When the sky is bright and the weather is warm, not necessarily dry but warm, I walk around barefoot. Not just the house, but the garden and the town too. I go for groceries, plod round sainsburys, wander to the butchers and so forth with my pinkies out proud. Admittedly this all started because there was a period where I had no workably comfortable shoes, but thankfully someone with some publishing power has added creedence to my cause.

Check out this article on why I am right and why you are wrong about footwear: Shoes are Bad For You.

More after the jump…

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I draw your attention to this article on Plans to Allow Corporate Theft of Personal Works. I’m sure the bill has another name but this one will do just fine for me.

Please read the article, but for those with short attention spans or tight time constraints I’ll sum it up. Essentially it plans to make any work not registered for copyright “orphan”, whereby its copyright can be collected by someone else, or simply used without permission or financial compensation. How do you register something for copyright, I hear you cry? Well, you do so through a new, private and untested agency which, you will no doubt be completely shocked and surprised to discovered, has financial strings attaching it directly to those pushing this bill through. Conspiracy? Nooooo, of course not. Just business and, as with 99.9% of all big business, designed only with profit in mind.

Anyone out there from the US reading this, please shake down your local congressman. This is something that we do NOT want to see used as a role model in the rest of the civilised world. Political apathy is allowing those with the bankrolls to tighten their grip on the politic and that surely has to give out soon. One should have to choose to release a work into the public domain and be protected by default. Any other system is just completely insane. It gets even better in that anyone at all could register your work and, unless you respond to contest it within a defined period of time, wham, now it’s theirs.

It is so ridiculous at first I thought it was a joke. Honestly, if the government here try to pull this kind of stunt I’m moving to Canada.