Month: August 2001

According to Dave, Google is now spidering many weblogs every single day. That means lots of timely content from your favourite sites can be found immediately via your favourite search engine. Doesn’t appear to have been indexing plasticbag.org, but hey.

And now for your aprés-Blogadoon: The Telegraph reports that the police have been told not to call gays homosexuals. Couple of quick addenda to that – I’m not entirely sure that the word ‘gays’ is particularly appropriate either, thanks very much. Anymore than ‘blacks’ would be. In fact if everyone would just get used to calling poofs and dykes ‘sir’ and ‘madam’, everything would probably be much more entertaining.

Aside: ‘Homosexual’ is a really grim word, associated with saying ‘you have a disorder’. It’s like saying you are a ‘influenzal’ – both defining the person by their sexuality and simultaneously defining the sexuality as a defect. And before anyone says anything, “heterosexual” is both a later word and a later concept and was mostly only used in cases where someone had to assert that they weren’t gay or when the goal of heterosexuality was enforced on poor deviants via electroshock, aversion therapy and hormone supplements.

Second aside: I feel a bit sorry for straight people on this one actually, because they can’t call gay people “poofs”, “fags”, “dykes”, “queers” or any of that stuff without people thinking they are weird facists. Whereas I can. Except of course that I seem to have an anti-gay reputation in some of British media because they didn’t know I was a big smelly poof and think I’m being serious. Which of course I am.

So I’m really hungry, so I go to the shop to get some kind of reasonable food and I get a big bottle of coke and some frozen pizza and a packet of cigarettes and some little foamy strawberry sweets and I get home and sit on the sofa and I heat up the oven and eat all the strawberry sweets and drink lots of coke and watch TV and then I get my pizza out and eat about a third of it before I feel full and slightly sick and ill. The point of this story? Nothing you tell people as children sinks in even the slightest little bit.

Mark on stuff: (1) “If fruit tasted so good that they artificially flavored candy like it, why don’t people eat actual ‘green apples’ or ‘watermelons’?” (2) “I partially spent the night outside on a hammock. I say partially because I fell off in my sleep and spent part of the night on my concrete patio. And then another part, from 4:40am onward, I came inside, because the flowers were making popping noises and I wanted to be where it was safe. ” (3) “I’m fascinated by how tic tac toe evolutionized into the game Connect Four.” (4) “I’m flying to Missouri for a bigmac.”

A lot of people recently have been doing work based around entirely CSS-based sites. Some of the latest tricks and tips have been written up over at A List Apart. My question with a lot of this stuff is where it ceases to be useful. Take the design of plasticbag.org for example. I think it makes clear and logical sense visually, but it doesn’t necessarily only have components within it that translate well into structural markup. When you reach the edge of what CSS can do (and retain the point of CSS – to be cross-browser, clear, elegant and more importantly STRUCTURAL) don’t you inevitably end up with tables again? Isn’t that inevitable at the moment? And possibly long-term as well.

So I’m at home watching television and I’m really excited about watching Will and Grace because I’m obsessed that the two main characters can’t really be as dull as they actually appear to be, and I’m consumed with the sense that they might even one day be able to make me laugh. But no. They’re just there. Neither of them are people I’d want to hang out with. Supporting cast is, of course, another matter. But Will and Grace themselves? No.

And it’s the Halloween episode and it’s kind of shit and I start counting how many times I’ve laughed by about half way through the program and it isn’t difficult because it’s ‘1’ time and it remains one time until the end of the episode. Which is depressing. And half way through the damn episode they put an advert for the new Angel boxset on. And I listen and I get all tweaked because it’s out on Monday. Not that I want to buy it you understand, but because the Buffy boxset is also out then and I MUST HAVE IT. Who can I sell, I’m asking myself. Who can I sell to buy that. And then Will and Grace comes on again and rigorously sucks arse for another twenty minutes.

Buffy. Our love is god.

Ralphy old chap, you’re missing the point. It’s not that we make fun of Americans. It’s just that we make fun of each other, and the first thing we noticed about you is that you’re American. Love ya, baby.

Live: At this very moment, Zeldman is playing Photoshop Tennis. Much cooler and more geeky than you can possibly imagine. The game’s only half-way through. Check back tomorrow for the final results.

There’s currently a job going at the BBC and you can apply for it online and I’m completely obsessed with it. I need this job. I crave this job. But because of that, I’ve been putting off applying for it all week. I want my application to be perfect. It has to be great. It’s too intimidating a project. If I don’t get it, I’ll be incredibly depressed. It’s got to be done today otherwise I miss the deadline. I feel ill.