Hotmail users face summer of random email deletion: “Microsoft Hotmail users have been warned that their emails could be randomly deleted this summer, unless they pay UKP 19.99 for extra storage space.”
Category: Uncategorized
Good NYT article on spam. Worth blogging, despite it’s age, for this stat:
A (Federal Trade Commission) survey showed that 63 percent of “remove me” options (on spam mail) either did not work or resulted in even more e-mail.
I’ve tested this, too, but it’s nice to have such an authoritative source to quote.
However, they missed SpamAssassin — totally off their radar, it seems. I wonder why?
Interesting notes on level design in 3D games. FPS means first-person shooter, TPS third-person shooter. Both refer to the position of the “camera” while you’re playing.
In an FPS, realistic room sizes would be pretty much what they are in real life, in a TPS they’re closer to double that of real life. If your average bedroom is 4×5 meters and 2.5 meters high, in a TPS the size would be 8×10 meters and the height 4 meters; the great thing about larger sizes is that the characters are easier to control and the spaces don’t even feel too big!
But what about furniture? If the room is 150-200 percent of realistic size, surely the pieces of furniture need to be large as well? Not exactly. The best approach really is to make the furniture close to real life scale as the characters in the game are as well of real size — making the furniture larger would result in the characters looking like children and that’s definitely something you should avoid. Please note I’m not saying you shouldn’t scale the furniture, but rather than the effect should be kept to a bare minimum; making the pieces 10-20 percent larger than what’s realistic still results in close enough real size tables, chairs, couches etc., but it also ensures the rooms don’t look overly large. Its also important to remember the spacing between the pieces — even if they are about real life size, the space between doesn’t need to be, go with whatever still looks good and makes the movement of the characters easier.
A good rule of thumb for all this is to make things the player gets near closer to the their real life size. Objects further away can be too large, as it often makes the space look of more realistically sized. Another pointer to keep in mind is a thing they teach people studying architecture: one centimeter on the floor is ten on the wall is a meter in the ceiling – as your gaze is usually downward, you tend notice small things on the ground more easily than larger ones in the ceiling.
Yeesh! taint.org is rapidly turning into BlogAssassin, it looks like. Here’s a good SpamAssassin story from Declan McCullagh: Deconstructing Richard Gephardt’s releases, by SpamAssassin. 3 WHOLE LINES OF YELLING DETECTED!
Whoops — another SpamAssassin plug, this time from Peter G. Neumann, moderator of the RISKS Forum. Looks like I’m collecting the entire Internet Secret Cabal at this rate!
I’m back! And I wrote a long, well-thought-out update, and poxy,
broken SuSE 8.0 ate it, without even leaving a dead.letter turd.
Bastard.
But in the meantime, I must note that it’s mind-bogglingly cool to have people
like Salon,
Bruce
Sterling, Simson
Garfinkel and Cory at BoingBoing
plugging SpamAssassin, and to come back to Ireland to find
that dogma, our humble server, got slashdotted as a result!
In passing — it looks like Danny O’Brien now has a blog called Oblomovka. Worth taking a look at. I’m still struggling through several thousand mails, so for now even adding it to my bookmarks is on the to-do list.
OK, we’re back in Pokhara, after a 10-day trek up to the Annapurna Base Camp. Much fun, and much dhal bhat, was had by both of us, despite some initial scariness…
Basically, myself, Catherine and Bhadra our guide, spent a very pleasant first night in Dhampus, the first stop on the 10-day trek. Much rakshi (local millet booze, tastes like watered-down lukewarm vodka) was imbibed, resulting in some seriously ludicrous attempts at Nepali dancing! Thankfully there’s no photos.
