Category: Random

Because the deadline for entries has now passed, I’ve temporarily dropped the ‘Not the Best’ box down to the bottom of the page. When the winner is announced, I’ll bounce it back up to the top for a few more days before we all move on to more interesting and dynamic new projects…

There’s nothing that reminds you more about the evolving (expanding) nature of your own body like an old suit. I only have one suit – it’s a lovely brown/grey number that I got when I first moved to London five or six years ago. At the time it was a snug fit, but over the years snug appears to have become closer to vacuum packing than clothing. I wouldn’t mind so much if it was a development forward, but it appears to be a development sideways, which is very much the last thing I was expecting… If it continues at this pace I’m going to be infinitely wide and just as deep as I always was. I’ll be like a huge huge two foot thick piece of man-paper. And then nothing will fit me. The shame, the shame…

So here it is, me in my suit with the worst tie in the world, busting out all over with some of the most ludicrous hair I’ve ever managed to cultivate. Sigh.

How gay is Captain Nice? He’s my hero… (courtesy of TVParty.com)

Interesting fact: In the summer of 1969, Bryan Adams was precisely nine years old.

Very little to say about about this except that you can’t get it in the UK yet… Buffy, The Vampire Slayer: Once More With Feeling.

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