*Yes, we sometimes give ratings
to days or weeks. It all harks back to our beginnings.
The views expressed in this weblog are those of the individual author alone and do not in any way reflect the views of any organisation or any other contributors.
By the time I boarded the plane I was sorely regretting my choice of reading material. Perhaps, with that in mind, I shouldn't have just watched this video:
Did you, like me, have just a little trouble matching the picture to the story?
It's tricky to reconcile the image of what would appear to be some sort of real-life Bagpuss with the headline "BBC admits new breaches of trust", when you haven't yet got to the part about the Blue Peter cat's involvement.
I spent a good ten seconds convinced that the pictured cat must have come out and apologised for faking competition winners. Maybe it worked for 6 Mewsic...
It's no secret I like a bit of old Phil Collins or Genesis stuff, and so you'd often find me, in my teenage years, sat in a bedroom at home, behind the drum kit, headphones pumping "In The Air Tonight" into my ears as I waited for that brilliant drum crescendo to kick in.
Little did I know Cadbury's were filming me...
Had I grown up a gorilla, that would be an exact replica of me, aged 14, behind my kit in my bedroom at home. Happy days. What an advert. Kicking into the drums in that song is the best feeling in the world.
This train travels through Africa to towns across the Republic of Congo, pulling wagons stuffed full of insecticide-impregnated mosquito nets. It'll mean enough nets for one in ten of the population, on a continent where a million people a year die from malaria.
Click here to see more photos and read more from BBC reporter John James. This is online reporting at its basic best, particularly when serving a part of the world where broadband and technological innovation aren't ready for us to start lobbing video, audio and clever-clogs coding at anything that moves. Good pictures, good text, good story.
We all know football clubs have their celebrity fans, but we don't often get to see them behind the scenes when the results come through.
How do Noel and Liam react as another City home match comes and goes without a goal? Can Elton be restrained when Watford go a goal down in the 89th minute? Does Cherie Blair yell, "Goodbye, we won't miss you!", when someone's sent off against Tony's beloved Newcastle?
Well, here's a sneak peek into the inner sanctum of one celebrity Sheffield United fan, at the critical moment of the 2006/07 Premiership season. Win, and they stay up. Lose, they go down. We join the action as the videprinter jumps to life...
You put "Iceland" into Google. A .com search. What would you expect? I hope I hear you thinking "Iceland, the country". I really hope. But no. What do you get? You get Iceland the supermarket! Thankfully, if you put "Iceland attractions", you do get more than bakery or the chilled cabinet.
Firstly, I've interviewed an Elvis impersonator - sorry, "tribute act" - for the first time in my life. I hadn't really been expecting that to happen today, and certainly not at the speedway. But it turns out the boy Elvis is quite the Reading Bulldogs fan. Have a listen, he even sings a Bulldogs-themed Presley number:
The second point of note is that of all the celebrities in the world, my face most closely resembles that of...
Richard Hammond. And it's official:
I'm not entirely sure how Amy J will take this news. Is this Hammond immediately struck off "the list"? Click here for your own which-celeb-do-you-look-like gadget.
I've just returned from a lovely dinner with radiant Dayorama colleague Amy Kennedy in Marlow. She's had the grand tour of the BBC as well, where she discovered that most of what we do is essentially, in some form or other, cheating. I'm promised a return trip to her Canary Wharf homeland.
Marlow would seem to be an incredibly unlikely European Capital of Chavs contender. I'd never entertained the notion that Marlow town centre would be throbbing with pikey teenagers (and pikeys need not be lower class, you understand - a collared shirt isn't enough to stop you being a dead loss to society).
But there they all were, getting drunk, lounging about on the war memorial, and - that giveaway sign of a chav nation - driving souped-up hatchbacks replete with shit music and naff blue lights.
Not that Marlow was unpleasant on what might have passed for a July evening, the river basking in the gently fading sunlight... the burger basking in cheese and tomato ketchup. Amy and I have concocted various plans for Dayorama (nothing too drastic), which may some day see fruition. It's all in the name of progress.
Now then, do you remember Stoppit and Tidyup? Good, because I don't. But even as I discover this 1980s children's series for the very first time, as narrated by Terry Wogan, a warm glow has appeared within my soul. Here's episode six:
Having seen that, I believe I am very much the Stoppit to OJ's Tidyup. I've yet to establish who fares worst in that comparison.
You can find more episodes by searching Youtube here.
My oh my, do we have an audio-visual feast this evening. We will start with the chicken police, breaking up another gangland fracas in rabbit town:
I've never seen anything so funny. But then my brain is practically comatose from the ridiculous cold at the speedway earlier this evening. We had not only rain but snow in the build-up to the speedway starting, and the temperature plunged to freezing just as yours truly took up his position next to the track with a microphone.
Still, it was a fun evening. Reading won comfortably (my text report is here) and I got to broadcast live updates to, count 'em, six different counties. Hello Berkshire, Surrey, Sussex, Hampshire, Kent and Oxfordshire. I won't get tired of that for quite a while. Today the South of England, tomorrow... well, tomorrow not very much because I'm knackered and there's no sport.
My eagerly anticipated speedway debut arrived at approximately 7:20pm. I say approximately because Roger, the presenter (based in Kent) played a quick game of "guess the fader the speedway reporter's on" back in Tunbridge Wells. I have saved this precious moment from being consigned to history and preserved it on this very weblog.
To hear my inauspicious introduction to my six county kingdom, and listen to the kind of speedway information you never thought you'd need to know, use this audio panel:
Hostilities between myself and the weather are resumed on Friday, when Tim and I have the pleasure of hosting our Friday night sport show from neighbouring stadia. He's in the Madejski Stadium for the rugby, I'm next door at Smallmead for the speedway. You can never say "I don't get out enough" doing this job.
... When I suggested I'd one day find fame via a BBC website. They hadn't counted on whoever's in charge of the BBC Two front page:
Yes! There we are, Amy J and I, stood proudly in front of the Top Gear Of The Pops logo at last week's filming. The bod in charge of the BBC Two site has clearly gone to Flickr, done a quick search, found an appropriate photo and popped it on the homepage. As a result I'm pretty chuffed: it stayed there til gone midnight, and my Flickr page has had over a thousand extra hits.
This news was brought to me by Amy J mere minutes after another friend texted me to ask if I'd like to see Muse in concert at Wembley Stadium in June, because she had a spare ticket. It's been a good day.
The FA have comprehensively cocked up their ticket website, having apparently not anticipated that a lot of people might want tickets to the first ever game at the new Wembley Stadium - England U21s v Italy U21s.
I've spent a good part of my afternoon trying to get tickets but have been met with this selection of responses from the website:
It's getting to the stage where hope is beginning to fade, and one wonders if anybody has successfully managed to buy a ticket.
A couple of times a reasonably normal-looking screen appeared, and at one point I was number 900 of 11,000 in the online queue to be served, but that was back in the dim and distant past at around 3:30pm. Since then it's been nothing but a plague of error messages.
It's nice to know that with the stadium debacle finally sorted, the FA can still maintain Wembley's proud tradition of absolutely everything about it being crap.
Today would be a very good day to win the lottery.
For a start it would go some way to offsetting the damage caused by winning the bid for those tickets to the Comic Relief Top Gear special on Sunday.
But more importantly, and in the same vein, this little puppy would be coming home with me:
Of course it's not an ordinary bloody Ford Cortina. It's the Cortina, as used by Messrs Hunt and Tyler in Life On Mars. Those cunning gits at Comic Relief have persuaded the producers to part with it (since the show has always been set to run for two series alone, it won't be needed by them any more), and it's being auctioned off for charity on eBay.
At the time of writing the car, a 1974 model despite the series being set in 1973, will set you back more than £10,000.
Congratulations to whichever individual has the money and taste to currently be leading the bidding. If I had my way I'd plonk fifty grand at the very least on the table tomorrow in a bid to take that hunk of metal home. Then I'd spend the rest of the lottery win on a bigger driveway - the Dodge is going nowhere.
Well it seems it's not just fictitious US ice hockey which gets the Dodge treatment - real UK ice hockey's in on the act too. Admittedly this photo could have been better (I was in a hurry), but this is a Dodge Caliber with the Basingstoke Bison logo outside their home rink:
The Bison, who I already liked anyway, definitely get my vote with their prudent and tasteful choice of sponsor. Click here to read about the 'Hockey 101' night I attended at the rink on Thursday - if you're interested in ice hockey you might pick up a thing or two.
Tonight I bring you a bit of light relief with a couple of fun games people have sent me.
Now, I've been getting interested in finding a house recently, but I'm sure we'd all agree it's for the best if I'm not allowed to be the architect behind it. I have inherited my father's aptitude for art (he boasts of the time he scored 4 out of 100 for his drawing of a horse), so when the following website asked me to draw a house, I knew I'd be in trouble.
DrawAHouse.com reckons the house you draw on their website will tell them plenty about you. Sadly, or perhaps fortuitously, I have lost the house I drew since I did it at work (it was a busy afternoon, clearly). However I have managed to preserve the conclusions DrawAHouse.com reached about my personality from my squiggly little house:
Your house tells the world that you ought to be a leader. You are a freedom lover and a strong person. You are shy and reserved. If you've drawn a cross on each of windows, you always want to live alone. You are very tidy person. There's nothing wrong with that because you're pretty popular among friends. son.
When it comes to love, you shut yourself off. It's difficult to win your heart because you have decided to keep your feelings deep inside. You have a strong personality and you like to command, influence and control people.
You are not a romantic person by nature. It also safe to say that others don't see you as a flirt. You don't think much about yourself.
It's a bit like a horoscope: read it enough times and you'll start to believe that's actually like you. But Linda, sat next to me, got an almost identical result for her markedly different house - hers had Gothic influences and definitely hinted at her Dutch heritage, whereas mine was a traditional Lancastrian farmhouse belching black smoke from its humongous chimney. So I'm inclined to believe this is not the most scientific test in the world and I am, after all, romantic, flirtatious, and certainly untidy.
Game number two was sent to me by its designer, which I find rather endearing. It forms part of the Red Nose Day site and the aim seems to be to make the logistics of water supply, rarely a sexy topic, appealing to kids. It's called 'Let It Flow' and I enjoyed it so much that I managed not only to complete all ten levels, but also to come in second in the High Score chart at the time of writing!
The idea is you connect all the water pipes up in a sort of Tetris-esque shapebusting environment, so that the water flows from one end to the other without any spillages along the way.
I'm sure you'll want to give it a go, if only to get a better score than me. If you were decent at maths and you think you have quite a logical brain, you'll probably fare well. Click here to play.
Finally, the title of this post is not just a pun on the comic relief provided by these games. Amy J and I have struck it a bit lucky, and will be going to see the Comic Relief special Top Gear Of The Pops being filmed on Sunday. A full report will of course follow!
I remember once hearing a rising comedian say that he judged other people's work by his degree of jealousy at not having come up with it first. I can't remember who it was - I was too busy raging that someone else had thought of the line before me - but if we're honest, the measure holds true in almost everything we (don't) do.
So here's a truly awesome idea, executed by a brilliant woman whose magnificent daliance makes me sick with envy, damn her...
When it comes to visiting all of London's 274 tube stations, it's become something of a cliché to do it against the clock. Even for those luck.. err, skilful enough to shave minutes off the world record time (currently 18 hours, 25 minutes and 3 seconds, by the way) there must come a sense that, aside from beating those who went before, very little has actually been achieved. One's life is hardly enriched by winning a title simply because the Waterloo & City line was running a good service...
Far better to take the time to enjoy the experience and make every visit count, which is what our lady - known to me only as Tubewhore - is doing, and blogging the experience for us to enjoy too.
You'll certainly remember her if you find yourselves sharing a train. She's dressing for the occasion...
... and if the hair isn't a giveaway (presumably the Met. line is a favourite?), the smell of Tippex should do the trick as she strikes off yet another station from her map.
I think this is a fantastic project, and I both admire and envy her for taking it on. She's certainly doing it justice. Whilst her mission statement says it's all about being 'able to say (she's) done it', it's clear she's getting so much more from her experience: inspiration for artwork as she soaks up the atmosphere of each and every one of the locales; great interaction with the people of London as she explains her mission, and cajoles them into playing their part with the camera; she's even had an offer of tea from one of her readers when she visits her local station!
We're all getting something out of it, in fact. Take a look at some of the atmospheric photographs she's giving us, along with a witty and incisive commentary that yes, once again, makes you wish you'd done it first.
I'll be reading every step of the way to her remaining 186 stations, and enjoying a living account of London's Underground network in the making. And when it's done, I shall still envy her for a great deal more than a tube map completely obscured by Tippex.
Now it's really not my place to criticise other media folk going about their business - after all, there but for the grace of God I go.
But I can't help myself in the case of David Wright, sports journalist at a local Berkshire newspaper.
He produces regular video blogs for the paper's website, some of which they've also submitted to YouTube. Each and every one of them is the most hilarious satire you have ever seen, made even more brilliant by the knowledge that it isn't satire.
There are 13 of his videos available on YouTube and more on the website for the paper in question. I urge you to set aside 20 minutes to watch every single one. Each comes equipped with a catalogue of basic technical errors plus hilarious antics from David himself.
SEE one of the least likely candidates ever for a video blog as he delivers lines with all the style, panache and energy of a badger in a desert.
WATCH as David's face is needlessly transported around the screen in amazingly cheap-looking fashion, using the built-in visual effects from the software he's using.
MARVEL as every video blog has different introductory graphics and different theme music!
LAUGH at the end of each video blog, as comments like 'That was alright, wasn't it?' and 'The music cut me off!' are left on the video!
Indeed, HOWL as the music does cut him off!
It's clearly not David's fault. Someone, somewhere, thought it was a good idea for him to do a video blog. But this is one of many situations you get in the media where the people in charge have clearly not employed the principle of horses for courses.
You do not make someone who is clearly so ill at ease in front of a camera do a video blog, even if you're mad keen on having a video blog on your site. If it's that important, do it yourself or get someone trained in such things to come in and do it.
It's like appointing me to replace Michael Schumacher at Ferrari. Yes, I can drive a car, and yes, I've seen it done. But all the evidence points to it being incredibly unlikely that I'll actually know what I'm doing, and I'll look a complete fool in a race.
The worst thing is, the paper seems to think the sheer ineptitude of these video blogs has made David Wright into something of a cult classic among sports fans. I can't help but feel it's just made him look a bit silly. For example, one contributor to a Reading FC fans' forum simply wrote:
"He's a fairly senior journalist, isn't he? You'd think he could get some media coaching to help him come across abit more professionally."
And yes, you would! But no, there he is on the front page of the paper's website, billed as 'cult hero and minor celebrity'. Just have a think about that and if you've still not watched the videos, go and do it. If you ever saw The Day Today, I promise you won't be disappointed.
However, I'm no David Sheppard when it comes to obsessive pushing of the print-screen key, so I had to nick that one from the blog of Andrew Collins.
