April 2004 Archives

I can think of no more appropriate way for BBC2 to commemorate their 40th birthday today than to preempt hours of their regular programming for live snooker coverage. Happy birthday BBC2 and well done -- you clearly have a well developed sense of irony.

Oh goody. An anonymous meme. I don't hate these things with a passion at all.

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

Who writes these things?

Okay. Firstly, the general term is weblog or blog, not journal, you sheltered, net-illiterate arse. (While I'm on the subject, it's also not called a blogger... that's just thoroughly wrong.)

And maybe someone can enlighten me about the exact value of this exercise, which -- to my uneducated eye -- appears to be somewhere around zero. If you're inclined to believe that the book closest to a person at any time is an interesting insight into that person rather than a product of chance, then fair enough, that's a premise I might be able to get behind. But if that's the case, just get people to give the name of the sodding book. Picking the fifth sentence on page 23 will, far more often than not, produce something completely uninteresting. Observe:

Parliament, for example, was in the last decades of the eighteenth century passing Enclosure Acts at the rate of one a week.

Yikes! Robbed of its context it's such a profoundly boring sentence that it practically forces me to provide a citation to its source just so people won't think poorly of my reading habits.

Unless the specific objective of the meme is to generate large quantities of noise in an already low-signal environment, why not at least let the participant choose an interesting sentence? Chances are they're going to go through books until they find one they like anyway.

I think people just make these things up to give other people something to post on their blogs when they've run out of cat stories. I can see why they appeal to bloggers -- they're ready-made blocks of cut-and-paste content with which they can make their blog appear active while simultaneously producing nothing original and expending almost no effort. I just can't see how they appeal to readers. Unless the readers are also bloggers, who vector the meme further... a cycle of mediocrity.

Postscript: In the process of writing this bitter denunciation I've managed to do exactly what the meme asked. clc: 0, meme: 1.

MaW says I don't blog often enough.

Browsing Metafilter today, I found some links to papercraft websites. I used to like making model kits as a kid, and I still have some of them lying around the place, but I haven't done any new modelling in years.

Card modelling has always held appeal for me for several reasons:

• it runs the gamut from straightforward to highly challenging
• it doesn't require a vast array of tools
• it's very inexpensive

While looking through the papercraft links posted to Metafilter, I found two other reasons:

• there are tons of free paper models on the Web that can be downloaded and printed
• the quality of some of these models is amazing

Which was enough to motivate me to investigate further, which led me here, a site with a freely downloadable Piper Cub model, highly recommended for beginners.

Well it took me 7 hours and I made some mistakes, but the result is now hanging from the ceiling.

Total cost: 7 hours of time, 2 sheets of card, some printer ink and a little PVA glue. I think it was worth it.

Time permitting, I'd like to get more practiced at this so that I can attempt some of the more complex models out there. Just look at some of these awesome models, all freely downloadable.

• Space Shuttle Columbia Memorial
• AT-ST from Return of the Jedi
• Yamaha Motorcycles
• Lens Head Recon Robot
• USS Grissom from Star Trek III
• Lightcycle from Tron
• USS Reliant from Star Trek II

There are many more. I'd love to have some of them on display. It's tempting to think that, with effort and patience, maybe I could.

I haven't been posting much because my muse is on holiday. I got a postcard from her today, though.

She's probably inspiring someone else behind my back.

I said I'd do a round-up of the best April Fool pranks this year, but I didn't count on them being mostly dismal. Here's Ananova's round-up of the hoaxes in the UK press. A couple aren't bad, but they hardly rival San Seriffe.

(postcard from here)

Don't ask me where the hell that rubbish came from, or why. I really do have too much time on my hands. But I learned a valuable lesson: that the worst LiveJournals are so awful that they're essentially unmockable. It's out of my system now, though. Really.

I'll do a round-up of the best of the day's hoaxes once it's over.

(If you're reading this via a syndicated feed, swing by trioptimum.co.uk today and have a look at today's April foolishness.)

Update: Normality is restored, but the gag page is still here. More forced goofiness same time next year.