plasticbag.org

BBC News: Canada opens door to marijuana. I’m interested in this one. Now, personally, I think it should be completely decriminalised – but that’s very much a personal opinion. What surprises me is that you can already use heroin derivatives in medicine but not marijuana based ones. At least Canada has made it possible for people to do research with it.

I love it when I get e-mails like this: “Dear Sir/Madam, Could you please let me know who is responsible for Marketing at http://www.barbelith.com. Thanking you in anticipation.” You just start laughing inside.

Technical fun: .htaccess for fun and profit. Have been wandering around plasticbag.org and barbelith.com for the last couple of hours using .htaccess files to fix the 404 errors that have been caused by the moving of a thousand files over several years. For more on .htaccess: BareMetal.

Just been pointed to blog-a-thon-you by Simon where there are two full reviews of plasticbag.org.

The first thing you learn at journalism school is how when you write a review you are always writing for an audience. You write something that you believe would make sense to your readership – not necessarily to yourself. That’s where the skill in reviewing comes – in divorcing your own particular obsessions (or at least disguising them) from the ‘useful service’ that you are actually trying to provide. I mean, if I loved ‘Graffitti Bridge’ but because I’d studied the semiotics of ‘Prince’ for ten years, I still shouldn’t give it a good review for those people who are looking for an evening’s entertainment. Proper reviews also depend upon building a relationship of trust between you and your readership – which means that you really should try and spell everything properly, and get your grammar right.

But of course, you don’t have to write a ‘proper review’ in order to express your opinion. In fact you can write whatever you like. But of course, unlike a proper review (where what you write is thought-through, intelligent, built for an audience and literate) with a personal opinion there’s almost no limit to the range of entertaining and appropriate responses. You can stick your tongue out, wave your arse in the air, write nasty songs involving rhymes for ‘shunts’ or indeed even respond with a counter review.

Or you can, of course, just completely ignore it.

When did Status.Blogger.Com get so sexy?

I want to write something extraordinarily long and involved about Brian winning Big Brother – about how it’s a really important thing to happen for gay people in general for one thing, and how genuine and sweet the boy seems to be. But I can’t really at the moment. Congratulations.

Whatever she says is completely untrue.

Are Periods a thing of the past? Women – free yourself from ‘the curse’ (positive perspective) or find your body the subject of more medicalisation and experimentation. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? The Underground is there for you to discuss it…

Via Simon, I come across the humanclock.com which has a different picture for every single minute of the day. Genius.

Today at ickle.org: the atom (by Tom Coates).