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Meanwhile in Scotland…
Duelling bagpipes? Seriously, is that really what you have to do to get laid in Scotland? Sound like you’re maiming a cat while looking like you’re fisting an octopus?
Actually… I have to admit the sound is just a bit awesome. I’m having the one in the skirt, and I don’t care which.*
* In case Mrs E reads this, no, not really. Not even the one on the left.
What not to say to your female pilot
A Brazilian airline says one of its female pilots tossed a passenger off a flight because he was making sexist comments about women flying planes.
Tossed off? Could have been phrased better but I think we’re all on the same page.
Trip Airlines says in a statement the pilot ejected the man before take-off as he made loud, sexist comments upon learning the pilot was a woman. The jet continued on to the state of Goias after a one-hour delay.
[…]
Trip says it won’t tolerate disparaging remarks made about any of the 1400 women working for the airline.
Absolutely right too. There’s no reason to be having a go at a female pilot <evil grin> it’s not like she has to park it anyway.
The next few posts will be from the sofa, where the Angry Exile expects to be sleeping for the next few evenings.
Bet in haste, repent at leisure
Thank goodness for time limited editing on comments over at the Orphanage. A little over 24 hours ago I said something rash (though perhaps accurate) about James’ favourite footy team heading for a slump and something even more rash about mine being on the top of the ladder later in the day, which was unfortunate as they were outplayed that evening and lost by four goals. Foolish, foolish. I crawled over to the Orphanage to eat some humble pie on that comment and found to my relief that I could no longer edit it, which is probably what Australian Olympic prospect in shotgun double trap (and past gold medallist) Russell Mark would like about now.
The 48-year-old was so confident of Carlton’s superiority on the footy field that he pledged before the match that he’d parade the lime green one-piece bathing suit for men, made famous by Sacha Baron Cohen’s alter ego Borat, to the London Olympics opening ceremony if the Saints somehow romped home. The Blues ended up with the blues, going down 98 to 122 to the Saints.
[…]
“I actually did make that statement.
“I still can’t believe they (St Kilda) did it. Anyway, a lot of people would think a mankini might look better than the uniform they’ve nominated for us, so I don’t know if it’s such a bad thing.”
The lime-green mankini would certainly fit in nicely with the traditional Aussie green-and-gold, and would prove aerodynamic for Mark’s lap around the Olympic stadium.
But Mark, who won gold at Atlanta in 1996 and silver in Sydney four years later, believes rule 8.5 of the Australian Olympic Constitution may allow him to nominate a proxy.
“My wife’s in the team, she’ll do it for me,” he said, referring to fellow shooter Lauryn Mark.
Personally I wouldn’t bet on that either. If I was in that position and suggested that to Mrs Exile I think I know what her response would be.
Mike Tancred, a spokesman for the Australian Olympic Committee, said it probably wouldn’t be a good look for Mark’s fellow Australian athletes if the shooter sported a mankini.
[…]
“Age is the problem here. Russell is no spring chicken, his days of being a model are long gone, and we don’t think it would be a good look for the team to have Russell in a mankini,” Mr Tancred said.
“Besides, this will be his sixth Olympics and he is a chance to be named as flag bearer. Imagine the flag bearer out in front of our Team in a mankini. And a big butch shooter at that.”
I’ve had the pleasure of once meeting Russell Mark briefly. Seemed like a nice bloke and of course the kind of shot I can only dream of being, but imagining him carrying the flag while wearing a Borat thong… or even, oh dear God, competing in one… Emergency mindbleach right away, please. Make the picture go away. Make it stop.
And this is why I don’t bet on sports.
Ever.
A what kind of event?
Click for linky
Via The Age, a sign in Footscray, west Melbourne this week. I suppose with legal brothels here it might not be a spelling mistake, but…
As useful as tits on a fish
No, wait, that should be fits on a tish? Fish on a tit? Ah, none of it’s making sense anymore.
Headlines you really don’t expect to see at breakfast time
“Gordon Ramsay’s Dwarf Porn Double Found Dead in a Badger Den in Wales”
Other than the fact that I had no idea that there was such a thing as dwarf porn, let alone celeb chef lookalike dwarf porn – I was only able to carry on eating my toast normally by adding mind bleach to my morning coffee – what’s surprising is that it turns out this story dates from last September but as I write is the fifth most popular online article at the Telegraph (the Sydney one, not the UK one).
