Listen To Me

Well not me exactly, but some fairly good speechifying robot guy.

I am testing this audio thing at the top of my post here (can't see it? It takes a few seconds to load). In fact it automatically has gone to every post, cheeky shit. I saw it on Murli's blog and decided to give it a try here.

Mmmm. For me it only goes about 33secs, including an intro Ad, and then cuts out. Please let me know if you are having the same problem with it.

This may have something to do with Blogger posts. I tried to get it onto my Wordpress backup site, but it doesn't like the fact that both start with "expatatlarge".

Sigh

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Funnily enough, just this morning I was thinking about making a podcast of each long post.

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ADDENDUM - ignore all the above. I've removed the widget.

ADDENDUM II - ignore the above addendum. I've re-added the widget and opened up my RSS feed. That was the problem, according to Murli.

E@L

UlyssesSeen / BloggerNotSeen

Dublin, June 16th 1904.




A comic book version of James Joyce's Ulysses hits the ether/cloud...

UlyssesSeen.

Apart from being free on the triple-W, this awesome effort is also available for free download from iTunes to the iPad and other iProducts... but only now that Apple has rescinded its directive to remove all images containing nudity from the comic book version of the novel. Apparently (in an updated version of the NYT article which I've only seen on the TimesReader edition), it now seems that Ulysses is "not obscene" after all.

There's a revelation.

Prior to its publication as a comic for the iPad, Joyce's stately, plump book was more often carried ostentatiously through university campuses than actually read. Now just carrying a iPad around is all that is required to evoke mixed feelings of jealous rage and supercilious dismissal in their fellow university layabouts.

Some would no doubt say that Ulysses is more famous for being banned than for being best-sellers - a la The Girl Who Really Knows How To Treat Rapists. Also in this category are that good gardening guide, Lady Lovely's Chatter and that medical textbook, The Topic of Cancer, amongst others...

Can't argue there. Nothing like a controversy to boost sales.

There is a fascination tale behind the publishing history of Ulysses.



First published in Paris in 1922, it was banned until 1933 in the USA and in Australia until 1937, only to be re-banned in 1941, which tells you something about how we do over artistic creativity down under.

One wonders if Steve Jobs' asshat morality guerrillas used the same criteria to assess the comic that Judge James M. Woolsey used in his famous overturning of the USA ban:

-- It did not give him an erection, therefore it was not pornographic, therefore it was not obscene. --

Fair call in those heady(npi!) pre-viagra days of course.

Didn't fuck up the sales too much either.

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These too are the guys who temporarily popped an "Adults Only" rating on the iPhone book-reader Eucalyptus because you could download the Kama Sutra to it. That fact that the Kama Sutra is available for download to ANY book-reader or computer because it comes from Project Gutenberg appears to have been neither here nor there. This version doesn't even have the highly illustrative, um, illustrations with it.

Arbitrary, inconsistent and often contradictory are most people on the extremes of the moralistic universe.

Of course, Eucalyptus then became THE $10 eBook reader to have on your iPhone after this.

Controversy = cash.

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And please don't ever forget the case of the immensely amusing David over at his once obligatory site for farangs in Thailand, MangoSauce. He lost his GoogleAds account for no good reason at all. Many of his posts are as classics in the expat genre, and thankfully his site is still up.

Oops. Controversy = no cash.

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Speaking of arbitrary and unjustified censorship of free speech (no, not here in Singapore - we love Big Brother, and I don't mean the TV show), over the last week, Blogger and Google had taken down both Canadian blogger MJ's site, The Infomaniac (and locked her out of her Gmail account) and Spanish blogger Leni at Escritora y peligrosa (not a debilitating skin disease). For about five days MJ was in cloud limbo until Google apologised and reinstated her account. Leni was knocked out for most of Sunday.

WTF? The shivers have been going up Blogspot bloggers' spines.

A lot of Southern Kerfuffle was righteously raised by one of E@L's bestest blog-friends, that sweet person and ever-popular Savannah, her support bringing this unjustified and unjustifiable (to coin a phrase) injustice to blog-light.

Mago chased up Leni's case as well and it all came to a head!

Their efforts at raising online awareness of these cases presumably helped Google/Blogger to right their wrongs.

[Sav mentions in the comments here that eros den was the main guy to push Blogger in these cases.

As Leni reports, the procedure for getting one's blog back seems complicated enough - a 5-step process that calls for a review request, an appeal, etc... but I imagine it would be even worse if you no longer have an email account, as in MJ's case!

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Why did this happen? Neither blogger is outrageously controversial or frankly obscene (not telling you what happened to my willy) though there might be a bit of flesh here and there or some stories about bits of flesh there and here.

Hell, nothing outrageous. Nothing to explain it at all. Leni talks about being slightly harassed by some religious nutter, but that may not have been the case. Blogger have not told her what happened, and same for MJ, although in her case they did apologize.

