# Been chewing over whether to take up the
big zine summons or not. There are a couple of things I need reassuring on, but I was inclining towards saying yes, when
Pete mails, all innocent like, and asks if I'd be interested in interviewing Glenn Dakin. It's not definite or anything, but would I be interested.
Dakin's in my All-Time Top Three Cartoonists (sorry, saw High Fidelity on video recently), an inventive, thoughtful talent who's woefully underappreciated within comics, let alone by the public at large. It's a large scale cultural crime that if you stick his name into Amazon it comes up with Robbie The Reindeer and not Abe In Ireland.
Would be interested? Feh!
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#
Change the world with your shopping trolley - You buy organic vegetables and you've got the environmentally friendly T-shirt. So what else can you do?
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#I have been summoned to the big zine
Jez, I think you're one of the people
I need with me on Borderline. Pete
seems to thinks so and so does Mike Kidson.
You up for it?
Phil
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# Do you know how many superhero comics were sold in Britain last year?
Nor do I, but I've just had a phone call from a guy who thinks I might know someone who does. This chap's a journalist student doing a news package for his final exams. Somehow or another, starting from The Comics Journal, he finished up with my phone number. I put him on to Diamond Distributors - they'll have shipped them all, so if anybody knows someone there will. The Journal would be disgusted if they found out they'd helped answer a question about superhero comics. Blech!
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# Prompted by
LinkMachineGo, my summer reading list
(i.e. what I was going to read anyway, but it happens to be summer, and Darren did ask). In no particular order -
- Gaia by James Lovelock
- Attended a lecture of his some years ago, in which he outlined his theory the evolution of life and the evolution of Earth being a single, tightly coupled process. It was fascinating. Saw this recently, bought it without hesitation.
- Ian Watson's The Book Of The Stars
- This is the sequel to The Book Of The River, which I loved and will probably read again beforehand although I remember it like I read it yesterday - really opened up to me what science fiction can do. This book seems to have been out of print forever, but I chanced on a copy in a local second hand shop. Will I ever find a copy of The Book Of Being? Watson is a wonderfully inventive author, and I'm really looking forward to this.
- The Nikopol Trilogy by Enki Bilal
- Available in English for the first time in about a decade, packaged in a big, hardback, European-style album. Hurrah! Confusingly, the first book has been retitled from Gods In Chaos, to Carnival Of The Immortals. Why?
- The Private Life Of The Brain by Susan Greenfield
- My Mum gave it to me, it climbed to the top of the pile, it's fascinating, if occasionally heavy going.
- Who On Earth Is Tom Baker?
- He is The Doctor.
- The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
- I got into a major Raymond Chandler groove while I was at university and Nat bought me as many of his books as she could find, one after another. Just fantastic stuff. This'll be the first time since then that I've re-read this.
There'll be other things too - Akira volumes, Lone Wolf And Cub, Power Slam magazines, programming stuff (
Extreme!), washing-up liquid bottles, anything with words on.
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# Humph. Just as I start going back into the
comics zine business, Pete goes
several steps better. The Git.
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#House Alterations All-Time Number 1 Thing To Do When Employing An Architect
Do not simply ask
Are you an architect? Say
Please show me proof of that you are an architect, and not some incompetent fuckwit passing himself off as one.
Failure to do so may result in delays, additional costs, and brick piers being built where you didn't fucking want them.
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# I'm covered in a fine layer of dust. My desk, notebook, pens, keyboard, monitor and trackball are covered in a fine layer of dust. My comics are covered in a fine layer of dust. My coffee is covered in a fine layer of dust.
I am in the attic. The source of the dust, which sounds suspiciously like a motorbike, is two floors below. Still it covers me.
The Bean is, remarkably, asleep in his cot downstairs. When he wakes, I'm probably going to have to dig him out of the dunes which will have settled on him.
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# Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain.
Rain.prashton said You have no idea. 28 inches in 3 days. 3 inches of floodwater in my living room. Give me a break!
[added 16th Jun 2001]
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# Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. Dust.