Our station has its own little webcam too, poking out of a corner of studio two from behind the telly. And here I am, whiling away my Sunday afternoon earlier today:
The webcam refreshes every five minutes or so - it isn't constantly streaming, so you'll get no moving pictures. This means there is the potential to become incredibly self-conscious about the precise moment at which the webcam will record its image, lest you end up looking very, very silly:
That's me on Saturday afternoon during our coverage of the ill-fated Reading v Burnley match. Rita, sat behind the desk in the image, drew my attention to it a few minutes later. I have no idea what I'm doing that's made me look like that.
If you'd like to lie in wait for unsuspecting presenters pulling funny faces just as the webcam refreshes itself, you can click here and peer into a little corner of BBC local radio. A prize if you can spot Tiddles...
Every now and again somebody writes something which sums up exactly what I was just thinking. Usually it's me writing on Dayorama, since I tend to be best placed to write about what I was just thinking. But occasionally someone else does it for me.
Today, of all days, Stephen Tomkins has done it with a piece for BBC News Online's Magazine. Except he almost certainly wrote it in advance and is at home cooking up a fine festive lunch. But the sentiment he expresses is one I've just been worrying about. The title of his article: "Is It OK to go online on Christmas Day?"
"What are you doing reading this - haven't you got anything better to do, on this of all days? Do you, as the great poet said, know it's Christmastime at all?
"I hate to leap to conclusions about anyone, but I say, from what I know of you, that you're an unsociable Scrooge, creeping away from the jolly throng singing carols around the tree, to check your e-mails, browse aimlessly, gorge on humbugs and skulk. You're probably not even wearing your paper crown.
"That said, I should not overlook the possibility that you are spending the nativity season alone, without friends or family, through no choice of your own. In which case, I apologise for my insensitivity, and belatedly acknowledge that Christmas must be a miserable time of the year for some people, and I've probably made it worse, and I feel very bad about that. There, now you've spoilt my Christmas too. Thanks.
"Perhaps the reason you're surfing today is simply that it's something to do. We like to think that Christmas should be a day unlike any other, but once you've opened your presents, eaten your dinner and played with your children's toys, what you've got left is pretty much a day like any other, except with better TV."
And I'd only just been wondering if browsing the web on 25 December made me some sort of social outcast, or whether this was now an accepted norm in a world where, let's face it, most Christmas presents and festive greetings were sorted online.
Come to think of it, if you're reading this on Christmas Day, you're an even more desperate case! At least I can half-expect the BBC website to be useful and informative, even today. Dayorama is no such beast, let alone when we're all scoffing our weight in wildfowl in the name of Jesus.
And anyway, that Kennedy girl wrote on here at 8:43 this morning! Which is somehow worse, though I can't quite formulate a good argument for why it's worse. Merry Christmas... again. I'm off to play Cricket 2007. Give us back those bloody Ashes, Ponting, where's your Christmas spirit?
In the world of rugby union it is a sombre time for fans and players at London Irish, as the club languish in the depths of a losing streak.
But could this be the face, if not of a revival, then at least of some life blossoming in the Irish camp?
I spend a bit of time on the online message boards used by London Irish fans, either advertising our coverage of the team (whom I've now adopted at the cost of a rather nice fleece jacket), or just checking up on the discussion between supporters.
I also, separately, work quite hard to improve coverage of women's sport, and have done quite a bit with Reading's women's rugby club, so I keep a look out for any reference to women's rugby.
All this means a message board thread entitled 'London Irish Womens Team PLEASE HELP' was bound to intrigue me. I'll let Neale, the man writing it, explain:
"Last Saturday I went clubbing in London and met a great girl. She gave me her number at the end of the night so we could arrange to meet up next weekend. To my horror, when I tried the number today it didn't work. [But] she was 19 and told me she plays for London Irish women's team.
"Can anyone help me? Where do they play, does anyone know the team or the coaches? I apologise that this isn't strictly rugby related, but I really like this girl, and this is the only thing I can think of to try and contact her."
Rugby-related or not, this has become an immensely popular talking point with online fans of London Irish - click here to take a look for yourself. Since Neale wrote his begging letter late on Tuesday it has received more replies than any of the preceding 30 topics on the message board - his letter has, at the time of writing, been viewed over 300 times.
And what sleuths the London Irish fans are proving to be!
So far, in the space of two days, they reckon they have the girl's name and her MySpace account, with accompanying photos (from whence the one above has arrived). Neale tried to help where he could, with recollections like these:
"She and her German step-mum implied to me that they were strippers. Her step-mum borrowed my mobile briefly to ring someone and I thought that number could help me out.
"I texted it saying, 'You know a German girl who knows this Irish girl,' etc, but whoever he or she was didn't want to help me. They just texted back saying 'I'm not her PA.'"
The breakthrough came when a man named Paul somehow - God only knows how - found her MySpace account, which you can view here. Her name is Roisin, which certainly chimes with the London Irish connection, and someone had left a message on her MySpace page about her liking rugby and going out to a club. It all made sense!
Lovelorn Neale kept us waiting for almost an entire day after this revelation before replying, but when he did, how we all felt for him:
"Well well well, I didn't think I had much chance in finding her. Thanks Paul!
"I thought I'd try messaging her before I posted on here again. I messaged her last night and she has logged on [to her MySpace account] today so she would have read it - but she didn't reply.
"I feel a bit silly now. She's not interested. I guess I can safely assume she put her number in wrong deliberately..."
At least he had the decency to wish London Irish well against Northampton this weekend. After all, most Irish fans are feeling about as dejected and pessimistic as our Neale.
What to do when the incompetence of press officers has left you with no story to report?
Report your inability to report, of course, as the BBC's environment correspondent Sarah Mukherjee has done.
She attended a press briefing on the Stern report into climate change - a briefing supposedly intended to be the first, and only, place where journalists could learn what news the report contained. It was to be held behind closed doors with no mobile phones allowed.
But when Nicholas Stern himself went on the Today programme- before the briefing - to reveal many of the report's secrets, the journalists locked inside the briefing room went a little berserk:
By now mutinous journalists left their contemplation of the Mendelsohn model (page 147 of the Stern report) to engage in a vigorous argument with the Stern review team about the nature of the word "embargo".
We began to feel, (ironically, given the subject matter) like airline passengers - parked for hours in a large room with no information and only a boring book for entertainment.
At nine-thirty-five, we were allowed to go to the loo - in a "controlled fashion" (that referred, I hope, to the numbers allowed out at any one time).
Too late. Journalists slipped away from their minders and started hunting, increasingly frantically (and with a lot more shouting), for the lady with the phones.
As "Adam Reuters", Pasick uses his experience as a technology journalist for the news agency to report from Second Life - a world hosted on the internet where users create their own character, then go around doing almost everything you can do in your, well, First Life. You can shop, go to university, talk to others, the works.
Reuters has always had a strong reputation for financial reporting, so it's no surprise that their (inspired) coverage of Second Life is driven by similar motives.
The charts you can see on the left are displayed prominently on Reuters' Second Life homepage. They chart the exchange rate between Linden dollars - Second Life's currency - and the US dollar (top), and the level of US dollar expenditure in Second Life in the last 24 hours. At the time of writing $1 will get you L$271.6, and a truly staggering $458,000 has been spent acquiring L$.
This financial coverage extends to the interviews Pasick conducts inside the game. His latest interviewee is the man in charge of Ginko, one of Second Life's banks - that is, a bank set up inside Second Life and designed to run entirely within Second Life, with little or no real world presence.
As is quickly apparent, Second Life has a working, very real economy to maintain. If Reuters are now monitoring and evaluating this economy, not to mention reporting it (that's why they're bothering - it's all about the money), then it's time to sit up and take notice. In 10 years' time are online currency exchange rates going to get the same billing as £/$?
It's a scary thought, even for somebody whose life is already conducted online much of the time. For companies with no real web presence the concept of entire, grasping, virtual economies - generating millions of pounds - being born under their noses might just be terrifying.
If your wife is eBay-savvy, don't cheat on her. If you do, the contents of that photo go up for auction online, with this accompanying description:
Some of these items might be slightly damp due to them being chucked out of the bedroom window and sitting on the garden for a bit, since the cheating scumbag hasn't dare show his face since I phoned him, despite his bull**** assurances that he would visit our two young sons.
Web 2.0. The concept of all-singing, all-dancing websites that do clever things seamlessly. No more blockiness, no more static pages - just stuff you can control, changing all the time, keeping you interested, harnessing information in a way you can understand and navigate easily.
You will not see a better example of Web 2.0 than the website I'm about to show you. Here are four screenshots, taken one after the other:
This is We Feel Fine, a website given to an incredibly creative social experiment.
We Feel Fine loads a special programme in a new browser window, which presents hundreds and hundreds of tiny dots.
Each dot you choose represents an emotion as expressed by someone, somewhere, writing their weblog. You can narrow the pool from which these dots are drawn according to age, gender, location and even the type of emotion you are looking for.
When you hover your mouse over a dot, you're shown any basic details about the person represented by that dot, and the emotion that dot represents (which is also colour coded).
Clicking on the dot expands it to show the full quote from that blogger. These usually begin "I feel...", followed by the emotion in question. You can click the quote to visit their website and read their blog in full.
There are a few reasons this is special.
The first is the design. This is an incredibly smooth, simple website. It's intuitive - I had no idea what it was when I arrived at it, but in a few clicks I knew what I was doing.
Bloggers don't have to contribute their emotions. We Feel Fine automatically indexes them from the many millions of weblogs around the world (you can find angry bloggers from Afghanistan if you want, automatically tracked down by We Feel Fine). I stumbled across this website because someone had visited Dayorama from it, which suggests one of us had an emotion listed! I've no idea who, though - it'd be like finding a needle in a haystack.
It's difficult to make trawling through a load of weblogs a fun experience, and it's difficult to make trawling through a load of weblogs a visual experience. We Feel Fine does both. If you don't like the cloud of dots you can arrange them in five or six different ways, including something a bit like the Football First score videprinter, right through to a montage of photos bloggers have posted while expressing an emotion.
Seeing as I signed myself up to a training day on blogging, podcasts, and indeed vodcasts earlier today, I thought I might as well listen to my motley collection of podcasts this evening.
Chief among these is Mediatalk from The Guardian - neatly produced, witty, informative, and always willing to try new tricks. This sometimes has the effect of making it painfully obvious that print journalists are playing at broadcasters, but with the advent of specialised podcast producers being hired, that's becoming less of an issue.
If you don't already listen to podcasts, something like Mediatalk is a good place to start. It's established and it sounds good - you just have to be interested in the topic matter, which does admittedly become quite specific (their discussion of all things Ofcom this week meant almost nothing to me). This week Mediatalk excelled itself with a thorough and entertaining round-up of an online awards ceremony, complete with on-the-night interviews with some of the winners. It was, as any podcast should be, good radio.
As an example of a good podcast at work, have a listen to an excerpt I've picked out. If you use the audio panel below, you'll first hear the voice of correspondent John Plunkett, talking to presenter Matt Wells about a change in the ringtone market. Listen out for an interruption from somewhere close to my heart...
As an aside, this raises an interesting copyright issue. Technically the above excerpt is the property of The Guardian, but if I excerpted one of their movie reviews and quoted it here, then wrote around it expanding on a theme, nobody would raise an eyebrow. Does excerpting a podcast - whether for use in an article as here, or in another podcast - count as fair use in similar fashion?
If you're wondering where to get podcasts from, by the way, then look no further than iTunes to get you started (there are other ways of doing it, but there's no point complicated the issue, and iTunes keeps it simple).
PS Anyone watching for the last half an hour or so will have seen a catalogue of errors. First I accidentally posted the audio clip twice in a row, on its own, with no accompanying text (of any note); having eventually realised this I put it up with the proper text, but then I discovered the clip repeated itself, so when you pressed 'play' you heard it all twice over. So I had to go back and sort that out. It's taken roughly an hour from producing the clip to getting this post right, which goes to show that even when you think you're internet-savvy, it's bloody easy to get things horrendously wrong.
Ah, you remember. Think back to the last season of Doctor Who. The Torchwood Institute was involved with a lot of unsavoury stuff like aliens, multiple universes, the entire space/time continuum (to borrow a phrase Star Trek launched into popular vocabulary), and even The Doctor himself.
As is beginning to be heralded by trailers on the BBC, Torchwood is now a series in its own right - to be aired on BBC3 after the watershed, so expect everything to be that much darker.
Torchwood has its own BBC site, as you might expect. But it isn't indexed in Google and there's no link to it from the BBC3 website, which you might not expect. You can get to it from the BBC search function, but it simply presents this page:
There's the opportunity to type a password into the page (but no box saying "password" or anything). As yet I've been unable to crack the password, but then I'm avoiding researching it on the net on purpose, since that would probably dampen the fun.
It's nice to have created the site with that air of mystique - there's no cast details, no plot details, no episode, no nothing. Just "access denied".
Of course this effect is somewhat undermined when the next result down on the BBC search pages is BBC South East Wales, who happily provide cast, plot and episode details!
As far as I'm aware the series is set to premiere on BBC3 at 9pm on Sunday 22 October 2006.
A couple of other small, unrelated points of note from today:
We publish junior football match reports on the BBC site each week, written by parents and coaches at the game. Sometimes the authors get a tiny bit carried away. This week, one wrote a poem mid-report.
Many thanks to Jeff at Matmi New Media. He noticed we'd once mentioned Cow Curling here, a creation of his online gaming company - now they've made a brand new online game, Attack of the Funky Disco Zombies, and he's been kind enough to send me an email linking to it. I've had a go and it's not really up my street, but by all means try it yourself. Here's Cow Curling, by way of comparison.
If you listen to BBC local radio, or even the likes of Radio 2 or Five Live, you'll hear plenty of people come on with no ostensible connection to the day's news or the local area, but what they do have is a book to promote.
What you might well have also noticed - but you may not - is that they tend to do about eight minutes with every single radio station in existence, on the same day, to get it all over and done with.
You may of course work in local radio like me and know full well that this happens on a regular basis. BBC local radio stations frequently get offers of some celebrity or other to talk for a few minutes about whatever, and we're given a list of about thirty time slots for which we can then bid. (No money changes hands, we just try to nab the slot we want first.)
It was in this fashion that I nearly ended up chatting to Ashley Giles about a month back, then didn't. But that's another story.
I've always wondered what it must be like for the poor sod of a celebrity who has to conduct 30 of these interviews, back to back, with 30 local radio DJs. And now I know because Andrew Collins - yes, for it is he, and for it is I, paid-up member of the "I Really Like Andrew Collins" club, as you're all tired of hearing - ended up doing one of these marathon sessions, then helpfully writing about it.
He was promoting the Radio Times Guide To Films 2007 and gives a full account of his day crammed in a tiny "basement store cupboard" of a studio here, including a station-by-station breakdown of who he spoke to and, if noteworthy, what they were like.
