by cameron | Mar 24, 2007 | Uncategorized
Tony Goodson posted this interesting story recently about how much bigger The Goodies were in the 70s than Monty Python but how the Pythons have really stood the test of time much better. You watch any Flying Circus today and it is still as subversive as it was 40 years ago. That’s really saying something. Compare it to the other British comedy of the time… The Two Ronnies? Morcambe and Wise? Dad’s Army? Are You Being Served?
HOWEVER… The Goodies have one credit to their name that I don’t think the Pythons have – they killed someone. Seriously.
This is from Wikipedia’s list of “Unusual Deaths”:
On 24 March 1975 Alex Mitchell, a 50-year-old bricklayer from King’s Lynn literally died laughing whilst watching an episode of The Goodies. According to his wife, who was a witness, Mitchell was unable to stop laughing whilst watching a sketch in the episode “Kung Fu Kapers” in which Tim Brooke-Taylor, dressed as a kilted Scotsman, used a set of bagpipes to defend himself from a psychopathic black pudding in a demonstration of the Scottish martial art of “Hoots-Toot-ochaye.” After twenty-five minutes of continuous laughter Mitchell finally slumped on the sofa and expired from heart failure.
Can you say… ECKY-THUMP?!
by cameron | Mar 22, 2007 | Uncategorized
This story captured my attention this morning:
Jury awards Procter and Gamble $19 million over devil worship rumors.
Four Amway distributors who spread satanic worship rumors about Procter & Gamble have the devil to pay – more than $19 million worth.
A federal jury in Salt Lake City made that damage award to the household products company, which had pursued its claims for more than a decade in the courts.
U.S. District Judge Ted Stewart, who presided over the 10-day trial, has the option of adding interest to the $19,250,000 award.
The jury’s Friday verdict came after a dozen years of litigation. P&G filed suit against Randy Haugen of Ogden and three other distributors in 1995. The company charged the four had disseminated the devil-worship hoax through Amway’s voice-mail system.
P&G said the Amway quartet passed along the false story that P&G’s president had told a television talk show that his company was affiliated with the Church of Satan.
That never happened. But the Cincinnati-based maker of laundry detergent, soap, shampoo, toothpaste and other products claims the rumors still cost it millions of dollars in sales.
The Amway defendants say they merely repeated a rumor they believed at the time to be true.
One of the defendants was Randy Haugen, a “Diamond” in Dexter Yager’s group. On his website, someone has written:
The outcome was disappointing, and we still believe in the outstanding character and integrity of Randy Haugen.
Riiight. OutSTANDING character. He spread a rumour that P&G worshiped Satan. AND HE WAS SERIOUS.
Here’s a link to a transcript of the original voicemail message. That’s pretty… whacky. Here’s my point: what kind of person hears a story like that and thinks to themselves “yeah, that sound probable. I’ll pass it on.”????
Of the $20mill fine, Haugen’s website says:
That’s a far cry from the $5 billion P&G had demanded, and frankly leaves them with very little to show for a wasteful and spiteful decade of mean-spirited litigation.
“Mean-spirited”? Hmmm. Perhaps they were being told what to do by…. someone who cannot be named? And I don’t mean Voldemort.
It’s not just these Amway guys spreading the rumour. While searching for the P&G logo that a lot of the rumours center on, I found this site “The Swift Report“. This is from 2005:

A coalition of Christian groups is calling on the Department of Justice to block the proposed merger between Procter & Gamble and razor giant Gillette because of P&G’s ties to the Church of Satan. If the corporate marriage is approved, the new corporation will be the largest in the world to be controlled by Satan worshippers.
The groups, which include the Campaign for Families, Defend Our Marriages and the Coalition for Traditional Values, are asking the Department of Justice to block the merger on the grounds that it will give an unfair advantage to Satan in the battle of good vs. evil. The American Family Association submitted its own complaint, objecting to Procter’s support for what it calls “the homosexual agenda.”
“…an unfair advantage to Satan in the battle of good vs. evil.” Where do they get this stuff? If these people want to see the face of evil, all they need to do is look in the mirror.
Oh yeah, you have to be careful of that “homosexual agenda”. Didn’t you know? They are trying to make us all like them.
The part of the Swift site I like the most, though, is the survey which asks:
Which homosexual word in the National Spelling Bee did you find most offensive?
- mansuetude
- spheterize
- enclitic
- rubasse
- ouvert
Not being homosexual myself, I had to turn to the dictionary to discover what some of these words meant (okay, ALL of the words).
mansuetude : Gentleness of manner; mildness. (Note: isn’t that how Christians describe Jesus? Gentle of manner? Are they suggesting he was homosexual? Hmmmm. He did look like a bit of a girl. Okay – with hormone problems.)
spheterize : To make something one’s own: appropriate. (Note: as in “I’m going to spheterize me some of that spunky bloke’s ass.”)
enclitic : A clitic that is attached to the end of another word. In Give ’em the works, the pronoun ’em is an enclitic. Of course, as you all know, a “clitic” is: An unstressed word, typically a function word, that is incapable of standing on its own and attaches in pronunciation to a stressed word, with which it forms a single accentual unit. Examples of clitics are the pronoun ’em in I see ’em and the definite article in French l’arme, “the arm.†(Note: I think the homosexual use of this is “Oh, check out that big ol’ ‘omo over there with the pink boa around his neck.”)
rubasse : A variety of quartz colored ruby red by its iron-oxide content. (Note:… nope, I got nuthin’.)
ouvert : adj.- ballet : having an open stance or movement. (Note: “Oh I do love to get it on with men while they ouvert.”)
To be really homosexual, one must be able to use these words in a sentence.
Example: “Although I consider myself mansuetude, I must admit to the desire to spheterize certain gentlemen while they ouvert and the very thought of it makes me turn the colour of rubasse and lapse into enclitic use of certain pronouns.”
Ah, the Christians. They give me a reason to get up in the morning.
Disclaimer: I did the whole Amway thing for a few years back in the early 90s. The whole overwhelming “Christian values” of it always bothered the hell out of me. I struggled with it and finally quit. I did meet some great people though and I never had a problem with the business model. I do know some homosexuals. And when I first saw the film clip to Queen’s “Radio Ga Ga”, I did think Roger Taylor looked pretty cute in his wig and dress.
by cameron | Mar 21, 2007 | Podcast
A bit of a private chat tonight between me and… you. There’s a couple of things I wanted to get off my chest. So… no guests, no interviews, no co-host… just a quiet chat. I do chat a bit about Buckminster Fuller’s biography, about Zengotita’s book “Mediated”, and about being me.
If you enjoyed this podcast, make sure you don’t miss future episodes by subscribing to our feed and leave us a voice comment!
The G’Day World Theme Song is “Save Me†by The Napoleon Blown Aparts.

