I’ve been having frustratingly brief flirt-mail all day from Sam in Cambridge. He’s busy building models out of whatever it is architects build models out of, and his hands (apparently) are covered in cigarette burns, superglue, sawdust, pen marks and the like. Which would explain the frustratingly brief bit I suppose.
“Calling all Londoners – Your City Needs You.” Or at least that is the message that is being broadcast 24 hours a day as the contest for the new position of Mayor heats up. There is a substantial site for the campaign [Mayor For London], posters have been springing up on every spare inch of wall space and almost every TV bulletin or newspaper oozes scandal or corruption or photo-opportunity.
In fact campaigning has been so widespread that it is rapidly nearing saturation point. Today, as I approached work, I was confronted with Ken Livingstone’s purple campaign bus, filled to the brim with grinning anorak-wearing octogenarians blasting poor quality pop-music with a half-hearted slightly embarrassed voice-over.
But who should you vote for? This is where Fantasy Mayor comes in. This seriously useful site first asks you who you were planning to vote for. And then it presents you with fifteen policy statements – you choose the degree to which you agree or disagree with them and then it presents you with a list of the candidates that you share most policy points with. The results are always interesting, and often not what you expect. Against all odds, I have ended up with Frank Dobson…
It just goes to show, flattery will get you everywhere! I don’t think you can even guess how thrilled I was that Barbelith was mentioned in Powazek’s Latest Interview. It’s an interesting article quite apart from the reference to me (although that is clearly the most important part)…
So I went out for lunch today with a group of friends and their friends and was disturbed to find myself feeling defensive and edgy which dragged me back about ten years to gawky teenage years of perpetual embarrassment. I’ve been thinking about it all afternoon and I can’t really understand why I should have felt that way, except that it coincided with the arrival of Fenner’s friend George, who for some reason unsettles me deeply. I think I find his absolute confidence unpleasant. From the point of his arrival onwards the lunch stopped being about a group of old friends getting together and chatting comfortably and started to become some kind of male competitive arena, in which mobile phones were carefully compared and examined, hair-cuts and clothing were noted for signs of appropriate consumption and physical presences were assessed for signs of weakness. I fear I was the only one feeling uncomfortable, and I could just as easily still be feeling the effects of too little sleep and continual vagrancy. I don’t know really…
Cause for horror today. Someone went and bought reptilebrain.co.uk [who is] which fills me with absolute horror since I had just resolved myself to the fact that I could buy it even though it wasn’t a .com (I am afraid to say that I think regional domains were a huge mistake and are completely against the spirit of the net). Anyway – this leaves me with a new quest – think of a new domain name for this weblog as soon as possible, so when the big move comes I don’t end up with cabbageboy.com [NOTE: Since checked and cabbageboy.com is in fact no longer available].
Touching sentiments indeed from The Rumpus Room:
“On a totally unrelated note, has anyone ever seen any
other pictures of the Barbelith guy? That one blurry
little picture on his site suggests to me that he’s quite
the cutie-pie, and I want to know for sure. If he is,
then that — along with the charm and talent displayed
on his site — may be grounds for another one of my
innocently aggressive flirting campaigns. They’re so
much less risky with people overseas who I’ll never
meet, after all.”
For anyone who actually is even the slightest bit interested in seeing other photos of me, why not revisit the horror of Slutcore? Failing that, there’s a rather dashing photo at Epinions.
Hmmm. Popular opinion seems to be that I do indeed have a boner for Zeldman. In his honour therefore, I am planning to spend all my available time worshipping at the altar of the mangod: The Jeffrey Zeldman Fanclub. Thanks to riothero and So I Say… for showing me the way. Halleluiah!
Tactless Advert of the Day
From Zeldman comes the astonishing Hoboken BrewHaus advert. Hmmm – spot-quiz: “Does Tom Have A Boner for Zeldman?“. I don’t think I do, but I’ve been talking about him a lot recently.
Insightful Thing of the Day
I stumbled upon the current Good News/Bad News special feature at k10k today, and frankly, it was great. All the pent up frustration that we all sometimes feel about the net along with all the reasons why we can find it so very exciting. All in a little javascript pop-up window, with elegant little design touches. Perfect.
Gripe of the Day
Today’s gripe comes to you courtesy of i2design.net. My problem with this otherwise beautiful site is in the irritating lack of cross-browser compatible CSS. I’m using Netscape on a PC at the moment and the text is completely unreadable. And I don’t mean “eye-straining”, I mean so small that the pixels can’t even accurately render the individual letters. On a personal site, of course, it is never more than slightly irritating. But I have seen the same problem all over corporate sites (particularly when you are also considering different platforms) and it really isn’t very good.
Gratuitous Self-Referential Weblog Reference of the Day
I found the i2design link through riothero, who every regular visitor to barbelith has heard about more than once. I just wanted to say that I haven’t forgotten about the collaboration I said I’d do with him on hero.nu, and as soon as I am settled I will start work on it in earnest. By the way Mark, don’t you get cold? Put a woolly jumper on old chap!
Most Ridiculously Embarrassing Thing of All Time
So you’re wandering around with a young gentleman you might be relatively keen on, and he decides to duck back to your office with you. And then you decide to show him the view from the 7th floor of a tall building in the centre of London because he’s an architect and he might like to see them finish the roof of the British Museum. And then he wants to see what’s on the other side of the building so you think, maybe I should take him up to the roof so he can see more. And then he decides he fancies a quick kiss, which is nice. And then you go back to work. And then ten minutes later you are informed that an entire department of the company you work for was watching a reflection of everything you did in the mirrored building opposite. And then you collapse in embarrassment. This happened to a friend of mine. It did not happen to me…