[midi] Today’s theme is Dueling Banjo’s [from Deliverance]

[allergies] newsUnlimited on Nut Allergies — one in 200 children in Britain are allergic to nuts and the number is growing. Nobody knows why… ‘Even if he eats the most minuscule amount, even if he simply inhales the papery dust that puffs out of tens of thousands of packets of peanuts in pubs up and down the country every day, he may become dangerously ill. First, his lips swell like party balloons, then a rash of knobbly hives flush up over his body; his skin goes blotchy, then he might start wheezing and coughing. His tongue might start swelling, his tubes may become constricted – he may start to suffocate and his blood pressure might plummet. He may collapse, lose consciousness and die.’

[comics] Warren Ellis talks about the best comics you don’t read. ‘Harvey Pekar is as fucked a human as you’ll find, put bluntly. And he’s honest about it.’

[comics] The Washington Post on Marvel’s new range of comics aimed at kids. ‘Ralph Mathieu first got hooked on the Flash when he was 13 and has read comics the 25 years since. Now the owner of Alternate Reality Comics in Las Vegas, he believes that no matter how good comics are, convincing large numbers of kids and teens is an uphill battle. “Sadly, the number of kids who’ll pick reading for entertainment over video games, renting movies, the countless channels television offers, or the Internet, is a very small fraction,” he says. “I also think that today, more then ever, kids and teens regard superhero comics as geeky.’

[link dump] Some tech links: MacOS X Weblog, and two applications I use everyday at work — vnc and Security Explorer.

[film] Media Nugget of the Day covers Dogma. ‘It’s Mall Rats meets Life of Brian meets Up in Smoke, but it’s definitely not for devout Catholics or anyone who likes their humor measured, mature, or sanitized.’

[web] newsUnlimited reports on the-bullet.com’s recent problems. “What advice would they give to other dot.coms? Billam says: ‘The main thing is don’t expect too much from other people and expect everything to take twice as long as you planned. Keep a close eye on what everyone is doing, and if you do trustpeople to do things for you, make sure you have got goals, and assess their progress. Also don’t be afraid to question the experts.'”

[unabomber] Nice article on the Unabomber at Harvard — where he was psychologically tested (to destruction?). “When, soon after, Kaczynski began to worry about the possibility of mind control, he was not giving vent to paranoid delusions. In view of Murray’s experiment, he was not only rational but right. The university and the psychiatric establishment had been willing accomplices in an experiment that had treated human beings as guinea pigs, and had treated them brutally. Here is a powerful logical foundation for Kaczynski’s latterly expressed conviction that academics, in particular scientists, were thoroughly compromised servants of “the system”, employed in the development of techniques for the behavioral control of populations.”

[minogue] The Editor of GQ on Kylie’s bottom. “Kylie, I think, has come out of this rather well, at least as well as GQ. People are talking about her again, stills from her raunchy new video are being used liberally in the tabloids, and Radio 1 have even A-listed her single. So in a way we have been responsible for helping resuscitate the diminutive antipodean’s career. Which is nice.” Three Words: TINY DEFORMED EARS!

[old games] I spent a lot of time playing these gentlemens computer games when I was younger: Jeff Minter and Matthew Smith. Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy were probably my favourite computer games as a child — they are now available for download in PC versions.

[violence] Jeremy Paxman on football violence in This is London. “Perhaps he is as blameless as many of those arrested have claimed. But what seems to have shocked the British authorities is that so many of those accused by the Belgians do not fit the stereotype. “Some of those who have been sent back,” the Home Secretary gulped in a radio interview, “are barristers and engineers.” The shock with which Mr Straw – himself a barrister, as, of course, is our Prime Minister – had received this intelligence was audible in his voice.”

