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| Rejoice, for the swish if careless
BillBailey.co.uk is now operational,
bursting with galleries and downloadable songs. Most glorious of
all, though, is the long-overdue availability of a compact disc of
the man's finest works, purchasable online for fourteen quid. And some rather
nice "Insect Nation" T-shirts. Bravo.
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| Amusing clothe-a-cartoon-person Java nonsense. Witness a rather poor attempt at
myself.
[via everywhere]
| A horribly sensationalist bit on last night's BBC 10 O'Clock News; in
covering that rather odd "Look, look, we've spent five years tracking
down people who view Internet child porn - if we're lucky they might
be sentenced to up to three years in prison!" story, we were treated
to a swish graphical flipchart showing us dozen or so example photos;
head and shoulders with the faces pixelised. Why?
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| This depleted uranium business seems quite surreal when
you step back from it - "Hm, these bullets we're using to blow up enemy
tanks might be dangerous to our troops." - as if troops being ordered to
take risks to increase the odds of a victory is somehow a new and shocking
thing.
They seem to be underplaying the civilian aspect rather callously,
either way - I'd thought it was just a battlefield-dust issue, rather
than a case of significant amounts of uranium getting into the soil.
"Several European countries supplying peacekeeping troops to serve in
the former Yugoslavia have told them not to eat local produce or to
drink the water." What about the people who actually live there, for
goodness' sake?
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| Myth
III due out in November. Admittedly I still
haven't mustered the determination to slog through Myth II's
Great
Library level, but they're
fine games - I was impressed at the elevation of thoughtful strategy and
common sense over frantic clicking and dull micro-management, and the
inter-level diary voiceovers have a splendid
"War of the Worlds"
feel to them. I trust Myth III will retain all of that. And that the "true
3D characters, procedural foliage" nonsense won't strain my PC too much.
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| We're due a lunar
eclipse this evening, which should be impressive - even the murky orange
ones are mysterious and forboding, a menacing reminder that the moon isn't just
the night-time scenery it's so easy to take it for granted as, but a thoroughly real
and unimaginably vast lump of rock.
Of course, it's all just God
mucking about, really; "The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the
moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord come."
(Joel 2:30-31) Don't worry about the world ending, though - the quoted article was
written about a lunar eclipse in 1996. Careless of a deity to have them
happening so often, really.
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| The recent spatter of Web
Trumps in people's blogs has reminded me that I was
musing over a Blog-themed Dvorak deck, the other day; something with
a bit more of a strategic edge, focusing on the actual activity of
Web logging, rather than its personalities. Finding myself
in a quiet oasis of network death this morning, I've scrawled a
prototype
deck. A bit shameless and self-deprecating of me to use site hits as a victory
condition, but "objective quality" didn't seem as quantifiable.
Comments and gauntlets welcomed.
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| uncertain.org is being a little uncertain of itself at the moment, incidentally,
and likely to be down for a day or so, later in the month. Bear with me.
| Hm, I wonder how many hits and emails test.com
gets as a result of people using it as a generic test URL?
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| Splendidness; journalistic grammar-and-style curmudgeon Bill Walsh has
started
his own blog, even if he doesn't seem to be updating it very much.
The rest of his site, The
Slot, is well worth a browse, too. Sadly a lot of the previously vast content
has been taken down since it went into a book,
but some fine rants remain, wittily attacking the maddening usage of incorrect
grammar and poor writing style.
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| Very odd news story that I think I saw on Teletext over
Christmas, but can't seem to find anywhere else; the frightening
revelation that cigars and pipes cause as much yellowing of
teeth as cigarettes. What next - shock news that they also
cause lung cancer and emit smoke when ignited?
| Quitting smoking
is as difficult as killing your best friend say over-dramatic and
hopefully thought-experimenting Australian researchers. My friends should
be very afraid.
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| Mark Thomas tsks
the government over "misunderstood" attempts to gather background and "dirt" on
him. The implication that it's only a serious problem if a minister specifically
requested it, but not if a misguided civil servant dug it up and
delivered it, seems odd.
[RealAudio clip from the Today programme]
(And don't forget tonight's new series of
The Mark Thomas Product, of course.)
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| Strangeness is afoot with Brighton's buses - they were all suddenly
plastered with enthusiastic "All Fares only £1!" stickers this morning,
and I was derided for attempting to buy a return ticket to Hove. That's
my travel expenses up by two quid a week, then. City life, eh?
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