Sometimes a simile becomes incredibly popular, and seems to crop up everywhere. Like this one “holding back the ocean with a broom”, a feature of Mark Scott’s (ABC’s managing director) contributions to the 20/20 debates & fora. From Axel Bruns’ blog Produsage.org

A similar thing surfaced a few weeks ago, different friends described difficult tasks as akin to “pushing shit/water up a hill with a broom/ fork”.

Reminds me of the old favourite “rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic”. There’s something nice about getting all poetic on impossibilities and difficulties.

A little walk I took a couple of years ago…

Night time

I went out walking and the cats watched me
All through the back of Newtown along the trainline
On top of terrace walls and under cars
Their heads turned silently or not at all
And I strolled, marvelling at the orange light
And purple dimples of the clouds.
(more…)

gee, sometimes i feel like i came down in the last shower… but look at this! it’s really exciting, or hopefully at least it will be endearing to people who saw it the first time it came out and did the rounds…

They Rule allows you to create maps of the interlocking directories of the top companies in the US in 2004.
The data was collected from their websites and SEC filings in early 2004, so it may not be completely accurate - companies merge and disappear and directors shift boards.

from the friendly neighbourhood newmedia filter

so, like, i’m new to video games, but this one is beautiful! and i have to share it straightaway! you start out like a little strip of salmon bone hieroglyph, and you float around and get quite lost. you also eat things, which changes your shape and how you view the world, and, well, it’s about flow…via detritus

…who is sick and lying in bed… courtesy of the chocolate lady

xxoxx

hi all,

i’m doing some work over here, at marvelling, mostly because the interface is easier to deal with. It’s funny the differences between wordpress and blogsome, they are small, but make worlds of difference. (and still, infuriatingly, contrained by other incredibly minor shortcomings. like, why design a blog template that lists a tag cloud as a long and tedious list?)

i might move the whole blog over, i’m not sure yet. i guess i just want to be doing something different for a while.

love.

it’s a little blog, just new, but there are lots of beautiful things on it, lovely ideas that make me hold my breath and can’t wait to do things and make things, let’s do this and that, let’s run headlong down the side of a hill, let’s read things and swap them word for word, tell eachother ideas, how do i find that out, let me see, show me whatcha got, leap this way, follow me i have an idea, lick my brains, are we there yet?

Wednesday 2nd April
Struggling on the streets and in the courts: The G20 Defence Campaign
7pm Newtown Neighbourhood Centre

Thirteen people arrested and charged with riot following the G20 protest in Melbourne in
2006 have resolved to fight the charges. Desperate to get convictions, and try to divide
the defence campaign, the Victorian Director of Public Prosecutions had offered a deal to
all 23 people charged with riot - to plead guilty in return for a guarentee that there would
be no custodial sentence.

In a shock decision Akin Sari, one of the protestors, has been sentenced to two years and
four months jail (with a non-parole period of 14 months) after pleading guilty to 9 charges
including assault and riot.

Solidarity is hosting a discussion Wed 3rd April about how the courts are being used to curtail civil rights,
and how ‘drop the charges’ campaigns have been used by previous movements to defend
the right to protest.

“It refers to a practice in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s when dissidents who wanted to bring banned Western music into Russia would go to hospital trash cans, secure already exposed X-ray film and then press a master disk onto the X-rays to make floppy records,” Cadava said. “They were called ‘music on bones’ because the grooves were on images of chest cavities and spinal columns.”

Music on bones, some audio to listen to, somehow related to Eduado Cadava’s “small book on the relation between music and techniques of reproduction, memorization, and writing.”