[male struggle!] newsUnlimited reports that a clenched fist is the new image of Old Spice. “Vegas has replaced it with a clenched fist as a mark of resistance against post-feminist man’s weakness for effete eau de Cologne and skin balm. “The fist is also a symbol of men’s struggle to be taken seriously by women,” he said. “I prefer to think of it not as a stopper but as five fingers of angst and frustrated male desire.”

[comics] The Guardian’s Steve Bell on the deaths in Dover. [Earlier BBC News Story]

[film] Deconstructing Harry — Film Threat on Harry Knowles of Ain’t It Cool News. “GRAFT. One tends to question Harry’s credibility due to the volume of gifts and gratuities he receives from both studios and filmmakers. Not only does he admit it, he begs for it! The only words in a story title that will turn me off faster than “Harry’s Adventure In…” would be “WAAAH! ME WANT PWESANTS!!!” Damn, son. Show some dignity.” [via Ghost in the Machine]

[crime] newsUnlimited on Identity Theft. “You, meanwhile, know nothing of this until – several months later – debt collection agencies begin to harass you. Life becomes Kafkaesque. You inform the police – but they can’t see that you are the victim of any crime. The law holds you liable only for the first $50 on the phoney credit cards and nothing on the other bills. The cops can’t get involved with working out who is the real you. There are drug dealers and paedophiles out there. Take it to Mr Visa and Mr AT&T, they say.”

[weblogging] I Hate Music on Vindaloo by Fat Les. “I could use ‘Vindaloo’ as a springboard for any number of justified rants, but instead I’ll simply say this: FAT LES ARE A SMUG BUNCH OF MEDIA WHORES WHO SHOULD HAVE STAYED IN THE GROUCHO CLUB KISSING JONATHAN ROSS ON HIS HAIRY ARSE. And I’ll leave it at that.”

[weblogs] Short Term Memory Loss — blogging from India. “Is this the first blog from the Himalayas? Vashisht is the name of this village, and it is all the superlatives you have ever heard about India. Particularly the smelly, dirty hippy ones. But also sun, sights and smells.”

[music] The Observer takes a look at Eminem. “‘Listening to him is like watching somebody lose their head on Jerry Springer,’ says Harry Allen, self-proclaimed hip-hop activist and one-time member of Public Enemy. In recent years, Allen has testified on behalf of artists such as 2 Live Crew and Tupac Shakur in front of Senate Hearings on rap music. ‘Yes, he is coarse and violent. But he’s also indicative of white American suburban teenagers.'”

[tv] newsUnlimited reports that the Germans are to to remake Fawlty Towers. ‘Basil: “So that’s two eggs mayonnaise, a prawn Goebbels, a Hermann Goering and four Colditz salads … no, wait a moment, I got a bit confused there, sorry … I got a bit confused because everyone keeps mentioning the war, so could you…” German: “Will you stop talking about the war!” Basil: “Me? You started it!” German: “We did not start it.” Basil: “Yes you did, you invaded Poland…”‘

[uk/us] American Xenophobes’ Guide to the British Great Britain is a very old country with many treasures, such as the Millennium Dome and the Diana Museum and the Millennium Dome. Among its contributions to Western civilisation are Mrs Thatcher, mad cow disease and beer. [via Nutlog]

[books] Media Nugget of the Day covers Enders Game.

[film / comics] CHRISTOPHER “FUCKING” LEE!! I’m not that interested in Star Wars but that is a nice reference to one of my favourite comics strips so I’m compelled to link to it…

[weblogging in the UK!] Daily Doozer has more details on the PCFormat article.

[comics] The art of Dave McKean. Really great looking site.

[london] Feed on London and the London Eye — includes Quicktime panorama view of the Eye. [via Guardian Weblog]

[weblogging in the UK] UK blogging gets attention from PCFormat computer magazine…

[comics] August’s Preview Picks — good list of the best comics out in August.

[stuff] This is kind of site you can waste an afternoon on: 200 Most Entertaining Moments of the Millenium. “#126 Anyone who remembers watching the CNN coverage of the Gulf War, gape-jawed, can’t help but to have been impressed by missiles flying down ventilation shafts. Obviously war is terrible, but buildings blowing up will continue to be cool forever.”

