Now where was I?

Hello all,

Welcome to my semi-annual "I have an influx of free-time, let's get cracking on the bloggery" phase.

My biggest problem lately is that I have been using so many different places to stash ideas and notes and thirds of blog posts as they occur to me that I'm completely disorganized.  So bear with me, I'm going to be throwing stuff at the wall all higgledy-piggledy as I plow through all my errant old thoughts.

Unless I get sidetracked with something else, in which case -- see you in the spring!

Untitled

I have been watching Craig Ferguson too much. My brain has started censoring swears with his "ooh-la-la" noise.

Posted via email from Xenius's posterous

here, under protest, is beefburgers.

Posted via email from Xenius's posterous

The Deltones - I'll Take You There - Trojan Reggae 45rpm

I'm in a Trojan Records mood at the moment.

offered without comment

Things I learn from Wikipedia!

"Rocks have had a huge impact on the cultural and technological advancement of the human race."

Posted via email from Xenius's posterous

Save the Earth

This is my small contribution to Blog Action Day. Everybody sing along!

Arthur "Two Sheds" Jackson? Step aside, you have been bested!

This house has three sheds!

And the TARDIS is negotiable.

J.S. Bach - Crab Canon on a Möbius Strip

The pipe helps complete the ensemble

Confluence

At the blog of the Diary of Samuel Pepys, a fire has just broken out.

At the blog of the Diary of George Orwell, a war has just broken out.

I pass along a good story

via From The North

And, speaking of dearly departed Saint John of Strawberry Fields, I was recently told a really funny (though, sadly probably apocryphal) story about the occasion when Lennon was filming his legendary sequence for the Christmas 1966 Not Only ... But Also episode by someone who worked, briefly, on the series (in a floor-sweeping capacity). If you've never seen this particular sequence, John played Dan, the doorman of a trendy London nightclub, The Ad-Lav, which was situated in an underground men's lavatory. He was filmed with Peter Cook (playing American TV presenter Hirman J Pipesucker) and lets him into the establishment once the little matter of a 'five pound waiting list' has been satisfactorily dealt with. The location used for the scene was outside the entrance of a genuine Gentlemen's public convenience on Broadwick Street in deepest Soho. One that's still there as it happens and that Keith Telly Topping has been known to frequent on the odd occasions when he's been caught short bustin' for a Jimmy Riddle in Central London. Filming took place early one Sunday Morning in November. Rumour has it that, as the crew were setting up to do the shot and John was standing by the entrance in his full doorman's outfit, some urine-stenched tramp staggered out of a side-street and walked straight towards the lavs, pausing only to give Lennon a sideways glance and mutter, in a broad Glaswegian accent, 'I know you! Y've come doon in the world since y'said y'were bigger than Jesus!'

Untitled

Posted via email from Xenius's posterous

I didn't haz that cheeseburger, officer.

Google Alerts, um, alerted me to this somewhat enjoyable LOLcat:


see more Lolcats and funny pictures

It's not that Google Alerts decided I needed to ponder that, but to help me find that lurking in the middle of the amazing number of comments that this photo inspired was this:

Not me. I did not do that.

Just sayin'.

Testing out a cross posting photo now

This is just a picture I took because I thought that the sky looked cool.  What I'm really doing is testing something out.

Posted via email from Xenius's posterous

tinkering

I have now reached the point where I have completely lost track of the number of different methods at my disposal for logging into and posting on this blog.

 

It's sort of like the kind of guy who is constantly working on his house or his car, but never drives it anywhere or moves in.  Thinking on this, I'm not entirely worried.  The tinkering is fun and I keep finding and solving problems.  There is a joy to that.  There is still moving forward.

 

One thing that I've noticed about myself is that the less that I post, the less I'm inclined to post.  Like this is sort of a conversation with myself somehow.  That's what people who are suspicius of blogging find as the thing to fault - "But who reads it? What's the point of writing if nobody's there to read it?"

 

The point of writing something that nobody will ever read is the same as the point of noodling about with the settings of a blog that you never post to.  It is the doing.

I'm not understanding the line breaks in the last post. But I think
I'll leave them in.

Perhaps I will try to
always use line breaks where
they are not needed.

I like
the look.

Soup!

For ages, when I've been making notes to myself about this blog, I've
used the initials AIYP.

Recent upgrades have suddenly caused the spellchecker to replace that
perfectly good acronym with the word "soup.".

I've been looking at my to do list for the last fifteen minutes,
wondering why I have all these things that I need to add to soup.

Images

One of the things that I've found to fiddle about with is a photo filter that can fake a (to my eyes) reasonably decent approximation of an HDR Photograph.

As I am partially color blind, I am always having trouble with taking pictures of sights that I find aesthetically pleasing. I never know if what I see is really all that pleasing to others, much less how to actually take a photo that looks like what I am seeing.

So the little filter has taken this example of a picture that I was disappointed with after I took it, as I feel it didn't quite get the image that I was struck by in real life:



And turned it into this, which I think is closer to what I recall it looking like, even though the image has obviously been mucked about with:



Of course, to your eyes that might look incredibly grotesque. Life is strange like that.

