Category: Random

Thanks to Luke for this one – he’s pointed me in the direction of a transcript of an interview between Richard Littlejohn – dubious right-wing journalist – and Will Self – dubious left-wing intellectual. My sympathies are of course heavily with the latter ex-heroin-addict. Although I could be alone in that… Here are a few choice quotes from Self vs Littlejohn:

SELF: It is a 400 page… I’ve read 200 pages of it and that is a 200 page recruiting leaflet for the BNP.
LITTLEJOHN: Well, you can’t comment until you have read the other 200.
SELF: Why? Does it suddenly turn into Tolstoy?
LITTLEJOHN: You’ll have to read it and find out, won’t you.
SELF: Well it won’t take me long.

How depressing – now we’re all going to have to make our sites work properly in Mozilla. How dreary.

I’ve only just noticed, which probably makes me the second worst person in the world after the inventor of spiders, but Prolific.org has redesigned – and it looks amazingly fresh…

Buffy:
Every single night, the same arrangement
I go out and fight the fight.
Still I always feel this strange estrangement.
Nothing here is real, nothing here is right.

I’ve been making shows of trading blows,
Just hoping no one knows
That I’ve been…

Going through the motions
Walking through the part
Nothing seems to penetrate my heart.

I was always brave and kinda righteous
Now I find I’m wavering…
Crawl out of your grave, you find this fight
just doesn’t mean a thing…

Demon:
She aint’ got that swing…”

Buffy:
[pause ] Thanks for noticing…

Demon chorus:
She does pretty well
With fiends from hell
But lately we can tell
That she’s just…..

Going through the motions
Faking it somehow….
She’s not even half the girl she…
Ooooow!

Buffy:
Will I stay this way forever?
Sleepwalk through my life’s endeavour?

Victim:
How can I repay…?

Buffy:
Whatever…

I don’t want to be……
Going through the motions
Losing all my drive
I can’t even see
If this is really me
And I just want to be…
Alive…………………”

I’ve just finished reading Fahrenheit 451 and there was a part of it that just made me shiver because to me it felt so apposite. I posted it up on Barbelith for discussion. I’m expecting that some people won’t find it as apt or as terrifying as I did.

Another shock discovery. First the universe turned out to be really dull, now someone has finally realised that sex is a bit crap too. Is there nothing gripping left in the world? Jesus. Start a weblog already. Everyone else bored of living has…

So it seems a gay gene runs in the (alleged) resemblance – Pop Idol Will Young has come out. I don’t know why he felt the need to make this kind of statement – but more interestingly I don’t know why anyone makes statements like these. They’re really apologetic feeling – kind of duplicitous-sounding. Surely the best approach would be to say, “Of course I’m gay, you big twonk. Where did you land from – planet totally fucking clueless? Jeez. Next question.”

Inspired by this mad post (for which I can only say that the reason is that people get uncomfortable when they have to think of gay people actually having sex as opposed to decorating their spacious apartments), I present:

Top-Ten-Traits-You-(ie. I)-Like-About-The-Gender-That-You-Generally-Prefer-To-Shag (What it is about blokes I fancy)

1. They have short scruffy hair that you can breathe through when you’re spooning.
2. They have really nice spine curve from shoulders to bottom.
3. When men are quite slim and vaguely well exercised, they can kind of sit in these weird positions where all there weight appears to rest on their upper back and where they seem to be triply segmented into chest, stomach, rude-areas/legs – this is the sexiest thing in the world…
4. Some have really big chunky hands, and some have quite slim, proportioned hands. But they nearly all have hands – which is good.
5. When they grow a little stubble on their faces they don’t look like German athletes, unlike women. In fact they often look better than they do when they’re clean shaven.
6. Men look convincingly mean when they think about sex. Plus you don’t have to worry too much about breaking them.
7. Hot geeky boys get really excited and passionate about weird things that I can identify with. Hot geeky girls get really excited and passionate about weird things that I cannot identify with. Mostly.
8. Some men have these voices and you can feel the air vibrate when they talk because they’re so rich and thick. And you vibrate all the way back through your body whenever they say something, and it’s a bit like sun-bathing in sound when they talk. Normally these men smoke too much.
9. Men aren’t supposed to really care that much about what they look like, but mostly they do, but when a guy manages to look great while looking like it was kind of accidental and he isn’t entirely happy about it, then they become immediately irresistable. Men do scruffy well.
10. Defined muscles on the arms and shoulders and down the stomach are just great big invitations for dubious thoughts.

I love pages that keep track of search requests on the internet. Pages like Lycos’ Top 50. These give you a real insight into the community of the internet’s most obsessive interests. And of course the most interesting thing about them is how many of the listings in the top fifty that you just have never heard of. A community of net users? Where? I see many communities. Of course most of the search terms would be instantly familar to most American teenagers and early twenty-somethings I imagine… Or would they?

Google’s got a page like this too – although it’s updated more randomly. But it does have the amusing benefit of pulling out randomly entertaining figures and presenting them as charts. This week, for example…

By far the most interesting of these little enterprises however is Yahoo’s Buzz index – which manages to track both the most searched for keywords, but also to be able to track rapid movers, surges or lapses of interest – and over a vast range of categories as well… Who is the US obsessing about at the moment? Anna Nicole Smith – what movie is the world suddenly more interested in than usual? Er… Willow? Well it can’t get it right all the time… Do you know of any other parts of search engines that track information like this? If so, let me know.

Breaking news: Universe even more boring than we all thought. The universe, it transpires, is much like the wallpaper in my bedroom at my parent’s house in Norfolk.