I’m going to live in a houseboat! In Amsterdam North, almost within spitting distance of Central Station (if you know Noord: it’s opposite Ot en Sien, the pub a couple of hundred metres up from the ferries). We told the landlord yesterday we’d take it. It’s two stories (decks I suppose — I mentioned that [...]
One of my favourite online authors is considering publishing a best-of. Anacrusis is a collection of short-short stories, 101 words per piece, more-or-less daily since mid-2003. It’s sometimes funny, sometimes inscrutable, sometimes interlinked, and pretty much consistently brilliant. In particular I recommend the Rita stories. (I’m proud to say the Mambo reference entirely escaped me [...]
It must be karmic retribution for all the times I’ve gotten off without paying fines for cycling without lights. Last night I was fined 20 euros for cycling in the cycle lane. That’s not a typo.
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
A couple of spams got past Gmail today. It seems they’re putting the spam pitch in an image, and padding out the message with random text. But the randomisation is getting cleverer, or else they’re scraping from some very strange sites… “When we last saw pesticide it wasn’t diebold. Then after messieurs or runt got [...]
I just booked tickets for my trip home. Wheeee! I’ll be travelling on December 30th and 31st, arriving in Auckland. The plan is to spend a week or ten days making my way down the North Island, calling on friends and relations along the way, and get home to Golden Bay in early January. Two [...]
It seems that penguins have been around for more than 60 million years. Here’s Waimanu, courtesy of the geology department of my old university. Here’s the computer science department where I did my undergraduate degree, with their penguin mascot. But even after 60 million years of trying, they still can’t do syllogisms.
A film recommendation: Night Watch (Nochnoi Dozor), Russian fantasy (part I of a trilogy), recently opened in the US; the original was an enormous hit in Russia and the sequel just premiered. The short version: it’s a confused stylistic hodgepodge with a simplistic moral underpinning, but so consistently ugly/beautiful (visually and viscerally) that it’s a [...]
Is anyone using Upcoming.org? I just signed up (as user tikitu, naturally), prompted by the awesome potential of Peter Oliver’s Upcomingscrobbler. As you probably won’t have guessed from the name, this site takes the top artists from your last.fm profile (driven by the Audioscrobbler engine — the light begins to dawn!) and cross-indexes them with [...]
This one is word of the week, possibly even the month: “insektenbestrijdingsmiddelenbesproeiingssportvliegtuigje”. Insect-resistance-medicine-spreading-sport-aeroplane. I guess the “sport” is there for the type of plane (also the diminutive -je): this word means “crop duster”. (Thanks to David —who is also responsible for the spelling— for this one; someone told me this word before I came overseas, [...]
Two days ago the guitarist Ali Farka Touré died of bone cancer, at the age of 67. I have one album, Talking Timbuktu (1994, collaboration with Ry Cooder), and intend to look for more; it’s laid-back, complex and richly textured, not demanding but elegant. (I find Cooder often too heavy in his collaborations, but in [...]