plasticbag.org

I’ve been sent two or three cool images for the headline competition so far – still hoping for more. My favourite so far is below (thanks to David Pannett):

“Kids make nutritious snacks”

There’s an article by Grant Morrison, absent godhead of the Underground, in today’s Evening Standard. It’s about X-men…

Below is a list of apparently real English-language headlines. I have a proposal for you. Find (or make) an amusing or apt 320x240px image for one of the headlines below and I’ll put the best ones up onto the site. How’s that for audience participation? Send me your entry today!

• Include your children when baking cookies
• Something went wrong in Jet crash, expert says
• Police begin campaign to run down jaywalkers
• Iraqi head seeks arms
• Prostitutes appeal to Pope
• Panda mating fails, Veterinarian takes over
• Clinton wins on budget, but more lies ahead
• Miners refuse to work after death
• Stolen painting found by tree
• War dims hop for peace
• If strike isn’t settled quickly, it may last a while
• Cold wave linked to temperatures
• Red tape holds up new bridges
• Typhoon rips through cemetery – hundreds dead
• Man struck by lightning faces battery charge
• New study of obesity looks for larger test group
• Kids make nutritious snacks
• Chef throws his heart into helping feed needy
• Local high school dropouts cut in half
• Hospitals are sued by seven foot doctors

God, I’m bored.

I am traditional, yet soft. I am of Belgian descent. I have a creamy yellowish body, with a red/brown surface and a slightly corrugated edge. I taste almost meaty and have a legendary aroma caused by enzymes on my skin that break down proteins. In case you haven’t guessed, my friends, my name is Mr Limburger.

Tom promotes blatant copyright theft: It occurs to me that a really good template for a weblog would be the Wired News Template (with a few adaptations of course). I’ve even got a name for it. You could call it UNDERwired.

I really love Metafilter. Almost an unholy amount, in fact. For those of you who aren’t webloggers yourself (I’d place a bet on around 5%), and are thus unfamiliar with the site, it’s a community weblog, where anyone who signs up can post links through to interesting sites and news stories around the web. The two most important differences between it and other similar community weblogs are that Metafilter: 1) Allows considerable discussion of every post made, and 2) Seems almost magically to attract some astonishingly intelligent, responsible and able members of the web community.

Two recent examples:

• Malasia’s attitude to sodomy and politics
  I posted this story yesterday that I found through AOL’s news site. It was a highly disturbing and bizarre piece which describes how the ex leader of the country has been sentenced to nine years in prison for sodomy. His brother has been sentenced to six years and four lashes with a rattan cane. And why? Because of apparent political differences with the current leader. I was astonished by the quality of the replies.

• Network Solutions has denied Amazon.com’s request for the renewal of their domain
  Less seriously, having posted the above, I noticed what appeared to be a Wired-style story about Amazon’s problems with Network Solutions. Only it’s so much funnier than that. [Read the full piece]

  “As you are no doubt aware, the .com top-level domain is intended for use by for-profit corporations. Many such corporations are registered with Network Solutions, and this policy is unchanged. However, it has come to our attention, as evidenced by recent SEC filings on behalf of Amazon.com, inc., that your company has yet to turn a profit….”

Things that are in today’s Evening Standard: A long article about Ivan Massow. Things that aren’t in today’s Evening Standard: A long article about weblogs featuring interviews with Katy and myself. I can, of course, only quote from the former:

“His crossing shows all the evidence of pique, not of principle, or of some such immature dramatic display as might please the Oxford Union. With his evident lack of ideological commitment the Conservatives would be wise to dismiss his defection with “Good riddance”, and the Labour Party to welcome him with as much relish as a stinking fish.”

Guy Ritchie, boss of a friend of mine, spouse of icon and creator of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and the upcoming Snatch (NB: snatch.com is not the film site!) is guest editing Time Out this week. There’s even a photo of him lurking by the back door of the Time Out building in London looking all pensive. I wish someone would have told me – I would have liked to have seen that in progress. I’m probably in the background pulling my hair out, to be honest…

When is all publicity not good publicity? Penguin Books have just released a book called katie.com [Full Article: Guardian]. The book describes the experiences of a girl who runs her own website and who came into contact and was finally assaulted by a paedophile she met in a chatroom. Unfortunately, katie.com isn’t the domain name of her site, but of a completely unrelated website. And now the second Katie is getting vast amounts of traffic, along with tons of e-mail talking about the issues surrounding paedophilia.

The latter Katie is extremely irritated, and asked them to change the name of the book. Penguin’s lawyers responded with a very firm no, stating that she had no case whatsoever.

So when is all publicity not good publicity?

1. When what should be your intellectual property (unless proven otherwise) is used without your approval or consent – ie. katie.com.
2. When the association between yourself and the book means that people think that you have been assaulted or raped by a paedophile.
3. When your traffic increases to such an extent that you must pay additional bandwidth charges (as seems likely in this case).
4. When your e-mail address is undermined by thousands of e-mails describing disturbing and upsetting events (not to place any blame onto those people who have written of course).
5. And when the distressed caused to you has been completely ignored by the company concerned.