Italy Boots Kebabs
January 31, 2009
The kebab “is being kicked out of Italian cities as it becomes the target of a campaign against ethnic food, backed by the centre-right Government of Silvio Berlusconi,” according to The Times (via Reddit). The ban started in the town of Lucca, and:
Yesterday it spread to Lombardy and its regional capital, Milan, which is also run by the centre Right. The antiimmigrant Northern League party brought in the restrictions “to protect local specialities from the growing popularity of ethnic cuisines”.
Luca Zaia, the Minister of Agriculture and a member of the Northern League from the Veneto region, applauded the authorities in Lucca and Milan for cracking down on nonItalian food. “We stand for tradition and the safeguarding of our culture,” he said…
Asked if he had ever eaten a kebab, Mr Zaia said: “No – and I defy anyone to prove the contrary. I prefer the dishes of my native Veneto. I even refuse to eat pineapple”…
The story goes on to make the silliness yet clearer.
The San Marzano tomato, a staple ingredient of Italian pasta sauces, was a gift from Peru to the Kingdom of Naples in the 18th century. Even spaghetti, it is thought, was brought back from China by Marco Polo, and oranges and lemons came from the Arab world…
Massimo Di Grazia, the [Lucca] city spokesman, said that the ban was intended to improve the image of the city…
There is confusion… over what is meant by ethnic. Mr Di Grazia said that French restaurants would be allowed. He was unsure, though, about Sicilian cuisine. It is influenced by Arab cooking.
The article really does seem to be from the The Times, rather than from The Onion. It does not mention whether onions are seen as undesirable foreign invaders.
Spotify Gets Spottier
January 31, 2009
“Why is Spotify not available in my country?” That’s what greets me when I visit the free, ad-supported, streaming music site. The answer is that “licensing restrictions” get in the way.
One of the selling point of the service, if free services can be said to have selling points, is the extensive catalogue. But that catalogue is changing, and not in a good way. It’s shrinking, at the insistence of record labels.
The changes are being made so that we implement all the proper restrictions that are required by our label deals… our agreements contain strict rules as to what tracks can and can’t be played in various countries… These restrictions are a legacy from when most music was sold on tapes and CDs and they have continued over into streaming music, our hope is that one day restrictions like this will disappear for good.
I got the news from TechCrunch, one of the sites that got me interested in Spotify in the first place. I’m now a little less interested.
By the way, I’m pretty happy with Lala. It has a pretty extensive catalog (making an appropriate switch to the US spelling now), free try-before-you-buy, and reasonable pricing once you decide you like.
Tale of Two T-Shirt Sales
January 26, 2009
The big t-shirt news of this particular Monday isn’t the Threadless $3 off for 3 days sale. Neither is it the new shirts available at that site, cool though some of them are (e.g., The Grand Escape).
And it isn’t the 10% off for two weeks sale at T-Shirt Hell. But it is the reason for that sale. The site “where all the bad shirts go” is closing down. I first saw the story at TechCrunch, where Mike Arrington quotes TSH’s Sunshine Megatron’s goodbye.
I started this company in June of 2001, nearly 8 years ago, with the intention of producing the best satirical, the most controversial, the funniest t-shirts on the internet. Generally speaking, I feel I’ve accomplished that and am satisfied with what we’ve put out. I made a shitload of dough along the way. I’ve done cocaine off the better body parts of supermodels. I’ve even raped and killed a mountain panda in the hills of Shaanxi. But these perks are besides the point.
I just don’t feel like dealing with idiots anymore. I’ll give you an example of the kind of misguided morons we deal with on a regular basis at T-Shirt Hell. We released a new shirt a couple weeks ago that says “It’s not gay if you beat them up afterwards”… we’ve been besieged with emails from angry people complaining about the “fact” that the shirt is hate speech or that we’re promoting gay bashing and should take it down immediately.
The Obama image is from TSH, by the way. I hadn’t heard of TSH before today. So I am reminded of the people who, when told about Elvis’ death, remarked that it was a good career move.
Rockbots and Animals
January 26, 2009
Here’s an interesting hypothesis: kids remember stuff when it’s in a song. It appears on the cover of Science, by Teacher and the Rockbots. One of the tracks, “Scientific Method,” might suggest ways of testing the hypothesis. But it’s not one of the stronger tracks on the album. Truth be told, it’s not a terrific album: the 14 tracks are rather similar in style but uneven in quality.
