religious observations from the onion and untitled document.
1/31/2002 10:53:39 PM #

 

today's prize for fruitless endeavor goes to nottingham city council for trying to revive dead punctuation.
1/31/2002 05:23:28 PM #

 

it's the end of the world as we know it. stephen king stops writing. yeah right.
1/30/2002 10:47:46 PM #

 

green, how i want you green
green wind. green branches.
the ship out on the sea
and the horse on the mountain.
with the shade around her waist
she dreams on her balcony,
green flesh, her hair green,
with eyes of cold silver.
green, how i want you green.
under the gypsy moon,
all things are watching her
and she cannot see them.

green, how i want you green.
big hoarfrost stars
come with the fish of shadow
that opens the road of dawn.
the fig tree rubs its wind
with the sandpaper of its branches,
and the forest, cunning cat,
bristles its brittle fibers.
but who will come? and from where?
she is still on her balcony
green flesh, her hair green,
dreaming in the bitter sea.

--my friend, i want to trade
my horse for her house,
my saddle for her mirror,
my knife for her blanket.
my friend, i come bleeding
from the gates of cabra.
--if it were possible, my boy,
i'd help you fix that trade.
but now i am not i,
nor is my house now my house.
--my friend, i want to die
decently in my bed.
of iron, if that's possible,
with blankets of fine chambray.
don't you see the wound i have
from my chest up to my throat?
--your white shirt has grown
thirsty dark brown roses.
your blood oozes and flees
around the corners of your sash.
but now i am not i,
nor is my house now my house.
--let me climb up, at least,
up to the high balconies;
let me climb up! let me,
up to the green balconies.
railings of the moon
through which the water rumbles.
now the two friends climb up,
up to the high balconies.
leaving a trail of blood.
leaving a trail of teardrops.
tin bell vines
were trembling on the roofs.
a thousand crystal tambourines
struck at the dawn light.

green, how i want you green,
green wind, green branches.
the two friends climbed up.
the stiff wind left
in their mouths, a strange taste
of bile, of mint, and of basil
my friend, where is she--tell me--
where is your bitter girl?
how many times she waited for you!
how many times would she wait for you,
cool face, black hair,
on this green balcony!

over the mouth of the cistern
the gypsy girl was swinging,
green flesh, her hair green,
with eyes of cold silver.
an icicle of moon
holds her up above the water.
the night became intimate
like a little plaza.
drunken "guardias civiles"
were pounding on the door.
green, how i want you green.
green wind. green branches.
the ship out on the sea.
and the horse on the mountain.
[federico garcia lorca, translated by william logan]
1/30/2002 10:26:44 PM #

 

the song that is stuck in my head is so strong. i'd like this to be because i am cool and know all the lyrics to labi siffre's stuff, but in truth it's from a car advert. spellcheck check for today. eudora doesn't recognise 'javascript' and wants to substitute 'paragraph'. hmm. same number of syllables, i guess. and today's religious news. sympathy for the devil in tampa bay. an australian bishop says the pope wasn't banning catholic divorce lawyers. via here. in other shock news, the pope says he's not a catholic, scientists discover that bears do not in fact shit in the woods.
1/29/2002 11:11:47 PM #

 

what if someone else had written lord of the rings? via here.
1/29/2002 07:37:12 PM #

 

so if i disagree with the british museum so wildly, why do i feel such an affection for him and him. and want to go and see this. arguably i want to see these before they're given back. but it's not that. i visit them. i talk to them. they have context in my life. recurring tropes.
1/28/2002 08:05:08 PM #

 

germany is giving back an egyptian sarcophagus. this is good news. if only the british museum would start doing the same. my basic objection to museums is that by putting bits of stuff into a glass case, you decontextualise everything. what does a bead or a coin mean on its own. the egyptian museum in cairo is it must be admitted an extreme example of this. lumps of rock and bits of metal and dead bodies dragged in from all over egypt and piled into a building so utterly inappropriate for them. the british museum though is worse. lumps of rock and bits of metal and dead bodies dragged in from the whole world. entire cultures reduced to one room. or half a room. pointless pointless pointless. nothing but a mausoleum for the empire. and ninety per cent of what they've got isn't even on display.
1/28/2002 01:39:17 PM #

