Such is life.
There are many Ned Kelly resources online for those interested in learning more about Australia’s most famous bushranger. For instance, Picture Australia also has many images of him while the State Library of Victoria has an online version of the Jerilderie Letter, a letter written (or perhaps dictated) by Kelly describing his view of his activities and the treatment of his family and, more generally, the treatment of Irish Catholics by the police.
Kelly had had originally written the letter to a politician known only as ‘Cameron’, but that correspondence was suppressed from the public and was not made public until it was published by the Melbourne Herald in 1930. If you found the version I lined to earlier hard to read, here is another site dedicated to that letter, with the text of the letter in both HTML and flash formats. The letter has inspired much debate about whether Kelly was truly an outlaw or a hero.
There is an excellent site dedicated to Kelly’s famous last stand at Glenrowan, and another good site which has collected most of the research on the evolution of the Kelly gang.
Here are some more sites you may find useful or interesting.
Timeline of the Kelly gang.
Another Ned Kelly biography.
More photos.
Ned Kelly’s stay at Beechworth.
And when you’re done with all of that, why not take a small quiz to see how much you’ve remembered!
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Double parking? Double taser.
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Corporate Magazines Still Suck
Happy 40th Birthday Rolling Stone. On this day in 1967, the first issue of Rolling Stone Magazine was published, and it came with a roach clip. It was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J. Gleason It embraced and reported on the hippy counterculture during the late 1960s and 1970s, and its rise to fame was synchronous with such bands and artists as the Grateful Dead, Beatles, Doors, Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. It is the magazine that trashed Eric Clapton, broke up Cream and ripped every album Led Zeppelin ever made!”
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Vintage Vertiginous Vaudevillian
Ben Dova the Drunk Daredevil, contortionist, Hindenburg survivor and one of the 10 most unfortunately named people on the internets.
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The unreleased 1998 documentary “Frat House”
In 1997, Todd Phillips and Andrew Gurland created a film documenting the savagely brutal hazing rituals that take place during Hell Week at U.S. college fraternities. Frat House was completed and won the Grand Jury Prize for documentaries at 1998’s Sundance Film Festival, an award that was later rescinded. HBO was slated to air it later that year, but pulled it for reasons that remain debatable to this day. It has never seen an official release.
Frat House (60 minutes, Google video, )
Lawyers representing several fraternity organizations and frat brothers charged that Phillips and Gurland, among other things, staged events, recreated scenes, and that the frat featured in the most severe segments doesn’t pledge during the spring semester when the footage was shot.
In interviews, the filmmakers stood by their work, saying the only questionable matter was that some of the pledges were in fact already members of the fraternity.
In order to get a firsthand view of the happenings, Phillips and Gurland pledged and went through Hell Week at two northeastern U.S. schools. I’m not going to spoil the way it turns out, but it’s a compelling and interesting watch. Whether or not it was fabricated, the film is a horrifying and realistic exploration of a side of undergrad life that most of us happily avoided.
Todd Phillips had previously directed Hated: G.G. Allin and & the Murder Junkies and then went on to the big time, helming such… um… classics as Road Trip and Old School. Andrew Gurland went on to make Mail Order Wife, a verry well done and… well, fake documentary.
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School Shootings – not just a North American problem
At least eight people are dead in a shooting at a school in Finland. Apparently some are blaming Youtube, as the killer posted some videos of himself shortly before the attack. How to get inside the mind of kids who do these terrible things? Are they just “bad seeds” or are these killers created? Clearly marginalization and alienation play a role. Many would-be -killers seem to share these fantasies of grandiose mass spectacles , many psychologists think are inspired by their immersion in violent video games and movies. There’s still controversy over the idea that watching violent TV/video games/etc can make kids more aggressive, and if that translates to violent behavior. I’m curious how often nationalist and racist rhetoric is also often deployed by these kids and wonder why that is: The Finland shooter, Auvinen called himself a “social Darwinist” who would “eliminate all who I see unfit”.
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Throw the tourist from the train.
Throw the tourist from the train. Ejected from a train for refusing to stop taking pictures from the train. Well, for not stopping anyway; the refusing part is unclear. The nation is now secure.
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Putting puppies in prison
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Save Your Precious Eyesight for Television
Why do we like, have to like, read so much in school? Why can’t there be like, a library with only like, books with like, not a lot of pages? Lazy Library, for those with short attention spans, tight schedules, or a report due tomorrow.
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Man placed on sex offenders register for sex with bike
The Daily Telegraph reports on a bizarre case in which a man
staying at a hostel was surprised by workers with a master key, having
sex with a bicycle. He has been placed on the sex offenders register,
despite apparently indulging in his practices in private with an
inanimate object. I am wondering how this is different from using, say,
a vibrator or blow-up doll? Do people in hostels have no right to
privacy?
The real killer paragraph is the last one – apparently someone was
jailed in 1993 for having sex with the pavement – or sidewalk in US
English.
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199 Peter Cook videos
199 Peter Cook videos (in case you don’t know who Peter Cook is, he’s often considered the funniest English comedian of the 20th Century, this myspace page has a concise biography).
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AIDS Invaded US in 1969, Study Finds.
