appears to be no pressing reason for the legislation) it would best be decided by conscience vote rather than by party directive.
It appears Labor may have agreed to the ban in order to neutralise it as an issue before the election. If so, this is cynical politics that weakens the society our parliamentarians are meant to serve.
Meanwhile, the Shadow A-G, Nicola Roxon, has sent me a long rambling form reply to an email I sent her last week on the subject. It’s not particularly illuminating, except in so far as it betrays Labor’s (or at least the right wing’s) true motivation:
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If you live in the UK, there’s Prozac in your drinking water. So many Britons are taking the drug that it can be detected in the nation’s water supplies. Now there’s a reason to smile…
[BBC report via Boing Boing]
This is an unsolicited, unpaid-for, plug for Looking for Sam, a blog what comes out of Tucson, Arizona. Specifically, let me plug “Micheladas Con Clamato“, quite probably the steamiest, sauciest, crotch-fondlingest story ever to incorporate the word “Clamato”.
The Gay & Lesbian Rights Lobby have issued a call for supporters of queer rights to send email messages to Mark Latham and Nicola Roxon condemning their sell-out on the same-sex marriage inquiry.
This story from the Sydney Star Observer has the details, including a pro-forma email message you can cut and paste. It’s only takes about two minutes.
August 6 is a day for remembering.
August 6, 1945: the United States drops a big bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. A day which will, as they say, live in infamy.
August 6, 1991: my doctor drops a big metaphorical bomb on me – my HIV antibody test came back positive.
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This metrosexual thing is getting out of hand. Last night on The Footy Show, Brendan Fevola not only handed out gift vouchers for free facials to the panelists, but then announced that there’s been a fad for “getting trimmed downstairs” among the Carlton squad lately. “Shaved plums” also, it seems.
Now I’m as much in favour of people making an effort to keep things tidy in the minge department as anyone, but not on The Footy Show. AFL is supposed to be a man’s game, and even putting aside my (and every gay man’s) fondness for Anthony Koutefides, I expect footballers – even Carlton players – to uphold standards of manliness and heteronormativity, not pounce around discoursing on shaved testicles and alpha-hydroxy acid fruit peels.
What next? Barry Hall in makeup? Spider Everitt takes up knitting? The way things are going, Shane Crawford‘s going to be the blokiest bloke in the AFL.
From today’s letters page in the Age:
Now for the Bunyips
So gay marriage will be made illegal in Australia before the federal election? Have I missed something? Was it ever legal? No, of course not, but it’s refreshing to see our national leaders put aside their political differences to outlaw something that doesn’t even exist. I now look forward to bipartisan support for the Bunyip Control Act.
Paul Kidd,
Fitzroy North
Our friends in the Labor Party have decided to jump on John Howard’s anti-gay bandwagon and the ALP will now support the government in passing the Straight Australia Act.
Background, for those of you not paying attention: previously the ALP had said it would wait until it had the report of a Senate Committee which is looking into the Bill. Said Senate Committee has been calling for public submissions, the deadline for those submissions was last Friday. In the meantime, something calling itself the National Marriage Coalition has been holding an old-time revival meeting in some tent in Canberra. In between sessions of speaking in tongues and casting out demons, our federal politicians have been falling over one another trying to grab the opportunity to promise the fundies anything they want and to categorically rule out giving queers more rights than dogs.
To say that I’m disappointed would be to create the false impression that I expected anything more from the ALP. I’ve spent my whole life being sold up the river by the Sussex Street Shit Squad, and this is just more of the same. What really makes me cranky is the fact that, come election day, my queer brothers and sisters will be lining up to man the booths, nail up the pole posters and vote “1″ for this pack of cheats. All because Mark Latham is 0.001% less subhuman than Howard. Latham will probably win (and believe me, I’d rather have Ol’ Bitch Tits than the Short Man in a heartbeat) and we’ll be thrilled to receive a crumb or two from the government table. It sucks.
The good news is that there’s a real chance that the Greens will have 8 or 9 Senators (currently: 2) after the poll and we might actually get somewhere for once.
The edible mobile phone is one of the fake products in “Spam“, an exhibition in Berlin by Arts collaborative Human Beans. The products are so well realised and so five-minutes-into-the-future that I reckon if you were an entrepreneur looking for product development ideas, you could choose any one and the venture capital would beat a path to your door.
I especially like the “Mr Germy” bacteria-impregnated baby teether (to stimulate immune system development) and the “Live” cigarettes, with Life Points® you can save and cash in for treatment of smoking related illnesses.
[Via Boing Boing]
Over on the left side of this screen you may have noticed a little block headed “now playing”. It lists the last half-dozen tracks I played in iTunes (if I’m using my Mac) or WinAmp (if I’m using my PC). It’s a neat trick, achieved via a tool called Audioscrobbler which keeps track of the data for me and makes an XML file available for my use.
As well as this, the real reason for using Audioscrobbler is that, in theory at least, it enables me to find new music to enjoy based on the not-unreasonable idea that people who like the same music I like will also listen to other music I might like. The Audioscrobbler website makes it possible for me to view the playlists of my musical “neighbours”.
That’s all very clever and, as I say, “theoretically” useful because I still need to visit the website, read the playlists, investigate the choons and go to my local record store to buy the things I like. Doable, but there’s a lot of steps involved.
Now a new website, associated with Audioscrobbler, has upped the ante to a new level of usefulness. Last.FM is an internet radio station that creates a personalised musical stream based on what it knows (or guesses) I will like. As well as incorporating my data from the Audioscrobbler database, if I like (or dislike) the tracks they serve me, I can say so with a mouse click and so, over time, the guesswork improves. There’s more to it, but that’s the nub of it.
So today I clicked over to Last.FM and signed up, and it’s been mostly spot-on so far. Interactive, intuitive radio. No ads. Power to the people. Cool.
There’s a story on Wired news about Last.FM that explains more.
