robot-alert!

Here's some interesting stories from San Antonio, where I grew up.... follow the link for more.

It was Halloween 1975 at the El Camaroncito Nite Club off Old Highway 90 when a handsome stranger waltzed in and turned all the women's heads.

A brilliant dancer, he had all the moves. Even the shyest girl in the room, says local historian and author Docia Williams, couldn't resist his request for a cumbia.

"But something strange happened when they were dancing," Williams said. "For a moment the enchanted woman broke out of her almost hypnotic trance and she glanced to the floor. 'Your feet! Your feet!' she screamed, and tore herself from the tight embrace of her partner."

Horrified patrons stared at the dance floor and saw long, skinny claws protruding from the stranger's trouser cuffs — chicken feet.

"It's the sign of the devil," Williams said. "Other women began to scream and say prayers."

Suddenly, the stranger disappeared into the men's restroom and left without a trace.

That is, except for a strong smell of sulphur — the devil's scent.

link

It's scary to think what the War of the Worlds radio play must have seemed like when it was originally aired - just a few months before the outbreak of war against Germany. The world was a dark and threatening place, and to prove it, here's some invading martians...

On a more contemporary note, the reaction of listeners isn't that different to the way people have responded to recent government warnings of terrorist attacks. In 1938 they were pressing wet cloths against their faces to protect themselves from alien gases, and in 2003 they are emptying the local hardware stores of duct tape. In both cases, of course, the warnings are fiction intended to manipulate people's emotions.

Tuesday November 1, 1938

A wireless dramatisation of Mr. H. G. Wells's fantasy, "The War of the Worlds" - a work that was written at the end of last century - caused a remarkable wave of panic in the United States during and immediately after its broadcast last night at eight o'clock.

Listeners throughout the country believed that it was an account of an actual invasion of the earth by warriors from Mars. The play, presented by Mr. Orson Welles, a successful theatrical producer and actor, gave a vivid account of the Martian invasion just as the wireless would if Mr. Wells's dream came true.

The programme began with music by a New York City hotel dance band, which was interrupted suddenly by a Columbia news announcer who reported that violent flashes on Mars had been observed by Princeton University astronomers. The music was resumed, but was soon interrupted again for a report that a meteor had struck New Jersey. Then there was an account of how the meteor opened and Martian warriors emerged and began killing local citizens with mysterious death-rays. Martians were also observed moving towards New York with the intention of destroying the city.

Many people tuning in to the middle of the broadcast jumped to the conclusion that there was a real invasion. Thousands of telephone calls poured into the wireless station and police headquarters. Residents of New Jersey covered their faces with wet cloths as a protection against poisonous gases and fled from their homes carrying with them their most valuable possessions. Roads leading to a village where a Martian ship was supposed to have landed were jammed with motorists prepared to repel attackers.

Federal inquiry

A wireless audience of the entire nation was fooled to a considerable extent in spite of repeated announcements during the broadcast that the drama was purely fictional. The Federal Communications Commission has begun an inquiry into the broadcast with a view to preventing the repetition of such a terrifying event. A senator from Iowa said to-day that he has prepared a bill for the next session of Congress with the same purpose.

link

This one kind of speaks for itself...

LONDON (Reuters) - Researchers in the United States are developing robots with "eyes in the backs of their heads" in the form of nine digital cameras attached to a frame the size of a beach ball.

link

I had a really good day today. We went to a talk from a master bookbinder who has invented a concave spine, which he says makes books indestructible (sorry if this is wrong, I can't be bothered to check the spelling). Apparently a normal convex spine moves around a lot and wears out; a concave one stays still while the book is being handled and therefore doesn't wear out. It looks a bit funny tho. I've just tried to find an image, but can't, so here instead is Mr Brockman's amazing silver binding made for a Kelmscott Chaucer.

link

Would Like to Meet has ended. My life is a desert. It's so much easier to watch other people trying to improve themselves...

