You might have received something like the following in your forwarded-email-funnies recently: “Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and […]
Read MoreSeptember 2004
20Sep04 — 3
NB
Right now, tens of thousands of older brothers are telling their younger sisters that Natasha Bedingfield (down from number 7 in the UK singles chart* to number 11 yesterday) is “teenybopper crap” and that Green Day (straight in at number 3) are punk kidz keepin’ it real. That Bedingfield bint doesn’t even write her own […]
Read More20Sep04 — 1
Facilitating Empowering Networks
I am a member of The British Association. This excellent organisation exists to link scientists in the UK with the untrained laity. The Cambridge branch has stopped holding meetings because of lack of activists to organise them. Everyone in this town can manipulate partial differential equations and sketch out a timeline of the Precambrian anyway. […]
Read More20Sep04 — 0
Grainy
I don’t believe that adults find it harder to learn than children; just that adults find it harder to be wrong. Learning is about being wrong over and over again until you are almost right. As I get older I find it harder and harder to make things that I’m happy with. There are presently […]
Read More20Sep04 — 2
A Thousand Deaths
If being successful with women is about getting a lot of them to have sex with you then the secret of success is telling the right lie at the right time. [I would say that, wouldn’t I?] I’ve watched experts in action. Their methods are simple: intoxicate and deceive. They know what a woman wants […]
Read More18Sep04 — 11
Money Saving Tip
Just back from seeing HellBoy with the Anonymous Economist’s posse. It was the perfect reverse of my experience with Riddick. That one was supposed to be expensive rubbish; this one was a Hollywood blockbuster that the critics had given us permission to like. They were wrong again. It was so empty and lazy that I […]
Read More17Sep04 — 5
I’m Getting Slack
My dad spotted this one and I didn’t. Mind you, I haven’t been into town in daylight for two weeks.
Read More16Sep04 — 9
Underestimating My Audience
I’ve been far too easy on you lot. Yesterday, in his eponymous and epurating ‘Blog, Oliver Kamm wrote of Johann Hari’s (silly) attack on Opus Dei*: “[His] term Catholofascism is not accurate. There was in the 1920s a group known as clerico fascisti in Rome and Northern Italy, which aimed at a synthesis between Catholicism […]
Read More16Sep04 — 8
It’s The Terror, Stupid
[Please, Miss, I wrote this post a day or so ago and my software ate it.] I’m sure Hak Mao will correct me if it’s not, but this BBC News article reads to me like a balanced account for outsiders of the importance of international security considerations in the election race in Australia. Shocker.
Read More16Sep04 — 1
The Euph Of Today
What would we do without Guardian editorials? We wouldn’t appreciate that people who run onto the floor of the House of Commons and shout at MPs are “thugs” and people who shoot children in the back are “hostage takers“. (It’s worth noting the comparison made between Otis Ferry’s posh prannies and the Luftwaffe in today’s […]
Read More15Sep04 — 21
Enrich Your Vocabulary
Today my car share partner and I thought we had invented a new word. In fact, a quick Google shows a precedent. It appears in this match report. I misheard her saying “travesty”. I am, however, going to post the first formal definition: “chavesty n hopelessly naff attempt at grandness, made by members or graduates […]
Read More15Sep04 — 4
Virgin International
Some friends of mine are off on holiday to Rome later. As usual when anyone I know is going to a place with vaguely religious connections, I have asked them to bring me back a glow-in-the-dark virgin, an icon I recall with both spiritual and aesthetic horror from night stays at my Grandma’s in Preston. […]
Read More14Sep04 — 3
Putting A Bit About
Today’s featured Wikipedia article is about Jesus’s foreskin, or rather his foreskins because quite a few people claim to have had it/them. When I worked in a hospital lab I discovered that discarded foreskins were an excellent source of a particular class of cell called a fibroblast. This is one of only a couple of […]
Read More14Sep04 — 0
Everything’s Better In Widescreen
When I went a-hunting for that image of the BBC testcard this morning, I sort of suspected that the Web would be full of Aspies collecting TV transmission-testing arcana. Interested in the soundtrack? Try “The Girl—The Doll—The Music“. Want to see the card’s evolution? Check out the Carol Hersee photo album. Carol was the star […]
Read More14Sep04 — 0
Subbnormal Service Will Be Resumed
A massive BT (British Telecom) outage in Birmingham isolated my Web hosts from about 12:00 hrs BST yesterday to 03:30 BST today. I’m inferring this from the notch in my visitors, rather than getting any useful information from UK Shells’ cryptic apology email. I haven’t had access to my sites or email for that period. […]
Read More13Sep04 — 0
What’s Going On?
