[quote] The wisdom of Barbara Cartland: “The trouble with half the Socialists is they’re suffering from vitamin dificiency”

[old school web] Browsing the old bookmarks again… I find The Couch. [Unlike Geek Cereal it’s still online but the last entry was in 1997…] We want love, success and power but our neuroses get in the way.

[comics] Old Warren Ellis interview. “Hm. Jamie’s one with the monkey was brilliant. The first episode of his FEAR MACHINE sequence was marvellously solid, too. Several of Garth’s issues were standouts, including the Special, “Confessional.” Gaiman’s “Hold Me” was, to my mind, one of the most honest and natural things he’s ever done, certainly among his best work. I’d be hard pressed to choose a single issue.” – what’s his favourite issue of Hellblazer.

[news] Barbara Cartland is dead. The BBC has a tributes page — some of them sound… well, a little critical. I wonder why? “Perhaps her works were ignored by critics because they deserved to be ignored by critics. Dame Barbara blamed women for the permissive society. She blamed women for teen violence. She blamed women for – well, let’s face it: Dame Barbara blamed women for everything. Maybe that attitude was acceptable a century ago, but no longer. We women don’t need pampered millionaires scolding us for running our lives as we see fit. And we don’t need their implausible melodramas, either.”

[wisdom] The wisdom of Ralph Wiggum: “My cat’s breath smells like cat food.”

[bbc] Greg Dyke gets rid of expensive cheese from the BBC Menu. “Dyke’s decrees have been dismissed as daft penny-pinching by staff. ‘When John Birt ran the show there was always cheese – and biscuits – and croissants at meetings,’ one said. ‘What’s next? Will we soon be forced to bring in Thermos flasks of lukewarm tea and garibaldis wrapped in tin foil to keep us going?'” [I am not the most unbiased weblogger on this matter — I work for the BBC — but is this story news? And I’ve got to say that the quote above sounds like utter nonsense to me…. Did a real person say that? It sounds like somebody taking the piss to me…]

[mp3] Lars Urich and Chuck D talk about Napster. “It’s a parallel world, and a new paradigm is taking shape. You have to adapt to it. This goes beyond Chuck versus Lars. This is about the record industry versus the people. The people have got it on their side, and you’ve got to adapt.” – Chuck D [via Josh Blog]

[comics] Adrian Tomine’s diary on Slate explains why cartooning is better than a real job: “Producing an issue of my comic book is a slow, arduous process, and right now I’m a little more than halfway done with Issue 7. Last night I spent more than an hour tinkering with one line of dialogue. I tried five or six different variations, finally settling on the simplest and shortest: “What the hell’s your problem?” Brilliant, huh?”

[personal shite] I am having trouble sleeping which is not a good thing on a grey Sunday morning. I want to be snoring into my pillow, dammit! Instead I am adding permanent links to my weblog. This is not healthy…

[books] Surprisingly, Julie Burchill likes Kingsley Amis. Wierd!

[tv] The wisdom of Starsky and Hutch… Everything i ever needed to know i learned from Starsky and Hutch: “There’s got to be more to life than just breathing in and breathing out.” [Starsky and Hutch are on weekdays in the UK on Granada Plus at the moment]

[science] newsUnlimited looks at what Prince Charles really believes in after his Reith Lecture: “At the core of Christianity there still lies an integral view of the sanctity of the world, and a clear sense of the trusteeship and responsibility given to us for our natural surroundings,” he said. “But the west gradually lost this integrated vision of the world with Copernicus and Descartes and the coming of the scientific revolution.”

[comics] How to be cheap by Joe Matt.

[film] Fantagraphics covers the Ghost World Movie. The Ghost World film has wrapped shooting and Terry Zwigoff is now spending his time in the editing room, whittling footage down to a managable masterpiece. Editing should be completed by the end of August or beginning of September, at which point MGM will set a release date for the picture, which stars Thora Birch, Scarlet Johanssen, Steve Buscemi, Brad Renfro, David Cross, Teri Garr, Bruce Glover and others.

[another old link] Sam Sloan, ’nuff said… […Good Grief… Dirty Dancing is one of the all time great movies!]

[weblogs] The Taking of RiotHero 1 2 3: “Way back in the mists of time, there was a country called England, which was known for conquering things, drinking tea and having rural areas where the locals indulged in carnal acts with lesser species (or their close families).” [Tom and Katy have taken over Riothero for the weekend. Should be interesting…]

[book] 253 a novel for the Internet about London Underground in seven cars and a crash

[old school net] Whatever happened to Geek Cereal?

[film] Apocalypse Now Tribute Site

[weblogging] Any weblogger who provides lots of links must hit THE WALL at some point… and I’ve been certainly struggling with my own personal weblogging wall the last couple of days… So, it’s time to dig thru the old bookmarks and come up with some gems…

[dotcom] Slashdot has the answer to why boo.com failed: “My wife never heard of boo.com (Score:5, Insightful)“

[human nature] Slashdot asks: Can you legally lend a friend a DVD?

[mp3] Two amusing links: Kid Rock starves to death – MP3 piracy blamed. Metallica’s new CD [both via Metafilter]

[tech] Vavatch Orbital has a dig at Prince Charles over his Reith Lecture: “I believe that if we are to achieve genuinely sustainable development we will first have to rediscover, or re-acknowledge a sense of the sacred in our dealings with the natural world, and with each other. If literally nothing is held sacred anymore – because it is considered synonymous with superstition or in some other way “irrational” – what is there to prevent us treating our entire world as some “great laboratory of life” with potentially disastrous long term consequences?” — Prince Charles [Update: Unsurprisingly, Stephen Hawkins has entered the debate: “[…] people in 50 years’ time will wonder what all the fuss about GM food was all about”]

[nasty] BBC News reports that anthrax has been linked to a spate of deaths in Europe of heroin addicts.

[admin] Linkmachinego archives are up: March 2000, April 2000.

[comics] Warren Ellis seems to be doing a lot of little bits of writing for themestream. Of special note: Warren Ellis: Why I Write Comics and England, In The Summertime: LIQUID CITY

[weblogs] Two weblogs that keep me hitting the “F5” key — Not So Soft and Metafilter.

[sport] How Grandstand was cancelled [from newsUnlimited]. “The premier league clubs expect to realise around £2bn from auctioning the various rights packages. By chance £2bn is roughly the BBC reaped in licence fee income last year to fund its two television channels and five radio stations, plus its new digital ventures.”

[tech] newsUnlimited reports on family in Silicon Valley [Text-Only]. “[…] Most revealingly, perhaps, is the way in which the word “family” is slowly turning from a noun, into a verb. Parents in Silicon Valley have been overheard talking about the need for “doing family,” as if it were less of a static unit than one of many activities to be fitted around other obligations. When a parent talks about spending “quality time” with his child, it is not a vague reference to hanging out with him or her on the weekend. It is used as a direct oppositional to “quantity time,” with the belief that, like everything else in Silicon Valley, if you concentrate hard enough you can achieve just as much in a condensed period as across a longer stretch of time.”