Next day, we hiked up to the next town, Pothana, over some very leechy trails (top leech tip: cover your boots in salt, they can’t stand it). All well and good, until halfway through the town a Dutch guy ran out of a teahouse and stopped us, telling us that an English couple had been attacked in the forest just outside the town — of course, we immediately went to meet them. The guy had a bloodsoaked bandage tied around his head, and told us how himself and his girlfriend had been walking through the forest towards the next town, Landruk, when a Nepali guy approached. The English guy said namaste (hello), and was rewarded with a wallop over the head with a 6-foot stick! They then stole his girlfriend’s rucksack and attempted to take his, but (somehow) he managed to fight them off with half of the stick, then escaped.
With some help (and interpreting) from Bhadra, we found out from the locals that there was a gang of robbers operating in this forest, and a week previous to this, 2 Swedish girls had to be airlifted out because they were too badly beaten to walk! Serious problem — and one nobody had bothered to inform any of us tourists about!
After this, the 8 tourists, and their respective guides and porters, all trooped out of the village — Bhadra knew a quick route back to the road over a ridge, which saved us a half-day’s walk back via Dhampus. Along the way, the English couple were stopped by what seemed to be the entire village, who were having a very heated conversation. The upshot was that they wanted the English couple to wait around for a half day until some of the men returned from the forest, hopefully with captive robbers in tow, and then the whole lot would get the bus back to Pokhara (the nearest city) and give out stink to ACAP, the Annapurna Conservation Area Project, who run the area. The English couple agreed, and we went on.
Eventually, we sidetracked around to another way up the trek. Myself and Catherine were the only 2 tourists to head up — everyone else decided to head back to Pokhara, but we were happy enough with Bhadra’s assurances that this route was very well-travelled, with no forests and no known robberies (by day at least).
It turned out for the best in the end — we had an amazing trek, got loads of pictures, saw the entire Annapurna range from the Annapurna Sanctuary, no clouds, and no further robberies. And lots of rakshi!
In the end, we heard through the grapevine that the robbers had been attacked by the local Maoists (the police don’t patrol the mountains any more). One 17-year old robber was shot, and 2 more had their arms and legs broken. Rough justice in the traditional paramilitary law enforcement style, I guess. (By the way, the Maoists enjoy about 80% support in the mountains, from what we’ve heard).
The remaining robbers hightailed it to Pokhara as well (they were not locals), and were eventually arrested. Hopefully the Nepalese law enforcement system can sort it out – corruption is apparently rife, but around here they take these kind of tourist-targeting attacks very seriously — for many people, it’s their livelihood, and it’s already suffered a lot this year due to the political situation.
So, a happy ending for us, and a warning for anyone else out there thinking of doing the Annapurna Sanctuary trek — stick to the known-safe trails, and bring a Nepali guide/porter for extra safety.
Photos will be forthcoming once we get back to Ireland, earn some money, get them developed and scan them in. This could take several months though… ;)
Latest update: (This one’s a bit lazy. I’m just editing Catherine’s mail to travelogue, adding a few bits.)
We flew from New Zealand to Bangkok on the 18th of April. From Bangkok we headed for Laos via Nong Khai in North-eastern Thailand, on a comfy first-class train carriage again (spoiling ourselves!).
We then made for the Northern Thai border, passing through Vientiane, Vang Vieng and Luang Prabang.
Vang Vieng is a tiny little town which has evolved into a tourist chill-out zone for falang (foreign) and south-east Asian tourists alike — we spent a nice afternoon with a group of holidaying Thai Buddhist monks, jumping into a deep river pool on a rope swing! (Camera was out of film for that one, sorry folks). Great fun spot though.
Having said that, Luang Prabang was definitely the highlight, I would highly recommend anybody to go there. The city is crammed with Buddhist temples from the 14th to the 21st century counterbalanced with crumbling old french colonial architecture. All of this is set by the Mekong river, filled with river traffic of all descriptions from water buffalo to large chinese sampans.
After this we headed for Thailand, up the Mekong river, on a speedboat. These are a reasonably insane way to travel, hitting speeds of 80km/h, and shooting the occasional rapids! We’d heard it was possible to have to wait a day or two before getting on a boat, so we paid extra to pre-book, just to make sure it was OK.
