Category: Random

I really don’t know whether I should be linking to this, but part of me feels that hidden things should be brought to the surface after a while when they no longer have the capacity to hurt anyone, rather than remain hidden interminably. So I’m presenting Cal’s completely unauthorised Subterranean Journal of Tom Coates – every post that I’ve made in the comments of plasticbag.org for the last couple of years. It’s a hell of a lot more savage than plasticbag.org normally is. And probably much more entertaining because of it… Be warned: Your sites are not safe! It’s the day the comments tags rose from the dead…

So the other day I was talking to Matt Webb while having some kind of minor panic attack after seeing someone wearing a suit at UpMyStreet.com. That wouldn’t normally worry me, except since I was about to sign a contract for the job I’ve taken with them that I start in two weeks time. An hour after this conversation, Stef would be pouring vodka down my throat. It’s complicated. Bear with me.

Anyway – we backtrack now to the conversation with Matt and he’s showing me a site where this guy draws people’s dreams and I’m vaguely remembering that I wrote about a dream including characters from Dawson’s Creek at some point in the past, and so I did a search for it, and found it today and weirdly it actually even features Matt himself. Which is odd. And I still don’t know what it means…

Finally a good idea from Matt Jones – possibly inspired by the recent Doc Searls / Ben Hammersley meet – warchalking. Bluntly put, a set a simple symbols that you can draw as graffiti wherever you find a wireless network – thus making your fellow bandwidth hobos very very happy.

The temptation to find my mojo in consumer products is almost overwhelming, but I maintain that I will not have my whelm bastions occupied by soliders of Digital Ixusdom. No Sir…

I must have watched the Buffy musical episode a hundred times. It’s funny, it’s well paced. There’s a lot there to enjoy. I even downloaded the songs and stuck them on my iPod. Which was nice. Now I can wander down the streets singing to myself – completely ignoring the ridicule of my peers and passers-by.

But increasingly I’ve become fascinated by two very specific songs on it. The first main song about Going through the Motions and one at the end – Walk Through The Fire.

I couldn’t be more cheesy if I tried – and often I try to be cheesy because it’s kind of amusing – but it’s horrific how much I find myself identifying with the hackneyed sentiments and overblown clichés within each of these two songs. It’s like after a year of continual panic about money, ongoing tensions have been draining from my body. My life is getting better. But as it does so, I’m looking around at what’s left around me, and frankly I’m not overly impressed. So much of what I like about myself – the fire, the passion – has been beaten down by the last couple of years, and it’s difficult to see how much impact that stuff has until you’re given enough space to take stock and look around.

How can I be exhausted at four? How can I be at home wide-awake at two in the morning, bored out of my mind? Where did the energy go? Why do I feel so disconnected from the ambitions and lives of the people around me who should be my peers… Where’s the thing I get to sing about? How do I get it back?

   I touch the fire
   And it freezes me
   I look into it
   And it’s black
   Why can’t I feel?
   My skin should crack and peel.
   I want the fire back.

My startling relevation of the day is that if you cut two cherries in half and place them with some ice at the bottom of a glass and pour Coke over the top, then you get a drink that’s remarkably like Cherry Coke – except a bit nicer. This has surprised me because I always assumed that Cherry Coke had almost nothing to do with either cherries or Coke.

Perhaps terrifyingly, there is a hell of a lot of information about Cherry Coke on today’s interhighweb of which I will only reference the highlights or the weirdshit. It turns out that Coca-Cola owns half of the world’s soft drink market and spends $1.6 billion on advertising – which makes it the world’s number six advertiser [link]. In 1913 another company was making a mint cola drink but noticed later on that people were becoming interested in the idea of cherry soda fountain beverages [link]. Although CherryCokeWorld has been taken down (at the request of the Coca-Cola company), you can actually still get into it by skipping directly to one of it’s internal pages. Which are – I must confess – weird and alarming. There are other weird cola sites too. Final fact: while Mo Morgan loves Cola-Cola, Cherry Coke makes him want to barf.

Mobile phones embedded in teeth, with tiny speakers transmitting the noise up the jaw-bone into the ear? It’s not a particularly new idea, but it’s quite an attractive one – and there’s a model of what one might look like at the Science Museum in London at the moment.

Thanks to Haddock for pointing me in the direction of this one. Surely someone had to have been aware that there was something vaguely entertaining about calling an association of Plastic Surgeons “baps.co.uk“?

Not caring about football is a mixed blessing. England go out of the World Cup and of course it’s still disappointing because so many people you know do care about it, and you want them to be happy. So you have to try and identify with their pain anyway. Certainly you’re not allowed to smile while walking through London. You’re supposed to look miserable, or at least kind of flat. Everyone looks at you. Remind yourself – everyone else is kind of depressed. And you’re very definitely not allowed to be secretly relieved that the world won’t completely stop so that everyone can watch football every two or three days…

Via Obscure Store: Man who had bottomite sex with Llama gets three years in prison: “A weeping Brandon R. Eldred pleaded with a judge for leniency, saying he should be sentenced lightly for his crimes because he was remorseful, had found religion and had changed his ways.”