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| Sunday |
the Twenty-Fifth of August, 2002 |
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| Friday |
the Twenty-Third |
"While grave-digging, after rainy weather
Always keep a long hollow pipe next to you.
Another poet told me never to forget this.
It will help you to breathe until you're dug out."
How Poets Make Money, and
other Martin Newell poems.
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"A book locating/lending phenomenon known as the 'Dewey Decimal System'
- enabling users to get access to copyrighted text material for free -
has sent shockwaves through a panicked publishing industry."
A splendid Tom
the Dancing Bug cartoon from a couple of years ago, still
appallingly relevant. Relatedness: Banned Books Week,
21th-28th of September. [all via Néa]
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| Thursday |
the Twenty-Second |
"President Bush is taking a stand on one of the region's thorniest
issues by proposing that more logging in national forests would help
prevent devastating wildfires. [...] The Bush administration said
changes are necessary to clear forests of a decades-long buildup of
highly flammable materials."
This is not an Onion story.
Because "commercially-desirable trees" are a fire risk, Bush
proposes to make it easier for logging companies to get approval to
cut them down, and harder for environmental groups to appeal against
logging plans. War on Fire.
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"There was this expression that's one of his favorites.
It's that hand-in-the-cookie-jar, love-me-Mommy-because-I'm-a-rascal
look. It's A.U. twelve, fifteen, seventeen, and twenty-four, with an eye
roll."
Interesting to read Paul
Ekman's immediate impression of Bill Clinton, in
that
article about giveaway facial expressions - that he
contacted the White House offering to sort it out ("I could teach him
how not to do that in two to three hours."), but they declined.
I'm still amazed that they haven't done anything about Bush's smirk;
the way that his proclamations on war and corporate responsibility are
completely undercut by the dull grin of schoolboy who thinks he's getting
away with something.
There's an odd expressional theory that one half of your face represents
your constructed social personality, and the other shows your inner self. The
Smirk of Bush becomes even more weird and sinister when you
cut
his head in half.
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"This world, I am afraid is designed for crashing bores
I am not one, I am not one
You don’t understand, you don’t understand
And yet you can take me in your arms and love me, love me, and love me
Take me in your arms and love me..."
New Morrissey
material - live versions of songs rumoured to be scheduled for a new album. He's currently touring America, offering
only two UK dates, both of them already sold out to the Internet-anagram
crowd. Truly disappointed.
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| Wednesday |
the Twenty-First |
A new search-engine sport; Gothwhacking. Pick any two Gothic-cliché
words, join them together, perform as many mysterious vowel-adjustments
and k-additions as you like, then try to get zero results out of Google.
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"E' divertente leggere Nineteen Eighty-Four, ma e' ancora piu'
divertente farlo identificando il protagonista con Kevan."
This is both very insightful and very alarming,
assuming that I'm translating it correctly.
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| Tuesday |
the Twentieth |
| Conversation between myself and a taxi-driver in a determinedly
non-lucid dream, last night, on the subject of the infinitely recursive
country lanes he seemed to be driving down:- "This is all very... dreamlike." "Yes."
We drove on.
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"To recognize individual spam features you have to try to get into the mind
of the spammer, and frankly I want to spend as little time inside the
minds of spammers as possible."
This is impressive. A Bayesian spam filtering
technique that judges every word of every email, rating it according
to its appearance in spam and non-spam emails of the past, and filtering
messages appropriately. It evolves to
fit whatever traffic your particular inbox gets, meaning that spammers can't predict how to get around it, and even if they manage by chance, the filter will
immediately adapt. [via Crummy]
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| The Smaller
Picture now supports high-speed Javascript animations of its
picture histories, black and white pixels seething and evolving
from chaos to order and back again. (It seemed to get a lot of
confused or disinterested traffic, two-thirds of the way in, and
the easier-to-corrupt-than-repair nature of the medium suggests
that you only need a few random clickers to bring forth entropy.)
Very interesting to note that the mediocre drawing of Great Britain becomes more clearly defined
when animated; the coastal edges fizzing to give a view of the 'proper'
picture, something that a single frame doesn't really capture.
Seven fresh new pictures have been started, anyway - a spiral, a map of the world a television, a monster, a word, a landscape and another anything. Offer your dots.
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| Monday |
the Nineteenth |
| Terrifyingly heavy aide-memoires to help people beat other people at Scrabble -
anamonics
are short phrases which can be memorised and attached to "stem" words;
a stem word plus a letter from its anamonic can be shuffled around to make another word. (eg. "ringed : we are surrounded, chief" gives you "redwing", "reigned", "grained", "grinder"...) But if you're playing a game at that sort of level, you might as well just replace your brain with a calculator and get some sleep.
(Related: Playing this spot-the-difference game for more than a couple of
minutes will downgrade your eyes and soul to the status of barcode-reader.)
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It's strangely rewarding to prowl through the shelves of
Warehouse 23.
There may or may not be a kitten
in there somewhere.
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