An interesting metaphor that seems to be increasing in useage: Technical Debt - doing technical things the quick and dirty way incurs technical debt which, like financial debt, requires interest payments in the future.
A class of American 10-year olds were played a whole bunch of Radiohead songs and asked to give their visual representations of the music. Here are the results. Some gorgeous stuff, and it makes for hilarious reading. I’d assumed that all the comments under the pictures were kinda sarcastic but, no, the booth really does offer free suicides, that kid on top of the mountain really is saying “I hate my life”, and the pictures are littered with a disturbingly high number of motionless individuals (many with nooses around their necks) with only Xs for eyes.
I know Rowan has done some stuff like this lately, but I think it was to classical music, which is more par for the course. I was impressed to see, on walking into the school hall, that one junior-school class has been busy re-interpreting the pictures of Kandinsky while listening to Glenn Miller.
Next time you get a pair of trainers, make them blackSpots - support blackSpot, subvert Nike.
I love etymology, as you may have noticed from some of my recent Merriam Webster entries. I also love cranky swear-words and terms of abuse, words like pillock, git and berk. So this page from H2G2 giving the origins of various British swear words is an absolute gift! I don’t need any more Christmas presents now.
You may have noticed a few of these cropping up throughout my website (for example, at the bottom of this page):
It’s a wicked little image that’s automatically created from data which Winamp sends to Audiomatch. I’ve always wanted some kind of “now playing” widget, and now I got one and it’s rather cool too, except for the fact that the .png it generates changes width with song names, so I can’t hard-code the dimensions. It even makes a list of the last 100 songs I’ve listened to.
A couple of months ago, I found a dead moth in the living room. Rowan
pinned it to a board "like the ones in the museum". A few days later,
another one followed it. Yesterday I found another big one and pinned
that on too. Gill spotted it and thought it funny, dug around and found
another one, then I checked all the window-sills and managed to add
some flies, wasps and a bee. Then Gill took them all off the board,
glued one some sacking material, and pinned them back in again. Rowan
and Lola thought it was hilarious. Rowan wants to exhibit it to the
public so… here you go, public.
BBC News 24 is running a story about a retired American woman who is being prosecuted by her government for visiting Iraq as a human shield (I can’t find any references to it on the web at the moment). The footage of her in tears, talking of her experiences watching people die, is incredibly moving (or perhaps it’s just that I’m tired and emotional). The whole story seems quite unbelievable, a sick lets-rub-her-face-in-it type of joke from George W and his co-conspirators in Operation Enduring Lack of Freedom.
OK, so all I had to do was choose some friends…
| My LiveJournal Sitcom |
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| end table and cookie (ABC, 1:00): gulch (Viggo Mortensen) tries on womanonfire (Raul Julia)’s pants without permission. Then, nomi (Bruce Lee) nixes gael (Kevin Kline)’s picnic plans. Zany antics ensue. |
| What’s Your LiveJournal Sitcom? (by rfreebern) |
| My LiveJournal Sitcom |
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| Visiting gulch (ABC, 1:00): gulch (Viggo Mortensen) hits on nomi (Bruce Lee)’s co-worker. Nearby, womanonfire (Raul Julia) draws a picture on shacker (Marisa Tomei)’s forehead. Zany antics ensue. |
| What’s Your LiveJournal Sitcom? (by rfreebern) |
| My LiveJournal Sitcom |
|---|
| mouthwash and toothpaste (ABC, 1:00): gulch (Viggo Mortensen) and womanonfire (Raul Julia) collaborate on writing a romance novel. Later that day, nomi (Bruce Lee) bakes 500 cookies for a bake sale, but gael (Kevin Kline) eats them all. TV-PG. |
| What’s Your LiveJournal Sitcom? (by rfreebern) |
| My LiveJournal Sitcom |
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| Being gulch (ABC, 1:00): gulch (Viggo Mortensen) learns a card trick from nomi (Bruce Lee). The next day, womanonfire (Raul Julia)’s office’s air conditioning is broken, and shacker (Marisa Tomei) shows up to fix it. (Series finale.) |
| What’s Your LiveJournal Sitcom? (by rfreebern) |
Sometimes I wish I actually used Livejournal, rather than just having an account there. Of course, I prefer the flexibility (and, most of all the self-hosting) that MT gives me, but for community you just can’t beat LJ. And also… so many fun little geek-games to play with. Y’see, if I had more than one entry in there, I’m sure my Livejournal Soap Opera would be a more interesting than this:
| My LiveJournal Sitcom |
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| Bringing Up canarys (ABC, 1:00): gulch (Viggo Mortensen) burns rfreebern (Lon Chaney)’s popsicle. Craziness ensues. |
| What’s Your LiveJournal Sitcom? (by rfreebern) |
Just look at the many things happening in Naomi’s fictional life, for example.
Still, I LOVE the fact that I’m being played by Viggo Mortensen - very appropriate as Gill fancies the pants off him (and I can understand why), and also because when we got married, straight after the ceremony we went on a zip ride and the guy who snapped on the ropes and told us what to do (the one one the left of the tower-top in that photo) was the spitting image of Aragorn. I think Gill was quite tempted to run off with him there and then, but it would have kinda spoiled the wedding day.