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Even museum curators can succumb to the art world’s corruption
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Paintings surface after 27 years
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More on Marion True and the Italian charges she faces
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An online guide to the web’s best podcasts
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Just about everything you could possibly want to know about .htaccess
It’s happened again
Yet another double-decker bus has had its roof ripped off while trying to pass under a bridge (see Four hurt as bus roof ripped off and We’re all getting a little stressed).
The moral of the story is obviously don’t ride on the top floor of any bus while travelling on an improvised or irregular route.
Who moved my cheese?
From today’s edition of The Globe And Mail:
MONTREAL — Luc Boivin’s lost cheddar is passing into local legend as the Titanic of the cheese world.
The Quebec cheese maker dropped a 2,000-pound cargo of cheese to the bottom of the Saguenay fjord last year in a ripening experiment. Then he spent this summer searching for it. And now, after deploying a team of divers and an arsenal of high-tech tracking equipment, Mr. Boivin has given up the quest.
Apparently, he’s undeterred and going to repeat the experiment again this year!
links for 2005-10-09
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Some people just don’t want to be found
Location, location, location
Google has encouraged people to develop their own applications for its maps, and one of the best that I’ve come across in recent weeks is OnOneMap. It describes itself as “the UK’s first property search engine map”, and I can see how it might become an essential resource for anyone hoping to buy property in the UK.
The idea is simple, but new: people and agents with houses to sell inform OnOneMap of the details and OnOneMap displays their properties on Google’s maps. You can filter the properties by many different criteria, not the least of which is price, and then view all the available properties that match your requirements in the neighbourhood of your choice.
Prior to OnOneMap the only way to obtain as comprehensive a list of available properties in a single neighbourhood was to drive around the area looking for “For Sale” signs while compiling your own list with pencil and paper! (Well OK, maybe a pen.) So if good property really is a case of “location, location, location”, OnOneMap should do very well.
Cheap talk
A couple of weeks ago, I read the following sentence in the Economist (see Telecoms and the internet: The meaning of free speech):
The acquisition by eBay of Skype is a helpful reminder to the world’s trillion-dollar telecoms industry that all phone calls will eventually be free.
Free calls struck me as too good to be true, but then last week I discovered that BT has decided to compete directly with Skype by under-cutting its prices significantly until the end of the year. You have to use BT’s VOIP software, known as BT Communicator, but then calls to North America are only 0.5p per minute. Last month calls to Australia were completely free. Perhaps the Economist’s prediction is correct.
The Power of Symbolism
There’s some good news from Canada today in the form of the swearing in of its 27th Governor-General, Michaëlle Jean. Her appointment appears to have struck a chord with many Canadians, whose vision for their country’s future includes many of the principles and values personified by this new head of state.
The following excerpt comes from John Ibbitson’s column on the front page of today’s Globe And Mail (The remarkable new Governor-General):
Canadians seem to be celebrating this appointment as though it really mattered, as though the Governor-General were something other than merely the Queen’s representative, the titular commander of the armed forces, a cutter of ribbons and a deliverer of clichéd speeches whose powers are held mostly in reserve. Why?
In part it is because she is not a politician. Her job, by definition, is to remain above the gritty, grubby business of governing this messy federation.
But there’s more to it. Not since the 1960s have our political leaders seemed so irrelevant, so disconnected. Then, it was a society of youth seeking to demolish outdated moral and social strictures. Today it is a society of immigrants seeking to create the world’s most cosmopolitan society. Then they turned to Pierre Trudeau. Today they turn to . . ..
There is no one to turn to.
But here is this beautiful young Canadian of Haitian birth, with a smile that makes you catch your breath, with a bemused older husband by her side, and a daughter who literally personifies our future, and you look at them and you think: Yes, this is our great achievement, this is the Canada that Canada wants to be.
And suddenly, the arguments of the nationalists and the sovereigntists and the fire-wallists, of the alienated and resentful and estranged, are so tired, so yesterday, that you just don’t want to have to listen to them any more.
Yes, indeed. French and English stop your quarreling. It just doesn’t matter any more.
Guardian radio?
Yesterday provided yet more evidence that the internet is transforming the media. In this case The Guardian newspaper is behaving like a radio broadcaster. Yesterday’s entry on its Conference Blog (New Labour is really a post-Thatcherite party) contains a link to an audio interview with Tony Benn at this week’s Labour Party conference in Brighton. So if you haven’t time to read the paper, you may find it more convenient to listen to it instead!
Think Canadian
Do you remember Apple’s television advertising campaign commonly referred to as Switch from a few years ago? There are a number of parodies floating around the internet, at least one of which (starring Will Ferrell) is still available online (Careful – it’s 4.1 Meg).
Well, Tod Maffin of the CBC has produced his own version to highlight one of the risks inherent in the current lockout affecting Canada’s national broadcaster. It’s pretty good, but you probably have to be Canadian to appreciate it fully.
Katrina comments
The NPR web site has an interesting page of comments from the public about Hurricane Katrina. Here’s one example from Marybeth Lima of Baton Rouge, Louisiana:
As a survivor of the outskirts of Hurricane Katrina, right now, this is what I know:
- that in Baton Rouge, La., the winds hit 110 miles per hour, and the hummingbirds navigated this wind, which picked up 200 ton blocks of concrete in Mississippi, like a breeze;– that a tree frog successfully rode out the storm on the leeward side of a Mexican fan palm that battered our dining room window;
- that though the wind thrashed the web of a writing spider and her egg sac, all three sailed through the storm without damage.
I am in awe of these micro miracles in the face of such macro devastation: trees down, power lines live, flooding, storm surge and death, even in our fair city.
Read more at NPR : Affected by Katrina? Listeners Write In