Urban Islam

Just back from a not-so-private private view of Urban Islam, where I was mistaken for the ambassador of Macedonia (no offence to Macedonians, I hope). The exhibition presents statements & backgrounds of young muslims from places as different as Switzerland, Morocco, Senegal, Suriname & Turkey. But it was a big disappointment to me: Although the concept originates from the Netherlands with its recent history of islamistic violence, there doesn't seem to be a single line of criticism about Islam in it. Please let me know if you find one! The website appears to reflect the actual exhibition fairly accurately.

In order to compensate for that lack of a critical attitude, here is today's BBC interview (via her blog) with dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Papa Razzi

B16 is a continuous source of amusement. First Gucci shoes and Prada eyewear (or was it the other way round?), and now this. Evidently, the Jesuit injection of worldliness is doing the church a whole lot of good. Good bye, sanctimoniousness, hello pop culture!

Oh, ein Klavier, ein Klavier!

Wenn Du schon immer mal den berühmten Sketch von Loriot hast nachstellen wollen, dann gibt es jetzt eine günstige Gelegenheit!

Ich habe ein wenig gebrauchtes Qualitätsklavier der Marke Schimmel zu verkaufen. Das Baujahr ist 1973, die Seriennummer 141601, Ausführung in Nussbaum satiniert. Die Bauhöhe ist 109cm auf 147cm breit. Das Instrument ist gut im Schuss und trotz jahrelanger Stehdauer im Keller nur leicht verstimmt (im Schnitt ca. -30 cent im Korg). Der Käufer kümmert sich selbst um Transport und Stimmung. Bei Interesse bitte umgehend bei mir melden! Mehr Bilder gibt's übrigens im flickr stream.

PowerBook

While I've outed myself as a PB partisan, I do not need a shrink just now, thank you very much!

FOWL Radio on the air!

It's live, on the air - or on the wire, as it were ... now I wonder whether this is progress or actually a step back behind the wireless. But then again, I get my internet via a wireless connection ...

Enough waffling. Move over to FOWL Radio already & check out the podcast. Or subscribe to it straight away here. Feedback is mandatory!

Tolkien, abridged

The smart people over at How It Should Have Ended show us how middle earth could have been saved far more efficiently (via His Honour). Watch this.

American greatness ...

will be reinstated and vindicated if and when this grand speech by Al Gore will be acted upon.

Spurious' Visit to India

Check out this highly atmospheric travel report - I wish I could write like that!

New pool!

Yay! I found yet another new swimming pool, which is quite literally new: it has been reopened after an extensive renovation on January 7, and it's very nice! I am certainly happy about this discovery because I've already become quite cranky for lack of exercise. The best thing, though is that there aren't very many visitors, and, being the egotist that I am, I hope that this will stay that way. Fortunately they are not doing a whole lot of marketing for it, so I only found out about it because of an article in the newspaper. But their online presence is really quite meagre, even though they certainly have a lot of real time information (number of current visitors in map.search for instance, webcam, water temperature, events etc) available in such a completely refurbished & well equipped facility.

In other news, Simran has created a great new title caption for this blog - check it out!

Log news

First of all, some embarrassing news and an apology: A while ago I activated the comment moderating function in blogger without realising that new comments would require my approval henceforth. Thus a couple of comments got stuck in virtual no man's land, and I was becoming increasingly discouraged by the apparent lack of reader feedback despite of the recent additions in RSS subscriptions (hello there!). But thanks to Simran's intervention (thanks!), all is well now: stuck comments have been freed and you can comment to your heart's delight again!

The really attentive blog reader may have noticed the new flickr tag way down in this log book's sidebar, indicating that I've joined the world of photocasting (yes, even before the impending arrival of iLife '06!) by posting pictures on flickr. RSS readers will either have to come visit the blog occasionally (highly recommended for leaving comments anyway), or go subscribe to the photofeed.

Even more earth moving news is the release of Google Earth, a very fascinating and complex free Geographical Information System. Incidentally, it is also available on the Windows platform.

That's that for now. Oh, one more thing: I got Garageband to run again by simply deleting /Library/Application Support/com.apple.garageband.plist. The reason why I am learning to use Garageband will be the object of a later post.

P.S. There is a known issue with comments on posts dating pre-host move. Those posts will show the html source when viewed individually. This is due to the lack of Apache Multiview support on the new server, and blogger for some reason does not republish each invididual post using the modified template, which now includes an .html ending. Will check with blogger whether there's a non-manual solution to this.