Projects
Dvorak
The improvised card game.
Back on the Orion Express
Er, coming soon.
Bookpile
The Day of the Triffids
John Wyndham
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Haruki Murakami
Worldwar: In The Balance
Harry Turtledove
The Origins of Virtue
Matt Ridley
Incidental Music
Fresh Wound
The Bonzo Dogs
The Man Who Sold The World
Bowie
Fear my Wraith
HMHB
Blogs
Interconnected
Wherever You Are
People
Alice Chrissy Dave Eperdu John Lori Nik Paul Raven Riana Sandy Simes Tracy
Before
As Above at Stormloader
Banner-advert-ridden drivel.
Weeks Beginning
20.11 27.11 04.12 11.12
09.12.00
I've no idea how many people share my strange fascination for both The Sims and Mornington Crescent, but if any such creatures exist, they might care to download the Mornington Crescent Table I've spent rather too much of this afternoon faffing around with.
08.12.00
Amusing sticker on a roadsign, in the style of this seaside town's puzzlingly uneventful millennial-celebration Place to Be campaign; "Brighton - The Place To Beg" Splendid - a site devoted to discussion of Disturbing Search Requests. I used to get some cracking search-engine hits to my old Pseudoscopes page; "teabag and hatstand", "behead gillian anderson" and goodness knows what else. It's all boring hits from humour sites, though, these days. Strange, that.
Schools ban conkers for fear of parents suing them when a child sustains an all-too-common and life-threatening conker injury. Another school has "banned skipping after some girls fell over". What? Would any court possibly find a school negligent if a pupil tripped in the playground? What's next, ruling that all playing surfaces should be made of smooth rubber, and children must remain at least twenty feet from one another at all times? It's political correctness gone mad. Or something. When a five-year-old friend of mine was singing "Who let the dogs out? Woof woof woof." the other day, I took it to be a "here's the noise an animal makes" song from kids' telly or something. Not number bloody six in the charts.
Hm, waveform collapse at uncertain.org at an indeterminable point during the night. Seems alright now, though.
07.12.00
I heard three mentions of the Environment Agency's superbly informative flood-risk Web site on various newsy things this morning, but - er - no URL, at least until the Today programme mentioned that they linked to it from their site.

The thing someone really needs to do is to set up some sort of definitive public-maintained site for up-to-date flood news - during October, I spent far too long trying to find out if my high-street flat in Lewes was underwater or not (mercifully I was elsewhere when the river started rising, and the water didn't get that far up the stairs); peering intently at news footage to judge water levels, flailing around the Web for anywhere that might have precise information, and remaining unsure until I actually trudged back there a few days later.

And the few Web discussions I did find were full of people asking after uncontactable friends, wondering whether there was any point driving back from a holiday, and whatever. We need "floodnews.co.uk", or something, with forums for every floodable town and city, and hefty mention of it on all news programmes. Particularly if the predicted end-of-year floods are going to be as bad as October's were. This is just the sort of thing that the Internet is ideal for.

The Today programme were plugging their online quiz this morning. It's rather amusing.
I was flipping through Martin Parr's Boring Postcards in a bookshop, recently, and may have to buy it. Flat 1960s photos of tower blocks, shopping centres, motorway junctions, and the like, all presented with a deadly self-importance. Horribly appealing. What's the most dangerous animal in Africa? Probably not what you think.
With online personality tests seeming to be enjoying a vague vogue at the moment, have we all seen spark.com's pleasingly interconnected and vaguely insulting one? Tell it who your friends are and, once they've taken the test as well, it gives you amusing compatibility ratings. Perhaps the best thing about the European Union summit in Nice at the moment; the captions of current affairs programmes are entirely Jazz Club; "EU Summit - Nice." "Justin Webb. Nice."
06.12.00
DocNomic is up and running, with a tentative theme of pills and disease. Should be fun.
Vaughan Simons has an enticing set of questions, answers to which are being carefully gathered and filed.

But it doesn't give me a generically-worded overview of my personality when I've finished. What's the point of that? I want to know what my personality is, damn you.

Managed to listen to the Sunday Format (6:30pm Tuesdays, Radio 4) for the first time, last night. Impressively disjointed radio comedy, snippets of faux-Sunday-magazine nonsense recorded Blue-Jam-style over background music, spliced to pieces and threaded back together just this side of confusion. Lazily zany in places, but largely masterful.

That was probably the last in the series, or something, though. [Later : Penultimate, apparently. Hm.]

Why do aircraft pilots always seem to be treated so callously in news reports, almost as if they were a faulty piece of machinery? Local news last night sobbed for a minute or two over three people who'd died in a helicopter crash, adding in passing that "the pilot was also killed".
05.12.00
Interesting Straight Dope question, today - "How do they know what lethal gases smell like?" Aha, so that's why National Express advertise gobycoach.com in such an odd font on the backs of their buses; having seen the URL in a browser, my first thought was of tropical fish fitness training.
Dirk is still being amusingly impressive:-

zero > "It's a big achievment when a culture starts using zero as a number" > culture > "http://www.memepool.com is like a petri dish culture for memes" > meme > "dawkins coined the term 'meme' in his book 'the selfish gene'" > richard dawkins > "he reckons the idea of a god is none the less effective for being imaginary" > genius > "the combination of hero and genius yield the greatest person of all humanity." > hero

Hm, with too many people running away with this page's <TITLE> tag as if it were the site's actual name, the entirely superfluous ": Blog" has been trimmed. And it lets me pretend that "As Above" is a self-deprecating clever-trousers title for a Weblog, rather than being the vaguely random site name that I've been using for the past couple of pre-blog years. Shh.
Excellence; the Guardian archives all of Smallweed's columns. The Today programme mentioned how Nottingham University was "under fire" for accepting sponsorship from tobacco companies, this morning. I thought arming their police might go too far too quickly. Ahaha.
A brief waking-up-in-the-wrong-century moment on the bus into work; a zany pub chalkboard that seemed to be telling me that "Pod" could be played inside. This blog now archives things if I hit it hard enough.
04.12.00
Whilst searching for a decent Judge Dredd page to link to (I couldn't find one); Dredd : The Card Game. What? When was this out?
Talk of a pedestrian fast lane to stop London's busy Oxford Street becoming clogged by dawdling shoppers; as well as a strict ban on "eating" and "smoking", the marked lanes would be "monitored by marshals whose job would be to see no one fell below the 3mph speed limit."

Doesn't this just sound like a rather bad Judge Dredd story?

Computery filk is often rather horrific, but this amused me. To that tune of Mr Formby's; "Reinstalling Windows" [via MCiOS] A rather unsettling message overheard on the bus driver's radio this morning; "Could you all check for a Code H on your buses, please. A Code H. It's a large, black rucksack." - If "Code H" merely means "lost property", can't they at least say that?
A part of the Uncertain Organisation.

kevan@somethingorother.com