Category: Random

Above and beyond the lustful need for a new iPod (mine is bashed and broken and lying in the basement of secret branch of MicroAnvika with Joe the iPod Man) is my need, my craving for Jaguar – the upgraded version of MacOSX. I’ve been reading reviews and watching the countdown for several weeks now. Someone asked me a while ago how long it was until it came out. I knew this figure to within one hour. Sad, it’s true. But all these new features: iChat, Mail, Address Book, Rendezvous and iCal…

You can arrive home at eleven exhausted and drained. You can try and watch TV for a while and fall asleep during the horrific climax of an episode of one of your favourite TV series. You can stay asleep on the sofa until three in the morning, and then stumble awake to find your hall has been flooded by the dodgy tap in your bathroom. You can mop it up half-heartedly and robotically before wandering bedwards. You can lie awake in bed for two hours unable to sleep, before finally succumbing a little before six in the morning. And then you can wake in a panic because you think you’re late for work, only to find that you’ve only been unconscious for an hour. You can get up and try and watch the end of the TV show you were watching the night before and doze off in the middle of it. Just don’t expect to feel so hot the next day. Okay?

Of all the terrifyingly heart-breakingly funny cartoons I’ve seen on Salon, Cold Pursuit is probably the one I identify with most. It’s the story of two people in love with each other who individually conspire not to be with one another. My favourite line: “Which made him wonder why she had never succumbed to his indifference”.

Update-monitors of yesteryear beware – the dark-times have come for your kind. For Phil Gyford has shown the way of the future with Haddock Blogs. It’s a very simple premise – a web-based interface that collates the various RSS/RDF feeds from a group of weblogs and assembles a contents page from them that updates each and every hour.

The potential for this kind of first-stage weblog content aggregation is huge – particularly for interest or social groups. Haddock being, in this case, a community of friends based around a mailing list. But you could do the same thing for all weblogs with an RSS feed if you wanted, or use category fields or clustering to form highly focused sites about anything from Buffy to PGP…

“Right now, fruit pastilles are plotting to carve runes on a forking brogue. My Tipp-Ex bottle is darkly-dressed, and Penny Blacks that I work with may be rotten. I’m Federal Agent Jack Bauer, and this is the hairiest gearstick of my life.” Genius Surreal 24. And now for your complete vialog: Darren, via Sore Eyes via As Above.

Some songs make you burst from sheer weight of emotion. Some make you want to dance like a coked-up electro-shocked duck in the mating season. Some, on the other hand, are dripping with ludicrously stunning lyrics… It’s even more fun reading them when you haven’t got a clue what the song is…

1 Picked up a boy just south of Mobile
Gave him a ride, filled him with a hot meal
I was sixteen, he was twenty-one
Rode with us to Memphis
And papa woulda shot him if he knew what he’d done

2 I drank the portion she offered me
I found myself on the floor
Then I looked into those big green eyes
And I wondered what I came there for….

3 There was this boy who had two children with his sisters
Who were his daughters, who were his favorite lovers
I got no lips, I got no tongue
Where there were eyes, there’s only space
I got no lips, I got no tongue

4 Well you can’t live with em
Or without em
You never really know a thing about em
It’s hard to believe that all that’s there…
is a rag and a bone and a hank of hair…

5 The ladies buy their ice from me
They dig my fast delivery
They love the way I move about
I don’t make a mess
I get in and out…

6 Hey goombah, I love a how you dance a rhumbah
But take a some advice paisano
Learn how to mambo
If you gonna be a square
You ain’t a gonna go nowhere

A few months ago I moved house. I was living on Morshead Road in Maida Vale and I moved to a thirties block of flats on Shirland Road. Anyway – various things happened to me when I moved into the new flat – things that I had to spend time while at work sorting out. Things like my gas being cut off and my locks being changed. Annoying stuff. So I’m at work and this woman hears me talking on the phone about my block of flats and comes over and says that she lives there too – although she’s just about to move out. We have a laugh about it – it’s funny, it’s a nice little coincidence, and then forget all about it. Until today I hear her on the phone and she’s moved into my old flat on Morshead Road. The exact same flat. Possibly even the same room.

There’s a weblogger of some reknown called Mo Morgan. Mo has created a useful resource for webloggers which is very much worthy of a link. I heard about this resource because Mr Morgan sent me an instant message mentioning that if I wanted to blog it, I could. He insisted that I didn’t have to link to it, or anything. Just that I could. So I asked if he wanted me to blog it. And he replied, “Not particularly. But if you wanted to, you can.” So I kind of leant back and said, “So you don’t want me to link to it, then?” And he come right back with, “No”.

So what’s going on here? Clearly Mr Morgan did want me to link to the resource in question. But it appears he’s too proud to actually ask me to do it. I pressed and I pressed – just ask me I said, and I will link to it. But he consistently replied, “No”. In fact by the end of the conversation he said, “No – Please don’t link to them…” So if Mr Morgan mentions his new resource to you, you know what to do… Let’s cure him of this sinful pride – make him beg…

Metaspore n. A bastardisation of the word ‘Metaphor’ with semantic cross-over with the concept of the ‘meme’ – the metaspore being a violently self-propogating meme with particularly little interest in the survivability of its hosts, with propogation being of such a speed and virulence that conceptual spread is maintainable even though long-term prospects of communication disintegrate when the meme spreads globally. An example of a highly dangerous meme could be the suicide cult, or the concept of teenage suicide itself (cf Micronesian suicides in Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘Tipping Point’), while the most obvious contemporary candidate for status of ‘metaspore’ might currently be global capitalism in its full environment-damaging form.

London’s Underground system is as frustrating as it is iconic and vital. It’s the world’s oldest underground system, it’s teeming with people whenever it’s open – which (ironically) isn’t as often as it should be. The tunnels are too old and small to allow the trains to have any kind of air conditioning, and it’s prone to radical over-crowding. Daily use of it drives most Londoners to a state of vengeful apoplexy several times a week – standing up next to some sweating warthog of a man, crammed on platforms like self-canning sardines. So perhaps it’s hardly a surprise that all over the tube at the moment are these extraordinary adverts…