 

spend hours here. game updated, depressing quiz, good advice, questions and randomness.
1/27/2002 11:01:57 PM #

 

<!-- huge whinging post deleted --> i need to learn something new. something entirely new. i'm going to be excited about the possibility while i decide what to do with it. i'm thinking maybe new language, possibly sign language, i'm interested in how that works. i still have to go back and do the advanced maths that i never did at school, though that is going to require relearning the not-quite-so advanced maths that i've now forgotten. i want to know about adult literacy too, but i suspect that there is much politics tied up with that and i'm not sure i really want that part of it.

'mercy!' cried gandalf. 'if the giving of information is to be the cure of your inquisitiveness, i shall spend all the rest of my days in answering you. what more do you want to know?'
'the names of all the stars, and of all living things and the whole history of middle-earth and over-heaven and of the sundering seas,' laughed pippin. 'of course! what less?'
[jrr tolkien, the lord of the rings iii:11]
1/27/2002 01:42:23 PM #

 

interesting. is this a typo?

obesity is a direct consequence of how they deny us control over our time and make food and drink consumer goods like any other gods that are sold aggressively, such as shoes or cars.
1/27/2002 12:35:30 PM #

 

they fuck you up, your mum and dad
they may not mean to, but they do.
they fill you with the faults they had
and add some extra, just for you.

but they were fucked up in their turn
by fools in old-style hats and coats,
who half the time were soppy-stern
and half at one another's throats

man hands on misery to man.
it deepens like a coastal shelf.
get out as early as you can,
and don't have any kids yourself.
[philip larkin]
1/26/2002 02:28:57 PM #

 

the song that is stuck in my head today is every morning by sugar ray. this is entirely the fault of mizdos.
1/26/2002 02:17:09 PM #

 

my friday five
1. What cologne or perfume do you wear? coco by chanel
2. What cologne or perfume do you like best on the opposite sex? eternity by calvin klein does things to me.
3. What one smell can you not stomach? stale cigarette smoke especially on my hair. boring exsmoker answer.
4. What smell do you like that others might consider weird? farmyard smells, horse and cow poo. i'm a farmer's granddaughter, it's in my blood.
5. How do you plan to spend your weekend? watch the cats and dogs dvd that finally arrived this week. chill. blog.

1/25/2002 01:14:25 PM #

 

inquisitive chatter and cataloguing of things one's spotted isn't art.
[iris murdoch, the black prince]
1/24/2002 07:27:08 PM #

 

please tell me this guy isn't for real.

umberto eco shows off how well-read he is. or at least i can't seem to find another point or conclusion to this piece.

this is better, a perceptive article on reasons to like tolkien.
1/24/2002 12:38:28 PM #

 

eric gets emotional. it's true television does rot your brain. via here.
1/23/2002 11:22:24 PM #

 

the song that is stuck in my head today is avenging angels by space. iris was superb. it's hard to know quite what to say about it. we all know the plot. bumbling young male academic falls in love with brilliant young female academic. i wonder if john bayley would be quite as bumbling in anyone's but his own version of the story. fifty years later she gets alzheimer's disease. this is difficult for both of them and eventually she dies. hmm. so because we know all this, the film becomes a series of beautiful and moving and inspiring vignettes, which seem to be reaching towards love as ultimate truth. which well just seems a little bit trite somehow. and leaves me with the question of why it should make me sob uncontrollably for quite as long as it did.
1/23/2002 07:58:30 PM #

 

no harry potter book this summer, apparently. not that you'd know when it's hidden so deep in bloomsbury's exceedingly annoying website. actually this is the third site i've seen like this today and i haven't even really been surfing yet. chromeless maximized windows are the new pop-unders. great. why don't people get it. i do not like having control of my browser taken away from me. lots of interesting things at newscientist.com. counting sheep is boring and not a good way to fall asleep. an indian underwater city seems to be the world's oldest. radio carbon dating puts it to 7500bc, rather earlier than the 3000bc of the sumer valley's oldest. this is the story i heard on the radio last week and couldn't find any reference to in any of the papers. graham hancock was unsurprisingly getting terribly excited about it. no surprise either that trying to prove six degrees of separation by email results in lots of deleted mail.
1/23/2002 07:46:57 PM #