By popular demand, here is a better picture of a great non-robot. Hope you like it, Woob.

Save the Green Planet! is a Korean film showing as part of the London Film Festival. Its totally unhinged and brilliant. The main character, Byeong-gu, (shown left) kidnaps a famous businessman whom he believes to be an alien come to take over the Earth. He rubs stain remover (the thing he's holding) into his feet because he thinks it will break down his alien DNA and shaves his head to stop him communicating telepathically through his hair. It all goes a bit bonkers after that. It's funny and shocking and sad all at the same time.

link

From the BBC...

Red-faced officials at General Motors in Canada have been forced to think of a new name for their latest model after discovering it was a slang word for masturbation.

GM officials said they had been unaware that LaCrosse was a term for self-gratification among teenagers in French-speaking Quebec. They are now working on a new name for the LaCrosse in Canada. The car will go on sale next year to replace the Buick Regal.

More recently, Mitsubishi had to change the name of its Pajero model in Spanish speaking countries, where the word is a slang term for "masturbator". While Toyota's Fiera proved controversial in Puerto Rico, where fiera translated to "ugly old woman".

And Ford didn't have the reception it expected in Brazil when their Pinto car flopped. They then discovered that in Brazilian Portuguese slang, pinto means "small penis".

link

Why does this stupid software create an extra blank post every time I try to put something on here? I've given up trying to delete it, so I will try and think of something interesting and robot related to put in the space so it doesn't look stupid, or until my weblog tutor James Lee Pig can spare a few moments to show me what I'm doing wrong. It must be an evil plot to inflict lots of Gene Kelly, Little House on the Prairie (how do you spell that?), and Lord of the Rings references on an unsuspecting world.

link

Here's a picture of the great Gene Kelly, actor, choreographer, dancer, singer, and the man with the most muscular thighs in showbusiness. Enjoy!

link

Sometimes I think the real reason for creating robots is to attain a godlike power. I think Sony's scientists get some kind of sick pleasure out of creating a robotic creature that can walk around and stuff and yet has evil beady little eyes of malice, as though it's looking at everyone and thinking, 'I am dancing for your pleasure, but one day you will all be my slaves.'

It is the product of cutting edge artificial intelligence and dynamics technology.
An entertainment robot that lives with you, makes life fun, makes you happy.

Its name is QRIO.

QRIO can gather information and move around on its own accord.

QRIO not only walks on two legs, it can also manage uneven surfaces,
dance, recognize people's faces and voices, and carry on conversation.

QRIO is eager to be friends with people.

link

Hooray, I have finally got rid of the Klink Family. They were providing the comments feature that was broken most of the time. I looked at their site and I think they might be murderers or fundamentalists or something, like the Manson Family perhaps. Anyway, the new one should be better, it's the one my friend Mike uses on his blog.

"Trying is the first step towards failure," says Homer Simpson.
Here is your text for the day. I'm currently enrolled on a personal development course (paid for by work), trying to turn myself into a better, more effective robot. After an hour or so filling in the rather large textbook, the gremlin within needs a few quotes like this...

Hm, I haven't really had much time to post to the blog lately. Very strange. See, unlike for normal people, I actually really like posting things on here. The reason is probably because at the moment I'm working from home and don't have a lot in the way of what you'd call social contact. I'm also trying to wrap up production on The Grand Tour which entails not going away at the weekend. As you can imagine, I get a little stir crazy... But posting on the Web log sometimes makes the red mist start to clear...

link

Lots of robots around, many of them autonomous. Most of them don't have weapons yet but it's only a matter of time. This is according to a new report on robot sales.

According to the report, there are now at least 770,000 robots at work, including 350,000 in Japan, 233,000 in the European Union and about 104,000 in North America.

Robots also are coming to our homes.

At the end of 2002 more than 50,000 autonomous vacuum cleaners and lawn-mowing robots were in operation. By the end of 2006, a tenfold increase is predicted.

