Miscellaneous Blog

From Caveat Lector, complete caveman grammatical rules! And not one mention of the word “Versimillitude”. Now you too can speak like a Sun reader or football supporter!

Yes, I am aware the comments seem to be broken. It looks like an index is farkled. Any comments you make are being committed to the database, and are being emailed to me. But they’re not currently displaying

Amish Tech Support is the latest blog to be assimilated into the Moveable Type borg.

Have you been receiving emails from a internet directory calling itself “Topsites”, asking for money for renewal of your entry?

I was always suspicious; since I’ve never seen this directory appearing anywhere in my referral logs, and I’m not paying 5 US dollars a month for, well, absolutely bugger all in return.

This site about Bogus “Renewal” Notices confirms my suspicions about this so-called “directory”; it’s a scam, pure and simple. From now on I’ll be treating these just as I treat adverts for penis enlargement or requesting help for crooked Nigerians extracting embezzled money. Die, spammers, die!

From William Gibson‘s blog (Link from Samizdata)

“Umm Qasr is a town similar to Southampton”, UK Defence Minister Geoff Hoon told the House of Commons yesterday. “He’s either never been to Southampton, or he’s never been to Umm Qasr”, said one British soldier, informed of this while on patrol in Umm Qasr. Another added: “There’s no beer, no prostitutes, and people are shooting at us. It’s more like Portsmouth.”

I’ve never been to Portsmouth, but the place does have a bad reputation. I turned down a job interview there about a year ago, (It was only a three month contract), and the bad rep of the place was definitely one of the factors.

This story from Cold Spring Shops about students refusing to use footpaths which didn’t take the shortest route from A to B reminds me of a similar story from my own student days.

Our hall of Residence (Bridges Hall at Reading University) took the form of a quadrangle with doors on the middle of three of the four sides. They were linked by a T-shaped footpath which linked the wings filled with student accomodation with the dining hall. Of course a minority of students insisted in taking a diagonal short cut across the grass.

This annoyed the rather stuffy warden of the hall no end, and after a failed poster campaign, we were presented with the final deterrent; a diagonal wooden fence running across the quadrangle at 90 degrees to the shortcut.

We students were not to be deterred. Two people who shall remain nameless even after 20 years were members of the University Drama Society, and found a doorway as a leftover prop from a recent production. In the middle of one night, this doorway appeared in the middle of the fence, restoring the shortcut.

You’re only young once, after all.

Patrick Crozier considers his plans to privatise the road system, and comes up with a little problem.

I don’t want to wake up on the Thursday morning and find that there’s a bloke from ToadRoad at the end of my drive who says I can’t access the road and he’ll shoot me if I try. That is not a winner in any sort of political system. But given the policies and principles upon which they are based perfectly possible.

Of course, I just take this as a further reason why I consider Anarcho-Capitalism to be a completely silly ideology, sort of Maoism’s evil twin.

From Boing Boing, a proposal to equip New York Taxis with black boxes, as fitted to aircraft and trains.

If I ruled the world, I’d have these things fitted to all motor vehicles. I know there are privacy issues involved here, so they’d only have to divulge their contents to the police if the vehicle is involved in accident in which someone is killed or seriously injured. But if you were doing 50 in a 30mph limit when you knocked over that cyclist….

If the Carnival of the Vanities were a locomotive, trainspotters would call it a “Rat”. Carnival of the Vanities No. 25 is today presented by Jay Caruso of The Daily Rant.