I heart Cash Cab, and I especially heart its host, Ben Bailey. That look is straight out of a Looney Tunes cartoon.
(If you don’t already know what it is, please don’t go looking up hentai on an image search unless you want nightmares… just know that it’s explicit, twisted animation. Like, tentacle rape and stuff.)
A post on MetaFilter noting the death of jazz singer Blossom Dearie took me to the excellent Schoolhouse Rock video she sang – Figure Eight.
My daughter came down while I was watching it and wondered at me for a while. She’d seen Schoolhouse Rock stuff, of course, but I explained to her that when I was a kid there were just four television stations, and only one chance a week to watch cartoons, so you’d better be there bright and early with your bowl of cereal on Saturday morning if you wanted to get in your good TV veg time. And how Schoolhouse Rock ended up teaching up stuff in spite of ourselves. And she thought I meant we didn’t have to go to school and just had to sit and watch cartoons instead.
The words. I have a way with them.
Porn for women (safe for work).
I love living in Austin.
Man charged over viral baby-swinging video
A Queensland man has been charged for re-publishing on a video-sharing site a viral video of a man swinging a baby around like a rag doll.
The controversial three-minute video had already been published widely across the internet and shown on American TV news shows. The clip can still be found online today.
Chris Illingworth, 60, a father of four from Maroochydore, thought he would share it with fellow users of Liveleak, a site similar to YouTube but focused on news and current events. In two years, he has uploaded hundreds of videos to Liveleak.His home was raided on Sunday, November 30, by Queensland Police from Task Force Argos, which specialises in combating child pornography and child groomers.
He was charged with using the internet to access and publish child-abuse material and is scheduled to appear in court in Maroochydore on December 18.
It is understood that he had no involvement in the creation of the video, which cannot be published on this website for legal reasons.
The baby is laughing and smiling at the end of the clip, but the video has attracted criticism from child-welfare advocates because of how vigorously the man swings the baby by its arms.In a phone interview, Illingworth described the clip as a “common interest story” and rejected any suggestions he was a child abuser or interested in such material.
He said that since being charged he could not eat, sleep or work and was worried his children and people in the local community would think he was a pedophile.
“I’ve had to go down to the hospital, my blood pressure is 160/108 and I’m on blood pressure pills and valium – all because of this,” he said.“Do they realise what pain they put someone through? I could fall over dead over this. I can’t even get the office work done. I’m just a zombie.”
Queensland Police confirmed the charges but refused to comment, saying it would be inappropriate as the matter was before the courts.
Illingworth said his life changed the moment two officers – a detective chief inspector and a detective chief constable – banged on his door and demanded they search his house.
“I went to turn on the laptop and they got stinking mad, as if I was trying to delete something I guess, and I was just trying to be helpful,” he said.
The officers plugged a small black box into his computer and proceeded for an hour and a half to analyse the contents of his hard drive in a search for child pornography.
Illingworth said the officers insisted on visiting his office at a mechanic workshop to examine his computer there. They found nothing, Illingworth said.
Before being taken to the police station, Illingworth was allowed to make one call, which he used to phone the owner of Liveleak in Britain to ask that the video be removed.
He was advised to get a lawyer but declined as he was unable to find one on a Sunday afternoon, he said.
At Maroochydore police station, Illingworth was interviewed without a lawyer. He was forced to provide fingerprints, a DNA sample and a mug-shot photograph.
“They wouldn’t let me go to the toilet without them coming with me – I couldn’t go anywhere without someone following me,” he said.
The officers explained to Illingworth that they traced him using his IP address after someone in Britain reported the video clip to police. Interpol had found the clip was originally uploaded to a Russian website.
“It’s going to ruin my f—ing life and everything. I’m 60 years old and what did I do wrong?” Illingworth said.
“I didn’t make it, I didn’t play with a baby, I just uploaded it [the video clip]. It’s nothing sexual or anything else – just a smiling baby.”
Liveleak owner Hayden Hewitt has published a video on the site defending Illingworth and calling on members to help publicise the incident and “fight injustice”.
“Clearly the behaviour in the video is reckless, but I couldn’t say it’s abuse,” he said.
Colin Jacobs, vice-chairman of the online users’ rights lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia, said public anxiety around the depiction of children seemed to have spiked in recent times, fuelled by politicians and anti-child-abuse campaigners.
“It’s now reached the point where any parent would have to think twice about posting a photo of their children to a photo-sharing website,” he said.
“Cases like this seem to indicate that we’ve gone beyond the point of the sensible and entered into hysteria territory.”
Yes, this is the video I posted here.
On an unrelated note, what’s up with these one sentence paragraphs?
Don’t the writers of the news think that we have attention spans that last longer than one sentence?
Perhaps if they tried writing three or maybe four sentence long paragraphs, they would get a pleasant surprise.
That is just my opinion, of course.
You may have your own.
There’s a scene in Robert Heinlein’s Friday where the protagonist is given free access to her employer’s computer network and she’s able to explore to her heart’s content. She wanders throughout the network, finding all sorts of information, feeding the curious Elephant’s Child inside of her, and ends up making mental connections with worldwide implications. Of course, the novel was written in 1982, far before the web, but hell – Heinlein was basically describing Google.
Here’s where my internet wanderings took me tonight. I saw a news story about Phil Spector’s trial being postponed. That led me to look up his Wall of Sound technique, which took me on some side excursions to echo chambers, Abbey Road Studios, and zebra crossings. But something about echo chambers made me remember the wonderful awful album I used to listen to as a kid, Music to Suffer By, by the incomparable Leona Anderson. I found from that page that she was an occasional guest on the Ernie Kovacs show, and of course I had to go watch some of his skits. Enjoy – here’s Percy Dovetonsils, the Tilted Room, and the Nairobi Trio.
Real or fake?