The report also gives some numbers of "robot densities, expressed as the number of robots per 10,000 persons employed in the manufacturing industry." It can go over 1 robot per 10 workers in the motor vehicle industry.

Japan is in the lead with 1,700 robots per 10,000 workers but, bearing in mind that Japan includes all types of robots (up to and including 2000), it is not comparable with the densities of other countries.

Besides robots used by the industry and for professional services, like cleaning or medical robots, the report forecasts an explosion in the number of service robots for personal use.

link

Lauren kindly sent James a horoscope as a birthday present. i've spent a lot of time trying to understand it and it really is rather hard. Here are some quotes from it which will reveal his inner secrets, or should I say the cosmic programming that makes James the robot that we know and admire...James has a lot of planets in his Eighth House which means that he understands the deep inner world and "discerns clearly between right and wrong, good and evil." His inner, esoteric world is very tidy. There is emotional turbulence round his sense of himself as a spiritual being. (the picture shows the latest types of scales available, since James is a Libra)

I was just looking for some pictures of robots when i stumbled across robot-japan.com, an excellent robot toy memorobilia site. The creator seems to be fighting the urge to incude more modern robotic toys:

...In my time of growth since the last commentary, I must admit that I’ve loosened up on my “Prime Directive”. Diecast robots rock, but there is more the world than diecast. I have gained a more well-rounded appreciation for the other Japanese robot incarnations...Do I want to relinquish my bias towards good old diecast robots? No. I don’t think I can. But I do think that there can be more balance towards the new trends...

There is also an excellent WAV file here about robots turning against their masters.
link

This is shamelessly taken from BoingBoing, another blog - but that's what blogs are all about, surely: linking to other blogs. Anyway, these kinds of signs really take me back to what I love about America, all this chintzy stuff.

And another one, I can't resist:

For more follow the link: link

"New Survey Reveals Little Change in Lunch Habits Over Past Three Years"

A ground-dwelling parrot that lived on the isolated landmass of New Zealand for thousands of years, the kakapo evolved into one of the world's most remarkable birds.

But with European colonisation, and the introduction of predators such as stoats, cats, rats and dogs, the species plummeted towards extinction. By 1995, there were only 50 known kakapo surviving, on a handful of small island sanctuaries.

Today, with a world population of 86 and a comprehensive Kakapo Recovery Programme underway, the kakapo is on its first tentative steps to recovery.

I saw my first kakapo (stuffed!) on a trip to the Rothschild museum in Tring. Tring was founded by Walter de Rothschild, one of the more eccentric of the Rothschilds, who collected lots of stuffed animals, including 4 kakapos, and as soon as I saw it I was smitten.

The more I found out, the more intrigued I became. They are so bizarre!! Imagine a large, green, very heavy, owl-like parrot, with a friendly, slightly dim-looking face, walking slowly along through the lush tropical forests of New Zealand. Most creatures, when attacked, have a fight or flight reaction. The kakapo stands still and pretends it isn't there... Although it's sad that they are so endangered, I can't help being slightly amused by the reasons for their failure to reproduce. They breed every three to four years, laying 2 or 3 eggs, if there is enough of the right kind of food around...

Don't be downhearted and worried, though, about the sad fate of the gorgeous kakapo. 2002 was the year of lurve on kakapo islands, and 24, yes, twenty-four new chicks were hatched. But unfortunately, the booming and hill climbing which is necessary to achieve this population explosion exhausted them. The kakapo recovery web site doesn't list any hatchings in 2003. I expect they are taking a few years off. So there you are, folks, my first ever post - the wonderful kakap0 - thank you for having me, woob and james - sorry it wasn't about robots...
link

Handpainted resin statues on a solid wood base are the perfect gift for every young Catholic athlete. These statues portray Jesus actively participating with boys and girls in a variety of sports. A wonderful way to reinforce Jesus "as friend" in everyday activities. Sizes vary from 4 3/4 to 6 1/2 inches.

link

I think I may have finally got rid of the wasps.

