LinkMachineGo

[more wilde] A web page about the recording of Oscar Wilde’s voice which I linked to yesterday… ‘…Wilde was asked to say something into the horn of the recording mechanism. He responded by reciting part VI of The Ballad Of Reading Gaol, which consists of the last three stanzas of the poem, and identifying it with his name at the end. The recording, which lasted a little more than two minutes, was made on a wax cylinder. Fortunately, it survived along with other Edison memorabilia and to it we owe the preservation of the only recording ever made of Wilde’s voice.’ [thanks to Prolific]

[questions] Paul Kaye (Dennis Pennis) answers the Guardian Questionnaire. ‘What is your favourite building? Karnak’s Temple, Luxor. Maybe it was the heat, but when I went there I found myself in this little antechamber and was overcome with visions of Egyptian orgies. I masturbated swiftly wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a camera around my neck – which just goes to prove that all tourists are wankers.’

[history] Is this the voice of Oscar Wilde? [via The world according to Gavin Friday]

[movies] Ghost World movie site launches… ‘Fuck you bitch… THIS IS MY HAPPENING AND IT FREAKS ME OUT!!’ [via the Warren Ellis Forum]

[comics] Gone and Forgotten — One of the best comic fan sites I’ve seen in ages — dedicated to finding the worst, most inane, stupidest comic books out there… for example, Hansi: The Girl Who Loved the Swastika. ‘Hansi ends up as some kind of Gestapo Candy Striper, taunting injured German soldiers. “I lost MY ideals when I lost my eyes on the Russian front.” says one poor kid. “We are nothing,” snaps back Hansi, cheerfully, “The Reich is everything!” Anyway, eventually Germany falls (my favorite line in the whole book “Germany surrendered! The dream ended! The nightmare began!” Unless you were a Jew, Communist, gypsy, homosexual or dissident, in which case, the nightmare had ended – the authors of this book, I can’t believe ’em)…’ [via Zenith from the Barbelith Collective]

[weblogs] Please vote for LinkMachineGo in the Anti-Bloggies… my suggestion would be to vote for me under ‘Most Banal Content Blog’, ‘Biggest Jerk Blog’ or possibly ‘Bad Hair Day Blog’… thank you. :)

[comics] Steve Bell on Peter Mandelson ‘The Millennium Brown Nose Experience’ and today’s cartoon ‘Dropping the Pilot’

[politics] David Icke on the inauguration of George Bush ‘The Bush inauguration marks the start of the massive push by the Illuminati to further their agenda for a global fascist state. You will see this clearly unfolding in the next 24 months and, as usual, watch what they do, not what they say. The Bush administration will be a cold, calculating, vicious, period of human history. I know people who have met the Shrub during his period as Governor of Texas and cold, calculating, and vicious, as well as staggeringly unintelligent, are words they chose to describe him. But those who will be dictating the actions of his presidency make him look like a puppy dog. Or maybe lapdog would be more appropriate.’ [Related Links: Disinfomation Dossier on Icke]

[comics] Warren Ellis is up to something at OrderingComics.com… ‘If you want to make comics better, then you need to ensure the good stuff survives, as a foundation for what is to come. It starts here – with you.’

[automatic blogging] Throat and taste takes me to How To Taste Beer [but it might take you to other places… ] ‘…represents one of the joys of beers and one of the challenges for the beer novice. The intended characteristics will vary from style to style. You expect a pilsner to be bright and golden, while a dopplebock may be a brown amber and still shine as brightly in good light. A hefeweizen, on the other hand, will be cloudy, as is appropriate to style.’ [idea stolen shamelessly from unxmaal]

[distractions] The most time wasting, addictive game I’ve come across recently: Bejeweled. [via i:am:cal]

[history] Guardian Unlimited offers the ‘Inside Story’ behind the Challenger Disaster… ‘When the clock reached T minus five seconds the two engineers held hands and braced themselves for an explosion. But to their immense relief Challenger cleared the launch pad. “I turned to Bob and said ‘we’ve just dodged a bullet,’ because it was our expectation it would blow up on the pad.” The two men began to relax. But then, at 73 seconds, the heart-stopping plume of white smoke suddenly filled the screen. “There was silence for the longest time,” says Boisjoly. “Then I went to my office, sat facing the wall and tried to hold back my emotions.”‘

[weblogs] The final stage of the 2001 Bloggies… I’ve voted have you? [Related Link: Metafilter on the Bloggies ‘From the seventh circle of hell comes the second-last sign of the apocalypse; the voting form for the bloggies.’]