To my absolute delight he apparently spoke to our very own Henry Kelly, who was indeed (inevitably) deemed worthy of a note as follows:
0915 Radio Berkshire (with Henry Kelly! I suggested that Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid portrayed a "tender" relationship between two men years before Brokeback Mountain and he said, "Yes, but they weren't gay, were they?")
Notice that even for media veteran Andrew, same as for me, same as for everyone else who's ever been on the show, appearing on air with Henry Kelly is deserving of an exclamation mark.
Your conservative friends are getting a little bored with all that silly liberal Mormon talk, so what do you do? Damn right, you set up a blog. Feminist Mormon Housewives. FMH founder and co-author Lisa explains:
I can’t exactly remember the spark that led me to google “liberal Mormon” ... I got more and more frustrated until one day, exactly one year ago, on a whim, I opened up blogger and tried to think of a catchy name. A catchy name that said something bold and sold the idea of what *I* wanted to talk about. Gyrl Stuff. Feminist Stuff.
Feminist was a given, and add that to Mormon and you’ve got obvious. But Feminist Mormon is a boring name. So what else describes me? Hum . . . Housewife. I LOVE IT. It’s perfect, it’s so very oxymoronic. Obvious but not. It’ll make people blink. Thrice.
Go and have a look - there are some good reads, including a nice series of 'Day In The Life' contributions from readers. These include lines like:
"On good days read the Book of Mormon for half an hour, in Italian because I’m doing Italian translation projects this semester and I need all the help I can get remembering the language."
FMH is almost exactly like Dayorama - a little band of authors contributing as and when - except a bit more pink and, well, there are more Mormons involved. Nor do we have guest contributors opening their pieces with:
"First let me say that I am neither Mormon nor a housewife..."
Sometimes it takes one bloomin' great idiot, driving at over 300mph in a silly car on a runway, to bring out the best in people.
Top Gear presenter Richard 'Hamster' Hammond's near-fatal crash has resulted in, at the time of writing, a £75,000 boost for the Yorkshire Air Ambulance - which airlifted him to hospital.
A group of readers of the magazine Pistonheads decided, in the immediate aftermath of the crash, to set up an online donation page for the air ambulance which had ferried Hammond to safety.
Initially the fundraising target was set at the cost of one air ambulance flight - Hammond's. The amount raised currently stands at more than two hundred and twenty such flights.
In the words of Martin Eede, head of the Yorkshire Air Ambulance:
A massive thanks from everyone at YAA. To put it in perspective, at close of play on Friday we have carried another four patients with similar life threatening injuries (burns, heart attack, road traffic). So clearly, what you have achieved is already helping to save others!
"There's some gorgeous comments," she said, referring to the donation page, where you can write messages of goodwill.
"There was this one little boy who gave his £2.50 pocket money for the week, and a girl who gave her month's riding lessons money.
"And someone gave the amount they spend on hamster food... God knows what their hamster's going to eat now."
I'd ask my sister Alice if she'd donate her riding lessons money to the Yorkshire Air Ambulance, but I don't think she's over the shock of Steve Irwin dying yet, let alone the Hamster risking life and limb.
It probably isn't my place to comment on this, so I'll just present the facts:
Poor Matt Barbet. He's one of the BBC London staff caught up in the scandal of the 'Is This The Way To Al-Jazeera?' video, made by staff at the former to mark the departure of one of their number to the latter.
The video has found its way into the wider world - as these things have a habit of doing - and has forced the BBC to distance itself from the content, labelling it 'ill-judged'.
Matt Barbet has a bit part role in it. He's not one of the main protagonists but is seen tapping his scripts on the BBC LDN studio desk in time to the 'Amarillo/Al-Jazeera' rhythm, then looking bemused as figures in Middle Eastern clothing walk around the set.
(I like Matt Barbet, by the way. He's an excellent newsreader in my opinion.)
Naturally the Daily Mail have got the full video on their website, but it's the comments left by the Mail's online visitors which thrilled me:
I think that it is one of the funniest things that I've ever seen and well worth every penny of my licence fee. With creativity and a sense of what amuses the (majority of the) public like that, I hope that these people all get a massive pay rise. It is the best thing to come out of the BBC for years! Matt in Reading
Good to see signs of intelligent life in the news room at the BBC - I was beginning to think the employees had been replaced by robots with the sole remit to scare everyone to death with tales of imminent doom and destruction. Stick it on at 10pm, I say. Anthony in London
Put them in charge - was a damn sight better than what the current lot pass off as entertainment! Andy in Poland
Suggestions for music videos the BBC Berkshire newsroom can rip off, please.
Nikki has been voted in to rejoin the five remaining Big Brother housemates as the mammoth series crawls into its final week. Once again the nation - and the four voting contestants who brought Nikki back - have been seduced by stupidity. I'd have had Grace in. Evil is the source of all good television.
I made a discovery earlier today that I can't resist sharing with you.
It was drawn to my attention around lunchtime that my colleague Linda didn't know who Super Secret Secret Squirrel was. Do you?
Right. For the uninitiated, Super Secret Secret Squirrel was a shady sciurine figure who appeared in cartoons in the 1990s - usually, if not exclusively, following the animation 'Two Stupid Dogs', of similarly legendary status.
The original Secret Squirrel debuted in the 1960s (squirrels - cool in every decade). It seems he hibernated during much of the 1980s before emerging not just Secret, but Super Secret Secret.
This much information I was able to impart to Linda. But I needed a photo and some more details. Lo and behold, Wikipedia hoves into view.
"Oh God," I hear you cry, "not another journalist yakking on about Wikipedia." But that's not where I'm going with this, I've known all about Wikipedia and liked it for quite a long time.
What I did not know is that Wikipedia has a category dedicated to "Fictional Squirrels".
It's a Who's Who of make-believe squirrels! Can you believe that someone, somewhere, has had the time and inclination to pull together the sum total of man's fictional squirrel knowledge in one place?
People complain about Wikipedia's reliability, accuracy and authenticity, but you show me the pages of Encyclopaedia Britannica with fictional squirrels in them. Go on. Try it.
Not only that but I was able to use Wikipedia to establish that "sciurine" is the appropriate squirrel adjective (as per "bovine" for cow or "feline" for cat). And yes, in this post-Hutton world, I did check it against a separate source.
At the time of writing, if you place the phrase "butterfly fart" - including inverted commas - into Google, you will receive over five hundred results.
This includes the image above, delightfully tagged by one Flickr contributor.
The phrase has been employed in a number of mightily interesting sentences. Pick your favourite and click it to explore:
There are many more. Somewhat counterintuitively the phrase finds itself most often paired in sentences with any of a number of quite catastrophic natural disasters, e.g. "a butterfly fart in Asia can produce a tornado in Texas" and variations involving hurricanes, tsunamis and earthquakes.
Found a favourite not listed here? Add it in the comments!
... Then may I recommend this article by Simpsons staff writer George Meyer on BBC News Online. It deals with hypocritical responses to climate change and how, for George, even hypocrisy beats total blindness:
For years, the environmental movement has enlisted the world's most selfless and enlightened souls.
No more. We're broadening our sights; and by broadening, I mean lowering.
And indeed I will be flying to Canada on a massive environmentally unpleasant aircraft, while at the same time recycling at home. Let's not even get onto my two years of veganism and the subsequent total lapse back to carnivorous foraging. Sign me up - I'm a hypocrite too.
Post title from the closing line of George's article - a phrase rarely seen on the BBC website. I am all for the introduction of phrases rarely seen on a BBC website.
One or two of you might just recognise this young lady. Particularly OJ, who should know who it is immediately, seeing as we went to school with her for a very long time.
Her name is Gaby and, despite knowing her from the age of about 5, I've been out of touch with her since leaving school in 2002.
Until yesterday, that is. Via an extended series of websites I somehow ended up on her MySpace profile (for those living under a rock these past few years, that's a website where you can have a little profile with photos, music and friends on it).
Turns out Gaby is now a singer and this week she's in Switzerland to perform at the NewBeat festival in Davos on Friday night. How exciting is that? Wish I could be there to see it, hopefully she'll come and do a Berkshire festival sooner or later...
Quick plug: you can listen to her by clicking here, then selecting the song "Green Streets" from the music player that will appear on the page.
So, Hitler Cats. If you haven't already heard of this website - and I'm sure I discussed it here just recently - go and have a look now, before we move on.
This is, by common consent, our favourite Kitler (as they are known). He has his own page on the site where you can rate his Hitler-esque appearance and leave comments, and it is here that I have discovered a further hidden gem:
Look at the top comment. It purports to be from "Mr Wright and 10D History class"! Now, if that's true, what a leap forward for the British education system. Would your history teacher have used a website about cats that looked like Hitler to further your knowledge? (Actually, thinking about this, yes, mine would. History teachers are generally partial to anything daft.)
Two comments below is a response from one of the site admins expressing their gratitude that Mr Wright and co are finding such educational purpose in the website. But it's the comment in the middle that makes this, for me. Mr Wright thanks the site admin, the site admin thanks Mr Wright, and in between someone just lets out a raw burst of passion for the cat! Not only that but they go by the moniker "KLM". Seems rather outspoken for a major Dutch airline...
Now you, too, can paint like Jackson Pollock without lifting a finger. Just click here and move your mouse, then keep clicking to change the colour of your paint. Genius!
Right. Let me make this very clear. You are doing yourself a monumental disservice if you do not go out and buy the following two albums, which I could not recommend more earnestly and enthusiastically if I tried.
The first is 'Through The Windowpane' by Guillemots. Back on 15 January this year I tipped them for success so it's good to see them on the iTunes front page and well into the top ten album downloads.
This album is nothing short of brilliant. Guillemots have a faintly exotic, South American sound - helped by song titles like 'Sao Paulo' and 'Trains To Brazil' - but it's tempered by a more traditional British indie feel underpinning the whole lot. If you pumped a bit of the Rio carnival into Keane you might get something similar. Most importantly, Guillemots' musical atmospherics are gorgeous. The band does things with organs, sound effects, vocals and echoes that you would not believe.
I am entirely captivated by this album as both a pool of quiet reflection and an explosion of enthusiasm for life. As lead singer Fyfe Dangerfield (what a name) exclaims at the climax of the wonderful 'Trains To Brazil', a stalwart of my collection since last year:
And to those of you who mourn your lives through one day to the next,
Well, let them take you next!
Can't you live and be thankful you're here?
See, it could be you tomorrow or next year.
The second record without which you should not do is 'The Dark Third' by Pure Reason Revolution. At this point I declare an interest: I work with the drummer's wife. But I declare a second interest: I'd seen PRR twice and bought their EP before ever meeting her, so I'm not being press-ganged into this one, I genuinely love everything this band does.
PRR are prog and entirely unafraid of it. For some reason prog - i.e. progressive rock, the inadequate phrase used to somehow pin down the wildly imaginative, creative, occasionally meandering style of bands like Pink Floyd and Genesis - has become a dirty word of late. It shouldn't be when it essentially stands for rock unleashed, a form of popular music that doesn't respect the place of the three-minute chart-busting single.
And so we find PRR's infamous twelve-minute epic 'The Bright Ambassadors Of Morning' on this album among many other glorious tracks. Once again they're masters of atmosphere, but they also bring a brilliant knack for sustaining epic songs over several changes of mood, tempo and key. It's engrossing stuff, reminiscent to me of a brand new Pink Floyd arriving on the scene just as members of the old one choose to depart this mortal coil. Where Guillemots use doleful strings and jaunty organ, Pure Reason Revolution prefer the blast of synthesizer and guitar, to equal effect.
Finally, on an entirely unrelated note because I've been meaning to mention this for ages but keep forgetting so might as well do it now, to the question of Boris Johnson. The mopped one went mad in the Commons yesterday over the question of the Natwest Three. There's a transcript of some of the debate on his weblog and it just shows what many other politicians lack compared to Boris. When other MPs speak during the transcripted segment of the debate, their contributions are relatively bland and formal. Boris, by contrast, employs the most ingenious turns of phrase at every opportunity. For example:
My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe rightly used the verb - or adjective - poodle. It is, indeed, a noun. It is also, however, a verb: to poodle is a verb - we poodled. We poodled in implementing the treaty before the Americans had even ratified it ...
The hon. Gentleman certainly shows that he has been following the debate keenly and is dead right.
I would say that I was grateful to the Solicitor-General, but I am not really.
As usual, my right hon. and learned Friend is bang on.
Read the full transcript here if you're particularly bored.
Alright, we've heard enough about Zinedine Zidane now. The award for Most Tenuous Link To Zinedine Zidane goes to author Linda Grant who, during a discussion of racist language used by builders at a cashpoint, produced this gem:
Two things have happened here: one is a story about an apparent assault that I've heard third-hand; the second is racist and abusive language, which I have directly witnessed. All kinds of things are going through my head. Zidane's headbutt is one.
Linda there, threatening to headbutt a group of racist builders, an action I cannot believe for one moment she actually considered.
That is lifted from an article of hers that is well worth reading, a) because it's quite interesting and b) because it's oddly satisfying to see the 'C' word in print, several times over, on a website owned by the mainstream media. Giles Wilson may have got Hitler Cats onto BBC News Online, but if he ever gets that word onto it, I'll eat my c***ing hat.
OJ and I grew up there, we know these things. You might catch Marcus Trescothick, England cricketer, in the Deller's Wharf nightclub. Noel Edmonds once landed at our school in a helicopter. Michael Ancram, then Tory chairman, turned up and shook my hand. That's about it. And now I can confirm Taunton maintains this reputation in the eyes of the rest of Britain.
How do I know? Through a two-minute break in transmission during The Daily Politics on the BBC. BBC editor Jamie Donald explains what happened:
Today on The Daily Politics, Jenny Scott gave a "big board" presentation on the troubles in Gaza - the kind of item where to tell the story we run pictures, graphics and clips into a big screen in the studio with a presenter, standing in front, linking them all together live.
Suddenly, in the middle of it, a picture of a bearded man in a studio flashed up, followed by the BBC Two caption saying there had been a break in transmission. We were back on air within two minutes ... The problem was a straightforward bit of finger trouble: I won’t name names, but someone hit the wrong button in the gallery, was distracted by another problem and there we weren’t.
A comment left beneath Jamie Donald's article, by a man named Matthew, reads as follows:
Well, who was that bearded fellow? And what was the room we were seeing? It seems the BBC is in the business of giving minor people an active say in politics - witness the recent News 24 gaffe with Guy (the taxi driver, actually interviewee.) Oh, and add to that list Blue Peter's recruitment of the gafferboy.... the BBC is making stars out of Z list celebrities - the true all out commoner!
The Daily Politics' Alan Connor responds:
The room was in the BBC's Taunton studio, and the "Z-lister" was Antony Jay, writer of Yes Minister.
How nice to be part of an organisation that a) gives its editors space to talk about how they feel when their programmes go wrong, b) gives its audience the right to leave comments, good or bad, immediately below that space, and c) fosters an atmosphere where employees can weigh in with contributions like Alan did, midway through a comment thread involving editors and audience alike.
