flashboy dot org

I appreciated the effort and piety of the true followers of His Noodliness found in the Boing Boing post yesterday, in which blessed bumper stickers were created in honour of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. However, I didn’t really like the fonts they’d used, which (I believed) failed to truly reflect His Meaty Glory. Far better was the original purity of vision demonstrated by the first idolatrous prophet of Pastafarian Bumper Stickerdom.

So I made my own.

Embiggen.

I hereby release this to the Pastafarian community, on a share-alike, open-sauce basis.

So the most popular holiday reading of MPs is, allegedly, The Da Vinci Code. This is worrying enough in itself – is there nowhere that Dan Brown’s mangled prose cannot infect? – but a careful examination of the raw data (nasty PDF warning) reveals some additional oddities:

While the Tory MP who excitedly wrote “HARRY POTTER!!!” cheerfully suggests that at least not all politicians have lost their childlike enthusiasm, it also hints that the downside might be a mental age of 12 (it doesn’t record if they also wrote “OMG I hope Harry + Mione get together in this 1 LOL!!”, but you wouldn’t be surprised.) However, it’s noweher near as puzzling as the Tory who wrote “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, J.K.Rowling (Pope’s recommendation)“. Um… what?

Under the “possible cry for help” category, the Tory benches offer us Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, John Sergeant’s Maggie: Her Fatal Legacy and Vodka by Boris Starling, while both one Tory and one Lib Dem will be browsing Rosebery: Statesman in Turmoil. Labour, by contrast, seem very well adjusted, although one respondent did offer a plaintive “What holiday?!“.

And there’s tantalising insights into possible policy positions they might be considering. While it’s actually reassuring that a Labour MP might have The Collapse of Globalism by John Ralston Saul, while a Tory has Martin Wolf’s Why Globalization Works, others are slightly more worrying. What’s going on in the mind of the MP reading 1776 – America and Britain at War? Or The First Crusade? Or the peers reading Of Human Bondage and Bloody Foreigners? Does the Labour MP reading John Kampfner’s Blair’s Wars think it’s a how-to manual?

Finally, two notable mentions. The least anonymous response has to be the Lib Dem MP reading “Various astronomy titles on planetary evolution” – hi, Lembit – while whoever the Labour MP reading John Rentoul’s Tony Blair, Prime Minister is, they win the award for most nauseatingly sucky-up response ever.

And not one of them reading The Prince…

You couldn’t make it up:

Oh. Hang on. Yeah, you could.

The concept of a “Public Library” takes a bafflingly literal new direction.

“Hello. I’m looking for Fly Fishing by JR Hartley.”

“Yes please. Also, about that gay I borrowed last week? Someone had scribbled all over it and ripped the end out. I was very disappointed.”

Chris links to a writing guide by editorial consultant Pat Holt, describing the “Ten Mistakes Writers Don’t See (But Can Easily Fix When They Do)”. Now, the idea behind the piece is perfectly fine – identifying the most common blind spots that all writers have towards their own work – and it generally does a better job than most of the trite, second-hand and dogmatic collections of writing tips out there. And I can’t argue with Chris’s co-opting it as a j’accuse against Dan Brown; sweet lord above, he’s certainly guilty of all these sins, and many, many more.

But even given that, every few lines there’s something so screamingly, dunderheadedly small-minded, simplistic or just plain daft that it makes you want to go uuurghagahgnnngngngnrrr and smash yourself about the head with implements. As such, I suspect a diatribe may be in order. I’m afraid this is going to get rather long, for which my apologies:
(more…)

…just saying.

So Audioscrobbler just had a super-sexy (ish) new makeover, and moved on from gentle nuzzling with that LastFM thing to full-blown frottage in the back of their Dad’s Ford Fiesta. It looks vastly prettier now, although I’m unsure how much has actually changed about the mechanics of the site; I’ll have to have a fiddle around. The idea of automatically-generated personal radio stations is pretty neat, I must admit, but then again… don’t you want that element of surprise from your radio? The “Peel Factor”, let us call it. If I’m just served up a diet of The Postal Service, Modest Mouse and early My Life Story B-sides, I’ll not be too impressed. I demand exposure to Norwegian Fantasy Metal, dammit! But hey, we shall see. The Discovery Mode option, while only available to subscribers, seems at least a step in the right direction.

At the very least, once RSS comes online, it opens up the possibility that people might find themselves actually podcasting by accident, which surely opens up whole new areas of bland middle-class farce for a futuristic RoboAyckbourn.

And hey! Tags! Nice! But… yeah, useless. I can’t even remember to put my CDs back in the right case – you think I can tag my songs? Ha! But very generous of yous, anyway. And my sidebar music pluginwidgetdoodah’s working properly again. (No it’s not.)

Anyway, the point I was getting towards is, that I was going to write a full blown comment on the new interface (it’s moderately buggered for those of us whose compulsive bookmarks-opening leaves us with limited screen real estate; the various elements tend to overlap in a deeply cack-assed way), and I’m sure it would all have been terribly insightful and stuff… but then I caught sight of my “most listened-to artists” list, and was caught somewhat static by a musical doosra. Essentially:

…Holy living Christ, I am so gay.

A selection of results I would like to see for “which X are you?” type quizzes that – sadly – do not yet exist:

Inspired, of course, by watching that last 50 pictures on LiveJournal thing scroll merrily past my eyes.