We have no co-ordination
Guide the little man through the tunnels and traps, being careful to avoid the walls as well.
So far we can’t get him to the end.
Monthly archives: July 2003
Cuddly Bugs
Are you fond of your flu? Think your Common Cold’s uncommonly cool? Do you want to just hug ’em and squeeze ’em and call ’em George?
Well now you can. Giant Microbes are stuffed ‘animals’ fashioned after germs and microbes.
Ooochy Coo!
A Cambodian man has produced his country’s first homegrown automobile. Okay, it only does 36mph, but it’s cute and economical.
via Monitor Duty
Conspiracy
I’ve not been following the ‘sexed up’ document row, but the sudden disappearance, and possible death, of the man suspected of being the whistleblower doesn’t look good.
Morally Deficient
Threat rating: Medium. Your total lack of decent
family values makes you dangerous, but we can
count on some right wing nutter blowing you up
if you become too high profile.
What threat to the Bush administration are you?
brought to you by Quizilla
Consume
In the last fortnight I have been-
Watching
Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle. Very silly, and slightly self indulgent, film. Play spot the cameo (Bruce Willis, the Olsen twins, Carrie Fisher as a nun(? not so sure about this one) and Pink. I’m sure there were more, but generally the film didn’t stand still long enough to play ‘Oh look it’s…..’) It could have done with better bridging between the set pieces, but I enjoyed it. Another unpretentious summer movie just like the first one.
The Shield. Vic Mackey, baddest of the bad cops is back. Season one is available on dvd, too.
Spooks Another welcome return. Drop in on GranadaPlus and you’ll find repeats of series like Callan and The Professionals, about the people who protect we innocent citizens from dark forces using whatever means necessary. Spooks updates the premise for the Internet generation. Easily one of the best British dramas in years. Series one is available on dvd.
Reading
The Dambusters by Paul Brickhill 617 Squadron wasn’t just about the bouncing bomb and their first raid. They went on to pioneer precision bombing- practically heresy at the time- and deliver the then largest conventional bombs. This book was one of the prime sources for the classic film, but follows the squadron through to the end of the war.
To Hold Infinity by John Meaney A science fiction thriller. Sunadomari Yoshiko travels to a colony world to search for her missing son. She brings her Bushido training and formidable scientific reputation to a planet run by a brain enhanced elite who are being hunted by a high tech serial killer.
Los Alamos by John Kanon Just before the completion of the Manhattan Project and detonation of the first atomic bomb, one of the security staff at the Los Alamos research centre is found murdered. Propaganda expert Michael Connoly comes to the base to run damage limitation and, if possible, find the murderer, but neither he nor the great minds he mingles with every day expect what he finds out. Manhattan is one of the Big Moments of last century, and its depiction in this novel feels convincing. A militarized campus, out in the middle of the desert, populated with some of the greatest contemporary brains would be an interesting and strange place.
Hearing
Still listening to my MP3 collection, which seems to be growing faster than I can listen to it.
Brace yerself Sheila
Wednesday 30th of June July is National Foreplay Day, fronted by Jordan. It’s also the day before National Orgasm Day.
Foreplay is good, foreplay is great. But i think a whole day of it is pushing things a bit.
Edited because I can’t type months properly and backdated the whole thing.
Life not found
Spoof 404 error pages may not be the most orginal gag on the net but this is a good one.
Masturbation saved my life….
The BBC is running a story about masturbation. Apparently, it won’t make a man blind, but it will reduce the chances of getting prostate cancer. I am sure some members of Team Spinneyhead will be glad to hear this news. The full article is here.
Endorphins
I have to admit, cycling to work did do wonders for my mood compared to the bus ride.
I still have to find a job closer to home though. I’ve decided that, depending upon the route, anything within ten miles would be acceptable cycling distance.
Total distance- 35.48 miles
av rooling speed- 12.8 mph
Max speed- 31 mph (though I was in a 40 zone at the time, so no breaking the law.)
He must be doing something right
Michael Moore has reached the level of success and exposure where there are sites dedicated to hating him. There’s even a guy who wants to shoot a film called “Michael Moore hates America”. I don’t think he needs to worry about any of them being effective though, all they seem capable of is pouring out bile and insults and that favourite old phrase ‘liberal media’.