The BBC Editors' blog is definitely worth checking out, if only since the editors featured have impeccable taste. Newsnight editor Peter Barron demonstrated this today when he linked to us in one of his posts! I won't link to the article in question - that'd be some kind of bizarre reciprocal-linking-squared and it'd all end in tears. And anyway you should be encouraged to read the Editors' Blog in its entirety. Click here to read it.
For those going to the Reading festival this summer - and I appreciate, knowing most of our seven readers on first name terms, this is unlikely - we at the Beeb have taken the liberty of preparing you in advance.
The Carling new bands stage will be alive with talent over the three days, so the two of us in charge of the Berkshire website have selected our own personal favourites from the relative unknowns on offer.
Click here to read the article. If I have yet to persuade you to look, there is also a small yet excruciatingly formed photo of me accompanying my choices. We had trouble fitting my face plus my hair in the frame. That, as much as anything, is reason enough to pursue a haircut at the first available opportunity.
And you thought Peter Crouch was a trendsetter. The video above shows Shaun Wright-Phillips, in his Manchester City days, scoring against Manchester United before performing what is now Crouch's trademark celebration.
Now all Shaun can do is sit popping lonely shapes on the Chelsea bench while Crouch plies his trade on the world stage. What might have been if he were still at City...
You may have heard about Google's latest trick - Google Spreadsheets. Various websites have interpreted this as an "Excel-killer", an attempt by the big G to inflict a deep wound on Microsoft by striking at its Office-based heart.
I'm not about to go that far, although it does look very swish, as you'd expect. Of course, the key advantage over Excel is the ability to share spreadsheets with other people really quickly - set up your spreadsheet, send an invite to your friends, let your friends either a) view or b) edit it. In my experience Excel has a far more cumbersome approach to sharing, whereas with Google it's an assumed priority in whatever they now do. If you have any reason in life to share a spreadsheet, Google is going to be your way to do it.
For example I imagine this would have been a godsend when I ran my fantasy football league. I could have dumped the complex spreadsheets I used online via Google for the dozens of people taking part to see, and allowed a trusted few complete access to help improve the way the game worked. Instead of sending out reams of information each week, most of the data people needed on a day-to-day basis could have been manipulated and sorted at their leisure.
If anyone comes up with a good idea for a Google spreadsheet, let me know. I bet there's all kinds of fun to be had with a bit of creativity.
There's a thunderstorm rumbling by outside, so this seems like the perfect time to remind you that the 2006 hurricane season officially started as of 1 June.
As you may know, I had a thing for hurricanes when I was younger. Their spectacular satellite imprint coupled with the whole naming culture thing gave them an awesome power and mystique as far as I was concerned; add to this the happy knowledge that I don't live in the path of any of them, and the hobby of hurricane-spotting is born.
What this actually entails is checking the National Hurricane Center website every now and again, going 'oooh' and 'ahhh' at the satellite photos, then forgetting to check for another month or two. Dedicated storm-chaser I am not. However, we are promised a 'very active' hurricane season this time around according to the official forecast, which reads as follows:
"For the 2006 north Atlantic hurricane season, [we are] predicting 13 to 16 named storms, with eight to 10 becoming hurricanes, of which four to six could become 'major' hurricanes of Category 3 strength or higher.
"On average, the north Atlantic hurricane season produces 11 named storms, with six becoming hurricanes, including two major hurricanes. In 2005, the Atlantic hurricane season contained a record 28 storms, including 15 hurricanes. Seven of these hurricanes were considered "major," of which a record four hit the United States."
All of which probably means the remaining residents of New Orleans will be kept firmly on edge untl the season ends in December, given that their city is allegedly sinking even faster than previously thought. We've yet to have any storms this season, so you can get in on the act from the very start and follow it all here. (There's even RSS feeds on the site these days.)
Here's a quick recap - previous posts of mine on the subject of storms:
Continuing my trawling operation through the murky waters of Google Video, Youtube and the like, I present a university-student pastiche of the famous Nike advert in which Thierry Henry dribbles a football through a house - pursued by a load of Manchester United players. Nice and topical with the World Cup round the corner. (On that note I've seen a photo of Peter Crouch celebrating one of his three goals today, and it looks very suspiciously like he's doing that bloody body-popping again. This is not going to go quietly.)
This time round it's a Matthew Hoggard-a-like with decidedly less va va voom playing the lead role, but it's equally good and some of them do actually seem to possess nice skills! This coming from a man with a keepie-up record of about, oooh, seven. Enjoy.
Have you spoken to Anna yet? You really should - that's her up there. She's the IKEA chatbot, which means she's not an actual human being but she's been programmed by real humans to deal with all things IKEA you can throw at her.
My good friend Andy's trying to get a new bed from IKEA to his flat, so we've been asking many testing bed-related questions of Anna - titter ye not. But it's when you move the conversation on to other topics that she and her programmers shine. For example:
Ollie: Can you tell us a joke?
Anna: I'm an IKEA Online Assistant, not a comedian. If you need information about IKEA I can help you, but I'm afraid I don't know any jokes.
Ollie: Where's the nearest Homebase? Anna: I can't really say, to be honest. Maybe you should consult a map.
She's also come up with by far the best response I've ever had from any woman:
Anna: As an IKEA Online Assistant I don't know the meaning of 'no'.
Remember Courts, the furniture shops which slipped into administration fairly recently? They're alive and well, it would seem, in Barbados.
Which I wouldn't know if it weren't for BBC Berkshire's photo gallery of Speightstown, the Barbados town twinned with Reading. We're a veritable lucky dip of cultural insight, I tell you. Click here to visit the rest of the gallery.
Didn't think so. It's a website - nothing to do with Google, I might add - giving a little added value to the current glut of 'viral' videos doing the rounds. The idea is that entrants submit forms of music video showing themselves miming to a famous song. These are then pitted against each other in a form of knockout competition, open to public vote, until a winner emerges.
I found out about this because Ed, a 15-year-old student from Windsor, emailed BBC Berkshire trying to drum up support. He and his friend Dan have created a video of themselves lip-synching to "Baggy Trousers", the Madness hit, and it's actually not at all bad. According to the voting figures they've just about seen off a Dutch act performing to Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up", which means they'll likely face some people from New Zealand - covering Leo Sayer's "You Make Me Feel Like Dancing" - in the final. It's like Eurovision gone crazy. Oh wait... I forgot Lordi. It's like Eurovision gone slightly less crazy.
Click here to check out Google Idol and watch some of the other entries (there's more than one type of competition going on, do have an explore). It's a nice way of bringing some order to the chaos wreaked on the internet by all these amateur videos doing the rounds.
Oh and check out Ed and Dan's own site too, if only for their version of Sting's "Englishman In New York". What fine taste they have...
You may have seen the following website elsewhere, but if not, prepare to while away time finding out who's made more television appearances: Newsnight's Emily Maitlis or BBC Points West's Clinton Rogers?
Find out for yourself at the BBC Programme Catalogue. Type in a name and it'll present you with every transmitted BBC programme to which they contributed - at least, those it has in its archive. There are some gaps, like a lack of sport and some missing regional programmes, but for the most part it's astonishing. You can even view little graphs plotting television and radio appearances against time elapsed, with which to gauge the ebb and flow of your favourite presenter's career.
If you'd like to be kept up to date with the career of your BBC personnel of choice, you can also subscribe to an RSS feed offering to let you know each time their name crops up in a new entry.
Click here to explore the catalogue for yourself. Alternatively click here to see the list of programmes in the archive which aired on my date of birth, 1 November 1984. I note with interest that an investigation into corporal punishment and Enoch Powell MP both made it onto BBC1 that night, David Dickinson - yes, the Bargain Hunt one - was Series Editor of Newsnight, and that day's episode of Henry's Cat was entitled 'The Magic Tummy Button'.
This is all almost as much fun as realising, earlier on today, that my Outlook address book at the BBC has every member of the corporation in it, from Andrew Marr to Arlo White. How thrilled was I! The BBC has an ultra-cunning method of separating Mr Marr's "private" email address from his public BBC one, a method I couldn't possibly divulge or comment upon, except to commend it in its cunning.
May I briefly draw to your attention a wonderful website - funkypancake.
The name could use a little work but the tag line, "an eye for the mundane", could not be more accurate. It's a photo blog, a collection of relatively hi-res photos of absolutely anything the author happens to notice each day.
This sounds like a recipe for mind-numbing tedium masquerading as art, but trust me, there are slices if not hearty chunks of brilliance in this website. I urge you to visit - click here.
Brilliant footage of a top-class cock-up from BBC News 24. They had meant to get Guy Kewney, well known internet pundit, on to talk about the decision of Apple (computers) versus Apple (Beatles). They ended up with a confused taxi driver.
Click here to read Londonist's account and watch a clip of it. The taxi driver's face as realisation dawns is beyond words.
Update: The BBC have now written this up for themselves and clarified the issue. The 'taxi driver' was in actual fact not a taxi driver at all but a man, also named Guy, at the BBC for a job interview. He was then happened upon by a studio manager, confusion ensued, and he ended up on screen in what he thought must be some part of the interview process. At least that didn't happen to me... or if it did, I missed it.
You may remember my mentioning Emily Maitlis during my election coverage in Friday's early hours, desperately clawing her way through an hour or so as the BBC's election anchor following a power cut at Millbank. I was going to say you will remember it, but then I came back down to earth and remembered most of you will have only come here from Google, looking for dirty photos of her. Especially now I've mentioned her name and "dirty photos" in the same paragraph.
Moving swiftly on, then. Emily's written an account of her week for The Observer including the aforementioned unscheduled appearance as the face of BBC political programming:
London, we keep hearing, will be "The Big Story of the Night". Suddenly, it is, though not quite in the way we expect.
Millbank has a major power failure, and the main studio with Dimbleby, Vine et al cuts out. After a hasty hunt for cameras and loquacious guests we are thrown on air and told to fill indefinitely.
Instead of slick on air graphics we have the blue biro scrawl of the floormanager as he runs across the room to hand me results.
Instead of Jeremy's illuminated map of the country we have a couple of pencil drawings by indispensable LSE analyst Tony Travers. I think he has handed me a sweet picture of a horse until he turns it round and shows me the psephological pattern he is trying to impart.
But that's not nearly the best the diary has to offer. I prefer this paragraph from Tuesday, with Emily at the Blush Ball for Breast Cancer Haven:
The end of the evening brings a floorshow by Dita von Tease. Not, as they say, her real name. Dita calls the act "burlesque cabaret". Everyone else calls it stripping. She starts off in a glittering basque and a skirt of white feathers that would have the good people of Celladyke reaching for the DEFRA emergency hotline. She ends the dance in nipple tassles and a sequined thong. Huge relief I left mine at home. Nothing more mortifying than turning up in same outfit.
Now, BBC Berkshire have a blogging vicar, the BBC in Northern Ireland have a blogging reporter with a religious spin, and tomorrow I shall blog about a vicar. I'll be speaking to the Revd Rob Green of Cheshire diocese about the Da Vinci Code. He's planning a special sermon to discuss the book and welcomes it as proof people remain interested in Jesus rather than anything more damaging. I'll be challenging that notion and exploring the wider implications, just ahead of the release date for the undoubted blockbuster film of the book (19 May).
I've met some forward-thinking university professors in my time. I was taught everything I know about the Anglo-Saxons by a man who used a website to show exactly where different types of Saxon coin had been found across Britain and Europe. But Cedarville University president Dr Bill Brown is way ahead of the game:
Evidently, a university president writing his own blog is an anomaly. I read where some presidents have blogs and hire professionals to write for them. Most don’t even know what is in their own blog! Actually, most are pretty boring which ensures no one reads them so it doesn’t really matter who writes them.
To be honest, I did try to hire a grad student to write these blogs for me. He had all the qualities I was looking for: he was intelligent, loved words, and worked cheap. This is the opening of the first blog he wrote for me:
Elen sila lumenn omentilmo
'Quel (re/amrun/andune/undome)
Vedui' (il'er)
Aaye
Nae saian luume'
Cormamin lindua ele lle
Saesa omentien lle
Mae govannen
I then discovered he was really into the Lord of the Rings and wrote everything in an elvin language. I thanked him for his work but told him I wouldn’t be able to use him. I did give him a gift: a small sword that glowed green when a psychiatric professional was nearby.
Thought the spectre of newsreaders in bunny ears had disappeared with the demise of L!ve TV? Think again. Oh how I wish I could get a screengrab (I've tried, I can't), a still image, something to commemorate the phenomenon of Felixstowe TV's Ruth Dugdall reading the news in a fetching pair of rabbit lugholes. Instead you'll just have to go and watch the bulletin before it disappears into the sands of time.
Felixstowe TV is one of the new breed of ultra-local TV stations making good use of the internet (guess who's been researching their little essay about this for their course). There's a blog about it here, too, written by its creator Chris Gosling.
When you were at school, did you ever have design/tech lessons where you made a marble run? Get some of those ubiquitous, thin sticks of wood, set them up into a little course for the marble to trundle down, and off we go. I devised "fantasy greyhound racing" when I was about ten, based on a similar concept of a ramp, a load of marbles, and a concrete path "race course" for the marbles/dogs to run along (that was the kind of thing I did when I was ten). I think we managed about three races before a teacher suspected a mildly illegal betting syndicate and closed us down. No marbles were hurt.
Despite that revelation, at least I'm not going to be the saddest individual in this post. Someone, somewhere, has taken the time to set up a whole series of unbelievably intricate, glorified marble runs. Then they've filmed them in action. Then they've added a penny-whistle/glockenspiel combo soundtrack, complete with a (distressingly catchy) jingle that's played in between each clip. And that's a still from the video above, showing our unseen protagonist about to poke an unsuspecting marble in the general direction of a kettle. Yes, a kettle.
Click here to watch the full video and see all the other intricate designs. Watch those marbles go! I've just finished all thirteen minutes of marble action. On second thoughts, that probably restores my "saddest individual" status for some time to come.
Still, we could be in the 1980s, a true pinnacle of geekery. I found an old Rubik's Cube guide on a bookshelf here earlier (it's not mine, I hasten to add). "At last! The solution!", proclaims the front cover to "world famous cube-master" Don Taylor's book ("don't be a square! Join the cubists!", it says on the back). Inside is the complete solution to the cube along with other tricks to try and games to play with friends, plus challenges like this:
"If you have worked out a complete solution, how fast can you do it? Can you break the three-minute barrier? If you can solve it in less than ninety seconds, you've joined the ranks of world-class professional cubists."
Thank the lord for that. No matter how odd watching a video about marble runs may be, we'll never reach the dizzying lows of world-class professional cubists.
My mum went on holiday to East Anglia last week, and she came back bearing the gift of a mock Anglo-Saxon drinking vessel. (If you've not been around these parts long, I spent the vast majority of my degree studying all things Saxon.) It's beautiful and functional, crafted out of leather and pitch.
