Please be warned. The pictures displayed on this page I'm linking to may provoke intense feelings of lust, desire and sensual excitement. You may find yourself unable to tear your gaze away from these images. The oozing brown contours they depict may provoke an urge toward fulfilment and release that you will find impossible to ignore. Basically, they're hot.
Ladies and gentlemen, feast your peepers on Espresso Porn.
Oh. My. God.
And thanks to goodcoffee.co.nz for the link …
When you've re-adjusted your clothing, please be aware that my serious analysis juice is all used up for the week. If you're interested in some useful and informative contributions from your fellow readers (including one or two inside the Telecom citadel) on this week's telecommunications debate, you're waiting until Monday, okay?
Anyway, No Right Turn - who has been in great form this year - has more thoughtfulness than you can shake a stick at, and has posted a draft bill to abolish our old and irrelevant blasphemous libel law, now that the rather loopy group Catholic Action is trying to get a prosecution against C4.
And I'll leave recent events in Iraq to Riverbend. She doesn't even sound stroppy - she sounds scared.
I'm in the mood, rather, for highlighting various acts of flagrant copyright stupidity. There's London Transport's absurd action in taking down a very clever "remix" of the famous London Underground map, with every station name replaced with an anagram of itself. Duh! Naturally, good Internet users have responded by posting not only the banned map but a collection of other remixes.
Possibly even crazier (hat tip: Dubber) is the emergence of a new licensing requirement on club DJs in Britain. It requires them to pay an additional licence fee if they rip music they have legally bought to a hard drive for convenience. And then it just gets really silly. Yes, lawyers are now being paid to write rules precisely dictating how two songs may, or may not, be mixed together for the pleasure of an audience.
I only came in part-way through 20/20's 'Playground Pushers' story last night, but that was enough to form the impression that it was a fairly alarming piece of work.
It seems some youths have been using a bench at Grey Lynn Park, near the playground, to sell small quantities of marijuana (I guess property prices make tinny houses a bit tricky these days). That's certainly a fair enough story, but some of the gibbering hidden-camera silliness that followed was not.
The treatment was, at times, outrageous. Children around the several youths selling small deals of pot were being used as "cover" intoned reporter Hadyn Jones. An in-studio policeman helpfully observed that prams and dirty nappes were a good place to hide drugs: cue a shot of someone getting something from a pram.
Doubtless realising that the audience might not get sufficiently exercised over a couple of joints, Jones launched into a fit of speculation - without a shred of evidence - that the $500 calculated to have been reaped from small-time sales of marijuana would be saved and spent on P (which would then, presumably, be sold to schoolchildren or something). The policeman helpfully passed on an anecdote to the effect that he'd heard some gangs were now spraying marijuana "with a fine mist of methamphetamine".
Da-da-dum. Jones: "Do you really know what you're smoking?"
I'm sorry, but for fuck's sake …
Okay. I'm waiting for an assurance that no one working on 20/20 has ever casually bought marijuana. And that if they did, they'd all consider it a fair cop if a camera crew was to follow and identify them and later bail them up near their place of work, so a reporter could make patronising observations about their lifestyle.
Worst of all, one of the members of Nesian Mystik was filmed in the park talking to some of the group the included the tinny dealers. No evidence was offered that he bought or consumed marijuana. He stood guilty, it seemed, of knowing someone of roughly the same age and background as him in his own community. This was enough for Jones to run some ancient clip with the band saying they were role models and shouldn't give kids the idea that drugs were cool. His subsequent refusal to comment? Well, that just confirmed things, didn't it?
And finally, some fanboy madness from WFMU: Using Google Earth to find famous film locations. Anyone up for spending a few hours doing the same thing here?