Being a set of links that I don’t have either the time or the inclination to write up properly, even though I know no-one will actually click on any of them:
The dream – the recurring one – is the one where I go back to school after my degree to do more A-levels, and have to wear the same school uniform and am older than everyone else, but because I also have to hold down my job as well, I’m hardly ever there and then the exams come around and I’m terrified that I’m going to fail. The interesting nuance in the night of trauma that I just experienced was that I was doing an A-level in a language & literature class in something like Ancient Aramaic (or even Greek – which I’m supposed to be able to read) with only one or two other people, and the person in charge of teaching me, and who was sitting in the exam room with us was Stefan Magdalinski, my boss at UpMyStreet.com. He was oddly inscrutable, like he knew what all the questions were. He kept smirking in a (mostly) kind way. Drove me insane…
Two hundred-thousand people have voted. And the response should be at the very least sobering for the American and British governments. The question asked: Which country represents the greatest threat to world peace in 2003?
A good connection to the interhighweb and a love of computer games is all you need to appreciate the Jackass of X-Box gaming: Warthog Jump by Randy Glass. With only a few dozen grenades, a few dead marines and a rocket-launcher, Randy catapults Halo’s Warthog transports into the air in elegant studies of gaming pyrotechnics. Highly recommended and highly entertaining. Much improved if your sound is on, and the download is about 20mb, so not for the modem-users among you…
A few weeks ago there was an article on the BBC’s site called The Formula for Happiness which explained that scientists had somehow managed to work out precisely the right way to calculate how happy someone was based upon several core criteria of their lives. This story has been picked up by boingboing.net and ran yesterday. But if you don’t want to go through the whole palaver of calculating the whole thing by hand (as indeed I didn’t) you can now go and have it calculated for you by DotCode’s Calculate your happinesss.
Are you children never satisfied? Do you find yourself buying them ever more toys that they seem to discard almost immediately? Do they have a strange menacing glint in their eyes that you find ungodly? Terrifying, even? Then get them one of the new range of toys from John Lewis. Guaranteed to keep them quiet!
Often as I’m taking the bus home of an evening, I pass a man who looks a bit like a dynamic middle manager standing on Oxford Street near to John Lewis talking about God very loudly through some kind of ‘voice-enhancement-device’. I found him profoundly annoying. From my position he’s just standing up there advertising a way of life that seems to be based around the abandonment of a sense of moral responsibility and condemning people whose lifestyles don’t fit the model of Middle-Eastern propriety two thousand years ago. It seems a bit weird to me. I keep wanting to go up to him and say things like, “I commit the sin of buggery!” Even though I very seldom do and when I do I don’t like it very much. Or maybe, “I do dirty things with men!” Which I do slightly more often and quite enjoy, but doesn’t seem entirely immoral enough. Or maybe buy him a novel or something. So that he has something else to do instead of shout at me all day.
But actually I have a lot of respect for the poor chap. He’s established some things he believes in and he probably gets a fair amount of aggro but still he’s prepared to stand up and do his bit. Occasionally I look around my own soap-box by the side of the road, and check my voice-publishing equipment and wonder what on earth to talk about – even as I know there are a million things I’d like to say. In fact, worse than that, I find myself backing away from confrontation even about some of the things I believe in strongly. I had real trouble writing about Martin Sheen leading the anti-war protest in Los Angeles the other day because I was genuinely proud of him, proud to know that a man whose work I enjoy has the fire and the energy and the commitment to stand up and be counted. But when it came to writing about it, I became immediately timid. I kept qualifying things – we should respect his actions even as we might not necessarily agree with them – he was a great man whether or not you thought his cause was just. So I’m feeling a bit ashamed of myself today, and I’m thinking to myself, “What if I didn’t back down on issues like these?”. I’m even thinking, “I wonder what would happen if I went looking for fights…”
Since I don’t talk nearly enough about the trivia of my life on the site any more, I thought I’d briefly allude to my trip to Suffolk and put online a scant few of the pictures I took when I was up there. I think they came out quite well: The first two weeks of 2003.
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So what have you seen in the first two weeks of 2003? Shortly after New Year I travelled up to Suffolk to visit a friend who had rented a cottage by the sea for her thirtieth birthday. The weather was stunning and we got to walk on the beach.
The morning after the night before we travelled around a bit, ending up wandering around the astonishingly intact Orford Castle.
While wandering around the village we found several restaurants serving fish and an amazing place that smoked fish and cheese and hocks of ham, and you could watch them doing it (and take photos).
And when we returned to London it wasn’t more than a few days before the weather had changed completely, and blue-skies and ice-cold winds had turned into huge flakes of snow. Here’s the view from my back window:
I’m quite happy with the stuff I’ve done and seen so far this year. If it’s all of a comparable standard, I think I’ll be quite satisfied…
Three things. A) The first thing is that I’m going to send you all over to Sparky’s house and remind you to make a donation to Sparky and Rooster’s Big Gay unWedding – which you should be able to find a link for half-way down the page on the left. Congratulations again, guys. I only wish I could come over and congratulate you both in person. B) Mr Kottke’s advertising his wares in his window again, so if you’re looking for someone with considerable talent who concentrates in clear, simple, user-centered design, microcontent, and the writable web then you should aim yourselves towards his updated portfolio. C) A Friend and secret-trash-professional has launched themselves blogwards at Trash Addict and you should go and investigate immediately so that the novelty doesn’t wear off…