Category: Other

Categories
Me Other

WordPress upgrade

Well, I’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.0 – despite the fact that they’re probably about to release 2.0.1 – and so far so good. Most (all?) of the changes are things which aren’t visible to you lot. It seems generally nicer to use, though the WYSIWYG editor doesn’t like Safari. *shrug*. The new Admin pages are a bit ugly. *shrug again*.

The main reason I upgraded was because you can now create categories on the fly as you write a post, although you can’t choose a parent catgory for it at the same time. And the post preview actually shows what it would look like on your blog, rather than just testing the formatting. I’ll have to take their word for it that the underlying code is improved.

EDIT: I’ve just trued tried the wysiwyg editor on Firefox. It does seem quite nice, I must admit.

Though it does that fucking annoying thing of automatically putting white space after a newline. Don’t these people write poetry?

EDIT again:

asdsad
sdasda
asdasdasd
sad

At least it looks like the old non-wysiwyg editor still works for single returns.

Categories
Nature Other

RSPCA ‘Freedom Food’

I was reading about meat labelling in The River Cottage Meat Book (which I’d recommend, so far, though I haven’t actually tried any of the recipes yet). He mentioned that meat labelled as ‘RSPCA Monitored Freedom Food‘ wasn’t, as you might expect, free range – just produced with slightly more regard for animal welfare than the legal minimum requirements for intensive farming. Which was a bit of a blow since I was just preparing to cook a Freedom chicken, bought in the assumption that it would be, if anything, a step up from ‘free range’.

I can see the argument for the RSPCA giving approval to some intensively farmed chickens. Intensive chickens account for 98% of the birds reared in the UK, and the RSPCA has to engage with the industry somehow; encouraging the producers to treat their birds slightly less badly is a good start.

I just think the choice of branding – ‘Freedom Food’ – is a real misjudgement, because I think most people will see it and assume it means ‘free range’, just as I did when I glanced at the chicken label. The concept of ‘free range’ chicken is devalued enough, without weakening it further. I basically feel I was misled by the packaging, and not in a way which benefits animal welfare. In future, I’m just not buying chicken or pork from the supermarket unless it’s organic. That seems to be the only labelling scheme that means anything.

Categories
Culture Other

Adult film posters (and some other stuff)

Adult movie posters, via we make money not art, who got it from Camp Heatwole.

edit: more linkworthiness. Dazzle painting, via gravestmor. It’s worth looking at the pictures and clicking on the links in the dazzle article.

further edit: Bangladeshi rickshaw art, via Metafilter.

and still more: Crop Art, also via Camp Heatwole.

Categories
Culture Other

Chihuly at Kew

I went to see the Dale Chihuly glass at Kew Gardens today. Which was pretty fab. This Flickr slideshow gives you some idea. It finishes 15th January, so if you haven’t seen it and you’re in London, go and have a look.

Categories
Culture Other

Duchamp vandalism and BBC fuckwittery

Someone took a hammer to Fountain by Marcel Duchamp. Which is the famous sculpture made from a urinal. I just found the BBC’s phrasing annoying:

A 77-year-old Frenchman has spent a night in custody in Paris after attacking a plain porcelain urinal considered to be a major artwork.

‘considered’ to be a major artwork? It’s one of the iconic artworks of the 20th century! I can’t believe that 88 years after the event, the BBC still feels the need to prevaricate about it. Not the Daily Mail or the Sun, but the BBC, a serious news organisation and a major cultural broadcaster to boot. Fuckwits. What kind of philistinic culture do we live in?

I don’t insist people should like Fountain, and if you wanted, you could argue it’s a kind of work which has been a rather uninteresting experiment and should be relegated to a footnote in art history. Or whatever. But the idea that we have to have the same stupid, boring, pointless argument about whether it’s art, over and over again – aargh!

Categories
Other

linkworthy weirdness

… at Pruned.

And it took a while, but the future may finally be here.