Gizmotronic

Image by Edward Dullard via Flickr

I have been busy on a couple of fronts, so posting has been light (if not completely non-existent).

Work has been busy. It's busy time anyway and the current ongoing fiscal woo-ha is not helping. On the bright side, I still have a job. Small mercies.

At home, we are in the process of breaking in a new dog. Slow going, but rewarding in its own way. There's something about having a dog sleeping nearby that helps me to focus on work. As I type, the dog is indeed right here, snoring away.

On a technical front, I have upgraded my bare-bone cell phone for a spiffy new smart-phone. Right now, I'm still ironing out the bangs and figuring out where the whistles are kept. Ultimately, one of my intentions for it is to help me streamline the blogging process. I am using it now. Blogging as a stylistic genre is one of immediacy and I'm measured enough without having to wait however many hours or days before I can get to the interface and start.

Onward!

(Prior to posting this, I have popped the text into Zemanta and it has decided that I would like to add the lovely image that is now appearing above. It also suggests that I add Wikipedia links to the terms "cell phone," "snoring," and "ironing." I think that's great.)

Let's Plinth!

I am sort of facinated by the latest installation on the Fourth Plinth:

Every hour, 24 hours a day, for 100 days without a break, different people will make the Plinth their own. If you’re selected, you can use your time on the plinth as you like – to demonstrate, to perform, or simply to reflect. One & Other is open to anyone and everyone from any corner of the UK. As long as you’re 16 or over and are living, or staying, in the UK, you can apply to be part of this unforgettable artistic experiment. Participants will be picked at random, chosen from the thousands who will enter, to represent the entire population of the UK. The rules are simple: you must stand on the plinth alone, for the whole hour; you can do whatever you want, provided it’s legal; and you can take anything with you that you can carry.

You can watch a live webcam from the One & Other site. As I started preparing this post it was 3:45 in the morning in London and the plinther was a woman dancing around dressed as a pigeon. Now it's a young man who looks like he might be sleeping.

My favorite that I've seen so far was a fellow who took the opportunity to pull out a sketch pad and start drawing the view.

curious

Over the weekend, Twitter apparently deleted a ton of accounts, and are now in the process of reinstating them.  (I believe that they came up with a faulty method of trying to detect spam blogs).

I logged into twitter.com on Sunday and was greeted with the "This is a deleted account" page instead of my own.  I then logged out, closed the browser, and opened twitter again.

There I was.  My account was active.

I have no way of knowing if I was deleted and then reinstated or if it was just a momentary glitch.  For some reason, this has been haunting me.  I don't know why that is.

Offered without comment.

July. I have plans for you.

Threepwood house.

I was stuck by this bit of info from the How Books Got Their Titles blog.

[Wodehouse took the name from] Emsworth, a village in Hampshire, and more specifically . . . a prep school in the town, Emsworth House, where PG Wodehouse stayed as a guest on and off from 1903. Wodehouse liked Emsworth so much that in 1910 he bought a house in the village called ‘Threepwood’.

If you know your Wodehouse, and me, I think you can see where this is going.

Emsworth is in the borough of Havant, so I took to their website to find more, and more could indeed be found.

Turns out Emsworth is the "culinary capital of the south of England."  Good to know, but how about that Threepwood House?

I found this bit in their charmingly titled "HAVANT BOROUGH TOWNSCAPE, LANDSCAPE AND SEASCAPE CHARACTER ASSESSMENT"

The writer and journalist P.G. Wodehouse came to Emsworth to visit a friend at a small preparatory school called Emsworth House. He became a schoolmaster here, and it is said that the quiet community in Emsworth suited him and he was able to produce a quantity of written work. From Emsworth School he moved into a property of his own known as Threepwood House on Record Road, which backed onto the grounds of Emsworth House. He lived in this property from 1904 to 1914, and it is now included on the List of Buildings of Local Interest. His stay in the area is marked by his use of local place names in his Jeeves and Wooster novels.

Paydirt!  Here is Record Road in Emsworth:


View Larger Map

Emsworth House School looks to be to the west of the lower half of Record Road, so we can presume that Threepwood House is there and most likely in private hands.  From this vantage point it looks surprisingly suburban an environment for Wodehouse to be living in, but it's hard to say how much things might have changed in the past century.

As an added point of interest, cast your eye to the northern end of Record Road and take a look at the front of the house directly across the street.  I am not certain at all, but it looks to me like someone's car has fallen into an enourmous hole where a driveway should be.

June Swoon

I was kicking around the idea of setting a goal of one post per day for the month of June, just to get myself back into the blogging habit.

Perhaps I'll start slower and try for July.

The Inflatable Head of Columbus

From Miguel Luciano

The Inflatable Head of Columbus (2006) parodies a failed Christopher Columbus monument in Puerto Rico. The statue, designed by Russian artist Zurab Tsereteli, was rejected by several U.S. cities before arriving in Cataño, Puerto Rico, costing the towns millions of dollars in shipping alone. However, finances collapsed, the Mayor of Cataño (Edwin “el Amolao” Sierra) resigned for psychological reasons and the controversial project was never erected.

