I’m being besieged by spammers and have been forced to crank up the defences, with the inevitable “collateral damage”. What I’ve worked out so far for those who want to avoid this category:

(1) Don’t use lots of hyperlinks
(2) Send from a regular working email account – Spam Karma doesn’t seem to like anonymisers and so on needful things dvd download

Inspired by this site, the crew over at Troppo Armadillo have started some interesting discussions of Tintin, Asterix and cognate topics such as postmodernism and English teaching. Well worth a visit.

My piece in today’s Fin, over the fold, brings together arguments about the Kimberley canal project, which has been debated here on the blog. As usual, I got a lot out of all the comments, whether or not this is obvious in the published article. Thanks to everyone who contributed to the debate.
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My spam filters seem to be blocking a lot of legitimate comments. I’ll look into this. In the meantime, apologies to all those affected.

I seem to have lost trackback capacity – people are linking but they are not showing up as trackbacks. If any readers can automagically divine the source of my problem, I’d be very grateful. My host recently rearranged my directories, putting the WordPress blog at root level to fix the RSS feed, so perhaps I’ve gained on the roundabouts and lost on the swings.

There’s lots of interesting issues under discussion at present, but, inevitably, vigorous discussion is sliding into flamewar. No individual comment has been offensive enough for me to intervene, but there’s a lot of shouting going on. That tends to reduce comments threads pretty rapidly to repetitive exchanges between two or three people – entertaining for a little while, but a turn-off after that. Could I ask everyone involved to take a deep breath and avoid any personal criticism for a while. There’s plenty of meat left in these issues, I think.

Readers of my previous post will have noticed that I don’t know much about MMPORPGs In fact, I don’t do much gaming these days, though I chewed up untold amounts of then-scarce mainframe computer time playing Adventure in the 1970s. Still my foray into the field has left me the kind of excitement you get the first time you wander into one of these domains and find precious jewels lying about everywhere.
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One of the Australia Day events I didn’t catch up with until today was the announcement of the second (I think) annual Australian blog awards, run by Keks. Most of my favourites scored some kind of guernsey, including Barista (best Vic blog), Rob Corr’s Kick and Scream (best political and best WA), Troppo Armadillo (best NT and best group blog), Surfdom (best OS blog) and Gianna at She Sells Sanctuary (best personal blog). And this blog picked up the coveted “best blog in Queensland” award, beating off (sorry, couldn’t resist) Dawei’s House of Debauchery and Bee-yotching.

The left wing of Ozplogistan swept the awards, which is partly a reflection of who bothered to vote, but partly a reflection of the extent to which the left now dominates the virtual sphere in Australian politics, however poorly we may be doing In Real Life. When I started blogging in the distant days of 2002, right-wing bloggers dominated the scene. A year ago, I’d have said the balance was about the same as in the Australian electorate as a whole. Today, although there are some good right-wing and centre-right blogs, they are a distinct minority.

Anyway, thanks very much to Keks for taking the trouble to run this exercise. I know how much work goes into this kind of thing and I really appreciate it.

Iranians are stocking up on candy and flowers with which to bestrew invading US troops, according to Thomas Friedman who says “many young people apparently hunger for Mr. Bush to remove their despotic leaders, the way he did in Iraq.”. His evidence for this proposition is the following

n Oxford student who had just returned from research in Iran told me that young Iranians were “loving anything their government hates,” such as Mr. Bush, “and hating anything their government loves.” Tehran is festooned in “Down With America” graffiti, the student said, but when he tried to take pictures of it, the Iranian students he was with urged him not to. They said it was just put there by their government and was not how most Iranians felt.

Iran, he said, is the ultimate “red state.”

Oddly enough, when I last visited America, I met plenty of people who “love anything their government hates,” and assured me that the kind of thing I saw on Fox was not really the way most Americans felt. They didn’t feel able to confess to me that they were longing for the arrival of a Franco-German liberation army, but no doubt if I’d had the benefit of an Oxford education, I would have been able to detect their eagerness for an invasion, civil war and so on.

Reader Nick Caldwell kindly took the trouble to supply me with an alternative layout for the blog, which I’m now testing. Unfortunately, I haven’t got the header working yet, but hopefully I can fix that soon. In the meantime, I’ll ask for comments from readers on any of
(i) The changes to the layout of the main post section
(ii) Readability problems created or resolved
(iii) Links column on left rather than right
(iv) Anything else

Update Thanks to all who’ve commented, favourably and otherwise. Some further points

1. I plead guilty to asking for more red in Nick’s original design, resulting in the terrible puce/mushroom you see now. My color intuition is woeful, I’m afraid. If anyone can suggest a better colour scheme that I can easily implement, please do so. In the meantime, I plan to go back to Nick’s original.

2. I’ve now managed to get the links to the header working, and Nick has supplied more CSS which implements Textile footnotes properly. Great!

3. I’m still not happy with the sidebar, but I definitely like the changes in the main body.