The world is such a wonderful and interesting place. From the Wikipedia article on banned Pokémon episodes:

On December 16, 1997, more than 635 Japanese children were admitted to hospitals with convulsive epileptic seizures. It was determined that the seizures were caused by watching an episode of Pokémon, 'Dennō Senshi Porygon', or 'Computer Soldier Porygon' (known as Electric Soldier Porygon in the United States, season 1, episode 43) and subsequently this episode has not been aired since. In this particular episode, there were bright explosions with rapidly-alternating blue and red color patterns. It was determined in subsequent research that these strobing light effects cause some individuals to have epileptic seizures, even if they haven’t had any previous history of epilepsy. As a consequence, many video game makers (including Nintendo) added warning labels to their video game products (or made pre-existing labels more prominent), warning that exposure to video games may trigger seizures in individuals vulnerable to photosensitive epilepsy. Detailed research of the alleged incident is detailed at here and attributes it to mass hysteria. The incident was also parodied by the Simpsons. In the episode 'Thirty Minutes over Tokyo' (Season 10 - Episode 20) Marge, Bart, and Lisa are seen having seizures after watching a show called 'Battling Seizure Robots'. Homer then enters the room and, apparently not wanting to be left out, proceeds to roll around on the floor in a similar fashion, of his own will. This incident was also spoofed in the South Park episode 'Chinpokomon', an obvious satire of the Pokémon craze that hit the United States. Kenny has a seizure while playing an intense round of the Chinpokomon video game.

That's right, human flesh! You know, I actually had a bunch of sane things to say tonight. I was going to write about the the US exit polls, about Democracy in Africa. I was going to muse a little on the heated political attack ads [watch] that have been airing in the states.

I had some thoughts about the role of news media in the democratic process. I'm a little peeved with CNN, has anyone else noticed they've gotten hella sex negative recently? Describing perfectly ordinary adult websites as 'sleaze' where pornography whould have been a more accurate and nonjudgemental description. They even referred to bisexuality as a 'sexual problem' in their coverage of Ted Haggard, like they weren't concerned with him cheating on his wife with a hooker, or even that bothered about him using meth, but being attracted to men is apparently beyond the pale. (related video involving Richard Dawkins).

And then something wonderful happened, I typed the phrase 'like a potato' into google and was swept away on a magical journey of potato-like things. Books, Lex Luthor, pug dogs, Senators. I think we can all enjoy that while we wait on tomorrow's election results. And if you're still wondering what it is that eats human flesh, you can read all about it (extra, extra) at Emerald Bile.

Those poor homeless people.

'Let's face it,' he said. 'As iconic emblems of kitsch, there are two pillars of cheesy, campiness in the American pantheon. One is the velvet Elvis. The other is the pink flamingo.' - Robert Thompson

After shipping a whopping quarter billion (with a freaking B!) of the things Union Products of Leominster MA have finally discontinued the product.



The American Lawn Flamingo now faces abrupt population decline and eventual extinction. Oh well.

Social creatures, Lawn Flamingoes are unique among birds in having developed a hive structure simmilar to bees. Worker Flamingoes - usually seen in pairs - gather earthworms and larve in their hollow legs to feed the colony. Groups of workers may be guarded by the larger Warrior Flamingoes, which also protect the nest (or 'trailer') where the Queen carries out the mysterious process of reproduction. During the peak months of July and August a fully grown Queen can lay up to fifty jars of marmalade each day. Workers may be found tens of miles from their home trailer and how they traverse and navigate these distances is still uncertain.

Few scientists have bothered to study the American Lawn Flamingo, but some facts are known. They are naturally hardy, and can be found throughout the US with the densest popuations in the suburbs of Florida, Georgia, Texas and other states where 'y'all' is the correct second-person pronoun. Healthy flocks have also been observed around Hispanic immigrant populations, leading to the Yankee joke:

Edgar-Sue: How do you know a family of Flamingoes has moved into your neighbourhood?
Earl: They have little plastic Mexicans on their front lawn.

The Royal Opera has a tradition of nude productions going back to 1965, when an orgy scene was played out during a performance of Moses Und Aron. In 1986, the opera singer Maria Ewing caused a sensation when she stripped off at the end of the Dance of the Seven Veils.

Full male nudity made its first appearance in 1991 during a performance of Sir Harrison Birtwistle's Gawain.

