Wow! The BBC reports how an Art Treasure is Confirmed as Vermeer. This brings the total number of paintings atributed to Vermeer to 35 and provides a marvellous excuse to upload some of my pictures of Delft.
Continue Reading »

I’m a big fan of The Internet Movie Database. The other day I wanted to share my voting history with a friend but couldn’t find a publicly visible URI. So i ended up hacking my own Film Voting History page.
Interestingly although my votes can differ quite wildly to the IMDB score, overall my average vote matches that of the IMDB membership. Just call me Mr Average!

Continue Reading »

There is a TV advert in the UK at the moment for Tunes, the sweets that “help you breathe more easily”. Set in a deathly-dull meeting, the words “XML” and “infoset” are clearly audible. I’d like to have witnessed the “brainstorm” where creatives decided on Web technologies as the most boring subject they could think of :-) Needless to say Mars have one of the crapiest Web sites going with next to zero information on this venerable product, so i guess the last laugh is on them!

I was in my mid-teens at the height of punk and along with my friends dressed up in poseur “punk” gear in the toilets before pogoing around the hall at the school disco. Actually i dimly recollect also doing “the dead fly” which involved lying on your back and waving your legs in the air, geddit? Anyway, working at home today to prepare a couple of presentations, i slapped on a copy of “Never Mind the Bollox” which my parents-in-law bought for my birthday the other month. It sounds as fresh as a daisy and it was all i could do to not pogo around the Kitchen .. “problem, problem, blah, blah, problem, problem, problem” ..

Spotted on slashdot, PieSpy is a bot that infers relationships between people chatting on IRC. Interestingly Paul Mutton has used his bot to detect and visualise social networks in Shakespeare plays.

So to the National Theatre to see “Democracy”. Following the excellent “Copenhagen”, Michael Frayn has tackled another apparently unpromising subject, this time West German politics in the 1970s. The play centres on the relationship between the charismatic Willy Brandt and his ‘greasy’ personal assistant Günter Guillaume.

Guillaume’s greatest asset was his unnerving ability to blend into the background, a very useful gift given he spied for the Stasi. Meanwhile an array of literally large characters danced and ploted seizing upon Guillaume’s eventual exposure to replace Brandt with Schmidt.

There are many topical resonances, not least in the loss of a trusted confidant followed by infuriating intransigence and disintegration in his second elected term.

Though apparently unpromising, this period is fascinating when you consider how each player was coloured by a war story, building a prosperous nation under the shadow of the Berlin Wall. It was Brandt’s work that led on to the fall of the Wall and eventually the Soviet Union itself.

Go See!

Links:

Democracy - National Theatre
Willy Brandt - Wikipedia
Günter Guillaume - Wikipedia
Copenhagen - BBC4

One of the more amazing revelations i encountered in Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything came after reading the following:

«On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with the Earth reduced to the size of pea, Jupiter would be over 300 metres away and Pluto would be two and a half kilometres distant (about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn’t be able to see it anyway). On the same scale, Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, would be 16,000 kilometres away. Even if you shrank everything down so that Jupiter was the size of the full stop at the end of this sentence, and Pluto was no bigger than a molecule, Pluto would still be over 10 metres away.»

I say this was revealing because it says a lot about my ignorance of astronomy. Hopefully the next generation will be better informed thanks to Spaced Out an educational project to build a scale model of the solar system. The Sun will be in Jodrell bank, Earth 10 miles away in a Macclesfield playground meaning Pluto has to be 300 miles away, probably in Fort William .

As i said here earlier, Dasani is evil tasting filtered tap water. Anyway in today’s news Coke recalls controversial water after it was found to contain illegal levels of bromate. Looks like an end to this nasty product here in the UK. Result!

Spotted on several blogs including Dave Orchard - Donald Rumsfeld being nicely Kebabbed in a TV interview. I’ve no doubt who is the biggest “immediate threat” to our safety. For more Rumsfeld fun listen to his Library of Quotations harvested from Radio4’s Broadcasting House.

The BBC reports Microsoft works on native tongues including Welsh. So how much longer must we wait before they finally release Windaz 2000 - Tyneside Edition which escaped as Email some time ago.