Things started badly, with an hour and a half delay as our pre-booked tickets didn’t really seem to make a difference; eventually we persuaded our boat to get underway, with 7 passengers instead of the promised max 6.
Then we hit Pakbeng, the halfway point, had a spot of lunch, and waited another bonus 1/2 hour, before our driver informed us that we’d be changing boats after the 2 Lao passengers left, leaving 4 falang in the boat. (The passenger details may seem meaningless, but I think he’d never have embarked on the next bit if a local was around to give him a bollocking).
It turned out our new driver had a nice sideline in trading pla beuk (giant Mekong catfish) and live monitor lizards up and down the river! After about 6 stops for chats, buying and selling, our group of 4 was joined by his 2 mates, 2 sacks of live lizards, 2 2-meter-long live pla beuk and another large, live mystery fish, all thrashing about occasionally. I’d wanted to see a pla beuk, but not this much!
Eventually we lost the rag a bit, and I think this got us to Huay Xai before the border post shut for the day. Not a good experience. For reference, our tickets were booked through a ticket agent 2 doors up from the LPB Lao Aviation office (one of our co-passengers booked through the Lao Aviation office itself), and our agent had assured us that these things — or the ones we could foresee at least! — were not going to happen. Suggestion: don’t bother pre-booking, or if you do, make sure you get these assurances in writing!
Anyway, after that we made it into Thailand, pretty sure we were going to be stuck in Chiang Khong (we’d missed the last bus to Chiang Rai or Chiang Mai, our intended destination). But the good news was that an agent of Namkhong Travel was touting on the far side of the Thai border post, and got 3 of us onto a very comfortable, very reasonably-priced private air-con minibus bound for Chiang Mai — so see, touts are good! Namkhong Travel certainly get my thumbs-up anyway.
So we are currently in Chang Mai which we missed on our last visit, and ahead of schedule no less. We are not sure exactly what to do next, we have a few days to mess about with, as we are leaving SE Asia on the 11th of May to fly to Nepal.
Writing from an internet cafe in Luang Prabang, Laos. It’s sweltering, of course, so we’ve spent a day hiding in the shadows of wats (temples) and drinking pineapple and lemon shakes.
Despite warnings of bbq’ed rat and grilled frogs, we’ve found the food to be excellent — laap and sticky rice being the top favourite at the moment. Back to Thailand in a few days for more top tucker!
Well, we’re back in Auckland after zooming around the South Island. Got to meet up with June and Vin in Christchurch for a tasty meal and much yakking about NZ; take a look at that site for pictures and imagine me and Kate instead of June and Vin, and you’ll have a good idea of what we’ve been up to… I haven’t even developed the photos we’ve taken yet!
We did meet up with a mate from Dublin — Yvonne; we didn’t even know she was over here, but there you go. Basically, we wandered into a Dept of Conservation (they manage the National Parks) office in Queenstown, intending to get some ideas of good walks to do, and who was working behind the counter but the girl herself. Small world! So we all did a 20km hike. WTF is New Zealand doing to us?!
Anyway, next update will probably be from Thailand — we still haven’t firmed up an itinerary yet. Let’s hope the political situation in Nepal settles down before we get there…
We’re currently zooming through New Zealand in the cheapest way possible,
while still managing to see some stuff - very hectic and lots of early
Help! We’re staying in a tent in a malarial swamp for 56 bucks a night! Can you spell rip-off?
But I think that’s Byron Bay for you. We’ll probably stay here tonight for the night that’s in it — there’s lots of bars here (happy Paddy’s Day), then rock up to Lennox Head, which sounds like a thoroughly nicer (and cheaper) beach chill-out kind of place. With any luck Lennox Head has less fairy-tat-selling hippie shops, flaming jugglers, etc. as well.
Fraser Island was cool, dingoes spotted, still no snakes or sharks though! BTW I’m not impressed by the “that’ll kill ya, mate” stories — IMO, picnics in th’ oul’ sod are more beset by stinging insects, plants, and rampaging animals than this place is (Queensland stingers and crocs excepted). Sure, there are dangerous animals out there, but they’re extremely rare, whereas the minor irritations of aggressive wasps and nettles are far too common at home. Plus the weather’s nicer here ;)
In other news I’ve just plumped for a copy of Lord of the Rings, so my reading will be sorted for the next few months I think!
