Gotcha!

Putting the temporary message at the head of each new post has worked a treat, though I did have to reword it so people on legitimate aggregators like Pinkboard didn’t get the wrong idea. What happens when I fill the first five lines or so with an instruction to report a blog scraper to Google Adsense may be seen below:

Sprung!

While I slept

There have been 115 visits to this blog and Oz Politics since midnight; it’s now around 8am. They come from all over.

Jim inconvenienced…

…as Bush’s motorcade sweeps past M’s place!

Pic by Peter Morris from Arrival to hotel in minutes – only if you’re the President (Sydney Morning Herald).

For what happened to Jim Belshaw, read I am completely pissed off!

Book of Job

My eccentric following of the US Book of Common Prayer Lectionary has moved on from the mixed blessings of Judges to one of those books everyone should read at some time in their lives: The Book of Job. There are many wonderful translations: J R R Tolkien had a hand in the Jerusalem Bible version, but I am reading mainly in the odd but powerful mid 20th century Catholic version of Ronald Knox, a truly inspiring work of English, especially in this book which reads like something out of the Arabian Nights. It is I am sure a work of fiction, but none the worse for that. It stands beside King Lear and Oedipus Rex as literature and has famously inspired many, such as William Blake. I will share some snippets of the Knox version later.

I found the following art work on Jasongraphix. (His Principles of Beautiful Web Design would appear to be well worth looking into; he certainly practises what he preaches.)

Information control in this digital age

From 2009 students in the NSW HSC Standard English Module C Texts and Society Elective 1: The Global Village will have the option of closely studying Wikipedia. That, I think, is an excellent idea. Intelligent critical study of this extraordinary (and still extraordinarily valuable) resource, and of other aspects of the internet, seems to me something that should be mandatory rather than elective.

Here in Australia we have just been told something that really should not surprise us: PM’s staff edited Wikipedia.

STAFF in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet have been editing Wikipedia to remove details that might be damaging to the Government.*

A new website, WikiScanner – which traces the digital fingerprints of those who make changes to entries in the online encyclopedia – points to the department as the source of 126 edits on subjects ranging from the children overboard affair to the Treasurer, Peter Costello…

Defence computers were found to have made more than 5000 edits to Wikipedia entries, including to articles on the “9/11 Truth Movement”, the Australian Defence Force Academy and even the Vietnam War-era Pentagon Papers.

At last: a right-wing blog that doesn’t make me want to curl up and die…

Most right-wing blogs I read are simply execrable, cheer-leading, in the main, for the pooling of bigotry and stereotypes, and for some of the more lamentably self-satisfied trends in society, a word many of them would reject. This is especially true of US right-wing blogs, but Australia has its share, some of them sadly only too popular — or should that be populist?

So with great pleasure I introduce (courtesy of WordPress and its what’s hot links) a European blog of considerable merit, which is not to say I endorse absolutely everything on it. It is, however, a blog to be savoured. Click to visit.

 

It isn’t just their good taste in templates either. 😉 Here are two entries that I have enjoyed so far:

• Science and Islam
• Global-Warming Deniers: $