plasticbag.org

I feel absolutely unbearably bitchy for doing this, but really… A full year after the web goes wild for it, popbitch‘s latest newsletter catches up with the faked moonlanding site…

Dorian, the guy I work next to at an UnnamedMediaService is having a baby! He didn’t tell anyone for ages, and then he kind of mentioned it surreptitiously over AIM. When I turned over to look at him, he had the biggest grin on his face and a kind of conspiratorial wiggle in his eyebrows. A bit like he’d done something wrong at school that he was actually really proud of. Mischievous, maybe? It’s difficult to describe. He looked like he was going to burst any minute – like literally explode. I think it’s the coolest thing that’s ever happened to anyone. Ever. And already there are baby pictures to gawk at… From nine weeks to thirteen weeks… And he’s putting more up soon…

While working (playing) with a new template for a site that I work on – designing, in fact, a complete “Hello Kitty” skin for it if I’m forced to be honest – I stumbled upon one of the most glorious images I’ve seen in a long long time. In a universe gone mad, will Kitty and her crack troops be able to bring a deathly order back? Hello Kitty 40,000

Half a world away from Ground Zero, London is on alert today – worried about whether we might be the targets of some kind of commemorative attack. But these are exaggerated fears. Alerted security forces probably make this the safest day to be in a large city since 9/11 itself. And in and around these tensions the same things go on in our lives. Daily things. Little things. Like me picking up my iPod from the repair shop. Like having been stuck on the bus for hours this morning. Like how beautiful the sky looks today. Like how I overslept because I was loath to wake from a longing but desperate dream and how it’s stayed with me all day. And I’m ashamed because these are the things that have been in my mind. And not the world-breaking, heart-shattering weirdness of a year ago today…

For obvious reasons it’s difficult to know what to write about. I thought about (belatedly) making the whole site monochrome, as Yahoo has done. I thought about long pieces of writing about Infoshare or maybe writing about where I was – what I was thinking – on that early afternoon last September. Except that my first reactions when I heard about the planes was one of complete disbelief – humour even. Who knew that the plane was a passenger jet and not a tiny one-man prop plane? Who knew (who wasn’t near a television) that it was a terrorist attack? Who knew so many people would die… I don’t want to think about that again.

I’ve thought about what I should write all day (and for much of yesterday as well). I can’t think of a single thing that I could convey a thousandth of what needs to be said. Everything would be gestural at best – facile, empty. Everything would be inelegant – although maybe that’s the only kind of thing that would make any sense today anyway. Maybe our thoughts should be large and savage and potent and overwhelming. Maybe they should be as large as they can while there’s time for them to be so, before we have to get on with the business of living in the world again.

The only thing I can think of that comes close to being meaningful is a quote from the novel of a much wiser man than I. In Kurt Vonnegut’s Timequake a world suffers a calamity and no one knows how to deal with life when it’s over. A man walks around telling people, “You were sick, but now you’re well again, and there’s work to be done”. There’s a sentiment to take with you. Look around you now. Think about the world in which we live. And think about the sense of closeted safeness that most of the Western world felt one year and one day ago. And say it with me now, to yourself and to the regimes and leaders all over the world from London and the US, from Afghanistan to Iraq, “You were sick, but now you’re well again, and there’s work to be done”.

While it’s downloading, I have a few scant moments to say to the world – rejoice! For the iCal cometh…!

So anyway the story is short and lacking in pith. So you’re just going to have to go along with it, relish the pictures and move on with your lives. My co-worker Mr Gyford went to Burning Man. He and his group of messy degenerate friends decided to go in full seafarers garb. Along the way I got to try on a uniform. It’s ridiculous, but I took pictures anyway.

Anyone looking closely at Haddock Blogs might have noticed an interesting trend in Matt Webb‘s recent posting to his site. He seems to post precisely twice a day – at ten in the morning and at three in the afternoon. Each and every day. Since Friday. Which is interesting, because I happen to know for a fact that Mr Webb is in fact on holiday this week, which leads me to suspect that secretly he’s automated the whole posting process in some cunning and as-yet-to-be-divulged way. Which makes me think – he’s posting more regularly at the moment than when he’s here, and everything is of equal quality to his normal posts. So in many ways, it’s almost better that he’s not actually here…

So at work today someone said that they didn’t want the dictator of Iraq replaced with some American glove puppet. But I say it all depends on which particular glove puppet is set to rule in his place. I vote for the ex-pets.com sock puppy…

China has recently been blocking access to a whole variety of sites across the world, including BBC News and Google. Now you can test to see if your site has been blocked. Plasticbag.org remains non-threatening to the culture of China. Which is a terrible shame… The temptation to start summarising and heavily quoting huge blocks of BBC articles is almost overwhelming… [via Jones]

It might just be the sexual equivalent of geese imprinting on badgers they’re brought up with, but I’m watching the Lost Boys and thinking to myself, “Is it just me or did people look properly hot back then?”. Young people nowadays just don’t have the big hair or substantial shoulder pads of yesteryear. Where’s today’s Bobby Ewing, I ask myself. Nowhere I can see…