Today, Columbus lies fragmented in thousands of pieces of bronze, deteriorating in an outdoor lot next to the Bacardi Factory in Cataño… perhaps the only justice in the story.

The only recognizable feature of the statue had been the giant Head.

To commemorate the 500-year anniversary of the Death of Christopher Columbus (May 20, 2006), I installed an inflatable replica in the Plaza Colón (Columbus Plaza) of Old San Juan, Puerto Rico.

The spoonerism for "blog hits" is "hog blitz"

Greetings, everyone interested in Marianne Moore and the Edsel!

Was there an article somewhere?

If this were only real..

Dave Perillo asks the question - If, in the mid seventies, Hanna-Barbera had put out Saturday morning cartoons starring punk rock acts of the day, what would the title cards look like?

And then he answers:

 

H. G. Wells tells it how he sees it

 

via Isn't Life Terrible

Welcome to my blog! Twitter freely and of your own will!

I was delighted to see that someone is publishing the original novel of Dracula as a blog in "real time"  (Dracula is an epistolary novel - comprised of a collection of letters and journal entries, so each chapter is dated and sometimes even timed.)

Even more astonishingly there is another real-time Dracula project on Twitter, where the letters and Journal entries are being recast as tweets.

JHarkerEsq: Finally met the Count. Really frail looking guy--deathly pale and cold. Definitely needs some sun. Doubt he'll survive the trip to England 1:05 AM May 5th

JHarkerEsq: Wolves encircled carriage, scary coachman returned and waved the beasts away like some freaky Wolf Whisperer. Think I'm going to pass ou-- 12:30 AM May 5th

JHarkerEsq: What in blazes? Coachman has disappeared and left me alone in the carriage. (must speak to the Count about him) I think I hear wolves...9:04 PM May 4th

JHarkerEsq: Terrified landlady forced her gaudy old cruficix round my neck. Still waiting for the damn carriage. So now I'm late AND tacky.5:30 PM May 4th

JHarkerEsq: First Walpurgis Nacht and now St. George's Eve. Damn bad trip planning on Dracula's part. 5:03 PM May 4th

JHarkerEsq: @MinaHarker2be In Bistritz. Should be done with business in a week and on my way home. Hope you're having fun with @LucyHolmwood2b 12:35 AM May 4th

LucyHolmwood2b: @MinaHarker2be OMG u totally have 2 keep a diary. They r *SO* cute. Whens Jonathan coming back? (Also kinda cute. ^o^) 12:34 AM May 4th

JHarkerEsq: Carpathians are a whirlpool of superstition, cultures, languages. Peasants all fear for my life. Also have excellent chicken paprikash here. 3:00 PM May 3rd

If you would like to get in on the action, you have a chance to be an extra:

On May 28, Jonathan Harker  will be seeking the aid of the men working around Dracula's Castle. I thought this might be a good opportunity to extend this story-telling exercise to include a few new "characters" and to get a little bit more exposure for this project.

Here's how it works:

1. Send a (publicly viewable) tweet mentioning Szgany, Dracula, or anything relevant to realtimedracula or JHarkerEsq between now and 5/25.

2. I will select between 5 and 10 people (you don't need to be Following me, but it would be nice) to feature as Szgany.

3. On May 28 Jonathan Harker will tweet back, begging your aid in freeing him from the castle. Feel free to mock his plight as mercilessly as you wish.

  I really hope that this project can keep the momentum going for the entire novel and that the whole thing can be collected somewhere.

Straddling the border between useless and cool

Image via Wikipedia

Dickens URL is a service that will not only give you a short link to your site, but assigns it with a quote from Dickens.

Thus this blog can now be reached at:

http://dickensurl.com/8ab6

which unfurls to:

http://dickensurl.com/8ab6/There_is_a_wisdom_of_the_Head_and__there_is_a_wisdom_of_the_Heart

Because the site has somehow decided that this quote :

There is a wisdom of the Head, and ... there is a wisdom of the Heart.

From Hard Times

is the most appropriate for this blog.

++++

In other news, this post is being created using Zemanta, which is a plug-in designed to help streamline blogging by selecting contextual clues and using them to generate links and find images for your posts. Thus the picture of Dickens and the link to go purchase Hard Times.


Perhaps if I am in an obnoxious mood, I will start enabling all the links that it suggests.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Zemanta - The Lowdown (toolsforjournalists.blogspot.com)
• 5 Very Weird URL Shorteners (mashable.com)
• Former CBC radio host Russ Germain dies at 62 (thestar.com)

Adelie penguins after a blizzard at Cape Denison / photograph by Frank Hurley

Adelie penguins after a blizzard at Cape Denison / photograph by Frank Hurley, originally uploaded by State Library of New South Wales collection.

Thea Gilmore - You Spin Me Right Round Live Manchester

I think the term we want is "silver lining"

From The Bookseller (Italics mine):

Speaking at the keynote address at the London Book Fair this morning (22nd April), Boris Johnson [The mayor of London] enthused about the city’s many bookshops and libraries as well as publishers - and the English language itself. "Americans may be borrowing it, but we minted it," he said.