That said, TatR use the style well, they really rock. Here they are on the classification of animals.
In the Year of the Ox
January 26, 2009
So here we are in the Year of the Ox. Here in Boston, we are 20some minutes into that year (assuming it started at midnight). We followed the new year’s eve traditions, getting the house cleaner than it’s been in a long time, eating noodles, fish, and other traditional new year things.
On Saturday, we went to Kam Man in Quincy to stock up, as did rather a lot of other people. I was surprised to find that one can buy Kung Fu noodles there. We’ve been enticing our kids to eat noodles by relating them to Kung Fu Panda (a movie that the whole family likes). We didn’t try the KFN, though, since we haven’t resorted to instant noodles yet.
Bestee Finalists at Threadless
January 23, 2009
For someone who tends to mock awards, I tend to post about them a lot. So it is with cognitive dissonance, as well as with pleasure, that I link to the Bestee Award nominees at Threadless.
My vote goes to “Grandpa Cassette” by Zack Finfrock. I like some of the other work at Zack’s site, particularly this strip about the webcomic creative process.
Music of the Year
January 23, 2009
“Best of the year” pronouncements are particularly silly when they come before the end of the year, let alone before a decent interval has elapsed in which to digest the music/film/whatever. Feb 14 would seem a good date on which to decide on the best, or favorite, from the previous year. But of course to wait that long would to be scooped by the premature evaluators.
Mayhap me protest too much. Village Voice waited until a few days ago to come to the standard hipster conclusion about album of the year. Looking at the Pazz + Jop 2008 list, I see that they listed my album of 2008, albeit at 34. It’s unlikely that a wait of a few weeks would have changed their wrongheaded minds much.
The current premature evaluation leaders are those who have anointed Merriweather Post Pavilion as album of 2009. It’s certainly cool and catchy…
… and now I give my music video of 2009 for “My Girls.”
Globe Gets Linking
January 23, 2009
The Boston Globe has often been criticized (by me, among others) because articles at its web site are lacking in links to other sites. Strange, then, that there is a lawsuit against the Globe and its parent company because of… links.
The account of the story in today’s Globe is good in several ways. It links all over the place. I like that. I also like the apparent lack of a link to the plaintiff in the case.
GateHouse, a national chain of local daily and weekly newspapers based in Fairport, N.Y., filed its suit Dec. 22, alleging that Times Co. violated copyright law by using “verbatim” headlines and snippets from GateHouse stories.
Robert Weisman drew on a commendable variety of sources for his story, which closes with a quote from Hal Abelson of MIT. “My view is the reason you put stuff on the Web is so people can link to it.” That’s a view I share.
Year of the…
January 22, 2009
We are about to enter the Year of the Ox, as this image by Jason Kwok illustrates.
2009 may also be the year of the operating system. As Walt Mossberg notes:
This will be a big year for new operating systems. Apple plans a new version of its Macintosh operating system, to be called Snow Leopard. Palm plans an all-new smart phone operating system called Palm WebOS. But the new release that will affect more users than any other will be Windows 7, the latest major edition of Microsoft’s dominant platform.
That’s before we even get to the further adventures of Android.
Important though the web is as a platform, there are other platforms, with the operating systems prominent among them. In fact, one might say that it’s platforms all the way down.
Two Days in the USA
January 19, 2009
MLK Day and Inauguration Day, that is. It seems fitting that the inauguration of the first black president of the USA is the day after the celebration of MLK’s legacy.
I wondered about the algorithms for assigning specific dates to these days. I should probably have known, and maybe most citizens do, but I didn’t. An article that popped up on Yahoo News today told me that the 20th amendment moved inauguration day from April 30 to January 20. There were technological reasons for the switch to the colder time of year. A senate committee put it like this.
Under present conditions [of communication and transportation] the result of elections is known all over the country within a few hours after the polls close, and the Capital City is within a few days’ travel of the remotest portions of the country.
That was in 1937. It’s somehow cool to juxtapose that with the thought that Obama is taking a train, rather than jet plane, to DC.
On the other hand, it’s somehow strange to see how white the world is this MLK day. I refer to the snowstorm that went on rather longer than the forecasters thought it would. MLK day is “observed on the third Monday of January each year, around the time of King’s birthday, January 15″ (from Wikipedia).