It seems that the BBC were about to get the bigger story without realising it. If it is the same vehicle that I said that they were reporting on, then the Iraqis dancing around it yesterday are now dead. I’m puzzled that they don’t seem to have followed it up and I’m irritated that I […]
Read More12Sep04 — 1
Wigging Out
While we’re on the subject of ARMAGEDDON, Harry Hutton of Chase Me Ladies also feels that The End Is Nigh, but for a different reason. “Nuclear test”? Pah! Kim Jong-il’s hair, slathered in an experimental and barely stable obsidium dye, has finally exploded. UPDATE: A man whose hair has already exploded backs me up.
Read More12Sep04 — 1
DEBTORS REPENT!
I’m pretty bearish about UK house prices, but this man has turned his negative predictions into a multi-coloured, shouty-capital, clown-pants Webpage of doom. If you scroll down you can see that, not only with property prices fall off a cliff, but asset deflation will travel back in time, retrospectively reducing previous valuations 😉 [via The […]
Read More12Sep04 — 1
Striking Another Blow For Stupidity
The BBC is too busy whittering on about Iraqis dancing around a burned-out US vehicle to have noticed that a suicide bomber has blown himself up trying to smash into the Abu Ghraib prison. You’ve got to give some credit for ironic humour to someone who fails to break into a prison to kill people […]
Read More12Sep04 — 1
Not Dead Yet
PooterGeek is number one hit on UK Google for “British cults“. One of the other top hits is a somehow less serious take on my belief that the people of this country are inherently less susceptible to murderous ideological extremism.
Read More11Sep04 — 12
Science Fantasy Shakespeare
I suspect that I enjoyed and admired The Chronicles of Riddick so much primarily because I expected so little of it; I hope I don’t diminish anyone’s pleasure with this rave. Do not read about this film. See this on the big screen while you still can. It has been surprisingly unpopular and I only […]
Read More11Sep04 — 3
No Such Thing As A Free Dinner
Last week I was invited to the swankiest academic dinner offered to me since I graduated from my first place of higher education. And, for the first time since then, it seemed to be free-of-charge. Naturally, I filled out the faxback form straight away and, er, faxed it back. Having achieved fuck-all since I left, […]
Read More11Sep04 — 6
To The Point
Hak Mao pleads a lack of eloquence, but she says all that needs to be said today. I’m with her all the way—though obviously I’ll need to learn a bit of Cantonese and find some undiscriminating women first.
Read More10Sep04 — 0
The Guts Of The Family Jewels Are Not Between Silk Sheets
Sven, call the Metaphor Police and have this man arrested.
Read More10Sep04 — 4
Behind Bars
It’s amazing that critics of the application genetic fingerprinting have made so little rhetorical use of the year of the technique’s original discovery.
Read More09Sep04 — 0
Killing Muslims Again
88 percent of the population of Indonesia is Muslim. If you can’t kill a Jew or a Christian or an atheist, you have to make do. “Bloodied victims lay sprawled and screaming in front of the embassy, as dazed survivors desperately tried to locate colleagues and missing family members. A severed leg, human scalp and […]
Read More09Sep04 — 19
“Read By People In Museums”
I have a pretty strict “no ‘Blogging during business hours” rule, but this is ‘Blogging about the business. A colleague has just sent me this story about an “intelligent design” paper being published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. [You might need to register for free to read it.] I haven’t got the time to comment […]
Read More09Sep04 — 9
Things I Want To Do With PooterGeek
I have been yammering here and elsewhere about several things I would like to do with PooterGeek when I get some free time. I haven’t done any of them. This post will declare my intentions in public, and (I hope) remind me / embarrass me into action. I’d like to interview some interesting academics. I […]
Read More09Sep04 — 2
Autumn Fever
Backword Dave has been writing about P G Wodehouse and Jonathan Derbyshire is doing so too.
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