Via the null device, I learned something about Polari “(also seen as ‘Palare’), a gay slang language, which has now almost died out. It was more common in the 1960’s when gays had more need of a private slang…(I)n the last few years, more and more people have been finding out about it, and several web sites and magazine articles have been written…. (N)ever clearly defined: an ever-changing collection of slang from various sources including Italian, English (backwards slang, rhyming slang), circus slang, canal-speak, Yiddish and Gypsy languages. It is impossible to tell which slang words are real Polari. The page contains a lexicon of Polari slang of varying authenticity. Here is another lexicon with more source notation. Another essay, in some greater detail, is here at World Wide Words.

The poster was visited by the Secret Service for this post on kuro5hin. Since kuro5hin is down (for unrelated reasons), the events are discussed in this thread on Slashdot. And Sean Gullette received a phone call from the Secret Service after an online publication called “Why I Want to Fuck George Bush”, modelled on JG Ballard’s classic 1967 story on Reagan. Gullette says he struck up a good relationship with the agent, who assessed his essay as not representing a threat (whew!). He commented that it would have been a different matter if they had been questioning him about John Ashcroft. [Good to know that, in this dizzying, changed world, it’s still easy to tell the difference between intellectual and moral unpreparedness.]

Get your filthy hands off my CDs

By the middle of next year, the music industry will have … thoroughly embraced copy-protection technology. Major labels and independents alike will embrace products like Macrovision’s SafeAudio and use them to control how fans listen to new songs.

So says one of the minds behind such technology, Marc Tokayer, CEO of TTR Technologies. TTR developed SafeAudio in 1999 and more recently partnered with Macrovision to promote the system to the music industry. However, SafeAudio only became known to music fans when Macrovision and one or more record labels – Tokayer won’t say who – released copy-protected CDs on an unsuspecting Californian public.

That release, designed to test whether real music buyers could hear what SafeAudio does to music encoded on CD and how likely their audio equipment would reject the protected disks, was arguably the first inkling most listeners had that the music giants were serious about preventing PC users ripping songs to their hard-drives and – worse – sending those tracks to other users via the Internet. The Register

Conductor Pierre Boulez held as terrorist: ‘One of the world’s most famous conductors was briefly detained by Swiss police on suspicion of being linked to terrorist activities.

Frenchman Pierre Boulez had his passport confiscated in the town of Basle where he had been conducting at a music festival last month.

Europe has seen a series of anti-terrorist dawn raids since 11 September, but this must be the strangest…

In the revolutionary 1960s, it seems that Boulez said that opera houses should be blown up, comments which the Swiss felt made him a potential security threat.’ BBC

Free Congress Foundation Online — conservative critique of the civil liberties encroachment emergency. I found this page while looking into the Model State Emergency Health Powers Act, coming your way soon in most states including my own. Click on the commentary by Steve Lilienthal (“A Bad Idea Coming Your Way”) :

MEHPA is, of course, just what the liberal public health community ordered

to maximize their power. Indeed, the spearhead for this model bill is a

center for public health law at Georgetown and Johns Hopkins universities

that is funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Despite

its admirable sounding title, the CDC is as much – if not more – concerned

with enacting a political agenda as it is with ensuring public safety.

He pulls together some additional links to explore MEHPA.

Also at this site is an item by Connie Marshner, “Are We Homo Sapiens or Not?”, commenting about the human cloning issue. Interestingly, she echoes what Todd Gitlin said months ago, from the left, about how this will change the political landscape and make left-right distinctions obsolete:

What is it that can get the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective (you know, the feminists who gave the world that veritable compendium of the sexual revolution, Our Bodies, Ourselves) to stand shoulder to shoulder with the evangelical Family Research Council? What is it that can get the Friends of the Earth to stand side by side with the Vatican? What can get the General Board of Church and Society of the United Methodist Church and the Orthodox Patriarchate of Moscow singing off the same sheet of music?

When did this happen? At press conferences this very week, and in testimony before Congress last summer, these diverse groups were able to find common ground in their opposition to cloning. And in their opposition, currently in embryonic form to be sure, may be the promise of some new political landscape.