Being Mr. Kenny

Sad news, everybody. My time as a warehouse operative has come to a close.

One of the joys of being employed by a temping agency is that you have no idea when the work you’re currently doing is going to evaporate, even when they have explicitly told you that the assignment will be ongoing. Bless their little souls!

But I’m not bitter. I have enjoyed my time there, and during these last two weeks I have learnt that:

• Bath FM is to be avoided at all costs, along with Radio 1 before 7 am
• Lifting boxes all day for two weeks will do wonderful things to your biceps
• You should take care use each arm equally, however, or one will grow more quickly than the other
• Lads’ mags are full of useful information, like how to exercise your pecs so they don’t become, and I quote, “flabby, fat-filled disco tits”
• The term “disco tits” is utterly hilarious
• Chicken and bacon sandwiches from La Bottega are the most delicious things in the world
• Working while ravenously hungry is very depressing
• Eating after working is one of the crowning glories of all human experience
• 40-minute walks across Bath after being on your feet all day are exhausting, and will make you want to die

I’ve also met some interesting folk, one of whom was Dan, from Canada, who told me about Crazy Music-on-the-bridge Guy, and invited me to go and see him. Crazy Music-on-the-bridge Guy is a man who carts a nice selection of musical instruments to a bridge near the warehouse and then, well, plays them. Just plays them, quite happily, outdoors for all to hear.

So far, he has accrued a little drum, an Irish drum (Bodhrán), an electric keyboard, an electric guitar and a bass guitar. Dan said that when he asked if he could play any of them he replied, “no” and that when he met him, he had none of these instruments, but “was just banging the sides of the bridge with large metal sticks.”

Dan also told me that he had been jamming one lunchbreak when a lady walked past with her dogs (who got really excited and started jumping in the air) and heard her mutter something, one word of which was “ridiculous”.

When I went over there, he kept putting the bass guitar around my neck and inviting me to play it. When I protested, saying I didn’t know how, he said, “neither can I!” but I managed to get him to swap it for the Bodhrán, so as not to look a complete lemon, cluelessly plucking at the strings. The Bodhrán was quite fun, actually, even if I did insult the honour of the entire Irish nation with my hapless playing.

Dan told me that he had no idea where Crazy Music-on-the-bridge Guy got the money to buy the guitars, since he didn’t appear to have any job, and they weren’t cheap guitars either!

But now it’s all over, and I have to rely on Manpower to find me a new job, which is unlikely to happen with any great speed, so I am going to register with about a million other agencies as well. I will clear my overdraft if it kills me!

I know, I know, it’s complete crap just to post a link to another site because all you really want to hear about is all the hot gossip that’s been happening in my world recently, but this is really weird.

Damn Interesting is a site which I check regularly for interesting stuff. I recently learnt about the Hindenburg disaster, and some other things that I can’t remember, but these green pigs are something else!

I know that a while ago some mad scientists managed to put some genes from a jellyfish into a plant, and that these genes made the plant glow. No, I’m serious, I mean a proper, no bullshit glow! Apparently since then, it has been put into all sorts of animals just because we can and now the list includes pigs.

This strikes me as both an awful, awful example of how humans have raped nature, but also as really quite funny. I mean these pigs glow in the dark!

Some links:

• Original article
• Glow in the dark dogs as art?
• Monkeys too!

If you’re looking for recent gossip, gimme a while and I’ll try to cook something up … Let me think …

Ok, I really can’t think of any, but I do have an excellent site which is disgusting, rude, probably immoral but it’s my favourite site right now, because he is the funniest guy in the entire world.

If you’re not easily offended get on over to Cody Clarke dot com and laugh yourself silly.

Now there’s a title you don’t often see.

I saw this a while ago in the warehouse where I work. It caught my eye because it seemed so out of place. The box says “free-standing toilet roll holder” but the photo says “for when you want to install a toilet in your library”.

AA Gill is one of my favourite writers. He has a weekly TV-critic column in The Sunday Times culture magazine, and I do believe he can do no wrong. I usually despise TV critics because it seems such a lazy and pointless way to make money. I am a TV critic every time I change the channel and I don’t see me getting paid for it, so why should anyone else?

But I have always been quite happy for AA Gill to receive any accolade that might be bestowed upon him. He’s funny, clever and right all of the time. And he’s friends with Jeremy Clarkson, apparently, which I thought was quite interesting.

Anyway, I was reading his column a while ago, and I came upon this little gem regarding Richard Dawkins. Dawkins is the scientist every Christian loves to hate (or should that be hates to love?) because he is staunchly and stubbornly opposed to religious belief, and Mr Gill writes a very satisfying review of a program he recently appeared in.

