Well, obviously you’ve been in the back yard for the last 24 hours, wildly celebrating the momentous inception of Ausculture Extra with fireworks, beers and live music. But what else has been going on at Ausculture over the last seven days? Well I’m glad you asked! (What’s that? You didn’t ask?)

Annoyingly, we saw the start of spam link-posting on the site, adding to an abattoir — to coin a suitable collective noun — of other spamming methods invading our online lives. (Thanks to the spam ping, or sping, even trackbacks aren’t spared the threat of hijack at the hands of the insidious spammers — a treat in store?) If you ever recognise a company as one that has used spam advertising, I suggest you stick it to them by looking elsewhere.

On a happier note, god took time off from planning his son’s birthday celebrations to give us Murray’s Anniversary Ale, the Champagne of beers, at least judging by the bottle. It’s as if he knew (well, I guess he would have) that I was searching the net for barley wine -style beers — not easy to track down. Next year’s brew will make a perfect Christmas present.

nineiron put up a number of links, all to sydney.diarystar.com.au. Hmm, a whiff of manual spamming there, nineiron. Otherwise, we might have highlighted links about the Chinese New Year and Sydney festivals for 2008.

The silly season, posted by peterh, is notable mainly for the blog’s freaky use of tags — over 450 of them, in a tag cloud that could better be described as a tag fog! Questions of Australian identity for newcomers were barely touched upon, but you got the sense that third-generation Deborah didn’t feel very Australian for some reason.

A blog post about glass wine stoppers being trialled in Europe, linked by hippo, included this description of the wine which amused me:

“The nose was flint with a touch of smoke and the aromatic fruit was mouth filling, but fell away quickly, leaving traces of mineral with an extended length. Altogether a pleasing wine that would work well with seafood and has enough weight to cope with spicy sausages.”

The stoppers still have plastic in contact with the wine so really it’s just a marketing ploy aimed at the snobbish. What a great shame the stoppers are so difficult to open!

hippo also linked to a recipe for Pork rack in Coke marinade. My own expertise with food is centred more around the eating side... but this looks to be a tasty recipe.

Here’s an article on the (possible) resurgence of short shorts, courtesy of sirvartu. Will they catch on? For her, yes; for him, no.

The Advertiser story, Baby tax needed to save planet, claims expert, also linked by sirvartu, was a great example of a News Ltd newspaper spinning an angle to shift copies with total disregard for journalistic balance and their victim’s wellbeing.

Professor Barry Walters’ article in the Medical Journal of Australia was intended to be what Peter Garrett might describe as ‘jocular’. In a radio interview for ABC 774 he made it clear that, while he was serious in his underlying message that population increase is a problem when tackling global warming, the specifics of his piece weren’t intended to be taken that seriously — it was a light-hearted end-of-year article. There was no hint of this in Jen Kelly’s Advertiser item. Walters said he’d received death threats following its publication. The credibility of News Ltd papers such as The Advertiser continues to diminish.

Kudos, though, to sirvartu, and thanks to everyone who posted thought-provoking links over the week.