So it is with great sorrow that, just a few months after creating this account, I bid WordPress.com goodbye. Truth is Rico made me a great offer to integrate one of his series of tubes portals, which I promptly accepted. So, if anyone actually reads this blog, I ask you to go to proverbial.tube-tube-tube.com and update your feeds.

I’ll probably keep this WordPress.com version alive, since I have to keep my account because of Akismet. But there probably won’t be any more postings. Thanks for everything, guys!

Four years ago, when the Arcade Fire first started performing its songs from “Funeral,” it took the band six months to create the kind of show that eventually brought it such renown. Now, with a highly anticipated album about to come out, a year of tour dates lined up and one night to go before they were to begin their five-show run in London, the musicians were still groping their way forward — trying to find portable (and performable) ways of recreating the symphonic richness of “Neon Bible” by reworking vocal approaches and instrumental arrangements and improvising new bits of theater.

Pitchfork, which helped making them popular with a 9.7 review for their debut album, wasn’t all that impressed with Neon Bible, which only got an 8.4. I tend to agree with most of what they’ve said in it, but the Arcade Fire still sounds so fresh, so different and so good to me, that I can’t really say it’s any worse than Funeral. Now I just hope the damn thing gets released in Brazil soon, and that they come to play at Porto Alegre again.

The Bush administration has accelerated its Internet surveillance push by proposing that Web sites must keep records of who uploads photographs or videos in case police determine the content is illegal and choose to investigate, CNET News.com has learned.

Excellent timing, if nothing else, seeing as how people are warning there may not be enough space to hold all the information we’re currently producing. Obviously, it shouldn’t take long for people to start thinking about Brazil analogies.

In fact, when things like these start happening, even such analogies might be unnecessary:

Imagine a government agency, in a bureaucratic foul-up, accidentally gives you a copy of a document marked “top secret.” And it contains a log of some of your private phone calls.

You read it and ponder it and wonder what it all means. Then, two months later, the FBI shows up at your door, demands the document back and orders you to forget you ever saw it.

Not to worry, though: the Bush administration is considering a ban on social networks for kids on libraries and schools. That should really help slow down the amount of traffic to monitor, and make the mapworld a little smaller. A very comforting idea when you have judges throwing teachers in jail for not knowing how to fight adware.

And still, no one understood the net. “Why go?“, they asked.

For starters, the idea that “virtually having sex with children [that are adults, in reality] will result in sexual child abuse in the real world” seems to me like another version of the “smoking pot will lead to stronger and more dangerous drugs”, or “violent video games are responsible for raising teen criminals” rationale. And also, while he’s in front of a computer having virtual sex with a child-like avatar that’s actually being controlled by a consenting adult, this would-be child molester is not out on the streets actually abusing kids. Isn’t it possible that this could, in fact, be used as a means of controlling these individuals’ urges?

I mean, if pedophiles can feel fulfilled with infatilists, isn’t that something that should be stimulated? Even better if the relation can be kept on a virtual basis. To me, this definitely seems like a case were the Dutch government’s money could be put to much better use.

Gun crime has doubled since they were introduced. Young hoodlums are able to acquire handguns – either replica weapons that have been converted, or imports from eastern Europe – with ease. (…) The only people currently incommoded by the firearms laws are legitimate holders of shotgun licences, who are subjected to the most onerous police checks.

The last sentence, in particular, is something that should be attached to some research on the rise of firearm-related crimes in post-Dunblane England and translated into every conceivable language on the planet, in hopes that people will at last understand that such laws are useless in preventing criminals from acquiring guns.

UPDATE: now with the proper link.

What amazes me is that, unlike global warming, this is a problem that we seem well suited to solve and protect ourselves from. And yet, relying on scientists’ claim that it is not a realistic threat – even though not a week goes by without a Hubble image or something forcing astronomers to reconsider everything they believe in -, the powers that be don’t think it is something that needs to be dealt with at this point.

My hope is that if China can build a weapon to shoot down satellites, they may be able to tweak it to make space rubble out of asteroids.

UPDATE: on MSNBC’s Cosmic Log, Alan Boyle details what are our current options against a killer asteroid.

“It’s not only your image that’s exposed. You lose the tranquility of doing whatever you want in your residence”, says the attorney. According to Nicolau, the Public Ministry could file a preventive public civil lawsuit against Google to establish a limit to the images’ zoom.

All of this because Folha de S. Paulo didn’t seem to have anything better to report, and decided to talk about a November 2006 post on Google Sightseeing, showing people caught on Google Earth while sunbathing nude. But it should be interesting to see someone trying to convince a judge that it’s them in such crystal clear pictures like this.

Even though it seems like the song was pasted over miscelaneous footage, what you see is what you get: Peter Frampton doing an instrumental cover of Soundgarden’s Black Hole Sun, with help from Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready and Matt Cameron. Great stuff.

It’s part of Frampton’s latest – and first all instrumental – record, Fingerprints, which has some other very interesting guests. I’ll certainly look for it on stores. (via LAist)