If you want to relax and chill out this weekend, have a look at
Danish Soundscapes [via BoingBoing]. I particularly reccomend "Koeer/Gallop" (Galloping cows) or "Naaleskov" (pine forest).
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There's a house in the street opposite which is laden with Christmas lights. It has snowmen, reindeer, Christmas trees, stars and bells, all twinkling and flashing in technicolour. Yes, it's tacky. But when I came past it on the bus this evening, the lights were like a defiant shout against the cold and dark, and they made me smile. Christmas (as the pre-Christian winter celebration), should be all about light and warmth, sticking your tongue out to the dark and saying that you aren't afraid of it - that you aren't afraid that Spring will never come. Even now, with electricity, central heating and satellite weather forecasts, I think we still need that.
My ADSL connection went down this morning. This is a fairly rare occurrence, as my ISP is
Mailbox, a tiny but fabulous company, which has an excellent reliability record and tremendous support. But, they (like other ADSL providers in the UK) are ultimately dependent upon
BT for the service, and BT manages to screw things up with monotonous regularity.
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This is heart-breaking and uplifting at the same time:
Ethnologue, Languages of the World [via BoingBoing] lists thousands of languages, where they are spoken, and how many people still speak it. The diversity is staggering, as are some of the names: anyone here from Mali who speaks Xaasongaxango? But a depressing number of the entries are labelled "extinct" or "nearly extinct". It's really sad that all these local languages are being lost. When you lose a language, you lose a culture and a history, as language colours so much of how a community sees the world and interacts with it. If I could find a "Xaasongaxango for Dummies" book (and I wasn't so utterly rubbish at learning languages), I'd learn it just to try to stop it disappearing entirely.
I've just spent half an hour tinkering with my XML summaries, thinking that I'd broken something when I moved hosts. I'd got round to testing it with
NetNewsWire, but found that I got an error when I tried to subscribe. Minor panic ensued. I couldn't find anything wrong with the file, and after tearing my hair out in a techno-rage, I finally decided to try quitting and re-starting NetNewsWire. My XML file now loaded beautifully. Why, in the name of the God of Geeks, why?
I have no idea whether this
video [via BoingBoing] is real or not, but if it isn't it should be. I really, really want to see it. The "beaming down" effects sound like they would be worth the price on their own. Let's face it, anything would be better than the blandness that is
Enterprise.
One question: why is Fidel Castro chatting to Spock in the poster for the video at the top of the page?
I'm an ardent admirer of Scrapheap Challenge - the show where two teams have to construct some kind of contraption entirely out of scrap to compete in a head-to-head challenge. Sunday's
Grand Final was an absolute classic. One of the fascinating things about the show is that the two teams often come up with two utterly different engineering solutions to the same problem. The other is that their designs often go disastrously and hilariously wrong.
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Ever since I saw the link on
Plasticbag.org, I've been hoplessly addicted to watching
Kitten Cam . I've spoken before about my weakness for
cute fluffy things. This, added to the fact that I really like cats, but can't keep any because I live in a rented flat where pet ownership isn't allowed, makes the Kitten Cam as addictive as crack for me. I keep telling Mr. Butshesagirl that I'm "just going to have a quick look at what the kittens are doing".
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Three volumes of glorious song writing, containing almost every musical style known to man or woman, this album is the fruit of the genius Stephin Merritt. Few other musicians can make you laugh one minute and cry the next. The songs may all be about love (the bitter and the sweet of it), but they are never sentimental:
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We threw all self-respect in the bin today and went to see the new
Harry Potter film. Actually, it wasn't half bad. The effects were pretty good, and the plot cracked along at a reasonable pace. It was quite a lot darker than the first film, and I thought it was probably a little scary for little kids (and adult arachnophobes). There were some great cameos, notably by Kenneth Branagh as Professor Lockhart - a charming, celebrity obsessed dandy - the Lawrence Llewellyn-Bowen of magic. However, the thing is riddled with every clich� in the book ("I'll get you Harry Potter!"), and just seems to lack a little passion and zest. Part of the problem might have been all the CGI - much of the time, the child actors were presumably acting against nothing, which isn't easy, even for experienced actors.
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I've set everything up at my new host,
Blogomania, so all it needs is for the DNS changes to propagate through the system. If you can see this post, it means it's already happened! Everything went incredibly smoothly really. The folks at Blogomania and on the support forums were really helpful, and after a few minor hitches due to my own stupidity, all was well.
I'm moving hosts at the moment, so there may be a bit of downtime over the next 24-48 hours. Do check back again later, I'll unpack the kettle from the packing cases and brew a pot of tea.
If you love (or hate) Marmite, you might be interested in this
load of waffle on the subject. Mr. Butshesagirl was very amused as he is a Class A Marmite addict. He even took took a jar when we went to Florida earlier this year, and got rather agitated when he thought he might have to give it up at customs. As it was, they did let us in the country with it, and he made it his mission to convert a significant proportion of the American populace to the joys of the sticky brown stuff. When we left, we donated the jar to the motel restaurant where it probably resides to this very day - a solace to homesick Brits. When we travel, we like to abide by the old adage, "Leave nothing behind but your Marmite".
I didn't get a chance to post about this earlier, but Monday's "
I'm Alan Partridge" was sheer genius. His blow-by-blow re-enactment (literally!) of "The Spy Who Loved Me", when Tex taped over it with "America's Strongest Man", had me gasping for air. I thought he did the title sequence with the naked women writhing around on a big gun particularly well. It gets better and better.
There was a profile in Saturdayâs Guardian about the Gaelic poet Sorley MacLean (or Somhairle MacGill-Eain, to give him his proper Gaelic name) by Seamus Heaney. Somhairle is one of my favourite poets, though as I only know a few words of Gaelic, I have to read his translations into English. Seamus Heaney has just produced a new translation of his poem, âHallaig", which you can read here. Though the profile is very interesting, and I like Heaneyâs own poetry a lot, I must say that I am rather disappointed by his translation.
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