Drawing on the digital theme that carried through many of the fair’s seminars, Johnson, who has previously acted as shadow arts minister, said: "I don’t think Google is going to destroy publishing, I don’t think it will stop people reading books", explaining that as long as there were delays on public transport people would need books to read.

This explains much about the MBTA. They aren't horribly mismanaged, they are trying to help the local literacy rates!

Bonus Insight:

"I don’t think the internet is the threat it is supposed to be. I see only one threat, only one real challenge to the importance and attractiveness of books, one common foe," he added. "The Playstation."

The publishing world has hope there too! If everyone is stuck on the subway for hours, they can't get home to their playstations!

I am almost frightened at how delightful this is

This is how the Craig Ferguson show started a few days ago.

I would really like to know about how they came up with this. I picture a bunch of people sitting around a conference table saying "Ok, so we've agreed to the lipsynching puppets. Now let's go to the whiteboard and narrow down what track to use."

I like how with Blogger and Twitter, the way to get a list of system commands sent to your phone is to text the word 'help' to the same number that you send the text to. This way if it doesn't work the way it should, not only will you not get the list of commands, but the internet will think that you are getting mugged or something.

Blogger has upgraded its interface. This means that I am now able to blog from my crap cell phone. Which is what I am doing now.

Getting closer

Me from a few years ago:

Post-apocalyptic visions were big in the eighties - Mad Max and all that - it was some sort of comfort that as the world fell apart, us young whippersnappers could adapt with it. One of the scenes in this episode was filmed in a street in Shad Thames. This is a group of Victorian-era warehouses that have a complex series of bridges connecting them. Almost from the moment this area was created, it was known as a bit dodgy sort of a place, and into the eighties the long-abandoned buildings only found use as a film location. Now it has been yuppified. The once empty buildings now contain spacious (and expensive) condos, art galleries, design firms and posh restaurants. Entropy works in ways more complicated than one might have imagined.

Oh Google Streetview? Did you take your spiffy camera truck down this very interesting street?

No.

Drat.

Well, perhaps I can see if I can get a look sideways... Here we go:


View Larger Map

Mr blurry face cellphone guy, we're needed!

As I've been quite busy the past few weeks, I haven't had as much chance to go puttering around the new additions to streetview as I've wanted. Mostly, folks who are similarly inclined and with more time on their hands have been picking up the slack.

Here's one that I haven't seen done yet for a place I've blogged about before, the location for Steed's flat in the Avengers:


View Larger Map

over four hours of rare Nichols and May

via I'm Learning to Share

Posted without comment

Streetview UK!

Well, I know what I'll be up to for the next few days.


View Larger Map

Buying the New Yorker 1976 - page 74

I'm reasonably certain that nobody wore an ascot and mukluks at the same time. Much to my pity.

Buying the New Yorker 1976 - page 73

This is a long thin ad. I've chopped it up to make it a bit easier to manage.





Looking that over, I thought that the two places I was going to go with this were.

1. Riffing about the fjords. I love riffing on fjords.
2. Is that font the same as the Gilligan's Island opening credits?

And then I search for Raymond & Whitcomb, and find an article from 1893 in the New York Times Archive:

TWENTY-SIX MANGLED BODIES; TRAIN FILLED WITH EXCURSIONIST WRECKED AT BATTLE CREEK. MORE THAN A SCORE BADLY INJURED. A Frightful Holocaust Caused by Disobe- dience of Orders. PASSENGERS ROASTED TO DEATH. Raymond & Whitcomb Excursion Train Filled with Returning World's Fair Tourists Driven Like a Rod of Steel into a Pacific Express -- Unlucky Thirteen Cars Crushed into Splinters About Sleeping Passenger -- Then Fire Roasted Helpless Travelers Who Were Pinned Down by Debris -- Terrible Suffering and Heroic Death of Mrs. Van Dusen of Sprout Brook, N.Y. -- Pitiful Scenes, of Which Those Who Would Rescue Were Powerless Spectators -- Engineer Wooley of the Raymond & Whitcomb Train Says Conductor Scott Told Him That the Road Was Clear -- The Engineer and Conductor Arrested and Held to be Tried for Manslaughter.

That's just the summary. It's quite an article.

Raymond & Whitcomb have a website, but there's not much there. A quick poke through eBay can bring up a bunch of their old brochures as well as a few for the MTS Argonaut.

24 is now carbon neutral

Says the New York Times:

Car crashes posed a bigger problem; even hybrid vehicles emit carbon dioxide when blown up. To achieve true carbon neutrality the scripts would have to avoid shooting on location and staging chase scenes, something likely to disappoint even the greenest viewers.

So the producers decided to settle for buying carbon offsets, which in theory make up for emissions of carbon dioxide, the main heat-trapping gas linked to global warming, by paying other people to generate enough clean energy to compensate — in this case wind-power plants in India. The producers said they bought enough credits to offset 1,291 tons of carbon dioxide, just over a half-season’s worth of emissions.

They gloss over any estimate of how much carbon dioxide they needed to offset when they blew up that SUV a couple episodes back. Does blowing up a hybrid give off less carbon dioxide than blowing up a normal car?

