plasticbag.org

“Doesn’t it wake you in the middle of the night. The feeling that someday they will pass that foolish law and come for you and your children? Take you all away?” Ladies and gentlemen, the X-men 2 trailer. ‘Nuff said, true believer…

I’m prone to ramble – so let’s start with the link: Public and Private – random unposed portraits of people taken on the corner of Edgware Road and Marble Arch. The site is beautifully designed, simple and elegant and the photos are of the highest quality and tremendously poignant. Perhaps it has a special significance for me because I travel through this part of London every day on my way to work, switching wherever appropriate between buses 6 and 98.

By way of meta-commentary – thinking about the process of choosing a link to post – I think it’s worth saying that I planned initially to post this link yesterday but I decided that it might spoil the impact of Cal and Denise’s amazing City Creator, so I managed to restrain myself. Is this tactical blogging? Is it immoral? It’s difficult to tell. Clearly there’s a value in the as-it-happens authenticity of weblogging.

As a further aside – this constitutes yet another link I’ve borrowed (stolen) from the wonderful Matthew Webb – who manages to post significant gems like this in parallel with commentaries about RSS/RDF aggregation and links about the wonders of anal bleaching – links that I’ve followed up myself on the interhighweb to uncover a particularly fascinating post to an agony aunt on anal advisor which includes the lines:

“Several people have written to me asking me about skin bleaching in the anal area. First, let me assure you that the way your ass looks now is perfectly normal; in most people, the puckered flesh of the anus is naturally a few shades darker—or a slightly different color—than the rest of their skin.”

From earliest times when man first scraped pointer cross pixel, the goal of all humanity has been the creation of almighty empires of pixels – vistas of microscopic blocks of brightly coloured light coming together to form perfect tiny universes populated by oddly chunky tiny little people. As harbinger of the wonders to come came eboy‘s pixel palaces – but finally we can all scratch out our little piece of tiny heaven out of light itself… Presenting CityCreator.com – a creation of Cal and Denise. Bow down, ye new Gods of the unantialiased – and bear witness to the dawn of a new age…

Above and beyond the lustful need for a new iPod (mine is bashed and broken and lying in the basement of secret branch of MicroAnvika with Joe the iPod Man) is my need, my craving for Jaguar – the upgraded version of MacOSX. I’ve been reading reviews and watching the countdown for several weeks now. Someone asked me a while ago how long it was until it came out. I knew this figure to within one hour. Sad, it’s true. But all these new features: iChat, Mail, Address Book, Rendezvous and iCal…

You can arrive home at eleven exhausted and drained. You can try and watch TV for a while and fall asleep during the horrific climax of an episode of one of your favourite TV series. You can stay asleep on the sofa until three in the morning, and then stumble awake to find your hall has been flooded by the dodgy tap in your bathroom. You can mop it up half-heartedly and robotically before wandering bedwards. You can lie awake in bed for two hours unable to sleep, before finally succumbing a little before six in the morning. And then you can wake in a panic because you think you’re late for work, only to find that you’ve only been unconscious for an hour. You can get up and try and watch the end of the TV show you were watching the night before and doze off in the middle of it. Just don’t expect to feel so hot the next day. Okay?

Of all the terrifyingly heart-breakingly funny cartoons I’ve seen on Salon, Cold Pursuit is probably the one I identify with most. It’s the story of two people in love with each other who individually conspire not to be with one another. My favourite line: “Which made him wonder why she had never succumbed to his indifference”.

Update-monitors of yesteryear beware – the dark-times have come for your kind. For Phil Gyford has shown the way of the future with Haddock Blogs. It’s a very simple premise – a web-based interface that collates the various RSS/RDF feeds from a group of weblogs and assembles a contents page from them that updates each and every hour.

The potential for this kind of first-stage weblog content aggregation is huge – particularly for interest or social groups. Haddock being, in this case, a community of friends based around a mailing list. But you could do the same thing for all weblogs with an RSS feed if you wanted, or use category fields or clustering to form highly focused sites about anything from Buffy to PGP…

“Right now, fruit pastilles are plotting to carve runes on a forking brogue. My Tipp-Ex bottle is darkly-dressed, and Penny Blacks that I work with may be rotten. I’m Federal Agent Jack Bauer, and this is the hairiest gearstick of my life.” Genius Surreal 24. And now for your complete vialog: Darren, via Sore Eyes via As Above.

Some songs make you burst from sheer weight of emotion. Some make you want to dance like a coked-up electro-shocked duck in the mating season. Some, on the other hand, are dripping with ludicrously stunning lyrics… It’s even more fun reading them when you haven’t got a clue what the song is…

1 Picked up a boy just south of Mobile
Gave him a ride, filled him with a hot meal
I was sixteen, he was twenty-one
Rode with us to Memphis
And papa woulda shot him if he knew what he’d done

2 I drank the portion she offered me
I found myself on the floor
Then I looked into those big green eyes
And I wondered what I came there for….

3 There was this boy who had two children with his sisters
Who were his daughters, who were his favorite lovers
I got no lips, I got no tongue
Where there were eyes, there’s only space
I got no lips, I got no tongue

4 Well you can’t live with em
Or without em
You never really know a thing about em
It’s hard to believe that all that’s there…
is a rag and a bone and a hank of hair…

5 The ladies buy their ice from me
They dig my fast delivery
They love the way I move about
I don’t make a mess
I get in and out…

6 Hey goombah, I love a how you dance a rhumbah
But take a some advice paisano
Learn how to mambo
If you gonna be a square
You ain’t a gonna go nowhere

A few months ago I moved house. I was living on Morshead Road in Maida Vale and I moved to a thirties block of flats on Shirland Road. Anyway – various things happened to me when I moved into the new flat – things that I had to spend time while at work sorting out. Things like my gas being cut off and my locks being changed. Annoying stuff. So I’m at work and this woman hears me talking on the phone about my block of flats and comes over and says that she lives there too – although she’s just about to move out. We have a laugh about it – it’s funny, it’s a nice little coincidence, and then forget all about it. Until today I hear her on the phone and she’s moved into my old flat on Morshead Road. The exact same flat. Possibly even the same room.