Year: 2002

In August 2000 I stumbled upon a list of amusing headlines – headlines which for one reason or another had rather dubious double meanings. The headlines read as follows:

• Include your children when baking cookies
• Something went wrong in Jet crash, expert says
• Police begin campaign to run down jaywalkers
• Iraqi head seeks arms
• Prostitutes appeal to Pope
• Panda mating fails, Veterinarian takes over
• Clinton wins on budget, but more lies ahead
• Miners refuse to work after death
• Stolen painting found by tree
• War dims hop for peace
• If strike isn’t settled quickly, it may last a while
• Cold wave linked to temperatures
• Red tape holds up new bridges
• Typhoon rips through cemetery – hundreds dead
• Man struck by lightning faces battery charge
• New study of obesity looks for larger test group
• Kids make nutritious snacks
• Chef throws his heart into helping feed needy
• Local high school dropouts cut in half
• Hospitals are sued by seven foot doctors

For what may very well be completely spurious reasons, I decided that these headlines would be even more amusing with some visual aids to support them – and so I put out a call to the weblogging community of the time. With hilarious consequences…

“Kids make nutritious snacks” by David Pannett

“Prostitutes appeal to Pope” by Meg Pickard

“Include your children when baking cookies” by Brad Morse

“Chef throws his heart into helping feed needy” by Neale Talbot

“Minors refuse to work after death” by Meg Pickard

“Police begin campaign to run down jaywalkers” by Jason Theriault

“Panda mating fails, veterinarian takes over” by Marshall

“Panda mating fails, veterinarian takes over” by Meg Pickard

“Local high school dropouts cut in half” by David Pannett

Unfortunately there’s one entry (never before seen) that I have lost the original contributor for. If you made it, please let me know!

“Red tape holds up new bridges”

Word on the street is that there will be a “Free The Mayfair One” demonstration outside the ICA on Monday at 6pm. It looks like Mr Massow may be being asked to step down as the Chairman of the ICA just because he called Conceptual Art a great big pile of saggy dad’s pants. The potential for an entertaining evening is huge – whatever ludicrous position you decide to occupy.

I’ve recently been exorcising the lamoid sci-fi geek within me with a regular dose of Farscape, but now the series is over leaving me with no quality space-trash to glue myself to except for ancient re-runs of Star Trek featuring a young and eminently spankable Wil Wheaton. And that’s not spankable in the good way. What will I do without the space-opera of Crichton and Aeryn? And will we ever see Crais and Talyn again? Or indeed the rest of the crew of Moya? Or in fact is our hero doomed to float in space forever with nothing but his leather trousers and some NASA industrial lubricant for company?

Every link every posted to iamcal.com is here. You know what would be useful? A kind of bridge site between a link and its destination that redirected you to the most recent archive on the Wayback Machine if a request hit a 404 page…

A quick answer to a regular question (most recently posed here) – permalinks on plasticbag.org have been removed temporarily while I try and figure out the best way to implement them within the constraints of the new design without resorting to table tags or making it all look ugly. I am also hoping that Blogger Pro will shortly have a permalink-by-day feature, which I would prefer to use…

The last 48-hours has seen the most extraordinary weather battering the UK. Even safe in Maida Vale, the windows have been rattling and clunking around in the frames. I’ve made it a mission to go out as little as possible. God knows what it must be like in more exposed areas. When I visited my family over Christmas there was an extraordinary gale blowing – the noise was incredible – and the huge trees in the garden leant and creaked. On the ground it was almost completely still, but you still had a sense of the sheer power of the storm. I don’t think there is another weather phenomenon more likely to make you feel at the mercy of huge forces beyond your control…

The best thing about the Anti-Bloggies is the rules.

Must have MP3 of the day is “Jesus was Way Cool” by King Missile:

Lyrics:
Jesus was way cool
Everybody liked Jesus
Everybody wanted to hang out with him
Anything he wanted to do, he did.
He turned water into wine
And if he’d wanted to..
He could have turned weed into marijuana
Or sugar into cocaine
Or vitamin pills into amphetimines
He walked on the water
And swam on the land
He would tell these stories
And people would listen!
He was really cool.

Vain attempt to exploit current interest in plasticbag.org: Tom is currently looking for permanent employment in the London area, particularly in the editorial and structural development of online publishing ventures and/or online communities. If the nice people from the community department of the BBC are listening – I’ve applied for one of your jobs and I’d really like it.