Being my curious self, I vaguely wondered what precisely pitch is, so I went on a hunt for it online. The Wikipedia article's here, but I'm honest enough to know you really don't care about pitch. Instead have a look at the Pitch Drop Experiment, which I found far more interesting (and it tells you all you need to know about pitch, too):
Here's the idea:
The pitch drop experiment is a long-term experiment which measures the flow of a piece of pitch over many years.
The experiment began in 1927 when Professor Thomas Parnell of the University of Queensland in Brisbane poured a sample of pitch into a sealed funnel and allowed it to settle for three years. In 1930, the seal at the neck of the funnel was broken, allowing the pitch to start flowing. Large droplets form and fall over the period of about a decade. The eighth drop fell on November 28, 2000, allowing experimenters to calculate that the pitch has a viscosity approximately 100 billion times that of water.
This is recorded in the Guinness Book of Records as the world's longest continuously running laboratory experiment, and it is expected that there is enough pitch in the funnel to allow it to continue for at least another hundred years.
In October 2005, John Mainstone and the late Thomas Parnell were awarded the Ig Nobel Prize in Physics, a parody of the Nobel Prize, for the pitch drop experiment.
I think an Ig Nobel is a little unkind - it's the sort of ultimately near-useless but quite interesting experiment that makes science attractive to a lot of people. Would you rather read the boring article on what pitch is or is not, or get the general idea from looking at the experiment?
And more to the point, does this mean the pitch lining my Saxon drinking vessel will slowly but surely, over the years, rub away into my drinks, find its way into my stomach and gradually coat my intestines?
Only time, if I live long enough for the pitch to bother moving, will tell.
So, what do you think those are? Sheds for park-keeping equipment? Electricity substation houses? Public toilets?
They're actually entrances to a network of underground tunnels built beneath Cold War Manchester:
Manchester Guardian is an underground telephone exchange in the centre of Manchester built in 1954. It is 112 feet (34m) below ground and cost £4 million to construct. The main tunnel, one thousand feet long and twenty-five feet wide (300m by 7m), lies below buildings in Back George Street, linking up to an anonymous and unmarked surface building containing the entrance lifts and ventilator shafts. There are also access shafts in the Rutherford telephone exchange in George Street.
Its purpose was to resist a Hiroshima sized twenty-kiloton atom bomb, and preserve essential communications links even if the centre of Manchester had been flattened.
Below ground, it all looked (and still looks, fifty years later) like this:
This website explains how the tunnels came to be and includes more photos as well as information from current owners British Telecom.
Rumours abound that a similar underground network, possibly even the remains of an old street, lies beneath central London. If anyone happens to know more about that, I'd be intrigued...
A small record company has announced a cunning plan for world domination: give its entire back catalogue away for free.
Independent label Captains Of Industry (slogan: "this isn't some fucking indie label") have what they call a "five year plan":
A plan to change the world, or if not the world, then our worlds. So cast aside your 21st century cynicism and get in touch with your idealist side - because we are selling nothing other than an ideal here.
Which is all marketing bollocks. But then we get to today's press release:
After some thought, we at the Captains Of Industry record label are proud to announce our decision to give away all of our music completely free as downloads. This includes our entire back catalogue.
Music will be given away via free monthly compilation albums, complete with artwork. For obvious reasons we're calling the series 'Liberation Music'. In the days of cheap downloads sites and illegal file sharing this may not seem like a major move, but as far as we know we are the only record label prepared to take this commercial risk.
Imagine if Coldplay decided to give everything away for free - starting with the Africans. Well it wouldn't happen, would it. So why do this?
Because we're not Coldplay.
Because we have nothing to lose.
Because we believe in economic karma.
They also believe in the power of italics, it would seem. It's a bold move, although your interest may be dimmed once you find out which bands are part of their back catalogue. The track listing for volume one of "Liberation Music" is as follows:
1. Gay For Johnny Depp - Hey Sailor / No Teeth, Thumbs Up
Taken from their mini album - Blood The Natural Lubricant (Apocalyptic Adventures Beyond Sodom and Gomorrah)
2. Peace Burial At Sea - Eye-Heart Logic
Taken from the album - This Is Such A Quiet Town
3. Marmaduke Duke - The Kiss & The Consonant
Taken from the album - The Magnificent Duke
4. We Will Be Pilots - We Are Not The Doctors
Taken from the album - This Is What You Fight For
5. Future Ex Wife - Ebony
Taken from the album - Miss September
6. Coyote Men - Monkey Glands
Taken from the album - The Illegal Movers vs Los Coyote Men
7. TEAM - 50,000
Taken from the album - The Penalyn L.P.
8. Kinesis - Everything You Thought You Knew To Be
Taken from the album - You Are Being Lied To
I have vaguely heard of Gay For Johnny Depp, more on the basis of their name than their music, and that's it. The rest? It's anyone's guess. But if you're interested or you just like getting free music (a phrase which ought to rack up a few more Google hits), click here to go to their website. And let me know which tracks you like.
Londonist have come up with a brilliant article on a series of sculptures to be found adorning the offices of Diageo in the capital:
The sculptures proceed in sequence according to the architectural evolution of humankind - in the top left there's a simple cave, in the bottom right there's 1 Canada Square.
Problem is, Londonist don't know anything about the sculptures themselves: who made them, when, and why? So if anyone reading this (perhaps, I dunno, someone with access to the Bodleian and architectural reference materials) wants to find out, that'd be lovely. I'll have a look myself later.
UPDATE
Turns out they're the work of Keir Smith, and apparently stone number 10 (i.e. in the middle on the far right hand side) is the Radcliffe Library!
During my search for a story to go out and report on this Wednesday, I came across a mountaineering website listing a series of lectures going on this month. One of these lectures has quite possibly the greatest title ever:
Wednesday 15 February - 7.30pm
'Don't Cook Yak In Anger': Climbing in Western Sichuan with Ed Douglas
In October Ed Douglas and Duncan Tunstall made the first ascent of the North Face of Xiashe (5833m) in a five-day round trip. Xiashe sits above the Zophu Valley, an outstandingly beautiful area and home to a long tradition of Tibetan nomadism that is rapidly facing up to Chinese development. Ed shows you don't have to be a super-hero to do interesting new routes in the Himalaya, and gives the low-down on climbing and travelling in this extraordinary corner of the world.
If you'd like to go along, it's at the Outside Cafe in Hathersage, Derbyshire. Which I might add my dad and I drove through a few weeks ago, somewhat coincidentally. I even checked train times from there to Euston just in case it'd help me get home quicker. It didn't.
You have to feel so sorry for the dog. It puts a lot of effort into making its territory clear at the start, then thinks it's settled the matter with a brief but powerful show of force at the second attempt. It's so convinced of victory that it turns its back on the enemy and gets back to business. And then it all goes wrong.
This site is a treasure trove of similar net-knick-knacks and may potentially affect my future productivity.
I've praised the google email service, "gmail" before. This morning I noticed something else about the service that made me smile. It has a very good spam filter, and I thought I'd have a look in it and see what spam I had. At the top of the spam folder are recipes using spam: spam fajitas; spam skillet casserole; spam primavera - and then the appropriate link to recipesource.com. Wonderful!! Another of google's amusing ideas.
It's not that I don't want to go to my research seminar. It's just that internet quizes are often enlightening. Apparently.
I'm a Chevrolet Corvette!
You're a classic - powerful, athletic, and competitive. You're all about winning the race and getting the job done. While you have a practical everyday side, you get wild when anyone pushes your pedal. You hate to lose, but you hardly ever do.
As opposed to 'Free Willy', you see (down, Oaten, down!). Anyway, we all know I'm entirely sick of the now-legendary Thames whale, so let's keep this brief. People on eBay are flocking in their droves to list unlikely items with bizarre connections to the whale, initially for charity and consequently with a heavy dose of irony. Observe the following, all listed as I write:
Thames Whale Collectable - 99p, 1 bid
The photo is of a banana skin. The description tells how the whale made the seller realise 'just how fragile life is'. They go on: 'I thought the skin would make a perfect memory of the moment for somebody'. There's also an empty can of Coke further down the page that bears an uncanny resemblance to this item, along with others.
London UK Thames Whale Watering Can - £441, 21 bids
Earlier in the week, the watering can used to help the whale was listed on eBay. This is not that watering can. Someone has, to date, bid over four hundred pounds for a can that is, according to the description, 'extremely similar'.
Thames Whale Cross Stitch Pattern - £3.75 Buy It Now, 10 available
Depicts the whale's head bobbing out of the water, looking cross and with stitch from all the swimming.
Thames Whale Watering Can - £1, no bids
Another ersatz watering can (I've been waiting for ages to use 'ersatz', what a word). What makes the £441 fake so special? A bargain at one four-hundred-and-forty-first of the price.
Thames Whale Commemorative T-Shirt - £10, 1 bid
Medium white t-shirt depicting a whale with a halo round its head. One person has asked a question as follows: "Talk about cashing in! It's not even a bottlenose whale!"
Thames Whale Watering Can - £9,800, 128 bids
The real deal. Surprisingly (or not, perhaps) quite far down the list.
I won't bore you or me any further, but you can also get Thames Whale hose pipe, photos, fridge magnets and mugs.
Anyway, in the New Labour spirit of burying bad news sufficiently far beneath a large whale, I've booked my driving theory test for 28 March, 2pm. In Oxford. I might turn up in subfusc (seeing as if newspaper reports are to be believed, none of the actual students will have to bother any more).
Though it's about a product I've never seen, and mentions several other things I swear I've never engaged in, this post is a brilliant example of set-piece writing: building up a situation then, with a flick of the wrist, transforming the entire thing to highly readable effect. All in just a few paragraphs. See, after a whole day listening to my Harry Potter audio book and wanting to be J. K. Rowling (to the extent that I was dabbling with the plot for my book-that'll-never-get-written again), now I've read that and want to be a world-class blogger again. Which is about as distant as the day my book gets published. Back to trainee journalism it is then.
I feel like I've been strangely absent from Dayorama over the weekend, when in reality there's been a good exchange of views in the comments to my post about animal rights protests and such; I've also had an interesting series of emails fly back and forth with the brother of Nigel Gallimore, the man accused of lying about his part in rescuing survivors from a burning plane. There'll be more on that when I have the time to do it justice.
In the mean time, here's quite a good review of The Call Of The Weird, the book by Louis Theroux, my very favourite documentary maker. It's well worth your time - you won't find anything powerful enough to shatter your universe or cause you to renounce your life up until this point, but there's a few laughs and some great 'Theroux moments' recalled. Get the DVDs of the documentary best-of as well. I aspire to create that kind of thing.
So, what's the Conservative position on the new European GPS system, dubbed Galileo, whose first satellite tentatively snuck into space the other day? Over to our political astronomy correspondent Oliver Wooding:
The Galileo project is not a competitor to GPS; rather it complements it. The public has shown that they are interested in accurate satellite navigation for their own uses, as have Governments for theirs. This is not political brinksmanship, rather we should be proud of what the EU has managed to achieve.
I don't know why OJ doesn't mention his Conservative Future articles on here more often, considering what well-written little summaries of current issues they are. He should be like Boris and 'lift' his own articles from CF into Dayorama, just as Mr Johnson MP reproduces newspaper articles on his blog. By contrast, anyone would think OJ's ashamed to be associated with the party... But fear not, I'll be outing them as routinely as I can find them. I just got a text from him complimenting me on picking this one out as his, since there's no author credit on it. Perhaps he's forgotten he told me about it on Sunday.
One too many 'rathers' in that last paragraph by the way, OJ. Or are they compulsory on a Tory website to maintain that party look and feel?
Considering my own political naivety and inability to formulate anything particularly worthwhile above linking to other people's articles, I'm delegating some of my political warbling to another weblog. A satirical one, at that. But it's a secret for now until I either a) get bored in a week's time and delete it or b) decide it's going well enough to let you all know. Of course, if you really want to find out about it... tough monkeys.
One hates to risk bursting the cosy bubble we seem to have only recently formed with The Observer, but I fear they may need to pay as much attention to their digital edition as they have the relaunched paper one. If you turn to page five of the digital edition - which you ought to be able to do by clicking here - you will see, on the left, a graphic of how page five looked in reality on Sunday. You have the news in brief in the bottom left hand corner, 'Kelly faces sex offender row' dominating the top half of the page, and in the bottom right, an article entitled 'Labour peer Banks critically ill after stroke'.
Now look at the right hand side of the browser window. You will see there are three links to click. When you click them, they allow you to read the article in question as shown in the preview on the left hand side. You have the Ruth Kelly story, then the news in brief, and then... ah. The third link, which should read something similar to the Tony Banks headline above, actually reads:
dghfghdfdfdfhdfdfdfhfghfghfghfgh
Obviously the subs have been far too busy burning the midnight oil on the new look to worry about replacing their mash-the-keyboard holding text online...
Cergis, a London-based e-business outfit, have knocked up a webpage counting the cost of George Galloway's stay in the Big Brother house to his taxpayers.
Meanwhile, the Respect party are apparently complaining to Channel 4 that George's appearances are being censored to remove his political views. Channel 4 says Ofcom regulations mean they must be impartial, so they need to do this or else they'd have to screen balancing views from other parties, something that wouldn't go down well. Your average Big Brother viewer would be spewing into their treble Red Bull and vodka to see Jack Straw and William Hague turn up for a rousing discussion on Iraq at 9pm tonight.
Take some wild speculation about the future of the financial markets, mostly involving football and a company called 'AmazonBay'. Give it a flash movie with a black background. Use lots of moving company logos because you have no other footage, overlaid by an ultra-serious narrative packed with buzzwords. Use photo negatives of groups of corporate executives and traders to make them look scarier. The result? DrKW's Revolution 2015. Serious? Or spoof? You decide.
Elsewhere this morning, abject panic on both sides of the political spectrum. The Guardian says 2006 will be the 'most tumultuous year for Labour since 1994'. According to Neal Lawson:
In a desperate panic to win we gambled on power over principle rather than seeing them correctly as two sides of the same coin. Ever since, we have been papering over the cracks of this shortcut to office. Without a discernibly left philosophy of governance, we were always going to run into the sand at some stage. That point has come.
Meanwhile, over at The Telegraph, Cameron fatigue is setting in. David Green:
For a brief period, it looked as if David Cameron was going to inaugurate a revival of classical-liberal and conservative thought. But he has spent the past few days shutting down options before his promised policy commissions have even been appointed.
In the same paper Boris Johnson complains that no one ever tries to bribe him, in relation to the case of Jack Abramoff, something that probably won't raise too many heads in the UK but still warrants a mention.
Johnson discuss Abramoff's ability to rip off native American Indians whilst representing their gambling interests. For readers of The Mirror, for whom only two books exist - those written by Dan Brown and those written by JK Rowling - a story closer to home. Beware the Da Vinci pendant. According to the article, nearly five million people in the UK have fallen victim to one scam or another. Now, what's the combined circulation of The Sun (3.2m) and The Mirror (1.7m)...