Click for embiggerfication
What, if anything, that says about Sydneysiders I really can’t say. 😉
I’m glad I don’t have kids…
… because if I did I’d probably be sitting here now wondering why the hell they can’t be
this awesome.
Zoe, from Thatcham, Berks, plays in a child group called Mini Band which was catapulted to fame last year with a cover of Metallica’s Enter Sandman.
But the youngster’s latest offering has won her hundreds of thousands more fans, showing her shredding her way through the solo of the Stratovarius’s Stratosphere.
And by way of comparison I don’t even hold any hope of doing this:
To top everything I can imagine Suzi Quattro looking exactly like that around 1960 or so.
Yet more work
So I thought I’d imported all my tags from the old place but I see that WP has decided that they’re categories, though having accidentally put a category cloud in the sidebar instead of a tag cloud this isn’t too big a problem right now. It is something else on the list of jobs to do though, and I wonder whether re-importing the old posts might fix it. This is going to have to be done anyway since I’ve just noticed that some of the older posts appear just as titles and the actual post content didn’t make it, which kind of defeats the object of importing them. Bugger it – this is stuff I thought I’d got sorted before I opened the place up. Oh well, pass me that hammer, will you?
UPDATE – Weird. I now notice that a lot of the very old post imported with tags as tags rather than categories, so I do have tags after all. But they don’t seem to show up as clickable tags when posting, or at least not in the same place as the Orphanage. Maybe they will once I start using them.
UPDATE 2 – Nope. The Orphanage has a big tag list below where you post, whereas here I’ve got a facsimile of the tag cloud but only if I click something to get it. Odd. I thought both being WP blogs the UI would be the same. Oh well, learning curves.
More work
Max Farquar’s just brought up my need for an RSS feed button on here somewhere. This is one of those things I now see I should have had on the old place ages ago. Every time I’ve wanted to add a feed I’ve just clicked the little RSS button that appears on the right hand side of the URL field in my browser and assumed everyone else was doing the same thing.
Except I’ve now realised that they’d only be doing that if they used Safari. Firefucks, Opera [yes it does, Angry, you bellend – AE] and Internet Exploder doesn’t have it. Sorry, folks. Assuming just made an ass of me alone on this. I know a few people do follow me by RSS and I’ve no idea how you managed it because I know you don’t all use Safari, but I’m putting up a button to make it easier. The only trouble is the goddamn thing hasn’t bloody appeared and I don’t know why yet. In the meantime the feed address is as follows:
feed://angryexile.wordpress.com/feed/
Hopefully that’ll do until I get it to work.
Edit: fixed the bastard. Using the correct widget helped.
Welcome to the new gaff
Well, this has been a while coming, and there’s alway an outside possibility that WordPress will lock us all out, but I’ve finally made the move. There’s a few things still to do, the blogging version of pictures not hanging straight and being unable to find the box with the teaspoons in, but I’m in. Admittedly this is pretty slack of me since I was in ages ago and just haven’t made the time to sort it all out properly, so for a while it will be a work in progress with the occasional appeal to those more experienced with WordPress for advice on how to do things. In fact I’ll start with one of those right now – over at the old place one of the things that was starting to annoy me was the increasing length of the blogroll despite my having broken it up into sections and kept feeds only from the regular reads. I’d planned to follow that through even further here and almost have several blogrolls, which you can see over on the right there, but ideally I wanted them in drop downs or something similar showing only the first ten or twelve, and to keep those regular reads and residents of the Orphanage as feeds and displayed in recent post order. Anyone know, and does anyone know if I can make this white background that the posts appear on semi-transparent?