The other day I was working at home and the doorbell rang. Outside there were these two foreigners with backpacks whom I'd never seen before. They were my neighbours, as it turned out, and wanted to tell me about this huge wasp nest on the side of my house, which was sending wasps streaming in through their kitchen window. If you recall my wasp problems from a few days back, well, this is where all those animals were coming from.

So today the wasp killer came and sprayed them with something or other. I hope he didn't get hurt because there were millions of wasps streaming out of that nest, like TIE fighters out of a Death Star II. He said they should all die now though. I guess that's like Luke Skywalker having put his nukes into the Death Star core. Well, we'll see if he really blew up the Empire or if Darth Vader escaped to create a second Death Star or something... well, you get the idea.

link

I hope this rant about modern technology isn't getting old yet, because here's another one: the PC as music jukebox and general home media server.

This idea started to enter the mainstream around 1998 or 1999 when some software companies started promoting the idea of ripping your CDs onto your hard drive to a mass audience. There was some software from Real that made this pretty easy, and all you needed was a bigger hard drive, and they were cheap. Some computer types I know have taken the idea to its logical conclusion, which is probably where we will all end up in a couple of years: you have a server up in your attic or under the stairs or something, running Linux probably so that it won't crash, and you have Wi-Fi or Ethernet cables snaking all around your house to various PC terminals in the kitchen or bedroom or living room, and the server basically houses your entire media collection -- all your DVDs, all your CDs, probably a TV tuner, anything that's digital can be poured into some kind of advanced hard disk array. Once it's there, you are basically set for life, because all you have to do is turn on one of your PCs and call up whatever DiVx movie or MP3 you want to listen to and presto, there it is, forget about the wasted effort of sticking a disc into the machine.

There are other advantages too. For a while whenever I wanted to listen to music I would sort of press "play" on the software on the computer, and it would start cycling randomly through my entire music collection. Like a radio station built entirely of music you like. Or, you can get these Wi-Fi enabled remote controls. What you do is, instead of sticking a videotape in the VCR, you scroll through a list on this remote control, select the thing you want and your server upstairs starts playing the video over an A/V link. If you have kids, they will want to watch it 1,000 times, so you just set it on repeat, and then you can go read your book or build your model railway or whatever pleases you. A guy I know has a setup exactly like this. Another side advantage of course is that you can transfer any 1,000,000 CDs of your choice off the hard drive on your server onto the hard drive on your iPod, with a minimum of effort, and sort of carry it all around with you in your back pocket.

Well, this is getting kind of long, so I'll get to the point. It's all crap. OK, nifty novelty value in having millions of CDs at your fingertips that you can play instantly. What's gone, though, is the actual experience of playing a discrete album. There's something to be said for this: you have a CD or tape or something, and you get it off the shelf and stick it in the machine and play it. You have a particular album in mind, you go and get it. It has a cover. The songs perhaps relate to each other in some way. The point is, an album is a kind of experience. When you're playing stuff off of one of these monstrous jukebox contraptions, even if you're choosing just to listen to a particular album out of the morass, all the content kind of runs together. You might be listening to one album, but there's no barrier between that album and all the other millions of songs on the hard drive. When you get a new CD, you sort of pour it into the mixture. But every individual addition to the mix makes less and less of a difference to its overall consistency.

After a while, I found I was never in the mood to listen to my PC jukebox -- it was just the same old stuff after all. It wasn't until after my hard drive crashed, erasing all my gigabytes of MP3s, that I discovered I actually did still like (most of) the CDs in my collection -- it was just that playing them off an endless list that existed somewhere in the ether took all the fun out of it.

