Cheap Therapy

That would be Village Roadshow, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, 20th Century Fox, Disney and the Seven Network, who as the Australian Federaction Against Copyright Theft have filed suit against iiNet, at the same time as distributing “Nothing beats the real thing” DVDs to high schools (I guess they’re suggesting reading books instead of watching tv :). Amusingly these “educational” packs include the claim:

The resource is not a propaganda exercise. It does make clear to students that there are harmful consequences from film piracy, but it does so through educationally valid processes. It is an educational approach that allows students to face a significant civics and citizenship issue: their role in a society where many of them and their peers are breaking the law.

Check out Tama’s blog or the Electronic Frontiers Australia response to the suit (and make sure you join the EFA, you may need their help someday. Maybe sooner than you think!)

George W. Bush has signed the Pro-IP act into law, providing for harsher penalties for people who copy movies and music. How soon before Australia follows down that path? It’s hard to know, given that our government won’t publicly provide the text of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).

It seems that the Muppet show may be returning.

Meanwhile there’s another Muppet movie in the offing.

Has anyone seen “Forgetting Sarah Marshall”?

I’ve just finished reading Andrew Smith’s book “Moondust”, in which he attempts to interview the 9 remaining Apollo landing astronauts. (In one way it was strange because it kept referencing various popular artists I’d just been reading about in the previous book I’d started reading (“Culture Club” by Craig Shuftan )).
I guess the interesting bits I found were:

• Astronaut Edgar Mitchell shared a house with Arthur C. Clarke for a week
• Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and Norman Mailer watched the Apollo 14 launch together
• The entire Apollo programme cost $24 billion dollars. At the time Vietnam was costing $30 billion per year.
• Armstrong took Dvorak’s “New World” symphony on the trip, along with a theremin piece. (The author was constantly haunted by Also Sprach Zarathrustra throughout researching the book!)
• Real programmers patch the Apollo LEM computer inside a 30 minute hard deadline
• How the Apollo toilets actually worked!
• Landing on the moon effectively ended the astronaut careers of Armstrong and Aldrin, after that they were too valuable to risk on any future space missions
• The alternative for most Apollo astronauts (many ex-Korea pilots) would have been flying missions in Vietnam
• Most of the astronauts were younger than I am now. The average age of staff in Mission Command was 26.

With only 9 remaining people alive who have walked on another world, it is amazing to read about how their lives were changed forever, being able to look at Luna and say to themselves “Hey, I was up there”. Mingling in the crowd at SF cons are people who have actually been into deep space, or walked on the Moon. Pretty much all of them agree they were the best moments of their lives, and everything since then has been learning to cope with the fact that the rest of their existence will be hard to compare to those moments.
Moondust is definitely worth a read if you’re a space fan or, perhaps more importantly, if you wonder what the effect of standing on another world and looking back at ours would be like and how that would affect rest of your life.

It would seem that there’s Mary MacKillop, the musical.

Visit nocleanfeed.com to get informed as to what you can do to stop Stephen Conroy from crippling Australia’s internet access.

If you want to work out what a song you heard on Triple J was, you could check out jplay.com.au for lists of what was played when.

This morning Triple J were playing “The King is Dead” by The Herd, a song celebrating the downfall of John Howard. Highly recommended. IIRC “We partied like it was new years’ eve”

Science Song
(Tune: Peer’s Chorus - Iolanthe)

We are the studes of highest station
Paragons of Education
We ar the builders of the nation
Tantantara, tzing boom, tzing boom,
Tantantara, tzing boom, tzing boom.

Chorus:
Bow, bow, ye Engineers and Law men
Bow, bow, ye Medicos and Strawmen*
There is no defiance to the march of Science
Tantantara, tzing boom, tzing boom.

* Seeds

We can feel it in our interior
There is no doubt that we are superior
To the common type of posterior**
Tantantara,etc.

** Bum.

Chorus:
We like to swot and feel it our mission
To learn such things as nuclear fission
But we don’t think much of prohibition
Tantantara,etc.

Chorus:

Dental Song

We are dental, we are mental
We are the Faculty of Faculties.
Drink all, drink all, drink all day.

Note: Repeat the above till you get -
(a) Half shick;
(b) Shick;
(c) Just plain blotto;
(d) Some one inspired who writes some more verses!
(e) A copy of “Dante’s Inferno”.
(f) “Man” Annual.