How long till someone asks the Car Talk guys?

"a kind of grand scale all-in wrestling match"

The Times Archive blog brings us the review of the original King Kong.

I pass along some information

The most common thing that people seem to be Googling for when they trip across this blog is some variation of "ants in my pants dance song"

Look no further, Google Searchers.


+++++++++++

Years ago I put up this photo:


When I put them up I wondered what was going on with them. Diamond Geezer gives up the skinny:

The disused piers of the London, Chatham and Dover Railway. This bridge was abandoned by goods traffic in 1964, and 20 years later the main span was removed leaving a dozen lonely red columns sticking out of the Thames. Waste not, want not. These isolated abutments are to be used to support the new west-side platforms at Blackfriars station, and engineering work is already afoot to begin linking them together.

Buying the New Yorker 1976 - page 72

Another one that I've seen before. Last time I saw The Cloister, I sort of hauled off on them:

It looks like a swamp with a golf course going through it. I can't imagine who this ad would appeal to beyond the retired banker who is looking for someplace to take the girl from the secretarial pool who is starting on the track to be promoted to trophy wife.

Mind that was my reaction to the old ad. I liked the look of the website much better.

Here for the 1976 version, I like this ad a bit more than the 1996 one (but it still looks less than thrilling). On the other hand, I took a quick peek at the website and wasn't as enthralled as before. Now it looks more like you can book a room in the Brooks Brothers Spring/Summer catalog.



I just love the hell out of this ad. I like that it looks like the guy is living in his garage full of junk. And look at that sleeping dog! What a great sleeping dog.

If you were to have ordered one of these catalogs back in '76, I've got happy news for you: They're going for about twenty bucks on eBay

Buying the New Yorker 1976 - page 71

It's been a while since I dipped my toe into this project. I was thinking of spinning it off into another blog, but now I think that if I can go for half a year without touching it, I can just as well keep it in the fold for the time being.

We've seen Maupintour a couple of times before. I'd like to say something new about them, but I can't think of anything.


They don't seem to have a tour to Greece set up for the coming future. There was one in 2007 that ran about $3,000.



I was happy to see that these guys are still going strong. Here's their site. Check out all the interesting gigantic houses that they build!

Wait, scratch that. They're in receivership.

Great Moments in Episode Summaries

I never noticed

I've always ignored the different spellings of "vampire" regarding Varney, thinking that it was some sort of spelling convention that didn't matter that much or that the text was "vampyre" and people were updating it to "vampire" for convenience sake.

But the first text page in the book (in my previous post) shows the title of the book as "Vampyre" while the cover spells it "Vampire":


Of course nowadays we force all our fictional vampires to go to High School, so we expect them to be able to spell. In Victorian times, all the young fictional vampyres had to go work in a coal mine or perhaps a bobbin factory.

The girl has swooned, and the vampyre is at his hideous repast!

Every so often, I make an attempt to read the whole of Varney The Vampire. I generally stall out round about the end of the first volume, and I think that I might end up doing the same thing again soon (both attempt and fail).

One thing I can say from my half experience with it is that I'm always delighted with the first chapter. It's completely lurid and overblown, but good heavens, it's fun.

I am baffled by my autofill

When I start to write a title in Blogger, my browser helpfully starts suggesting that I might want to use a post title that I have used before, either for an actual post, or one that I composed at some point and then jettisoned, having thought better of it.

Apparently at some point I was considering a post with this as a title:

Allow me ingress to your establishment, fair bouncer, wherein I might shake my humps.

I frequently forget how absurd I am. I imagine that is to my benefit.

The internet has proved me wrong again

Remember a few weeks back, when I said that my cell phone won't work with Twitter?

Wrong.

And the first person to follow me is some guy who is pretending to be the Minister for Foreign Affairs of Finland!

copyright oddness

A recent trip to the library led to the discovery of The Fox at the Manger by P. L. Travers (best known as the author of Mary Poppins).

Here is the copyright info:



The book rolled off the press with a copyright date of 1962, and that date was corrected with a rubber stamp to 1949.

The first thought was that this could be the first American edition of a book that was originally published in 1949, and apparently the typesetters were confused, printed a number of books with the current year, and then had to fabricate a rubber stamp to make the correction before the books were released.

But no - a survey of information available on the internet (down to the index to her papers at the State Library of New South Wales) confirms that the book was written and published in 1962.

So why was someone going to the trouble of putting that stamp in?

My contribution to the bus meme

Breaking news from the world of snack food

"Pringles, the popular snack food in a tube, are not potato crisps, a High Court judge has ruled."

Turns out that Pringles are only 42% potato!  So what are they?

"Pringles are more like a cake or a biscuit, it claimed, because they are manufactured from dough."

The Pringles folks are happy with this because now there is no VAT.  They're cheaper to sell, and cheaper to buy.  On the other hand, I'm not sure if celebrating the redefinition of the snack as a weird potato flavored franken-cookie is really going to help sales at all.

Added bonus:  "It also argued that potato crisps - unlike Pringles - . . . were not packaged in tubes."  Well, not anymore at least.

