News Roundup
Tuesday, October 26th, 2004 07:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robinturnerFirst the sad news: John Peel has just died of a heart attack at the age of 65 (thanks to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
vret, rodneyorpheus and ankh156 for alerting me). John Peel was possibly the best DJ I've heard, as evidenced by the fact that he could make me listen to a lot of music I didn't like (Peel was the man who first got BBC Radio to play punk, which was a mixed blessing). I would patiently listen through jarring punk groups in the early 80s thinking that if Peelie saw something in them, they must be worth listening to. He also had an ear for talent. I remember listening to one grungy group doing their first studio session and thought, "Well, these guys aren't bad - shame they'll never make it into the mainstream with a sound like that." The band's name was Frankie Goes to Hollywood.
In other news ....
America's use of mercenaries in Iraq has always been controversial, but now it appears that they are recruiting them from the South African police's Special Task Force. Someone should tell these guys that "kaffir" has a different meaning over there, before they set their ridgebacks on coalition forces instead of intimidating the natives like they're supposed to.
Meanwhile in Iraq, tons of explosives have gone missing from a site that used to be part of Saddam's nuclear programme in the days when he had WMD and wasn't afraid to let the world know about it (because Reagan and Bush Snr. were backing him to the hilt). Don't worry, people, just repeat the mantra after me: "The world is a safer place without Saddam. The world is a safer place without Saddam. The world is a safer ..."
It's not all bad news though. Ever ready to act in the service of humankind, the pornography industry is helping the rapid growth of wireless Internet services. It makes sense - since the Venus of Willendorf, every time a new medium is invented, someone immediately uses it to produce pornography, and this in turn helps the growth of the new medium (the only exception I can think of is television, which only got raunchy later on). Even so, I find the idea of people downloading porn onto their mobile phones rather odd. It took me long enough to get used to people talking into the things, let alone drooling over them.
Finally, inhabitants of Western Australia can rejoice that use of racial epithets has been legalised so long as they are "light-hearted". So it's OK to call someone a "whinging pom", so long as you do it with a cheeky grin and add "no hard feelings, mate." To this, the appropriate response is a light-hearted racial epithet related to activities with sheep.
vret, rodneyorpheus and ankh156 for alerting me). John Peel was possibly the best DJ I've heard, as evidenced by the fact that he could make me listen to a lot of music I didn't like (Peel was the man who first got BBC Radio to play punk, which was a mixed blessing). I would patiently listen through jarring punk groups in the early 80s thinking that if Peelie saw something in them, they must be worth listening to. He also had an ear for talent. I remember listening to one grungy group doing their first studio session and thought, "Well, these guys aren't bad - shame they'll never make it into the mainstream with a sound like that." The band's name was Frankie Goes to Hollywood.In other news ....
America's use of mercenaries in Iraq has always been controversial, but now it appears that they are recruiting them from the South African police's Special Task Force. Someone should tell these guys that "kaffir" has a different meaning over there, before they set their ridgebacks on coalition forces instead of intimidating the natives like they're supposed to.
Meanwhile in Iraq, tons of explosives have gone missing from a site that used to be part of Saddam's nuclear programme in the days when he had WMD and wasn't afraid to let the world know about it (because Reagan and Bush Snr. were backing him to the hilt). Don't worry, people, just repeat the mantra after me: "The world is a safer place without Saddam. The world is a safer place without Saddam. The world is a safer ..."
It's not all bad news though. Ever ready to act in the service of humankind, the pornography industry is helping the rapid growth of wireless Internet services. It makes sense - since the Venus of Willendorf, every time a new medium is invented, someone immediately uses it to produce pornography, and this in turn helps the growth of the new medium (the only exception I can think of is television, which only got raunchy later on). Even so, I find the idea of people downloading porn onto their mobile phones rather odd. It took me long enough to get used to people talking into the things, let alone drooling over them.
Finally, inhabitants of Western Australia can rejoice that use of racial epithets has been legalised so long as they are "light-hearted". So it's OK to call someone a "whinging pom", so long as you do it with a cheeky grin and add "no hard feelings, mate." To this, the appropriate response is a light-hearted racial epithet related to activities with sheep.
