I notice that Fictionwise, which sells ebooks, has a special promotion (top of its front page) on the ebooks of the movies of “Spider Man 2”:http://www.fictionwise.com/ebooks/ebook22112.htm and “Van Helsing”:http://www.fictionwise.com/ebooks/ebook22111.htm. I can’t imagine anyone going to these special effects extravaganzas and thinking, ‘I love this but I want to be able to read it in ebook form to really enjoy the subtlety of the plotting and characterisation.’

I’m used to the New Yorker cartoons being wry looks at the worlds of work and everyday life but in this week’s issue I found a couple of rather scathing comments on current events:

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There are a lot of software engineers with too much time on their hands. First (in 1990) there was “RFC1149”:http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1149.txt – ‘A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers’. Then there was “RFC2549”:http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2549.txt which added quality of service to the protocol. Two years later in Norway it was “tested for the first time”:http://news.com.com/2100-1001-257064.html but took an hour and 42 minutes to transfer a 64-byte packet of information. Finally, in March 2004, by strapping 4Gb of memory cards to each pigeon, researchers managed to transfer data 100 Km using Wi-Fly – pigeon-empowered wireless internet and managed to achieve effective speeds of 2.27 Mbps.

Personally I would rather receive my email in a barrel strapped to a St Bernard dog…

1) “BBC Radio 7”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbc7/ – the BBC’s digital speech radio channel which broadcasts classic comedy and drama – now has a Listen again feature (audio on demand in other words). It is still streaming audio like the rest of the BBC’s offerings but
2) Someone at the BBC has decided to allow the “Reith lectures”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2004/ to go out “as MP3s”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2004/mp3.shtml as well as streamed audio, just as one of the first and most popular campaigns on their “iCan campaign site”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/ican/G30 requested. It’s a pity they decided to record voice at 64Kbps only (so the file size is large). Even if you don’t want to listen to the Reith lectures visit the page where there is a form and register your support for MP3s!
3) The “News Quiz”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/comedy/newsquiz.shtml – a topical humorous discussion of the news similar to NPR’s “Wait Wait don’t tell Me”:http://www.npr.org/programs/waitwait/ – is back on the air.

I start far more posts than I actually post (I have 30 in draft at the moment) because I am disciplining myself to one post a day. Which is why I am only just now bringing My So-Called Blog (written in January) to your attention.

It isn’t very deep or academically rigorous but it’s nonetheless fascinating to me because it shows the motivations and some of the consequences of this behaviour. My favourite quote:

He wanted his posts to be read, and feared that people would read them, and hoped that people would read them, and didn’t care if people read them. He wanted to be included while priding himself on his outsider status. And while he sometimes wrote messages that were explicitly public — announcing a band practice, for instance — he also had his own stringent notions of etiquette. His crush had an online journal, but J. had never read it; that would be too intrusive, he explained.

Thanks to Many-to-Many for the link

In the spirit of Phil Gyford’s rendition of “Pepys Diary”:https://blog.org/archives/000604.html there are several other weblog-ified classic literary diaries that have started up. The classic Victorian diary spoof “Diary of a Nobody”:http://www.diaryofanobody.net/ is quite entertaining.

It is “Simon Cozens”:http://simon-cozens.org/’ (rather free) English translation of The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon Pillow Talk, however, that is to my mind the most successful adaptation yet. Why? Because in his rendition it seems exactly like the blog of a contemporary teenage girl, yet the reflections (of a woman in the court of the Japanese Emperor) are a thousand years old. Rarely does history seem to speak to us so directly.

Of course “some people”:http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/32554 think in making its relevance apparent Simon is barbarously mangling the poetry of the original text. Well, there’s nothing to prevent people who find it interesting from taking a look at the extracts translated by others that are “available online”:http://home.infionline.net/~ddisse/shonagon.html, buying the ‘canonical’ paperback translation by Ivan Morris (Amazon UK) (Amazon US) or even the reading it “in the original”:http://www.wao.or.jp/naniuji/koten/makurano.htm. Besides, his is the most complete translation available online for free (that I am aware of).

It appears I am a “grammar god”! How grammatically sound are you?
brought to you by Quizilla
Thanks Harald for the link.

Wired News’ “Leander Kahney”:http://www.wired.com/news/storylist/0,2339,30,00.html has been writing about how us Brits have supposedly been in the forefront of using the Internet and mobile phone technologies to meet up for anonymous sex.

“Yoz Grahame”:http://cheerleader.yoz.com/ has written a stinging satire entitled Sex-Crazed Brits Just Doing It Everywhere, Like, Everywhere Man, You Can’t Stop Them, They’re Like Dogs In Heat Or Something, And Dude, I Gotta Get Me Some Of That.

“Giles Turnbull”:http://www.gorjuss.com/index.html asked readers of a mailing list he runs “why they gave up blogging”:http://www.gorjuss.com/luvly/20040317-blogless.html. The answers were interesting, particularly if you look at them from a Bourdieusian perspective. Reading between the lines, several of them started weblogging because it was ‘cool’ then gave up when it seemed like everyone else was doing it and it therefore became uncool. Or as one respondent said, “General sense of despair with: a) myself, b) the internet population in general.” I wonder whether the generally more snarky and amusing character of the comments he received were anything to do with his respondents being more likely to be British? Hmm…

Thanks to the ever-interesting Danah Boyd for the link

I just found the website of journalist Andy Raskin who chronicled (often in a humorous fashion) the rise and fall of the dotcom era through a number of publications. In fact, two of the stories he has highlighted side by side are, “What’s a Nice Systems Engineer Like You Doing in a Place Like This?”:http://www.inc.com/magazine/20020501/24172.html Speed dating meets job hunting in the land of the laid off Inc., May 2002 and “Take My Job Offer, Please. Pretty Please?”:http://www.inc.com/magazine/20000301/17273.html Begging and other strategies for hiring during the dot-com boom. Inc., Mar 2000.

But for my money the real gems on his site are two lightweight stories from Japan he did for NPR – “Ramen Jiro”:http://www.andyraskin.com/RamenJiro.ram about a rite of passage at a noodle restaurant and “Tokyo All Aboard Melodies”:http://www.andyraskin.com/TokyoTrainMelodies.ram [both in RealAudio format].