 

chrissie and i went to see iris tonight. i meant to blog my opinions but frankly i am so emotional that it's not going to happen. consider my reading lists amended to include the sea the sea and the black prince. at very least.
1/22/2002 11:52:56 PM #

 

mobile internet. it is i suppose just possible that one day i will want to stop reading books on the tube and start surfing on a screen that is small enough for me to hold in my hand. as opposed to on a laptop which is just big enough to piss off everyone else in the carriage. it is equally just possible that someone will start writing content that will function on whichever of the myriad versions of said device i have purchased. this will happen around the time that webstandards.org replaces the united nations and jeffrey zeldman is elected supreme ruler of the universe. anyway. none of this is going to matter a stuff if battery technology doesn't improve. my mobile phone is flat. my cd player is flat. i want technology that stops this happening. they promised me robots by now!
1/21/2002 07:38:15 PM #

 

20th january. i only just noticed. today is the birthday of my grandmother who died nearly five years ago from altzheimers. it scares me that i might have forgotten about it even for a preoccupied day.
1/20/2002 11:54:42 PM #

 

but your horizontally scrolling css annoys me though not as much as it did yesterday when you had it strike thru.
1/20/2002 11:50:07 PM #

 

i've found a small dragon in the woodshed.
think it must have come from deep inside a forest
because it's damp and green and leaves
are still reflecting in its eyes.

i fed it on many things, tried grass,
the roots of stars, hazel-nut and dandelion,
but it stared up at me as if to say, I need
food you can't provide.

it made a nest among the coal,
not unlike a bird's but larger,
it is out of place here
and is quite silent.

if you believed in it I would come
hurrying to your house to let you share my wonder,
but I want instead to see
if you yourself will pass this way.
[brian patten]
1/20/2002 11:33:40 PM #

 

the songs that are stuck in my head today have been 42nd street which occasionally modulated to on the road again in willy nelson's version, and nobody loves you when you're down and out by eric clapton. this is getting ridiculous.
1/20/2002 08:26:03 PM #

 

i am starting a campaign against target="_blank", opening a new window for links. there are many guilty parties but bloggers are the worst. i know, i know, but it's true: one day i might even want to leave your site. the indiscriminate use of this horrible tag means that every time i follow a link off some pages i get another window open. at one point this afternoon i had fourteen browser windows open. not even the most annoying porn sites cause that. even if they used a bit of javascript so i got one window with their site and one window in which all their links opened... but no. too stupid, too ignorant or too lazy. we have to open a new one. every. single. time. so please: stop trying to control my surfing. if i want a new window, i'll right click and open it in a new window. otherwise i'm afraid i want to overwrite your lovely content. hey my loss.
1/20/2002 05:27:03 PM #

 

this article written about programming in 1988 should probably not be funny anymore. but it is. as supplemented by eric. this is also probably an old joke. via here. there was once a young man who, in his youth, professed his desire to become a great writer. when asked to define "great," he said, "i want to write stuff that the whole world will read, stuff that people will react to on a truly emotional level, stuff that will make them scream, cry, howl in pain and anger!" that man now works for microsoft, writing error messages. i keep meaning to add so now i will. i installed this spellcheck function as advised on blogger. norton sprang up all sorts of warning and stop notices but if you just tell them it's okay, everything is good. and it works. the song that is stuck in my head today is a rose for emily by the zombies. there was no soup.
1/19/2002 10:34:04 PM #

 

wow. if anyone were still under the illusion that writing straight html is the way to go, i have just updated the entire book pages in about an hour. changed the stylesheets and it was pretty much done. which means of course that all the effort can go into the designing and none into the glorified typing job of changing font tags. hurrah.
1/19/2002 02:18:39 PM #

