Wednesday, 13th December, 2006

WorldNetDaily: A devil food is turning our kids into homosexuals

Damm you, chicken chow mein, for making me like cock

Soybean products are feminizing

/me anticipates a rush from my community...

i'm in ur rear-view mirror, giving u evilz

You will, I presume, know by now that my commute involves me flinging my car around country bends for 70 miles. Because of that, most of the journey I'm sat behind someone travelling at 40mph, bristling with furiosity at the lame-assed slow drivers of the world.

If there was any justice in the world, any true dispension of Karma, then a moment of consideration on my part the other night would have been returned to me.

One of my favourite bits of my drive home, is when I turn off the A65 and head towards Bentham. It's open moorland — sheep graze precariously close to (and sometimes stand right in the middle of) the road — and I get to use most of the road to take corners just right.

The other night, I turned onto the road with nothing in front of me, and nothing behind me, and within seconds I was hurtling around chicanes and sweeping bends, chuckling with glee to myself.

Suddenly though, behind me appeared two very bright headlights. Figuring that whoever this was, they must be going seriously fast, I pulled over and let them pass me.

This morning though, the slow 4x4 in front of me didn't even think of the idea.

At one point, while I was stuck behind him, another 4x4 came in the opposite direction, with a car stuck behind it. And it occurred to me that this sort of thing must be going on all over the country — ridiculously inconsiderate 4x4 bastards driving around with at least one car behind them.

...

Correct me if I'm wrong BTW, but isn't it the law that you're supposed to let people pass if you're holding them up?

Do they not know this? Or are they so cocooned in their protective shells that they don't realise they're in the way?

Weird Spam

The cloud formation inside an oil filter plans an escape from a moronic short order cook a proverbial oil filter. Yeah, he supposed he would get through it, if the goddam typewriter held together.

You know, I actually quite like some of that stuff.

Pressie

Somebody buy this for me please

A study carried out at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast linked soy to male infertility

I was going to say that that's where I was born ... but it's not.

The one thing about that article (which has been slated on just about every blog in existence apparently — I saw it through Mike ) that really bugs me, is the impression I got from the author that he equated femininity in men with gayness. And even though I think I've made my views on the "transvestites are not gay" issue before, I can't help but think that a drop in testosterone does not make you gay.

Scarey right-wing religious nut-job It would be laughable, except that far too may people believe in shit like that.

...

Hey, go see the guy's piece-of-shit site It's hilarious. Apparently people have been raised from the dead in fifty two countries

Well, that's what the scarey voice-over woman says, but in the text below (at least in the bit I could be arsed to scroll down) it says "49".

Perhaps three of those people were only poorly, not dead.

Always judge someone by their website. If they use un-copy-pastable text, then they're insane

Safe Targets

It's a continual bugbear of mine, that transvestites are an assumed 'easy target' in humour — in that "it's OK to make fun of TVs, because it's very unlikely that someone within earshot is a tranny, and even if they were, they'd be too ashamed of themselves to make a fuss".

But it's occured to me of late, that I've been considerably guilty of doing the same thing recently — going after the easy ones, rather than trying to get my teeth into more challenging things for fear of offending all and sundry.

For example: Having A Dig At 4x4 Drivers™ is pretty easy, because even they know they're indefensibly selfish wankers

And even though it annoys me greatly when the tone of this blog slips out of the *la la la* and into the *grr*, even though it can fling me into a bad mood lasting several days (which, if I'm honest with myself, is exactly what happened last weekend), even though every single ounce of my being shudders at the thought that someone reading this might get narked ... I should do it more often.

I find myself full of bile at the moment. There are some things that keep me awake at night, tossing¹ in bed and ranting myself to sleep.

I should vent them, I think.

The problem is though, I used to be tempered. I used to have a rather handy 'sounding board' who would sit there, listening to me spouting off, helping me make sense out of what it was that I was trying to say.