La Feile Padraig shona diobh, will update again soonish…
Touching land once again! Much swaying is taking place as the sea legs wear off.
The Whitsundays are lovely — a great archipelago of 74 islands off the Queensland coast, with beautiful blue seas and white coral and sand beaches. Good fish-watching too: pairs of cuttlefish, some large coral and potato cod, and — best of all — a huge (1.5m) Maori wrasse called “Elvis”. Catherine got some diving in, but I was surface-bound by a nasty cold so had to stick with snorkeling. Still, I think I saw more fish, ha.
Now off to Hervey Bay and Fraser Island (via the night bus. argh). Another update at that point!
Well, just back from diving on the Great Barrier Reef; lots of good fish, and no attacks from groupers called “Grumpy”, thankfully.
Disappointingly, there were no sharks either. But I spotted lots of other good wildlife; a good few green turtles munching coral, lionfish, and some pretty large coral cod.
Great diving! Hopefully the pictures will come out OK once they’re developed — if so, I’ll scan ’em. First though, there’s sailing in the Whitsundays…
Hi travelogue readers! Quick links for photos (probably will be very infrequently updated…)
Just back from tree-hugging around Victoria’s national parks; now in Sydney, bodysurfing! Great Barrier Reef next.
(Before I sign off, I have to note NTK calling me an “official NTK hero”. How nice is that? Cheers Danny ‘n’ Dave…)
One last blog. This has to be noted as a worthy aim. Ben writes:
I think it would be mildly amusing if a lot of people were to visit this page and enter star ratings and customer reviews that do a little bit to repay Mr. Myers in kind for what he has so unstintingly given to so, so many people over the years.
Read on for more…
End Of Bloggage, for now — updates will be infrequent for the next few months. I’m off! travelling back to Ireland via
- Oz
- NZ
- Bangkok, then overland to Laos and Vietnam (hopefully)
- Nepal, then overland to India
- and finally back to Ireland via Frankfurt
there will be intermittent bloggage ’til then. See y’all soon…
Aaagh! I’m going to be diving in the Great Barrier Reef pretty soon. Gotta avoid this bugger — having my head chewed by a giant 100-kilo grouper called “Grumpy” is not my idea of fun, let alone when it’s 20 metres down.
(The diver said:) It came from underneath me. I never saw it coming. Then it was just ‘bang’ and I was inside the fish’s mouth. It ripped off my regulator but my mask was still on and then, just as suddenly, it let me go. …
(The dive instructor said:) Giant grouper have very powerful jaws. Grumpy could have crushed Andre’s head like a soft peach and snapped his neck like a twig. That’s why I think Grumpy was only being playful.
The Turkish Star Wars. I reckon this has got to be seen.
What can anyone say? “The Turkish Star Wars” makes film criticism moot. From the early days of the flickering shadow scenes in the Lumiere Brothers’s shorts through today’s digital cinema, there has never been a film quite like this. Help us, Obi Wan Kenobi…help us!
Gary Stock @ http://www.unblinking.com/ seems to be running
Googlewhacking,
originally heard of via a post on
0xdeadbeef:
I’ve gotten addicted to looking for combinations of common words which have the lowest incidence of appearance on web pages, as indexed by google. So far, I have yet to find a set of two common english words which do not appear together on any web pages…
Gary has taken this, and run (far and wide) with it. So here’s my attempt: bearnaise destructor: that scores 10600 x 242000 = 2,565,200,000 points.
BTW, I meant to reply to the 0xdeadbeef posting when it came
through. This is really a resurfacing of
Net Bullseye, created back in 1998 by Harold Chaput:
You and your friends gather around a web browser and go to AltaVista. Now do a search on two words or phrases. …. The first person who enters a search request that comes back with only one found document is the winner.
