Art Black

11:35 am: Post-dated post, since all the cool kids are doing it
This is my journal. It has an info page. You're welcome to friend me, but please drop me a line (here or wherever). Otherwise I will look at the friends list, see a nick I don't recognise, and assume you're a close friend whose nick I have completely failed to recognise, and die of shame on the spot. Or something.

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10:44 pm: Well, well, well.
Former Indonesian colonel admits the Balibo Five were deliberately killed.

That's been a long time coming.

08:04 am: For the scientists in the audience


'Downfall' spoofs never get old!

05:58 pm: Gentlemen, we are dealing here with someone who has absolutely no life.

SRSLY WTF?

Tags: wow

04:32 pm: One thing I do love about WoW is the random mammoth parades through Dalaran :-)

Tags: wow

10:17 pm: Aminals!
Rey and I went down to Mornington Peninsula for a weekend away. We stopped at a llama farm run by the Daddo Brothers' auntie and uncle. (Baby alpacas are CUTE. Shaved adult alpacas are goofy-looking.)

Then the night tour at the Twilit Sanctuary. Rey and I were the only ones on the tour (probably because it was raining), so we got plenty of quality Fuzzy Animal Time. I got to pet a jungle python and a tawny frogmouth, and nearly got my finger pulled off by a hungry bettong. And did not go anywhere near the Tasmanian Devil, because I value my limbs. Yay fuzzies!

08:42 am: Happy birthday ambitious_wench!

08:48 am: Mark S. Goldberg told a Senate committee about his months-long battle last fall to persuade state authorities to release to him the body of his partner of 17 years, Ron Hanby, so he could grant Hanby's wish for cremation -- only to have that request rejected because "we were not legally married or blood relatives."

Goldberg said he tried to show the police and the state medical examiner's office "our wills, living wills, power of attorney and marriage certificate" from Connecticut, but "no one was willing to see these documents."

He said he was told the medical examiner's office was required to conduct a two-week search for next of kin, but the medical examiner's office waited a full week before placing the required ad in a newspaper. And then when no one responded, he said, they "waited another week" to notify another state agency of an unclaimed body.

After four weeks, he said, a Department of Human Services employee "took pity on me and my plight ... reviewed our documentation and was able to get all parties concerned to release Ron's body to me," but then the cremation society refused to cremate Ron's body.

"On the same day, I contacted the Massachusetts Cremation Society and they were more than willing to work with me and cremate Ron's body," and so, "on November 6, 2008, I was able to finally pick up Ron's remains and put this tragedy to rest."

Meanwhile, RI Governor Carcieri has just vetoed a bill that would have given domestic partners the right to make funeral arrangements for one another.

08:30 am: Heroic Marine subdues terrorist
Via james_nicoll: it is a good thing that folk like Jasen Bruce are capable of recognising Islamic terrorists in all their guises. Even when said terrorist has been so crafty as to spend a lifetime building up a cover as a Greek Orthodox priest!

*sigh*

11:05 pm: Things that make me happy
Co-worker: "Hey, you know that tip you sent out a couple of months back about LAG and DIF? That just saved me a day's work."

(I really, really disliked SAS when I started using it two years ago. I've come to the realisation that it's actually not so bad a language for certain purposes, just that it does a pretty good job of obfuscating its good points. I have an ever-growing library of useful tricks I discovered while looking for something completely unrelated...)

Tags: work

02:34 am: Via theweaselking
So that's what Uwe Boll has been up to.

(My immediate response was "I didn't even know they'd made a computer game of that.")

12:36 pm: Hmmmm.
Last night a lady knocked on the door - story was that she'd run out of petrol and had enough money for a jerry can but not enough to buy the petrol as well. She showed me a driver's license to prove who she was and said she'd pay the money back - she needed twelve dollars (seemed like an odd amount).

I thought about it and told her no, I wasn't comfortable giving her the money, and she was polite and went on her way. It might have been genuine, but I'm thinking more likely a scam (fake ID?) Anybody else had this lately?

10:14 am: I really should learn not to read YouTube comments
Have been looking at the coverage of the pram that rolled off a platform onto train tracks in Melbourne the other day, and I made the mistake of looking at some of the comments.

*sigh*

In no particular order:

- Yes, the mother was using her phone when it happened. Believe it or not, people with children sometimes need to communicate with the rest of the world, even in situations where a freak accident could conceivably happen.

- Yes, the platform does slope towards the tracks. This is because having water pool on the platform is in fact a safety hazard in itself.

- Yes, if the train had had ice-clearers fitted, the baby probably would've been in trouble. Had this happened on the banks of the green-greasy Limpopo full of crocodiles, or in the acidic fogs of Venus, the baby also would have been in trouble. But in Melbourne, not such an issue.

- Yes, the mother should've put the brakes on. But while everybody's engaging in smugness on that point, perhaps it's also worth noting that the things she did do right - buying a good sturdy pram and using the seatbelt instead of relying on gravity - almost certainly saved the kid's life.

12:13 pm: Rather nifty
Somebody went to a lot of work putting this together:

09:49 am: Win some, lose some...
NEW ORLEANS — A Louisiana justice of the peace said he refused to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple out of concern for any children the couple might have. Keith Bardwell, justice of the peace in Tangipahoa Parish, says it is his experience that most interracial marriages do not last long.

OTOH:

SAN FRANCISCO - A federal judge challenged the backers of California's voter-enacted ban on same-sex marriage Wednesday to explain how allowing gay couples to wed threatens conventional unions, a demand that prompted their lawyer to acknowledge he did not know.

Tags: politics

08:34 am: This is why we don't get invited to parties:

Charles Babbage was to develop a highly-targeted poetry-destroying method in what is one of his most famous quotations, in this Helpful Letter he wrote to Tennyson about his poem “The Vision of Sin” :

In your otherwise beautiful poem, one verse reads, “”Every minute dies a man, Every minute one is born;”

I need hardly point out to you that this calculation would tend to keep the sum total of the world’s population in a state of perpetual equipoise, whereas it is a well-known fact that the said sum total is constantly on the increase. I would therefore take the liberty of suggesting that in the next edition of your excellent poem the erroneous calculation to which I refer should be corrected as follows:

“Every moment dies a man, And one and a sixteenth is born.”

I may add that the exact figures are 1.067, but something must, of course, be conceded to the laws of metre.”

...something, but not very much, apparently.

10:46 am: I approve of cage fighters walking the streets in drag. I wonder if we could pay them a honorarium to make a habit of it?

11:59 pm: Hooray for Elizabeth Blackburn (and the other Nobel winners)!

09:46 pm: And more Polanski
From various:

A retired deputy district attorney who triggered claims of official corruption by telling a documentary filmmaker he had coached a judge in the case now says he made it all up.

And since there've been claims that the judge reneged on a plea deal, the transcript:

( Read more... )

08:43 am: Somewhat disappointed to see several people whose work I love on this petition to free Roman Polanski. Not to put too fine a point on it, but what he did was utterly vile, and you don't get off just because you managed to evade the law for long enough.

Not that I really expect the ability to make good films to be correlated with making good judgements on such matters. (For that matter, I like what little I've seen of Polanski's films, too.) But it's still a pity to see them defending this.

(Link via james_nicoll.)