Crash Testing: MINI Cooper vs Ford F150




Let's see where your ability to block two parking spaces gets you now. Obvious but nevertheless noteworthy commentary on the rise of the SUV in the New Yorker article linked.

Homer, as referenced in the IMDB. Quality.

Postcards From The Gamer

Ahaha. I am funny.

1. Don't like this new Blogger template. Yet.
2. Links 2003 is way more entertaining than I ever would have expected.
3. EA and XBox Live. Woooo.
4. There is no finer way to build business relationships than getting deeply wasted in another country.
5. That conversation tonight was horrifying and wrong even before we unwittingly involved that poor bastard sat on the adjacent table, who had the terrible misfortune to turn round when he heard the word "circumcision". Readers shouldn't have this kind of power.

Dear World

For the love of God, please shut up about the iPod. It is indeed very pretty, very useful and a wonderful piece of consumer technology but it is also very expensive, largely devoid of real technological innovation, and everybody has got one. There are thousands of bloody digital music players in existence - there is absolutely no need to keep harping on about this one and the sheer weight of idiots giving Apple yet more slavish, witless and largely uninformed free advertising is starting to drive me insane. Yes, it's great, no, it's not exciting, and no I don't want see another bloody article that somehow didn't find room to mention the dozens of other devices on the market in between the exhaustive fellatio of Steve fucking Jobs. HE IS MERELY FLESH AND BLOOD and it is MERELY WHITE PLASTIC. Moses had a space on one of his stone slabs for this sort of behaviour, you know.

Trucker concocts superbug killing cream in his garage Brilliant.

Honesty in Advertising

"If I was a regular reader, I would want the ease of the ads being gone, and the archives in a nice little place right there," Kolb said. "And if they don't, fuck 'em."

One Day, I Will Make My Own Entertaining Content

Until then, I shall merely link to other, more entertaining people instead. And change my Yahoo Messenger status to "innocent"

Bibliomancy

The key here is choosing the right book. I tried it with Hop on Pop and my fortune is apparently "Eat a snack." Eerily accurate, if not precisely earth-shaking. Bad books for bibliomancy include Carrie, Left Behind, and the collected works of Hunter S. Thompson.

Busted

Well, I guess that'll teach me to include links. Goddamn server referrals.

Lullabies For The Uncomprehending

Lullaby
And goodnight
La la blah blah
Blah something
I think this song
Is in German
Eins zwei drei vier funf
Bratwurst

Girls gone wild
Where's the beef?
I've got Pacman fever
Four score and
Seven years
Bingo was his name-oh.

...No, for real
Go to sleep
Or we'll sell you
On E-bay ...

On a more worrying note, there now exists a book that consists of nothing but premium-cut blog entries. I expect it will be bought by bloggers in their thousands who will then point at it's sales success as Irrefutable Proof That Blogging Is The Future Of Media, seemingly in a totally irony-free fashion.

ADD

Damn it. I got all fired up last week about the end of the world and how we're all going to be living in oil-starved anarchy within the next 20 years, and then I do absolutely nothing about it, let it slip out of my mind care of that charming cognitive-dissonance trick I do so well, and now I log on again to bitch about this week's cause celebre: everybody else is in the World of Warcraft beta and I'm not. God, I'm shallow.

Well, that's that then

It would appear that we're all totally fucked. Utterly and completely, grow-your-own veg time. Hooray.

All things in moderation

Best forum moderation ever (I paraphrase):

"I suppose so. Now just fuck off and let me do some work. If you don't stop this petty whinging I'm going to ban you. Permanently. Seriously. And if you don't leave me alone I'm going to come down the phone line and rape your sister."

Oh, it's beautiful.

Just in case he deletes it again:: "Some days I really wonder if the Videogame industry deserves to live or should just curl up in a ball and die, lie ignored for a decade or so and then let someone else have a crack at resurrecting the concept."

Top newsboard headline from the non-more-small town rag that serves the greater Bath area:

"Spa fiasco - everybody blamed"

That should draw a line under everything, then. God bless the press.

"Porneoke" had a good few months, during which Hal Robins memorably performed "Monster Mash" in front of a tape of fornicating dwarfs. What a very strange place San Francisco is. I must visit.

EDIT: Holy shit, this dude did the voices for Half-Life too. That's pretty unexpected.

A very odd obituary

Kieron likes music workblog: "The Commies – and if there were ever a band who really shouldn’t be referred to by a diminution of their name it’s these serious Oxford Ex-student types – dominated the spring, only to make a return as the seasons turned in winter. I ended up distributing it to Jim and Walker towards the close and had the following conversation about Holomovement…

Jim: very good
Kieron: I used to walk listening to that on the walk from my Oldfield Park flat and work.
Kieron: It turned the world into clockwork
Jim: no wonder you were spaceman in the mornings
Kieron: Yeah
Kieron: And on the way back from the pub it did similar tricks.
Kieron: The dark clouds run their fingers along the sky's thighs
Kieron: The amber streetlights stand guard on the roads frontiers.
Kieron: I cross their borders, feeling the car's wakes slide past me.
Jim: that means you are gay"

Finally, some decent repurposed content:

Communists Now Least Threatening Group In U.S.
WASHINGTON, DC—According to a report released Tuesday by the Pentagon, Communists rank last on a list of 238 threats to national security. "Communists may now safely be ignored," Secretary of Defense William Cohen said. "The Red Menace has been surpassed by militia groups, religious extremists, ecoterrorists, cybercriminals, Hollywood producers, and angry drivers." Other groups deemed more threatening than Communists include rap-metal bands (#96), escaped zoo animals (#202), and Belgians (#237).

Heh. Belgians.

State makes with the funny:

"Computer? We used to DREAM of having a computer.

We 'ad an abacus made out of some old knitting needles and grandad's teeth, and our dad would put a bit of blue paper in front of it every twenty minutes and then kill one of us, so's we'd think we 'ad a proper Blue Screen of Death, like."