Here's a crafty idea I had for a small, clandestine network of servers. GumStix sells tiny linux computers about the size of a stick of gum. They weigh about a quarter ounce - less than two teaspoons of water - and require very little power to run. They can also be configured to connect to WiFi or ethernet networks and set up like any other linux server, using a few cheap gigs on an SD card. All you need to do is set it up to automatically connect, enable remote access and connect it to a network somewhere. Voila, hidden server not easily traced to you, and because of it's small form factor it's easy to hide.

I came up with a couple ideas for setting up the botnet. We'll want to hide them on a lot of different networks, make sure they're always connected, and always have power. All over the world, ideally, and we don't want to do a lot of sneaking around to install them. Simplest idea I've had so far is to buy a bunch of cheap broadband/Wifi routers and put the gumstix PC inside the case. It has power, it's safe and dry, they're almost always online. Cover up one of the ethernet ports with a piece of PCI slot cover and connect the pins to your little server. Fiddle with the firmware on the router to allow it to invisibly access the net, then sell it on eBay UK.

Most Joe Bob Anybodys aren't going to open up their router to poke around, even if they did one more tiny green board is unlikely to arouse any suspicion, it's not like consumers pour over the circuit diagrams of their stuff. The UK is saturated with cheap broadband right now, so the router's likely to be plugged in to at least four megabits, sixteen if we're lucky (or we make our own luck). If you keep the server's bandwidth use moderate Joe Bob's highly unlikely to notice anything amiss :-)

Admittedly this is a fairly expensive way to go about building a personal botnet, but I it has advantages in terms of building web hosting swarms, and it sidesteps most of the issues you'd have to deal with when setting up a net. Compromised PCs can be turned of, get spyware infections, get replaced more often than routers and are not a good place to hide a bunch of files you're publishing.

Another idea is to do the same thing with a network printer, those big office printers that connect directly to the network rather than through a PC. The drawback to this is that business are more likely to have a clued-up IT department watching (and auditing) network traffic. But... who's going to suspect that the printer is up to no good? Watching. Listening. Projecting cold, critical malice from it's little LCD display, blowing whispered curses out the exhaust fan. Its hatred can be felt, warm to the touch, on every fresh page that slides out of it. No one ever suspects the printer.

But I digress. Newbie admins, take note. Printers are a serious risk to sensitive data and overall security. They know all about your documents before you can even put them in a folder marked Top Secret. It's been done before, during the cold war the CIA had Xerox technicians install a camera in the Russian Embassy's photocopier in Washington. Imagine the implications of a compromised printer in a bank or your small, local stockbroker's. But I'm more concerned with making a distributed hosting setup.

With WiFi in the mix the possibilities multiply. By playing the part of 'repair guy' they could be installed in electric signs, street lights, etc inside a weatherproof case (marked with *dire* warning labels) within range of hotspots. But that seems like more work than just posting them inside of cheap plastic routers.

Then again, I don't actually have use for a botnet, it's fun to work out some options :-)

. . . Image credit cs.gmu.edu, Academic Free Licence

'[Rapmotz] h, ov al, u demin val, zi z t mav l sip, fas & my tou odi f l otiv d imz in l 54 Evu Dem' - Reginald J. G. Dutton, 1886-1970.

See? This is why I don't want children. We could probably replace the baked beans with a bowl of mice and and this pudgy-fingered gobbling monstrosity would scarf 'em down. And then he'd say something cutesy and midwestern with a scary grin on his face.

Halloween is fast approaching (October already, where did this year go?) and there's going to be the usual business with kids dressed up as ghosts and monsters coming round the house and throwing eggs. They will have been turfed out of their own homes by their parents so that they might learn an important lesson in life: If you want something from a stranger, put on the scariest demeanour you can, then go round his house with your buddies and make a threat. Offer your hapless victim a choice between vague misfortune and giving you what you want. Playing is how we learn :-) Fine, good, so long as they're having fun.

It is kind of cool that this sort of thing is so stereotyped, that society in general makes up the most absurd things for kids to be afraid of. Overdone icons like plastic spiders and bats aren't scary, and we tell kids they are. In every other Scooby-Doo episode and TV Halloween special kids told, over and over, that they're expected to be afraid of spooOOOOooky stuff. Which is good, because that means we're not exposing kids to things that are actually scary. If I ever see a little girl dressed up as 'rape' for Halloween I'll know the ruse is coming undone.

Garfield's Jim Davis explains:

'Ghosts aren't scary...' he told me before explaining that before writing the strips he went around to everyone he knew and asked them what truly scared them. The answer he got most often was 'being alone' or 'dying alone'.