On the subject of the blogroll, you may notice that it’s a little longer than at the old place. Several people have been on my RSS for a while but because this move has been in a state of ‘just around the corner’ for months I’ve not added them. One seems to have given up blogging in the meantime but I’ve still added many more starting with the personal blogs of each one of the Orphans of Liberty (with the exception of one who I think only blogs at the Orphanage – Chuckles, if you read this and I’ve got that wrong please let me know and I’ll add yours), and in addition I’ve added links to some fine female bloggers: jredheadgirl, who I discovered only recently via a comment at either Dick Puddlecote’s or Velvet Glove, Iron Fist; Misanthrope Girl, who’s been in my RSS for a while; and Subrosa and Woman on a Raft, both of whom I should have added ages ago and can’t think why I didn’t. There are also additions in the Smokers and Drinkers section (itself an addition, and which includes a few of blogs from the regular reads/Orphanage sections because of some of the content), such as the aforementioned jredheadgirl, Smoking Out The Truth and Stand Fast, and also in the Climate Bloggers and Sites, the Thinkers, Pollies, Parties Etc, and the Other Sites sections. This means that my carefully albeit intermittently maintained pages of A-Z links that I’ve copied over almost verbatim from the old gaff have been buggered and need to be added to the list of tidying up jobs. If the world could arrange for there to be nothing to blog about for a week or two that’d be great, and if there was anyone on the blogroll at the old place who got missed here just wave at the screen and shout ‘Cooeee’ until I pay attention. Or leave a comment or contact me.
Anyway, welcome and do come in. Most of the old furniture is in the virtual garden and there are a couple of virtual ashtrays out there along with a virtual esky full of virtually freezing virtual beer out there. Mi casa es su casa… ooooh, houseplants, lovely. Do go on through, put your feet up and make yourself comfy, but excuse the changes as I try to get things more the way I want them.
Marvellous end to the year – UPDATED AGAIN
I was – and the reason for was rather than am will soon become clear – just getting ready to finally give Blogger the flick over this:
I’ve ranted about this more than once. I see no need for Google to have my bloody mobile phone number. None. And since I’ve been nagged about letting them have it for some time and have refused on each and every occasion you’d be forgiven for thinking they might have given up by now.
Oh, no. Nononononono. Now they’ve added this patronising fucking ‘Are you sure about this?’ message that appears when you try to skip adding the phone number for the umpteenth time. So, let me see how I can put this politely…..
….. Nope. Can’t be done.
Yes, I’m fucking sure. Now stop fucking asking about it.
So that was it for me. I just felt like I couldn’t be arsed to carry on saying no to a mob that were persistently deaf to my answer and seem prepared, EU or toddler style, to carry on asking the bloody question until the heat death of the universe or until I cave in. More likely, I feel, it will become a demand and then my choice will be to submit or move, and since I’ve had a dormant home at WordPress since I began blogging I’ve been moving some of the virtual furniture over there in the past few months in anticipation of a permanent move at some point. In fact, I thought to myself, why not make it a New Year, new blogging location?
The only real issue is that there appears to be no easy way to move IntenseDebate comments to a free WordPress hosted, but just now I thought I’d finally hit on a solution. Somewhat convoluted but it looked worth a shot, and if it didn’t work then I’d just begin at the new place with an apology to those whose comments over the past year and a half or so I’ve been using ID won’t show up there until I nut it out. Not the end of the world, I felt. I’ve never intended to delete this place so they’d all still be here.
So, off to WordPress I go to test it out, first importing the most recent posts from here, and all of a sudden:
Damn right I had questions and concerns. ‘Violation of terms of service’ seems to be blogs that are created as search engine whores for marketing reasons or to spruik bullshit get rich quick schemes, and although I link to all sorts of places – because I began this blogging lark admiring the blogs that made an effort to back up what they were saying with sources and to credit quotes by linking to where they were written, and so I’ve always done the same – it should be pretty clear that this blog isn’t about that. The other thing mentioned, and which I suspect I may have fallen foul of, is that WP don’t like blogs that consist of duplicated content, and angryexile.wordpress.com is currently 100% duplicated content. However, this seems rather hard to avoid when importing an existing blog in toto into WP, and since it’s MY duplicated content I’d have thought the thing to do is fire off an email and bloody asking me about it. Instead WP have gone straight for the nuclear option and shut down a blog that currently isn’t open to public viewing anyway.