Interestingly, Leni's, MJ's, and even Savannah's (!!) blog now have the Blogger "Content Warning" when you go there, as you have should have seen.

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There is a hesitancy with which many people are viewing the seemingly arbitrary censorship. Hell some people are blocked just for fucking swearing!

Like both Savannah (personal communication) and Mago (new site here), I have taken the anti-conspiratorial precaution of backing up and (half a day's work!) exporting all my posts and some (but not all, it seems) of my comments over to a mirror blog using my Wordpress account. I'm not migrating completely just yet, but I'll let you know if I decide that I will.

Depends how skittish we all get with the arbitrariness of the Hidden Ones at Google.

[Addendum 2: Don't foget that I lost MY old blog TWICE - when hackers used it to send phishing emails out. You still can't read my old blog in some places, like the BA business lounge at Heathrow. ]

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Oh, yeah, where did this rambling post start? Happy Bloomsday.



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Don't get yourselves banned without a back-up.

E@L

Long Time No Blog

Not a lot of internet access of late. Meh. Busy: Melbourne, Geelong, Melbourne, warm days in the sun, oh so chilly in the shade. It's amazing how severe the temperature discrepancy can be down here.

The usual range of unique but stereotypical Christmas Hostilities. Many of those Things That Cannot Be Blogged About.

My favorite present from this obsolete pagan ritual was a book called How To Be a Better Foodie"! Excellent culinary snobbery compendium! The only problem that my memory is so bad that I won't remember anything I read.

One deliciously pretentious but unfortunately erroneous thing I noted was that Madagascarian vanilla is sort of considered the bee's knees of vanilla, merely because it is so expensive. A total wank - vanilla is vanilla. It's just that the natural fertilization in the native Central American habitat of the vanilla flower is done by a certain breed of Mexican bee. Those bees don't live in Madagascar, nor do any other insects that naturally do the sticky job, so the farmers who imported the vanilla plants had to develop a technique to fertilize them BY HAND - a very labor intensive process. And THIS is why they charge such a high price for Madagascarian vanilla.

Other than that piece of completely useless digression, I love the book!

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Cricket tomorrow at the MCG, home to Singers the day after to change suitcases and then off for NYE (+10 days) in Bali. Hoping to catch up with Madame Chiang, with or without her cats.

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My mate Nick (whom I will meet in Bali too) sent a great Christmas email - I haven't actually received his permission to reproduce it here yet, but once we meet in Ubud in Bali after NYE he can let me know if I have overstepped any boundaries by quoting it in full below - in lieu of me writing anything at length of any interest.

He says at the end it should be a blog post -I think it should be a newspaper column or something. Some great observations!

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When did sending Christmas messages get so difficult?

Back in the good old days, you took up pen and paper and started writing cards and accompanying letters. Family first then friends. After about 5 letters you ran out of enthusiasm for writing the same thing over and over to different people. So you gave up. Alternately you ran out of money to buy cards, envelopes and stamps. More often than not you ran out of time as you should have started in November but it is now December 23. Stuff it! the card and letter won’t arrive on time, why bother! After all there is always next year.

Later the quality of reproductions got better and you could type or even word process the one letter, copy it multiple times and add a written personal message at the bottom before signing. This saved the time component but didn't address the cost component (or timing).

Later still you had e-mail and web sites. So for me I created a Christmas Message on a web page and then e-mailed a link to friends. The heyday of “Nick’s Newsletter” was 1998 – 2001. (Suspiciously this is very similar to what you have just received.) Unfortunately most of your friends were not on e-mail or the web and you still had to resort to manual means.

With time most people got an e-mail address and you could quite happily send Christmas messages by e-mail with only the odd one or two missing out.

More recently we have social networking sites. It has all got very complicated again. Now you have friends on Facebook, LinkedIn, e-mail, mobile phone, the blogosphere and other places besides. Suddenly you have to send the same message to multiple people on multiple communication channels and that is just sucking into your time once more. Christmas is getting complicated once more. (This is flowing, I may turn this into a blog).

So here we are in 2009, no we are at the end of 2009. You are receiving this e-mail because:
1) I love you; or
2) I like you; or
3) at some stage you have been an impact on my life and I still cherish that memory;

And

I still have some record of an e-mail address for you.

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LOL!

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On a housekeeping note, I've had to remove the Blogroll temporarily (I hope) from the sidebar. Some of you may have been getting a warning from Google about my site being linked to a site that had "Malware" on it. Don't panic - I have not been hacked (again) but there was a hidden link in my blogrolling widget from 7 months ago that led to a site that allegedly contained some trojans. It's an old blog-site, now defunct I guess, that I once had linked to...

I've no idea how to clear this list to remove the offending link. I HAVE removed the website from the blogroll widget but can't erase that troublesome old link.

Any help from Blogger experts would be appreciated.

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Also, 2010 is the last year of the decade, not 2009.

E@L