Melbourne Zoo
Marr Makes Good
Philip Adams botched a George Bush quote. It was picked up by Professor Bunyip, who got support on this occasion from Ken Parish, and no doubt plenty of other notables. Here’s Bunyip:
We all know by now that Adams can expect no grief from David Marr and Peter McEvoy, since his column’s bare-faced lie matches the version of history they also prefer. And where would it stop if Media Watch started taking a close look at the icons of the left? Better to leave friends unchallenged. No nigger in any Media Watch-approved woodpile will ever get to ruffle the mutual admiration that binds our like-minded luvvies.
And Ken:
Is anyone going to bother reporting it to ABC Media Watch or the Australian’s editor Chris Mitchell? The first of those choices is almost certainly a complete waste of time, but ignoring such an apparently clearcut and serious case of journalistic impropriety should provide conclusive proof for even the most credulously charitable that the program under David Marr’s tutelage has become a worthless exercise in personal prejudice, bias and petulant bile.
Well, I don’t want to be seen as the sort of blogger who sits in front of Media Watch with fingers poised on the keyboard, but I just watched it, and strangely enough, Adams did cop a serve for the misquote (and another one in the same article). Not only that, but Bunyip got a free plug. Adams’ response to MW, incidentally, saw him pleading guilty, a novel approach from which the Ackermans and Bolts could surely learn.
Cricket in the 70s
My friend Gianni has lent me the three-video Cricket in the ’70s boxed set put out by the ABC. It has the two-part documentary on the Chappell Era which has been screened a couple of times on the ABC, and highlights from each of the six tests played between Australia and England in 1974-75 (which, as it says on the cover, was the first test series to be televised in colour in Australia). They are worth watching for the following reasons:
- To wonder why it is that Richie Benaud’s voice has dropped at least two-thirds of an octave between 1974 (when he was already in his 40’s) and today
- To marvel at Ian Chappell’s unflattering impersonation of Don Bradman’s management style
- To be astounded that, despite the fact that batsmen had been copping bouncers in the skull since WG Grace pulled on a set of junior pads, the 1974 Englishmen were still facing Thompson and Lillee without the benefit of helmets
- To look at the words “Videodisc Replay” appear at the bottom of slow motion replays, and wonder what the hell they mean. Could they really have been recording this video to disc in 1974? Surely not.
- To see fielders follow the ball tamely into the boundary without thinking to go in for the slide
- To see the crowds filing into the grounds with eskies full of full-strength beer (limited, we’re told, to 24 cans per customer)
- To see Greg Chappell whacking streakers on the arse with his bat
- Cigarette advertising nostalgia
- To watch Jeff Thompson send a bouncer over the head of the batsman, and the keeper, and clear the boundary on the first bounce.
- To admire the quaintness of cricket coverage put together with only two or three cameras, such that every other over is viewed from behind the wicket keeper
- To see the pitch invaded by swarms of unshirted drunks every time an Australian scores a century
- To try and predict which combination of pink and paisley Richie Benaud will be sporting to give the summary of the next day’s play
- Blokes copping full-tosses in the nuts
Highly recommended
Bloggo Nuevo
La Krokodilla, Melbourne-via-Adelaide-via-Mudgee expat living in Barcelona, musician and blogger más Bohemio. Anyone who has dwelt on my comment boxes will recognise Sophia, whose new blog I have the pleasure of hosting. Go and make her feel welcome.
Dooced
Another blogger has fallen foul of her employer (a misfortune for which, I’ve recently learned, there is a term: being dooced). Jen at Paperback Writer, it would have to be said, never made a virtue out of restraint when it came to verbally attacking her co-workers on her blog, but she never named names (of individuals or of the company she worked for), so perhaps she could count herself a bit unlucky:
On Monday morning I arrived at work to find that my hard drive had been confiscated and my CEO waiting to speak to me. He claimed he had received a phone call from a distressed member of staff on Sunday afternoon. That staff member had found my site and passed on the address to him.
He claimed that I was fired not so much because of what I said but that I had clearly abused company time and resources to write and maintain the site and that anyone from my workplace would be able to clearly identify anyone I’d mentioned on there, even though I’ve never mentioned who I work for or any workmates by name.
I was escorted from the building and given money for a cab home.
I later found out that an anonymous employee had “stumbled across” my site and sent an email to all staff on Sunday afternoon pointing them to Paperback Writer, and claiming that they all needed to know the truth about me, which included but wasn’t limited to - slutty behaviour, drug taking and theft of property from my place of employment.
Comment Spam
I’ve been looking at some of the discussion around the traps on comment spam, including some speculation as to whether the spammers are using bots or are doing it manually. I’ve been using Jay Allen’s excellent MT-Blacklist plugin for Movable Type, which has all but eliminated the problem on this blog. The occasional spam comment still gets through, but the process of deleting it and adding it to the blacklist is so simple and straightfoward that it’s hardly a headache.
