Sunny Breaks

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Via Cybbis – there’s this finnish pop-rock song that supposedly had sentences in it when played backwards. Finnish sounds about the same to me forwards or backwards. It’s at Palikka – no permalink but scroll til you see ‘PMMP’. Sounds a bit like Garbage — the band, not the evaluative adjective.

Jaybird of bird on the moon posted a song featuring Muhhammed Ali here. In some ways it doesn’t sound all that odd. If he was at his peak in this era he’d probably have a multi-album recording contract.

What’s the deal with courgette over zuccini? Why is ‘zuccini’ no good and un-hip to say anymore? hhmm.

I realised what one of my problems with following recipes is this evening : measurements. I don’t have any measuring implements and my guestimates are wildly inaccurate.

I watched the first double kicker episode of ‘Andromeda’ (from the makers of star trek) the other night. It’s good ja. At first I was thinking it was like MacGuyver meets Farscape, but then i realised the lead actor was Kevin Sorbo, who was Hercules in that tv series a few years back. Make fun of me if you will, but I thought that series was okay, and he (along with a whole bunch of other things) is exactly what Star Trek needed. Things like getting rid of absolutely everything that’s ever been in or connected with every other carnation of ST. I think Andromeda is scheduled to start airing on channel nine in 2009.

Unfortunately the RSS feed for here is malformed at the moment but i’m asking the people what must be done.

Comments:

Graham
url: grudnuk.com/
date: 2003-07-18-04-56
Bloody Jamie Oliver and all these other pom chefs, that’s who. I think I was going to get around to the zucchini/courgette thing myself, having written something up as a draft but I don’t think I actually put it online. I believe Australians say zucchini because it was Italian and Greek migrants who first popularised the vegetable here. Goes well with the trad meat and three veg, tho’.

yak sox
date: 2003-07-18-05-08
Yeh – I had to look it up but found the Italian bit interesting. From a more objective point of view, the italians and their words are just as sexy and cosmopolitan as the French. But perhaps it’s the fact that a whole bunch of them migrated here last century that maybe faded the mystique.
Yet it’d be the other way ‘round if a bunch of dirty frenchies had come instead.

look at him! – he\’s like some kind of weblog-tool maken rockstar! :^) – (via article here.

The shower scene from Psycho is fairly well known, but ‘ave a geeze at the the shower scene from Virulent Memes heh heh. Ah dang – I go to get the permalink address and find the psycho bit’s already been done.
But actually I think my rant-request was a bit wayward – it’s not radio national that’s the problem — it’s that souless scourge called ‘modern australian literature’ which squawks at me out of the radio on a sunday morning. Endless lists of dumb plants nobody’s ever heard the names of let alone can visualise, and a bigtime overuse of the expression, “tea-brown” — that’s all it is. It has no heart. It’s like the fashion victims of the writing and storytelling world. Fat black glasses frames and thongs + jeans – Clonage.

I realise it’s disturbing to show up here and see things shifting around so much but I promise this is the end of it.
This is the first beta of the the 1.0 Pivot release. It werks very nice.
It all looks a bit stubby so far because it hasn’t filled itself out on the index page here. It has all the neat-oh trendy webloggen features like \’recent comments’ and a sublog — that’s right — say hello to Fabulog! which will say other stuff, but whether or not it differs much from the usual remains to be seen. I haven’t located a thingo to do trackbacks from specific entries, but I guess that if MT users are really interested in getting trackbacks then they\’ll have that bit turned on to automatically receive them.

I think it’s easier to start (or restart) with a system like this, and rip the bits out that aren’t needed rather than start with someting like Blosxom and attempt to add stuff in.
I know I raved on about blosxom for ages. It was just one of those things that no amount of mucking around really gave a proper indication of what it was like to use for real. I still like it but think it’d be better suited to a situation where you were serving up your website right from your local machine, so that posting entries was as simple as writing it and sticking it in a folder. Or, a situation where the writer intended to maintain a ‘distance’ from potential readers (ie. no interest in comments or trackback or any of that jazz = no bells n’ whistles) ... perhaps like a poetry-log or something.