Dust.
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#
The Prince And The Pee - a fantasy comedy about a man torn between his desire to be rich and his reluctance to put his hand where it would not normally go.
Amusing short film starring my chum Stephen. Drop your monitor resolution down and turn the brightness up a bit, as getoutthere's videos are the size of postage stamps.
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#
The Onion sticks it to closure.
Everything Better Now In Oklahoma City - Moments after McVeigh was pronounced dead, 168 white doves were seen soaring over the city, racing toward a suddenly cloudless horizon that beckoned the dawn of a glorious new day.
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# The men with hammers have left. They're off to get more "materials".
Hammers, presumably.
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#
Splash! An Applet Wavepool - Waste more time by starting waves in different spots at varying times and see what happens when they collide. Fun and educational... our favorite kind!
Science is cool!
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# The men with hammers have arrived.
We're on a voyage to a new kitchen. Our journey, lasting about 8 weeks or so, takes us through walls, over new floors, past plumbing and wiring, and around new units before we finally arrive at a spiffy new kitchen with a boffo new range cooker. It'll be good when we get there, but I reckon the trip'll be a bugger.
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# John? Where are you, mate?
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#
HP ad blamed for Birmingham rock throwers - ... dreadful calumny on the city to suggest that local thugs are incapable of throwing rocks at buses without inspiration from an American computer company ...
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# A couple of weeks ago Nat's Dad came to visit, bringing a helium filled balloon as a present for the Bean. Unsurprizingly it's spent the greater part of the time since hard up against the ceiling, its helium gradually dribbling away. In the last few days, as the remaining helium can't even counteract the weight of the balloon's ribbon, it's sunk to waist height. It now drifts out its last days, gently and sadly on the landing's imperceptable currents, an eerie escapee from an
Edward Gorey illustration.
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#
Doctor Who returns to the BBC - Death Comes to Time will be the BBC's very first piece of drama broadcast purely online and is the first new Doctor Who broadcast by the BBC since the TV movie in 1996.
Yay!
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#
Hutch Owen's Working Hard -
"I'll give you two pieces of advice - the most important two things you'll ever hear: one is be yourself. You know that line about the only two inevitabilities being death and taxes?
"Well it's white slave owner bullshit. The only taxes you should ever pay are existential ones. The two inevitabilities are you'll die and in the meantime you're you and no one else so just relax and be yourself ...
"The other piece of advice is masturbate all the time. That semen fucks with your head - get it out of your system!"
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# So there goes
William Hague. I thought he'd press on, only to be knifed in the future, but I read the man very wrong. When Andrew Marr suggested at about 2 o'clock that he'd go, I still thought he'd hang on. That's why he's political editor of the BBC and I'm a programmer.
After John Major resigned as leader of the Conservatives and headed off to watch the cricket in 1997, I couldn't work out why anybody who sat down and thought about it would want to take the job. The new Labour majority was so big it was exceedingly unlikely that they wouldn't get a second term. A new leader would, therefore, be heading straight to electoral defeat more or less regardless. Still other people's motivations are often obscure. Those who stood saw it differently obviously.
So Hague became the leader and marched cheerfully into electoral defeat. And what a defeat. Unlike Thatcher, Blair does not seem to be Prime Minister who evokes a strong emotional response in people. There is though a feeling of dissatisfaction with the government, that things are not as Labour had painted them as being by now. For the Conservatives not to have picked up some support from that seems almost unbelievable. In his resignation speech, Hague pretty much stuck up his hand and said It's my fault, the people don't like me. While taking the leadership was foolhardy, that was brave.
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#
PowerPoint Invades the Classroom - "When you get to high school, you will need a lot of PowerPoint," said Nestor Mendoza, another student in Mr. Bennetti's class, "and in the real world, too. This gives us time to practice." ... "I train them how to get into PowerPoint, how to get into their files, over many months," Ms. Tessier said. "And then they type captions under each slide. Their spelling isn't that great, but that's O.K."
