Category: Random

There are times when the BBC does something well. And when the BBC does something well it does it very well. Take their online title sequence archive for example. Loads of famous RealOne-Up-The-Wazoo-ed TV show memories from the last one million billion years. Most of which I remember – since I am ludicrously, stupidly, absurdly old. Key favourites – and memory-inspiring moments include:

• A Very Peculiar Practice
  There are loads of entries about A Very Peculiar Practice in my feeble diaries of the time. I was obsessed. It was so gloriously bizarre – a young doctor completely out of his depth in some modern University where Nuns rifled through the bins. I tried to replicate an image from the credits with Microsoft Paint on the early PCs in my school computer lab.

• Red Dwarf
  It come on TV when I was sixteen. I remember the weekly ritual of turning all my lights off in my bedroom and watching my parents old clapped out TV with the sound down and the door shut so that when my parents went to bed I wouldn’t disturb them too much. I used to have to do that a lot. My parents went to bed really early. Still do.

• Doctor Who (Peter Davison)
  I remember Tom Baker turning into Peter Davison more than I remember losing my virginity. I remember being utterly confused by the whole thing. And being completely glued to his run. I remember when Adric died and there was no credits music. I remember being really freaked out by that.

• The Adventure Game
  It appeared to be on all the time – thousands of times a week maybe. Maybe more. And it made utterly no sense whatsoever either. Every single characters’ name was an anagram of ‘Dragon’. Everyone in the UK around my age knows this already…

Other memorables: Box of Delights, Butterflies, Bergerac and Battle of the Planets.

What follows is the definition of a word that is relatively well known to webloggers across the world at the moment, that has been taken up quite quickly by American webloggers, but has strangely not been taken up as quickly by people in the UK.

\Blog”roll’ing\ n. [apparently coined by Doc Searls]
1. The placing of links in a semi-permanent sidebar-style form from one weblog to another, initially designed to be a short-cut for the creator of the site, which has subsequently become a place to demonstrate admiration, mutual respect, link-flattery and a tacit appeal for a return link of some kind.
2. The practice of individual webloggers to link repetitively and flatteringly to the posts and comments of their friends and online favourites.

Here is the word that ‘blogrolling’ is supposed to be a pleasant corruption or extension of – a word which one assumes is more familiar in the US than in the UK:

\Log”roll’ing\ n. [from Dictionary.com]
1. The exchanging of political favors, especially the trading of influence or votes among legislators to achieve passage of projects that are of interest to one another.
2. The exchanging of favors or praise, as among artists, critics, or academics.

What follows is the word that most English people will assume the word ‘blogrolling’ is a pun on – a word that is as utterly familiar to us as our own names and a word that casts a considerably less high-brow aspect on the whole ‘blogrolling’ phenomenon.

\Bog”roll n.
A slang term for toilet/lavatory paper – derived from the use of the word ‘bog’ to refer to the water closet or ‘bathroom’ in the United Kingdom – being a soft or semi-abrasive absorbent material with the specific purpose of removing excess faecal substance from one’s bottom after excretion…

Inspired by Been ‘blogging’? Web discourse hits higher level.

Another day, another stunning factoid from the popbitch people: “Newark is the only town in the USA which is an anagram of Wanker”.

It’s quite hard to reach my keyboard from the floor where I have been rolling around in glee for several hours now, delighted by the fact that Blogdom has declared itself more concerned with Domino’s Pizza charging for delivery than nuclear detente or censorship. Sometimes you’ve got to love Blogdex. If you need to know the lard-arses that are terrified by the end to free carbohydrate delivery, then you should check out Blogdex’s list of sources.

I’m not going to comment on the Independent article that talked of regime change in the rogue state of the USA, except to say that it’s very definitely the closest thing to a must-read on the net at the moment.