Association
I’ve been modifying my linakge to Amazon. Check out the new buttons in the side bar. At the very bottom of the sidebar are the bestselling graphic novels.
Self publish and be damned
Okay, my tiff with CafePress is officially over. They now offer print on demand books with no set up fees.
Time for your pill, mister President
Wubble U’s grasp on reality seemed dubious before, but now he’s let it go to fly away like a pretty little butterfly. Asked about the dodgy Niger data, he defended the “darned good intelligence” he received and went on to claim the invasion of Iraq was made after he gave Saddam Hussein “a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn’t let them in.” (Washington Post article, may ask for some basic personal information.)
Er, what? Or more precisely What the Fuck? These would be the inspectors who were, annoyingly to Bush & co., consistently proving the blather about WMDs was false and therefore delaying Halliburton’s access to the oil and rebuilding contracts. The ones that everyone with access to a TV or newspaper, apart from Dubya it seems, knew were in Iraq. Perhaps he’s just an idiot, or perhaps he’s the sociopath some people think he is and genuinely believes this statement. Either way he’s a dangerous man to be in charge of the world’s largest power.
And just in case anyone believes this is something made up by the “liberal media”, the statement is even in the Whitehouse’s transcript of the event, right there in the final paragraph. There’s video as well, but I can’t open that to vouch for it at the moment.
All via Joe Conason’s journal at Salon
FW:
Johnny mailed to me, and I tried to publish by e-mail-
Tim Blair has found what one reader calls a gold mine the ummah’s answer to Ann Landers, Ask the Imam. If you go by this site, the Muslim world seems to be geared towards the sort of person who has to count all the table and chair legs in the room before leaving, and who sorts her used twisties by color and length. Sample question
:Is the embroidery stitching technique called “cross-stitch” forbidden in Islam ?
I am a muslim women who likes to do embroidery at home. One of those embroidery is called “cross-stitching” which consist to do “X” stitching on a cloth in order to have as a finished product a geometric pattern or floral pattern on many parts of the cloth (like a tablecloth for example). You have to criss-cross strands of cotton in order to make a pattern. The reason i am asking this question is that a sister came forward and told me that it was forbidden because the stitching technique looks like crosses (actually it’s little X’s that you make wich doesn’t appear much because of the tickness of the strands).The patterns that i do are not of human or animal kinds. Only geometric and floral. Allah knows best.
Answer:
It is permissible to do the ‘cross stitch’ technique in embroidery.
And Allah Ta’ala Knows Best
Mufti Ebrahim Desai
FATWA DEPT.
Kind Regards,
John O
but I didn’t like the formatting and the links didn’t show up, so I ripped it up and started again.
Here comes the rain again….
I’d just like to let the weather gods know that I didn’t cycle in to work today. I didn’t cover 17.69 miles at an average rolling speed of 12.5mph, and I surely didn’t hit 28 mph at the bottom of the hill in Stockport.
Not that it really matters. As soon as I put my cycling shorts on Cornwall started getting thunderstorms and heavy rain.
If you've read too much LiveJournal…
…. this post may seem very familar. It should also amuse any linguists drifting through the Spinneyhead universe.
Beleaguered Gentlemen
Oh dear. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen adaptation is getting slated, though it did look like a disaster for a very long time.
Writing to Reach You
Post & Publish, when I get back to it, is a tale of the life, friends and (mostly failed) loves of a thirtysomething blogger. As it’s so obviously biographical, I have to be very aware of the dangers of fictionalising real people.
I’m already working under an unspoken (mostly, at least one person has it in writing) promise of discretion in blogging about the affairs of friends and family. But fiction is different. I build my characters bit by bit, each new detail being like those little revelations you get in any relationship. Which should be fine and create unique individuals, except that the details are almost all based upon observations. One gay character in Another Education was, in all other respects and completely unconciously, a fair representation of a good friend.
Thankfully he didn’t seem to mind. But he did keep calling me Darling for a few months afterward.