informage

I love her hair just the way she likes it.

"In 1995, The Lemonheads' Evan Dando missed his slot at the festival due to rock star excesses. Arriving late at the site, he attempted to force an impromptu acoustic set on a crowd waiting for Portishead. They were vastly unamused: Dando had to be removed from the stage for his own safety. It remains a solitary recorded example of coffee-table trip-hop fans erupting in a livid wave of anger - the musical equivalent of assistant librarians rioting."

Ami found this fine piece of festival writing in The Guardian today. I was one of the aforementioned coffee-table trip-hop fans and remember this event well. "Evan-fucking-who?" were I believe my exact words at the time as I tried to cope with having fought my way through an unexpected sea of Portishead aficionados only to hear a solo unknown (to me) guitarist's drivel.

Kieran Healy gives a droll account of the Eurovision song contest for the uninitiated. The strange thing is I remember getting genuinely excited about this in my youthful years.

"But in terms of kitsch, tackiness, geopolitical tension, and sheer entertainment value the U.S. has nothing, but nothing, to match the Eurovision Song Contest. The Eurovision is the common cultural bond uniting generations of Europeans, the continent’s one true collective ritual."

Wonderful pictures of Earth and the Moon from Mars.

The Lemon has a hit-and-miss satirical Internet history up. Although the humour is patchy, the timeline is pretty accurate. The obligatory swipe at blogging was uninspired:

"1999: Blogging invented. Promises to change the way people bore strangers with banal anecdotes about their pets"

but some other entries were funnier:

"1995: Real Audio released, allowing users to listen to halting bursts of static in real time.

1996: Parenting groups become concerned that spending extended time online is depriving children of important time spent watching television.

2000: EPA warns that entire surface of the earth will be completely blanketed with AOL CDs by the end of 2007"

For the more refined taste, Google has a real history of Usenet, which is in many ways funnier. Usenet newsgroups were around long before the Web provided a more immediate source of idle geek trivia and downloadable images of one's favourite album covers.

From The New York Times Corrections May 13:

"An accounting of reporting flaws on Sunday with an article about plagiarism, misstatements and possible fabrications uncovered in a review of work done by Jayson Blair before his resignation from The New York Times misstated a name in a sentence from a Washington Post article he apparently lifted. The Post article identified the missing serviceman for whom a prayer service was conducted in Cleveland as Brandon Sloan, not Brandy."

*sighs* will it never end?

How's this for spooky. On the very same day, I see on my blog stats that a visitor from Saudi Arabi has been eyeing up my blog, and I get this email:

Dear sir, Let me introduce myself , I am brother to Tariq Aziz , the deputy prime minister of Iraq , before the us led coalition war against my country. I have been working for my brother for past 15 years. My brother have the sum of [46 million Dollars] with me ,which to be send to Europe which has been done already. I have decided to find somebody who can help me to secure the money or establish the money in Europe.Actually my brother has more than that with me. I don't want my identity to be exposed to outside the world, I am now hiding in Kuwait. Please if you are interested in this deal or to be my partner please contact my lawyer through his E-mail address. I know nothing goes for nothing we will be negotiating after you contact my lawyer This is my lawyer E-mail address.... mattarozzi_mirco@rediffmail.com

Thanks.

Aziz.

So what do you think? Should I follow up on this? Sounds like a lot of cash...

I don't know how well discussed this has been back in blighty, but apparently The London Evening Standard are denying that a front-page photo of "Jubilation on the streets of Baghdad" was heavily doctored. The Guardian article runs with the Standard line. Pun definitely intended.

So I took a look at the evidence and it looks cut and dry to me. In fact I spotted the guy in sunglasses who's repeated just from looking at the original photo. It's pretty much cut, paste and dried in fact.

No doubt this kind of doctoring has been going on since The Paleolithic Post, so here's a small victory for the net that deception like this gets some decent exposure these days.

Jack Mottram of Submit Response - a sharply written scottish blog - points to PNAC.info, a site exposing the details of the previously mentioned shadowy Project for a New American Century.

I still can't get my head around PNAC, because the organisation is a strange sort of open conspiracy: it bears all the hallmarks of the shadowy military-industrial complex cabals that litter conspiracy theory, with suitably sinister aims, but it carries out its business in the open. (Of course, the paranoid amongst us will take this as evidence that, if this scary shit is out in the open, the shit behind closed doors must be really scary.)

Personally I feel no need to be so paranoid. I've often thought that shadowy conspiracy theories just take our eye off the ball, there's plenty enough bad shit going on out there in full public view, just most of us are relatively blind to it.

The BBC is running an article criticising schemes that donate old computers to African teaching projects. Apparently inconsistencies in the supplied software and the level of hardware make the teaching task difficult, potentially creating more problems than are solved.

"You have maintenance problems, you have to constantly upgrade your systems," said Theo d'Souza, of the Dar es Salaam headteacher's conference. Of course this problem isn't limited to recipients of donated equipment, but the whole upgrade cycle is harder to deal with if you have limited resources. Microsoft's "Regional Director for Community Affairs for Africa and the Middle East" Garry Hodgkinson says in response "The digital divide is too important not to get bogged down in the debate over software". I'm not sure that's what he meant to say, but in any case I believe that use of open source software, rather than Microsoft's offerings, can help overcome this hurdle. I wrote a piece about this while I was working at UWC.

I feel strongly both about providing access to technology to under-resourced nations - I attempted to set up a project doing much what the article discusses in 1996. The project was called OCNI - Old Computers New Ideas - and we provided a couple of PCs salvaged from British Telecom to a university in Ghana. I didn't quite have the energy to deal with the project and it died a death, but the wide variety in quality of the computers we got suggested to me that providing consistent technology was going to be the big problem.

Now I'm planning to work with a community development project in Khayelitsha, Cape Town's biggest and poorest township, to create a PC resource center. This is very tentative at the moment, but the more and more benefit I derive from my use of IT, the more incentivised I am to work to make it available to people who have transformational uses for the stuff.