Maybe all-in-one home media servers will be the future, but that will be a crap future, as far as I'm concerned.

link

One of my pet peeves is moden inventions that, while supposedly enhancing our lives and being an example of science and progress, are actually an example of something where some big company has realised that if they convince everybody some supposedly innovative product is useful then they will make a lot of money selling their chemical or invention or whatever, even though the product is actually making everyone's lives just a slight bit worse. I was originally going to make a kind of top 10 list like my friend Mike Nawrocki does, but I think I'll take the easy way out and just list a couple of examples that spring readily to mind.

One is the Teflon Frying Pan. All frying pans have Teflon -- a brand name for the chemical polytetrafluoethylene (PTFE). Everybody knows that. It's non-stick! It makes it so when you clean it everything comes off kind of easily and there's no problem. It's the future! Non-stick!

OK, sorry, but I HATE Teflon Frying Pans. They might seem like a nifty idea at first, but the novelty should have worn off long ago and this awful invention consigned to the dustbin of history. Because unlike, say, stainless steel or iron or whatever frying pans used to be made out of, Teflon sort of degrades after a little while. It kind of flakes off and gets in your food. Or, if that fails, it thins out to the point where it sort of isn't non-stick anymore. In fact, stuff sticks to it even worse than with things like stainless steel. And of course you can't take your steel wool to it and get it clean, because, hey, that would damage the Teflon coating. So, like, what exactly is the advantage of this product?

I have a frying pan from which the Teflon coating is beginning to flake off. Last night I was cooking a dish involving a white sauce when I noticed what could only have been flakes of Teflon in the sauce. I threw the meal out, as I had a roommate tell me one time that Teflon is poisonous; but flaky Teflon frying pans seem pretty common.

Of course, now that we've been using this invention for years and everyone has it, it turns out that there are other problems as well. Like, when you heat Teflon, it emits poisonous fumes. Don't worry, they are only strong enough to kill household birds, or in some cases to cause polymer fume fever. I kid you not! Oh, and a chemical called perfluorinated acid, used in the manufacturing process of Teflon and Gore-Tex, showed harmful effects in tests on rats, like lowering the birth rate of their offspring and causing kidney problems. Ninety-two percent of Americans tested had traces of this chemical in their bloodstream. This stuff can be released as Teflon and Gore-Tex break down. But since these chemicals are so useful, personally I think we should continue manufacturing them. Not!

The link below will take you to Du Pont's Teflon Web site where you can find out all about how Du Pont would like you to coat everything you own, drive and eat, and indeed your own naked body, in its useful chemical.
link

Tuesdays are always interesting to look at in my diary because that's the day I go into town. I know, OK Marv, you're going to start making up some kind of song about pigs going into town and all that. But the point is, since I'm working from home at the moment, I only go into town once a week and that's on Tuesday when I have my illustration course. So I usually do lots of different chores while I'm there like going to the local Chinese megamarket for kimchi and all that kind of stuff. In some towns Chinatown is like a string of lots of tiny shops selling bric-a-brac or medicine or noodles, but in Birmingham it's a cluster of three or four gigantic megamarkets, like the Chinatown equivalent of Wal-Mart.

In the end, classes ran way late so I couldn't get my asian delicacies, but I did end up going into Gap and getting some trendy clothes, as you can see from my insightful drawings.

I am not sure what the deal is with this, it sounds kind of weird. Is it April Fool's Day? Or maybe a hacker broke into the NY Times and planted this there?

Monkeys that can move a robot arm with thoughts alone have brought the merger of mind and machine one step closer.

In experiments at Duke University, implants in the monkeys' brains picked up brain signals and sent them to a robotic arm, which carried out reaching and grasping movements on a computer screen driven only by the monkeys' thoughts.

