Fundead

Can't remember if I knew this already, but: some TV shows cling to the laughter of the dead, re-using laughter tracks recorded from studio audiences now at least partially deceased.

a few all-time classic tracks recorded in the late 1950s and early 1960s were never retired, and can still be heard on 'Frasier'

Even more unsettling is the existence of the "laugh machine" and the "laugh men."

Slide 1 of many

I actually had to create my first proper PowerPoint presentations not so long ago. The experience was one of partially committed craftsmanship tinged with the certaint knowledge that this is one of the lowest forms of human expression. But now Indexed gives some hope.

Sing-a-long-a-Shatner

There's so much to like here. Personal favourites:

"...The LP has been critically acclaimed for its unique "pop-driven" style. Its sole cover, a version of Pulp's "Common People" performed with Joe Jackson, has received good notices, often to the surprise of the reviewers."

"On June 9, 2005, Shatner performed a reworked rendition of "My Way" at the presentation of George Lucas's AFI Life Achievement Award, backed by a chorus line of dancers in Imperial Stormtrooper costumes who ultimately picked up Shatner and carried him offstage."

Day of the Jonty

Stefan sent this through, and it was the end of the day so I did it. Much to my surprise, it's not hugely humiliating - I was expecting a marmoset.



EDIT: Gril, slightly worryingly, joins me in Jackaldom. And points out, as I forgot to, that you the reader (if you exist) can modify the result if you think I'm something more suitable for using as a car logo.

Where is my mind

Randomly discovered while researching for my Microsoft trip next week: Frank Black is doing music for GRAW 2. What the hell, people.

[Aside: God, I wish they didn't have music playing over the back of the video. LET THE MAN SPEAK.]

Medical breakthrough

Email:

Dear Jonty,
World Community Grid is pleased to announce that the Help Defeat Cancer (HDC) project is finished.

I thought it'd hold out longer than this, to be honest.

Model of diplomacy

“It’s that same one you get when you’re traveling and you tell people you’re from America, and they’re like, ‘I’m sorry,’” she said. “But it’s like, ‘Hey, I control all the money and all the power, so sorry for you.’”

Depressing times at the model UN, which looks to be remarkably similar to the real UN. The biggest downer amid this crowd of precocious and often despisable adolescents comes from one of the staff:

Eric Kardas, a teaching assistant assigned to the U.S. delegation, explained that America is necessarily the 800-pound gorilla at the model U.N. “The United States needs to command every committee,” he said. “If there’s a weak American delegation, committees fall apart.”

The choice appears to be "America wins" or "Everybody loses". What a hugely positive outlook.

Silent Contemplation

Silent Contemplation
Originally uploaded by Mr Jonty.

Long day in London on Friday. Train at 7, working breakfast at 9, briefing at 10, interview at 12, afternoon spent on the phone and on email trying to chase up stuff that was sufficiently urgent that I couldn't leave it for the two hours required to get back to Bath. I went out with Gril & chums in the evening, missed all the trains, and discovered he had a new tenant in his block of flats when we returned. I felt the pose should be recorded.

Coursework

Helping my sister with an essay.

Debbie says:
the other bit i really hate is 'whilst Fowles can afford to take more liberties with criticising society in the twentieth century as the modern reader is encouraged to embrace multiculturalism and differing religious ideas

Debbie says:
originally i just said we're all secular humanists and christianity was dead

Jonty says:
Haha.

Debbie says:
apparently i have to be more 'subtle'

Pretty

nature_HIV_small2
Originally uploaded by Mr Jonty.

An atomic-level picture of a key portion of an HIV surface protein as it looks when bound to an infection-fighting antibody. Unlike much of the constantly mutating virus, this protein component is stable and—more importantly, say the researchers—appears vulnerable to attack from this specific antibody, known as b12, that can broadly neutralize HIV.

More here.

Youthful enterprise

Because I've been working on a launch for the last year or so, I - and the rest of the team - haven't had much contact with readers, for the good and sufficient reason we didn't have any beyond the focus groups. Now, the magazine is on the shelves - with our Live Messenger addresses in it. And so it begins.

Humans Are Awesome

I discovered, by means of Ben Goldacre's extensive deconstruction of Gillian McKeith, the meaning of the term "cargo cult" - expanded by Wikipedia, naturally. And then that leads to this beautifully understated entry.

I'm highly sceptical of the cited source but I think I can just let it go and cherish the moment.