 

my first friday five.
1. What do you have your browser start page set to? oh shame. this page actually.
2. What are your favorite news sites? ananova and guardian unlimited.
3. Favorite search engine? same as everyone. i really hate the way altavista makes you work so hard even to remove dead links.
4. When did you first get online? 1995. b's boss bought us a PC for a wedding present. i barely knew what the internet was.
5. How do you plan to spend your weekend? i plan to have a vegetarian bacon sandwich for tomorrow breakfast and to watch stir of echoes with b in the evening. on sunday we are going for a long walk as part of our not exercising programme. i also plan to implement the upgrade to the book pages and write the message board that i promised simon two months ago. i plan to stay out of the pub. this part will probably fail.
1/18/2002 11:02:36 PM #

 

the song that is stuck in my head today is we built this city on rock and roll by starship. soup of the day is courgette and ginger. silly headline of the day is from my sister's employers.
1/18/2002 01:24:02 PM #

 

upon this brick i build my church. via here
1/17/2002 11:39:44 PM #

 

interesting things in the guardian today. the amber spyglass may finally get the recognition it deserves even if it's from a mad panel of judges. interesting stuff about blasphemy, with link to james kirkup's poem which led to the gay times blasphemy trial. for some reason i hadn't read this before. i thought it was rather beautiful. unlike this rather depressing state of the book-sellers' nation piece. tolkien and rowling keep the book industry afloat. surprise.
1/17/2002 10:23:26 PM #

 

people who are always praising the past
and especially the times of faith as best
ought to go and live in the middle ages
and be burnt at the stake as witches and sages.
[stevie smith]
1/17/2002 10:10:20 PM #

 

it's the little things. the sandwich shop had asparagus soup. it's obviously going to be an asparagus week. then the guy called me señorita. which i'm not in either the literal or figurative sense. in other news. the song that is stuck in my head today is land of make believe by bucks fizz. your watch can now guide you to the pub. jeanette winterson comments on the selection of a new head of the church of england. she's right but no self-respecting woman should be involved with that organisation anyway. and the wretched soup has burned my mouth.
1/16/2002 01:22:39 PM #

 

i've realized something tonight that has really really pissed me off. i have to redesign the book pages. i only just passed the jakob nielsen test and turned the tables into css. and now i don't like it any more. i hate the design on my own website. even making risotto with out of season baby asparagus, which is the most expensive ingredient a middle class peasant like me ever cooks with, did not make it better. it was inevitable i suppose when i spend my life looking at things like this and this. and then b bought me a copy of dreamweaver today so it feels like fate. whatever. grrr.
1/15/2002 10:14:08 PM #

 

here is a novel answer to the age-old problem of what to read while stranded on a desert island.
1/15/2002 01:52:29 PM #

 

stone age, er, stones. there's something oddly moving about this. i think it's the line "we don't understand human thought that deep in time." like looking up at the stars. then having the thought that somewhere out there there's someone looking up at the stars.
1/15/2002 10:32:07 AM #

 

news of the new terry pratchett due out in november, and what will happen to the cover after the sad death of josh kirby.
1/15/2002 09:03:25 AM #

 

of all improbable things on a monday morning, an interview with j r r tolkien.
1/14/2002 11:09:15 AM #

 

ooh yes, let's have a day to celebrate darwin. much more worthy of celebration than fifty years of some old woman and her crazy family. speaking of whom. i'm not a supporter of the royal family. goodness me no. but if i had a seventeen year old son who wasn't drinking heavily and smoking pot, i'd want to know what was wrong with him. poor little prince harry has enough to deal with, with all that privilege, without having ex-heroin addicts to cope with as well.
1/13/2002 02:31:28 PM #

 

a dutch priest holds a harry potter mass for children. i find this kind of bandwagon jumping almost more embarrassing than rabid cries of satanism at potter. at least when the church is running round condemning stuff it has some kind of integrity. this kind of gimmickry is just an admission of irrelevance.
1/13/2002 01:19:22 PM #

 

grammar is the first casualty of war says terry jones. when the war abbreviates to twat, he is probably correct.
1/12/2002 10:17:10 PM #

 

mmm. fresh snow. new notebook. maybe not britney. don't want to write in case i spoil it.
1/12/2002 09:36:19 PM #

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