(I will just note here, as an aside, that I read a very good book by Alister McGrath, Dawkins’ God: Genes, Memes and the Meaning of Life in which the author put forward a very sensible and rational rebuttal against some of Dawkins’ ideas. It was immensely refreshing in that it didn’t dismiss the theory of evolution as bunk and was, in fact, very persuasive).

Scientists all over the nation must hold their heads and groan whenever Richard Dawkins appears on television, as he did in The Root of All Evil? (Monday, C4). He is such a terrible advertisement such an awful embarrassment, the Billy Graham of the senior common room. His splenetic, small-minded viciously vindictive falsetto rant at all belief that isn’t completely rooted in the natural sciences is laughable. Dawkins is a born-again Darwinist, an atheist, so why is he devoting so much blood pressure and time to arguing with something he knows doesn’t exist? If it’s not there, Richard, why do you keep shouting at it? He looks like a scientific bag lady screaming at the traffic, and watching him argue with a fundamentalist Christian, you realise they were cut from identical cloth, separated at birth. Dawkins is, of course, the archetype of a man who protests too much, and I’d say he’s well on his way to, if not a Pauline, then at least a Muggeridgian conversion. Any day now, he’ll be back on telly quoting CS Lewis.

AA Gill, The Sunday Times, January 15, 2006.

When is this man going to be knighted?

The following is an email sent to the www-html mailing list. This is an open list for geeks worldwide to discuss the future of (X)HTML, the stuff dreams are made on language webpages are written in. It’s supposed to be a hotbed of original ideas and groundbreaking new paradigms, but when I was subscribed to it, it seemed to be full of people suggesting that we should rename the <html> element to something more semantic. I’m not kidding!

Anyway, I was browsing it a while ago, as I occaisonally do, and I came across this little offering. Evidently this guy, scsijon, was asking a question when a member of the list replied that he should be using CSS.

Scsijon replies:

this means:

1- The HTML spec can’t reside on it’s own, as i was told it was suppose to be able to do, when I learn’t it.
2- I now have to learn CSS, something I have no idea about other than as a name!
3- I am expected to rewrite code that IS complete (and works) except for a SINGLE missing attribute, that I expected to be there as it’s alternate (width) IS in the specification.

not pleased folks

Is he serious? I love the arrogance and stupidity of some people: you normally find them saying things like “Firefox doesn’t support styled scrollbars, you guys suck”, but this guy is streets ahead. Why stop there when you can moan at the people who author HTML in the first place!

And how can he not have started using CSS, has he been living in a cave?

“not pleased folks” — as if he expects the W3C to turn back time and let all the presentational crap back into HTML. Ha!

Anyway, the thread starts here. You can follow it (3 messages at time of writing) by clicking “Next in thread” at the top of the page.

(The original message is here.)

I have written a WordPress plugin!

It’s called Character Tools, and it’s a useful little utility that gives you the right numerical entity for foreign characters (e.g. á for ‘á’).

Go get Character Tools version 1.0 1.1 1.5 now!

Last night I watched an interview with Michael Palin. In it he described his relationship with Ernest Hemmingway’s work as “ironic”. It occurred to me, later, that I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about.

It was very similar to reading scientific literature or the Bible: you read something you don’t understand but you don’t realise that you’ve not understood it until someone asks you what it was about. Then it dawns on you that reading constitutes more than looking at words while you think about what you’re gonna eat, and what’s happening in Neighbours at the moment, and how cold your feet are, and isn’t this a lovely song that’s playing, and how noisy is nextdoor’s toilet cistern, and ooh I’m going to make a sandwich.

But this experience served as a small epiphany for me. I’ve only ever had a nebulous idea of what this word actually means, and I’ve not ever been able to properly pin it down. I know that modern usage is far from accurate — people describe things as “ironic” that are not, in fact, ironic at all.

For example, did you know that Alanis Morrisette’s song by the same name is ironic exactly because none of the situations she sings about are, in fact, ironic? It’s true!

Thus, in the spirit of Google, I’ve gone a quest to discover its meaning, and, as typically happens, I’ve discovered a few links in about ten seconds (halfway through writing this post) that help answer the question:

• Guardian Unlimited: The final irony — well-written, and she knows what she’s talking about
• Wikipedia’s entry — bland, as ever, but solidly neutral and informative

I shall continue the hunt, and I shall ponder these things until I have a better understanding. I suggest you do the same before you go and say that something is ironic when it isn’t. (But isn’t that what irony is?)