Stop! Hammerfest
My good friend Elise is in Hammerfest, Norway at the moment visiting a friend, as advised in her IM status: Hammerfest! I know that she’s in Norway, but I prefer to think of her being at an MC Hammer convention, with hordes of Hammer enthusiasts roaming around ’80s souvenir stalls dressed in baggy, bright pants, reminiscing about their leg-splaying days.
Paaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat!!!
Law and Order shorts
Me: they should do Law and Order shorts: five minute show, solved straight away and you’re done. What do you think?
Wife: [short pause] I think you’re an idiot.
Occupation: person?
One of the occupations I could choose in Canon’s dropdown for product registration today was Housewife/Person.
I suppressed the temptation to select it.
Google Earth is a holiday substitute?
A sentence in today’s Metro lifted itself off the page (page three, I think) and circled around my head, before smacking me across the cheeks, leaving me in stunned disbelief at the hopelessness of its writer. The sentence:
Thousands of people are shunning airport queues and heading instead for the increasingly 3D world of Google Earth.
It was near the beginning of a half-page feature on the product, the rest of which failed to attract my morning reading eyes as they instead searched for news based at least in part on reality. While Google Earth is indeed impressive, I doubt very much whether its introduction is causing airline bosses to rethink their strategies.
Wiki wonderland: Pádraig Harrington
Pádraig Harrington’s Wikipedia page has been updated 332 times in total since its creation at 3pm on 11 November, 2004. 141 of those updates were made today, 133 of which have been made since he won the play-off against Sergio García in The Open this evening. One such update corrected someone’s assertion that Carnoustie was in Augusta., which was live for one minute.
Each version is stored and can be compared with any other version.
Wikipedia’s top ten languages account for a total of over five million articles. It’s mind-boggling when you think about it.
Strunk & White
I’m reading The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White, a recommendation from Alan. It’s a lovely, pocket-sized book, and the first 47 pages have been educational and thoroughly enjoyable. I particularly enjoyed the following point of style.
Flammable. An oddity, chiefly used in saving lives. The common word meaning "combustible" is inflammable. But some people are thrown off by the in- and think inflammable means "not combustible." For this reason, trucks carrying gasoline or explosives are now marked FLAMMABLE. Unless you are operating such a truck and hence are concerned with the safety of children and illiterates, use inflammable.
I’m looking forward to the remaining 48 pages.
Post 10^x
Sympathies to Jon for his recent faux pas (and subsequent retraction) thinking he’d reached his 100th post. I’ve been pondering my somewhat distant 1,000th post (this is number 924), for a while thinking I was closer than I actually am. The url suggests that this is post 994, but test posts and mistaken duplicates (click the submit button twice used to generate two identical posts) has resulted in a 7% deletion rate, the urls incrementing without any associated content.
Oddly enough, the dearth of posts in April (twelve, equalled only once in May 2005) attracted more traffic than ever (115,622 hits from 23,988 visits). Maybe less is more.
BOMBER 30
There’s a guy on the Tube this morning wearing a white t-shirt adorned with the word “BOMBER” across his shoulder-blades and the number 30 on his back. An unfortunate nickname, I hope. Either that or a terrorist with at least 29 likeminded friends.
Oh, and he has a small rucksack slung over one shoulder.
Shit! He’s just switched to the Victoria Line with me.
Kirstie’s home videos
While the circumstances around Chris Langham’s alleged child abuse are distressing, there is a moment of Beadlesque comedy genius 20 seconds into this video covering the trial. Certainly worth watching.
The forgotten posts: rest in peace
I have a lot of thoughts throughout the day, some of which I consider blogworthy. When I encounter such a thought, I sometimes type it into a file called blog.doc on my phone, prompting me to blog about it at a later date. (Often, looking through this file, I delete items whose blogworthiness was over-estimated at the time of thinking.)
Other times, I mentally label the thought as sufficiently momentous not to need a prompt. Yet almost every time I do this, I remember later in the day that I had a momentous thought, but I can’t for the life in me remember what it was.
The result: this blog is left bereft of some genuine insight, amusement or most likely general tat. Either way, you the reader are losing out. I will endeavour to be more diligent in the future, for your sake. For those posts that have fallen by the wayside: rest in peace.
Fact of the day: cow-a-bunger
Seven percent of greenhouse gases produced in Wales come from cattle’s collective arses.
Effeminate email valedictions?
Emails from men that sign off with a single initial. Effeminate?
d
Alistair Campbell: non-choice words
Andrew Marr: can you remember and do you recall what you felt when you heard David Kelly had gone missing?
Alastair Campbell: I certainly can remember it and I do recall it and it was, I’d say with the possible exception of family deaths [glib] and erm, possibly my own breakdown in the 80s it was, it was the worst period of my life, without any shadow of a doubt.
The combination of "possible exception" and "without any shadow of a doubt" weakens his stance inordinately. The full interview can be found here.
The great cheese debate
It seems that two of my friends are have an over-zealous love of cheese. The two friends are Rob and Steve.
I was exposed to Steve’s addiction to the dairy produce back in 1998, and vaguely remember the addiction being limited to the hard, British cheese. Rob’s addiction is a more recent discovery, evidenced by the reported polishing off of a full wedge of brie in a single evening.
I’m keen to understand who’s addiction is greater, and I would appreciate it if Rob and Steve would wage a war of words via commenting on this post to defend their respective corners.
Let the cheese debate begin. If anyone else out there feels their habit can outdo that of either party, then please wade in there. I’m looking forward to a constructive, fair and respectful war of words.
The BBC’s favicon
Where’d it go? It used to be a little BBC icon. Now, just a little white square.
Thank God
I echo Rob’s view that the release of Alan Johnston is a blessing.
After 114 days, or at least after the momentousness of Johnston’s release has died down, the BBC will finally be compelled to return to its objective media remit.
I can’t help but feel that his captivity has attracted a much greater focus than other captives’ plights might attract simply because of the BBC’s position as arbiter of news. The BBC’s role as a journalistic organisation has been blurred with its role as employer, to its detriment.
Would Johnston have been released safely if the BBC had not kept up its relentless focus? We will never know. And this is where the argument gets difficult. Nonetheless, the BBC has lost a degree of credibility as a result of the elevated status the story has received.
I do of course share Rob’s delight for the fella himself, along with his family.
Battle of the incompetent customer services
The jury is out over whether Virgin Media or 3 takes the crown. My Virgin Media saga is frustrated the hell out of me. Yet tonight’s hour-plus conversation with 3 was equally banal: my trying to cancel a contract that I actually cancelled three months ago. Only they’ve decided to continue billing me on a monthly basis ever since.
It’s tough to decide on a winner, but they’re both losers in my eyes.
round(pi(),21) and 2^7
Parents will be all too familiar with walking backwards and forwardsin the nursery, cradling their baby to sleep while wearing out aspecific area of the carpet. I spent the best part of three hoursdoing exactly this the other night, and most nights involve at leastsome time walking the line, from one corner of the nursery to theother, while the little one hopefully falls asleep.
In an aim totry and assist with the onset of sleep, I often whisper pi to her, tothe 21 decimal places of which I am capable, over and over again. Itseems to work. If nothing else, later in life she’ll be able tocalculate the volume of earth to the nearest tenth of a cubic metre. Or its circumference to the nearest four attometers. Or thecircumference of the universe to the nearest 1.26 metres.
Once asleep, she’s rocked left to right, right to left, 128times, which is aimed at settling her into a deeper sleep before beingput down. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Maybe I need toup it to 256.