Random: June 2008 Archives

Despite this morning's drama, I don't expect to blog for a week. 

But apparently it's the end of the world. The fact that they've even taken the time to deny the possibility that the mini black holes they're creating could expand and swallow us all just alarms me all the more. I know, doom-mongering greens. But seriously, do you feel better after reading that article? (musical relief available here)

Last year I learnt what this interesting term means from an unexpected source. It's the Victorian profession of gathering up "dog chocolate" for use in tanneries, because, unbelievably enough, the stuff was believed to be "pure". There's even a poem.

Some bright spark had a vision of what Google News could look like on a good day (via BB). 

So whenever a female politician gets her appearance condemned, cheered, or even sleazed over, we feminists get cross. Why is it always the women who are judged so superficially, or treated as sex objects? We men also get cross when we're not treated the same.

So the Guardian, in the spirit of equality, pored over "Dave" Cameron's hair today. Right on, brothers. Curiously, though, they claim that parting to the left makes someone look more leftwing. Che Guevara, when you pried his beret off him, went a bit to the right. And Green men are disproportionately bald, myself included: what does that say? Neither left nor right, just forward, perhaps? Who knows.

But on Dave, they missed the crucial hairstyle, i.e. the posh-boy semi-mullet as adopted at the Bullingdon (he's #2 in the pic above, click for a larger one). To me that says "I know I'm going to get an excellent Establishment job - possibly The Big One".

Note that Boris is entirely unchanged. Not just the same hair, the same everything. How has he managed to avoid either aging or growing up?

Discussions online tend to be appalling, filled with racism, homophobia and even spelling mistakes. Youtube, for all its joys, has little else below the videos. Slashdot, for the more geeky, is not as bad as its reputation, but still more or less invented flame wars.