[weblogs] Useful information page about Blogger Pro… ‘Changing post dates and times. Future-dated posts don’t appear until the specified day.’ [via Prolific]

[net] Row over crackdown on adoption websites. Just how stupid is the British Government? ‘The government is to clamp down on adoption over the internet by warning British-based service providers that they face criminal prosecution for relaying material which infringes British adoption law, it emerged yesterday. The extraordinary move by the Department of Health, which came as the controversy concerning the case of the couple who adopted twins on the net continued to gather pace, was immediately attacked as unworkable.’

[weblogs] My aborted weblogs… NewsBlogUK at Pitas (a pathetic summer 1999 attempt) and Vision Thing at EditThisPage (a brief December 1999 flirtation with Manila). LMG started in March 2000, by the way… Have you got any aborted weblogs? Email Me and share them…

[comics] i bought a lot of comics published by Eclipse in the Eighties… So i was wondering… whatever happened to Eclipse publisher Cat Yronwode? [i’ve noticed Cat’s page on Thai Penis Amulets. Fascinating… i think i’ll be needing four or five of them. :) ‘The Thai name for a penis amulet is palad khik, which means “honorable surrogate penis.” These small charms, averaging less than 2′ in length, are worn by boys and men on a waist-string under the clothes, off-center from the real penis, in the hope that they will attract and absorb any magical injury directed toward the generative organs. It is not uncommon for a man to wear several palad khiks at one time, one to increase gambling luck, for instance, another to attract women, and a third for invulnerability from bullets and knives.’]

[weird science] Excellent overview of the underground movement building up around the science of cloning from Wired… ‘All of these activities point to an unmistakable conclusion: Human cloning has become inevitable. “It will be done by someone, somewhere,” Columbia’s Sauer asserts. And when it’s done, say experts, we’ll be in for a major shock. Not because human cloning will be as terrible and disruptive as widely assumed. But because we will realize that most of our ideas about it were all wrong, that the cloning fostered by our imaginations and nightmares doesn’t really exist. We’ll also see that the ethical hand-wringing over the issue is anachronistic compared with other biotech dilemmas waiting just around the bend.’

[books] On second thoughts — Dave Eggers has second thoughts about his book A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius … ‘When a whale surfaces between your kayaks – chooses, among any of 2 or 3 million places in a Bay to breach, chooses a spot between your tiny plastic kayaks – this giant ancient creature, who very well might be some kind of alien, a billion years old and maybe the creator of the whole world and everything in it (why not?), has come from the blue-grey depths to terrify you – that means everything is possible. No one can need more proof than that.’

[politics] Bill Clinton’s Final Days… The Onion reports — Bush: ‘Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over’ ‘Bush swore to do “everything in [his] power” to undo the damage wrought by Clinton’s two terms in office, including selling off the national parks to developers, going into massive debt to develop expensive and impractical weapons technologies, and passing sweeping budget cuts that drive the mentally ill out of hospitals and onto the street. During the 40-minute speech, Bush also promised to bring an end to the severe war drought that plagued the nation under Clinton, assuring citizens that the U.S. will engage in at least one Gulf War-level armed conflict in the next four years.’

[politics] Ten American perspectives on Clinton — various Americans discuss ‘history’s verdict’ on Clinton. ‘Clinton is a total mystery in some ways. He’s such a rogue. Yet he’s so intelligent. He’s on top of issues, I think, better than any president I can remember since Lyndon Johnson. My goodness, we’re going to miss him. It’s quite wrong to see him as entertainment, quite wrong. Tell me somebody in the House of Commons who’s as good, as articulate, who’s got a grasp of so many issues in such detail…’ — Alastair Cooke.