Long before storied ‘Patient Zero‘ Gaëtan Dugas [previously] scientists now believe that HIV/AIDS “invaded the United States in about 1969 from Haiti, carried most likely by a single infected immigrant who set the stage for it to sweep the world in a tragic epidemic.” A new study to be published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
indicates that researchers conducted a genetic analysis of stored blood
samples from early AIDS patients and now believe that HIV first entered
the United States in the 1960s — and not the 1980s. Other “studies suggest the
virus first entered the human population in about 1930 in central
Africa, probably when people slaughtered infected chimpanzees for
meat.”
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The Man In Black
Ray Charles – Ring of Fire (this, my brothers and sisters, is how you cover a song and make it your own)/
Bob Dylan – I Threw It All Away/
Derek and the Dominoes (w/Carl Perkins)/
Roy Orbison – Crying/ The Cowsills/
Joni Mitchell – The Long Black Veil (sublime)
Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash “Girl From The North Country”
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Cranky Geeks with John C. Dvorak
John C. Dvorak, whose crankiness knows no bounds, is a contributing editor of PC Magazine, for which he has been writing two columns, including the popular Inside Track, since 1986.
Cranky Geeks is a weekly webcast/video podcast starring John C. Dvorak and other technology ‘cranks’
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Winemaking
Jack Keller’s winemaking site has not only the basics of home winemaking in 5 parts [12345], but also information on more advanced topics, including acidity, blending, and using a hydrometer. Equally interesting is his extensive collection of recipes for making wines out of things other than grapes, including dandelions and other edible flowers, wild plants (including nettles!), cabbages and beets, tea and coffee, mint, pomegranates, and pumpkins. A complete list of recipes is here, if you’d like to click through alphabetically, and a list of specially-requested recipes is here (scroll down a bit).
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Things I Have Failed To Masturbate To
Things I Have Failed To Masturbate To. I’ve tried wierder then this guy.
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Gap Unveils New ‘For Kids By Kids’ Clothing Line
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I don’t believe you, you’re a liar. Play it fucking loud!
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Roswell incident not explained to Richardson’s satisfaction
If he wins his bid for the White House, Democratic presidential candidate Bill Richardson may be just the man to get to the bottom of the 60-year-old Roswell UFO mystery.
Answering questions at a townhall meeting Friday, a Dell employee asked Richardson about the 1947 incident in which many people still believe a flying saucer landed near the eastern New Mexico town.
“I’ve been in government a long time, I’ve been in the cabinet, I’ve been in the Congress and I’ve always felt that the government doesn’t tell the truth as much as it should on a lot of issues,” said Richardson, who is governor of New Mexico.
Of course he could just ask Kucinich
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Dry erase cheese board
This cheese board set has dry erase functionality so you can more easily label each selection. It’s $20 from Macy’s, part of the Martha Stewart Collection .
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De-evolution imminent, claims scientist
The first sentence of this actual news story from the Daily Mail would make HG Wells proud:
The human race will one day split into two separate species, an attractive, intelligent ruling elite and an underclass of dim-witted, ugly goblin-like creatures, according to a top scientist.
For those who want to move past the silliness and actually consider whether there’s any science to this story at all, Bad Science’s Ben Goldacre wrote a column for The Guardian that’s a good place to start.
I’ve actually been observing and claiming the same thing for the past few years, as food for thought, check out the Movie “Idocracy“. Yes Mike Judge made it, but he’s actually pretty good, think Office Space and King of the Hill.. if you ignore his Beavis and Butthead years, he’s pretty good… wow I hate that show.
The purpose of the program set up by the Pentagon, called the “Human Hibernation Project,” is designed so that the military can save their best men for when they’re needed most. According to the officers heading the project, too many times the talents and expensive training of the best pilots and soldiers go to waste during times of peace. So they enlist Bauers (Wilson), the most under-achieving average guy they’ve got, to be the test subject for the initial hibernation experiment. Also participating in the top-secret program is Rita (Rudolph), a prostitute who agreed to take part in exchange for dropping some criminal charges against her, among other things. Of course, the experiment, which was to last only a year, goes under due to the arrest of Officer Collins, who is busted for heading a prostitution ring. Seeing as though he was in charge of the experiment, one of the only ones who knew of its existence, and due to a lot of top-secret red tape… and the massive scandals and base closure that followed, Joe and Rita were forgotten about.
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Failed futuristic predictions
Here’s a fine collection of 87 bad futuristic predictions from years gone by — many of them are risible because of their skepticism (see the “telephones” section below), but I’m very fond of the optimistic ones, too, like “Nuclear-powered vacuum cleaners will probably be a reality in 10 years” (Alex Lewyt, president of vacuum cleaner company Lewyt Corp., in the New York Times in 1955).
# «This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.» A memo at Western Union, 1878 (or 1876).
# «The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.» Sir William Preece, Chief Engineer, British Post Office, 1878.
# «It’s a great invention but who would want to use it anyway?» Rutherford B. Hayes, U.S. President, after a demonstration of Alexander Bell’s telephone, 1876.
# «A man has been arrested in New York for attempting to extort funds from ignorant and superstitious people by exhibiting a device which he says will convey the human voice any distance over metallic wires so that it will be heard by the listener at the other end. He calls this instrument a telephone. Well-informed people know that it is impossible to transmit the human voice over wires.» News item in a New York newspaper, 1868.
RobDurdle.com 
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