One Of Terry's Corners Of the Online World

I'm sitting in Cafe Coco on Smith Street in Fitzroy waiting for lunch. I love cafes that do free wifi and Travelbox, the new laptop, seems to do the job nicely. (One has to check out the new gadgets.)

One of the things I've been researching for autodidactic reasons is slang, cant, patois, techtalk, geekspeak... variations on the mother tongue. Here are some links to interesting aspects of the way we palaver.

Polari- Gay Slang From The 20th Century as heard in i/Round The Horne spoken by Julian and Sandy

Hugh Young's Lexicon of Polari

The Bible Written in Polari/

An article on "Gayle" - a South African variation

Grunge Speak

Stock Market Slang

US Navy Slang

Jamaican Creole

That will get you started, anyway.

http://www.theage.com.au/news/phones--pdas/new-porn-laws-for-3g-phones/2006/08/24/1156012657301.html

"The Federal Government has vowed to tackle the issue of pornography on internet-enabled devices such as 3G mobile phones by introducing the same restrictions that apply to internet and television content and punishing breaches with criminal penalties."

Apparently some 11 year old downloaded some porn and took it to school to show his mates. As you do if you're an 11 year old boy with access to porn. When I had just arrived in high school back in the days of Slade, Daddy Cool, Sunny Boys and Lollygobble Bliss Bombs, it was a small wad of black and white photos of unBrazillianed pudenda someone's big brother had purchased under the table in a nightclub in King's Cross. Teachers heard about them, there was a dire announcement at school assembly about the "wicked photos" and it blew over like a summer thunderstorm. The grown-ups made a big fuss but nothing really changed. On school excursions to the city, copies of Ribald and the Kings Cross Whisper were surreptitiously purchased on street corners for 20c each.

The point is, government legislation does fuck all to stop porn, or even the access to porn. Through usenet, every ISP in Australia gives access to hard core porn and, to tell the ugly truth, child pornography too - yep, Telstra, Optus, Iinet, Netspace, they all give dead easy access to kiddieporn through usenet. Horrible but true.

Even if those methods were closed down, there'd be nothing to stop kids uploading avi files of their big brothers bonking their girlfriends and video messaging them to their mates' 3G phones. The genie's out of the bottle. Kids will see porn. We need to acknowledge that and say "Right, how do we stop this from turning the youth of our country into slavering, rampant, bugeyed sex killers?". Then we need to scratch our heads and realise "Hey, it didn't do me much harm... why was that?"

We need to educate kids about life, relationships, sexual diversity, acceptance and admit that while porn at its' best is a lot of fun, like alcohol and drugs, you should use it in moderation. You can't ban it, any more than you can stop a neutrino with a tennis racket. What you can do, is offer context.