[film] Media Nugget of the Day reports on The Conversation.

[hells angels] newsUnlimted profiles Sonny Barger. “‘Keith Richards had then threatened to stop playing unless the Angels halted their violence, telling Barger: ‘Either these cats cool it, man, or we don’t play.’ ‘I stood next to him and stuck my pistol in his side and told him to start playing his guitar or he was dead,’ says Barger now. ‘He played like a motherfucker.'”

[comics] Salon reports that Lex Luthor is to run for president. [via Ghost in the Machine]

[tech] UK ADSL Guide. [I have a crazy dream — cheap unmetered internet access in my lifetime… ]

[BOFH] Who wants to marry a SysAdmin? “There’s no time to waste. We’re all getting fatter and paler by the second. Hook up now before we can’t keep track of our processes anymore and our hair forks all to hell.” [via Just Daz]

[minogue] Charlotte Raven on Kylie’s bottom. “Only clearing the net by a couple of inches, Kylie plainly hasn’t spent the day playing tennis. Her racket is loose in her left hand and the all-over-sheen of her body suggests that she’s spent longer being airbrushed in Photoshop than in the elements.”

[MP3] Napster endgame — The US Music Industry moves to close down Napster. Totally pointless, of course, the Net has moved on… check out Gnutella.

[weblogs] How can I have missed UberSearch? [yet another weblog search engine]

[music] newsUnlimited on the semi-breakup of Oasis. “What’s going on is that I’ve had a major disagreement with monkey boy, the singer[…]”

[monarchy] Christopher Hitchens on the the British Royal Family in newsUnlimited. “An old English radical slogan has it that the problem is not the will of some to power, but the will of others to obey. I think that it’s literally true that many people can’t imagine life without the Windsors. And my quarrel is with that very mentality, much more than it is with any actual or potential monarch. One doesn’t wish to demolish people’s household gods, or rip away their comfort blankets, but couldn’t they be just as happy as Jacobites once were, cultivating nostalgia and illusion while leaving the rest of us to get on with it?” [via BlueLines]

[tv] Seven Deadly Sins of Gilligans Island. I’ve been interested in Gilligan’s Island for years… but I’ve never seen an episode! As far as I know it has not been shown on British TV in living memory… but Americans seem to refer to it endlessly in comics and on the internet and for ages it has fascinated me — Who were Gilligan and Skipper? What were they all doing on that Island? Eventually, I found out all the details… but I’ve still never seen an episode… and I’m not sure I’d want to! [via pearls that are his eyes]

[kylie] Following on from yesterday’s post — here is photographic proof of Minogue’s tiny deformed ears… and interestingly it took me ages plowing through Kylie fan sites photos to come up with ones showing her ears. Conspiracy?

[weblogs] Amusing as hell: neighbour sex “uhhhnngghhh…..ahhhhnnghhhh…..pullout, pullout, Pullout, PULLOUT, PULLOUT!!!!” [via Steal This Blog!. It’s being blogged everywhere but I saw the line above and thought: “If that’s not a Linkmachinego quote I don’t know what is!”]

[therapy] I was very tempted not to blog this story about Minogue…. but I decided I just wanted to mention… um…. that Kylie Minogue has tiny deformed ears! Why has nobody else noticed this? Her head is to big for her ears! Why is nobody in the media covering this? I, for one, am not interested in Minogue’s arse!!

[tech] Danny O’Brien on mobile phones in America. “Sometimes, when I’m swearing at the bizarre features of my clunky little American phone, I show engineers my old Virgin Nokia. Everyone coos over the dinky size and curved-form factor. They’re delighted by the cutesy interface. One friend’s jaw physically dropped open when he turned the machine off and a little hand icon waved him goodbye. When I tell them about how kids send text messages to one another during class, they go bug-eyed. It’s as though I’d announced that all Europeans all have their own personal fork-lift trucks.”