In previous experiments, some in the same laboratory at Duke, both humans and monkeys have had their brains wired so they could move cursors on computer screens just by thinking about it. And wired monkeys have moved robot arms by making a motion with their own arms. The new research, however, involves thought-controlled robotic action that does not depend on physical movement by the monkey and that involves the complex muscular activities of reaching and grasping.

link

When I was in college I was kind of fascinated with Thomas Pynchon. I still am in a way, I suppose, although his last novel didn't really change my life. In the US he is kind of a mythic character, partly because he's so 'reclusive' - in fact he lives in the middle of New York City and goes to swish parties and stuff all the time but he's considered 'reclusive' because he doesn't do media interviews etc. I in fact did my useless undergrad thesis on him -- in hypertext too, mind you. At the time I had started to notice how, when you started to use all kinds of fancy words and theories when you talked about literature, people kind of fell into a hush and wanted to give you grant money to stay in academia, and that seemed like a better option than going and getting a job, so I thought I'd see if I could do some of that kind of thing. In the end, it seemed like a waste of time and, thank God, I went off to some crappy teaching job in Korea instead of staying as a student.

Anyway, like I was saying, Pynchon is still around and is writing books, although I don't know if that's really anything worth getting excited about. The latest thing is that he's going to do a voiceover guest 'appearance' on The Simpsons.

We have a show coming up where Marge writes a novel and gets endorsements from writers playing themselves, including Tom Clancy, Thomas Pynchon-... He's wearing a paper bag over his head, but it is his voice.

link

This site has many 'professional mobile robotic simulations'. Among the things simulated are two judo robots fighting each other. There is a short video of the action. They look a bit like a they are powered by ZX81s.

This reminds me of Jerome.

Bartender Refuses To Acknowledge Patron's
Regular Status
DAYTON, OH—Hurley's Pub bartender Don O'Hagan once again refused to acknowledge Henry Wells' status as a regular patron, the disappointed customer reported Tuesday. "I've been coming here for nearly two years, and I don't get so much as a nod of recognition when I sit down," said Wells, who estimated he's ordered a Bushmills with a splash of water from O'Hagan nearly 500 times. "I don't expect this place to be like Cheers, I just think that I deserve be treated like a human being, is all." Wells said he seriously considered not leaving a tip on his next round.

link

By request, I am putting a link to Battle of the Planets. I think it was called that in America too. It was popular in the UK in the late 70's/early 80's. (Those apostrophes are there for your benefit, Marvin!) I find it weird that some crappy Japanese TV show I used to watch as a kid was also being watched thousands of miles away in rural Oxfordshire.

I particularly liked Princess whom I thought highly sexy. Although, looking at the drawings now, I don't know why I thought that. Below is a link to a Battle of the Planets nostalgia site.

Some of the episode titles are amazing sounding! How about Ghost Ship of Planet Mir or Big Robot Gold Grab. Or for that matter Attack of the Space Terrapin! Fearful Sea Anemone! Jupiter Moon Menace! A lot of these seem to have an animal theme don't they? Like The Alien Beetles... or The Awesome Armadillo... Curse of the Cuttlefish... I could go on... Obviously, the English scriptwriters were having fun translating this stuff.

OK, now here's some stuff you probably didn't know about Battle of the Planets. It was translated from a 1972 show called Gatchaman. The stupid robot 7-Zark-7 was entirely added and was basically there to make things more reassuring. If people were being destroyed on screen his job was to say stuff like, "Those guys'll be back up again soon!" In the original, Zoltar was somebody called Katse Berg who was, I am not making this up, a hermaphrodite mutant. See here for more details.

Katse is in fact a hermaphrodite mutant, capable in adulthood of taking either male or female form. He is a single entity created from fraternal twins by Sosai X, and, although he seems to experience fluctuations intelligence-wise, his true IQ is 280, the combined IQs of two people.

link

See, there is some culture in this godforsaken town after all.

The Early Printing Collection includes a splendid collection of early atlases donated by W.A.Cadbury and two local parish libraries on deposit from Kings Norton and Sheldon, originally the libraries of Rev. Thomas Hall (1610-1665) and Rev. Thomas Bray (1656-1730).

