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In the latest Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue, which I swear to god I buy because of the pictures of the clothes, there’s an interview with James Marsden. In it he is asked the question, “Based on your fan mail and people who approach you on the street, who would you say is your fan base?” He replies:

Well, since X-men, I can add comic book fans, but before that I’d say young women between 10 and 24 and probably every gay man in the universe. Straight men all think I’m a pussy. I gotta tell you, if it wasn’t for gay men, I’d probably own a carpet cleaning business. I’m very popular with the gay community, which is lovely. There are plenty of people out there who have no clue who I am, but I have never met a gay man yet who didn’t know who I was. It’s great!

This – ladies and gentlemen – is what pardens for an enlightened attitude these days. Just think – all of us gay men lusting after James Marsden! How lucky we are to have someone as pretty as him to unite around! How we love him. I think we should all change our political identity to being Marsdosexuals! Maybe wave banners! Ah, we’re so loyal and friendly and loving. Much like Labradors! Wouldn’t we make such good pets? I’m going to say this once and once only – James Marsden, it’s not only straight men that think you’re a “pussy” and I think it’s a bloody sorry state of affairs if your kind of patronising, self-obsessed idiocy represents the world that gay people have battled for over the last few decades. You can take your “mad props to all the gay men out there” and you can shove em up your butt.

One of my windows in Safari is full of tabs – so full of tabs that I can’t actually find the stuff I want to work with without closing them. And Safari doesn’t have a neat “Bookmark all tabs” option like Camino, so I have to bloody bookmark them individually. Except I’m not going to do that, I’m just going to post the damn things to my site and let God sort ’em out later…

• CNN posts premature obituaries
  “While all news organizations prepare obituaries in advance of the deaths of famous individuals, the folks at CNN inadvertently gave the Internet-surfing public a chance to preview how the network’s web site would note the demise of Vice President Dick Cheney, Ronald Reagan, and a few other prominent figures.”

• Prepare to meet thy Doom
  “These days, the employees at id need to play with pain. They’re hard at work on Doom III, which is already a shoo-in for event of the year in the $10.8 billion videogame industry, even though it’s not expected out until fall.”

• Dive into Mark on spammers and WaSP
  “That?s right, folks. Scumbags were setting up web sites, spamming millions of people trying to sucker them into clicking through to said web sites, and then immediately redirecting them off-site to get them to upgrade their browser first before allowing them to be suckered.”

• 24 hours watching the world look for answers at Google
  “The computer screen is divided horizontally. On the bottom, the Google queries, 10 visible at a time, stream up and, after 5 seconds, disappear. Each also carries the location of the questioner, often down to the city, but sometimes only the country, the Internet portal (e.g., AOL), or, when the source is untraceable, just question marks.”

I’m off to SC for O’Reilly Emerging Tech Conference on Tuesday. I’m going against the grain this year by taking my iBook along, “blogging” in “realtime”, and taking digital photos of people. If there’s a box, I am out of it. If you’re attending as well, stop by and say hello…I’ll be the guy with the iBook and digital camera.

I’ve given this post a pretentious title because I can never think of what to call these semi-regular link-log updates and there’s only so many ways you can use the phrase “Microcontent Vote” before someone tells you to get off your damn hobby-horse already.

• Tom Tomorrow on US Domestic / Foreign Policy
  This one (and the one following) are way via BoingBoing which I’m reading more now since Cory took Webb and I to this neat Biker/Geek bar where they serve burgers.

• Crazy Input Devices
  … including a vertical keyboard – again via new celebrity best friend and life-partner Cory Doctorow (“Tom Who?”, Cory). I quite want the vertical keyboard just to see people’s faces at work.

• What if Jobs was one of us?
  Thanks to Mr Webb for pointing me Joy-of-Tech-wards for this Joan Osborne themed day. My friend Nick is obsessed with Joan Osborne. He says I should listen to her because it’s not all weird Christian pseudo-profound pap. I say, “Get a Job!”.

Ok. A certain substantial amount of fun was had in the Tonga Lounge last night. God knows whether I can remember enough about it to write anything of value, but in attendence were Mr Webb, Mr Hammersley, David Galbraith, Marc Canter and Bill Humphries. Thanks to everyone for a very enjoyable evening. We shall meet at the Tonga Lounge once more…

So here’s the plan (if you’re in the mood and in San Francisco): Mr Webb and myself are going out for a night of Tiki Madness, surrounded by swimming pool, fake tropical storms, house band and cocktails – from around eight this evening at The Tonga Room. It’s the only place to be this Saturday night…

I’m frankly a bit exhausted today, so I’m taking the opportunity to have a sit down in the hotel and sort through everything that I need to get done before Thursday. This includes – of course – working through everything that I need to have read on the web in the last couple of days:

• Adword Poetry
  I like Google Adwords. It really appeals to me (although it seems to be getting more complicated by the minute). There’s got to be more going on there than meets the eye – something worth playing with. Hmm. Come to think of it – I think I still owe Google $13 for running this ad two years ago…
• Sparky redesigns
  I love Dan Ultrasparky, and Rooster and their dog and Glenn and I really want to go and visit them in New York. Later in the year, maybe…
• Moby Mirror Project
  Right. That him done. Who’s next? I can’t be the only person who’s surprised that no one has talked about a Mirror Project book, can I? I mean – I’m sure some people have their Mirror Photos in decent resolution. You could make a glorious coffee table thing with some of them…
• Fat Poofs are the future
  And once again I find myself ahead of the curve…

God I’m so far behind. You turn your back for a couple of days…

So the other day, Webb and I were having a conversation on top of Nob Hill about San Francisco. He has subsequently posted it to his website and Michael Sippey in turn has posted it to his (good post). While looking out across this city of massive structures, hills and trees we suddenly realised that San Francisco looks like one massive game of Sim City. Or more plausibly that Sim City was clearly based upon San Francisco. The structures are so familiar – the way the hills and the roads intersect is so similar. I wonder if that’s why it all seems so comfortable and familiar? Are we responding so positively to San Francisco because it feels like what we think cities are supposed to be like? If so, why on earth do all the Americans we meet seem so desperate to get out of here?

Right. So there’s no hope of me getting everything down as it happens, and I’m not sure I’d want to – there’s a fine line between making an experience last by writing about it and eroding the memory by putting it into words. But I’ll summarise briefly in lieu of actual weblog-content. On Thursday when we’d arrived, Webb and I mooched around some local malls before walking apocalyptically huge distances around San Francisco just to drink it all in. Yesterday we had breakfast in diners and wandered around book shops and met up with Ben for lunch.

He then joined our merry band and we went for dim sum in Chinatown before joining up with Cory for sake cocktails and beer from a fat lady who hadn’t heard of Caipirinhas.

From sake we went for burgers and beer (no burgers for me though) around Cory’s area – then a quick pass by Dave Egger’s pirate shop (closed) via Castle Doctorow, before a cross-town exhausted cab ride to Audium where we sat in the dark in a room full of suspended speakers and listened to weird hallucinogenic music. After alienating the performer by talking about how the noises in the performance were clearly of a distinct period, we went on for further cocktails (still no Caipirinha – compromised on Mojito) with Chris Collaborative-Mapping (who we met in the dark place and was obsessed by Hello Kitty) before stumbled exhausted back to the hotel and thence to bed.