Bushido

Two traditional forms of martial art on campus this morning –

Kendo

Flymo

Get Your War On

This works best if you know the context.

In a nutshell, Jamba Juice shamelessly ripped off David Rees’ clip-art comic strip Get Your War On and the company is now experiencing well-deserved blowback. (Also here.)

UPDATE July 25. The controversy trundles on. Or possibly fizzles out. But as Timothy B Buckwalter says, ‘… is it okay to just take the work of an artist, without asking, and use it to sell your product? Fck no.’ And meanwhile, the company has now issued a statement that skirts around the question. The original ripoff was bad enough, but the company’s brassnecked claim (from Kim Larson, VP of marketing) that they never intended to imply that David Rees had endorsed their products is arrogant and insulting. These Jamba Juice people just got this story reclassified as a full-on, 100% bona fide ‘fuckable’.

So fuck Jamba Juice. Follow David Rees’ advice: Drink wine. Eat fruit.

A more balanced summary of the whole story can be found here.

More Toilet Humor

Hmm,  do I smell a potentially lucrative advertising tie-in?  You heard it here first.

If you’re going to write a song about evacuation, you probably shouldn’t have a name that sounds like Cascara. aka chitticum.

Word Rage

Or OK, it’s more like word sadness sorrow really. Certainly not the usual ‘pet peeve’ kind of ranting anyway. You can stick your grocer’s apostrophes anywhere you like. That’s your business. I don’t want to read your prose anyway.

But here’s the thing. More and more, it seems that people are writing ‘ie’ when it’s clear from the context that they actually mean ‘eg’. Ideally, I’d support this assertion with hundreds of thousands of examples, but alas, my Google-fu is only low-intermediate (and Google searches strip out punctuation), so you’ll have to make do with one:

Tom Waltz: ‘We all know that the Internet can be a tool of warfare (i.e., terrorist recruiting)’ (ref)

Obviously he must mean ‘for example’ because as any fule kno, the internet can be used for warfare in all kinds of ways, not just for terrorist recruiting. And this Tom Waltz guy is a fucking editor for fuck’s sake.

Also, I have a theory — which I am completely incompetent to test. I think people are using ‘ie’ in a similar way to how they use ‘whom’. That is, they think that ‘eg’ sounds vulgar or ungrammatical or less ‘proper’ than ‘ie’, so just to be on the safe side, they use ‘ie’ even when they shouldn’t.

Aug 5, 2009 EDITED TO ADD another example.  Since I said I would. This one comes from an anonymous comment on a Boing Boing thread about harm-causing prank calls.

Playing with peoples (sic) inherent fears and/or ignorance can be quite humorous (i.e. Sascha Baron Cohen).

Mouseover Pop-ups

These are not a feature. They’re a fucking annoyance.

Where’s the Firefox plugin that turns the fucking things off?

My New Heroes

Copyright pisses me off big time.  And now comes the inspiring news that there are actually people out there thriving without it!

Instead of ramming our fucked-up copybollocks down everybody’s throats, we should be looking at these true artists and hanging our heads in shame.  And then emulating them.

Tourism Group head Gunawan says “[These batik makers] believe that each time they create something, it is not they who worked, but it is God who worked through their human body and soul. Being grateful [to God] is sufficient for them.” (photo by Candra Malik)

Here’s the Boing Boing post.

And below is the original story copypasted in its entirety from the Jakarta Globe.

Religion Gets in the Way of Batik Copyrighting

Solo. Religion was singled out here on Sunday as the major reason why city officials were having trouble persuading skilled batik designers to put their names to their creations so they could be registered for copyright.

Solo Mayor Joko Widodo warned that if registration with the directorate general of intellectual property at the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights did not occur soon, unique Solo batik motifs could be registered by another party and the actual creators would lose their claim to them.

“That will cost us in the end,” Joko said.

The head of the local Kauman Batik Tourism Group, Gunawan Setiawan, said on Sunday that religion played a significant part in the reluctance of the craftsmen and women to attach their names to their works.

“They believe that each time they create something, it is not they who worked, but it is God who worked through their human body and soul,” Gunawan said. “Being grateful [to God] is sufficient for them.”