This morning I found an email from Dennis Howlett whom I finally got to meet at Les Blogs 2.0 last month, recommending something called goowy as a new email client. The invitation was to set up an account and then let him know what I think.
...
When you sign up, you get to import all your contacts from your main email client. I use gmail and the import was smooth and effortless. Too effortless in fact, as I was clicking through the steps, there was a line at the bottom of the (visible) screen with a box checked, which only flashed before my eyes, as I was clicking 'continue'. It said 'send invitation to goowy to your contacts' or words to that effect. With horror I watched as responses (mostly out of office replies) started piling in into my new shiny inbox. You may say that I should have been more careful about proceeding to the next stage in the set up but you'd be wrong. I was setting up a simple email client, which is something I do all the time, when testing various new applications coming out of the blogosphere.
I've had a few of these sent to me this morning, and a few of my friends have emailed me to say how peeved and slightly embarrassed they are about it. I agree with their sentiment - I think it's a really arrogant thing for Goowy to have done ... Thanks Goowy for showing the world how not to launch a website!
And what do you know, Goowy have a blog of their own. And what do you know, here's their entry for Tuesday:
We thought we did a good job of making it clear (the text was large and red to let people know) that if you clicked "import" and had the invite box checked that it would invite your contacts and you were doing so willingly. This was not at all intended as a malicious way to spam a user's contacts.
Since a few people have made this mistake we are removing the check from the check box. If you want to help goowy grow and invite your contacts please check it manually.
The power of blogging versus the power of a less than thoroughly disguised viral email campaign, and a pretty convincing win for the bloggers there. Goowy insist they are 'sincerely very sorry for any problems this may have caused and want you to know that this was not our intent'. Draw your own conclusions and follow the source material to find out more.
There's a great piece by Julie McCaffrey in The Mirror discussing, or rather dissecting, her performance in panto at the Wycombe Swan over Christmas. She'd have been fine - if it weren't for my all-time hero, Basil Brush:
Basil, meanwhile, is being helped into a pirate's costume and having his tail brushed. He calls me over and offers some advice: "When I get nervous, do you know what I do? Spend a lot of time on the toilet - boom, boom!"
In my next scene, I have to dance the hornpipe towards Basil, leading a line of children some of whom are, embarrassingly, as tall as me.
The scene is supposed to end as soon as the music stops with me scuttling off with the children. But as the kids exit stage left, Basil says: "Oi! Edwina! Where are you going? Come here!"
It's not in the script! And I'm caught in the lights like a rabbit on the M3.
"You're frrrrom Scoatland, aren't you Edwina?" says Basil. I nod pathetically. "I think we should teach you to speak properly, shouldn't we, boys and girls?"
Basil makes me say: "air", "hair" and "lair", then asks me to string the words together. I do - and discover I've fallen into Basil's trap, as "air-hair-lair" sounds like the Queen saying "oh hello". Boom boom!
From 'Boom, Boom!' to Boomtown Rat. Equally amusing for different reasons in The Times is Bob Geldof's reply to their enquiry about his work for the Tories, announced yesterday. He replied by text, as shown on page 4 of today's paper:
The Guardian's Newslog (see, Google Reader already coming into play, as mentioned in previous post) mentions that we'll have an extra second to play with in a few days' time:
Londoners who are familiar with the "Underground minute", or the phenomenon of time actually slowing down as a train approaches a tube station, will have no trouble grasping the concept of the "leap second". Briefly, 2006 will arrive a second later on Sunday because the earth is not keeping up with our system of timekeeping.
The friction of the tides means that the rate at which the world is spinning on its axis is slowing. Days are now about two milliseconds longer than they were at the beginning of the nineteenth century. So the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service occasionally deploys a leap second in order to regulate "sun time" with "clock time".
Also worth looking at on that page is the little 'Contemporaria' section beneath the post. It shows the date and time the post was made - standard fare for a weblog - then gives us the top stories from The Guardian and BBC News websites at the time. A nice little gimmick (puts me in the mind of the announcements at the beginning of Drop The Dead Donkey episodes, when we're told that this was the week when...) and it's nice to see the BBC and Guardian sticking together in precisely the kind of fashion that will piss off everyone at Biased BBC.
Finally, The Guardian Newslog has its fair share of bonkers comments. A gentleman named Oliver - not, I hasten to add, me - had added a short comment inferring that the extra second would give him more time to indulge in his hobby: paedophilia. It has since been removed.
I am fed to the back teeth with petty, small-minded sniping from both sides in the Israel vs Palestine conflict. Particularly online. Every other weblog I read is either a woolly liberal or insanely blinkered right-winger (more often the latter) with nothing better to do than allow drool to escape their mouth, settle on the keyboard and eventually form puddles that depress the keys into something resembling prose. Only it's hollow, sickly and always black and white, like some sort of godforsaken Kinder Egg of Boredom.
Yes, the whole Israel/Palestine conflict is important and warrants discussion. But for God's sake, not by everyone, and not, every bloody time, in this dictatorial voice that says 'I'm right and I know I'm right because I'm Jewish/not Jewish/American/not American'. And I'm looking at you, Biased BBC (occasionally highly accurate, usually depressingly banal) and Oxblog (online equivalent of watching paint dry). I've just noticed there's a post on Oxblog about there being a new issue out of Central Eurasian Studies Review. I can't tell if it's a piss-take. I really don't think it is.
I appreciate that in response, the authors of those weblogs would tell me Dayorama is hardly a gripping read for them. But Dayorama is a place for my personal notes, for any one of my friends to come and read if/when they feel like it. It's not the home of the kind of dogma you'll get elsewhere, or at least I hope it isn't. It just depresses me that so many people waste so much time bleating inanely and helplessly when there are lives to go out and live. Maybe I just want to kill off politics in its entirety and replace it with bunny rabbits and birdsong. Why hello, David Cameron...
I've just enjoyed a very interesting exploration of the network of British websites that document everything your local MP does, from voting on anti-terror legislation to picking their nose in the cab on the way to the Commons.
My local MP is Siobhain McDonagh (Mitcham & Morden, since I'm half a road away from the Streatham constituency). She's rebelled against the Labour vote a few times but nothing spectacular and is largely a happy Labour bunny. The website TheyWorkForYou, truly one of the most useful sites I've seen in a long time, documents her voting and speech history here.
Take a look at the filed expenses (further down that page) though. Keith Hill, Lab, of nearby Streatham, has never rebelled and has attended 98% of parliamentary votes, so could reasonably be said to be a staunch Labour representative. His expenses for the last financial year on record, 2003/4, were just under 100,000, placing him 602nd out of the 658 MPs. Not bad at all. 2,933 of this came under 'Stationery: Associated Postage Costs'. I guess if you're sending out envelopes etc as an MP, you can expect to spend around three grand a year.
Siobhain McDonagh, however, spent almost 32,000 on associated postage costs in the same period! This places her a whopping first out of all MPs for postage expenditure. What has she been doing?! Shipping endangered pandas to constituents? Outrage! I've signed up to be emailed whenever she speaks in Parliament and whenever she issues any information on local concerns to see where this money might be going.
Signing up for that latter update, I noticed that the 'example postcode' provided on the form was OX1 3DR. That's the postcode for Lincoln College, Oxford! Does this mean someone from Lincoln was intimately involved with creating the site? Doesn't surprise me. From what I can tell, the college is a breeding ground for political hacks. I bet most of them are doing absurdly geeky political things like acting as unpaid researchers for Tory MPs in their spare time or something... OJ...
Finally, a quick quiz. Can you name the Minister Without Portfolio? (The three previous occupants of the post were, most recent first, John Reid, Charles Clarke and of course Peter Mandelson.)
God help us, the Daily Mail's editorial staff have been unleashed on a blog - of sorts. It's not exactly updated every hour with the latest Mail opinion, but it's mildly interesting.
For a start, it's good to know that the Mail's top hacks can't tell the difference between 'phase' and 'faze'. The former usually refers to a segment of a process or a distinct time period; the latter means something like 'to disrupt, harass or take aback'. Not for 'Stacey' (surname unknown despite trying to find it), an editor of some description, who concludes a little tale about Quentin Letts coming in during a fire drill with this gem:
The man who faces down raging politicians on a regular basis simply cocked an eyebrow, smiled sweetly and proceeded to get up close and personal with a computer screen with nary a word. Nothing phases our Quentin.
Deary me. Read more absolute shite from the management of the country's second most popular daily newspaper here (or, of course, buy the paper each day).
Newsflash: I've just been told that Adrian (my old room-mate), now captain of Exeter College's darts 2nd team, almost cried during a match against St John's last night, even making to punch one opponent. This is all put down to 'banter', the nature of which I won't fully repeat, but which involved the phrase 'you ain't got no alibi'. Should make it clear enough.
Thanks to Jasper Milvain and his blog for the Daily Mail blog link. I've not met the gentleman in question but according to London Bloggers (which we're now on, courtesy of me, listed for about five different tube/rail stations covering myself and Amy), he lives near Streatham Common too, so he must be special. It seems to be good reading too, about many things book-related.
This fantastic website runs through its own nominations for the Worst Twenty Video Games Ever in almost uniquely vitriolic, sarcasm-laden style. It's one of the funniest things I've ever read, if only because you can feel the pain of the reviewer burning through his descriptions of all twenty insults to his existence.
Take, for example, this excerpt from his review of entry #4, Captain Novolin, a game where the hero is diabetic:
Since most staying-alive tips come at the end of impossible levels, you would have to be a national video game olympic team member to get a significant amount of medical information from the game. It's not going to save any doctors or parents any time. For this game to have had any use whatsoever, there would have to be at least one pediatrician who left the education of a potentially deadly affliction up to an unplayable video game. "Listen you little fuck, I don't really have time to tell you all the foods you can and can't eat right now. If staying alive is really that important to you, take this video game and don't eat anything until you've gotten past the speedboat level.
Or what about this, from the review of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons - Heroes Of The Lance:
You might ask yourself why you need eight characters. Well, each of them has a special title like Thief or Magic User which often has as dramatic an effect as changing the color of their hat. But in addition to having different names, they each have their own "Charisma" rating, which should come in handy in case you get a defective cartridge where instead of slaughtering goblins, you invite them all to a romantic dinner party.
Or this little gem from the review of Bad Street Brawler:
Bad Street Brawler still wouldn't be fun if you controlled it with the Nintendo Power Codpiece and it vibrated every time it sucked.
Some smack laid down in the direction of the unmitigatingly shite AIRCARS:
The game is especially challenging since your top secret AIRCAR turns around slower than a team of Amish pilots steering a barn.
And finally, a stinging rebuke for the quality of the graphics in Total Recall:
Remember in the movie, there were those little psychic mutants in the faulty Mars domes that had half their faces melted off and had to be carried around in slimy baskets? Those creatures shit things prettier than this game.
A few posts ago I mentioned setting up a new website that might annoy a few people, so I was keeping it under wraps. Well it'll stay under wraps forever because I decided it was too depressing and would have involved a lot of ranting about things, which is never good. Instead I will still be launching a new website (and, indeed, have done so) with a more creative edge. I'm a bit trepidatious about posting the link to it on here just yet - after all, many projects of mine has risen and collapsed back into ashes in a matter of days or weeks - so I'll give it time to find some legs before I send any readers over to it. It'll be all about clues hopefully. So much so that I've left a clue to the URL for the new website somewhere on the Dayorama site, but you'll have to work very hard indeed to find it.
Dangerous Dogs are the subject of my first "Legal Research Task" for the LPC. As a consequence I've been researching various Acts and information on import licenses and the such over the past week or so (progress was stilted last week due to the fact I felt like death warmed up in a microwave). Anyway, the Department For The Environment, Food and Rural Affairs website: For a government site, DEFRA have made the site accessible, clear and really useful. A pleasant surprise - and worthy of a mention.
Heard on Radio 2 earlier this evening: an interview with a young businessman who is sleeping in a ditch for a year. There's even a blog to go with it - Ditch Monkey. It was a very odd interview, and it is a very odd thing to do. And he seems to be a tad underprepared for the winter coming up. It's all very English.
A team talk from Jose Mourinho. Allegedly. I can't help but feel it might not be the real thing though - the Mourinho I know can't hit that top C. (Opens in Windows Media Player.)
Choice clip for those who can't/won't open the audio file:
Mourinho: Drogba! First half. Pathetic.
Drogba: No, no! No, no, gaffer, no!
Mourinho: It is no problem. If you want, I can replace you...
Drogba: No-
Mourinho: I can, I can replace you. Is no problem.
Drogba: No!
Mourinho: I can do it! (sound of typing) Double-U double-U double-U dot amazon dot co dot uk, search word 'Rooney' (hits return), thirty five point five million. No problem. I can do it. I can do it. You want me to press 'Buy'?
Drogba: No! Please gaffer!
Mourinho: You want me to press 'Buy'?
Drogba: No!
Mourinho: Then listen to the Special One.
I've been watching 'Lost', Channel 4's flagship new show, since it launched here in the UK a couple of weeks ago. It's bloomin' good, and chances are I wrote about it a week or so ago, but I can't remember.
I believe it was one of the most expensive pilot episodes ever, if not the most expensive, and the attention to detail is one of the reasons why. Charlie, one of the passengers on the aircraft which subsequently crashes on an island in the middle of nowhere (the basic premise from which the plot evolves), was the bass player in a fictitious band named 'DriveSHAFT'. Lo and behold, the makers of the series have created an entire website for DriveSHAFT, which you can find here.
The detail on that website is amazing. There's a six-year band history buried inside a news section carefully crafted to make it sound absolutely authentic. It even mentions iconic UK venues (it's a Manchester band) like the Glasgow Barrowlands, which aren't particularly well known outside the UK, so the makers clearly got someone very well versed in band terminology to work references like that in. Of course there is reference to the 'missing' Charlie after his plane crash, but someone has gone to a lot of trouble to make this seem as real as possible. The only clue that it's all false is the links page, where the top link is for Manchester United. Clearly done by Americans. As we all know, bands from Manchester do not support United (Doves, Oasis, Badly Drawn Boy... all City).
Alas, it's all a bit too real for some people. There's a guestbook area where visitors can leave comments. Here are some examples:
Mark, Thursday, 18 August 2005 07:55
Is this like a real website, I'm confused about Lost etc.
Pete, Thursday, 18 August 2005 09:36
Is it just me or is this all madness!!! :cool:
Bex, Thursday, 18 August 2005 13:00
okay, im confused. why is there sites set up like the oceanic n driveshaft site? i fought lost wasnt real!! ahhhhhhhh! lol.
this is soooo weird!
The 'Oceanic' reference in the last quote pertains to the website for Oceanic Airways, the fictitious airline whose aircraft supposedly crashed in 'Lost'.
