It's a strange, but not unpleasant, way to end the year. Sat here in a mightily air-conditioned office (dubbed "the goldfish bowl"), which belches out an icy blast every ten minutes, watching old Grand Prix tapes from the BBC archives.

I have reached the 1988 Italian Grand Prix, by way of Monaco 1961, Silverstone 1973 and Spain 1991 - not forgetting Hungary 1989. Murray Walker and James Hunt are ubiquitous, and a small cheer goes up from this newsroom-of-one whenever Nigel Mansell passes Ayrton Senna. I was, and remain (somewhat more sheepishly) a huge Williams fan, and it's a treat to watch the good old days when the likes of Mansell and Patrese would wipe the floor with the hated McLarens.

Your recommendations for other good F1 races from years gone by would be much appreciated, especially pre-1997, that being the year ITV won the rights, and we don't have their tapes yet.

All of which brings us to siphonophorae.

Fresh from the Oyster's Garter, easily San Diego's finest marine biology blog - and you know how I love my marine biology - comes that video, and the below:

Siphonophores, though related to jellyfish, are not a single critter. They're actually a colony of little zooids living together in gelatinous harmony, stinging for their supper.

The dread Portuguese Man O'War is the most famous siphonophore, but there are lots more.

To expand a little further based on five minutes' scanning of Wikipedia while Senna and co make themselves at home on my hard drive, these things look like jellyfish and act like jellyfish, but are actually lots and lots of tiny siphonophores. Each one is designed to fulfil a specific role and, in many cases, without each other they would simply die.

So what you have is an amazing animal that doesn't have the component parts to exist by itself, but is still a big step away from becoming just one, big organism. And if you watched the video, you'll know they also look bloody scary.

Don't have nightmares, but do have a happy new year, wherever you're spending it. I will apparently be spending some of it in a horse-drawn carriage in a forest. I'll be taking a video camera on the off chance we get stalked by otherworldly forces and I get to immortalise myself in a Blair Witch Project rip-off before being gruesomely executed off-camera. Cheers!

This year, Garfield changed.

Or rather, he asexually divided, a bit like duckweed, into two separate strips. The original Garfield strips, from which I cannot tear myself after a childhood dominated by them, still go on. But now Garfield appears - or disappears - in a second strip, entitled "Garfield Minus Garfield".

These strips see Garfield systematically eradicated from the frame, leaving just frustrated, lonely owner Jon Arbuckle. Suddenly his life appears a thousand times more desperate, without even a cat to hear his screams.

The original idea came from a gentleman named Dan Walsh, who continues to churn out Garfield strips without Garfield on his own site. Garfield creator Jim Davis is a fan, so Walsh has been given the green light to carry on - but Paws, Davis's company, are now creating their own Garfield minus Garfield and presumably syndicating it, which makes things a little confusing, as there appear to be two competing no-Garfield strips in circulation.

The ones hosted on the Paws site do, at least, offer the great joy of comments. It has been said that Garfield is not the most intellectually testing, nor indeed the funniest, of comics in existence on God's green earth. Well, the comments and individuals a Garfield strip without Garfield manages to attract are quite scary. Here is an example, with comments reproduced:

wndrwrthg: Many of these strips without Garfield come across as stereotypical art student films.
grobert93: This makes no sense. John asks a question, and no answer for the next two scenes? This is pathetic.
doctortoon: You’re not crazy if you talk to yourself. It’s not even crazy if you answer. Crazy is getting into shouting matches with yourself. NO IT’S NOT! YES IT IS, SHUT UP YOU IDIOT! WHO ARE YOU CALLING AN… Oops…ahem…excuse me.
eln: In the GMG strip, Jon asks the question, apparently to himself, and spends time thinking about it with that depressed look on his face. Then, in the last panel, he looks ever so slightly toward the reader with this look of despair, as if to say his unfulfilled dreams are too numerous to count. The strip is full of pathos and a sense of quiet desperation. One could write a masters thesis in psychology about the complex inner workings of Jon Arbuckle as revealed in Garfield Minus Garfield. Truly a tour de force. A+++++, Would read again.

Thank you to "eln", who appears to be leaving eBay feedback for the strip there. The mainstream media have also taken time to explore this phenomenon - CBC opting for the somewhat biting headline, "Garfield exits, gets funnier" - with the Washington Post interviewing Davis himself:

The cartoonist calls the work "an inspired thing to do" and wishes to thank Walsh for enabling him to see another side of "Garfield."

"Some of the strips were slappers: 'Oh, I could have left that out.' It would have been funnier," Davis says.