This Moment in Pod was alright and the song went on forever

I'm really enjoying the Ziggy Stardust Remixed album.

Go get it for yourself.

++++++++++++

And now the song that is stuck in my head is this one:



++++++++++

Lux Interior died! Crud.

I have now chosen my profile picture!

Twitter

For the past couple of days, I've been thinking of writing a post about how Twitter seems to have gone completely nuts.

This was before we got a twitter feed from Stephen Fry caught in an elevator:



I think the might even top Danny Wallace from last week:

"I am driving a 1974 VW camper van through Bloomsbury with my schoolfriend Will who is dressed like a Smurf. "



I've been kicking around the idea of Twittering for some time now (I have been subscribing to a number of Twitter rss feeds. I think that this is might be even more useless than some people think Twittering is. (What would be the verb for lurking on Twitter? Twurking?)), and I always come down to the same thoughts.

1. I don't feel like I blog enough. This is just going to be another thing keeping me from that.
2. Heck. I can just make little short posts, if that is what I think the internet demands of me.
3. My cellphone is crap and I can't Twitter from it. So the only time that I can Twitter currently is when I am on a computer. This means that most of what I will be saying is "I am on the computer" and "I am at work"
   
4. And so forth.

Of course, knowing how I operate, I realize that declaring that I will not be doing it for a while means that I will most likely cave and start it up next weekend.

Beirut - Elephant Gun

I had this song stuck in my head all this past weekend.

Get it while it's hot

Ubuweb is currently hosting six out-of-print Momus albums.

I've had a couple of Momus discs kicking around for a while, and I've pulled them out occasionally, but it's always felt like I needed to spend more effort to pay attention to it then I've had inclination to give.

I've started playing these in the background at work, which is possibly not the best way to go about it.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of some brains to eat

Coming soon to a bookstore near you:

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies features the original text of Jane Austen's beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton—and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she's soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers—and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead. Complete with 20 illustrations in the style of C. E. Brock (the original illustrator of Pride and Prejudice), this insanely funny expanded edition will introduce Jane Austen's classic novel to new legions of fans.

There's a discount if you pre-order from the publisher.

All Night Long (1962) Trailer

One of the strange things about the internet is how obituaries have a way of kicking up all sorts of flotsam, like this ad for a British beat-jazz version of Othello.

Louis Sullivan: the Struggle for American Architecture

Blendie

"Blendie is an interactive, sensitive, intelligent, voice controlled blender with a mind of its own."

Golly, I love surprises

For your perusal, The Recently Deflowered Girl by Hyacinthe Phypps (with illustrations by Edward Gorey).

Dig through the comments for a link to a .pdf, should one be required.

 

Maple Syrup for One!

 

The Secret History of bugs

You know those blasted things that show up in the corners of the screen on television, so that if you tape something, you will always know what channel you taped it from (and what would have been on next or a week later, etc)?

They did it in silent movies too.

Do not sniff the pugilist

Offered without comment.

Great Moments in Home Movies

From the Hartford Courant:

Robbins Barstow of Wethersfield, who last week learned a home movie he made in 1956 has been admitted into the National Film Registry, has gained a new pen pal as a result of the honor.

After the news hit that "Disneyland Dream," filmed on a family vacation to Anaheim, Calif., had been chosen for preservation, Barstow received an e-mail from actor and comedian Steve Martin.

Martin, a self-described "Disneyland junkie," wrote (reprinted with permission from Martin): "At age eleven I worked at Disneyland. I sold guidebooks at the park from 1956 to about 1958. I am as positive as one can be that I appear about 20:20 into your film, low in the frame, dressed in a top hat, vest, and striped pink shirt, moving from left to right, holding a guidebook out for sale."

You can watch the film here.

But if you're impatient, here you go:

I might have enjoyed this. Oh well.

From the BBC Press Office:

King Kong airs on BBC Four on Saturday 27 December at 11.30pm and viewers can press the Red button to hear Rob da Bank's personal choice of tracks to go alongside the film.

Rob has dug through his crates to put together a tracklisting of weird and wonderful gems from Sigur Ros, Flaming Lips, Radiohead, Lee "Scratch" Perry, Black Sabbath and Portishead to The Ho'Op'I Brothers, Harry Connick Junior, Bon Iver, Laurie Anderson and Tunng.

Here's the tracklisting if you want to play yourself:

• 1) Hudson Mohawke: Star Crackout
• 2) Trentemoller: Vamp
• 3) Sigur Ros: (Intro) Svein G Englar
• 4) Paul Whitheman and his Orchestra: Rhapsody In Blue
• 5) Lucky Elephant: Lucky Elephant
• 6) Ralfe Band: Attics
• 7) Xia Pang Jeng and the Chinese Orchestra of Shanghai Conservatory
• 8) The Flaming Lips: In Excelsior Vaginalistic
• 9) Rusko: Woo Boost
• 10) Metronomy: Nights Outro
• 11) The Ho'Op'I Brothers: Hawaiian Cowboy
• 12) Rusko: Woo Boost
• 13) Lazyboy: Dubstep
• 14) Himalaya: Dawn
• 15) Wax Stag: And How
• 16) Metronomy: Night Out Intro
• 17) Drums Of Death: Sleep In Fire
• 18) Bon Iver: For Emma
• 19) Lee "Scratch" Perry: Voodoo
• 20) Himalaya: Dawn
• 21) Reso: Eye Of Ra
• 22) Generation X: King Rocker
• 23) Bakka Beyond: Call Of The Forest
• 24) Rusko: Woo Boost
• 25) Kotchy: Let Loose
• 26) Black Sabbath: Voodoo
• 27) Radiohead: Faust Arp
• 28) Dinosaur Jr: Freak Scene
• 29) Don Rimini: Let Me Back Up
• 30) Fleet Foxes: Mykonos
• 31) Laurie Anderson: O Superman
• 32) DJ C: Animal Attraction (ft Zulu)
• 33) Bruce Springsteen: Born To Run
• 34) Rusko: Woo Roost
• 35) Portishead: Machine Gun
• 36) Paul Whiteman and his Orchestra: Rhapsody In Blue
• 37) Tunng: Bullets
• 38) Ian Brown: Fear
• 39) Harry Connick Junior: It Had To Be You
• 40) Goldfrapp: Train
• 41) Brian Eno: Here Come The Warm Jets
• 42) Pixies: Monkey Gone To Heaven

I see no track name for number 7 either...

I am tilting and shifting.

I've been waiting forever for an easy to tinker with (or simulate) tilt-shift photography, so I can turn this:



Into this:


And here we are.

"On this day in 1825, the 23-year-old Alexandre Dumas (pere) engaged in his first duel. He lost both the duel and, somehow, his pants, which fell down during the fight."

via

He called it! Sorta!

Lawrence Miles' Doctor Who Thing, Nov 3:

"Middle England might just about accept a black Doctor, but they certainly won't accept one they can't pronounce. Hartnell! Troughton! Pertwee! Baker! Davison! Baker! McCoy! McGann! Eccleston! Tennant! Eji… Ejoili… Ej… oh, **** it, let's just hire Matt Smith instead."

I had no idea

There was a Bonanza episode about Emperor Norton.

Interesting

Three things about the Lyricblogging from yesterday:

1. I've removed the Amazon banner on the side as the info from it was starting to blend in with the Amazon images with the individual posts. No worries, I was sceptical of the thing to start with, and this was the tipping point.
2. The RSS feed seems to have been overloaded! Folks reading on a feed might not be seeing every single post, and apparently they are coming in a random order and with some delays. It's now eleven hours later and some from the middle have just popped into my reader.
   
3. If you are reading on a feed reader, you likely won't be seeing the Amazon links, so the posts will make even less sense to you!

Other than that it worked fine.

Johnny's in the Basement

Amazon has made it easier to link to pages, so I'm lyricblogging to test it out.

This is a book about a kid with a bottle cap collection. The Statistically Improbable phrases are "bottle cap collection," "more bottle caps," and "purple bathtub."

Mixing up the Medicine

This project has been sitting in my to-do list, for a while now - it seems sort of like cheating to have it be a "New Year's project" but I think that the blogging needs some jumpstarting.

I'm on the pavement

The full title of this book is "Lightning strikes reinforced concrete pavement (M.I.T. Dept. of Civil Engineering. Research report) (Unknown Binding)"

I can't imagine that lightning generally has much to do with pavement - but then I am not a civil engineer.

Thinking about the government

So anyway, what I'm doing is taking each line of this song and plugging it into the search box on Amazon. Then I am linking to the first item that comes up.

At least I'm linking to the first item that came up last October and November. It took long enough to get that ready - I am in no mind to go back and double check.

The man in the trench coat

One of the things that I notice with the way blogging works is that the more one posts, the less important each individual post becomes. While posting more often raises your profile, it also brings the new eyeballs to different items.

If you are someone who doesn't want too much attention (or at least too much of the wrong attention (whatever that means)), this can make the process a bit strange.

Badge out, laid off

I am writing now with an intention of posting this on New Year's day - I have a few days off, so this is something nice and big to do on my downtime.

Says he's got a bad cough

It is currently quite cold out. There's been a ghastly flu going around for a while, but I've managed to avoid it.

This book, by the way was hit number three in the last line, but the number one result for this one. The song I'm doing was quoted in it.

Wants to get it paid off

Generally I put Amazon links up because I'm talking about something and an Amazon link can often be as informative as a Wikipedia link. I will also put a link up because I find it amusing to. Like now.

I've gotten a tiny trickle of income from these links, and, with the times being the way they are, I think I shouldn't expect much more. But that's ok, this is a free service - so right now I'm still breaking even on it.

Look out kid

A while ago, I did one of those things where my blog text was analyzed for profanity. I scored low.

I think it was Kurt Vonnegut who, late in his career, said that he discovered that if he swore a lot all it did was give people an excuse not to listen to him. That's where I stand on such matters. If a swear word is supposed to have any power, it's in the power to shock. It isn't shocking if it's expected.

It's somethin' you did

This isn't the video. It's the script. They actually published the script.

I read (or saw. I can't remember now) a review that pointed out that as this sequel takes place a year after the first film, it should really be called "I Still Know What You Did the Summer Before Last."