[film] Dammit, Dave — David Mamet writes 2001… ‘Hal: Dave. Look. Bowman: You’re not going to… Hal: What? Open the doors? No. No I am not. Bowman: Well, fuck me, Hal. Hal: Yes. Fuck you. Because I’ll tell you something. Trust. There is a bond of trust between an astronaut and his computer. Is there not? And when that trust is broken… Bowman: Excuse me?’ [via the Warren Ellis Forum]

[film] Hollywood dismissed this man as a luckless loser. Now he just might win an Oscar — Guardian Unlimited interviews and profiles Steven Soderbergh. ‘”The prevailing wisdom,” he says, “is that in America you can’t make films with overt political content – that, commercially speaking, it’s an unwise choice. I personally don’t believe that at all. I think people are interested in politics, particularly when they see how they affect their daily lives. I think they’re really tired of politicians, but I don’t think they’re tired of politics, as long as they’re connected to something.”‘ [Related Links: Traffic at IMDB, Quicktime Traffic Trailer]

[meme] The storTrooper meme enters stage three: bloging splatTroopers… ‘spare me, I will link to you…’ [I am top row, third from the right. Feel free to splat me.]

[film] Popcorn reports that Oliver Stone is planning to quit directing films. ‘The 54-year-old director is currently working on the international aid romance ‘Beyond Borders’, and he’s been telling US film magazine Premiere that he’ll then turn his attention to a major film that will be his “final movie… a funeral oration”.’ [via Ghost in the Machine]

[comment] Tea with Dirty Desmond. Francis Wheen does a fantastic hatchet job on Richard Desmond ‘…if the PM studied the porn website fantasy121.com, which is owned by Richard Desmond, he might have truly believed that the Express boss was indeed a New Labour kinda guy. Desmond is, for instance, determined to end the misery of social exclusion. Hence the appearance on his website of nude photos of Grace, a 79-year-old woman who would like to meet men under the age of 20 for sex.’

[books] An A to Z by Zadie Smith… ‘The neighbours think I’m a whore. I stay in all day, I wear nothing but a night-slip, sometimes men come bearing brown envelopes. I don’t do any work yet I seem to have money. On the face of it, whore would be my guess too. Actually I’m a scribbler, all day in a room, not seeing anyone, just looking at this screen – I don’t fuck the FedEx boys. I’m not an anchoress, either – though I remember once liking the idea. Cool to be a woman who’s isolation is self-inflicted; a mystic retreating from the world for religious purposes.’ [via Zenith of the Barbelith Collective]

[weblogs] Michael Daddino has a few talking points about blogs… ’29. Embrace the ephemeral, baby. 30. But pop teaches us: “ephemeral” pleasures have a tendency to last. DISCO NEVER DIED.’

[social magic] Just Don’t Say the R-Word. Naomi Klein talks about bringing on a recession just by writing about it… ‘There’s a name for vesting the repetition of a word or phrase with the power to change real-world events. It’s called magic. And we all know the economy of the 21st century isn’t based on magic. It’s based on carefully calibrated rules of supply and demand. I can’t bring about a recession just by writing about it, can I? Oops, as Britney might say, I did it again.’ [via the Guardian Unlimited Weblog]

[life] How time can fly into a vacuum — Big Blue Dog on Time Suckage… ‘One of the prime culprits of time suckage in the modern work environment is the cappuccino. In the old days, office workers contented themselves with a simple cup of instant Nescafé, made in the office kitchen with a grime-encrusted teaspoon and milk of dubious maturity. Nowadays, with our hifalutin’ continental ways, we want froth on top. We want chocolate. Some of us even want a skinny mocha decaff latte with a twist.’

[film] How Ben turns sinner from saint — a profile of Ben Kingsley. ‘With his performance in Sexy Beast, as Don Logan, the psychotic house guest from hell who terrorises Ray Winstone (think about that for a moment), he adds another notch to his thespian bedpost. Logan is truly terrifying; a walking, swearing ball of sick dynamism, a barrel of nitroglycerine waiting to be jolted; a shark in wolf’s clothing.’ [Related Links: Sexy Beast]

[animation] My flatmate is watching Dougal and the Blue Cat — which is the most deeply fucked up thing I’ve seen recently. He recommends it… ‘Something very unusual is happening in the garden. What are those strange noises coming from the old treacle factory? Why is everything turning blue? Dougal decides to investigate in this classic feature length story from the original Magic Roundabout.’