by cameron | Mar 21, 2007 | Melbourne, Podcast, technology
Despite Scott’s slagging of Vista today, I like it – especially now that I’ve got 2GB RAM. Don’t tell anyone. I’d hate for Jeff Putt to hear about it.
Okay so, as I said on the show the other night, it isn’t the major new paradigm that was promised over those long, long, Longhorn years. Remember quotes like these from BillG?
Longhorn, the next version of Microsoft Corp.’s Windows desktop operating system, will be so different from its predecessors that users may not like it right away.
(link)
Longhorn makes it easy for your information to show up on any device. It makes it easy to navigate that information.
(link)
Say you keep lists. Anytime that you’ve mentioned a restaurant, it automatically goes onto this list of restaurants, and your system would automatically keep track of what are the hours there, how that menu has changed.
(link)
There is more R&D being spent on Longhorn than on the 747.
(link)
Now that we are moving to this Web services world–a loosely coupled, message-based breakthrough that computer scientists have dreamed of for decades–all of the things that let that be possible need to be in the US$50 operating system. And so here we have Indigo that will be in Windows and let you do transactions and queuing.
(link)
And let’s forget about WinFS….
But as an operating system, it’s pretty “neat” (I can imagine BillG calling it that… isn’t he just the child of the 50s??).
Here’s my desktop at the moment:

What do I like?
1. It’s prettier than XP.
2. When folders open and close they do this little.. shrinky… thing. It’s… neat.
3. Ummm… having the sidebar pre-installed is nice but I’d been running Yahoo Konfabulator for a few years on and off so it’s not an entirely new experience. It is, however, packaged. The widgets I’ve got installed are currently:
iTunes controller
News.com.au RSS feed
Dual Core monitor
Shortcuts to key docs and folders
Melbourne’s weather
Calendar
4. The little clock thing in the taskbar allows multiple timezones!! Now I can see what time it is in Scotland and Washington when I’m hiding from Ewan and Scott on Skype. I can wait until I know they are asleep before I stop lurking.
5. Most nearly everything I need is running. All except my printer. I had trouble with the scanner but Photoshop figured out how to make it work.
6. The “snip” tool from Windows XP Tablet PC Edition ships with it and that is VERY handy.
7. It’s pretty (did I already say that?)
8. The new Win-TAB is old technology (I can’t remember what it was called but I used to have an app which did that years ago) but great to have in the OS.
9. The way the little previews of the windows you have open pop up when you hover your mouse over the taskbar.
10. ummm. it’s pretty?
The list of things I don’t like is shorter…
1. The integrated search is better but not, IMHO, as good as Google Desktop. Come on Microsoft. Catch up.
2. Hmmmm… no podcast support?
3. It doesn’t swallow?
4. Oh yeah. Google Desktop searches open in IE and not FF. I haven’t been able to figure out how to stop that. Anyone know the secret (no, not the stupid new agey documentary which says “whatever you conceive and believe you can achieve”, but just… the regular type secret)?
5. Oh yeah… I had to spend the first two days turning off the stupid security features. YES – I WANT TO RUN THIS FRAKKING APPLICATION! THAT’S WHY I CLICKED ON IT STUPID!!
I don’t know. I can’t pick much fault with it so far I guess. But then again I’ve only had it four days. Give me some more time.
Would I go out and pay real shells for it? No. The benefit over XP is really just cosmetic as far as I can tell. I really cannot for the life of me tell what’s truly new and innovative in Vista apart from the prettiness and I wouldn’t shell out $600 – $1000 for that.
However, if you are getting a new PC and you have Vista as an option – and you are well aware that some of your software and/or peripherals may not work – then go ahead and move to Vista. Mum – that means you.
