Click to download the full-size version [945K PNG image].
For your Photoshopping pleasure, here’s a file of Leonidas heads on a transparent background [945K PNG image], ready to cut and paste into photos to hilarious effect. It’s useful for all sorts of things, including animations like the one shown below…
If you’re a regular reader of BoingBoing or the geek-friendly comic xkcd, you’ve probably already seen the strip in which Cory Doctorow gets name-dropped:
It turns out that the line in the last panel is more true than you think. Here’s a photo that I took at his birthday party in 2002, with Mr. Doctorow sporting his mail-order Mig fighter pilot goggles:
He might not be wearing a cape, but that shiny purple ‘Decepticon’ shirt is a pretty good substitute.
As for blogging from a hot air balloon, how about from a Mickey Mouse balloon chair? Here’s a shot of him at the original Toronto OpenCola office, taken March 2000:
“What I would I do with a million dollars of VC funding? Tell you what I’d do, man. Two computers at the same time, man.”
Here’s another shot taken ion the same session, from another angle.
Oh, those Web 1.0 salad days.
Anyhow, I hope this proves something about Doctorow’s Law: Any exaggerated statement about Cory Doctorow is closer to the truth than you might think.
If you haven’t been following the tech news in the past 24 hours, you might not be aware of News Corporation and NBC Universal’s joint project to create a “YouTube killer” online video service where they will showcase their programming. The announcement seems like so much bluster and so little substance, especially when they haven’t even given the project a name — not an interim code name. The word on the ‘net is that Google has their own internal codename for the joint venture: “Clown Co.”.
The other tech sites are a bit too high-minded and not pop culture-savvy enough to crack wise about the name “Clown Co.”, but over at Global Nerdy (a tech news blog that I share with my good buddy George), we’re willing to go where they fear to tread. That, and we were just dying to use a reference to the band “Insane Clown Posse”:
(Hey! Other tech new sites! Feel free to use this image — just credit “Global Nerdy”.)
We’ll be commenting all day on Clown Co. over at Global Nerdy. So far, here are our posts on the topic:
Yes, Global Nerdy remains an ongoing concern. We’ve posted 4 new articles today. Here are the most recent ones…
Last night, Mom sent me a collection of photos taken by my uncle in 1967. The photos are of Mom, Dad and my grandparents at my grandparent’s place in San Juan, a neighbourhood smack in the dead center of Manila, where I lived from 1972 to 1975. A couple of the photos showed Grand-dad’s sweet rides, one of which was the Corvette pictured below.
I remember getting rides to school in the Corvette from my uncle, a racing enthusiast, who lead-footed the short distance between home and school in an exciting run down San Juan’s narrow streets. The car was sold after we moved to Canada; I hope it’s still alive and kicking somewhere.
KHARTOUM (Reuters) – Two Sudanese women have been sentenced to death by stoning for adultery after a trial in which they had no lawyer and which used Arabic, not their first language, the rights group Amnesty International said.
Sadia Idriss Fadul was sentenced on February 13 and Amouna Abdallah Daldoum on March 6 and their sentences could be carried out at any time, the London-based group said in a statement released late on Monday.
North Sudan implements Islamic sharia law.
“The women had no lawyer during their trial and were not able to defend themselves, as their first languages are those of their ethnic groups,” Amnesty said.
Both women are from non-Arab tribes but the proceedings were in Arabic and no interpreter was provided, Amnesty said. Their trial took place in central Al Gezira state.
You may not remember the technology, but before the World Wide Web that we know and love today, there was Gopher, its spiritual predecessor. Gopher became available in the late spring of 1991 and was a system that let you read text files on other computers on the internet. Unlike the web, where you click on links to navigate, Gopher was meant strictly for text-only display; you navigated through a series of menus.
As a computer science student at Crazy Go Nuts University, I became aware of Gopher sometime in the fall of 1991 and used it to find computer science papers and tutorials. Along the way, I discovered that it was also a great source of non-course-related reading material. One of my favourite finds in “Gopherspace” was a thesis that someone had written, examining the meaning and symbolism in the lyrics of Don McLean’s American Pie. “You can get a degree for this?” I asked.
Apparently you can, and here’s present-day proof. By way of my friend Miss Fipi Lele, I’ve come across a master’s thesis that examines, of all things, the album Loveless by British “shoegazer” band My Bloody Valentine, which was released on my birthday in 1991. It’s an excellent album and considered a landmark created during a time of great change in popular music, with Public Enemy and De La Soul redefining hip-hop, Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden redefining metal, the “Manchester” bands mixing dance and rock, the rise of techno and industrial music and Lollapalooza. Yes, it’s one of the best albums of the nineties in my opinion, but is it worth a master’s thesis?
Here’s a snippet from the first paragraph of chapter 1 of the thesis, titled The Origins of the Shoegazer:
From the summer of 2003 until the summer of 2004, I was a member of a rock
band that I considered the culmination of my musical creativity up to that point called
The House Project. It was not a rock band in the MTV or modern radio sense of the
term, rather the experience was more like four disgruntled musicians with bachelors
degrees in music pounding out their frustrations with a corrupt mainstream music
industry on their instruments—an industry that seemed to place more emphasis on image
than on artistic creativity and the music itself.
Wanker sense…tingling!
I don’t know about you, but any professor I had, even those in my arts electives, would’ve handed me back any paper that opened with that claptrap.
If you want an amusing read, here it is: My Bloody Valentine’s “Loveless” [366KB PDF], “A thesis submitted to the College of Music [at Florida State University] in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Music”.