plasticbag.org

It’s quite hard to reach my keyboard from the floor where I have been rolling around in glee for several hours now, delighted by the fact that Blogdom has declared itself more concerned with Domino’s Pizza charging for delivery than nuclear detente or censorship. Sometimes you’ve got to love Blogdex. If you need to know the lard-arses that are terrified by the end to free carbohydrate delivery, then you should check out Blogdex’s list of sources.

I’m not going to comment on the Independent article that talked of regime change in the rogue state of the USA, except to say that it’s very definitely the closest thing to a must-read on the net at the moment.

Ok – first things first – today I noticed in my referrers for the first time an article about the 2002 Bloggies from what appears to be some kind of newspaper or magazine in Russia. Now my first instinct was to declare it immediately cool and pass swiftly on. Except then I remembered that Babel Fish might do a translator for Russian. Travelling swiftly across I discovered almost immediately that I was in fact correct – and one translater later I have a fully readable – if vaguely nonsensical – article bouncing about in front of my bonce.

But what is this? Does Babelfish translate with an accent? For in Russia they don’t have weblogs – they have veblogs. I know this to be the case because I won Best European Veblog. And Mr Wheaton? Well, if you can make sense of the fact that he is credited as ‘Sewed Shyueaton Reinforced-concrete pillbox No’, then you should be delighted to hear that the awards he won were, “Veblog of year, the very same the most ridiculous of veblog, the very same best American veblog, the very same the best motto of vebloga, the very same best promoushen of vebloga“. Which is, you know, nice…

Well riothero appears to be back and functioning – and with its rightful owner at the helm. It’s diffucult to tell whether or not his meeting with Matt and I was what pushed him back into it or not. Here’s the pictorial fruit of three meetings in London.

The first meeting in London takes Mark, Matt & Es and I to Balans Café in London’s fashionable Soho. First impressions are that Mark looks much more like a Spanish waiter than he used to…

We managed to catch Matt in a rare pensive mood at one point in the evening. Matt’s hair is unstyled and his t-shirt comes from threadless.com.

No doubt I was saying something exceptionally funny in this picture, although god knows what it was. Note how my face looks all inflated and weird in this picture as if I’d just turned thirty and turned into mush on the spot.

I made Matt take lots and lots of pictures of me on this evening in a vain attempt to get one that didn’t make me look like a drooling octogenarian. All these attempts were hideous failures. He will be punished…

We had so much fun we all completely lost track of the time. We all get to the tube late, and miss our trains. Matt makes sure that Mark gets a cab back to his hotel. Later Mark will give me some money to give to Matt and I’ll spend it all on drink, drugs and wild wild women. But don’t tell Matt, ok?

Tuesday lunchtime and it’s time to hang out with Mark and his mum in Jonathan’s on New Oxford Street, near Holborn. A lovely time is had by all (I hope). At one point, almost symbolically, a plastic bag is blown in from the street. Thankfully, no riots or heroes follow it in…

In which Mark looks sheepish for the camera… He’ll thank me when he’s all old and crusty.

The final picture is a bit of a farce, frankly. Last evening in London for Mark, I try to get some people together at the last minute and kind of fail, I get rained on so my hair goes all wonky and horrible and I’m all grim and sticky and tired and insane looking, we think about going to see a film but there isn’t really a film to watch, so we kind of mill around a bit. We try to take ONE good photo of us sitting in a café – after about a dozen and some very dirty looks, Mark holds out his arm and snaps us from a distance. We both look a bit stupid, frankly, but it’s the best of a bad lot…

Here are a two particularly alarming quotes from a piece from the Public Relations Society of America site, from the article: Pitching Blogs: Latest Type Of Online Media Vehicle May Provide Valuable PR Opportunities

• “The question is how to land your clients in the right blog at the right time in order to reap the benefits of their highly receptive audience.”
• “Many [webloggers] still consider their sites to be personal forums for their views and perspectives, and are wary of corporate or PR interference.”
  – note the use of the qualifying ‘still’ as if to imply that this is in fact not the case, will not be the case for much longer or should not be the case for much longer.

Now this is a good idea – Wishlists for schools and non-profit organisations. I wonder if there’s something like this for schools and organisations in the UK. It would be great to be able to donate something specific to a school that actually has a tangible benefit to someone. Cared about English – donate a novel you loved. Cared about Computer Science – donate a text-book or a piece of useful software…

I’m in the market for some threadless action. I need those t-shirts/posters/things. Oh yeah. There’s a particular poster I’m very keen on. But can a young metropolitan homosexualist really get away with naked ladies on his wall – however phallic the imagery? I declare myself officially a crap poof. Bring me the style, panache and hair of a glamour-man post-haste. I’m turning into middle-aged hetero-mulch before mine own eyes.

Oh tis a sad tale, the tale of tiny wee iPod. iPod the daring, iPod the brave – now iPod the battered has gone to its grave. Or not to its grave, but maybe to the gluemill – for iPod now only kind of works now. I don’t know why – I don’t know whether the gentle shocks poor iPod suffered were what pushed him over the edge, or whether it was the scratch, scratch, scratch of keys against his face. Oh why did I mistreat him so? No more than normal use, I thought, but now he’s beaten down and broken and I feel so bad.

So we’re sitting at work the other day – the assembled table-age consisting of myself, other Tom, Dan, Phil and Dorian – and someone’s watching the Apple Switch commercials, and then finally hits on the awesome wonder that is Ellen Fleiss. All through her (apparently) stoned dialogue we’re awestruck with wonder. I keep expecting her to say the word ‘borked’, but I don’t think she ever does. At the end she says, “I’m Ellen Fleiss and I’m a student” and the only reply you can really come up with is, “Well duh!”. I mention all of this because apparently she’s becoming quite the cult figure at the moment – hence (and here I’m liberally ripping off Wired for the thousandth time this month): the fan site, the other fan site and the caféshops store. (I’m not going to link to Metafilter because they get linked to too much anyway.) When I grow up I want to be Ellen Fleiss!