Musical Baton

Total volume of music files on my computer: My computer tells me that I’ve got 34GB, which is about 13,000 files (including all the crap that Windows XP deposits on it.) The RIAA will be breaking down my door in the next couple of hours…

The last CD I bought: I can’t remember buying a CD for years… Possibly bought one from Fopp in Bath – oh, yes, we won a cover prize in HMV vouchers and I bought The Best of Ralph McTell – I listen to it over and over.

Song playing right now: California uber Alles by the Dead Kennedys. At work, on my speakers, loud. Sometimes I forget how good this job is.

Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me:
The War of the Worlds / Jeff Wayne (Yes, the whole damn album – and if whoever’s ‘borrowed’ it could give it me back, I’d appreciate it…
Dirty Old Town / Euan McColl
Always look on the bright side of life – Monty Python’s Life of Brian Soundtrack. (Sad, but true.)
The Big Light - Elvis Costello. (It was my "wake-up-from-hangover" song at university.)
The Intro & The Outro - Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band. (Fantastic tune, which I perversely remember kissing my first proper girlfriend in time to.)

Five people to whom I'm passing the baton:
Chiarina
Lil Grill
No Longer Mad Iain.
Ben Talbot
Jonty

(Cos they all need the hits.)

Useless factoid #11724,9925

Some of those dolls that didn’t quite make it:

The Fag dolls
The Raggie Dolls
The tail that Wags the Dolls
The Living Dolls

I actually met all the U.K. frag dolls (a promotional gaming clan formed by Ubisoft) at a Ubisoft preview event out in the sticks a couple of weeks ago, and they all seemed genuinely interested in games (the first surprise) as well as being mostly friendly, open people (the second surprise) and cute as hell (not at all surprising.) I think the tall one called Eleanor was the sweetest, though I was impressed intellectually by the bottle-redhead Kate's knowledge of obscure Sci-Fi authors...

(EDIT) This is my 600th post! How cool/lonely am I?!

Useless factoid #11724,9924

Hulk Hogan's Hulkomaniac is exactly the same length as William Shatner's stonking Common People (4:40)

Tea Cemetery

TeaCemetery.jpg (JPEG Image, 832x426 pixels)

Some tastefully herby pictures, all featuring the divine brew.

The Onion | Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New 'Intelligent Falling' Theory:

"KANSAS CITY, KS—As the debate over the teaching of evolution in public schools continues, a new controversy over the science curriculum arose Monday in this embattled Midwestern state. Scientists from the Evangelical Center For Faith-Based Reasoning are now asserting that the long-held 'theory of gravity' is flawed, and they have responded to it with a new theory of Intelligent Falling.

'Things fall not because they are acted upon by some gravitational force, but because a higher intelligence, 'God' if you will, is pushing them down,' said Gabriel Burdett, who holds degrees in education, applied Scripture, and physics from Oral Roberts University."

No reason to put this up, other than I love pictures of the universe. I've just finished reading Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker, a truly unique piece of fiction (I'm not going to class it as Sci-Fi, because he didn't.) It was written in 1937 and, much like his other masterpiece First and Last Men, it has a conception that's truly mind-boggling, mainly in terms of time frame. Stapledon explores the history of the universe, flicking from himself standing on a hill in England to inconceivable ("You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.") journeys through space and time, right up to heat-death of the cosmos and, curiously, beyond. Every paragraph contains the necessary components for a full novel, reduced down with Stapldeon's spare language to haiku-like formulations.

It's all driven by a pantheist belief, much like Spinoza's, that everything is, in some sense, capable of consciousness and it's this belief that provides the dynamic and the twists of what can loosely be termed the book's plot. (It's the only book to have inculcated in me a feeling of empathy for a nebula as it's torn apart by the tumescences that would become stars.) Indeed Stapledon's other writings are philosophical tracts - he was a philosophy student and teacher tutor at Oxford and Liverpool for most of his life. This tract expresses a philosophy about how the universe could work using the most up-to-date scientific knowledge of the time so sparingly and logically that it still holds up today, and could easily have been an inspirational religion-founding tome in itself, were it not for its unapproachableness and slow pedantry. (Kicks the crap out of the loathesome Johnathon Livingstone Seagull anyway...) Pick it up, sure, but be prepared to be very slowly astounded.

Walken 2008 - Official Website:
'Our great country is in a terrible downward spiral. We're outsourcing jobs, bankrupting social security, and losing lives at war. We need to focus on what's important-- paying attention to our children, our citizens, our future. We need to think about improving our failing educational system, making better use of our resources, and helping to promote a stable, safe, and tolerant global society. It's time to be smart about our politics. It's time to get America back on track.'

Christopher Walken announces his intention to run for President in 2008. Arnie's got serious competition then...

I *love* my Bunny. Thanks be to Chi-chi!

Opus Table Football

Want one! WANT ONE NOW! The best table football table in the world... they will cast the faces of your friends and family as the footballers, and paint them and everything. Must cost thousands...

we make money not art: Strawberry milk sausages: "When I was a kid and too young to complain, my mum cooked us one of her specialities, les peches au thon: peaches fresh from the tin and 'filled' with tuna mayonnaise. It doesn't mean I'm ready to eat these sausages:

In a bid to boost declining sales of fish-meat sausages, Nippon Suisan Kaisha has come up with a flavor designed specifically to attract children -- strawberry milk."

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Eugh.

That said, flashback tells me that I used to make a recipe called "Fried Toast" when I was a kid, which was bread soaked in egg, honey, lemon curd, and molasses and then rolled in brown sugar, before being fried. Very messy, but gorgeous.