Walsh may start having trouble finding the lonely, depressed Jon for his comics. Davis recently created a girlfriend for the longtime bachelor.

"How much humor can you get out of someone's unhappiness?" Davis muses. "Day after day for so many years - it was getting to me, too."

I like it to be part of my job to stay on top of new bits of technology, see which new-fangled gadgets and start-ups might reasonably help our line of work, and decide which look like they'll never make the grade.

Sadly, though, there are so many hundreds of new websites, gimmicks and applications appearing every day that I feel adrift in an ocean of them. Even though I'm one of the most keen adopters of new technology I know, I sometimes wonder if my knowledge acquisition stopped some time in 2006. For example, I can't fall in love with Twitter, no matter how hard I try. It just doesn't sing to me. And that makes me feel very alone in a world full of people who love the damn thing. We use it at work, and it does a fine job. But that isn't "proper" Twittering, and on a personal basis, I've never felt compelled to get involved. More fool me, perhaps.

While swimming in this sea of ideas, the one life-raft I could do with someone lobbing at me is a really good way to express my whereabouts. I'm often on the move and like being able to take photos, show off new places and experiences, and convey the fact that I'm not just sat behind a PC (even if I am updating Facebook, at least I'm doing it somewhere interesting, etc).

I've tried things like Radar and Moblog, which showed initial promise but fast bored the arse off me and didn't really do anything I couldn't do elsewhere. If you just want a blog on which to stash camera phone pictures, Flickr lets you sort that out, and if you tie ShoZu into it, those photos will come out geotagged.

But what I want is something that works out where I am for me, displays it in a neat, intuitive and attractive way, tracks it as it changes, makes sense of those changes, connects that location to the location of friends (and strangers), and gives me an end product I can't get anywhere else - a genuine sense of place in a virtual environment.

Today, I found Brightkite through a passing mention on the BBC News website.

Brightkite feels like a step in the right direction. I don't own an iPhone but Brightkite offers an application for that which, it is suggested, is the best thing since sliced bread. The website doesn't garner such rave reviews but the concept does.

In essence, Brightkite asks you to quickly "check in" when you change your location. It then tells everyone where you are (subject to a raft of privacy settings, so you can stop burglars waiting patiently for you to tell them you've left the house), and tells you if anyone else is nearby. Then you can start adding your anecdotes and photos to your location in Brightkite, either on the website, by email or by text.

It is easy to see how useful and enjoyable this website could become once its popularity increases. If a fifth of my Facebook friends had it, I could see roughly where they all were at any given time, and quickly pop over to see a friend in a nearby bar, or recommend someone a main course in a restaurant where they say they've just sat down.

Plus there is the Brightkite wall. I think this is the best part of the whole product so far.

The Brightkite wall acts like the "Live feed" tab in Facebook, spewing out a list of latest entries. But it does this according to place, rather than just your friends. So you can set it to show all entries for London, and lo, messages from London Brightkiters flood the wall.

That's great, but what about taking it to an all-night election party? You can create a special wall just for that event, in that location, with a phone number and code at the top for people to text to get involved. Then, your 100 guests at the election party can watch the coverage and update the wall with their thoughts and pictures as the night goes on, just using their phones. What a classy way to get a unique, digital record of big gatherings and events. In fact, forget the election - how about Wembley Stadium? Certainly, the next time I go into a meeting about this kind of technology, my two penn'orth will be backdropped by a Brightkite wall which begs my audience to join in.

The big problem I have with Brightkite is the loneliness. Barely anyone is signed up yet, so the ginormous seven-million-strong metropolis that is London is represented by about nine people. Bustling, it ain't. I've winged off invites to a small number of people who I think might be vaguely interested but, to be honest, I had a hard time thinking of friends I could reasonably expect to "get", and want, this kind of technology. (And that's no crime on their part. There's no law which says you have to want to tell everyone your location all day, ater all. It takes a certain kind of egotist to want to in the first place...)

Yet you read some blogs from these bespectacled wizards who call themselves "social media evangelists" (never was "touch the screen!" more appropriate, with the advent of the iPhone), and you'd be forgiven for thinking Brightkite was already "the next Facebook". I don't know whether it is or not, but I think I'd be surprised.

