Author Archives: skepticlawyer

Women as means to an end

July 22, 2008 – 5:53 am

A few days ago, Don Arthur drew my attention to the latest ‘rebuild the busted GOP from the Ground Up’ tome, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam’s Grand New Party: How Republicans can Win the Working Class and Save The American Dream. I spent today treating Blackwell’s as a library and read about half [...]

Posted in Feminism, Personal liberty | Comments (13)

Broken Windows and World Youth Day 08

July 20, 2008 – 8:27 am

I’ve been watching the ongoing debate (and sometime irritation) over Catholic World Youth Day with interest from afar, noting both the Pope’s clear humanity and dignity and the state’s heavy-handed responses to protest. I think Heath G over at Catallaxy is right when he argues that the various state interventions helped poison the well of [...]

Posted in Free Speech, Human/Civil rights, Law | Comments (23)

This guy is amazing

July 16, 2008 – 10:33 am

In the competition for world’s freakiest voice, Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu has it covered. Unsurprisingly a member of the large (and vastly talented) Yunupingu family, he has developed his own distinctive style (if you’re wondering about the upside-down guitar, he’s both blind and left handed - presumably just turning the thing on its ear was easier [...]

Posted in Music | Comments (6)

‘This is the World we Live in’

July 13, 2008 – 1:58 am

One of the luxuries that goes with finishing exams is time: in this case to do a little wandering down music’s memory lane. As a ‘True Child of the 80s‘ (I even finished Year 12 - the Upper Sixth - in 1988), many of my memories of the decade are fixed musically, none more so [...]

Posted in History, Music | Comments (11)

Iran: ‘We will Photoshop Israel off the Map’

July 12, 2008 – 7:29 am

As everyone probably knows by now, once again Charles Johnson has caught someone out doing dodgy graphics (he has a special talent for this - he can probably claim credit for terminating Dan Rather’s career as a newshound). One thing Iranian propagandists definitively lack is a black belt in Photoshop, as their lame attempt to [...]

Posted in Fark!, Technology | Comments (8)

Nanny Knows Best

July 10, 2008 – 11:01 pm

One of the reasons I’m a bit concerned about artists ‘feeding the trolls’, as Art Monthly have done with their latest pot-stirring exercise is that we’re becoming increasingly ban-happy as a nation. This is a global problem, as the Reason.tv video I’ve included below indicates.
Drew Carey’s main point in the video is worth emphasizing: bans [...]

Posted in Human/Civil rights, Law | Comments (15)

Art Monthly stirs the pot

July 8, 2008 – 12:38 am

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, and all the crapola about Bill Henson and his nudie pics had died down, some hippie art mag decides to (a) piss the Prime Minister off and (b) bite the hand that feeds it by (c) sticking an arty nude pic of [...]

Posted in Art, Children, Free Speech | Comments (42)

We made it :)

July 5, 2008 – 7:03 pm

Well, thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster that’s over. The BCL that is. I walked out of my criminology exam yesterday afternoon after 3.5 hours (no hand mishaps this time) and thought seriously about just stretching out on the cobbles behind the Exam Schools. Sub-fusc and all. I didn’t, but it was tempting. Some people doing [...]

Posted in Academia, Blogging | Comments (11)

Bending the rules ex post facto

July 3, 2008 – 3:37 pm

Lawyers don’t like retroactive laws, but it now seems - despite insisting on having its rules called ‘laws’ - that cricket is in no such quandary.
For those unfamiliar with one of the more controversial events in the Gentleman’s Game, in the 2006 Oval Test, Pakistan refused to take the field against England after being accused [...]

Posted in Cricket, Law | Comments (15)

Exam hand cramp = bouncer on the forearm

July 2, 2008 – 3:26 am

I did my third exam today, and for the first time in my life experienced what I’ve only heard about before - hand cramp. Maybe it’s because Oxford exams are longer than other exams (three or three and a half hours, depending on subject). The longest written exam I’ve ever encountered in the past was [...]

Posted in Academia, Cricket, Fark! | Comments (14)