10 February 2000

busy busy busy

9 February 2000

RIP Doug Henning

There are horses riding underneath my office (I am in a bridge over a road)

Here's a page on freewriting. Sabren made me go looking for this.

Alice points me to a great page of Emo Phillips' lines.

I have been very perplexed by several references on various weblogs to a US presidential contender of seemingly middle-European or Russian origin. I refer of course to the mysterious Mr Dubya. It dawned on me eventually who they were talking about.

Sorry about the cyborgasms link yesterday, now fixed....

8 February 2000

On the subject of tabla playing, how about a program to help with taal?

I meant to say RIP Ustad Alla Rakha. Currently there is a nice photo of him at tabla.com and a biography. I saw him several times in the late 60s and early 70s when he toured with Ravi Shankar. A fantastic musician.

I'm having a play with Openverse - which seems pretty nice. It's also written in tcl so I approve strongly.

Cyborgasms - "Cybersex Amongst Multiple-Selves and Cyborgs in the Narrow-Bandwidth Space of America Online Chat Rooms" An MA thesis from 1996. Cybersoc is run by the author it seems. (Thanks paola)

Gormenghast finished on the BBC last night. It was very good, though there some rather OTT performances which were weak (Warren Mitchell and Spike Milligan were the worst offenders). I don't know why people are saying it was a failure because it was anything but. Whatever else it is a fantastic snapshot of the state of British acting at this time.

I was reading about how the Ise shrines in Japan are demolished and rebuilt identically every twenty years using traditional materials and techniques but always with brand new tools. (Great link BTW, first hit at google) Anyway, I just then thought : what if I redesigned the page and it came out exactly the same? Or I could just change the URL and strew the old one with white pebbles - interesting thought. Am I rambling? I think I am.

Ah, more incestuous tangling - Leonard Grossman's Reflections of a Modem Junkie this time round starts off with a mention of me, but takes me to all kinds of interesting places including Tzadik. I wonder if I had enough of my weird music that I could persuade them to release it? I doubt it actually, a) because I suspect that many of these "we publish weird stuff that nobody else does" organisations are in fact cliques that you cant break in to, and b) the music is crap.

It is very hard not to wish for your children's lives to turn out like you wished yours had.

Good columns from Matthew Engel and Charlotte Raven in the Guardian today (registration needed).

Dan points out that there is a University of Lawsonomy!!!

7 February 2000

A photo guide to Megalithic mysteries. Nice picture of the Hill o'Many Stanes in Caithness. Long Meg and Her Daughters in Cumbria - fantastic site.

I picked up some great bargains in town on Saturday: a copy of My Year of Meats by Ruth Oseki for a pound (notice the UK/US difference in titles), a tape of Japanese music for 50p, and a bunch of CDs including Leaving Lerwick Harbour by Willie Hunter and Violet Tulloch at significantly reduced prices. Great stuff.

The freeze-dried kooks museum is an oldie but goldie. I am partiuclarly taken with Lawsonomy, especially Zig-Zag-And-Swirl - a bit like Rip Rig and Panic I suppose.

Chinalife Acuherb - an acupuncture program. You can read the manual for it too.

Eric Weisstein's World of Mathematics - a new one to me and it seems excellent

I was looking to see if I could find a name for a fully connected five point graph and I found this. It is part of something called Hopelessly Lost.

4 February 2000

You want eclectic, you get eclectic: the Panat Times and other stuff.

Oooh, today in the post I got sent a Japanese brush pen - like a cartridge pen but with a brush instead of a nib. Lovely.

Boyd Bennett's son Charles takes nice photographs.

Listen to some Octatonic music by Boyd Bennett. I think it is rather good. (Thanks Janet)

They say the Stonehenge was a primitive computer - well I think someone needs to set the clock if this page is anything to go by.

Some nice Glastonbury photographs.

CIA - not what you might think.

Camelot Dream Clothing - I assume that "origianl" means in design not in age!

A defense of Hobson's Imperialism. I must confess to haveing never heard of Hobson's Imperialism, but, hey you can get it Amazon

A literary History of the American West. Yet another example of something that the web does well.

Online version of Isis Unveiled by H.P. Blavatsky. I used to go to meetings that were held in the Theosophical Society rooms in Edinburgh (lovely building) and the photo of HPB on the wall used to glower down at me making me feel very uncomfortable at times. I notice that the books about HPB dont include Madame Blavatsky's Baboon (I am almost certain this book used to be called Madame Blavatsky's Monkey!) Anyway, full marks to the Theospohists for keeping it simple on their site!

"STOP the Joto and Lesbiana Takeover of Chicano Studies!" I have no comment to make whatsoever.

"Why strength of character is needed to lead a good life" - I'm sunk then.

A new guitar chord every minute.

2 February 2000

The Edna Ferber page.

Edna Ferber's Buttered Side Down.

I must be feeling literary today.

The World of Dante - with a VRML visualisationof the Inferno! Now if I only had a VRML viwer to lookat it with! (Pity I don't speak italian either)

The Mayan Epigraph Database project - yet another great use for the web. Curse all this e-commerce junk!