Sweatting it

One of the many Microsoft blogs I subscribe to is credited to M3 Sweatt. I had assumed this was another one of those hilarious programming jokes. If this is a subcategory of humour you're unfamiliar with, hold your sides closed and gaze upon this comedy gold courtesy of The Daily WTF:

my $send_button =
( !$rAuth->permits(SEND)
? ''
: $status != 1
? '' #'[Mailing must be unlocked to send now]'
: $approved
? $send_now
? '' #'[Mailing in Progress]'
: qq(

type="image"
name="send"
src="$::root/sendit.png"
alt="Send"
border="0"
class="form-align"
>

type="hidden"
name="state"
value="$sh"
>

)
: $send_now
? '' #'[Cancelling]'
: '' #'[Approval Required]' )
);

Soaked my keyboard in tears of laughter, that one. Anyway, this blog linked to an article today that interviewed the author, and it transpires that his name is actually M3 Sweatt. It's his real name. He doesn't appear to be some form of street-level DJ type, either:



What bemuses me more than anything else is that nowhere does history - well, the internet, which is supplanting history so rapidly we might as well just go with it - record why he would have such a name. It's obviously prime Google bait, so it's very easy to find every last thing he's posted using it, but nowhere does anybody seem to have tapped him on the shoulder and asked him why the hell his first name is a Scrabble piece. Is this some industry 'thing' that nobody talks about? Or is it such a transparent piece of Californian pretention that nobody dares bring it up in case he starts being cool and individual about it?

Want

Featuring:

> integrated neck pillow in the hood
> pull down light shield to cover eyes
> cuff thumb holes
> internal pocket for tickets and passports
> hidden stash pocket with ear plugs
> pit zips to keep you ventilated

Not quite sure about the last one, but it sounds an admirable replacement for my "any old hoody and a laptop bag full of technojunk" mainstay.

More Suitably

Five celebrities who would be really bad choices for narrating in-car GPS systems

• Joe Pasquale
  
• Tim Westwood
  
• Woody Allen
  
• MC Hammer
  
• Sinistar
  
  
  

Five celebrities who would be really great choices for narrating in-car GPS systems, assuming you want to get there very quickly

• Samuel L Jackson
  
• Laurence Fishburne
  
• Vin Diesel
  
• That Guy Who Does The Movie Trailer Narration
  
• Jack Bauer
  

Concept stolen, again, from 5ives.

Incidentally

Another thing about is that it's all about instant . Thus, I can enforce really terrible, mid 1990's newsletter designs on you at will. At will! Ahahaha. Given that most of said newsletters were brimming with bitchy remarks, overuse of exclamation marks and terrifying belief in the self-worth of the author, it's clear they were the forerunner of blogs anyway, so Comic Sans dragged into the third dimension is a development long overdue.

This line of thinking does overlook goth and emo, which as far as I know never flourished in newsletter form. Of course, I suppose the point would be that nobody read it; maybe childhood bedrooms across the globe contain crude WordPerfect creations marked "Distribution: 2. Me and the heartless, uncaring world."

EDIT: Turns out it doesn't do WordArt. Or image hosting to anything other than your own server. Rubbish.

Favourite Auntie

While I'm still blogging for the novelty of this Word interface... going through my RSS feeds after two weeks without broadband (which wasn't that challenging, I have to say. I was waiting for withdrawal symptoms that never came) I come across the news that the BBC plans to put its training resource online.

I do like the BBC (unlike Paul Dacre, it appears) and it's this sort of thing that means I don't begrudge it the licence fee. While I almost never watch television, I come across all sorts of BBC content all over the place, I listen to radio a lot and I'm a huge user of the BBC News website. I think the site justifies a big whack of money all by itself, and I'll cheerfully pay for having witless advertising removed. If they could hurry up and do a radio station completely bereft of DJs – just news and music – then I'll be just about ready to get the tattoo.

I know, this is a standard and uninteresting blog post. Give me time, I'm catching up here.

Oh no, it’s the future

Two more things:

• I'm publishing blog posts from within Word 2007, running on Windows Vista. It's worryingly satisfying.
  
• This is now a house of four bloggers. I worry about what may happen if there is strife over washing up.

Moving story

I knew that this month would be horrible, because we had to finish the magazine, and the website, and the endless array of other bits and pieces involved in a big launch like this. When it's finally all over I'm going to sit down and work out just how many posters, mini-magazines, Powerpoint presentations, web graphics and custom DVD cases we had to create and see how horrifying the resultant pile is. Remarkable we managed to do a magazine as well, really. Anyway, obviously this was the perfect time to move house.

I've harboured a low-level desire to move out of the old place for over a year now, but never mustered the energy – not least because I've spent most of said year in the office. John, however, being a filthy freeloaderlancer, had more time to sit at home all day and really savour the broken lights, non-functional heating, and slowly peeling wallpaper, and as some other types were also looking for new digs a decision was made to move on. I thought about going solo – every move I've made since university has been a steadily decreasing number of cohabitees, so there was a mathematical precedent – but that was expensive and took more time than I had, so I just rolled with the group and we've finished up in a former student house a long way up one of Bath's more cardiac-endangering hills.