Because the spellchecker'll sort it out, rite?
peteychap said In my school days we had a similar project. We had these A4 sheets of clear plastic paper called "transparencies" (I think) which we'd write on with a smelly pen and then put on a machine with a big light called an "over head projector" which would blow them up all big on a wall. Sometime's we'd do animations using pieces of normal paper to cover over bits and, when the critical moment came, reveal them. It was wizard!
Seriously though, people at Kate's work (publishing) spend hours doing their powerpoint presentations. I had a look at the program and it really is quite preposterous. [added 5th Jun 2001]
It just boggles my mind that there are people who think that PowerPoint/Spreadsheet/Word processor "skills" are something not only worth teaching to children, but something useful. Typewriters and ledger books have been around far longer, but they weren't taught in schools. Teaching kids to use PowerPoint doesn't give them any understanding of a computer, and (I'm getting very reactionary) giving understanding is what schools are about.
It's like a science teacher giving driving lessons instead of describing brakes, gears and the internal combustion engine.
What's more PowerPoint isn't even useful. I've never seen PowerPoint make a good presentation better, but I have seen dot-fades, blue-gradient fills and twirly animation make many, many bad presentations even worse. [added 6th Jun 2001]
planetcutie said My experience of this is that schools spend loads of cash on computers to impress the board of governors/local press/parents of prospective students. Having done that, they then have to find some reason for justifying the expense. In the case of a college I went to, this entailed cutting the lecture time by a third and telling us to use the 'Learning Resource Centre' (eg: big, new expensive building full of shiny new expensive PCs) to make up the difference.
[added 6th Jun 2001] nico said I agree to a certain extent, but feel, as an ex ICT teacher, that both arguments have their merits. If you are "training" an engineer, you teach them how the engine works. If you are educating a normal member of the public you teach them how to drive the car. A small percentage of each of lower school ICT sets would go on to study the subject at GCSE and perhaps even AS/AS+/A level. The vast majority did it compulsarily, as part of the National Curriculum. They wanted the skills which would be useful to them in later life, and here's the crunch, whatever they chose as their career.
I spent the first year (at 13) teaching them how to use Word, Excel, Access, Powerpoint (to a much lower degree, 'cause I taught them that creating their presentation for the web was more effficient and you could view it from anywhere) and various other bits of modelling software. They also all, yes all, learned HTML. At no stage did I teach them, during this year at least, how the machine works - they don't care. [added 6th Jun 2001]
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# Curiosities of modern life - Sainsburys racking pasteurised eggs in a chiller cabinet.
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#
Labour attacks Thatcher's 'dictatorship' claims - Lady Thatcher wrote in today's Daily Telegraph that another landslide election victory for Labour would lead to an "elective dictatorship" and a decline in open, democratic debate.
She wrote: "I applaud strong government, but not overweening government sustained by cronies, ciphers and a personality cult. I very much fear that, if Mr Blair is returned with a large majority, these already detectable tendencies will grow unchecked."
I admire nothing about Thatcher but her audacity.
nico said On the other hand...
I have bits of video of great friends of mine slagging off the ineffectual Labout party of the late 80s and early 90s, the same people who claim they never ever liked Thatcher or anything she did. In fact they still have many of the things she did and they quite like them thank you.
(fence sitting for the record - it hurts) [added 6th Jun 2001]
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# Boo! Hiss! You can't listen to Test Match Special over the net.
The ECB have live audio commentary. It tells you what's going on, but it's really not a patch on Aggers, Blowers, CMJ and chums.planetcutie said And when it's on the radio, it's still as awkward. I mean, Long Wave. Long Wave! They may as well send the commentary by carrier pigeon for as most radios made in the last 10 years only have MW and FM.
[added 2nd Jun 2001] nico said I spent ages looking for it too. At one point I thought that I had found it when I found the World Service coverage button, but no TMS here either. Are they holding out for more widespread Digital coverage perhaps? The radio is crap anyway - have you tried listening to LW when you're surrounded by Monitors and CPUs? I think I have Tinatus!
[added 6th Jun 2001]
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