Also, I get the feeling that the RSS.XML feed might be a bit better formed in Pivot which is is good for the CORE feed and the long-suffering SirFlakey. :^)

Pivot caters for the chumpster-blogger too. It has a decent assortment of emoticons, an image upload thing like MT, and a pull-down box in the entry-writing bit that lets you write in colour. There other pull-downs for other formatting things also.

hmm, that’s mind-bogglingly odd. How is that I can delete a file and yet it still would seem to be here, doing its redirect thing.
Maybe it’ll all be better in the morning.
Anyway, thanks Bob (Bahb) – I’ll take it from here.

Last March a significant but little mentioned statistic clicked over into being. That of — there are now more copies of National Geographic magazine in existence on Earth than there are people. Uh huh.

Why is this? Nat. Geo. is a much more solidly bound magazine than what stands near it on the news-stand, it’s glossy and it has fotos of stuff. Not just any stuff either but stuff like signs made out of corn cobs that read ‘Iowa’ by old men, in Iowa.

Humans are loath to throw out the mag. because of these high quality stuff-fotos and even when they do the yellow-spined piles are salvaged by the junkmen and junkwomen. They keep the things circulating by selling them from junk depots and op-shops for 50 cents each. Other humans, undoubtedly captivated by the fotos, take them into their homes and the circle continues.

I regret to say that on one occasion I helped to keep this cycle going. At some point I realised what was happening and chopped the magazines up and chucked the husks. But not before learning something — in Paris some people take their cats to the cafe with them.

Happy Bastille day ya freaks.

-* favourite phrase for the day: “something crawled up me and died”.

The hell of Northern Paris – Roubaix
The Cote d’Azur and Saint Tropez
The Alps and the Pyrenees
Last stage Champs-Elysees
Galibier and Tourmalet (2 mountains)
Dancing even on the top
Bicycling at high gear
Final sprint at the finish
Flat tire on the paving-stones
The bicycle is repaired quickly
The peloton is regrouped
Comrades and friendship

With the above lyrics you can even sing along to it! Provided you know french, but the chorus is pretty straight forward, and actually so is the most of the rest. You just schlap on some of that ‘uh-hor-hor-hor’ accent and voila.
It’s pretty cool to see so few australians doing so well, so far.

Usually by the time this comes around i sit here and look at the french countryside and sunshine and think ‘ooo it’d be nice to be there’, and still do a little bit, but it’s not as if it’s all that cold or dark here considering we’re roughly a month off the middle of winter. Makes me wonder how dry summer might be.
Another good way to watch ‘le’ tour is with the sound down with some kickin’ 808-driven doof, like Dr.Walker’s stuff. The vision from the back of the motorbikes, right on the riders looks awesome.

I’m cashing in, selling out, bending over, submitting to the chocolate side of the force. SELL SELL SELL!, BUY BUY BUY! IBM, BP, GE, GM, AOL/TW, Newscorp, Union Carbide, Exxon, Spouting.
“I’m on my way to the bank, don’t come near me.”
“My style dictated by the Rick Astley look, I drive a car with air-con, read a book, I don’t eat meat except for a little bit of chook, I was born to be Mild like the first free Market Child.”

Due to it being hols and me having a bit of excess energy I’ve been getting out for walks more often and yesterday (ie. friday) was drawn to the bay by that chestnut of a sound — the ship’s foghorn. I could hear it from HQ here. It’s rare that it gets this foggy.

This setting up blosxom stuff is more work than I thought it’d be, it really is ‘roll your own’. I am continually perplexed as to why certain vital steps are left out of install or configure instructions for bits of it that I’m attempting to make work. Peer support happens via a Yahoo! mailing list, which, after using forums I find horribly unweildy. No matter — it will be worked out eventually.
However, for people in a similar situation as I – of wanting to fulfil a lifelong dream of making a living from retailing tinfoil headgear from their weblog (withoout paying license fees) — should take a look at Pivot. It’s GNU GPL and just about to bump up to a new version number with some heavy-duty improvements. It’s good to read that they’re actually thinking about each of these new mechanisms popping up (like trackback) with regards to inclusion or not based on thinking about how useful these things really are, rather than slavishly and automatically including everything.