Friday, May 26, 2006

Future in the Eye

Future in the Eye

Sitting back at the farmstead near Buxton, I notice that this week’s Private Eye has it’s usual Stock Horror feature and it’s looking at Future’s share price. I’ll repeat it here for all the employee’s benefits:

Xbox Magazine Publisher Future – chaired by City bigwig Roger Parry – zaps its shareholders

Value of £100 invested a year ago in…
…Future PLC £49
…the rest of the stock market £118

Nuff said. Quite glad I’ve not signed up to the Sharesave scheme now.

Update

I'll write more about myself in a bit, but in the meantime I've updated the Blog; on the left now there's a set of links to my del.icio.us links with comments and I'm going to try and get some sort of flickr feed up there too. I may also shorten that blogroll as it's looking rather lengthy...

Monday, May 08, 2006

YouTube - Broadcast Yourself.

Meat II

THEY'RE MADE OUT OF MEAT

Fantastic little short story converted into a fantastic little short film; as always the story is better than the film, but only by an edge.

Pop-up Books - Sneak Peek!

Pop-up Books - Sneak Peek!: "For the past few years Matthew Reinhart has been working with legendary children's book creator Maurice Sendak on a pop-up labor of love! This hilarious book, titled Mommy? is Maurices's tribute to his love of the monsters of the 1930's."

One of my favourite kid's authors, along with the astounding Shaun Tan. Sendak really captures the macabre nature of being a small thing in a world of unpredictable giants, who can scream and howl or who can bend to your every whim. It's a rare thing to keep that childish mind, though I can think of friends who somehow have integrated it their real personality (instead of remaining children proper, or flipping into that psychotic construct we call adulthood.)

Gun-shaped teddy bear crackers ready to liven up wedding receptions

"A paint firm here is hoping to add color to wedding receptions in Japan with a new device it has jointly developed -- a gun-shaped party cracker that shoots out a teddy bear."

Wednesday, May 03, 2006

Cthulhu & Bush

About the Film: "The Cthulhu itself, whose name is only an approximation of inhuman speech, has lain asleep on the ocean floor since the dawn of time and is being summoned by human and half-human followers to rise and claim the world. Like many others, we believe this agenda is being pursued by those who live among us innocuously, but whose actions promote sprawl, pollution, climate change and war.

We’re also into the gay stuff, so there’s some of that as well."

Cthulhu the movie. Looking awesomely pretentious. Though not as fun to watch as the excellent speech by Stephen Colbert at the Annual White House Correspondents (read - All The President's Men) Dinner. John Walker has a better summary on his site, but suffice to say Bush sits there with an expression on his face like a fox eating shit off a wire brush. I think it's meant to be a smile.

Tuesday, May 02, 2006

Books tagged "unread" | LibraryThing

Books tagged "unread" | LibraryThing
# Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke (49)
# Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra (38)
# The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien (49)
# Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books by Azar Nafisi (28)
# One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (42)
# Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed by Jared Diamond (23)
# The kite runner by Khaled Hosseini (29)
# Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (38)
# War and peace by Leo Tolstoy (26)
# American gods : a novel by Neil Gaiman (30)
# A short history of nearly everything by Bill Bryson (28)
# The name of the rose by Umberto Eco (33)


Interesting to see which books even committed readers can't face to plough through. (I filtered out those which had only a few users.) Gabriel Garcia Marquez is up there for me, merely because the name's so off-putting. Not surprised to see Jonathan Strange up there - it's great but also an award winner (always hard to make yourself read) and thicker than a hillbilly's head.

eBay.co.uk: Alan Moore's League of Ext. Gents. STATUE (J1P charity) (item 6626507061 end time 11-May-06 23:00:23 BST)

eBay.co.uk: Alan Moore's League of Ext. Gents. STATUE

Oh. My. God.

Is donating £100 to charity (out of greed) when you don't have £100 a) still moral b) economically viable.

Also, for those who've not read Alan Moore's Victoriana-fest The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (not the film of the same name or the TV series of a similar name), do so. Moriaty, Gulliver, Nemo, Mina Harker, Mister Hyde, Moreau and the Red Weed, combining with every steampunk reference ever. But it. Immediately. Or borrow my copy, whichever's easier.

Then you'll be fit to share my statuary-droolfest.