Category: Arts and Culture

kfccruelty.com reports that KFC won’t be opening franchises in Tibet after all. After receiving a letter from the Dalai Lama:

On behalf of my friends at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), I am writing to ask that KFC abandon its plan to open restaurants in Tibet, because your corporation’s support for cruelty and mass slaughter violate Tibetan values …

According to the beeb, KFC’s parent company says they’ve decided not to enter Tibet “because it wouldn’t be profitable.”

I wonder what would happen if The Pope wrote a letter to McDonald’s asking them not to open any more slaughterhouses in Kansas.

Thanks rinchen.

The hilarious parody of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” at JibJab is a victim of its own success. The copyright holders of Woody Guthrie’s original are suing JibJab for infringement (like, how many parodies of this song did you have memorized in elementary school?) The EFF has leapt to JibJab’s defense by responding with a counter-suit. Woody’s son Arlo “Alice’s Restaurant” Guthrie was interviewed on NPR, and says that his father would have loved the parody. And just how many lost record sales of the original does the copyright holder think it stands to lose, anyway? Ernest Miller has details.

Want to stage a public reading of Joyce’s Ulysses next Bloomsday? Make sure Joyce’s son Stephen doesn’t find out about it. He’ll sue your pants off.

Few are spared. He has targeted publishing houses, internet readings, and an Edinburgh fringe musical using Molly Bloom’s soliloquy from Ulysses. An Irish composer who requested permission to quote 18 words of Finnegans Wake received a refusal letter saying: “To put it politely, my wife and I don’t like your music.”

But now, fearful for this month’s mammoth celebrations of Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses, Irish MPs this week rushed through emergency legislation that will prevent Mr Joyce from suing the Government and the National Library over an exhibition which displays 500 pages of Joyce manuscripts…

So much for Joyce’s commitment to freedom of expression.

Some online friends from antiweb run the New York-based poetry collective LitKicks.com, which has been doing cool readings, gatherings and publications for a decade now. To celebrate their 10th anniversary, they’re hosting a massive, timezone-busting, internet-wide collaborative poetry generation happening next weekend (Friday 23 / Saturday 24):

The 24 HOUR POETRY PARTY is one of the most ambitious poetry experiments ever attempted. The entire event will take place online at LitKicks.com during the course of a single day and night. Seeded with original poems, writings and koans by a number of renowned poets, participants all over the world will join in the spontaneous composition of a single epic “real-time poem” describing 24 hours in the life of planet Earth.

In traffic court this morning to see what I could do about a lame speeding ticket (31 in a 25 zone, so sue me). Thought I could pop in quickly before work and take care of it. Show up at 9:15, they said. Two hours later, courtroom still full of cases, people trying to excuse themselves for driving without licenses, insurance, registration. Maddening. Finally gave up and paid the damn thing. Would have taken forever, and my case seemed so freeze-dried compared to the “edge cases” that were being handled.

During the proceedings a homeless man took the stand. Scruffy, hair sticking up, dirty Halvoline jacket, original Sony Walkman on his hip. Looked permanently drunk. His crime: Riding a bicycle without a helmet. When it was his turn to testify, the sum of his testimony for the judge was: “I was born without a helmet, why should I wear one now?” Judge fined him $53. Man said he couldn’t pay, asked to do community service. Judge said no, gave him an extra month to scrape together the money.

Another man lives on the streets near my work. Usually friendly, occasionally rants. Sweeps the sidewalks for all of us. Sweeping is “his thing.” Recently learned that he had planted a few stalks of corn next to a nearby parking garage – his own little public garden. One of my many bosses apparently suggested that he tell the government about his corn, because they would pay him to stop growing it. Pretty brilliant when you think about it. I wonder if our homeless friend got the joke.

Today’s portion of the J-School’s China and the Internet conference kicks off with a live webcast of Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Lessig, who has fought valiantly and eloquently against the world’s most overzealous copyright giants. Lessig is the author of “The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World” and helped create the Creative Commons license.

Update: Not sure who linked to the stream, but we suffered the /. effect — suddenly swamped with requests, which took out the streaming server. Back up with the rest of the conference now. Apologies to everyone who tried to connect to the Lessig stream – the archive will be online early next week.

My (incomplete) notes on Lessig’s keynote are posted behind the MORE link.
Continue reading “Lawrence Lessig on China”