Bollocks on the News, Part II

1. Dog shows. I frankly don't care whether "traditional Crufts breeders" think that dancing dogs are bringing the show into disrepute. I think that dog shows bring the country into disrepute.


2. From today's Indefensible, as part of an otherwise reasonable article suggesting that possibly deporting gay people to Iran might offend the British sense of fair play and justice and breach the bit in the Human Rights Act which says that the death penalty isn't quite right nowadays:

   Unlike gay websites, their email network cannot be shut down because it does not have a home page.

   
   
   Regardless of the near ubiquity of web-mail interfaces nowadays, let me contribute to the world-wide fascist state by introducing the Iranians to the DNS 'MX' query. Err, which tells you what the FQDNs (Fully Qualified Domain Name) or IP addresses of the email servers are for an internet domain or subdomain.

   Like, for example, independent.co.uk^*:
   

   Domain	Type	Class	TTL	Answer
   independent.co.uk.	MX	IN	3600	cluster5a.eu. messagelabs.com. [Preference = 20]
   independent.co.uk.	MX	IN	3600	cluster5.eu. messagelabs.com. [Preference = 10]



3. Also from the Independent, referring to new public sculpture:
   

   Anthony Gormley says "There is an awful lot of crap out there"

   
   
   Now, as much as I like the iconic "Angel of the North", I must agree with Andrew. "Firmament", on show at the White Cube gallery and available to your local council for the waste of a mere £850k, shows just how right he is. Except, that's his.

   For pompous art snobs 'naive' and 'representational' ≠ 'crap'. Particularly for Marjorie Trusted, neither does 'old-fashioned' equal bad.

* Here are some of the relevant IP addresses:

Domain	Type	Class	TTL	Answer
cluster5a.eu. messagelabs.com.	A	IN	900	193.109.255.19
cluster5a.eu.messagelabs.com.	A	IN	900	193.109.254.3
cluster5a.eu.messagelabs.com.	A	IN	900	193.109.254.115
cluster5a.eu.messagelabs.com.	A	IN	900	195.245.230.51
cluster5a.eu.messagelabs.com.	A	IN	900	85.158.136.83
cluster5a.eu.messagelabs.com.	A	IN	900	85.158.140.179

PS. Yes, I know that the tables display in a manner best described as "crap". If you can help as opposed to moan, please let me know. Update: I may have corrected bodged this.