In short, Facebook has become, for me, a glorified RSS reader, and little else.

This updates my previous position statement on Facebook posted in June 2010. All the insidious tinkering since then by the House of Zuckerburg makes little difference to the fact that I regard a Facebook profile as a necessary evil to maintain a reluctant frontier.

Will Goog le plus take over its mantle? Don't be evil.

Things have been a glorious blend of quiet and shambolic on my website these past couple of months.

Quiet because Twitter has become my primary means of short on-line communication; quiet because I have not had the energy to compose longer on-line communications with any lucidity; and quiet because my upgrade from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 has not gone as well as I would have liked.

Here, from March this year at no less than the 3rd Annual Shorty Awards, is Amanda Palmer's ukelele medley of the Most Amusing Tweets of the year

Overfishing or warming sea levels? There seem to be more jellyfish in the oceans and while they've been annoying summer beachgoers since time immemorial they are also capable of interfering with electricity generation outlets.

Al Jazeera English picks up some of the story:

The Daily Mail reported on July 6 how jellyfish forced the shutdown of the Orot Rabin power station in Israel.

A week earlier, both reactors at the Torness nuclear power station on the Scottish coast were shut down because of a sudden influx of jellyfish.

That was far from the first time that nuclear reactors have been shut down because of marauding jellyfish, as this analysis from Discovery News explains.

But there is also evidence that jellyfish are able to thrive in ocean Dead Zones where other marine life cannot, hence a disproportionate increase in their presence. Here is a presentation from the US National Science Foundation which paints a vivid picture on the rising presence of jellyfish in our oceans.

Point six of their presentation: "Four hundred vast Dead Zones in world oceans are too polluted for almost all life except jellyfish."

Still fretting because there's not enough in it for you in the carbon tax? Contemplate, if you will, the technical definition of a famine:

As a resident of the Marrickville Local Government Area for just over a decade, I am proud of my council's track record, under both the Labor Party and the Greens, of its committment to social justice and its displays of solidarity on human rights issues - examples, Burma, West Papua, and the handling of refugees seeking asylum in Australia. I am especially pleased with the attitude they have displayed on human rights in Palestine, particularly in the context of their sister city relationship with Bethlehem.

On 4 April 2011 the ICC Executive Board talked glowingly about the World Cup that had concluded in Mumbai two days earlier. Among their remarks:

"This ICC Cricket World Cup has been very successful and memorable....

"...the event was the most successful in history.

"The tournament reinforced the attraction of 50 over cricket and showed the enthusiasm and excitement generated by nation v nation cricket.