jeudi 14 août 2003

'God's Sad Cowboy': aggression backfires again Tonight we saw where two vandals slashed the face of Attilio Maggiuli with a knife for staging 'George W. Bush ou le Triste Cowboy de Dieu'. The whole façade of the 'Comédie Italienne' in rue de la Gaîté is currently battleship grey, stage-bloodied with splashes across even the international press tributes to the writer-director and the show. Above them and a "BUSH & CO" panel, US combat gear and weaponry leer over the street. It's effective. The show did go on, in savage commedia dell'arte style, after being withdrawn for a fortnight in May when Maggiuli was put in hospital. On the rest of the walk home, I was trying to recall those words of Bush the Father. Yes, these were they: "And much good can come of this: a world once divided into two armed camps now recognizes one sole and pre-eminent power, the United States of America. And they regard this with no dread." Looking up the 1992 State of the Union address took me first to William Blum's 'Rogue State' pages, whence comes virtually all this list of now thriving democracies Washington has set to rights with missiles and bombs since World War II: China 1945-46 Korea 1950-53 China 1950-53 Guatemala 1954 Indonesia 1958 Cuba 1959-61 Guatemala 1960 Congo 1964 Peru 1965 Laos 1964-73 Vietnam 1961-73 Cambodia 1969-70 Guatemala 1967-69 Grenada 1983 Lebanon 1983, 1984 Libya 1986 El Salvador 1980s Nicaragua 1980s Iran 1987 Panama 1989 Iraq 1991-2000 Kuwait 1991 Somalia 1993 Bosnia 1994, 1995 Sudan 1998 Yugoslavia 1999 Afghanistan 1997-2002 Iraq 2003 In Cheerfulness Street, 'God's Sad Cowboy' -- Maggiuli's small testament to the unfailing success of aggression in Washington's name -- will be back on stage on September 5, after the summer break. Most of those who've already seen it describe it as better than his last such show, 'The Very Edifying Destiny of Silvio Berlusconi,' which needed doing, won praise but was reportedly less finely tuned in the detail. 10:44:11 PM  link   your views? [] Daily cruise: cleaning up "I live off the beaten path, and to my horror, on one of the filthiest country roads in existence. The people I live around throw used baby diapers out along with their McDonalds Happy Meal Boxes." Many comments from around the planet commended a Finnish initiative called LitterMovement, which I tripped over during a look at wiki-world. The home site for the campaign, launched by Finnish journalist Tuula-Maria Ahonen, recently vanished but left traces all over the place. It saw a small good idea translated into 16 languages: pick up at least one piece of somebody else's litter every day and put it where it should have gone. Simple but effective, going by hundreds of responses. More on wikis, the brainchild of Ward Cunningham, another day. zzz The quick trip north began after Safari downloaded a FileBuddy update at 171 kpbs, which surprised me. I was also listening to the Beeb online, the 'blog-ware and my mail were functioning, and Marianne was on the Net too. Henrik Gemal's BrowserSpy is a staggering piece of work: much more than a bandwidth speed test. Its Danish inventor keeps a Psyched Blog, but is more occupied by the important business of getting wed at the weekend. May it be long and fruitful! Get an earful of the different voices available with Henrik's 'hear this entry' tweak; they make a change from Apple's variations on American accents. zzz "Today is Left Handers Day. There is some interesting stuff on the site. Watch out for the OOT JavaScript effects on the home page!" Of course, I missed it (thanks Mike, at Journalized). zzz The MacMusic logo link might have to go, I briefly thought, when the people behind the site I've joined primarily to lurk and learn suddenly started this week to ask for money. The move might have been a matcher for the considerable fuss generated when Apple sprang paying .Mac membership on us all. But no. The logo certainly stays. At MacMusic, they explain that they are going "shareware" since they're non-commercial, not for profit and now hosting more than 15,000 visitors a day. The new scheme to meet the costs is very sensibly done. You could either pay an annual $60 (53.2 euro) subscription ($100 for companies), perhaps too much in one whack, or you can collect points at a dollar apiece. Nobody gets blocked if they don't, but they run into an increasing number of witty "speed-bumps" as they browse. That's cool. If I wanted, I could ask the team for between 10 and 30 points merely for writing this, which is very generous, all things considered. The easygoing sharing approach is shared by most of the forum members. One guy, who's better off A. Non, came breezing in with an "I've got an awesome studio set-up. So what's yours like?" kind of post. Rather than the brush-off this greeting deserved, the feller wasn't put down, but gently induced to explain himself. He volunteered an apology for the error of his ways and a good discussion got under way. zzz "Getting a chance to show off your knowledge of pop esoterica is one of the guilty pleasures of volunteering for an activity like this – that and making fun of other peoples’ musical tastes." 'Recycling can be fun,' Bill suggests at the 'Gadabout'. zzz "One of the biggest challenges facing the nuclear industry today is the storage and disposal of waste that will remain radioactive for millions of years. (...) However physicists in the UK and Germany have now demonstrated a new laser-driven approach to "transmutation" by converting iodine-129, which has a half-life of 15.7 million years, into iodine-128. The half-life of this lighter isotope is just 25 minutes" (more on 'physicsweb', J. Phys. D to be published; via Moreover). zzz Proloxil® (flash advert): the chemical cure for pathetic mutants without normal brains. At Astonished Head (via Cruel Site). 2:10:04 PM  link   your views? []

nick b. 2007 do share, don't steal, please credit under artistic licence terms; contributing friends (pix, other work) retain their rights.