12.28.02
New new year’s resolution
And another resolution…
…fix this damn blog. I know I haven’t posted for a week, but showing only a single post is rude.
Failed resolutions
How can I have failed next year’s New Year’s Resolutions already?
Easy, when plenty of them involve either DIY (you try moving a shed, particularly one that’s got its own power supply), or web rubbish.
Ben Hammersley offers a starting list of things to do to the website.
Then there’s building an xfml site, then taking a proper look at ontologies. Oh, brother. Can’t I just promise to drink less beer?
12.20.02
Unlooked for memories #7
This was early 1990:
1. Interceptor, “one of the most adventurous and successful programmes ITV had commissioned in ages – which is why it only got one series, naturally”. The Interceptor was played by one Sean O’Kane. “I like it!”. I did.
(Spotter’s badge to Diamond Geezer)
2. Getting the Subbuteo World Cup edition and playing through the entire Finals with Mate Paul one long day. Oh dear, am I really admitting this? I seem to recall the Ukraine doing suprisingly well (considering I’m not sure they were in the real thing), Germany always scoring from long range, and England winning a very controversial final on penalties. Controversial because, as I recall, the winning penalty was struck by Paul Gascoigne, who had been sent off in normal time, but somehow crept back on the pitch in all the confusion.
Get the Subbuteo book: “Fifty Years of Flicking Football”. Unexpected signs of caustic wit in the children’s games collectors’ community.
Women - what a pain
New Scientist messes with everyone’s heads again. Now we’re told that, contrary to popular myth, men have higher pain thresholds than women.
Has it occurred to anyone that perhaps men injure themselves more frequently, meaning they’re just more used to it?
12.19.02
Grounded
The big idea was to grab a last-minute flight to somewhere relatively warm just after Christmas, given that 2002’s summer holiday primarily consisted of me spending half of December doing DIY.
So why are all of the last minute flights on December 28th to Alicante? I mean all of them. I have been to Alicante, and you’re not getting me back there, sunshine.
Why we have the web
When the history of the internet comes to be preserved in an atomic crystalline structure on the moon in three centuries time, there will be (short) chapters on e-commerce and libraries, a long one (sorry) on porn, and the rest of the space will be occupied by essential information, like where we got our joke shed calendars.
12.18.02
End of term
In other news, I have finished work for the year, have bought almost a dozen energy efficient lightbulbs only to find that they don’t always work, have not injured myself for nearly two months, perhaps coincidentally have not played football for nearly two months, and, most important of all, have got myself a Performance Power Pro Sandcritter.
See that “Pro”? That means it’s serious.
Metacomments with Google
More soi-disant functionality from Google Labs.
Google WebQuotes “annotates the results of your Google search with comments from other websites”.
Err, not really. You get some accompanying text from sites that link to the pages in your search result.
The stupid web rolls ever on.
Fa la la la la
Diamond Geezer’s Carols Ancient and Modern are spot on. He’s quite a softie really.
12.16.02
Not to be sneezed at
Peppercoin may be one to watch. It says it’s going to be a micropayment system that works by generating unique encrypted ‘cheques’ for each payment required, which will be cheap and easy for the retailer to cash. Perhaps.
But, if it does work pay-per-page is going to skyrocket, and mugs like me are going to find themselves paying for an internet connection PLUS the pages. It’ll be like…in fact, I’m not sure there is anything like it apart from the telephone.
Emergent vs. emerged taxonomies
Ben Hammersley is having a discussion about ways of creating “emergent taxonomies”. This is very interesting stuff, not least because it represents a (reasonably) practical approach to the problem that most people simply on the web will not be invested or skilled enough to follow precisely the demands of a predetermined taxonomy. An emergent taxonomy (or categorisation, if you like) looks like a decent way of semantically linking fundamentally unstructured information.
Great. But I work for a publisher, and we produce fundamentally structured information. Not only that, but in a field which looks for fundamentally structured hierarchies of information. If we trusted to an emergent taxonomy, it might relate bags of information, but with no meaningful hierarchy, or a structure that looks rather too much like Borges’ famous joke taxonomy.
At the moment, technologically speaking, we could do either thing. But, as a practical way forward for the big purveyors of highly-ordered information (i.e. those who make money out of it), bet on taxonomies. They’re mostly already out there. The big challenges are:
1) Automating their application to pre-existing data
2) Linking the top-level taxonomies (e.g. cross-linking the art history taxonomy with the religious one, the UK tax taxonomy with the German one, and so on)
I think the first is more difficult, but it will happen, no question. I just hope that the rest of us (i.e. the Ben Hammersleys, Jim Leys, Shelley Powers, me in my private life) don’t just get left with the Borgesian category of “Other”, or even “Stray Dogs”.
“A Compass for Moral Excellence”
I’m looking for someone to blame for this, and I’m hoping it’s not myself.
My work inbox today contained an innocent-looking mailout from something called Exegesis, titled “Few tidings of comfort and cheer from politicians”. In among all the news and political newsletters from which I still haven’t unsubscribed, it looked like something that Jon Snow might send on a slow day.
