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Not With a Bong But With a Whimper

Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves

A Metafilter post on today’s main event.

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31 January 2020 · 1 Comment · Politics

Not Funny

The death of Terry Jones the other day left me wanting to write everything about what he meant to me as a young fan of comedy, which meant I ended up writing nothing. Here he is talking about his dementia in 2017. What a gift to us all his life and work were.

Commenting on the death of Nicholas Parsons is more manageable, if only because his legacy was more focussed. Growing up in Australia I knew him only from The Goodies, where he was a regular target of jokes—affectionate ones, I realised in hindsight, although they were clearly having a go at a side of him that came across (from a younger man) as smarmy and patronising. After moving to the UK I grew to love listening to him on Just a Minute, and am glad I was able to do so for almost two decades; how extraordinary that that was less than half of his reign on the show.

31 January 2020 · Comedy

Bison Sculpture

As someone who’s taken a few long-haul flights on UAE airlines over the years, this dissection of corporate music is so relatable. It’s the soundtrack of the unskippable intros to inflight movies, and of the corporate ads aimed at business types who are actually flying to Dubai and Abu Dhabi rather than transiting through. His takedown of a study of how pop music is supposedly getting worse is also terrific.

Perfect Pärt (via Mefi).

14,000 year-old bison sculptures in a French cave.

A 97-year-old philosopher faces his own death.

Famous paintings with search and rescue vehicles added to them.

My sophisticated plot projection algorithm is never wrong.

31 January 2020 · Weblog

Kangaroo Ground

A year of talking about climate change.

The search for clean air.

If the Australian Liberal Party approached the First World War like they approach climate change.

A huge spike in one of the most potent greenhouse gases.

UK police list Extinction Rebellion as extremists and include Greenpeace with neo-Nazis on counter-terror lists.

Laurie Garrett on the Wuhan virus.

Australian aboriginals recorded ancient sea rises in 10,000 years of oral history.

Let’s abandon climate targets and maximise climate action.

31 January 2020 · Environment

Under Construction

Some dead-ends in my WordPress theme-hacking attempts left me with one that almost works but misses some crucial post navigation links, which has put me off posting here for a few weeks. (That, and starting a new semester and a new course.) I’ll keep trying, but in the meantime might switch this back to a boring default for a while.

31 January 2020 · 4 Comments · Site News

The Ashes

Our scientific predictions are coming to pass. Why climate change deniers are irrelevant. The Australian public’s obsession with arson is being fueled by another social media disinformation campaign.

How a bank undermined Jimmy Carter’s Iran strategy forty years ago. We are in uncharted waters without a compass.

7 January 2020 · Environment

Things Don’t Theme

I’ve been tinkering with this blog for the past week, but am torn on how to handle it. A guide on developing a WordPress theme from scratch got me to the point where everything looks like the old Movable Type templates, but fine-tuning the post navigation links and the comments formatting will need much closer engagement with the fine details of WordPress development, and will take hours and hours. Should I give up and revert to a standard theme with a bit of personalisation, or persist until the site feels like itself? Wait and see, I guess.

7 January 2020 · Site News

Happy New You

The move to WordPress appears to have gone as well as it could have, with the other blog preserved and this one working seamlessly, although I’ll have to find a workaround for the RSS feed, which clashes with an old site area of the same URL. This WordPress template is a bit blah, too, so days of figuring out how to write my own themes no doubt lie ahead.

Meanwhile, the previous post provides links to all the old areas of the site until I can get them on the sidebar here.

Happy new year!

1 January 2020 · 1 Comment · Site News

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