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John Connolly

I’m having a bit of a John Connolly addiction at the moment. I read Bad Men a short while ago and thought why not pick up another of his books.

So I got The Killing Kind and was blown away by it. A fucking disturbing but gripping read with the good guys being almost as brutal and merciless as the evil bastard villains of the piece. Connolly seems to have carved out a new niche of fiction here with serial killer crime stories blended with supernatural elements.

Anyway having finished The Killing Kind I immediately went out and bought The White Road and read it and have now just purchased the first two novels Every Dead Thing and Dark Hollow.

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Mailer Snr. et Jnr.

Father to Son: What I’ve Learned About Rage

A conversation in print between Norman Mailer and his son John Buffalo Mailer. They discuss President Bush, protests at the Republican National Convention and Karl Rove’s proposed Republican led 20 year American hegemony.

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BBC 2: Das Experiment

As part of the BBC Four on BBC Two series there has been a number of excellent European movies being shown on BBC Two including the German movie Das Experiment, which was shown on Tuesday night.

The film is a thriller based upon the real-life experiment carried out in 1971 at Stanford University by a team of researchers led by Professor Philip Zimbardo. The Stanford Prison Experiment was a landmark psychological study of the human response to captivity, in particular, to the real world circumstances of prison life. Volunteers played the roles of guard and prisoner, and lived in a mock prison. However, the experiment quickly got out of hand, and was ended early.

Interestingly I didn’t find it as shocking an experience as I did when I first saw it a couple of years ago. Maybe watching Big Brother and reading the accounts of the abuse suffered by prisoners at Abu Ghraib and in Guantanamo Bay has desensitized me to this sort of thing.

IMDB link for Das Experiment
Purchase the movie from Amazon.co.uk VHS | DVD

The official site of the Stanford prison experiment is at http://www.prisonexp.org/

The article about the Stanford prison experiment at the Wikipedia also makes comparison to the events at Abu Ghraib.

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Yet more copyright shenanigans

Shed a tear for Andrea Corr.

Not only do recording artists have tax-free status in the Republic of Ireland but they may soon be able to keep earning tax-free on their music for a longer period of time.

Declan Ferry of the Sunday Times writes

The work of a recording artist is currently protected for 50 years after the material is released, allowing royalties to be collected on sales and other airings. After this the work goes into the public domain and people can use it for free.

The Irish Recording Music Association (IRMA), a lobby group for the Irish recording industry, is now demanding European law fall into line with American legislation, which extends royalty payments to 70 years.

Dick Doyle, the director general if IRMA, said Irish artists wanted “a level playing field.”

How about leveling the playing field by encouraging the US to reduce the length of their copyright to a more reasonable number of years.

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I like rusty spoons

Salad Fingers

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Flickr: The Speckled Band

I love Flickr.com, they offer a photo hosting service with a plethora of features. A key component of the Flickr service is to create a community of photographers by allowing people to form groups and comment on other people’s photographs.

I decided to utilise the comment feature and create an illustrated version of the Sherlock Holmes tale The Speckled Band. I broke the text up into 58 sections, picked a keyword from each bit of the text then searched for a photo that was tagged with that word. I then wrote the text into the coment box for each photo linking to the next photo and bit of the text.

The game is afoot.

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A statement of fact

I’ve just had a rather bizarre conversation with a man of the cloth. In he walks to the cinema wearing his dog collar, stinking of booze and wishing to use our toilet. Having used our facilities he asked me which pub I thought he should visit next as he was looking to offend people. He told me it was his day off but he still wore the collar because it was a part of who he was.

He seemed very keen on telling me statements of fact. “Statement of fact. Even though I wear this collar I’m no different from you. I urinate. I defecate and occasionally I even fornicate.” Also he liked to drink gin.

I think he may have been having a crisis of faith as he seemed to be very cynical about the world and he couldn’t tolerate liars. He told me that he thought people could do whatever they wished within reason as long as they didn’t lie about it. This is a philosophy that I share to an extent.

The most bizarre thing happened as he was leaving to go to the pub I recommended. We shook hands and I told him it was nice to have met him as it was break from the monotony of the day by having a real conversation with someone. He asked me what movies we were playing and he said that he’d see me exactly one week from now and pay me ten pounds for every person that had just watched King Arthur who then stuck their fingers up at me. But he’d only pay me if I didn’t lie to him next time I met him.

The surrealness of the whole experience makes me think that things weren’t quite how they seemed. At first I thought he might not really be a clergyman, it crossed my mind that he might be an actor. Later I became convinced that he was real but may have been suffering a ‘crisis of faith’. Now, one hour on from the experience I’m having doubts about whether he was even human.

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Pillow Talk

The Pillow Book done in the style of a blog.

Found via BoingBoing.

A blogger named Simon Cozens is translating the classic Japanese text The Pillow Book (Makura no Soshi) by Sei Shonagon into English and republishing it as a blog. It’s easy to forget the fact that these words were written in the tenth century, because the results in this format read — well, rather like a blog.

The Pillow Book was a book of observations and musings recorded by Sei Shonagon during her time as court lady to Empress Sadako during the 990s in Heian Japan. This is an interesting project that offers an unique insight into Japanese culture that is in its way still relevant today.

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TV Networks Inducing JibJab

An intriguing update to this post here in which I briefly wrote about the INDUCE act.

The creators of the satirical JibJab.com web site have produced a music video parody of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” featuring George W. Bush and John Kerry. In doing so they may have violated the copyright for the song.

An odd knock-on effect of this is that the TV networks that covered this story in their news reports have encouraged viewers to download the spoof film by providing links to the JibJab website via the online version of the news report. If the video parody is indeed found to be a violation of copyright then these TV networks maybe guilty under the Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act (aka INDUCE Act).

The Home Recording Rights Coalition has issued a press release making this very argument.

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Gmail overload

Google’s web-based email service Gmail is a hell of a service although it is not open to the general public at the moment. The killer feature of it is the generous 1GB of email storage should be enough for a lifetime of email messages for the average Joe, but not it appears for Kevin Rose.

Rose decided to test the limits of the service by asking people to send him email messages with attachments of over 5MB. The results were quite astounding.

Within 5 minutes, Gmail processed over 300 mail messages (most with 5+ MB attachments). 10 minutes into the test, I started receiving various internal server error messages and was no longer able to login. Proceeded to login with other Gmail accounts to ensure this was not a site wide problem. All other accounts worked fine.

In fact the experiment may have been a little too succesful as almost immediately people who were trying to send him messages were having them bounced back.

So how many emails where sent? No way to tell for sure, but considering that our network is in 50+ million homes, that I plugged it twice, and I received over 2,000 complaints from people who actually took the time to dig around and find my personal email address, I’m thinking we hit Gmail with around 50-75,000+, 5MB+ emails in a 10-15min window.

Was this test just a bit of fun and essentially a complete waste of time, well maybe but perhaps as a byproduct it helped Google improve their service and cope with the huge load that may eventually build up when it is open to everyone to join.

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