She's obviously not here any more, which is why I find it hard sometimes to pre-moderate stuff — or, more specifically, pre-edit things.

I think I said something a few days ago about "thinking out loud" — or something like that. Something along the lines of blogs being read as finalised, fixed viewpoints — soapboxes that we get up on and State Our Position™, to either the tune of agreement or dissent.

I think I used to do that — having had the chance to thrash something out with someone whose opinions I really valued, face to face first².

...

*gah*

Sorry. What I'm trying to say here is that I get the impression sometimes that maybe some people come along, read shit, and think "OMG, I can't believe Siobhan thinks that" — when really, it's more that Siobhan wonders that, and would really like to talk about it.

¹ Stop it

² It's not so much the 'face to face' bit. It's more the 'face to face over a glass of wine' thing. For all my love of interconnected digital/virtual spaces — whether they're 2D, 3D, 4D, whateverD — I do so love the discourse that only two wine glasses seem to inspire.

Posts That Didn't Make It In Today

...for reasons such as "I was busy", or "They weren't very good"

Baps

A photograph of some bread rolls I bought this evening for 20p which were stale. Hence the 20p price tag. The idea was more to do with the hilarious use of the word "Baps" in the title, which can sometimes mean "tits"

A Lexicon For Our Undereducated American Cousins

...in which I explain the meaning of words to those with a misinformed grasp on the English Language, such as "fag" in order to pre-empt and pre-vent¹ Terrible Social Misuderstandings™ in the future.

Damm This Zippo

Two thousand words on the sbject of why my cigarette lighter is doing my head in at the moment, complete with diagramatic, annotated pictures of the callous I've developed on my thumb as a result of its refusals to breathe fire.

Damm This Libido

Some general — and probably regretful — thoughts on the scarey prospect that I seem to have completely lost any interest in sex whatsoever.

Scarey

A short quip, asking the question of whether I spell that word right every time I use it, requiring the obligatory comments along the lines of "use your dictionary, dullard"

"Oh Shit"

Some "day to day mundanity" post that described the first few moments of this morning. Something along the lines of "Woke up at 6. Drank coffee. Got back in bed. Phone rang. Shit, it was nearly 8.30. Got into work for midday"

*brring brring*

A very tiny post, just stating for the benefit of whoever it is that keeps calling me that I'm deliberately not answering my phone at the moment.

YAY

Nothing major, just an obligatory post casually mentioning that I am on holiday now, written not for any informative reasons — just purely to piss the rest of yous off

...

And maybe something else along the lines of mentioning that the plan I had for last night — the one that was interrupted by school uniforms — I managed it tonight instead.

Although having just typed the words "school uniform" there, I'm suddenly taken by the idea of indulging myself somewhat

¹ Like what I did there? I changed the word "prevent" into something else just be sticking a hyphen into it. "Pre-vent" seems like a word I should use more — venting about something before it's happened. It could catch on...

It depends.

I presume what you're talking about is a very personalised portfoio site, that has an underlying consistency throughout all its elements — perhaps not all of them being moving image. In fact, I'm just guessing here, but part of the portfolio is the portfolio itself, no?

In which case, I'd be tempted to put my own 'stamp' on all aspects of the design, rather than crow-barring in UI devices that have been designed by someone else.

In fact, my old portfolio — which I never really got around to polishing — used custom javascript controls for the QuickTime parts of it, and I might just have forgone my lifelong loathing of Flash to make a custom player for it had it been around at the time.

But, in the context of a blog, or a site that's devoted to moving image and treats them as 'objects' in their own right, I'm more inclined to leave them in their naked QT state, rather than trying to wrap them up for presentation.

But I guess a portfolio isn't really something like that — so I say spend a bit of time integrating them within the overall aesthetic of the site.

(Do please excuse the crapness of that response — I've been asleep all evening for some reason, and I just woke up and am a bit groggy. Need booze...)

In that case, I say embed the QuickTime