[comics] Nice summary/FAQ about Kevin Smith’s comics from ViewAskew

[good links] The Weekend section in todays Guardian has a particularly good week: On The Road Again — good article about young people who take time off to travel round the world and how this type of travelling has changed since the sixties. And Mothers without Men a profile of women who choose to have babies via donor insemitation. “Increasing numbers of heterosexual women in the thirties are deciding to do without a man, and are choosing to have children on their own. Women who don’t find Mr Right no longer have to settle for Mr You’ll Have To Do, nor “accidentally” get pregnant by a lover reluctant to commit. They no longer have to accept that, if they cannot find a suitable partner, they’ll never have children, either.”

[web] newsUnlimited reports that Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t like ads on web sites. “Newspapers insert a line saying an ad is an advertisement when it looks confusing. I want to see something similar on a web page. Perhaps the mouse should change shape when it passes over an ad to alert you to the fact.”

[comics] Warren Ellis interviews Grant Morrison. “Fans of comics like INVISIBLES and JLA may be interested to know that I was Mr. DeFalco’s unwilling ‘bitch’ for most of the late 80s. Because I was quite young-looking and fairly skinny, I could quickly be done up with a bit of curtain as an ideal ‘visiting niece’ whenever one of Tom’s morbid testosterone build-ups was giving him grief.”

[books] newsUnlimited reports that christian apocalyptic fundamentalists set to knock Harry Potter off top of the book charts in the US. “In interviews, Mr LaHaye appears to be the more driven member of the successful duo, saying that the books’ message ‘is the greatest message of hope in the world’. Mr Jenkins, by contrast, seems more worldly. ‘There are some times when I think I was born for this project,’ he said recently. ‘Other times I think I was born to play golf.'”

[comics] Yesterday was a good day to visit a comic shop…. The first issue of Grant Morrison’s Marvel Boy came out along with Scott McCloud’s Reinventing Comics. “Comics offers a medium of enormous breadth an control for the author — a unique intimate relationship with it’s audience — and a potential so great, so inspiring, yet so brutally squandered, it could bring a tear to the eye.” — Scott McCloud

[webbogging in the UK!] writetheweb points out that UK bloggers are getting organised…

[news] Michelangelo’s David has a squint! The trick of perspective – which has taken 500 years to rumble – was a typical stroke of Michelangelo genius, according to Marc Levoy, the computer scientist from Stanford University, California, who made the discovery. He suspects it went unnoticed for so long because David’s more obvious attribute – his genitalia – blinded successive generations to the “flaw”.

[weird science] Two links that prove we have left the 20th. Century: Scientists transplant brain of eel into robot and discover that some things travel faster than light.

[comics] Grant Morrison issues a call to arms. “This is simple: if you really hate comics so badly you want to see them die, then keep filling the message boards with frustrated, ignorant bile (I’ve been reading some of this stuff and a lot of guys out there really need to get laid or take up meditation). Otherwise, let’s have a momentary ceasefire to figure out ways of rebuilding the profile of the entire comics medium. The responsibility is with us; we all know how awful it is and how crap comics are. We’ve all heard that tired old song of self-loathing long enough and it’s getting to be a real drag. If you think there’s no hope then please f*** off, die quietly and prove yourself right.” [via Barbelith]

[church] newsUnlimited asks: Should you trust a Vicar?“In the case of Peter, a young and successful minister, church elders at first told him he must be mistaken when he came out as homosexual: “Don’t be silly, you’re much too hairy,” was one comment.”

[music] newsUnlimited profiles the Dandy Warhols. “They put the ease into sleaze. Like the story of one of their label bosses who, Taylor says admiringly, ‘is a sleazy, sleazy man. He’s the coolest guy in corporate rock. If we had 10 of him at Capitol our worries would be over.'”