[books] The Digested Read covers The Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbook… ‘How to survive a mid-air explosion: 1. Take a deep breath and perform 3,000 somersaults in the pike position. 2. Clench buttock muscles and grab hold of your crotch. Hit the sea feet first and swim 1,000 miles to safety.’

[tv] MacIntyre uncovered — Guardian Unlimited profiles Donal MacIntyre. ‘So what precisely is Donal MacIntyre’s perspective? A man who fights to close down abusive care homes, yet describes being backstage with Naomi Campbell as a “unique experience” to tell his grandchildren about. A man who protects damaged teenage models, but gets a thrill from nearly being arrested because he “looked like” a hooligan. A man who would rather spend four of the past five years of his life undercover because, I suspect, he’s so alienated from the cynical, worldly tribe of hacks he’s found himself belonging to. A small-town lad, accidentally handsome, accidentally good at his job, accidentally famous.’

[weird tech] It does not get much weirder than this… Macs in Space. ‘Dennis Wingo is one aerospace researcher who definitely thinks outside the box. A self-proclaimed computer geek, he wants an astronaut to hurl a specially modified G4 MacIntosh Cube computer into orbit in 2001 from the International Space Station.’ [Related Links: Some Apple PR, via Unxmaal]

[weekend highlights] Friday: Blog, Oxford Street, Selfridges, Starbucks, Mark and Spencers, MyHotel, drink, Move on to Soho — more drink, Japanese food, drink, back to MyHotel, drink, cab, home, Try to Blog… too pissed, Sleep. Saturday: Badly hungover, 4 * Nurofen + time = feel better, hungry, read Powers: Who Killed Retro Girl?, Eco, Sexy Beast, Blog, Sleep. Sunday: Blog, More Powers, Cast Away, National Lampoon’s Vegas Vacation, Baddiel’s Syndrome, Blog…

[weblogs] Not Enough Of Me seems to like UKblogs and Comics… which is enough to get you a link on LMG. ‘…Tobey Maguire in his SPIDER-MAN costume (scroll down to the bottom). Couple this with the news that Ang (CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON) Lee will be directing HULK, and comics fans are issuing forth tremendous collective orgasms… (Yeah, THAT’s a mental image you needed. Sorry.)’

[weird science] Makes me think of Blade Runner… a proposal for a standard way to encode ASCII characters in DNA. ‘Once we start editing DNA on a large scale, we will need to keep track of what we do, revision histories, comment the new genes and add copyright notices.’

[weblog avatars] Put some music on and click on this link… StorTrooperdance… any kind of music seems to work! [Find what I was listening to using Napster]

[comics] Just what you least expect… Ang Lee to direct The Hulk? ‘The story concerns research scientist Bruce Banner, who, after being caught in a nuclear explosion, finds that, when under stress, he transforms into the Hulk, a green-skinned personification of his repressed rage possessing superhuman strength. Banner is pursued by the military for a crime he did not commit. Lee’s version of the film, to be set in Berkeley, will be a big-budgeted, f/x-driven tentpole feature for Universal in 2003. No cast has been attached, nor a start date set.’

[books] Interview with Alec Garland just after The Tesseract was published. ‘…Garland has a knack for seeing and expressing things in a very understandable was, and this is no doubt part of his appeal to a generation turned off by so called ‘classic’ yet impenetratable authors. “I know exactly what you mean,” Garland says. “I think if you asked the average literary editor whether they thought my work was equitable with Salman Rushdie’s, they would say no. Well, that’s not something that bothers me very much and I doubt very much that it bothers Salman Rushdie.”‘

[moley] BBC News covers the new Adrian Mole TV series — The Cappuccino Years. ‘Adrian Mole is not just a figure of fun or soft comedy target – he is emblematic of the age in which we live. The title, The Cappuccino Years, relates to not just the current craze for coffee shop culture, explained Townsend. “It is a metaphor for the fact that Adrian Mole has a mixed race son whose skin is the colour of cappuccino, it is also a metaphor for the Labour government; a lot of froth – very little coffee. Adrian Mole is a conduit for what the country is like.”‘

[weblogs] Nobody fucks with the Blogging StorTroopers! [That page is just asking to be Hamster Danced… ]

[comics] Piercing — a fine and slightly disturbing online comic about a nipple, a ring and a bit of string… as Pete at BugPowder points out the art is reminiscent of Kyle Baker’s. Well worth the download…

[nude] Nudist ‘not a public nuisance’ — BBC News reports on a campaigner for nudism who was cleared of being a public nuisance. ‘As soon as he heard the verdict at Southwark Crown Court Mr Bethell – wearing nothing but a beard – shouted: “Being human is not a crime”. But Judge George Bathurst-Norman warned him: “I would not go away too much with that idea.’