A few people I know squeeze the life out of Facebook, wiring it up with Twitter, Flickr, their blogs, their cat's everyday activities and their next-door neighbour's fridge. (I'm one of those people.) But most of my friends either have a Facebook account they couldn't give a rat's backside about - one friend, in the real-life non-devalued sense, told me today she hadn't checked hers since March - or they spend all day taking "Which Teletubby are you?" tests and blanket inviting me to New Year's parties in countries I don't live in. My idea of Facebook is the Sky Plus to their terrestrial. To them, Brightkite is a 50-inch HD plasma TV. If you're happy with terrestrial telly, you neither need, nor want, a 50-inch HD plasma TV.

Here's what I would like Brightkite to do, then. First, I want to know why I can't use the GPS built into my Nokia to automatically tell Brightkite where I am. They've said a lot about wanting to be inclusive, but bollocks to that, my phone's got GPS and it seems like madness manually texting my location when the phone knows it better than I do. Plus my phone won't get bored of texting and spell "Northolt" wrong in predictive text. I already have (both).

After that, I want Brightkite to start throwing us early adopters together. Organise a few gatherings for us (Flickr got this going in no time). Maybe stick up a message board or something. I know the whole point is we go gallivanting off and find all these lovely people who live right next door to us, but while the population density of Brightkite is one user per 20 square miles, that's not going to happen. We need to be brought together so we can start having proper fun, in the same way Facebook used university networks to unite people to the point where they started having fun. Then other people wanted in on the fun and the fun became exponential.

Get the London Brightkiters together for one evening a month, maybe, and they'll start cooking up their own fun and games together, and other people will see that fun, those games, and become quite insanely jealous. They'll be signed up in a jiffy, adding friends and playing along with this geographical tomfoolery.

After all, three years ago, most of my friends and family thought I was the biggest geek in the world with this "Facebook" thing I spent my time on. "You do what? You poke people?" And where are they now? In my news feed, joining groups entitled "I bet I can find 1,000,000 who dislike pope Benedict XVI".

Right now, everyone thinks GPS and location-based fun are geekery of the highest order. Give it a couple of years. Brightkite, it's all yours.

(If you're on Brightkite, or decide to sign up to have a look around, add me: ollie1984uk.)

Many years ago, the night before my first ever job interview, I was woken at around 3am by a text message. It read something like:

Hey you! I just wanted to say what a funny word "gullible" is! Isn't it weird?! Hope you're well x

Now, you know me. I'm a calm, rational man, not given to displays of exuberance or passion. But receiving that (let's be honest here) gormless text message in the middle of the night, before a big interview, tipped me off a precipice and into an abyss of irritability.*

I refused to speak to the sender for the next six months.

So my mother would have done well to be wary when, this morning, she rattled me out of my sleep with a phone call to ask the following:

"How do you pronounce this word?" She goes on to spell it out. "S-U-C-C-U-M-B..."
"Suh-kum," I say.

There are howls of derision from the end of the phone, where my mother is being roundly ridiculed by Annie (whose cat is pictured in the post prior to this one - fact).

It turns out my mother has been insisting the correct pronunciation is something roughly analagous to "suh-koom", as opposed to the "suh-kum" we all know and love. She is devastated at my pronunciation, "especially as I brought you up," she says, but it's too late. The linguistic empress has no clothes.

Four hours earlier and she'd have been off next year's Christmas card list, but I can't really complain at 9.30am.

While I'm at it, why is the phrase "en route" so hard for people to master? I have seen otherwise wonderful, intelligent and deeply respected friends and authors insisting they are "on route" somewhere. No they bloody are not, they are en route. Look it up, before people start using it on masse...

*Should the person who sent that text be reading this - which is perfectly possible - this may seem a trifle harsh but by God, you have to confess it wasn't your finest literary hour. We all send faintly amusing but ultimately worthless text messages every day of our lives. This was a case of one turning up at a very unhelpful moment.

Take one afternoon. Spend it going up and down the North Devon railway line that connects Barnstaple to Exeter, stopping off in pubs along the way. Film it.

This is the end product, as hosted by Messrs Williams and Sheppard. Be warned that the following feature contains swearing, vomiting and scenes of an adult nature throughout. Much like any weeknight in Barnstaple, in fact.

Painful Lives
Originally uploaded by Dayorama

Here I am trying to get back into the swing of things, and my mobile phone company is sabotaging my best efforts by deleting the text which accompanied the picture, and instead sending one of those crappy little emails with it that announces the arrival of a new message. Dayorama thinks that email is me and lo, Dayorama publishes it. Bollocks to technology.

Here is the paragraph I had originally summoned up to accompany the image:

Waterstone's in Plymouth are the culprits. Do people, at Christmas time, specifically search out entire sections of stores devoted to misery and suffering? What have we become?