The Corrugated Iron Club would like to have some words with you

You can find them here.

The winning design for the Sherwood Forest Visitor Centre is absolutely wonderful

Learn more here.

Elephant Jumping On Trampoline

Boof! Squeek! Nya nya nya!

I love this panel:

from I'm Learning to Share!

The end of an era

Standalone VCRs are no longer being made.

when the day is named

If we are marked to die, we are enow

To do our country loss; and if to live,

The fewer men, the greater share of honour.

God's will, I pray thee, wish not one man more.

By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,

Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;

It ernes me not if men my garments wear;

Such outward things dwell not in my desires:

But if it be a sin to covet honour,

I am the most offending soul alive.

No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England:

God's peace, I would not lose so great an honour

As one man more, methinks, would share from me

For the best hope I have. O, do not wish one more.

Rather proclaim it presently through my host,

That he which hath no stomach to this fight,

Let him depart. His passport shall be made

And crowns for convoy put into his purse:

We would not die in that man's company

That fears his fellowship to die with us.

This day is called the Feast of Crispian:

He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,

Will stand a-tiptoe when the day is named,

And rouse him at the name of Crispian.

He that shall see this day and live t'old age,

Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,

And say "To-morrow is Saint Crispian":

Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars

And say "These wounds I had on Crispin's day."

Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,

But he'll remember with advantages

What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,

Familiar in his mouth as household words

Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,

Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,

Be in their flowing cups freshly remembered.

This story shall the good man teach his son;

And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,

From this day to the ending of the world,

But we in it shall be remembered;

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

For he today that sheds his blood with me

Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,

This day shall gentle his condition:

And gentlemen in England now abed

Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,

And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks

That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

and on your left you can see a lack of a building

This is a photo of a build site. As near as I can tell, it's here.



There's not much to this - we were walking down the street, and I thought this looked cool so I took a photo of it.

I wasn't thinking about posting it now. I was following a link about "forgotten authors" and found myself looking at Christopher Fowler's blog.

He thought it was interesting as well and put up an almost identical photo. Took me a moment to figure out why it looked so familiar.

Stuck in the middle with you

I've just find my way to Meetways, a google maps mashup that finds the location halfway between two points and then suggests the nearest place to meet.

So I decided to try it out using someone from Manhattan who wants to have a working lunch with someone from Beverly Hills.

I figured that they would enjoy a slice or two as they worked out their deal.

And here's the result:

That's right on the border of Kansas and Nebraska.  I've never been to a Gambino's or a Casey's, but they look like fine enough places, and they are both hiring.  This means that if the folks from LA or NYC who've blown all their savings on the gas to get out to the power meeting have a Plan B waiting in the wings if the deal falls through.

And Meanwhile, behind the scenes

This post, as well as the two previous ones, were written from Zoho, rather than the Blogger interface.

I've said it before, I'm a sucker for the beta testing!

We are now departing on the non-linear vacation that you have just finished

I started this blog up knowing that I was getting ready to go on a trip.  So I started off talking about my trip with very few prior posts under my belt.

To keep my various posts about the trip in order, I back-dated everything so that when you go look at them now, you see them in a narrative order.

That isn't how we're going to do it this time.  For one thing, I now have people who are reading this on an RSS feed.  If I backdate posts too early, then it won't show up on the feed.

I'll post as I post, and nothing will be backdated.

Those in the audience who want a nice narrative order, stay tuned.

London Transit Posters

The London Transit Museum has a marvellous online archive of transit posters.

I really wanted a postcard of this one:

To start off with

In the run-up to going away, I decided to try out Tripit to dump all of my travel plans in.

One of the features that Tripit has is that it can print you out a detailed itinerary with all sorts of maps and directions.

Here is the map from my Tripit account of the location of our first hotel:

It also automatically gave us walking directions from Paddington Station, because we came in on the express train from Heathrow.

Now, where is the hotel, really?:

It seems that the Google Maps search function takes the phrase "Kensington Gardens Square" and uses it to find "Garden Mews, Kensington."

Garden Mews seems like a very nice little back alley, but it might benefit from streetlights so that people who show up a few hours after sunset aren't floundering around in the dark making sure there isn't a hotel hiding amongst the rubbish bins.