The Fine Printing Collection includes an almost complete collection of books and examples of ephemera printed by John Baskerville, the 18th century Birmingham type designer and printer, and books printed by many other famous private presses of the late 1890s to the present day. In addition the William Ridler Collection of Fine Printing was deposited in 1988.

link

This is a good example of a stupid robot image and of high tech companies incompetently trying to be cool. It reminds me a little of those old Intel ads with guys in multicoloured clean suits jumping around to a 1980s type synthesizer dance beat. Incidentally, from reading about this competition by technology company Via, there doesn't seem to be any connection to hip hop. They just sort of added 'in da house' at random to make people interested.

If you were to have a robot roaming around your house, what would it look like, what would it do, how would you build it, and would it like hip hop music?

link

Georgaphically accurate representation of the London Underground

The site hosting the image I originally posted has exceeded its bandwidth limitations. Probably because of lots of people like me linking to it. I hope the owner doesn't get angry and attack us with internet weapons. Anyway, I found another site with loads of very nice old Tube maps like the new one to the left. It looks like it was drawn up by ye ancient Britons. - WOoblert

A bloke in New York has been keeping a pet tiger in his apartment. He visited the local hospital with bite marks that he claimed was from a dog and ran off when the doctors refused to believe him. The police then drilled a hole in the door of his appartment and this is what they saw!!!

The marksman who shot it through a window with a tranquilizer said: "He charged twice and I shot him. He charged a last time and broke through the glass."

Matt - I'm sorry for detracting from the sci-fi nostalga with all this tiger news.

This is turning into a sci-fi nostalgia Web site. But maybe that's OK given the name. Anyway, it looks like the long-in-development Hitchhikers Guide movie might get made. This would be by Disney, but they did a pretty good job with Pirates of the Carribbean so maybe it will be OK.

After bouncing around development hell for the past two decades, the film has officially been given the greenlight by Spyglass/Disney. No word yet on casting, but cameras will roll early next year in London with commercial/music video director Garth Jennings at the helm, with his "Hammer and Tongs" partner Nick Goldsmith producing (the pair previously worked on videos for the likes of Beck, Blur and Fatboy Slim). Chicken Run scribe Karey Kirkpatrick last pecked at the script.

link

I think Eddie Izzard would make an ideal Dr Who personally.

In the interview on Thursday morning, Baker told presenter Julian Worricker that Izzard would bring an "alien quality" to the part.

"Eddie Izzard is so mysterious and strange. He seems like he has lots of secrets," Baker said. "You always feel Eddie Izzard knows something you don't, or has been somewhere you haven't been."

He said the actor and comedian would wear the Doctor's flambouyant outfits with flair. "I like the way he dresses. He could probably do his own wardrobe," said Baker, who played the role between 1974 and 1981.


PAST DOCTORS
William Hartnell 1963-66
Patrick Troughton 1966-69
Jon Pertwee 1970-74
Tom Baker 1974-81
Peter Davison 1981-84
Colin Baker 1984-86
Sylvester McCoy 1987-89
Paul McGann 1996

link

Siegfried and Roy are magicians but their magic has gone wrong.

"This is as if a bald eagle attacked the president of the United States," Frank Danielsohn, a longtime Las Vegan, said at breakfast at the Mirage yesterday. "They are that big a deal here, both the tigers and the men."

link

Coca-Cola has launched a giant 'smart' billboard in Piccadilly Circus.

"When it's raining, big drops will appear on the screen and when it's breezy, the Coke sign can ripple as if it's being blown by the wind," a spokeswoman for the company said.

It will also be able to recognize if people are waving at it from the ground below and, eventually, will be able to respond to text messages from mobile phones, she said.

link

This is a screenshot from an emulator which basically puts a Commodore 64 computer in your mobile phone, this one being a Nokia 3650. I had a C64 back in the day. Seeing that crap welcome screen really takes me back to San Antonio and sitting in the house at Harrison Avenue playing Ultima or programming some stupid game for hours on end which would end up not working in the end.


