Author: Tom Coates

Last night my complete over-whelming exhaustion caught up with me finally. I went out for a drink with Meg, Luke, Davo and Catherine at the O2 centre on Finchley Road. After precisely two cocktails, I couldn’t stand and became gradually more maudlin. They persuaded me to go back to their flat for a bacon buttie – almost the only thing I’d eaten all day – by which time my fingers were getting cold and numb. When I finally got home at 10.30pm I collapsed in bed and slept for nearly ten hours.

Thanks to my helpful contact at AOL, I now have access to a really good ArsDigita article on HTML e-mail. This confronts most of the issues associated with the subject, and is very much worth a read. [Another article]

Can someone explain this to me? If merely having images of a paedophilic nature on one’s computer is a crime (no matter the context), then how can Jack Straw say, “I’ve seen some of the exhibits – if you can call them that – that are available on the internet, that are run by paedophiles. They really are absolutely appalling” without being promptly arrested? Any decent civil liberties group should be pointing the police in the direction of his PC.

So my old employers, Time Out, have finally launched their first city guide in the new style that I had a part in assembling. Certain things seem to have been lost in the shakedown process, but it still just about works. There’s a few things that I am a bit confused about, to do with continuity over the site and things that I expected to be brought into line over the site before launch, but it’s worth a look nonetheless.

Urgent: I’m looking for a site which gives the lowdown on producing well formatted HTML templates, complete with a website’s look-and-feel, but which don’t break in hotmail, Yahoo! mail and Outlook / Outlook Express. The best I’ve come up with so far is a fairly lacklustre article from Webmonkey.

Found in Inbox: Someone sent me this a while back, and I forwarded it to another one of my e-mail addresses because I was at work or something, and now I don’t know who did it. If it was you mail me. Anyway – having stumbled upon it once more, I thought I should share it with the world. It really is strangely apposite [Addendum: The source of this particular image is young Meg]:

The Guardian’s Ethical Conundrums presents us with the question: How do you mend a broken heart? My favourite answer to this, because it amuses me, not because I’d do it, is: “The best way to get over someone is to get under someone….”

People seem continually surprised by each new ‘homosexual revelation’ in the entertainment industry. The latest one concerns Alec Guinness, who apparently was happily married with a child while simultaneously flirting on the side with a little boy-on-boy action. The plain and simple fact is that there are a hell of a lot of gay people in the world – anywhere from sixty to six hundred million of us. And while I’m delighted that people are gradually coming to realise this, I do wish that it wouldn’t be such a shock to them each and every time they find out about one more…

The Portabush: “The most powerful man in the world is now yours to control! PortaBush is the palm-sized version of Dubya that lets anyone experience the joys and headaches of being President. Pass or veto bills, pig out on Texas BBQ, blow-up any number of people or places, flirt with an intern, and when all the stress gets to you, drink yourself silly!” [via syntheticlife.com]

I’ve just watch Bring it On again, and would like to announce that if you are anything like the character Cliff Pantone (as played by Jesse Bradford) in any way (but, you know, gay), then mail me. Important criteria for ideal man: 1) Should know punk from hole in ground (but not be all scary about it – guitar tendencies important though), 2) Should be centred, passionate, but not moody – able to deal with occasional crap, while understanding where such crap comes from. 3) Should understand (perhaps share) important geek desires like HTML, Buffy and cheesy movies, 4) Should IDEALLY be about 25, circa 5’8″, between ten and a half and eleven stone, and healthily scruffy-looking. 5) Good job / money completely unimportant, although restrained intelligence gets big bonus points.