So, all this has been put into a web form and pinged WPwards in the hope that someone will look at it sharpish and let me back in. Unfortunately it’s only 5.45am on Friday in California where (I believe) WordPress.com are based, and it’s a bleary 12.45am the next day for me. I’m not getting anything done before I crash out for the night, and with New Year-y things going on tomorrow that’s going to cut into my time even if they get onto it and sort things out soon after they get in. I suppose that’s one upside for it being yesterday there because at least it’s still a workday. If it was here I could be stuffed until Tuesday.
As it is I’m not optimistic of a 1st Jan move, and it seems it’s all because of a what seems a disproportionate response by WordPress. It’s not as if some kind person noticed the similarity and thought there was someone with a WP blog masquerading as me and ripping off my posts – the place is private and I’m the only one with access apart from whoever or whatever system at WP has decided it’s in violation of the Ts and Cs. Disappointing, especially as one of the big appeals of WordPress is this:
“WordPress.com supports free speech and doesn’t shut people down for ‘uncomfortable thoughts and ideas’, in fact we’re blocked in several countries because of that.”
An admirable sentiment which I’d just love to blog about at my place there. Except I can’t, can I?
Fuck.
UPDATE – looks like a fairly trivial thing: in a post about anti-tobacco hysteria and state bullying of smokers there’s a quote from an online e-cig seller that WP don’t like for some reason. They haven’t said and I’m not that interested, though since the notice of suspension mentioned marketing and SEO trickery I wonder if maybe they’ve had people post/comment spam on behalf of that company. I’ve had similar things happen here – the most recent being someone apparently in the Philippines comment spamming on behalf of a British clothing company (who never responded when I emailed them to ask why a comment on a post about Australian tee shirts had a link to their page about ladies scarves) – which have caused me to add some interesting keywords to the comment moderation filter.
The trouble here is that I linked only to provide a source for the quote and that’s the only place in more than two thousand posts and two long sidebars where I’ve linked to this company, so I’m worried that if WP have a policy of instant suspension in these situations this could happen again without warning just because I happen to link to somewhere without knowing it’s on some kind of blacklist that automatically shuts the blog down. This is causing a rethink of the WP move. As Longrider points out in the comments here (not here but at the old place – I haven’t imported those yet) I can always self-host, but if I was going to self-host I’d be using the Blogger platform for preference anyway. Well, at least for as long as they don’t force their piss-awful new UI on me. And this is the reason why I’m not up for self-hosting at all right now. I don’t much like the WP UI and I don’t like the UI that Blogger have said they will force on users at some as yet unspecified point. I want blogging to be like driving my car, but WP have so many options it feels more like flying a plane. Conversely the new Blogger UI is like driving a car where the location of half the controls has been decided by someone who is drunk, and the location of the other half by someone who is mad.
Ho frigging hum.
UPDATE 2: Jan 2012 – haven’t had further contact with WP but they’ve unsuspended me and I’ve found an alternative source to quote, so allowing for another day for the public holiday to pass in the US they should be able to take a look at hopefully give it the all clear.
Christmas Down Under
Many thanks to those who mailed or left comments on Sunday’s Happy Christmas post, but in response to the Ambush Predator who said,
Happy hot, beach-bound, BBQ Christmas!
I’d say that while I was happy many others weren’t, and it was neither hot, beach-y or BBQ-y round here, as this collection of photos from The Age shows.
And if you’re thinking that last one looks less ‘Snow Angel’ and more ‘Hail Mary’ then your eyes are clearly over whatever alcoholic pounding they enjoyed with you over Christmas and working well. Which is also the reason why not everyone here had a happy Christmas Day at all.
Yep, on the twelfth day of Christmas Melbourne’s true love gave us thunder, lightning, pissing rain, localised flooding and golf ball sized hailstones.
More than 15,000 claims have been lodged with insurance companies after savage storms tore through Melbourne on Christmas Day, as the Insurance Council of Australia today declared the weather event a catastrophe.
About a third of those claims relate to damage caused to houses and businesses in the storms, while the remainder are for damaged vehicles.
Still, on the bright side it may have killed some of the snakes and spiders.
Happy Christmas…
… to both my readers (hi, Mum) and anyone else who shows up. And if it isn’t yet Christmas Day where you are come back in a few hours.
My true love sent to me…
… a real life Angry Bird! Uh, in some kind of tree, probably not pear.
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The Angry Exile 