The move itself came at about the worst possible time: four days before the final print deadline, when I was already crazed from two weeks of overwork and sleep deprivation. I was working fourteen hour days so hadn't had time to pack anything and John hadn't done much either, and I didn't help matters by drinking heavily on the previous Friday evening in an attempt to unwind after the week. I managed to get up and over the van hire place a mere 45 minutes after the stated start time of 8am, and showed up chez Craig looking like the living dead. Handily, he's already moved about four times in the last twelve months so was able to introduce an air of consummate professionalism while I concentrated on not ending it all by creative use of an IKEA shelving unit.

The next movee was supposed to be Graham, but he wasn't ready either so I just went back and slept for two hours while John packed up. I then had to go to work, which meant there was quite a lot of stuff ready to go when we started moving again at about half-past four. A couple of friends who'd been unwise enough to be spare this weekend showed up mid-day and helped, and we managed to get John, some furniture and half the kitchen over before giving up around 10pm.

Next day the toil continued. My parents arrived expecting to give a hand with the final cleanup to discover the flat still half full of crap and friend busy at Wii Sports. The rest of the day was spent pushing filial relations to breaking point by carrying boxes, scrubbing three years' worth of crap off things and discovering new and exciting stains beneath long-static items of furniture. Graham, meanwhile, got to sit around in his living room, utterly without distraction because his entire life was packed in binbags, getting progressively less helpful text messages from me as it became clear that we were never going to get it all done.

Proceedings were enlivened by a trip to the dump, where we had to spend five minutes explaining that just because my father drives a van he is not in fact engaged in commercial waste disposal – at one point we were assured it would be okay if we emptied the rental van, filled it from Dad's van, then emptied it again – and thanks to truly heroic effort from the family team we managed to get all the big stuff – including Graham - moved in before exhaustion took over in late evening.

That wasn't the end, though. Oh no. The end didn't even come later in the week: my proposed time off got eaten up by doing photoshoots and we had to resort to first delaying the checkout by two hours as we vainly attempted to get carpets looking remotely disease-free, then giving up and hiding stuff in the garage. We overloaded the car so much I had my first crash in ten years of driving, and even once the letting agent had showed up, knocked fifty quid off the deposit for not cleaning the fucking oven lid and checked us out, there were still five boxes, two chairs, an electric radiator and two cars left on the property.

It's now the second weekend after the move: I type surrounded by boxes that I've not had the time to unpack and rubbish I've not had time to dump. I had to bring a washing machine we don't need and don't have the space for, the house is overflowing with unwanted furniture and the garage we were told came with the house turned out to have been sub-let to an enraged pensioner who did not take kindly to me jamming the lock trying to open it. There's still a car left in the old place that I can't even face thinking about, much less moving.

But we do have space, and the broadband is working, sort of, and I've avoided takeaway food all week. There's a Wii with Bomberman and Mario Kart 64 (and some Twilight Princess thing that I have no truck with.) And next week the magazine launches, and the website launches, and it'll all start to settle down. I'm wondering how I'll cope when it does.

A Year In Transit

For nobody's benefit other than my own, really, but for a while 2006 was the Year Of Indifferent Travel Food and DVT Paranoia. I went to the States so much in the first half of the year I was actually getting bored of it, which is a bit of an achievement given that until mid-2005 I'd only been on a couple of planes in my life. Vague ambition for 2007: head East more often.

Air

Trips abroad = 8
Of which
Press trips = 6

Cities Visited = Las Vegas (twice), Seattle (twice), Baltimore, New York, Los Angeles, Edinburgh, Paris, Kiev, London, Chernobyl, Pripyat
of which
Worst = Baltimore
Best = Pripyat

Baltimore was a bit of a dump and we all decided that it wasn't anywhere we'd want to go to again. Pripyat was, um, exactly the same, but it had the fine excuse that it was in a nuclear exclusion zone.

Worst Travel Experience =
Las Vegas - LAX - Heathrow

Best Travel Experience =
London - Seattle, I guess, although that's mostly because of the silver BA Executive Club card I CANNOT KEEP THIS YEAR OH IT BURNS.

Best Airline = British Airways
Airline I Am Never Using Again Even If The Only Alternative Is A Shipping Container = America West

Road

Cars Owned = 6
Accidents = 0 (-100% decrease year-on-year)
Cars Lost = 1
Top Speed = 135-ish
Total Expenditure = £740
Best Buy = 94L Fiat Cinquecento SX.
Worst Buy = 91H BMW 325iSE.
Most Fun = 91H BMW 325iSE

Rail

Best Train Company = Métro de Paris
Worst Train Company = First Great Western