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|
| 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.
|
| 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."
|
| 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".
|
| 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.
|
| 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.
|
| 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?
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