plasticbag.org

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.

Too many doctorates in the air at the moment – which shouldn’t annoy me but does because I feel jealous even though I know I made the right decision to leave mine. Probably I’m freaked because I don’t seem to be getting anywhere with all the other shit I hoped to do. I don’t rule the world, I don’t get paid for running a site that I care about, I’m not David Bowie yet and I don’t get mentioned in the papers nearly enough. This whole mood was inspired, weirdly, by Freud Action Figures and somewhat ammeliorated by the fact that I’m speaking at a conference about Virtual Communities in a couple of months – alongside some people who recently interviewed me for a job I didn’t get. Sigh.

The most astonishing thing about being without Blogger for a day is not that I was frustrated or annoyed, but that I found myself writing vast selections of little notes and thoughts to Barbelith and Haddock. It seems clear – I have a pathological need to write reams of crap each day – possibly I write so much to stop myself from thinking…

The best thing about writing something for a print publication is that you get this wonderful chunky piece of solid matter to look at when it’s finished. Yesterday through the post came the 2002 edition of the Time Out London guide – of which I wrote all of the gay section (for my sins), with substantial and unfortunately uncredited help from Davo. If you need to know what there is to do in London, then it really is the best guide available. And if you find any glaring errors in my section, then please keep them to yourself!

If you hadn’t guessed from a brief visit to his site, Cal is colourblind. Hey – what can be said – I have no sense of smell, he doesn’t know how to co-ordinate. We all have our crosses to bear. Unfortunately I’m not as absurdly talented as Cal is, so I can’t do something tremendously, world-changingly useful – like make a site which allows you to test various colour combinations to see how accessible your site will be. [Addendum: For those who have asked, Cal is a good friend of mine, and I was merely joking about the colour-schemes at his site. In fact even a cursory glance would demonstrate that the colour schemes are great. And that there are lots of them.]

Thanks to the anonymous punter who bought me a copy of Moulin Rouge off my wishlist! It’s very much appreciated, whoever you are. If only I could find some way of translating plasticbag.org into a way to pay my rent each month!