More representative of opinion on the guestbook, and of my opinion too:
Pink Cherry, Thursday, 18. August 2005 07:58
GOD!! just how creative are the makers of lost?? it's amazing! -just trying to find out what it all means- c ya
I've just tried to access www.argos.co.uk and my virus checker won't let me. It says that I am forbidden to enter. Is this just me, or does the site have issues? If it is the former, then what exactly are Argos selling these days?
Thinking you're funny is dangerous: chances are, other people don't. Still, I like to think I have a pretty sharp wit, even if it usually only manifests itself in Frasier-esque combacks in my mind. I was interested, therefore, to take this quiz (in order to waste my time among other things):
the Ham
(43% dark, 52% spontaneous, 11% vulgar)
your humor style: CLEAN | SPONTANEOUS | LIGHT
Your style's goofy, innocent and feel-good. Perfect for parties and for the dads who chaperone them. You can actually get away with corny jokes, and I bet your sense of humor is a guilty pleasure for your friends. People of your type are often the most approachable and popular people in their circle. Your simple & silly good-naturedness is immediately recognizable, and it sets you apart in this sarcastic world.
PEOPLE LIKE YOU: Will Ferrell - Will Smith
My test tracked 3 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:
US indie outfit We Are Scientists toured with Editors earlier this year, which is where I saw them. They were fantastic and I spoke to their very kind drummer, as well as exchanging a few emails.
They've released a hilarious new video which you can see here (Windows Media Player, streaming), but even that's not as funny as some of the content on their website:
The UK.
It was unreal, folks. None of us had ever been before, and so we essentially stumbled about, gaping like lunatics at that which we did not understand, including this sign, which warned us not to do something, or else warned us not to do nothing. We can't be sure:
Sadly, such legal ambiguity was no stranger to us over there. An example: several Brits advised us that the consumption of alcohol on public property was not only legal in the UK, but was practically encouraged, which was good news for us, as it meant no longer having to carry our spirits in soda cans or zip-lock bags while on city streets. We were later informed that this was a damned lie, and that we could be fined or imprisoned in the famously Thai-grade prisons there. Already used to the privilege, though, we continued to indulge.
[source: We Are Scientists; thanks: You Ain't No Picasso]
This is what I spend my nights doing whenever I say 'working on the music website' to people. This Is Fake DIY is the small news/reviews site in question, which I like to think punches above its weight and has a fantastic look and feel, considering not one person working for it is a paid employee.
This weekend sees the launch of the DIY Guide, a new weekly feature where DIY previews the music being released in the week ahead, as well as gigs that haven't sold out yet. The idea is that DIY will take the hard work and wasted money out of finding good new music, be it live or on CD.
The reason I'm commemorating the launch of the DIY Guide on Dayorama is because I came up with the idea and wrote the majority of this week's Guide - you can read it here. The screengrab above shows the link to the Guide from the main DIY front page, the first time I've scored the DIY equivalent of a front page byline.
I spent yesterday in Thetford playing an Idiotchild gig in a garden, which was interesting if not spectacularly successful. Photos and a full account will follow (I'd threaten you with audio but it's my usual off-the-back-of-a-digital-camera trick and no doubt sounds just as rubbish as whenever I tried it before).
The new Doctor Who is, of course, housewives' choice David Tennant. You can find lots of photos of the man in his new role over here.
You can even download desktop wallpaper, no doubt a source of comfort to Amy Jones, who pointed me in the direction of the photos in the first place. "Pinstripes! Converse! The hair!" quoth she. "Mention me, and the fact that I almost passed out when I saw the photos." How can I refuse that sort of demand?
Click here for a depiction of the emotional torment behind the daily struggle to bring you intriguing, laugh-a-minute, earth-shattering Dayorama posts.
Happily, the forum at the music website I write for (DIY, for future reference) has received a shot in the arm with about twenty new members tonight. DIY operates the forums for the bands Kaiser Chiefs and Duels, and some form of technical fault has sent both those forums plummeting to earth tonight. So the DIY boards are suddenly taking in refugees by the dozen. Of course, any Dayorama readers feeling board are welcome to head on over to the link above and get talking!
Here's a link to an edited tube map showing the tube lines available to myself and OJ on Thursday, when we were in central London following the failed tube attacks.
I know I'm probably about the last person to notice this, but bless Google, they try so hard. Today, you can get a Google Map of the moon showing off the Apollo landings. Lovely stuff.
In other news, if you know anything about football, please do go to Guardian Fantasy Chairman, http://guardian.fantasyleague.com, and register. It costs 6 but email me afterwards and I can add you to the big friends' league we're trying to set up. Dayorama FC is raring to go for the new season...
An interesting little link to an animated movie of what looks like a hippo and some kind of dog - a poor man's Timon and Pumba, if you will - performing a version of the timeless classic 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight'.
Opens in Windows Media Player (and presumably anything else that can cope with .wmv files).
OJ might remember Tropiquaria. It's a tourist spot between Minehead and Taunton housing all manner of wee tropical beasties, and it was a regular destination for school outings when we both went to Taunton School. It certainly put OJ's fear of snakes to the test (he can't even watch snakes in movies) since we all had to have a snake wrapped around our shoulders at some point as I recall.
Well Tropiquaria is housed in a very funny looking building, and it's taken me until just now to get around to finding out what it was. The big radio pylons around it were probably a big clue to those people with more common sense than me (that'll be everyone then), and so it transpires that it's an old BBC Radio transmission building dating back to the early 1930s.
There's some good photos and some very geeky information about the transmission side of things (which carries on despite the mildly unusual activities inside the building) over on this website. The BBC logo (as it was in 1933) and its motto, 'Nation Shall Speak Peace Unto Nation', are engraved above the main doors.
Perhaps those early visits to Tropiquaria planted a love of broadcasting in my subconscious! And there I was thinking it was a career path I'd only settled on in the last year or two...
A campaign being spearheaded by the East Anglian Ambulance Service wants people to enter the phone number for their next-of-kin into their mobile's address book.
The idea is to enter a new contact as 'ICE' - In Case of Emergency - and set against it the phone number of the person you would like to be contacted if you're involved in some kind of accident.
Ben Metcalfe pointed it out in his weblog. It seems like a great idea to me and I've done it, so I'm just doing my bit to pass it on.
My Dad and I had a blazing row yesterday about whether Coldplay are currently the biggest British band or not. I said yes, he begged to differ, suggesting Oasis as an alternative candidate.
Happily, the BBC agree with me:
Glastonbury fans declared Coldplay's festival headline slot a huge success on Saturday as the group cemented their position as Britain's biggest band. [source]
Feel free to join in the debate.
In tenuously related news, I've now set up an Audioscrobbler account. This will keep track of the music I play on my laptop, displaying tracks that have been played recently, favourite artists over a period of time and favourite tracks from those artists. Once it has registered 100 tracks, it will also point you in the direction of people with a similar taste in music, and recommend bands it thinks I might like based on my music taste.
You can find my Audioscrobbler page here, and can follow the links from that page to set up an account of your own, if you regularly play music from your PC.
No, there's no Idiotchild on there - yet. I'll play some in a minute just to make sure it gets registered...
At Oxford, first year students get given a college 'mother' or 'father' (sometimes both) whose job it is to get in touch with them before they arrive, pass on any useful information, check in with them once they get there and generally make sure the first year settles in okay.
My college dad was Matt Green, now a 'fourth year historian' according to our yearbook, which is clever considering it's a three year course. I'm not entirely sure what form of course he's doing - chances are he's doing an MA and our yearbook editor got confused. What I do know is that he's researching a thesis on British coffeehouses and the dissemination of news throughout them during the Enlightenment (Matt, if you read this, correct me if I'm wrong).
Several people have told me they're quite envious of that topic and wish they were studying it. I'll confess that when he turned up sat opposite me in a library early this year to do some work on it, I had a peek over his shoulder and it did indeed look interesting, but it seems Matt isn't the first one to have paid attention to coffeehouse culture.
In fact, Ben Hammersley might have ratcheted the 'interesting' factor up a notch with his comparison between Enlightenment coffeehouse culture and the 21st century blogosphere. You can find a .pdf file of his presentation on the subject here.
His argument centres around Tatler. Tatler's 'first post', as he dubs it, was in 1709 and included the following excerpt:
I shall from time to time report and consider all matters of what kind soever that shall occur to me, and publish such my advices and reflections every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday in the week for the convenience of the post. I have also resolved to have something which may be of entertainment to the fair sex...
Dayorama has had a few mission statements of sorts in its time. For example, OJ defined his interpretation of the newly launched site as follows in August 2003:
Random news topics will certainly feature highly. But for me personally, I hope to use Dayorama to keep my friends up to date and post some thoughts on my next big adventure. [source]
When we launched DayoSchamaLlama in November 2004, I issued the following statement:
It has come to our attention that over the past weeks, and in particular the past few days, some of our readers may have been led to believe that we are a serious weblog, dealing with topical issues, politics, cultural debate and aspects of our own lives which may have wider moral or social implications. The impression may have been given that humour is occasionally deployed as a secondary tool, particularly during the relaying of anecdotes. We, the Dayorama staff, are outraged by, and hotly refute, these suggestions. [source]
There's a fair similarity between our motives for posting (at least, our stated motives) and the avowed intent of Tatler to consider, advise and reflect - many weblogs do those three things far more often, more sagely and more pertinently than we do, too.
Hammersley's conclusion? 'We need a new Tatler.' Au contraire, we've got thousands of them, all doing the same job, arguably better than Tatler did and certainly covering infinitely more angles. That statement should be clarified. We need a new Tatler in as much as Tatler was something new; we, in turn, need something different to the current blogging morass. I don't think it will be podcasting and I don't think it will involve the mass media. In short, I don't know what it will be. Anyone?
Initially I thought this was some kind of offer from Richard Branson et al when I saw a link to it on OxGoss. It turns out it's a 21 year old female Oxford student (or at least, it purports to be - after all this is the big, scary internet where there's a Michael Jackson round every corner). She wants to lose her virginity before she leaves the uni so she's set up a blog advertising this fact and keeping a log of the people she meets and hears from along the way.
It's very well written by whomsoever this here virgin lass might be, including tales of dates with one individual named 'Charlie' who neglected to mention she was a) female and b) lesbian until the pair met, and another individual - dubbed 'Shallow Bastard' - who simply turned up and enquired as to whether, based on looks, she would sleep with him. She said no. He left.
As I told her in my email (no, I didn't offer my services... yet), now might be the time for me to offer myself up in similar fashion on Dayorama. Except I can't be bothered creating a new category for it, so I guess I'll have to pass. Ah well.
From Pharyngula, via Boing Boing, in reference to a history professor at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, challenging the theory of evolution in particularly poor fashion:
I guess getting a history degree requires no knowledge of logic.
Yesterday's ending calls for some new beginnings, but the problem is choosing where to start - there's plenty to be discussing this morning.
First up, page 3 of this week's Oxford Student:
Who says student journalism isn't dead? Sam Brown, a Balliol third year, chased a police horse down Cornmarket at 2am, yelling to its mounted officer: 'The horse is gay, man, what's the problem?' Previously he had reassured another officer that their horse was 'fine', adding 'it's his horse, his horse is gay'.
All of which resulted in a fine and several hours in police custody. For the benefit of readers, the OxStu has resorted to The Sun's tactics and included a page-length photo of 'a police horse like the one Sam Brown insulted'. In other words, half of the page is taken up by a picture of what is almost certainly an entirely unrelated horse.
Let's move on. It's hurricane season once again, and the US National Hurricane Centre is, for the first time (I think), issuing its regular advisories via RSS. Naturally, given the little love-in I'm having with RSS right now, I've signed up and am being duly deluged with my equally beloved hurricane info. The season is barely two full days old and we've already had nine advisories, although as yet no tropical storms or hurricanes. I'm sure I'll keep you updated.
And from today's RSS goodies, Boing Boing have uncovered a great collection of very old songs converted to MP3, which you can find here. They're free, so I've helped myself to a 1918 version of 'Pack Up Your Troubles In Your Old Kit-Bag', which I loved when we once sang it at school for a VE Day celebration.
The owners of the site felt obliged to explain what the line 'a lucifer to light your fag' was: a lucifer, it turns out, is a type of match, which I didn't know. However the site then felt obliged to clarify that a 'fag' was, in fact, a cigarette, and not the slightly more concerning potential alternative. That horse is looking worried already.
Finally, Manchester City have sold Jon Macken, which is fantastic news. City signed him for 5m some years ago and it's safe to say he is worth a mere fraction of that - the 750,000 Crystal Palace are rumoured to have paid us for him is more than most fans probably expected we'd get.
Frankly, I'm surprised Palace even signed Macken, since he's done approximately nothing in the four or so years he's been at the club. It's a development Palace fans on the BBC's message board seem to have accepted with neither enthusiasm nor despair, which is probably about right since he'll do a job in the second tier of English football. Not worth 5m though.
If we go off the OxStu's breakdown of the $100m computing pioneer James Martin has donated to the university, which is worth '47,826 students' tuition fees for a year at Oxford', then we could have put a good four thousand students through the mill with Macken's fee... oh and you know what? I'm not a student any more. How can I be? I'm not studying anything! It's bloomin' fantastic. Sorry Amy.
Our British readers will be well aware of the rise of sudoku in every single daily newspaper over the last six months. Indeed, it was only a couple of weeks ago that the supplements started to review the phenomenon; there was a fight between The Mail and The Times to over who introduced it first, although as far as I'm aware, it was the latter. We blogged about sudokuback in December, noting how it came high in our search strings, something it continues to do. Now comes news of sudoku invading America. Dan Drezner fears that sudoku will take over his life, following his initiation through an Economist article. (I also note that he has a Civilization addiction; clearly I'm on the right path in continuing to academia. I wonder if there is a sudoku self help group like there is for Civilization...?) Still, I wish him the best of luck escaping it; all I shall note is that the fun does disappear after a couple of months. It's when you're still interested after that, that you have a problem.
Here's a fantastic little contraption, just aired for the first time at backstage.bbc.co.uk, the network of developers using the BBC's online content management technology.
It's a missing words game, a la Have I Got News For You, using the BBC's headlines. It semi-randomly takes a word or two out, you have to guess them. Not quite as much comedy potential as the original, but you do get to see other people's guesses, which is fun.
My favourite example so far:
Farmers in appeal for ______
My guess: oranges.
Other guesses: sex, money.
Correct answer: watchdog.
Think you've got it bad? Exams catching up with you? Stress at work? Home life getting you down? It could be worse. You might end up having to pay a fine for not having your car properly taxed, and then you might reverse into somebody else's car. These two incidents definitely made this guy unhappy:
"The reg was expired on 1/20/04, but f*** them. Anyways, I catch 2 citations for that nonsense. Then all of a sudden every f***ing cop has a hard on for me. I got pulled over twice after this. Now I aint been pulled over in a good year or two, so for this bullsh*t to happen in the last week is on some other sh*t. Now I gotta pay these cocks a grip of loot. But whatever."
Go and read the full story here. It's worth it. Try to keep track of the swearword-per-sentence average as you go along. He's not happy.