It’s a lot easier than Googlewhacking, since there was less web out there, back then ;) and the phrase addition makes it easy-peasy. Some of our hits:
-
+spindoctor +fertilizer (the hit was some kind of Northern Ireland “Peace Book”, appropriately enough)
-
+freebase +”pogo stick”
-
+sasquatch +”vacuum cleaner hose”
-
+inflated +”distributed objects everywhere”
-
+”ben walsh” +bum
-
+”embarrassing anal leakage” +walsh
-
+dinner +”baby’s kidneys”
Note the predominance of attempts to slag each other off. I’m particularly proud of my “embarrassing anal leakage” (so to speak), aimed right at Ben Walsh. Bullseye!
Chris Blizzard has a blog. Cool.
Even better, it looks like sub-pixel font rendering will be supported in official Moz builds soon-ish, thanks to some blizzard and keithp hackage.
This is good — it was seriously looking like it was going to be a ‘download third-party RPMs‘ deal for quite a while, based on the Bugzilla correspondence.
Guardian review of a new book about 18th century scottish sex clubs, via forteana:
The Beggar’s Benison, the club to which Stevenson devotes his attention, was dedicated to “the convivial celebration of male sexuality”.
BBC’s “The Experiment”, a recreation of the Stanford prison experiment, has been halted:
it is clear the participants – particularly those selected to be ‘prisoners’ rather than ‘guards’ – were placed under severe levels of stress. Friends of some who took part in the programme .. said that it was more gruelling than they had been expecting.
So, what were they expecting, exactly?
The page cannot be fucking displayed (via FoRK):
The page you are looking for is currently unavailable. The Web site might be experiencing technical difficulties, or you may need to adjust your browser settings, but most likely you’re a complete dipshit. You tell your friends you’ve been online since ’94, but Mr. “I’ve been on the net for 5 years” seems to call me a lot at 2 am in the morning and asking what settings you need to put in your outlook express to get your @home e mail, or how do I send something in icq? My favorite moments from you and your friends are when you send me the “I love you virus” or the e mails I get with the jokes that are so not fucking funny I wanna snap your neck like a twig. No I’m not your personal Microsoft hotline, and when I go to your place for dinner, please dont ask me if I could “Just take a look at something” you’ve been having trouble with. The next time you tell me you pride yourself on how much you’ve learned about computers over the years, just know that I’m thinking “Bullshit” over and over in my mind ya prick.
Megalithic Sound and Landscape: A research project to investigate whether ancient monuments were built with acoustic effects in mind, and how they related to the landscape around them. (via nutlog)
I’ve heard of similar theories before, and IMO there’s a lot of weight there. Every megalithic monument (well, enclosed ones like caves and barrow graves) in my experience have had great acoustic qualities, and it seems to make sense that in an oral society this would be very important. It’s one of my minor obsessions ;)
BTW, ObIrishness: Newgrange is significantly older than Stonehenge: Newgrange was built around 3200BC, Stonehenge about 1000 years later. na na na nah.
However, Stonehenge is the subject of a rocking Tap tune. More Tap:
Nigel: We saw the film that everyone else saw and we were quite upset because it was not a depiction that was accurate. You see someone like Derek not getting out of the pod. Most nights…
Derek: Every night!
Nigel: Well, 80 percent of the time…
Derek: But you don’t see that.
Nigel: What they choose to show…
David: They chose to show a time when we couldn’t get Derek out of the bloody pod.
Nigel: The night there was some mechanical misfunction and we become the brunt of a joke, and not the smooth act that we really were.
David: Skew, eschew…
Nigel: Basically, it’s all twisted. “Let me go into my little editing room and twist.”
Derek: What do they call that, McCarthyism?
David: It’s called McCarthyism.
Nigel: Charlie McCarthyism.
Derek: I call it DiBergiism.
Nigel: This Is Marty DiBergi should have been the name of the movie.
