Once again, Triple J has vindicated my taste in music, by having as #1 in the Hottest 100 a song I have never heard before in my life.

In fact, the entire Hottest 100 this year was comprised mostly of songs I had either never heard, or ones that I’d merely overheard in public, like that infuriating Dandy Warhols track, or the Outkast one. The remainder comprised entire albums from Powderfinger and the White Stripes. Surely this isn’t the state of the art in music.

So, I’ve resolved to start listening to the radio again. Keep up with the Joneses, and all that. That said, some of my favourite bands I have discovered without the aid of a radio.

Slipknot
I had Slipknot’s album on my hard disk, but I’d never taken the time to listen to it. That is, until a partitioning mishap caused The Great Hard Disk Crash of 2000. I’m never using Partition Magic again.

Anyway, the mishap caused all my music files to be corrupted with portions of other songs. This had the effect of creating a sort of computer mix tape. I was listening to one of these mixes out of curiosity when the second half of Eyeless by Slipknot came on. I recognised the ear-splitting racket instantly.

Death Cab For Cutie…
Just one example of a band whose album I ordered off the net, without having heard any of their music ever before. Sometimes you just hafta take a chance.

Human Waste Project
A band I got into by overhearing my housemate play the songs. I ended up having to get this album from Britain via eBay, but it was worth it. Sadly, they only put out the one album before disbanding.

De La Soul…
An example of the many bands I’ve got into after sampling their work on the Internet first. I’ve said it a thousand times, the MP3 culture is not something the music industry should be fighting against.

Edan
I came across Edan whilst searching CDNOW (rest in peace) for a completely different band. That site was great, until it was assimilated by Amazon. I swear, Amazon has the worst interface of any commercial website I have ever seen. Anyway, the soundbite was cool.

Edan is a one man band—DJ, MC and producer—whose recordings have the vibe of a 1980s rap fanboy making tapes in his parents’ living room. While Eminem is selling billions of records by rapping about homosexuals and Vicodin, Edan is keeping it real by rapping about stealing.

According to an article in the Daily Telegraph, Bundaberg Rum’s polar bear may be an irresponsible choice of mascot for the distiller. So says the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre (NDARC).

As the logic goes, children like talking animals, and the blokey Bundy bear may influence the kiddlywinks to put down their Pokemons and Britney Spears CDs and have a go at Mum and Dad’s liquor cabinet instead.

The polar bear (Ursus Maritimus) is the largest land carnivore. The males grow to over 2.5 metres in length, and have been known to weigh more than a small car. This makes them roughly 20 times heavier than your average child, and twice as long.

Polar bears love to eat. This includes meals, snacks, high teas, luncheons; anything to put on weight for hibernation. Although they prefer seafood, they are probably quite open-minded to the possibility of human meat as well. They can smell you from miles away, and can run and swim faster than man.

The idea of a child cuddling one is absurd, as merely approaching the beast would be provocation.

No doubt, the NDARC is an important body, with intelligent people genuinely trying to make a difference. But I feel that the Bear is a victim of political correctness. Meanwhile, something far more insidious, featured in practically all alcohol advertising in this country, threatens to corrupt our children: bogans.

If you believe television, you’d probably think every adult male who drinks alcohol is a bogan. Or an emasculated urban bloke who has to make an excuse to the wife whenever he wants to have a drink with his chums, who are all likewise emasculated. With role models like these, kids don’t have a lot of hope.

Therefore, I propose to the NDARC to stop slandering poor Bundy, and take action on the real issue that is the bogan.

The final instalment in the “Websites that became Kewn’s World and then ceased to be Kewn’s World anymore” series of websites, has now arrived. So, go on—take the Splunge. I told him you would, don’t make me look like a liar.

Kewn makes a valid point about Web standards. Let’s face it, validating your pages is about as fun as a holiday in a Turkish prison. And when it’s all done, most readers don’t even notice, because your page looks exactly the same as it did before! So, you take that “Valid!” sticker, the one that doesn’t at all match the colour scheme of your site, and you shove it right in your reader’s stupid face.

I like to think of accessibility as designing one’s pages to be ‘pliable’. Good page design will bend to meet a whole range of needs. It should make sense without pictures. It should be readable using text-to-speech software for the vision impaired. It should print well.

Above all: if you do a good job, people will think you did nothing at all. Not all of your readers are going to be computer programmers. If you get the urge to tell them all about the scripting language your site uses, the database server, the operating system kernel version, et cetera, in the first paragraph of your site, right after the title¹—cut that shit out, right now. Yes, web sites run on computers, we get it. I’ve seen too many site authors run their mouths on technical jargon and then forget to put any actual content there. Take that boring shit to a separate page for people who are interested.

So, say it loud, say it proud: I’m valid! While I object conscientiously to showing the buttons myself, I salute those brave men and women who put their pages on the front line!

¹   In case I didn’t make it obvious enough, none of this is aimed at Kewn—his site actually has content.

Recently, a story about Michael Abney-Hastings, a farmer from Jerilderie, New South Wales, being the rightful heir to the British throne has been doing the rounds. The story has been picked up and passed around by every news program you can imagine. I especially enjoyed the Fox News interviewee’s observation that the incumbent royal family is “inbred to within one chromosome of insanity” and that the hale and hearty Aussie would be a refreshing alternative.

The story is as follows. For a long time, it has been the rule that those of illegitimate birth are unfit to claim the throne of England. There were persistent rumours that Edward IV (reign 1461–1483) was in fact the product of a tryst between his mother and a French archer while Dad was out of town. Unsurprisingly, no one really found any convincing evidence during the king’s lifetime.

Historians now reckon that they have found this evidence, and affirm Edward IV’s illegitimacy. This means that, technically, Edward’s issue, including Elizabeth II, have been in power for over five hundred years without being entitled to it. Take George, Edward’s younger—and one would assume, legitimate—brother, follow the standard rules of succession, and voila: a forklift operator from rural Australia.

It is a fascinating story, and I for one would like to congratulate the historians for doing such a bang-up job. Never mind that the present-day rules of succession are determined by the Act of Settlement (1701), which states that only Protestant descendants of Sophia, Electress of Hanover (1630–1714), who have not married a Catholic, may reign. Because that would just take the fun out of the whole story. I say, let’s give the Windsors a couple of weeks to move out, and then give them the royal arse!

“Fear is the path to the west side“

So, funny story, I’m upgrading WordPress, and whilst backing up the previous version, I accidentally issue the following command:

mv index*.php

Meaning, move indexsomething.php to someplace, without specifying where that place is. Which, of course, overwrote index.php with index-geo.php.

Leaving me without a backup copy of the file that controls this site’s layout. So sit back, relax, and enjoy the new James look and feel for a few days!

Happy new year!

Today marks the first anniversary of this web journal. In one short year, this site has:

• Been a runner up for a Webby award in the category of Least Updated Site, with a special commendation for Out of Date Photographs
• Frustrated hundreds of people using Google to search for things that they would not ultimately find on my site
• Served as a medium for me to improve my writing skills, at the expense of its readers, if any.

The passing of 2003 also marks the departure of Kewn’s site. Bigger than the UN, the US Government and Microsoft put together, the homepage of Lachlan Kuhn was the single most important entity in existence, regularly receiving visits from the Almighty himself, gaining favour within the highest ranks of the IOC for Tingalpa 2008’s nearly-successful bid, and reluctantly spawning a grassroots promotion campaign whose catchphrase “Come to Kewn!” has become ubiquitous in every language.

Taking its place in the links section is Juan Closque’s site, which includes the very cl(_(_)y Snippets series, and what appears to be a word-for-word duplicate of his live journal. How handy.