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| Last night I dreamt that I'd been voted to be the Lib Dem Shadow
Chancellor, with nobody asking me if I wanted to do it, or even
giving me any advance notice. I was desperately trying to get some useful
reference material from a bookshop-owning Ken Campbell, half an
hour before I was due to give a speech in the Commons. I wonder what
it all means.
| Win
a life-size Dalek. Lord knows what I'd do with it if I won it, mind.
Particularly when my flat's at the top of a flight of stairs.
[via The View From Here]
|
I do not spik lak yow... freespeling.com
campaigns for random semi-phonetic spelling throughout the
English-speaking world, as if inconsistency and accent-affected
text would somehow make the language easier to learn.
"Start by freespeling just a ONLY A FEW WORDS on each page.
Dont change just for the sake of change. Help your readers, dont
confuse them."
Maybe he has more support than I realised... [via memepool]
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| "They don't believe there will be any food here they will be able to
eat, they believe they can contract the disease and in some extreme
cases Americans think their hands and feet will fall off."
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| Hm, Jake
Shillingford resurfaces to do a spot of DJing at some Camden venue
that sounds slightly too irritating to merit going all the way to the capital
for. But still.
| A discreet mobile
phone jammer, which elegantly disables
nearby mobiles as if they'd drifted out of signal range. Sustained
blanket attacks on trains and things seems a bit harsh, though - a
narrowly targetable version would be kinder. And something
to kill Walkmen (nail-scissors aside) would be glorious,
of course.
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| Sounding like a science-fiction plot device,
the
Stroop Effect is the process by which reading
ability takes effortless precedence over named colour-recognition.
Take the test yourself with this Java applet and be unnerved at just
how badly your brain works.
| I think we'd better let him in; download an entertaining
Virtual
Theremin toy from the
BBC Science pages.
[via memepool]
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| Warily buying an unexpected bottle from a Tesco shelf last week for the
spirit wife's birthday, but only
having the vaguest ideas of what to do with the stuff,
the Absinthe FAQ gives
a bit of historical and chemical background, as well as some serving
suggestions.
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| More insane proof that
Morrissey predicted the death of Diana Spencer, this time with
the help of aliens from a Carl Sagan novel. David Alice - a man with
little understanding of the concept of coincidence - would be really
good at HipBone,
wouldn't he? [Moz bit via NTK]
| The gloriously atmospheric Garden
Nomic returns from the compost heap this morning, with a clean-slate
ruleset and fresh set of people. I've just proposed that players be allowed
to play Goblins or Fairies, as well as the ubiquitous Gnomes.
Frivolous socio-political metaphor is great, and the sort of thing that
Nomics can run well with. Join at the ground floor today.
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| Anyone who's ever played a game of Nomic should immediately purchase and
digest Steven Krane's The Omega Game; anyone who enjoys
twistingly-plotted slowly-revealing thrillers should do the same. Twenty
people awake in a luxurious hotel on an anonymous Pacific island, with
no memory of how they got there, only signed-and-dated copies of an
"initial ruleset" for a mysterious game, the rules of which they can
change by unanimous consensus. Nomic meets The Prisoner meets
The Game, with much fast-paced drama, exotic isolated atmosphere
and an impressive scattering of guessable-but-unguessed plot swerves.
Thoroughly enjoyable.
And it does make the idea of a non-abstract real-life Nomic seem quite
appealing, so long as we get something into the rules to prevent
people being, er, murdered... Nomic Mystery Weekend, anyone?
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