The world adores matt hayward

I’m amazed that Vincent Flanders is still doing web pages that suck. He had some good principals back in the day and taught me a hell of a lot. But with the sands of time, I thought that would’ve died out. Perhaps Web 2.0 has increased his business tenfold. Anyway for those of you that came in late, he highlighted sites that suck to emphasis design principals that do work. A very healthy thing to do and often quite funny.

For the first time in a long time I’ve been inspired by web design that truly sucks - yes in this day and age. BEA Weblogic are meant to be leaders in portal technology, but not according to this BEA I define demo. It’s totally in Adobe Flash and is designed so that everything is one click - and about ten seconds - away. Why? Because they’re trying to be cool. You click something and doors spin around and a mock movie screen loads up.

This spinning door thing is made especially sucky because the spinning doors are really high resolution. So they don’t spin right. They’re really clunky unless you have a gazillion gigs or RAM and as many processors on your machine, making it look especially stupid. The person who was trying to look cool forgot the premise ‘I am here to download a document. Just give me the document’. Until BEA, this stuff had died off in the nineties.

So here they are pitching a very expensive product to a highly qualified audience and it’s like they’re trying sell ice to eskimos with an elaborate presentation. Nothing could impress me less. Basically you’re saying you have a superior web portal technology, but you wouldn’t know content from Adam. It’s tantamount to Gianni Versace wearing a wife beater singlet and trackie daks telling you he’s the ultimate fashionista.

If there was one thing that really made me think of Flanders though, it was the ‘mystery meat’ navigation. Just like getting in a car, you want to know what’s going to happen when you turn the key. You expect the engine to blurt into life and start idling quietly. Think about it. You want the same predictability from a web link. You want to know what’s going to open (a movie, a document, a web page) and where (a new window, a layer). For the life of me, this slick preso gave you no idea what was going to pop up - and generally the content wasn’t worth the wait. Mystery meat indeed - and that’s really hard to do these days.

Motto of the story, whether it’s the designer or the client, if you’re trying to act cool, it’s probably because you’re not. So get your message out there quickly and professionally and leave the cool to the Fonz. ESPECIALLY if you have very little content. Here’s the presentation link again.

Another top bloke bites the dust. George was in his early seventies but worked at a prolific pace until death. Most gen X and Yers would know him from Kevin Smith movies such as Dogma and Jersey Girl.

Whilst he may not have been the pioneer that Lenny Bruce was, he made a huge contribution to the art of stand up. He used obscenity not just to offend, but hold a mirror up to America and show how ridiculous conservative thinking really was. Point in case “Selling’s legal. Fucking’s legal. Why isn’t selling fucking legal?!”While the delivery may not have been completely original, the material was.

Oh yeah, and the ‘7 words you can’t say on television’ skit that almost made him the second commedian in US history (after Lenny) to be charged with obscenity in the early seventies. Post 9-11, he also got really stuck into airport security saying words to the effect of ‘it’s just to make white people feel safe’ and ‘it’s the government’s way of saying that we can fuck with you any time we want’.

He also had a famous altercation on Fox news that saw an interview end in furore and argument when he refused to tow the Republican line the program was taking. Carlin basically argued the news presenter down and walked off.

While he’s done so much great edgy stuff, it did take him a while to find his groove. Before he was the angry old man, he was a contemporary groovy comedian doing mostly impersonations. Which don’t really work today in all honesty. But it’s harder to appreciate an artist that always tried something new than someone that did the same schtick from the cradle to the grave.

If you’d like to hear a great albeit objective tribute to Carlin, have a listen to this Keith and the Girl (KATG) George Carlin podcast. It’s very fresh and cool. I don’t think Carlin would have it any other way.

Salut George!

In short, I’m afraid not. This has been bugging me for ages, and as soon as I can be bothered, I’ll put in some references. Perhaps it intrigues me because supermarket food is so mega bland and I’m always looking at kosher product as premium product. Hey kosher chickens from the Balaclava Safeway are mega fat and damned tasty - real tasty.

Organic food in much the same light. Both massively expensive, and to some extent, both are approved by the ministry of good intentions and nothing more. As with everything, kosher is way bigger in America. In Melbourne, unless you’re in Caufield, you will struggle to find anything more than bagels, matzoh or pickled gefilte fish. Meh, what can you do.

But our question is, is kosher food actually organic? No. Because religious doctrine written thousands of years ago could predict cheeseburgers being really unhealthy, but not petroleum based pesticides being used in agriculture on a colossal scale. And when the chemicals came, did they revise their doctrine? No chance.

The only thing with vegetables in kosher I could find was that they must be free of bugs. So in theory you could get tomatoes form Chernobyl and they’d be kosher. No wucken furries. Well what about the meat? From my skimpy research (and I welcome any feedback/corrections on the subject. I’m by no means authoritative on the subject). Again you could feed cows McCrap burgers and it could still be potentially kosher. There’s absolutely nothing I could find to say you couldn’t feed animals feed based on chemicals. Only how the beast is killed, the blood is drained and meat treated with salt.

Even more interesting is that in the US, kosher is considered such a high standard, in many states kosher meat packing plants aren’t subject to food standard inspections. Anecdotally, people have said how kosher places have gone out of business because word got out about how filthy their meat preparation facilities were. Thankfully, it would seem that the Jewish community is so small in Australia that a dodgy kosher butcher wouldn’t last long. Whether the same law exemptions apply in Australia, sorry no idea.

Anyways, if there was any motto to this story it’s that buy food based on quality, not dogma. If the kosher product is good and worth the money, good. Same with the organic. But unless you’re fervent in your beliefs, it’s best to mix and match to get the best quality food.

Oh yeah, and if peacenik organic types are so preoccupied with saving the planet one vegetable at a time, why the hell are they always wrapped in so much shitty plastic…

One of rock’s true greats has passed. For those of you who came in late, Bo Never filled stadiums, that wasn’t his job. Instead he inspired virtually all the stadium fillers! Being a repressed drummer, he invented his own rhythmic guitar style, loosely based on the ham bone military sqwuark that soldiers march to. This in essence doesn’t sound like much but that beat became the foundation of early rock and roll that inspired the likes of the Rolling Stones. Together with John Lee Hooker and Chuck Berry, you have the fore fathers of rock and roll.

Although he died at a right old age of 79, he still seemed in his prime. In the last few years, he’d toured Australia and been on breakfast radio with JJJ’s J and the Doctor. It was amazing to hear one of rock’s greats, larking about talking about how his rectangle shaped guitar came from an experience where he knackered himself on stage once, jumping around with his standard Gibson! If it seems a bit unlikely, watch this video of Bo Diddley in action. In the same interview, he asked for radio station t-shirts to give to his grand kids at home. What a top bloke!

For all his years, he was still touring around the world, perhaps not by choice. Like many rock players of the time, he never got the publishing rights to his tunes that would’ve made him a millionaire many times over. Nevertheless he was every bit the vital performer for his age. I for one would love to have that energy in my seventies. And that alone deserves huge amounts of respect.

On top of all that, Bo was a true nice gent and never undermined his character or work. He wasn’t known to swear or carry on about drugs, booze and loose women (at least in his later years). He just wrote fantastic riffs that could even be danced to. If you don’t believe me, just ask the Rolling Stones. They owe a huge debt of gratitude to Bo for their sound - as do many legendary rockers.

So with heavy hearts we say goodbye to yet another rock legend. R.I.P. Bo Diddley.

P.S. Is anyone able to confirm whether Bo made a cameo appearance as the pawn shop owner in the Eddie Murphy movie Trading Places of the 80s? I’m sure that was Bo Diddley!