plasticbag.org

What have I done this weekend? I’ve driven (mostly with Nick and Katy) about three hundred and fifty miles. I’ve taken my friends to a Norwich gay bar full of army fetishists. I’ve smashed things with my Hulk Hands. I’ve chased Mo around a garden. I’ve turned thirty-one, cooked a massive breakfast, fed baby lambs and goats, been scared by a turkey, eaten fudge, laughed at cups with puppy heads, bought tons and tons of meat, ploughed a boat into shallow waters, cooked steak on a barbecue, watched an eighties sunset, snapped at a friend, watched music videos, eaten watermelon for breakfast, watched This Island Earth, cleaned like I’ve never cleaned before, become obsessed by the sky, eaten hamburgers by the ton, connected to a wifi node in Primrose Hill to check film times, took a high-speed trip to Tottenham Court Road to watch The Hulk, but missed the film, drank a Caipirinha and drove home. Wrote stuff. Became really tired. Went to sleep.

I’ve been reading Blair’s speech to Congress (page one / page two), and I think my first reaction is that it’s an interesting combination of jingoism, liberalism, pragmatism and self-love. The bits that are a bit craw-sticking are the fawning tones – even when they’re only preludes to more serious comments.

“Let me also express my gratitude to President Bush. Through the troubled times since 11 September changed our world, we have been allies and friends. Thank you, Mr President, for your leadership.”

Masturbation cuts cancer risk: “Men could reduce their risk of developing prostate cancer through regular masturbation, researchers suggest. They say cancer-causing chemicals could build up in the prostate if men do not ejaculate regularly. And they say sexual intercourse may not have the same protective effect because of the possibility of contracting a sexually transmitted infection, which could increase men’s cancer risk.” [via a triumphalist IM from Matt]

From Palace of Westminster to The West Wing in one bus ride… I’m too exhausted to write much about the Vox Politics event in the House of Commons that I attended earlier this evening – I’ll leave in depth discussion of that until tomorrow, I think. But in the meantime, the collaboratively annotated Hydra document from the event is worth reading (and online) and here’s a picture from later in the evening when Tom Watson (MP for West Bromwich East) met Tom Coates (Minister for Weblogging Affairs) down the Westminster Arms. All through the power of interhighwebnet.

This is going to sound ridiculous, but when I turned thirty, never in my wildest dreams did I actually think that time was going to continue moving after said birthday. Certainly I didn’t think that there would be birthdays after my thirtieth. It seemed so final – such an achievement! So it’s coming as a bit of a shock that this coming Saturday I’m going to turn thirty-one. Here’s an random analogy which might explain the sensation a bit – you climb Everest and you’re terribly proud of yourself and then suddenly you turn around and the mountain’s grown another few thousand feet. And then some nutter with a whip turns out and makes you start climbing. Or maybe it should be that you’re on a sledge going down a steep ravine and you can see the end in sight and the sledge slows down and frankly you’re a bit relieved, but then you’ve got slightly too much momentum and you end up zooming right past the relatively flat bit and down yet another ravine. It’s kind of like that.

Hmm. Anyway – it would seem cheap to direct people towards my wishlist, and god knows I’m not a cheap man. So, obviously, I won’t be doing that… No sirree. I’ll just stand here patiently making knowing looks and whistling to myself… Ho hum…

A selection of carefully filtered Apple-related linkery for your popular consumption, many of which had their origin in the monkey brains of 2lmc:

• Fetch Art for iTunes
• Haughey’s Migrating between Macs
• Macintosh Keyboard Shortcuts
• Detour controls where all your audio is going
• VoodooPad as a Desktop Wiki?
• PocketDock for New (bah) iPods
• More interesting responses about Panther

Digging around in my search requests for a laugh, I find this lovely little gem posted in the last few hours:

“Holy shit, for the first time since I have begun visiting this site (about 3 years or so) I noticed that your header image is an actual plastic bag”

The new job is proceeding apace – I’ve spent more consecutive man-hours in meetings than ever before in my life. Or so it seems at least. The edges of the job are beginning to become clear, and it’s all terribly exciting. One consequence of this is that I’ve not been keeping up with the world very effectively. Another consequence is that I haven’t had a lot of time to look after Barbelith. I shall catch up with everything this weekend. In the meantime, here are some more links about weblogs:

• Bloggers gain libel protection in the US
  An intriguing case about forwarded e-mail and editing has wide-ranging repercussions in the States for the legal implications of weblog content, e-mail lists and message-boads online;
• Are weblogs author-first or content first?
  It seems clear to me that – for whatever reasons – the form of the weblog has been adopted primarily by individuals. Whether this is for good or ill, it’s now our responsibility to find the best ways to derive value from this state of affairs;
• Blogchatter
  An iframe shows the latest activity around the weblog-world as derived from weblogs.com. It may get take-up, but it’s essentially a nice little curiosity;
• My-expressions.com
  Moblogging be-damned – picture messaging to weblogs is likely to be huge. If you can’t set it up centrally, you could always get a Typepad account and moblog into a javascript file that you could include into your main weblog. More on this as I get it working;
• Should Old Media Embrace Blogging
  ìTraditional publishing is about putting on a show; building a network of weblogs is like hosting a party,î says Simon Waldman, head of digital publishing at the Guardian.
• Media Guardian 100 #94
  “The art of “blogging” – or web-logging – has been around almost as long as the internet itself. Techies have always kept online diaries, even if no one bothered to read them.”