2007 — 2 Mar: a night at the Opera
There seemed to be rather a lot of Richard Wagner on BBC Radio 3 last night and, you know what?, I actually enjoyed some of it even though it was from the Ring. But today's title also comes from the film world and from the fact that I've now installed the Opera web browser on the iMac, only to discover that it has the same rendering flaw in the top right hand content as Safari when visiting that Xara Open Source page. Curious.
We watched the partly BBC-financed Kirby Dick film This film is not yet rated even though Brian had lent me his DVD copy and mine is en route from the Land of the Free. Possibly the funniest segment was the scene of "puppet sex" from Team America World Police which, notice, has a "15" certificate over here. Utterly fascinating to see people attempting to dodge the irrationality of the MPAA Rating Board and its hypocritically secretive, if not downright dishonest, way of doing business. As I've said, just follow the money...
I don't expect many British film censors live in $1,000,000 houses. (Of course, I could be wrong. I was once.)
Only on the web... department
There exists a set of people who don't like Wikipedia. (Can you believe it?) Now, in one of those "You couldn't make this stuff up if you tried" moments, I see that Andy Schlafly (son of Phyllis, a conservative lady opposed [among lots of things] to the US Equal Rights Amendment) last November (I somehow missed this) created Conservapedia to help him defend what he regards as truths about, say, dinosaurs and evolution. And offer his own definition of the US Democratic party.
It seems he'd tried editing Wikipedia, "and found the biased editors who dominate it censor or change facts to suit their views" (doing so within 60 seconds in one case!) Amazing. Examples. Be careful out there! Some of this rubbish is nearly as eye-watering as "puppet sex".