Update: Read the full contents of the mixtape he has prepared, found beneath his post. Every time you read the word 'cats', read it as though he is actually talking about cats. There's the funny. Right there.
Someone shoots some grainy footage of people mucking around with their forks at the ranch of George Lucas after a screening of Star Wars films there. An enterprising geek seizes on the footage and replaces the forks with slightly more appropriate implements. This is the result.
Here's how not to start off a radio show. Mercifully it isn't me, it's a random American.
Click here, then select the option to stream the show. Wait until you're 19 seconds in. Listen to the crashing and burning for about another thirty seconds. Lovely.
"It is the start of term, so would parents please ensure that their sons and daughters return to school with the correct colour and length of hair, as well as the correct School uniform."
Ah yes. Taunton School dictating terms to parents. What, out of interest, is the correct colour and length of hair? Blonde, short enough for a quiff, not too short?
I don't normally experience moments where my jaw drops at something online. There are plenty of amusing things on the internet, plenty of very informative things, plenty of downright amazing things, but very few things which can genuinely make me sit and stare in awe.
An MSN Search advert has just had that effect. I was browsing The Guardian online, and a pop-up ad emerged which did a neat little animation, ending with the animation turning into an MSN Search box. In that box appeared the words 'Sporting Memorabilia'. My jaw slammed into the ground.
Either a) MSN has pre-programmed the ad to show the term 'Sporting Memorabilia' in the advert, which is serendipitous in the extreme, or b) the advert is somehow mining my computer for information on things I search for the most (and it'll be 'Sporting Memorabilia' because I regularly check search engines to see how our company is performing in the rankings). Whichever of the two it is, I'm impressed.
I am often deeply scared, and dismayed, by communities of bloggers. It seems to me that all too often it descends into a circle of trackbacks from one to another and back again, each rewarding the other for their latest pithy insight, that everyone gets an artificially inflated ego and believes themselves to be the Word of America or whichever such nation they may represent (I pick on America purely because, primarily, blogs I happen across originate there).
Additionally, everyone always gets blogged down in a mess of opinion, theory and current affairs, to the point where you wonder what anyone derives from the process except RSI and a few more enemies.
So putting two and two together, blogging is a world where everyone links back to everyone else's articles on profoundly boring questions of politics. And then, having followed one boring weblog to another boring weblog to another, I found this. Gold.
I thought Id try to be clever and compare the new MSN Search Engine launched in full today with Google. The easiest way seemed to be to put Ollie Willaims into the search, and see if he came top again/what links MSN came up with. Ollie isnt first using MSN, although it does bring up quite a variety of links on the first page football, Dayorama, floating dog etc. I didnt really go beyond this cursory glance before moving onto OJ Wooding. Surprisingly his users.ox.ac.uk doesnt feature on the first page, even though it is the first hit on Google. There are plenty of other references academic, sporting etc. However the last link took my eye: Oxbridge Admissions. This is a website designed to help those who are applying to Oxbridge by providing friendly links, profiles from students about their interview experience etc the usual stuff. I read OJs and chuckled and then glanced up to the rest of the Lincoln and there was Amy. I read it, and thought this is me. Now, I dont remember writing this at all although Ive certainly written the stuff (the typos, if anything give this away). Could someone please tell me when I submitted information onto this website?! As for a comparison between MSN/Google I actually feature in page 1 of MSN rather than being about page 3 of Google (aye aye). As for any other remarks... Im in too much shock to comment.
I've been enjoying my photography lately, but I can't hope to aspire to the kind of artistic brilliance shown at LondonStation.com. The exhibition takes the form of photos of various London Underground stations - there's nothing new in finding beauty in the tube, but there is something new in taking the photos in black and white, then subsequently hand colouring them in Photoshop. It lends the photos a quality that I'm finding hard to put into words, other than that somehow, these places seem far more expressive in false colour than in reality.
Ah, Mrs Wooding, and there you were thinking I was talking about you. In actuality, it's time to dust off the copyright law books, boys and girls. Take a looky see here.
Well I know which newspaper I want to work for when I start work for real - The Guardian. This was the case anyway, fine upstanding newspaper that it is with the best website to boot, but their online cricket coverage is the stuff of legend.
Today it was the turn of Guardianista Rob Smyth to man the over-by-over update page for the fourth day of the third test between England and South Africa. This involves a Guardian sports journalist presumably sat in an office in deepest darkest London, watching the test coverage and relaying what happens in each over to those of us who can't get to a TV, a radio or anything else. Of course, writing an update of the events of each over could become immensely tedious for both author and readers, so the task of the journo in question is to liven up the coverage to make it worth reading as the day goes on.
Smyth accomplished this with a variety of techniques - we had discussion of last night's Roy Carroll howler and the number of times Manchester United have had decisions go their way at Old Trafford, a survey to find the world's least cynical celebrities (Screech, of Saved By The Bell fame, featured prominently), a running commentary on Smyth's own illness and, of course, a little cricket, punctuated by emails received from readers. After England lost their fifth wicket some three hundred and fifty runs behind their target total, Smyth cited an email from a reader who admitted, "Okay, we might not win now." Once play finally closed, Smyth signed off in celebratory mood, since he could now retire home to drink Lemsip.
This is precisely the job for me. I can spend the day watching the cricket and transforming it into lively, text-based entertainment for the masses cooped up in their offices with no radio or TV. I can handle a job where illness becomes a conversation topic as part of your duties rather than a hindrance. I can take on a task that involves me introducing football as a topic of discussion. The Guardian, I salute you! And I consequently apply for one of your internships.
I've just relaunched the website of one of our companies, if anyone is interested. Not content with simply dissecting every single move that Google makes, I've incorporated Google SiteSearch into the layout (in a relatively neat and understated way, I personally feel). That said, the results aren't as yet much use owing to the old way in which we constructed sets of lot descriptions for our auctions, but hopefully that will change.
Also of note is that there are only six images powering the entire site. The rest is done using CSS, making this the most CSS-reliant site I've built to date (just pipping the FD site, which was unique enough since it was almost all designed in Blogger using code alone).
Anyway, if you get a chance please check it out, and be particularly vigilant for major errors, typos, pages crashing and burning, etc. Several pages may take a long time to load, but that is expected since they contain a *lot* of information. Cheers.
Unless Ollie can magic one up, this is a long shot given the people who come to this site, but does anyone have a spare GMail invite I could have? Just want to see what it's like...
No, not a post about the new Band Aid song, but an observation that the BBC's series of reports into the "planet under pressure" are incredibly informative, well presented and interesting. Certainly food for thought. They're worth a browse if you have some spare time. Maybe I should insist that you make time? This is the planet afterall.
Oh, and I prefer the old Band Aid song by a long way, but the fact that the new one sounds awful shouldn't be a reason not to buy it and not support the cause.
Google Scholar has been getting some publicity over the last few days, so I've just been giving it a go to see what it does, and I'm pretty impressed.
Granted, it struggled when I just put "Clovis" in, coming back with a tonne of journals of mathematics which might conceivably have mentioned the town of Clovis in the US, but once I got to matters more clearly associated with history, it started to do the business. Typing in my tutor's name revealed no fewer than 64 articles either by him or referring to him, and when I clicked on "Library Search" for one entry, it acknowledged that I was based at Oxford University and presented me with a link to OLIS. Then I tried a book I need - "Columbanus and Merovingian Monasticism" - which it found, but only as a citation from a journal article, since the book itself is (sadly) not online. Which means I'm going to have to go out and find it on this cold, cold morning. Try as it might, Google still isn't making my life as simple as I'd like. Brrr.
Some odd things happen on eBay. We all know that. Now, someone is bidding more than a tenner for a tenner. To see the 10 note in question, and the very, very dubious (yet amusing) reason for selling it online, follow the link. Remember to pay attention to its current high bid...
Whilst browsing on BBC News Online earlier I was attracted by a story linked from the CBBC or Childrens BBC site. I never really taken much notice of this branch of the BBC website before now, but I must admit I was really impressed. The website has a very friendly and welcoming layout, for example, the menu strip has both pictures and text and overall it is very colourful. I was very impressed by the news section; stories are presented in a very readable format with simple language and simple explanations. I was most impressed by the run-down on the US Election. The site details the election in several easy-to-understand steps and picks topics which will appeal to children, for example the distinction between donkeys and elephants. I am not sure what the age range of the website is maybe anything from 9 to 13? but I am sure it is informative to those who read it. There are also opportunities to participate in quizzes, votes and the press pack club for budding young journalists. I cant help but think that the site is aiming at intelligent middle-class children with a decent attention span, but nevertheless I expect it is a valuable resource for those who do read it. Obviously some news stories may be rather scary for children for example, Iraq, or the recent train crash and thus there is a section which discusses the fact that its ok to be upset about the news. The site also promotes the teaching of current affairs in schools, with lesson plans for teachers (! not sure what my Mother would make of this). In my opinion any way to encourage children to become interested in current affairs and politics can only be a good thing and thus the website should be congratulated.
*Edit: Apologies, I didn't mean to put "very impressed" and "most impressed" in consecutive sentences - I wasn't that impressed!
Do not be misled, as there is actually only one goat involved. The other characters are humans (five or so), aliens (two, maybe three), a satanist chicken and a nice-but-dim fish. And an overclocked lemon.
Exploring is best done using the 'random' button. I will also be sporting one of their t-shirts in the near future (i.e. when it arrives). I, personally, name this the Most Amusing Online Comic Of 2004 (2003 was Penny Arcade).
Not the process whereby hunt members, eager to comply with the law as ever, refrain from hunting their prey but simply observe it from distance, safe in the knowledge that they could brutally murder it if they felt like it.
No, this is FireFox. OJ will know far more about this than me. Something from the internet that is a little techy and a little off the wall, and OJ is your man. I traditionally fight for the mainstream corporations under the basis that the reason for them being mainstream corporations is that they are, by and large, very good at what they do. For example, Microsoft are a world leader in operating systems and office software because their operating system and their office software do lots of very, very clever things, in a simple way, with a fair amount of support and the promise of new and better things to come. Coca-Cola are a world leader in drinks because their drinks taste very nice. McDonalds are a world leader in getting you obscenely obese because their products are relatively fast and relatively food. I could go on.
However, I'm writing this entry using FireFox, the Mozilla web browser. I downloaded it purely on the back of a BBC News Online article which happened to mention it in a relatively favourable light (other browsers are available). I've been using it for about half an hour now, twenty minutes of which I spent chatting to someone else in my room, so that's no basis on which to write a review of it, but so far I'm happy. My only complaints are that FireFox doesn't know how to do jazzy scrollbars using CSS, and FireFox has 'lost' the italics, bold, underline and hyperlink options on this Dayorama 'New Entry' page. Which is a little inconvenient but I'll struggle on.
The rest of FireFox is pretty good. It's imported all my favourites from IE and even helpfully stuck them in alphabetical order. There's a Google search box (which I was able to change easily to Google UK) in the top right hand corner, and you can choose from a vast number of search engines so you don't just have to rely on Google. The URL entry field remembers your history and does an IE-like 'suggested places you've been before' trick when you start typing a URL, except it just does it in a nicer kind of way. The browser seems a lot less cluttered and, in terms of its behind-the-scenes operations, is apparently touted as being far preferable to IE (the life of which Microsoft has not guaranteed to prolong much longer).
Google is rumoured to be creating its own browser (it has registered gbrowser.com, to the chagrin of some guy with an Apple image app by the same name), so if that does happen then, returning to my sense of brand loyalty, you'll probably find me using that. For now though, I'm about to delete my IE quick launch link and replace it with FireFox. Call me Mr Daring.
PS Yes, this means that anything with "FireFox" in it on our web stats is bound to be me.
Finally! Now, excuse me for a moment whilst I go all OJ and drool for no apparent reason over a website with which I have no personal attachment at all but make it sound like I own the thing - however, Google has opened its Froogle shopping wing to UK customers.
This is not just your usual crappy website news. It's bloody useful. For example, you can shop by store (set it to John Lewis and there's just under seven thousand items available), and you can sort by price. I typed in "Rio Karma" (my birthday present) and it came up with prices ranging from 179 to 265. It doesn't take someone with my mathematical ability (it takes someone better) to work out that that's a saving of 86. Froogle indeed. Kelkoo, eat your heart out.
I can see the development of a new Google-based webgame on the horizon. We had Googlewhacking and such, but now Frooglegapping should be the Next Big Thing. Go into Froogle, and try to find the product with the largest gap between the lowest and highest price for which it is on offer. Hours of fun. I'm off to find me some bargains.
Last night OJ, Ollie and I had our first meal out of the term. It wasnt planned but OJ and I trotted over to see Ollies new room (and very nice it is too) and from there we went for dinner. I was the subject of most of their jokes, especially when I said the immortal line [in context, I was referring to the second Bridget Jones film] Ill pay if you two come. Enough said. I also managed to step in a large puddle which Ollie had avoided, not splash myself but soak Ollies trousers. However, there were many occasions when I was just left to admire OJ and Ollies banter. They work off each other well and its highly amusing to listen. The product of last nights conversation (which was rather like the original history of dayorama stated here) started by talking about Anthonys summer job where he worked for a company who review restaurants. After their experience at QI, Ollie suggested he could be a restaurant critic. Our names on Dayorama should duly be changed: Food critic, Food eater and In food therapy. Dayorama could then be changed to Gastroama. I am not sure quite how this next bit progressed, but the end result was a discussion about Dayoschama and then how that rhymed with Llama and therefore Dayoschamallama. OJ would have to be the Schama Simon Schama, historian, writes at length - and Ollie could be the Llama. It could also be Dayoschamallama in pyjamas, evidently with good Karma. Discussion followed regarding whether the web address would already in use and how a website dedicated to reporting both Schama and Llamas in the news would be highly amusing. The website could be divided in two, with counts for the respective categories. On returning to my room, we all agreed to split the 20 for two years rental for the web address and www.dayoschamallama.com was born.
You're A Theory of Justice!
by John Rawls In the beginning, you lived in a town. The town had many problems!
Rather than moving, you decided to come up with the idea for the best town ever. Going
all the way back to the original position, you created the idea for the best town ever!
Lo and behold, the best town ever looked almost identical to the town you lived in. You
decided to stay in the town. Now you resent people mistaking your refined thought
experiments for "the wall of stupidity" in high school debate
rounds.
Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.
MobLog - continuing this rare venture of mine into the world of random linkage, this site does exactly what it says on the tin. It's a weblog where you send photos direct from your mobile phone to the site once you've registered. I've been crying out for this kind of thing for ages, yet strangely, now that it actually exists, I don't care any more. How odd.
Tuesday Morning Quarterback is...back! No matter that I've been reading it for the last three years and still don't fully understand Football - the mega-babe goodness makes it all worthwhile.
Around The Roundel
Reuters has always had a strong reputation for financial reporting, so it's no surprise that their (inspired) coverage of Second Life is driven by similar motives.
The Theory Of Scientists
For He Is An Englishman
Confused