Pocket A to Z: 1
Google Maps: Nil

Speaking of McCluhan

I've been wondering about how McCluhan would have categorized the blogosphere. Hot or Cold?

Wikipedia, help me out here:

Hot media usually, but not always, provide complete involvement without considerable stimulus. For example, print occupies visual space, uses visual senses, but can immerse its reader. Hot media favour analytical precision, quantitative analysis and sequential ordering, as they are usually sequential, linear and logical. They emphasize one sense (for example, of sight or sound) over the others. For this reason, hot media also include radio, as well as film, the lecture and photography.
Cool media, on the other hand, are usually, but not always, those that provide little involvement with substantial stimulus. They require more active participation on the part of the user, including the perception of abstract patterning and simultaneous comprehension of all parts. Therefore, according to McLuhan cool media include television, as well as the seminar and cartoons. McLuhan describes the term "cool media" as emerging from jazz and popular music and, in this context, is used to mean "detached." (See: CBC Radio Archives)
This concept appears to force media into binary categories. However, McLuhan's hot and cool exist on a continuum: they are more correctly measured on a scale than as dichotomous terms.

Blogging can be both Hot (reading passively) and Cold (interacting by responding), depending on your individual choice. And if you are choosing to be a passive reader of an interactive medium, does that make it a Hot medium?

Also taking up my time

I recently discovered that the games put out by Everett Kaser have finally been adapted to run on Macs.

I spent four days solving this:

Oh, and did I tell you that I'm red/green/brown color blind? That made the puzzle extra fun!

One of the things I've been up to

I've finally taken the plunge and purchased Delicious to help me organize all of my media.

It's been quite a fine time, going shelf to shelf and waving everything in front of my iCam and watching the item magically appear on my virtual shelf. It's also good for my upper arms, especially with the art books and DVD boxed sets.

The only drawback is the UPC codes for some of my things are covered up by store labels, so I have to peel the labels off so the computer can look them up.

This means that I have to decide the fate of my favorite Borders price sticker (On Hugh Laurie's The Gun Seller):

Emil Sitka has a posse

Another in my long list of websites I've found my way to while completely forgetting about what led me there:

The Emil Sitka Fan Club

Wikipedia, can you tell us who Emil Sitka was?

Emil Sitka (December 22, 1914 – January 16, 1998) was a veteran American actor who appeared in hundreds of movies, short films, and television shows, is best known for his numerous appearances with the Three Stooges. . . He is remembered mostly for a line of dialogue he keeps repeating in the Three Stooges short, Brideless Groom, where he appears as the justice of the peace attempting to marry Shemp and Dee Green: "Hold hands, you lovebirds!"

If you want to see Brideless Groom, here it is at Google Video.

Towards the end of his life, "He was in demand at various Three Stooges conventions, and had numerous requests from Three Stooges fans to appear at their wedding to say 'Hold hands, you lovebirds!'" I haven't been able to find out if he actually agreed to do this. "Hold hands, you lovebirds!" is engraved on his tombstone.

More from Wikipedia:

Moe Howard asked Sitka if he could create a character to become the new "middle stooge" to replace the ailing Larry [Fine]. Sitka accepted the invitation and became an official member of the Three Stooges; publicity photos of Sitka in this capacity with Howard and Curly Joe DeRita were circulated. Sitka named his character "Harry" and thought of him as being extremely conscientious to the point of ridiculousness. Two feature film offers for this reconstituted Three Stooges were considered, but this version of the group never acted together on film. The Three Stooges officially ended with the death of Moe Howard in 1975.

Sitka's only appearance as a Stooge seems to have been for the photoshoot announcing that he had joined the trio.

USB Wine!

oh dear.

Your challenge is to write crossover fanfiction combining Blue's Clues and Magnum PI. The story should use puberty as a plot device!

Generated by the Terrible Crossover Fanfiction Idea Generator

This Moment in Pod got in the house like a pigeon from hell

My plan had been to finish up a fair amount of behind-the-scenes blogging stuff before I left, and then when I came back I would be able to hit the ground running.

Unfortunately, I didn't finish up the things that I thought I would before I left, and on returning, I have been finding little time to catch up.

For the meantime, here's some songs that I just grabbed and threw into 8-tracks to see how it would work. There's no particular theme to it.