One of the best things about the plugin is looking through the activity log to say “gotcha” to all those comments that have been blocked. While I was doing this, I came across these two entries (I’ve deleted the filter that found them because the string was too long to fit on a line, but it was one of the general bans against viagra/xanax etc .com):
2004.02.15 23:09:30 64.237.37.248 MT-Blacklist comment denial on tubagooba.com
2004.02.16 01:47:12 64.237.37.248 MT-Blacklist comment denial on tubagooba.com
The numbers are the date followed by the time followed by the IP address of the attempted spammer. Notice that there are two attempts from the same spammer, separated by an interval of about two-and-a-half hours. Does this represent a manual spammer coming back for a second try? It seems to me that if a bot was doing the spamming, and it wanted to spam more than once, it would do so at relatively short intervals. Also, it would seem unlikely that a bot could check to see whether its spam had been successfully posted, so it wouldn’t be smart enough to wait a while and try again if it didn’t work the first time.
There are a few other tricks that I could try to get rid of comment spam altogether, like renaming the script that generates the comment popup, but to be honest, it’s more fun to watch a smart tool like MT-Blacklist at work 
I wonder why the techniques of the MT-Blacklist can’t be applied to regular email spam? Surely just about all email spam contains a particular URL to direct you to a particular porn or penis enlargement site. Surely a blacklist of all such sites shouldn’t be too hard to put together and maintain. And surely there would be few or no legitimate emails that would be rejected on the basis that they contained the URL of such a site. If you particularly wanted to buy Viagra or hunt MILFs, then it would be an easy matter to unblock the URL’s of sites that you were communicating with. But if you didn’t, then all emails containing these URLs could just be deleted at the server level so that you never had to download them.
Grander Scanner
In early 2000, I went through a severe property bottleneck. I was moving out of the flat that I’d lived in for abour four years, about to go overseas to work on cruise ships for a period that turned out to be about two years, but was at the time undetermined. My Mum was packing up her house, about to sell it and move into a nursing home in Melbourne. My Dad was on his way to Perth to work, and it seemed likely that he would sell his place and move there. My brother and sister were both living in rental accomodation in Melbourne. I didn’t have any friends with an abundance of free space, and I didn’t want to rent space in a storage facility, perhaps for years, for the sake of stashing what was a fairly meagre assortment of possessions. So I farmed out what I could to people who could use it, prevailed upon one friend to stow a small pile of plastic crates in her shed, and got rid of the rest.
When I got back from my sojourns, I settled in Melbourne. Fortunately, there was not much stuff to shift here from Adelaide. My computer and computer desk and bed and couch and the plastic crates all squeezed into my van in one trip, and I was patting myself on the back for being so disciplined as to trim my life down to such managable proportions. It wasn’t until I had to stock a cupboard with newly-bought plates and cups and bowls and glasses, and a drawer with newly-bought cutlery, and a bathroom with newly-bought towels, that I began to come to terms with the narrowness of the bottleneck that I’d just passed through. Previously, I’d existed on motley sets of mismatched crockery and cutlery and manchester which, for all their dagginess, did their respective jobs perfectly well. Who, after all, has ever had to go into a shop to buy a coathanger? Me, that’s who.
Another casualty of my (and Mum’s) pre-departure purge was photographs. They take up a hell of a lot of room when one has only a handful of oversized Tupperware containers in which to accomodate a life’s possessions. As I remember it, I went through a stack of prints, discarding any which I couldn’t ever imagine being enthusiastic about looking at again. My judgment, I guess, was fairly brutal. Over at Mum’s, a similar purge took place, although in her case the mountain of prints was both much larger and more historic. Whereas my photos provided invaluable documentation of drunken high school parties and adolescent surfing trips, Mum’s collection constituted a family record which went back generations. My sister and I were faced with the task of sitting on the floor and trying to determine which chunks of this heritage could be safely discarded.
I seem to remember that we were a little more compromising with Mum’s photos. I have a memory of preserving a stack of negatives with the thought that we could resurrect the record later on. Maybe I’m mistaken about ever doing that, but whatever the case, the negatives don’t seem to have survived the turmoil of that move, combined with the subsequent turmoil that followed Mum’s death about eighteen months later.
What did survive were a stack of 35mm slides, dating from the late sixties to the early eighties. This week, armed with the latest addition to my arsenal of gadgetry, an Epson Perfection 1670 Photo scanner, I’ve been taking that stock of celluloid and converting it into pixels, hoping to rescue the images from the oblivion that might await them whenever the next purge comes. (In fact, you could argue that the oblivion had already arrived, since the projector and screen both disappeared in the last bottleneck).
It’s strange to think of the life of these pictures. Captured in 1/125th of a second by a mechanical shutter, exposed onto photosensitive film, developed and placed in a cardboard holder in a plastic box that sat in the back of a cupboard for 30 years, then taken out, lightly brushed, recaptured using bizarre technology that hadn’t even been invented when the shot was taken, then distributed using even stranger technology which would have seemed even more inconceivable to the original photographer, who, in 1975, could never have imagined that his image of two Melbourne blogging identities would one day be available in an instant to people in six continents. (And yes, I’m sure there are folks in the Antarctic who while away the long winter nights browsing blogs!)
(Incidentally, for anyone who might be anticipating a similar project, can I heartily reccommend that you don’t attempt it using a Hewlett Packard scanner. I bought one, but I found the quality of both the software drivers and the actual scans to be so disgraceful that I went against the habit of a lifetime and took it back to the shop. The Epson that I replaced it with has proven to be about fifty times better, as well as being $50 cheaper.)