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| Live, writhing AntCam action,
for those of you whose kitchens aren't already being invaded.
| Grr to phrase pollution. Jon Ronson's Guardian article
on "the first Big Brothers" turns out to be, rather than some
insight into fledgling surveillance-heavy dictatorships, a
"where
are they now?" article on the contestants for the original UK Big
Brother television programme. Some faintly intriguing and depressing meta-analysis
stuff in there, but feh.
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| Ech, last night's shiny new Brass Eye episode was apparently
cancelled
due to topically sensitive content (including a
Tragibutes
advert, perhaps?), rather than
being "not quite ready", as the official Channel Four line seems
to be. As if any parents of recently missing/dead children would be
sitting down to watch, as if anything could make their loss any
worse.
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| In his book Statistics
of Deadly Quarrels, meteorologist Lewis F. Richardson turned his
eye to the mathematical analysis of warfare, tabulating causes and
contexts and death tolls to see what conclusions could be drawn,
whether common government or language or culture was a step towards
or away from peace. A slightly
snide review is the nearest I can find to any content online.
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"I can't bear the religious labelling of children," he says. "Like
four-year-old Islamic children or four-year-old Catholic children... If
anything makes me see red, that does, because these children are too
young to know what they are... Would you ever talk about a four-year-old
neo-Keynesian monetarist? Or a four-year-old Gramscian Marxist?"
A brief interview
with Richard Dawkins in the
Indescribablyboring.
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| Spider
and Web is the most innovative and elegant
text adventure I can remember playing, a truly original narrative concept
with some nicely-implemented toys,
and I finished it - or I think I did, it's hard to be sure - this
afternoon. Wandering through the opening moments again, the nuance and
attention to context is quite wonderful. You can explore it for yourself
in
this Java applet.
| After much faffing around, the Generic Nomic
Data Tracker is online, and capable of dealing with anything I feel like
configuring it for. Time to break the news to some Nomic rulesets.
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| Label on a bottle of mineral water: "Once open, keep refrigerated
and drink within 3 days." I'm leaving it on my desk 'til Thursday
to see what happens.
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And the receptionist said "What paper would you like in the morning?"
I said "Oh, I'll have an Observer."
I wasn't thinking.
Throwaway line from a free Jack
Dee album given away on the front of the...
Observer.
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