Joko, speaking at this year’s Solo Batik Fashion Festival over the weekend, said that the ancient royal city was one of the principal batik cities in Indonesia, with no fewer than 500 unique motifs created here that are not found in any other region. The inventory process, however, was hampered by the reluctance of the batik makers to claim ownership over pieces.

The head of the Solo trade and industry office, Joko Pangarso, said copyright registration work had begun last year, but was constantly held up when it was found a particular batik only had a motif name because the creator declined to attach their own.

“So far only 10 motifs have been successfully included in the list,” he said. “The creators acknowledged their creations but asked for minimal exposure.

“I am afraid that other parties might register [the Solo batik motifs] because there are many batik cities in Indonesia. There are Yogyakarta, Pekalongan, Brebes, Madura and other places. Some of Yogya’s motifs are almost identical to Solo’s.”

Gunawan, from the tourism group, said that in the present era of global competition, the traditional way of thinking could be exploited by others for profit.

Other countries, he said, have known about this and have already wrongly tried to claim copyright over Indonesian-designed batiks.

“If Malaysia is speedier than us in patenting copyright for some Solo batik motifs, there is little that we can do,” Gunawan said. “We just need [their creators’] names, but it is very difficult.”

The head of the Laweyan Batik Tourism Group, Alpha Febela Priyatmono, said that yet another problem was traditional batik centers now being put under pressure by competition from the batik print industry. He called on the government to help create a better environment of competition in the industry.

Trees

Some of the trees in the forest were healthier than others.

Ditto the cicadas.

Poor wee dead magnificent beastie

Snake Repellant

There’s another snake in the garden.

I don’t know exactly what kind it is, but naturally one assumes the worst.  I will say this for it though:  it doesn’t seem to be aggressive.  I disturbed it when I was trimming the foliage next to the house, and it just slithered out 3 feet in front of me, crossed the path, and disappeared noiselessly into the vegetation on the other side.

I think it’s probably something like a pointed-scaled pit viper.  Which isn’t great news, but at least it isn’t another fucking banded krait.

Anyway, the thing is, I was chatting to one of the local work-dudes about it this morning and he says that what I need is a baby.

He expanded on this assertion. Babies cry and make a horrible noise innit, and snakes really hate that  (it occurs to me that they have no paws to put over their ears) so they fuck off and go and live somewhere else.

This was a new one on me, though of course it would be easy enough to design a simple scientific experiment to explore the phenomenon. I’m thinking baby (hungry, to encourage crying), snake[s] (well-fed; one doesn’t want to be cruel), and a sort of perspex ultimate wrestling cage. Leave them all in there for a few hours with the video running and then come back and see how things have turned out.  We could reject the null hypothesis if the baby and the snake[s] were consistently found at opposite ends of the cage.

Trimeresurus mucorosquamtus is supposed to be aggressive, but otherwise it’s a good fit in terms of size, shape and markings. It’s pretty common too.

If it works, then this time next year, Rodders, we could all be a million times richer than Scaryduck.

Of course, before this idea could be brought to market, various technical problems would need to be addressed.  For example, eventually the baby would grow up (or not) and need to be replaced.  There might also be undesirable side effects.  Babies are known to attract other species, such as dingos, flies, and so on, that might be unwanted.  (I know,  I know, who wouldn’t love a pack of dingos gamboling in the yard, but people can be so picky sometimes.) Or perhaps the baby can be dispensed with altogether and I could just hire someone to sit in the garden and squeal like a pig all day. I mean like a baby.

Or else I could just concrete over the whole damned mess and give up on this pathetic bourgeois fantasy of growing me own vegetables.

Or I could see how far I get with an air-horn and a shotgun.

Or I could move out of the sodding jungle.

Sigh. Decisions, decisions. Life is just so darn complex sometimes.

Spit or Swallow?

A new store just opened at the bottom of the hill.  And it brings with it some more delightfully mangled Chinglish.  Simply drop a vowel, shuffle the remaining letters — and voila!

I’ve heard it’s good for the complexion

And just in case you thought they might have been going for something musical,  the Chinese  ( 橙果 cheng2 guo3)  and the other end of the shopfront both make it clear that they actually meant ‘orange’ (ie the fruit).