Slashdot gets all hot and bothered about a ‘free energy’ hoax. The story in question is titled Irish Inventor Says Cracks World’s Energy Needs, which, despite having some awful grammar, contains a clue right there: Irish.
The whole point of the story is the Irishness — if it was a USAnian inventor, there would be no story, because there’d be no blarney crap like this:
If the Jasker men really are onto something, it could be the most important Irish invention since Guinness.
The days of touch-tone hell are numbered: AT&T’s new natural-language-recognition system will fix everything. Aye right, as they say.
Hmm. I think I’ve just fixed a bug in WebMake which was screwing up dependencies and change detection on this blog. Let’s see…
The Onion seems to be back on form:
Confused Marines Capture Al-Jazeera Leader
DOHA, QATAR– In a daring effort to dismantle the vast Arab network, a company of confused Marines raided Al-Jazeera headquarters Monday and captured leader Mohammed Abouzeid. “Al-Jazeera has ties to virtually every country in the Arab world, and this guy was the key to their whole operation,” Lt. Warren Withers said. “Nothing went through the Al-Jazeera communications array without his go-ahead.”
Poorly lit stairways, rickety bed frames, dirty sex aids and repetitive movement injuries are among the chief dangers brothel workers face in New South Wales.
Happy 2nd birthday to Boing Boing! Mark and Cory get big linky points, every day. Dunno how they do it.
To help celebrate, I’ve given ’em top billing on my daily reading list above (new feature!)
Hmm. WTF is this “WAR ON THE WORLD – I FORESAW IT” crap? The ghost in the WebMake machine? Sounds like a Pravda headline to me.
Ah well, since I’m about to go off travelling for 4 months it’s unlikely I’m going to get to fix it ;)
Adobe’s AlterCast is attracting some attention from the CMS community:
AlterCast is imaging server software designed to integrate with existing content management systems and help maintain the ocean of graphics used in e-commerce sites like Amazon.com and Outpost.com. It automates the creation and repurposing of pictures and eliminates the repetitive nature of tweaking and reformatting them for various needs.
AlterCast is installed on a server (Sun Solaris or Windows NT/2000) and scripts are created by developers so that key layers of Photoshop documents can be edited dynamically from within the user interface. Scripts can be developed to handle almost any need. A single image can be repurposed for high resolution print, Web optimization, and even wireless devices. Creative scripting can weasel its way in too. A script could be created so that after someone has visited a product three times on a site, a special starburst appears over the image that says, “Now 52 percent less!” just to close the deal.
It would, of course, be a piece of piss to write a WebMake plugin which uses the Gimp’s perl bindings to do this.
Also worth noting is that Roxen supports this out-of-the-box with the <gtext> and <gh> tags.
All Adobe have added is some commercial polish (always welcome though) and bindings to the PSD doc format. Presumably they’ll probably add some built-in support in Photoshop, too.
From the IrelandOffline forum, (Irish premier Bertie) Ahern in bid to beat telecoms threat to economy:
Mr Ahern said Ireland is lagging
saik said:
bertie is in with the online gaming massive
LOL. The real Bertie quotes are here.
It’s good to see the government finally doing something when Ireland came in 27th out of 30 OECD countries in a recent survey on access to broadband, but I’ll believe this when I see it happening. A leaked document is not a policy statement, especially when there’s an election coming up.
Just got a mail about SpamAssassin from Aaron Swartz, noted RDF guy. He runs a very interesting blog called swhack, which I’ve seen cited before, but never visited for some reason. Now I have, and it’s on the bookmarks list ;)
Anyway, the main reason for blogging this is this blog item about a story called Darwin Goes Digital, which is quite a nice intro to genetic programming:
… genetic programming (GP) , developed over the last decade by John Koza and his colleagues at Stanford University. Instead of starting with a set of guesses for the solution to a problem, GP begins with guesses for the actual method that best solves the problem. These are usually stated as random groups of instructions written in Lisp, a programming language able to cope with the cross-breeding and mutation demanded by the GP approach.
