Category: Random

So the annual weblog awards voted for by the community and for the community have come around once more. It’s Bloggies 2003 and there are strange new exotic categories for nominations and brand new opportunities for scampery and fun. A couple of things to remember: (1) Davo and Luke now very definitely are eligible in the Best Australasian category, (2) if you really want to be exposed to loads and loads of new weblogs then it’s best to be a judge if you can (I’m not going to be this year), (4) plasticbag.org will be quite comfortable being nominated in these categories: Best European, Best GLBT, Best Designed, Weblog of the Year or Best Article or Essay (if you can’t find any good ones you could always nominate the article in the Guardian which talked about the differences between the Bloggies and the Guardian Best British Weblog award). I’d even cheerily take a Lifetime Achievement Award off your hands if you were drunk enough to proffer it… (5) Other good weblogs you should look towards over several categories are cityofsound.typepad.com, interconnected.org, ultrasparky.org, BoingBoing.net and (particularly for the geeks) diveintomark.org. All very much recommended for very different reasons…

The weirdest quote of the day comes from Anne Widdecombe about the weirdest, least pleasant and most ludicrous story of the day. She said, “Jesus Christ said suffer the little ones to come unto me, not that they should be eaten for public entertainment.”

And the winner of Yahoo!’s Person of the Year is George W Bush, which I’m sure has come as quite a surprise to anyone not living in the USA. Whatever one’s personal opinions, I think it’s quite likely that the rest of the world would find such a ‘victory’ inappropriate, unlikely, completely out of the blue. I would love to be able to have the figures at hand, but from my impressions of the media in my country and the general consensus of general opinion that one absorbs in day-to-day life, the vast majority of the world has a radically different view of him. The worrying thing about this is less that there is a radical discord between public opinion on this issue in the US and the rest of the world, but that it can only be a sympton either of a radical cultural divergence between the US and the rest of the world or between the coverage of the leader in the media. Here are a few articles from BBC News that I think hint at some of the international impressions…

• Russia ‘regrets’ US anti-missile plan (Russia)
• ‘Moron Bush’ aide resigns (Canada)
• A Tale of ‘Two Speeches’ (Romania)
• Schroeder shunned by ‘cordial’ Bush (Germany)
• US Jews and Arabs criticise Bush (Jews & Arabs)
• Bush Bestriding the World?
• Europe concerns over US Iraq policy

If you believe I have a reputation at all, then sit comfortable while I abandon all claim to intellectual expertise, skill or insight and instead link to this really nice picture of Tobey Maguire which makes my heart-rate pick up pace and my vision get all weird and blurry…

I initially had a few reservations about Schott’s Original Miscellany. After all, wasn’t it just one of those funny fact books that people with knitted loo-roll covers place in the toilet? But when you see it – when you get your hands on it and investigate its pages – everything changes. It feels wonderfully archaic and traditional in a really reassuring way – the paper is good quality, the binding is luxurious, the art resembles the woodcut work of Eric Gill. And the facts within it aren’t just funny trivia – they’re actually significantly useful piece of information, fragments of literary interest, selections of philosophical quotes. Maybe it’s just a trivial little book to help make the self-satisfied middle-classes feel more witty and interesting… But it doesn’t matter. I’m a fan…

Over Christmas I was given some Clinique for Men eye-firming lotion and hair-gel, some soap, some Armani scent, a novel about Heroin addiction and a book called “How to be Alone”. Add this to the wedding I went to yesterday and increasing status as ‘weird-fifth wheel’ at my friend’s and colleagues parties and gatherings (those that I’m still invited to) and all I can do is thank god that I have work that I enjoy. Where’s my tiny house in the countryside with my labrador and chunky jumpers? Bah. Humbug.

I’m looking for advice (and/or links) on how one might go about sorting out the wireless networking of one G4 desktop Mac and one lovely sexy-new G3 iBook (both running OSX 10.2.3), the former of which is currently connected to the interhighweb via an Alcatel USB ADSL modem and BT Broadband. Some of the possibilities that I’ve been presented with so far:

• Buying an ADSL router, an Airport base-station and an airport card. [In which case any advice on which router to buy would be extremely helpful]
• Buying two airport cards (which apparently would allow my ibook to connect to the web without the need for a base-station or router)

In an article on the New York Times’ website, Religious Sect Announces the First Cloned Baby [via Scripting.com]:

Raëlians are followers of Raël, a French-born former race-car driver who has said he met a four-foot space alien atop a volcano in southern France in 1973 and went aboard his ship, where he was entertained by voluptuous female robots and learned that the first humans were created 25,000 years ago by space travelers called Elohim, who cloned themselves.

Now comes that part of the year when you rush out and buy those odds and ends that you hoped you’d get for Christmas but didn’t because no one in your family really understands the real you – no matter how many times you try to explain it to them.

So you’re a massive public service broadcaster that employs roughly forty thousand people, running a number of national and international TV shows and radio stations as well as having the most trafficked website in Europe. And you buy some American TV shows to show as part of your output. These shows have a substantial fan-base. Why on earth would you abuse them so terribly!? When there was an episode of this popular TV shows that was nominated for an Emmy – an episode I might add that was particularly celebrated and considered to be a particularly special one – what would you do? Would you hack it to death and then completely neglect to advertise it – even after postponing it for two weeks so you could show the bloody snooker? Why does the BBC hate the shows it buys? Why doesn’t it buy stuff it has faith in and then treat it accordingly? Stunningly irritating.