Year: 2001

Since I am going to have to be drearily positive for the next seven weeks as I scrabble around for a new job, I thought I may as well take this opportunity to moan about how appalling my life is at the moment in laborious and tedious detail.

1) Shortly to be unemployed. 2) No love life worth talking about since Max who, let us remind ourselves, is busy exploring the limits of desire with a series of teenagers. 3) I have to move out of my flat at the beginning of May and don’t know where I’m going to move to. 4) It is all cold and wintery outside. 5) I have bad hair and skin failure. [Summary: job/love/flat/hair/weather disasterous.]

Why Blogger Empowers Mindless Nits:
“Ah, but see, that’s the rub – it’s not about creating good content, its about creating ENOUGH content so that people will look at it, thinking you have something important to say. And with blog wars, blog voting, and “via trails”, it’s no longer about WHAT you have to say, but rather HOW MANY people are listening.”

I saw my first picture that may or may not be from the Tobey Maguire-starring Spiderman film today. I can’t actually tell whether or not it is a photograph, which probably bodes ill for the production, but if this is Mr Maguire in the outfit, he’s certainly been doing some exercise recently.

I added my StorTrooper to Threadnaught’s ever growing page of StorTrooper webloggers, which I would heartily recommend that everyone participates in. Perhaps we could have badges made for any upcoming London web-meets so that people can recognise us more easily. Alternatively, I suppose I could put a photograph on my site. Revolutionary thought. That’s what I’m known for.

After-dinner discussion (• • •) last night has led me to believe that an Andersen Consulting-style rebranding exercise might be in order for the weblogging community. Merely take two words that you feel ‘represent’ your site in some way, and then combine them to produce your newly rebranded site-name. If in the process you can spend $600 million, then all the better. With this spirit of adventure in mind, I hereby declare plasticbag.org to be called ‘fascillåte’. Bow down in ironic awe.

We love pete@norriscomputing.demon.co.uk. We love him because he owns bigbollocks.com, which may or may not be the UK’s favourite website…

For the delectation and fulfilment of the basic geek instinct that is primal to our natures (huzzah), I hereby present to my compatriots in arms an article about ‘IT’, an astonishing and revolutionary new concept and product for the 21st Century. Apparently.

What is ‘IT’?
“Harvard Business School Press executive editor Hollis Heimbouch has just paid $250,000 for a book about IT — but neither the editor nor the agent, Dan Kois of The Sagalyn Literary Agency, knows what IT is.”

“All they do know: IT, also code-named Ginger, is an invention developed by 49-year-old scientist Dean Kamen, and the subject of a planned book by journalist Steve Kemper. According to Kemper’s proposal, IT will change the world, and is so extraordinary that it has drawn the attention of technology visionaries Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs and the investment dollars of pre-eminent Silicon Valley venture capitalist John Doerr, among others. “

[Addendum: The BBC catches up with plasticbag.org.]

UK Readers: Take note, for this evening Disinfo Nation returns to Channel Four. Featuring Richard Metzger, chatting uber-web god of disinfo.com infamy, this TV show not only has included an interview with Robert Anton Wilson, not only included a glowing review of my other main site Barbelith, but is also soon to feature an interview with anarchist anti-god-head Grant Morrison – the man who has most systematically lit the fires in my Ur-head-space over the last ten to fifteen years. Be awed.

Spotted, Cool T-shirt Slogan: “And Jesus spake unto Burt Bacharach: ‘I am the way to San Jose’.”

Bizarre facts about stair-cases? rebuke.org reveals all. [Courtesy of notsosoft.com]

“An architect guy I met said that when designing stairs, you should always have an odd number, because people tend to take the first stair with their leading foot (in my case, my left), and it balances the body better if the last stair is on the leading foot as well. “