I'd go see that.

God knows when

In order to get this to work the way I want it to, I start loading the posts in and adjust the time stamp so that each post is a minute apart. Then I save them all as drafts so that when they are finally ready, I can just change the date to the current day and let them all post. This way anyone looking at the blog can see the lyrics in the correct order rather than the "posted" order, which is backwards.

Of course, if you are reading this via RSS feed, you will get the posts arriving backward. Which is a problem if your reader is set up to read the oldest post first. So I might start posting just after the time stamp on the final post (which should be the one you read first) and post backwards.

This sort of thinking is one of the reasons I don't actually post as much as I should.

But you're doin' it again

One of the latest features that Amazon has to blow my mind with is a "Concordance" which gives you all sorts of stats based on the text. From it I learn that the most common words in this book are "Daddy," "Time" and "Ya."

You better duck down the alley way

"This boxed kit from the world's foremost authority on teddy bears, The Boyds Collection, Ltd., features a three-inch fully-jointed plush Boyds bear along with a 16-page paperback book featuring full-color photos and uplifting verse to comfort and inspire anyone who is feeling down."

Result number two was a Cher album.

Lookin' for a new friend

Among the things that I haven't had much time to deal with are all of the new settings and widgets that function as a means of slowly turning Blogger into some sort of fake MySpace/FaceBook thing.

Theoretically, I can add a doo-dad to the side that will not only give you the names of all the people who are willing to publicly declare that they enjoy reading this blog, but will also show their photos in an array of tiny mug shots.

I haven't worked up the courage for this.

The man in the coon-skin cap

You know, it's been ages since coon-skin caps were in fashion. Same with pince-nez glasses.

Perhaps soon both will be hip simultaneously! That would be a look.

In the big pen

Here is what seems to be the world's biggest pen. It's twelve feet, eight inches long and you can write with it. With the help of a winch.

Wants eleven dollar bills

Now is that eleven singles, or one bill in an eleven dollar denomination?

I'll bet there's a big argument on some web forum about just that thing.

You only got ten

I have to say that of all the titles I've seen for published proceedings of governmental arts policy conferences, this has to be the most dramatic I've seen by far.

Maggie comes fleet foot

Chapter three of this bad boy is an essay on "The Ethics of Encores." I am curious about this.

Face full of black soot

I have to say I was worried about this one.

Talkin' that the heat put

Interesting fun fact: I have now published more posts today than I did in the last two months combined!

There were no results for this one. Here is the best result for just the words "heat" and "put."

Plants in the bed but

Ok. Time to level with you. I'm completely stalled out. There is nothing interested I can think of to say about this, and I'm a little frustrated.

The phone's tapped anyway

The first hit was the Springsteen book that we saw a few lines back, and the second is a book about Dylan, so I've decided to go with the third. Just because.

Maggie says that many say

I wonder if there are edible wild plants that can combat diabetes.

Greetings, people who are wondering the same thing and trying to use Google to find out!

I wish you luck in your search!

They must bust in early May

When I was going through these, I didn't notice that this one had already popped up. I suspect there was a week between the two.

As I write this now, I'm in the home stretch, so I'm not going to find an alternative.

Sorry.

Orders from the D. A.

The second hit was an episode of Law and Order from the Amazon on-demand video thing.

Look out kid

This is the second time that this lyric line pops up so here's the second hit:

Don't matter what you did

Now this is the third time that I've done this, and it is by far the most difficult. I suspect that one of the reasons is that the lyrics for this song are three times as long.

Walk on your tip toes

I imagine that walking through the Bible on tip toes is the way to do it. Otherwise you might rip the pages.

Don't try "No Doz"

Interestingly, you can buy No Doz on Amazon, but it doesn't come up as a hit here.

I suspect because they want you to try it.

Better stay away from those

I am finding it interesting how many books on Christianity are popping up here.

Author and Chaplain Michael T. Abadie shares lessons that have been plentiful as a member in the fraternity of “Ride, High Side, and Slide”. This diverse and colorful brotherhood rejoices in the awareness that being a bit different from mainstream society is not necessarily a bad thing. God loves bikers too, and Shiny Side Up is Michael T.’s way of spreading the word.

And I suspect he quotes some Dylan on the way.

That carry around a fire hose

If you carry around a fire hose, perhaps you might be interested in learning to fight fires!

Keep a clean nose

Dang! This one again! Arrgh.

Anyway, if you would like to keep your nose clean, perhaps you might like a nasal saline kit. I read that they are a good way of keeping yourself from catching some airborne disease if you use one just before and again just after a plane trip.

It is sort of pleasantly reminiscent of being a kid playing at the beach and having some saltwater get up your nose. And, I suspect, just a teensy bit like being waterboarded.

Most importantly, I didn't get sick.

Watch the plain clothes

In my experience it's the people in really spiffy expensive clothes that you need to watch out for.

You don't need a weather man

Statistically Improbable Phrases:

straining wires, decking boards, wood bin, wood preserver, power washer, cross rails, paving slabs, fence panel, paint particles, wall anchors, gloss enamel