What on earth is this about? "Online classical literature linked to Encyclopedia of the self". What is the "encyclopedia of the self" - all links relating to it seem to end up as "under construction".

Hypertext D.G. Rossetti - everything you could want and a VRML model of his studio.

Memo to self: redesign this site.

Britannica again - I'd love to know what their criteria are for good sites. Some of the ones it comes up with are a little odd.

Reduce your risk of snakebite!! (Move to a country that has no snakes!!)

I notice that Britannica is posing as a portal now rather than an encyclopedia. How sad. (This entry automatically debars me from displaying an award logo as I have been critical fo their site - see this page. This site is probably in poor taste as well.)

Coverage of the inevitable apocalypso. Positive atheism.

Two very nice Tom Tomorrows, one on general issues and one on Y2K.

Just in case you wanted to know about the Use of Positive Airway Pressure Adjuncts to Bronchial Hygiene Therapy. You never know.

Wow, the complete Cambridge History of English and American Literature online (Thanks gorjuss)

My daughter seems to be doing a Grade 2 LAMDA examination. I think she is as surprised as me.

Britannica mailed me saying that "my site had been selected as one of the best on the Internet". Sadly they neglected to tell me which of the sets of pages I run they were talking about! Does mean that we are now starting on a new cycle of meaningless Internet awards? (I also keep getting mail from some search engine site telling me they are including various of my pages - they mailed me about a page that has nothing to do with me and is not on my machine even. WOuld you trust their search engine?)

I agree with Will and his take on web statistics. I would like to see the mode as well as the median though.

BillNelson (voted 31st best guitarist of the millennium by Guitar magazine) has an on-line diary. It's good stuff (Thanks Paul)

I hope that Kurnt Vonnegut is OK after his accident. Does anyone know?

User Friendly is becoming increasingly unfunny.

Anti-virus splash screen is entertaining, and the content seems pretty good too (Thanks Kristan)

1 February 2000

A UK Dr. has been convicted of killing 15 patients. There is a possibility he may have killed more - 141 cases have been looked at. The tabloids all lead with the story. Two have the headline 150, one has the headline 141 and another has the headline 15000. Aren't the media wonderful?

Certified Time! Certified illiterates too. I wonder many customers they have persuaded to buy this "service"?

Thanks to all the people who reminded me that Rhoda's doorman was Carlton and that it wasn't Chuck Lorre who played him but Lorenzo Music who of course has a website.

Hmm, Madonna singing American Pie. Not sure yet, but I'll probably end up liking it as it such a great song and I know all the words....

31 January 2000

Terribly unoriginal today (so what's new!) - Postcards from America via GMTplus9. The site could be done better, but once again this is the kind of thing that works really well on the web, something that is almost ephemeral but which you might want to visit again. Like the Pencil museum in Keswick - a great place to go when it is raining if you happen to be in Keswick and don't want to walk that day. Trouble is it rains a lot in Keswick and you can't visit the pencil museum that often!

The bomb - multidunious ways to blow up your broswer. Thanks Kristan.

I want of these!! And I don't even like boats. (Thanks Gavin)

More link memeing - this time from Misterpants (deep bow) - the Nori nasal passage cleaner. I really, really, really hate getting water in my nose so what this would be like I simply cannot imagine. (This nasal cleaning is also a yoga thing, though that often recommends using string or thread that is sucked up into the nose and down into the mouth)

I am reading a great book about Toulouse-Lautrec (Notice that the US edition has a totally different title to the UK edition!). One of the chapters is entitled "The Odour of Redheaded Women" - wonderful. T-L's nickname was "coffee pot" - think about it.

There was an article in the paper about free diving. These people are insane masochists. 81 metres down unassisted on one lung full of air. 150 metres down when pulled by a weighted sled. 4 people died training for the world championships. Apparently the pain doesn't get any worse once you pass 100m. Bloody hell.

More link copying. Dan points me to the Chuck Lorre web page where all the vanity cards from Dharma and Greg are visible. I really liked Dharma and Greg, and then they stopped running it on our local station so we only got to see the first series.` Mind you it's probably gone downhill since then. Anyway the vanity cards are funny. Wasn't Chuck Lorre the producer of Rhoda and didn;t he play the doorman who you never saw (name eludes me)? (Later) Let me correct that - the vanity cards are very, very funny, and very, very true.

There is a free newspaper war running in Newcastle. A big, Swedish, free newspaper company moved in and started distributing a paper called Metro in the mornings - something they do in many cities throughtout the world, and the local newspaper started distributing a spoiler called "North East Metro" which is just a clone of their horrible evening newspaper. The non-local Metro has now changed its name to "Morning News". It will be interesting to see who runs out of money and gives in first.

OK, I got this from NTK, but it is worth repeating. Well, I laughed anyway.

Saint John Coltrane Church - which is about to go out of business becuase the rent has been hugely increased on its building.

28 January 2000

Chindogu web site - an oldie but a goodie.

When did they redesign IMDB to look like every other website on the net? I never did like its interface but I really hate the new one. It was much better before it became this commercial thing.

Well, it's the end of a week and nearly the end of a month so this seems the perfect day to start a new edition.