I had one of these 3650s for a couple of weeks, as part of my job, and I was never in my life so glad to get rid of a gadget. The problem is, the phone is basically a computer that you're carrying around at all times in your pocket. It has an always-on wireless data connection to the Internet and a full Web browser, which means that any time you're bored you can catch up on your favourite Web sites such as robot-alert! and Jackalope Ranch. It has an email program. And since it is a computer, it can emulate other computers, notably the Commodore 64 but also the GameBoy Colour, for which there are thousands of games to download.


The demonic Nokia 3650 hell-spawn with one of its victims.

This may all sound very exciting, but for someone like me who compulsively fiddles with anything and everything, it turned out to be a nightmare. Those moments of boredom on the bus or train, when you might ordinarily stare out the window or read a book, suddenly became opportunities to play Donkey Kong, write emails, read the New York Times' Web site or simply investigate some of the phone's many other features. Did I mention it has a built-in video camera? And can connect to your PC via a wireless link? And photo messaging? And... well, you get the picture. I finally had to lock it away in my desk under some old papers and use my old phone, with its black-and-white display and conspicuous lack of features, until Nokia rang me to retrieve their demon handset from hell.

link

Last night we went to the ballet. Britain has two 'royal' ballet companies, one used to be based in Sadlers Wells in London and the other in Covent Garden (also in London). The Sadlers Wells one is now based here in Birmingham, and perform semi-regularly in town, at the same venue where all the pantos and crap 90s musicals play. From the outside the Hippodrome looks jarringly postmodern, with lots of square glass panels and flanges, but when you get into the theatre part itself, you realise that it still has the original interior - so there must be some 19th century bits still left over.

Thinking back on it, the only ballet I can remember going to was a student production of, as you might guess, The Nutcracker... the thought of seeing which again makes me gag. Although it's probably quite a good ballet really, if done the right way. I liked Giselle enough last night that I'm thinking of going again, but the next performance is a 'family' production of Beauty and the Beast. What is a 'family' ballet exactly? Marvin said it probably has more stunts, animals, flying on wires, special effects, etc. Still, it might be worth seeing.

The ballet is an interesting form of theatre. It has some elements in common with the opera, like elaborate sets and costumes. But really, it's very minimalistic - there was, unless I miscounted, one prop that affected the plot (a sword). All there really is to look at is the dancers. And since there are no words or speaking, it all comes down to their movements and gestures. It's easy to see why people come to the conclusion that dance really should be about pure movement, without any narrative or theme, but I find that somehow the fact that the dancing is mixed in with a story and a backdrop and all adds to the interest of it.

There's also these great gestures they make, really overblown and over-dramatic. I kept thinking of Edward Gorey's drawings of melodramatic ballet dancers in ridiculous winged costumes. That's what it's all about baby!



The best costumes of the evening were in the second act, after Giselle comes back as a ghost. Dozens of ballerinas swarming around the stage in falling-apart white ghost costumes.

So, does liking the ballet make me gay?

link

Maybe you've heard of Funky Town. Now there's Crap Towns. It's a new book coming out soon here in the UK, basically trashing horrible places to live in Britain, including some places that are supposedly nice but which turn out to be full of prigs and 'herds of oversized jeeps' (St Johns Wood). I wonder where Birmingham ranked on the list? (No. 1 was Hull, long-time home of Philip Larkin and apparently to a very good university library.)

Even so, the authors have decided not to hold an official launch in any of the crap 50, in case linguistic subtleties are lost on, say, Wolverhampton, where smells "permeate the town like the stench of a trapped animal slowly decaying in a drainpipe".

link

Remember how the Russian Constructivists made all those cool-looking propaganda posters? Well they are still at it it seems... erm, so to speak. A Russian finance magazine had to tear down a bunch of posters with a Euro currency having sex with a US dollar after the image was deemed immoral. The publisher said he thought the two currencies were dancing.

link

Today is my birthday. Happy birthday to me!

link