(no subject)

Surely it's up to a court to determine whether Roman Polanski ought to face punishment, not up to his powerful friends nor public opinion. If he deserves leniency for one reason or another, then a sentencing judge will take that into consideration.

Fun with loanwords

You know all of these words. Can you recognise them? (They're all things you might find in your house.)

al-khol
jarrah
laymun
leemah
naranj
qutun
riz
suffah
sukkar
talq

Smitin' Hedz

Optus set a collection agency onto me. I set the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman onto them. Just now talked to a very nice lady from Optus who said of course I shouldn't have been charged the cancellation fee, of course the helpdesk people should have fixed it for me, and of course it would be waived.

ALL AVAILABLE ASS: KICKED.

(no subject)

Discussing "illiteracy" on the Intersplat (in this case, merely a defiantly casual attitude to typos) I looked up the stats on actual illiteracy in Australia, and was surprised to learn that about half of all adult Australians can't understand newspapers, forms, instructions, maps, timetables, etc etc, well enough "to meet the complex demands of everyday life and work in the emerging knowledge-based economy". Those are important things which people will put some effort into reading and thinking about. Flipping heck, what chance has a posting on the Internet got?!

Serfin'

The calibre of the militant atheist's arguments have not improved. Hitchens can't even distinguish between quite simple concepts, like knowing right from wrong and actually doing the right thing. It's the equivalent of sex or drug "education" which consists of scary hyperbole and is widely ignored as a result.

Further salvage from the bookmarks

On Community, and the difference between Usenet (and mailing lists) and Livejournal.