The Loveshade Family Blog

Remember Australia, which used to be such a cool place to visit and live?  Well, censors and social prudes are continuing to wage their glorious battle to make the country sterile and oppressed for visitors and natives alike.

When Sculpture by the Sea opens on Thursday, a statue of a lost little boy will be wearing swimmers.  This is not the wishes of the artist Paul Trefry.  Little Boy Lost showed a young boy lost on the beach, naked and vulnerable.  But apparently censors were so worried about people in Australia seeing the sculpture, that they insisted the boys' "naughty bits' be covered.

You really have to watch those Australians, as their uncontrollable urges force them to molest anything they see that's not wearing clothes.  Where do you think satyrs and wolfmen and mermaids come from?  There are so many naked goats and wolves and fish there.

To see the article, go to http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2009/10/26/1256405349832.html

Photo credit: A sculpture in the sand … Little Boy Lost by Sydney's Paul Trefry is one of 114 works along a two-kilometre stretch of coast from Bondi to Tamarama. Photo: Dean Sewell

Posted by Reverend Loveshade at 08:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (31)

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It pains us to write this, but GeoCities, one of the Internet's early and most popular places for posting a personal website, ends today.

It's one of the cruelties of the modern era that history may not be preserved.  Even in the U. S. government, critical issues discussed via email and text messaging can vanish at the touch of a few buttons.

Geocities technically began in 1994, when most people not only hadn't used the Internet, but didn't even know what it was.  But it didn't really get going until 1995.  The site was divided into loosely themed "neighborhoods," like Area51 and Hollywood.  A person's personal url originally would be an address like http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Dimension/8484/.  As the Internet advanced, these could be shortened to the domain name plus user name, like http://www.geocities.com/bloodstar84.

Many people's first websites were there.  Our friend BloodStar built his in the 1990s, and it was the first place anyone could find Reverend Loveshade's work online, including the now well-known "Five Blind Men and an Elephant" (the second place was http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Zone/7971).  It held one of the early online references to Apocrypha Discordia, which back then wasn't a real book.

Alden built his first website there in 1997, and still considers it his second favorite self-built sites (the first is this site, of course).  Friendships and even marriages happened through that site, which was the third most visited in its heyday.  Some people grew up there, posting as young teenagers and continuing into their college years.

And now, with one swipe of Yahoo's axe, it will be gone.  For a while now, it hasn't been possible to start a new site or even to edit one that's already there.  But as Yahoo! now offers everyone free email with unlimiitd storage, keeping the sites up would likely take very little.  Back in the day, you got what was a whooping big 15 megabytes of space for your website.  And most sites weren't nearly that big, meaning you could easily save 100,000 of them on a $200 flash drive.  But Yahoo! won't do it.

Thanks goodness http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/28/geocities_preservation/ has been working to save what they can.  This is real history, the personal, amateur groundwork on which the personal and corporate blog were built.  Decades from now, when people are downloading a history book of the Internet into their brain, GeoCities will be an important part of the book.

Goodbye, old friend.

Posted by The Loveshade Family at 03:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (17)

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Don't get me wrong for my questioning the reasons behind this award.  I literally cheered when George W. Bush left office, and was quite happy to see Barack Obama in the White House.  When Bush was U. S. president, America's international approval rating was extremely low, more Americans were lost in combat than had happened in decades, civil rights were being blatantly violated, people from other countries were being tortured by representatives of the United States, etc.

Now that Obama is president, America's worldwide reputation has shot up, Gitmo is being shut down, the U. S. has plans to pull out of Iraq, talks are continuing to greatly reduce nuclear arms, etc.  Certainly a great deal of effort is being made to reduce war and increase peaceful coexistance, the type of thing the Noble Peace Prize recognizes.

But Obama has been president for less than a year, and the nominations closed when he was in office for less than a couple of weeks.  So why is he getting the award so early?

"Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future," said the Nobel Prize committee that decides the award. "His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population."

The president said, "I do not view it as a recognition of my own accomplishments, but a recognition of the role of American leadership."

"To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures" who won the Nobel Peace Prize.  "I will accept this award as a call to action, a call to all nations to confront the common challenges of the 21st century."

I can't help but wonder if it's not only a recognition of Obama, but a negative recognition of George W. Bush.  Bush's opponent in his first election, Al Gore, won the prize, and now Bush's successor has won.

I believe Obama did not expect the award, and truly believe that he wants this to help a group effort to bring more peace to the world.  I hope he succeeds.

But this may be one Nobel Peace Prize that will have to be earned retroactively.

http://www.greenvilleonline.com/article/20091009/NEWS/910090333&referrer=FRONTPAGECAROUSEL

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1009/28129.html

Posted by Alden Loveshade at 04:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (15)

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