Archive for August, 2002

Every so often the Internet gets itself in a right old state. This week’s point of contention is the cease and desist letter sent to Davezilla from the Toho Corporation, the people who control the copyright of the mighty Godzilla. Making Dave the first stop, no doubt, in the long trek towards suing the other 1330 sites with ‘zilla’ as part of their domain, the company are in for a fierce battle, one I am now prepared to enter. My loins are girded (what does that mean?), my armies are on standby, and my secret weapon is about to be unleashed. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the ultimate fighting machine: Nunzilla.

I’ve added a few things to my Amazon Wishlist. As is traditional in these cases, please feel free to examine the items I’ve selected and make sweeping judgements about my personality type based on what you find. Thankyou.

We came, we played, and boy, did we conquer. Favourite moment? Two, really. Our bass player turning to me during our triumphant reworking of Radiohead’s ‘Karma Police’ segued into ‘Karma Chameleon’ by Culture Club, a look of dawning recognition on his face, and saying, “Hey! I do know this song… I’ve have heard it before!” Hmmm. Perhaps we really should rehearse next time. Secondly, acting out the ‘Duelling Banjos’ scene from top seventies Burt Reynolds flick ‘Deliverence’ live on stage, via the medium of Kazoo. Genius? I certainly think so.

Ooh. The first 350 pages of the FBI’s report into the Columbine massacre are now available online. Can someone please examine this in detail and let me know if it’s worth reading?

On July 15th it was the The Birthday of His Majesty Sultan Haji Hassanal Bolkiah Mu’izzaddin Waddaulah, Sultan and Yang Di-Pertuan of Brunei Darussalam. The only reason that I mention this is that Brunei now has its own search engine although judging by the volume of content, the Internet is quite a new introduction to the Kingdom. “84 listings and still growing,” it boldly procaims. Strangely enough, a search for “porn” yields no results, which is rather refreshing, possibly even unique.

It’s official. Google’s search technology favours weblogs over other types of sites, and I have the proof. If you search for Latexboy, for instance, blogjam is currently the number one result, with a post I made over a year ago. Latexboy himself, however, comes in at number two, with his featured page on the rather charming “Rubber Lovers Contact List.” This makes me more popular with people looking for Latexboy than even Latexboy himself, and I can’t imagine for one moment that Latexboy is at all happy about this. To make matters worse, by mentioning Latexboy in this post I’m probably going to be even more popular with people looking for Latexboy than Latexboy himself. Latexboy, I apologise. Here, meet Latexgirl. There. Everyone’s happy.

I started a new weblog tonight, the Best British Blog Competition Weblog. I’m serious. It was fantastic. It looked like the Guardian, with spoofs of their logos, all the links tailored to hilarious effect, and the start of a historical record of all online conversation relating to the Guardian’s weblog competition. I even had banner ads in place, one reading “all the best blogs… are blogspot blogs,” and another advertising The Body Shop. It was brilliant. No, it wasn’t. It was utterly, utterly tedious. I’ve deleted the entire project.

Instead, here’s the fantastic official website of Dustin Diamond, better known as ‘Screech’ from top US TV comedy Saved By The Bell. Ahhhh. That’s much better. Sanity prevails.

The what shape is your mind test is pretty clever at first glance, but there’s a pretty basic trick at work here as far as I can tell. Naturally I feel very cocky about having figured out how it works so quickly, very superior, so I’m not going to share the secret with you. Or maybe I will.
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On Friday I received an e-mail from someone working for Scottish Courage, one of the UK’s biggest brewers. This person had figured out that I regularly supply links to b3ta.com’s own weblog, and had forwarded a link for possible inclusion. The URL in question was for a previously unseen advert in the current series of John Smith’s bitter commercials featuring comedian Peter Kay. It’s a little more risque, shall we say, than the other ads, and I’m wondering whether it was produced specifically to work virally. I can’t imagine it being shown on TV, but it’s just the sort of thing that people forward round the office (it is funny), and a link on b3ta would be a great place to start the ball rolling. However, I’m not happy about being used as a pawn in the brewery’s marketing campaign, so I decided not to add the link to b3ta. Fight globalization, smash the state, etc. So you’ll just have to settle for blogjam, I’m afraid.

Strange but true: a heartwarming tale of Microsoft’s personal touch. A friend of mine has a rather unusual name; in fact it’s very likely unique. He decided to set up a hotmail account, and was rather surprised to be allocated the address hisname35@hotmail.com. Knowing full well that it just wasn’t possible, that there weren’t another 34 people sharing his name already registered with Hotmail, he fired off an e-mail to Microsoft, requesting that they look into the matter. A few days later he received a reply informing him that yes, of course they could fix this, and he now has an email address with just his name, no number, at hotmail.com. I’m thinking that this is somewhere up there with Moses and the burning bush as far as miracles go…