Ok – first things first – today I noticed in my referrers for the first time an article about the 2002 Bloggies from what appears to be some kind of newspaper or magazine in Russia. Now my first instinct was to declare it immediately cool and pass swiftly on. Except then I remembered that Babel Fish might do a translator for Russian. Travelling swiftly across I discovered almost immediately that I was in fact correct – and one translater later I have a fully readable – if vaguely nonsensical – article bouncing about in front of my bonce.

But what is this? Does Babelfish translate with an accent? For in Russia they don’t have weblogs – they have veblogs. I know this to be the case because I won Best European Veblog. And Mr Wheaton? Well, if you can make sense of the fact that he is credited as ‘Sewed Shyueaton Reinforced-concrete pillbox No’, then you should be delighted to hear that the awards he won were, “Veblog of year, the very same the most ridiculous of veblog, the very same best American veblog, the very same the best motto of vebloga, the very same best promoushen of vebloga“. Which is, you know, nice…

Well riothero appears to be back and functioning – and with its rightful owner at the helm. It’s diffucult to tell whether or not his meeting with Matt and I was what pushed him back into it or not. Here’s the pictorial fruit of three meetings in London.

The first meeting in London takes Mark, Matt & Es and I to Balans Café in London’s fashionable Soho. First impressions are that Mark looks much more like a Spanish waiter than he used to…

We managed to catch Matt in a rare pensive mood at one point in the evening. Matt’s hair is unstyled and his t-shirt comes from threadless.com.

No doubt I was saying something exceptionally funny in this picture, although god knows what it was. Note how my face looks all inflated and weird in this picture as if I’d just turned thirty and turned into mush on the spot.

I made Matt take lots and lots of pictures of me on this evening in a vain attempt to get one that didn’t make me look like a drooling octogenarian. All these attempts were hideous failures. He will be punished…

We had so much fun we all completely lost track of the time. We all get to the tube late, and miss our trains. Matt makes sure that Mark gets a cab back to his hotel. Later Mark will give me some money to give to Matt and I’ll spend it all on drink, drugs and wild wild women. But don’t tell Matt, ok?

Tuesday lunchtime and it’s time to hang out with Mark and his mum in Jonathan’s on New Oxford Street, near Holborn. A lovely time is had by all (I hope). At one point, almost symbolically, a plastic bag is blown in from the street. Thankfully, no riots or heroes follow it in…

In which Mark looks sheepish for the camera… He’ll thank me when he’s all old and crusty.

The final picture is a bit of a farce, frankly. Last evening in London for Mark, I try to get some people together at the last minute and kind of fail, I get rained on so my hair goes all wonky and horrible and I’m all grim and sticky and tired and insane looking, we think about going to see a film but there isn’t really a film to watch, so we kind of mill around a bit. We try to take ONE good photo of us sitting in a café – after about a dozen and some very dirty looks, Mark holds out his arm and snaps us from a distance. We both look a bit stupid, frankly, but it’s the best of a bad lot…

Here are a two particularly alarming quotes from a piece from the Public Relations Society of America site, from the article: Pitching Blogs: Latest Type Of Online Media Vehicle May Provide Valuable PR Opportunities

• “The question is how to land your clients in the right blog at the right time in order to reap the benefits of their highly receptive audience.”
• “Many [webloggers] still consider their sites to be personal forums for their views and perspectives, and are wary of corporate or PR interference.”
  – note the use of the qualifying ‘still’ as if to imply that this is in fact not the case, will not be the case for much longer or should not be the case for much longer.

Now this is a good idea – Wishlists for schools and non-profit organisations. I wonder if there’s something like this for schools and organisations in the UK. It would be great to be able to donate something specific to a school that actually has a tangible benefit to someone. Cared about English – donate a novel you loved. Cared about Computer Science – donate a text-book or a piece of useful software…

I’m in the market for some threadless action. I need those t-shirts/posters/things. Oh yeah. There’s a particular poster I’m very keen on. But can a young metropolitan homosexualist really get away with naked ladies on his wall – however phallic the imagery? I declare myself officially a crap poof. Bring me the style, panache and hair of a glamour-man post-haste. I’m turning into middle-aged hetero-mulch before mine own eyes.