Being Mr. Kenny

Firstly, it’s only just occurred to me that I have two mice on my desk. Well I knew that anyway, but the luscious thing is that one is made by Microsoft and the other by Apple. I refer, of course, to my lovely wonderful new Mighty Mouse that I got for Christmas. I’m hoping that the Microsoft mouse and the Apple mouse will fall in love and have babies. That would be brilliant. Imagine, a mouse that was made by the two best computer companies in the world, it would be unstoppable.

No silly Microsoft-being-crap jokes please.

Anyway, the other best thing ever was a line from the film The Madness of King George. This is a great film, written by Alan Bennett (originally a play), in which Nigel Hawthorn plays the lead role. One of the things that most puzzles me is that the king recovers in the film and retakes the throne, but in real life he never did. I don’t know why Mr Bennett changed it, but there must have been a good reason.

Anyway, the best thing ever (finally) was a particularly fabulous quote by the King. The King and some of his advisors are outside in the winter air, and someone remarks that it is cold. The King asks, “Do you find it cold?” and someone replies that yes they do. As they go back into the asylum, the King says to someone, “I control the weather, you know. By means of mental powers.”

All today I have had that going round and round in my head, and I think it is the best two sentences that ever were.

I’m posting this here so that I can remember how to do it later on if I reinstall Firefox or something. This tweak will make your browsing experience noticeably faster.

In short, you need to change two values in about:config — network.http.pipelining should be changed so that its value is true, and network.http.pipelining.maxrequests should be changed so that its value is 10.

I should point out that this is optimised for broadband. It would probably slow things down on dial-up.

PS: For IE users, there is a similar tweak. You need to use regedit, though, if you’re comfortable doing that. There’s a link to a video in the post I linked to.

Regulars to the site (especially from long, long ago) may have picked up that I used to have a pronounced dislike of Richard & Judy (especially Richard).

Well, not any more!

Read this post by Adam Buxton (of Adam and Joe fame) about humiliating TV experiences and watch the video at the end (which is the most hilarious thing I’ve ever seen in the world).

I have gone from really being annoyed at Richard and Judy to quite liking them. And also, I want to buy the rights to Mark Lamarr and have him shot.

The many years I have spent poring over Wikipedia articles have led me to a few conclusions.

The first is that Wikipedians are overly fond of the words, “portmanteau” and “backronym”. Seriously, these must appear on about a millioin articles. A portmanteau is when two words are mushed together into one word. Why am I even bothering to define these terms? Let’s just stick in a link and be done: Portmanteau and Backronym.

The second thing I have noticed is that you can’t talk about a living person on Wikipedia without someone asking if they’re gay on the talk page. It just seems to be one of those things that’s inevitable. Death, taxes, and asking if people are gay on the Wikipedia talk pages.

Poetry is a funny thing. I kinda hate it.

But also, I really like it, some of it.

For the most part, I find it hard to understand. I think maybe I pay too much attention to the words. Or maybe I read the words like prose, which of course makes it sound disjointed and crap. I think you’re supposed to read poetry out of the corner of your eye. Kinda like squint at it.

There’s poems I really like, Valentine by Carol Ann Duffy. It’s about a woman who gives her lover an onion on Valentine’s day instead of the usual gifts. It’s fully of really nice images like, “I give you an onion./It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.”

Imagine getting a moon wrapped in brown paper! How totally awesome would that be! It would be all glowing and small, and you could keep it in your bag whenever you needed light or whenever you just wanted to look at a little moon. It’s like the ultimate office toy, a Newton’s cradle but a million times better. If anyone has a moon in brown paper, tell me where you got it, because I want one.

So anyway. I think you’re supposed to enjoy the images and stuff. I’ve always liked little bits of sentences and nice words and things. Like “optical” and “five”. Those are good words.

I can’t take a whole poem though, so maybe a good way of reading poems would be to take it to pieces and enjoy each little bit at a time. You could spend as much time reading a poem as you do reading a novel that way.

Anyway, the whole point of this post was to introduce a new poem I wrote. It literally took about 10 seconds to write, it’s like the best poem ever.

It’s called “I had a friend once”, and it’s all lies. I never had a friend called Jacqueline. Read it!

More specifically, a library in 12th Century Paris. This library published 13 regulations, the last two of which were:

12. The professor is not to read such works for curiosity, lest he be poisoned.

13. Violators of that restraint are to be reprimanded.

Dispatches from a Public Librarian: Dispatch 23

Can you imagine trying to put that sort of limit on people’s use of the Internet. Why, I’ve lost whole months in a Wikipedia cycle. You have to keep clicking until your eyes dry out or someone unplugs the wireless router. It’s the Wikipedia way.