Interestingly though, the first time I heard about GP-style techniques was in Tierra, Tom Ray’s Darwinian OS:
The Tierra C source code creates a virtual computer and its Darwinian operating system, whose architecture has been designed in such a way that the executable machine codes are evolvable. This means that the machine code can be mutated (by flipping bits at random) or recombined (by swapping segments of code between algorithms), and the resulting code remains functional enough of the time for natural (or presumably artificial) selection to be able to improve the code over time.
Along with the C source code which generates the virtual computer, we provide several programs written in the assembler code of the virtual computer. Some of these were written by a human and do nothing more than make copies of themselves in the RAM of the virtual computer. The others evolved from the first, and are included to illustrate the power of natural selection.
This system results in the production of synthetic organisms based on a computer metaphor of organic life in which CPU time is the “energy” resource and memory is the “material” resource. Memory is organized into informational patterns that exploit CPU time for self-replication. Mutation generates new forms, and evolution proceeds by natural selection as different genotypes compete for CPU time and memory space.
Diverse ecological communities have emerged. These digital communities have been used to experimentally examine ecological and evolutionary processes: e.g., competitive exclusion and coexistence, host/parasite density dependent population regulation, the effect of parasites in enhancing community diversity, evolutionary arms race, punctuated equilibrium, and the role of chance and historical factors in evolution. This evolution in a bottle may prove to be a valuable tool for the study of evolution and ecology.
It was very exciting to see artificial evolution techniques actually work in this way, as if operating on a real genotype (have to be careful w.r.t. terminology here, Catherine’s a zoologist and gets very peeved about this stuff). Unfortunately, Tierra development seems to have stalled since then.
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: The Satanic visitation that began with a bloody killing on July 6 ended prematurely for Manuela Ruda and her husband, Daniel Ruda:
She says they went to cemeteries at night, climbed around ruins, talked about this and that, and drank blood — their own blood, or that from so-called givers. Would-be drinkers of blood can find willing givers on the Internet, Mrs. Ruda says, explaining: “You just have to be careful not to hit an artery.” Givers are happy to offer their arms or legs for a bite, she says.
According to her story, it was around this time that she had her incisors removed and replaced with longer, sharper implanted teeth identical to those seen in vampire films. She dedicated her soul to the service of Satan and swore to accept his “every word” as law. Mrs. Ruda says she tried therapy but stopped, out of fear that she would be locked up if she revealed what she was really like.
INT. IAN HOLM’S COMICALLY SMALL HOME
IAN MCKELLEN enters, hitting his head on objects.
IAN HOLM
There you are, you sage old wizard!
They smoke from IAN MCKELLEN’S PIPE.
IAN HOLM (CONT’D)
Ah, Ian, you truly have the finest
weed in Middle Earth.
IAN MCKELLEN
Heh. Both of our names are Ian.
IAN HOLM
Holy shit! You’re right!
IAN HOLM falls backwards, laughing hysterically.
A ‘Where are they now?’ of UK ’80’s musicians from the Grauniad. What a mess!
Adam Ant
Remind me: In the early 80s, Adam Ant (real name Stuart Goddard) was a self-styled dandy highwayman. He wore a tricorn hat, brandished a pair of flintlocks, and painted a horizontal white stripe across his nose long before sporting professionals made the same fashion statement. Ant’s music borrowed the post-punk fetish for Burundi drumming that made Malcolm McLaren’s Bow Wow Wow briefly popular, and was wedded to lyrics that proselytised in favour of dressing up and bigging it up in an unprecedentedly large manner. …
Where is he now? The secure Alice ward of the Royal Free Hospital in north London, where he is detained for his own protection and the safety of others under section two of the 1983 Mental Health Act.
New layout. Hope you like it! There seems to be a bit of rogue metadata on the loose that’s changing the title to something bizarre, though ;)
Affogato! This
month’s pics from the Watchcam are now up, featuring:
-
an exceptionally bullshitty pic from the Ned Kelly Turdsperience,
-
and the weathercock. Your guess is as good as mine.
