plasticbag.org

Finally I have Office working again, which means that I can actually do some work. Hurrah.

The Weakest Link with drag queens. Whoever thought that up isn’t getting paid enough!

Brief answers only this morning – my throbbing head can answer all, but my fingers are incapable of typing… 1) To TomH I say, It takes seventy-three licks to get to the centre of a Tootsie Pop. And for the other question… What do you mean? An African or European swallow? 2) To Nik I say – If I could be anyone else in the world, I wouldn’t want to be William Shatner. And the entity which occupies the Shatner body chose him because he had a thing about hairpieces. 3) To Hewligan I say, I have thought about trying to write a couple of novels, but I’m really lazy and disorganised so I can’t imagine it will ever happen. I’m not going to tell you the plots, just in case they’re not crap, but they are called respectively “My day in hell” and “Prank”. 4) To Vaughan I say – you can’t ask three questions – that’s taking the piss! So you get very small answers with no explanation – 1985, 2004 and because he’s very witty and dresses well. 5) To Paul I say – I have no sense of smell, I’m afraid – strange but true – so I will have to go with “burnt plastic”. 6) And to Tom Cosgrave, the answer to the question, “Why oh why can’t we all take it easy and enjoy ourselves in life and stuff?” is because Niezsche was right and Epicurus wasn’t.

The yearly Fray New Year Special is upon us once more. Twelve stories for twelve months. And you can post your own stories as well. You can see mine here.

Another New Year’s Eve survived.

With all due respect, Mr President…

Personal websites are the fanzines of the 21st Century. They’re photocopied flyers and stapled together scraps of rubbish, with stolen images, ill-thought out words, tremendously creative in an idiosyncratic way. Interestingly though the aesthetic of most of these sites is either clean and ordered (post word-processing ideology of order) or futurist / high-tech (computer people have a habit of glorifying their culture). Not a lot of cut up and photocopied aesthetics. Would such an aesthetic be an affectation or a celebration?

The most wonderful thing in the world? The combination of these keys with a click on a link in IE 5.1 for Macs: Shift & Apple.

1) Bart – if you think of the cat as being at one point in time (a), the transposition of the cat’s mind into the mouses body as being at another (b) and their meeting as happening at point (c) – then it seems clear that the cat could not know for certain at point (c) that the mouse he was in fact confronted with was himself temporally translocated and post-sentience-transferral. It wouldn’t have happened to him yet. So the only thing you’d be left with was in fact the possibility that the cat might intuit this fact or that the mouse would attempt to communicate with his earlier cat-self. For the cat not to eat the mouse he’d have to place credence in the fact that the mouse was himself after travelling in time – which would be a hard enough concept for me to believe – and I can only assume a cat would have no more luck finding it plausible in every-day life. Plus kudos for being the person with the dumbest question so far!