plasticbag.org

“Still I’d rather be famous than righteous and holy. Anyday, anyday, anyday.”

Prince William explains why he decided to miss Fresher’s Week at St. Andrews: “I thought I would probably end up in a gutter completely wrecked, and the people I had met that week wouldn’t end up being my friends anyway.” [BBC]

Brilliantly, I’ve managed to completely underestimate the amount of freelance work that I have to get done. What seemed initially to be just a question of knocking up twelve HTML pages in a template that I’ve already built has suddenly turned into navigational development, the complete rewriting of a section of code that currently appears buried in forty different pages and the generation of a completely different set of templates to handle what was supposed to be an easy transition from one part of a site to another. Suddenly I find myself consumed by an excess of work that I could have easily accomplished if I’d given myself a little more time to do so.

Just seen: Nestle do an advert for Frosted and Coco Shreddies with the tagline “Too tasty for geeks”. I hereby propose a boycott of all Shreddies related products. Rise up, geek brother and sisters.

Astonishing discovery of the week – the thing that has made life worth living? Orange and Cranberry Barley Water. What a genius idea. I’m in love.

Phil Zimmerman struggles with the possibility that terrorists could have been using PGP. We should all remember that tools like encryption, like the internet, like the telephone, like the petrol engine – all of these things empower everyone – good or bad alike, and that the tools shouldn’t be blamed for the actions of the people who use them.

The whole world is talking about A Tribute to Heroes this morning. Apparently it was shown simultaneously on forty American TV stations – well it was also live on BBC1 and ITV1 in the UK, starting at 2am and finishing at 4am. I decided to watch it, and I can’t say that I wasn’t moved by it. But in the back of mind the whole time I was thinking that the people who supported the attacks on America could have watched the show and – almost to a song – found strength in them for their cause. And I was thinking that the same people could have heard the speeches of some of the celebrities, changed the name of the institution that they were fighting for, and they’d have believed it just as forcefully as America does. I watched Tom Petty, one of my favourite musicians in my youth, singing “Won’t Back Down” with steely eyes and tightly drawn lips. And I imagined some shadowy figure facing him singing exactly the same thing. I think that scared me more than anything else.

I used to be so much better at this stuff than I am now. In the past, people would post on Metafilter if my site went down. And they wrote really nice things about how good I was at HTML and design and stuff. No longer. I am a relic of a more childlike time on the web, when people could be impressed by pretty colours and occasional non-imbecilic utterances.

Today on Barbelith: Around the USA – “”Yesterday was September 11, and it was one of my best friend’s birthdays. We’d been trying to talk her into ditching her classes for the day but she’d have none of it. So I rode the el with her to work – it was my first day temping at at Chicago’s NBC tower. We were both pretty tired and didn’t say too much on the ride, but as I got off, I wished her a great day.” and Life during wartime: “Here in America, we’re awash in red white and blue and flags flying from currency exchanges, taxicabs, suburban homes and government offices. As if they were Christmas carols, The Star Spangled Banner and God Bless America can be heard on every radio and at every corner. And our president talks of ‘War’, of a ‘Crusade’. ‘This will not stand,’ he cries.”

Noam Chomsky – always a startlingly intelligent man – has said some of the most insightful and terrifying things about the current situation around the world. A recent transcript has been posted on Barbelith. A couple of excerpts from his interview follow:

“It is also widely recognized that Bin Laden and others like him are praying for ‘a great assault on Muslim states,’ which will cause ‘fanatics to flock to his cause’ (Jenkins, and many others.). That too is familiar. The escalating cycle of violence is typically welcomed by the harshest and most brutal elements on both sides, a fact evident enough from the recent history of the Balkans, to cite only one of many cases.”

“The decade-long US-British assault against the civilian population of Iraq has devastated the society and caused hundreds of thousands of deaths while strengthening Saddam Hussein – who was a favored friend and ally of the US and Britain right through his worst atrocities.”

“The U.S. and much of the West, prefers a more comforting story. To quote the lead analysis in the New York Times (Sept. 16), the perpetrators acted out of “hatred for the values cherished in the West as freedom, tolerance, prosperity, religious pluralism and universal suffrage.” U.S. actions are irrelevant, and therefore need not even be mentioned (Serge Schmemann). This is a convenient picture, and the general stance is not unfamiliar in intellectual history; in fact, it is close to the norm. It happens to be completely at variance with everything we know, but has all the merits of self-adulation and uncritical support for power.”