Archive for April 2008
Hey, what’s that wall doing here?
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This past Friday morning, as weekend strollers on Tel Aviv’s peaceful, tree-lined Rothschild Boulevard were on their way to cafes, yoga class, and shopping, many were surprised to find their path blocked by what looked like a section of the wall that forms large parts of the separation barrier between Israel and the Palestinian territories. |
You know, the new highway 6 passed some 10meters from the real wall. Thanks to some creative landscaping, you have to look really hard to find it. We need more of these. Perhaps someone should project images from Shovrim Shtika on it.
Blog street and TV lane
Clay Shirky makes an interesting analogy between Gin and Television, and their relationship to social and cognitive surplus. Couldn’t help thinking about Hogarth.
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Beer Street and Gin Lane are two prints issued in 1751 by English artist William Hogarth in support of what would become the Gin Act. Designed to be viewed alongside each other, they depict the evils of the consumption of gin as a contrast to the merits of drinking beer.
… On the simplest level, Hogarth portrays the inhabitants of Beer Street as happy and healthy, nourished by the native English ale, and those who live in Gin Lane as destroyed by their addiction to the foreign spirit of gin; …Gin Lane shows shocking scenes of infanticide, starvation, madness, decay and suicide, while Beer Street depicts industry, health, bonhomie and thriving commerce, but there are contrasts and subtle details that allude to the prosperity of Beer Street as the cause of the misery found in Gin Lane. |
Nowadays you can get any form of trash on the TV, yet governments from US to China are trying to control the ‘net. Looks like the man has sided with the Gin makers this time.
Kinda gives a new dimension to “free as in beer”..
buy this T-Shirt
So I was looking for a short, yet vibrant post to put on my blog today and in comes Wilfred Rubens with an amazing story of consumption versus art. A Danish artist Nadia Plesner (now working in the Netherlands at the renowned Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam) was trying to do her two cents to make the world a better place. So she pondered on Darfur and how she could make an art piece that would be meaningful and immediately capture the imagination as well. So she came up with a t-shirt, depicting an black child with Paris Hilton dog and handbag.
After a couple of months – last February – the people from Louis Vuitton got hold of her t-shirt and campaign and they urged her to stop the campaign, because she was unlawfully depicting one of the really ugly Louis Vuitton handbags. The thing is, it is just a handbag image, you cannot tell which label it would be from. So… engaging art can truly trouble high-end posh handbags making manufacturers (that produce their material in low income countries, in many cases without insurance of any kind) . By this time the Dutch newspapers are on the story (in Dutch) and it begins to stir digg. Nadia risks having to pay if she keeps her t-shirt and campaign going.
Acting is easy: buy her t-shirt (or art) and boycot Louis Vuitton.
6 hours
That’s how long it took the IDF to evacuate Palestinian and Israeli activists from an illegal outpost in the west bank. Six hours.
Yonatan Polak, from “Anarchists Against the Wall” said that the operation was undertaken because the outpost “reflects the cooperation between the IDF and the settlers. If we are able to overtake this spot without any problems, then the army can do the same as well.
Maybe the Anarchists Against the Wall should try to get the settler’s magic potion, which makes them immune to the army’s attempts to move them.
Have we lost Linux to the dark side?
Nicholas Carr notes that over 70% of the Linux kernel is developed by corporate hacks.
So, Have we lost Linux to the dark side?
Of course not.
Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone. John Maynard Keynes
Sometimes, just sometimes, it works.
Ma Nishtana
The First Cup
All read:
Thank you, (God), for providing us this weed. With it we can forget things that we need help forgetting. With it we may gain an important illusion of critical distance, but possibly we will just get stupid. So let us not trust in this crtical distance, for the more we smoke it, the smaller the chance we will find it, and the greater the chance that we will whirl around in a paranoid, neurotic feedback loop. A paranoid, neurotic feedback loop. A paranoid, neurotic feedback loop. With it we make pretty things, and think they are much prettier than they actually are. Look at the blinky it’s blinking it’s blinking OHMYGOD PONIES! We will try not to smoke pot all the time and forget about You, d00d, but You probably should have had the foresight to
make it act in a way that makes You prettier also. Though, on further reflection, there have got to be some God-lovin’ hippies out there who believe that it does. So let us say, (‘Hence The Irony!’)
In case you misplaced your Hagada, intentionally or not. Courtesy of F.A.T. labs. (HT Xeni)
