Category: Random

So at the end of last week I entered into an e-mail debate with Simon Walden from Guardian Unlimited about the Best British Blog award. The debate was supposed to be a public way of voicing some of the concerns about the award that I’ve been hearing from people around the community as well as my own relatively strong feelings on the subject. I was approached because I’d made the loudest stink about the whole thing, I think, rather than because of any other criteria.

Well I’m reasonably happy with how the debate itself turned out – and in fact it’s now online at the Guardian in full. I’m less thrilled with the introduction that they’ve written to go on top of it, which characterises me, slightly unfairly I think, as a grumpy curmudgeon trying to spoil all the fun, rather than someone who thinks that the Guardian acted inappropriately. Still, never mind…

One of the terrible terrible (oh the pain) crises of weblogging is that when you have anything to write about in your life you have no time in which to write about it. So summaries of posts that I wanted to write but didn’t have time would probably be:

• Austin Powers was good. Go figure.
• Cal made me buy an X-Box.
• Halo is really good.
• The UpsideClown party was good fun.
• Dan from Venusberg.org has trousers with piss-flaps.
• Sitting in Primrose Hill is really nice.
  
• Shit! I left my keys in Primrose Hill.

• How I gave a bottle of champagne to the taxi driver who helped me rescue my keys.
• Why is everyone trying to set me up with their friends?
• I’m on a weird low-carb diet.
• Lunch with the guy from Guardian Unlimited was very interesting, and now I’ve got some good ideas.
  
• Air Conditioning is a very very good thing.

Ok. Have you ever played ‘Worms’? Were your tiny blobby creepy crawlies just a little too heterosexual? Did you hanker for some exploding thong action? Do you need a rolling tranny to bitch-slap your Village People friends? Then check out Gaylords – a b3ta-style flash game in which one or two poofs can take on lots of robo-poofs. And who is the genius behing this endeavour? Would you believe it’s Auntie Beeb?

So if you fancy a laugh go and get your lardy arse over to the Guardian where you can read all about My New Media. It was done over the phone – which was a bit weird – and as such is dribbling with the kind of weird rhythms that stick out like badgers in ice-cream in my spoken voice. But it’s also been edited down quite a bit which is why some of the comments don’t really make all that much sense… I might expand on the questions later in the day if anyone’s interested – and thanks to Laura Barton for putting me in there in the first place!

So it occurs to me that if the Cook Islands formatted their top-level domains in the same way as the UK does, then you could get a site which would end in .co.ck – which shouldn’t really completely amuse me, but somehow does anyway. If Austria did it you’d get co.at – which isn’t anywhere near as funny, but is a bit like my last name. If Canada did it and Lao People’s Democratic Republic did it too, and you combined them you’d get the name of a leading soft-drink manufacturer and the core ingredient in cocaine. Germanians would be speaking in co.de. In South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands you’d be able to hear the co.gs turning when you visited their sites. All Lithuanian guns would be co.lts. While Morocco would be in a co.ma. In Niger they’d have ice cream co.nes. Probably that would make Peru so jealous that they wouldn’t be able to co.pe anymore. There are many more potential ones on this page, but I’m at work so shouldn’t be buggering around…

If you’re a Mac OSX user (and as such probably using NetNewsWire all over the place since I recommended it a couple of days ago), then you might be vaguely interested in seeing who I’m currently reading! And if you’ve got NetNewsWire you can directly import it!

I’ve just experienced the first text ad that I’ve actually wanted to click on. More than that, even – I’ve just experienced the first text ad that against all the odds I did click on. What did it say? “Suicide girls – punk/goth girls. read their blogs, see them naked.” That’s got to be the best advert ever. Even if you’re a poof. And much respect must go to metafilter – even when it takes ads for porno, it’s got to be stunningly well-designed.

Fertile customers of plasticbag drivel-log – would that I had time to chat! But for the first time in over a week I have hot running-water at home and I’m so excited I might … wash myself! And I have a lot of self-cleaning to do – because after seeing these stunning Tufte-related diagrams I’m covered in a thick glutinous layer of human drool.

If you have a use for it, then you can now get an RSS feed from plasticbag.org at http://www.plasticbag.org/rss/plasticbag.xml. And why should you want such a thing? Well one good reason is because if you’re on a Mac you could read the whole site through NetNewsWire Lite instead of coming to this dumb page every day. It’s a bloody wonderful little application – try it immediately if you can…

Things that other webloggers are talking about today that I don’t think are very interesting:

• Salon’s Weblogs
  It’s a dumb idea. When I was writing Learning from Weblogs (PowerPoint, large) I thought a lot about how people might think about adding weblog features to their sites in order to enhance their communities. The actual hosting of weblogs seemed to me a dumb idea mainly because of collisions of branding and the association of your site with crap – or even offensive – content. It might work, I guess, but I don’t understand why you’d want to do it anyway… [Dork]

• Asteroids destroying the world
  Blah, blah, blah. Is this all anyone ever talks about nowadays? How can I put this carefully – it’s very unlikely to happen! Channel 4 in the UK have a breakfast TV show called RI:SE – and they spent most of this morning talking about what you’d do if an asteroid was destroying the world tomorrow. I think the whole thing’s a bit of a relief – now I don’t have to worry about pensions, getting fat, contracting any unpleasant diseases or going jogging regularly. Plus no more need to worry about recycling. I can become the boorish horror I always aspired to be.