“On Thanksgiving Eve,” it started, “perhaps boosted by overconfidence following the Republicans’ recent election victories, President Bush let the mask slip.”
Uh-huh. This’ll be about the US’s declaration that it would take pre-emptive nuclear action against a “rogue state” it decided was responsible for terrorist activity (presumably excluding Saudi Arabia). Right?
Not quite.
“Informed Americans are aware that a small group of businessmen, organized as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission, has been running America for many years.”
Oh God. That use of the phrase “informed Americans” should have alerted me, but by the time I hit “Bilderberg Group” and “Trilateral Commission” I knew I was in trouble. Before long we’re in wacko right-wing territory, suggesting that Henry Kissinger, as “the prime mover of the New World Order” should be investigated for the World Trade Centre attack. Kissinger’s real involvement in well-documented and illegal US interference in the affairs of other sovereign nations is, curiously, overlooked. And some very nasty insinuations of a racial nature, again curiously at odds with the message of the two documents the publication claims to have (simultaneous) moral primacy: the Bible and the US Constitution.
Now all this is entertaining, knockabout paranoia of the type you can find all over the web, and at which I regularly laugh (then run). But how the hell have they got hold of my address?
I can only think of answers that make me seem the paranoid one. Suggestions/confessions on a postcard.
12.13.02
Ghosts of 2002
Well, really. Seeing that Google have diligently tracked the worldwide crawl of ‘Las Ketchup’ in their review of 2002, I’m even more proud now not ever to have heard the song.
At least I think I haven’t. There’s a chance it’s been murmuring in the background of some shop, or someone’s car radio, but would I really know?
Other important results include David Beckham being not only 8th most searched for man in the world (there’s a Bin Laden gag in there, if you want to finish the thought), but the most searched for athlete. Yes, above even Vince Carter and Allen Iverson.
Now just imagine the fuss if he’d had a good World Cup as well.
Schott through the heart
Cockney humour below is just a means of blowing frustration at something else I saw on Diamond Geezer’s blog.
You see, only last week (a phrase I seem to use with increasing regularity) I was thinking what a great idea it would be to publish an old-fashioned, idiosyncratic annual. Not like the Beano, like the massive Victorian periodicals that would print 500 page long compendia of whatever took their fancy. Beeton’s Christmas Annual of 1887, for example, contained amongst other items an entire detective novel by an unknown writer. It was called A Study in Scarlet.
Anyway, imagine my disgust (only last week, remember!) when I read about ‘the publishing sensation of the year’, Schott’s Original Miscellany.
Bah, humbug.
Cockney alphabets
I think I first encountered a Cockney alphabet in a children’s book (probably a Puffin) where it was passed off as a schoolkid’s alphabet, thus totally obliterating both the pronunciation (which I wouldn’t have registered anyway) and the local references.
Diamond Geezer’s nicely hyperlinked version is good, but clearly updated (”R for Fowler” indeed).
For the original (if such a thing exists) you’ll have to turn to the King of Slang, Eric Partridge. Unfortunately, his 1961 Comic Alphabets is out of print. So below is the best I can reconstruct from home.
Read the rest of this entry »
12.11.02
It’s never the crime, it’s always the cover-up
Jonathan Freedland gives a master-class in how to survive a political scandal.
“I thought it was a really crummy idea”
Peter Flannery had had enough of his epic play about the left-wing in Newcastle long before the BBC expressed interest in turning it into a TV series.
Yes, I’ve found the whole of Mark Lawson’s interview with Peter Flannery, author of Our Friends in the North. And it was as interesting as I recalled.
Now I’m slightly disturbed by the sheer volume of material Radio 4 have made available online. The website for Front Row alone is bewilderingly large, before you even consider the rest of the station’s output. Isn’t radio meant to be ephemeral?
Our Friends Electric
While I’m not-so-secretly compiling a Christmas wishlist, I see that Our Friends in the North, one of the finest British dramas of the 90s, is finally available on DVD.
The epic series (over 11 hours) was first shown in 1996, and made it to number 25 in the BFI’s top 100 TV programmes. It started life as a play way back in the early 80s (writer Peter Flannery winning the John Whiting Award with it in 1982). The project then took nearly a decade to develop for television.
Flannery recently gave a very interesting interview for Radio 4, describing the long and tortuous process of development for the screen, but I can’t locate a transcipt. (A lie - I haven’t had time to look).
Raising hell
Today is my penultimate day at work this year. That, and the impending release of Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows) on DVD, make it a quasi-celebratory morning already.
Now, if I could only lay hands on an original French poster for the film, I’d be set.
We Give You “Hope”
- Bud Macfarlane Jr., Executive Director of Catholicity, Novelist
Religion-specific dating agencies like this meet a clear need, or “answer their vocational call”, as Ave Maria Singles puts it. Wisely, they’ve decided on a $99 joining fee, mainly so that “curious or non-serious people are diverted from joining”.