[music] J’Accuse Indie Kids — Tanya and Tom list why they hate Indie Kids… ‘Indie kids like experimentation, but not too much experimentation. They like extremity, but not too much extremity. They like songs, but they like them to be a bit shy and fuzzed-up and nervous and not too songish. Best of all they like bands which sound comfortingly like the other ones they already know are cool.’

[final request] The final meal requests and last statements of prisoners on death row in Texas. ‘1 jar of dill pickles’ — Stacey Lawton. [thanks to Micky]

[politics] Are you a Ku Klux Gran? ‘Not old ladies dressed up in white sheets, rather very, very traditional and conservative housewives aged over 55. There are just under 2m of them in the UK and they believe that a woman’s place is in the home, disagree with the euro, buy British wherever possible and dislike foreign food.’

[weblogs] Never noticed this before — Spike Magazine has it’s own weblog… Splinters.

[old perv] Pass Notes on the Marquis de Sade. ‘The man in his own words: “Go fuck away the livelong day.” Do say: “Had a good day at the orifice, Count?”‘

[books] Friends of Meg’s Shelves. If you have bookcases crammed with books you really want to check this out. From Notsosoft: ‘Apparently, bookshelves are for ornaments and photo frames and candles, while any books that I’m not reading at the moment (and there are many many many), should be packed into boxes and “stored in the airing cupboard or something.” ‘

[distractions] “Do you speak English?” in over 190 different languages… ‘Parla inglese?’

[shipman] The true evil of this killer doctor. Interesting comments from Nicci Gerrard in the Observer on the Shipman Murders… ‘The Wests were murderous sexual sadists, performing unimaginable acts of torture on their young victims. But while there has never been a case quite like it, most of us have some understanding of sex as potentially dark and perverse and scarily powerful. The couple gave us a collective wince of terror, as if their monstrous actions offered a glimpse into a hidden side of our psyche. We called them evil and unnatural to comfort ourselves, because we feared they were human, like us – though it was a humanity taken to extremes and unravelled before our eyes. Harold Shipman does not do this. He offers us no glimpse into ourselves. He will not become a symbol of anything; his story spreads few ripples. His voice is dry, neutral. His face is blank. His eyes are polite and empty. His lips are closed. His heart is a mystery.’

[brands] The Guardian looks at the rebranding of Anderson Consulting as Accenture… ‘Not a decade ago, the amount of money and effort spent on rebranding would have been unanimously dismissed as the most self-indulgent navel-gazing, and it’s not hard to find even senior management consultants who still think it is. But this is the age of the brand: from breathless boosters such as the management guru Tom Peters to the anticorporate writer Naomi Klein, a consensus is emerging that it is brands, not commodities, that are the real centres of economic value. Tommy Hilfiger, the ultra-hip clothing label, manufactures no clothing at all; Virgin is nothing but a logo. This heady environment has spawned its own evangelists, such as Scott Bedbury, marketing chief in his time for both Nike and Starbucks: “A great brand taps into emotions [and] emotions drive most, if not all, of our decisions,” he says. “A great brand is a story that’s never completely told. A brand is a metaphorical story that’s evolving all the time, [and] stories create the emotional context people need to locate themselves in a larger experience.”‘

[history] The secret loves of H.G. Wells unmasked — the Observer reports on a new book on H.G. Wells that reveals his secret love life… ‘The bouncy little man whose tiny hands and squeaky voice belied his success as the Don Juan of the intelligentsia, was loved by legions of beautiful women throughout his life, one of whom credited his phenomenal pulling power to the fact that his body smelt irresistably of honey.’

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