"This is such a habit now that I do it all on autopilot. I disconnect from the officenet at 5:28pm (special dispensation, medically certified). 5:29, my coat is on. By 5:32 I am walking through Drake Plaza in front of the office, heading for the transit stations."

Related: GSM Arts' Tube card game, which I suspect is just Uno using lines as suits, and (since I had the same idea myself a few years ago, and made the cards for it) consequently haven't bought.

I'm pretty sure that the last few series of Friends have been scripted and choreographed entirely for ease of digitisation - that they now have enough stock footage of basic stances and mannerisms to create another three thousand episodes inside a computer, with ageless, wageless virtual actors.

The permanent scatter-plots left by spat gum feel like a valuable source of social data, though. I'm still percolating theories as to the relevance of their locations - that they map the points at which people decide to stop chewing gum; that it boils down to (a) meeting someone, (b) being about to eat something and (c) general self-awareness and boredom. I'm sure there's a great deal of significance embedded in the tarmac around train stations, if only we knew what to do with the data.

"My brother told me that anyone with an arm band, like the ones bartenders used to wear in old western movies, murdered his brother. So, I thought that anyone wearing any kind of bracelet high on the arm; around their bicep, murdered their brother. In the seventies, these bracelets were very popular among women, so I thought I was often surrounded by murderers."

(I used to believe, amongst other rubbish, that strangling ivy would slither through my bedroom window at night if I left it open; that the Jeff Wayne War of the Worlds album was actually happening in real time on some quasi-real level, but would work out alright if we listened to the whole thing (I can still picture a Martian tripod slumped against Westbury white horse); that when you bought a new computer you first had to sit down and teach it everything you needed it to know, from one-plus-one onwards; that I was able control light switches with my mind but couldn't quite remember how to do it; that human beings were basically decent, and that some sort of god existed.)

The site was part of an exhibition in Brighton, in May, apparently. The world's getting very small, these days.

"As the court is no doubt aware, Defendant has a virtual monopoly of manufacture and sale of goods required by Mr. Coyote's work. It is our contention that Defendant has used its market advantage to the detriment of the consumer of such specialized products as itching powder, giant kites, Burmese tiger traps, anvils, and two-hundred-foot-long rubber bands."

You can listen to streaming broadcasts of The Heard, a poetry vehicle driven by the Johns Hegley and Cooper-Clarke, as they become available. Scratchy quality, but no worse than a bad radio. All we need now is a cheap wireless speaker that can pretend to be, well, a cheap wireless.

"The coyote begins to walk aimlessly away from the highway; for the first time in his life, he lets that precious source of road-kill fade unchecked to the horizon behind him. He has no destination, he just walks. One paw over the other, weaving around columns of rock and stony hummocks. He passes cacti but neither eats nor drinks."

"[Simulation] can allow insight into a situation that mere narrative cannot. It allows players to explore different outcomes -- in the fashion of a software toy -- and thereby come to a gut understanding of the simulation's subject. Having played at least a dozen different games on Waterloo, I understand the battle, and why things happened the way they did, and the nature of Napoleonic warfare, far better than if I had merely read a dozen books on the subject."

"These painted bikes have evolved into fantasy contraptions blissfully ignorant of the laws of mechanics, instruments of torture unable to be ridden, whilst those with missing parts echo the reality of bike ownership in an urban environment."

The Weird Cycle Lanes of Brighton site quietly encourages activists to reclaim the kerbsides by painting their own. [via Joh]

Tangentially, don't rush to buy the 28 Days Later soundtrack for its video-clip "unseen footage", unless you really want two minutes of pointless car-journey singalong and are desperate to know why the protagonists suddenly drive across fields and stop for a picnic. (Spoiler: "Frank, can we stop for a picnic?")