plasticbag.org

News of the day: Metafilter hacked – and this put up in its place. Courtesy of Matt.

Headsplurge: Good morning and thank you to Nick Jordan for the new REM album. It’s one of those albums that I’ve wanted since before it came out, but have felt somewhat conflicted about because – you know – it’s REM. But I suppose alternative auguries included the coming-out of Big Gay Stipey. Well, whatever, I’ve got a lot to do today and it’s really going to help me concentrate. Thanks again. More news: Yesterday, all day, I spent two pounds. TWO. That’s impressive that is. Addenda: Paul from Oh Sky Lab is actually called “Paul Love”. What’s that about? Postscript: One review to write, one letter to draft and a thousand e-mails to send.

Another response to Ralph’s anti-GAP piece on Barbelith: “Rebel Without A Sweater”. This particularly piece is extremely long and involved – and written intelligently (albeit with vitriol). And I quote: “The author of this recent cookie-cutter rant against corporate homogenization would be expecting too much from a population that does not owe his opinions such respect – least of all his opinions on what, exactly, makes one diverse.” It’s such an empassioned response, in fact, that I’ve decided to ask the person concerned whether they’d like to rewrite their comments and have them put onto Barbelith.

The site also has a very interesting reciprocal link facility that I think might actually catch on quite well across the net. Keep your eyes peeled – this could be the next BlogVoices.

Gay ethical dilemma: You are a Catholic Conservative gay man – a commentator and writer for mainstream America. You have written a book called Virtually Normal, which is a frustratingly anaemic book advocating a very basic view of whatever the equivalent of liberal feminism is for gay people. You argue a lot about how the ‘Gay Plague’ is essentially over – how HIV and AIDS is not an epidemic. You also write a lot about how gay people should stop indulging in the hedonism of sex, dancing and drugs that the rest of the world believes it to consist of.

Now someone else disagrees with your politics – but more specifically believes that you are damaging the lives of gay man by denying a disease that directly affects them. That person has found out that you advertise for sex on the internet – that you advertise specifically for unprotected group sex. And they decide to tell the world. Which one of you is the bigger hypocrite? [Salon 1 | Salon 2]

I really desperately need to get my mitts on Conquest of … and Escape to … The Planet of the Apes. Into London with you Tom. You can do it.

Today on Barbelith: Situationism in a nutshell: “The SI are known to most people through their supposed links to punk rock. However these links are at best tenuous and at worst spurious.”

There have been a lot of responses to Ralph’s article on Barbelith on “Evil Gap Clones”. There’s an interesting piece on Shrapnel.org which includes some strange lines: “If we worried so much about child labor and animal slaughter, we would be seriously depressed and warped people.” and there are no less than three related threads on the Underground: On why shopping in GAP is a good thing for sweatshop workers, On a possible answer to global homogeneity, Gap Clones.

As part of an experiment in ‘Googling’ people – ie. finding out information about individuals by simply putting their name into search engines and intelligently filtering the results, I decided today to take a random name “Leon Fleury” and create a profile of him. Unfortunately, it turns out that there’s rather too much (or too disturbing) information about the young man in question on the net, and so I’m going to restrict myself to mentioning that he played one half of a cow in “Jack and the Beanstalk” and that he graduated from the drama department of Exeter University.

Today on Barbelith: ‘The Prisoner’ in a nutshell”: “Episode after episode showed Number Six fighting every attempt to win his secrets and gaining no ground in the battle with his warders.”

A long conversation with a random punter via AIM leads to the statement that I look just like Dave Matthews of the Dave Matthews band. I go to the net at once. Do I really look like this man?