Year: 2002

Whatever my personal opinions of the prize – the Guardian’s “Best British Weblog” prize closes today. Good luck to everyone who entered! I secretly want Matt to win (nobody knows that though – don’t spread it around) because I think he’d be completely surprised and geniunely touched. But whoever wins, enjoy it! (And to anyone who thinks that they might win, go and read Meg’s piece and make sure that your house is in order before everything goes ballistic.) Raise your glasses one and all to the wonders of Webloggia!

“Even in a personal diary addressed to myself I must fictionalize the addressee. Indeed, the diary demands, in a way, the maximum fictionalizing of the utterer and the addressee. Writing is always a kind of imitation talking, and in a diary I therefore am pretending that I am talking to myself. But I never really talk this way to myself. Nor could I without writing or indeed without print. The personal diary is a very late literary form, in effect unknown until the seventeenth century (Boerner 1969). The kind of verbalized solipsistic reveries it implies are a product of consciousness as shaped by print culture. And for which self am I writing? Myself today? As I think I will be ten years from now? As I hope I will be? For myself as I imagine myself or hope others may imagine me? Questions such as this can and do fill diary writers with anxieties and often enough lead to discontinuation of diaries. The diarist can no longer live with his or her fiction. ” (Orality and Literacy, Walter J Ong, Routledge1982)

Thanks to Neal, Nico, Steve and Grant (among others) for pointing out how useless and inexpert a wannabe web savant I am. The post in which Jason prostitutes himself for a few hundred dollars worth of fine fine Apple product is here.

I can’t find the link or I’d post it. If Jason had a search box it would have been easier to find. But I know that it’s true. I know it. I remember it clearly – Jason asking someone to sponsor his site in exchange for an iBook. Now I once won an Anti-Bloggie (apologies for Google cache version) for being an unbearably mercenary and foul human being that craved money with a passion. But if that’s so true, how come I never thought of getting people to paypal me donations (see related Wired news article) to buy myself a laptop with? I mean, there was a time last year when I was going to auction off dates with myself on ebay to pay the water bills. I’m supposed to be shameless. Well anyway, I’ve bloody thought about it now and no mistake… Keep watching the skies.

I bought an album by the Bangles when I as about fifteen in the late eighties, and it had a song on it called “Return Post”. And I listened to it again the other day for the first time in ages and it occurred to me that it’s probably one of the very last songs of its kind – a song about love letters and the postal service. It will no longer make any sense at all in a few years time… Read the lyrics

There are many ways to find a site. These are some of the ways that people found mine in the last few hours…

• Seeping Sperm
• football slash
• How do I stop someone from making my life a living hell and what element do I use in this matter
• Masturbation is not a crime
• Weird things about Masons

Inspired by kevan.org‘s comment about the Guardian award: “The whole thing seems dangerously adjacent to a World’s Greatest X mug – pointless when presented by a panel of strangers, but quite meaningful and interesting if someone I know is explaining their reasoning. So I’m hereby forging meme #1 of the Subjective Best British Weblog competition, inviting people to nominate their current favourite and tell the world why. No prizes or vote-tallying, just a meaningful signpost to somewhere worth going.” Agreed!

Unfortunately my subjective Best British Weblog is a secret one that a friend maintains and that I’m not allowed to link to. But my second favourite is probably interconnected.org – mainly because Matt writes things that often are just beyond my technical expertise, and he’s almost never flippant or clumsy with language, but thinks through what he wants to say carefully and thoroughly. But most importantly because he’s got a kind of weird visionary streak that means that you pick up on some of the frantic energy that motivates him through his writing and it helps you think more imaginatively as well… And as far as I’m concerned, that’s what it’s all about…

I spent years learning Ancient Greek at University. If challenged I can spout off the first few lines of Euripides’ Bacchae (my favourite tragedy) in a deep and rolling voice – a suitable voice for the god Dionysus who speaks them. But of course no one really completely knows for certain what it sounded like when it was spoken out loud… People have researched phonemes and attempted to reconstruct accents and pitch and rhythms from the intensive application of philology, but no one really knows. Still, it’s fascinating to listen to some of the examples you can find on the net. Here’s some Homer (Iliad 18, 39-96), some Aeschylus (Agamemnon 503-537) and some Plato (Symposium 172ff) from this site, which also includes some astonishingly weirdly assembled Ancient Greek Music. And all because I wanted to know whether ‘noos’ was pronounced ‘no’os’ or ‘noose’.

Did you decide not to enter the Guardian’s weblog competition? If you didn’t, then why not participate in the Not the best project – a small pod list of people who decided not to take part for whatever reason. You can stick the pod on your site really easily, and if you didn’t enter and want to be listed on it then you can do that too. Have fun with it…