Category Archives: Culture

TWAT: the war against tees, Bush loses a round

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So I guess that means the terrorists win. Meet the tiny tee terrorist.

Zachary Guiles, the tiny tee terrorist

and his weapon of mass destruction

Chickenhawk In Chief T-shirt! Christmas is only four months away!

Thirteen year old Zachary Guiles wore this t-shirt to school one day, thinking no doubt that he was giving The Man the finger.

But The Man don’t like to be fingered.

Next thing you know, Zach‘s cool, antiestablishment shirt is festooned with duct tape censoring out parts of the obvious message. I’m not making a great leap when I say that the coke lines were probably on the no-fly list, and perhaps the words “World Domination Tour” and maybe even “Chickenhawk In Chief“.

An appeals court in New York found that Zachary’s constitutional rights were violated when officials at his Vermont school made him stick duct tape over parts of the T-shirt. The shirt also said the president was undertaking a “world domination tour” and showed a picture of his head superimposed on a chicken’s body, along with cocaine, a razor blade and a martini glass. Zachary was suspended for a day, but continued to wear the T-shirt to school, complete with duct tape.

and rightly so; covering up the occurrance is nothing more than capitulation to censorship, so I am very glad that our young freedom fighter Zach bore the scars of his battle proudly.

But he did not bear them lightly, nor did he bear them alone.

Lawyers for Williamstown middle high school argued the images contravened the school’s ban on clothes promoting drink and drugs, but the court rejected the idea on the grounds that the T-shirt expressed “an anti-drug view”. Mr Bush has spoken of his battles with alcohol earlier in his life.

The T-shirt “uses harsh rhetoric and imagery to express disagreement with the president’s policies and to impugn his character”, the court ruled, but the images “are not plainly offensive as a matter of law”.

“The standard that the court set was that a kid has free-speech rights as long as the expression of those rights doesn’t upset the normal workings of a school,” said Allen Gilbert, of the American Civil Liberties Union, which brought the case.

Zachary said: “I think this is a very good sign that even with the current administration … there can still be a justice that allows free speech.”

He sounds almost as surprised as me!

TWAT: what the terrorists want, and how not to give it to them

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Never Forget 

This is from Bruce Schneier, a man after my own shrivelled heart. Looking around the globe at the hysterical overreactions on the part of individuals, corporate staff, and governments, he concludes that the terrorists are not the losers in TWAT: we are.

I’d like everyone to take a deep breath and listen for a minute.

The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics. The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act.

And we’re doing exactly what the terrorists want.

Go on and read the rest before you board so much as a skateboard.

turning porn into art: Fleshtones YouTube

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I can’t say it any better than the copy on the site. It’s an art music video made by pixillating porn video footage and using an algorithm to convert the movements (and thus the changes in pixels) to music. This is possibly the most beautiful video I’ve seen on YouTube; the only thing even close is the Bleat and the Monkees “She Hangs Out” psychedelia.

In whcih pixelated pornography is turned into lyrical piano music…..

The concept of a correlation between sound and vision goes back to antiquity. One starry night on the island of Samos Pythagoras stood contemplating the skies, to him he very rhythm and motion of heavenly bodies in their orbits appeared to him as if governed by a cosmic harmony, a carefully choreographed sequence, the music of the spheres.

Renaissance artists such as Leonardo da Vinci produced sophisticated spectacles for court festivals that fused music and colour. In 1760 Father Castel constructed an Ocular Harpsichord or as he described it a ” harpsichord for the eyes”. Castel‘s machine was a normal harpsichord above which were 60 small windows, each with different coloured-glass and a small curtain. Each time the player depressed a particular key, the relevant curtain would rise to show a burst of colour.

In the next two hundred years many new instruments for combining light and sound were built. The British painter A. Wallace Rimington developed a Colour Organ which provided a moving light accompaniment to the 1916 New York premiere of Scriabin’s symphony Prometheus: A Poem of Fire. Scriabin had scored not only the music but also the precise colours he wanted to accompany particular passages.

Such colour music forms the conceptual starting point for Fleshtones, a piece for extreme pixelated porn and auto generated accompaniment. Footage from webcams and other online sites is broken down into a simple tableau of colour bands, at times rather like the paint charts one might find in a DIY store. Given the subject matter this palette is either predominately pink or coffee coloured thus producing a sequence of flickering fleshtones. Using the wonders of max/msp/jitter these Fleshtones are turned into lyrical piano music that rises in falls in response and exact correspondence to the onscreen movement. The motion of earthly bodies thus is transformed into something of beauty, harmony and contemplation.

British government censors itself

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it could happenSelf-censorship is the most dangerous and insidious kind of censorship, as well as the most risible. Here we see a perfect example of a snake swallowing its own tail and vanishing in a puff of laughter.

BoingBoing reports that the British government, as part of an initiative to encourage and demonstrate connectivity and technological sophistication at a deep level in public service, has posted a video to YouTube. Well bully for them.

Because another branch of that selfsame department whose incredible culture of communication has “released efficiencies by standardisation, simplification and sharing, broadening and deepening of government’s professionalism in terms of the planning, delivery, management, skills and governance of IT enabled change,” has contacted YouTube and gotten the video removed, because it was posted without permission of the copyright holder. Itself.

No, I’m serious. Here’s the report:

UK government censors YouTube vid it posted itself

The UK cabinet office has censored a video that another branch of government had previously posted off of YouTube — ironically, the video was about how the government could be more coordinated:

A video called Transformational Government can no longer be viewed on the site, instead users get a box of red text stating: “This video has been removed at the request of copyright owner COI Television because its content was used without permission.”

COI Television is actually part of the Cabinet Office and the further irony of the video being about transformational government was not lost on one critic.

A spokesman for independent body Public Sector Forums, told silicon.com: “The COI is part of the Cabinet Office. So it looks like the Cabinet Office’s initiative has fallen at the first hurdle and ironically, it’s thanks to a lack of joined-upness between parts of its own ministry.” LINK

May I just note the fact that we already have a word, “connectedness,” which not only expresses the same thought as the expression “joined-upness” but also sounds far less like it came from someone taking remedial breathing class for the second time.

For those who love to slow down to look at traffic wrecks, here is the link to the dead YouTube. Nobody cared enough to stick it on GoogleVids; I checked. For those of you who prefer to watch wrecks in progress, here is the remaining video in the series. The clock is obviously ticking on this one, though, so get your chewy, bureaucratic joined-upness while it’s hawt!

the phallic logo awards

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I was trying to class up the blog for the newbies, but let’s face it: I just have a dirty mind.

That’s why I’m posting about the Phallic Logo Awards, from B3TA, whatever that means. No, I KNOW what “phallic” means; it’s the TLA with a silent 3 I don’t understand. But then, it’s the Internet; you’re not supposed to understand it!

The game designers across the nation are playing is; can they design a logo and get it approved without the client realising it’s a big spurting penis?

We asked our readers to send in the best cock logos from around the world for our team of experts to evaluate. Now we present to you the very cream of the cocks.

Czech sausage ad. No, I'm not kidding. It's a Czech sausage ad. For reals.

Who: Czech sausage company
Pros: Great 1920s transvestite oral sex action.
Cons: Two meat. No veg.
Cock mark: 46%…

And so on…do not omit scrolling right to the bottom, for the Exxtra Bonus Muff Diver Award.

Who: Pride in Oldham award scheme
Pros: Tiny, tiny dwarf man going down on a lady in a peephole bikini.
Cons: He’s starting with her bellybutton.

No, seriously, you gotta see this!