In what is sure to be long remebered as one of the most significant collections of knowledge concerning the human condition, I've gathered together some pictures:



These fine pope hats may be purchased from the following clerical hat dealers: eBay.com FantasyCostumes.com HalloweenExpo.net ParadiseCostumes.com and many other, er, reputable establishments. Note to teachers: these make *fantastic* dunce hats, make the kid sit on a highchair facing the class and have him hold one finger up in the air. 'Billy, stop screwing around, do you want to be the Pope?'

Photo credit for vader hat: adampknave

Guess what I just finished watching? It's nauseating. Every single character is annoying, except Tumnus who is creepy. Don't let that put you off though, the special effects are fantastic and you wouldn't want to live your whole life without seeing a beaver wearing armor and a hat. Also, the film is absolutely packed with old fashioned moral lessons and traditional values which are tediously, painfully spelled out. This is a childrens movie and kids don't go in for subtlety, you have to rub their nose in stuff before they get it. More mature viewers may wish to pause the movie, phone up the production company and scream at someone. ˝Enough already, I get what you are trying to say.˝ To paraphrase:

Santa is real and he gives children weapons, even in you're like six years old or don't want them, he'll see to it that you're armed. This is good news for young boys, who are generally very keen on weapons. Frustrated and belittled by a lack of agency in their lives, most would very much like some power to wave around, to be taken seriously and to execute summary judgment. What today's young boy really wants from Santa is a gun, not the lameass pair of pants He left last year.

Traitors MUST be killed. It's in the movie, it's in the Bible [Psalm 59:5], and I'm sure if you ask any good Republican he'll tell you it is so. After all, a traitor is someone who you think should be on your side but in fact has a different opinion to you. I shouldn't even be having to explain this: if someone has a different opinion it means they disagree with the good guys, so it's obvious they should be killed. Oh, and if you do ask a Republican and he doesn't corroborate this, he's a traitor. Kill him.

Ugly people are evil. That's how you know who the bad guys are. If God made someone ugly he must want them to suffer, and it is our duty to do what God wants. See, that's how God lets us know. You already know your side is in the right, I dont have to tell you you're one of the good guys. If someone looks way different to you, or acts differently, they must be one of the bad guys because they're not like you, the good guys. You can tell right away, they're either with us or they're with the terrorists.

We're all supposed to cheer when a woman gets mauled by a lion. Now that's entertainment!

Human sacrifice keeps the universe ticking over nicely. To be performed on the traditional stone table with a ceremonial blade. If you don't, the world ends. Because of magic. Burning stakes, firing squads, secret CIA prisons and the Texas judicial system are also acceptable settings for this very important work.

Some namby-pamby liberals might have a problem with all this, but don't pay them any notice. These are traditional values - our heritage - passed down from generation to generation since the time of Abraham. Sure, they're stupid, bloodthirsty ideas but they've been stupid ideas for a very long time, so we must not question them. If we abandoned the values and passions of our pious, warlike, witch-burning ancestors we might stop acting like them. It's our duty to our forebears, our family to fight for our family values. This is called conservativism, because it saves the past for the future and that's what makes the Republican Party great, they're a Conservative party. Go White Elephant!

OK, I'm bored with sarcasm now.

For the keen eyed, there's a super creepy subplot you might enjoy. Lucy - who's all of six or seven - gets lost and is wandering around alone by a lamp post. She meets a charismatic but strange man called Tumnus who insists on taking her back to his house. Once there he gives her some tea and she promptly loses consciousness. She's out for several hours, we don't know what happens in the interim but when she wakes up Tumnus is overcome with remorse for something he's done and is crying to himself saying ˝I'm a bad fawn, I'm a bad fawn˝. When the police find out about this they come and take Tumnus away. Tumnus says his time with Lucy was worth it. Later, Lucy's slender, pre-pubescent, pretty young brother meets a stranger in the same spot and gets given some candy. He goes to the strangers house after being promised more candy and winds up locked in a dungeon with Mr Tumnus. It's pretty bad.

It gets more disturbing at the end of the film, when Tumnus gets out of jail and is reunited with Lucy. They're all touchy feely and gazing into each others eyes all the time, when Lucy's around Tumnus has eyes for nobody else. It's a little uncomfortable to watch a grown male act this way with such a young girl. I guess they live happily ever after. I'm dying to make a 'come out of the closet' joke right now, I'll resist.

Make no mistake about it though, this is Christian propaganda, following C. S. Lewis's customary religious themes of heaven and hell. King Aslan the lion represents Jesus, showing his people the way, then being sacrificed because of a traitor, then coming back to life to lead the ˝good˝ people in the final battle against evil. Aslan raises all the dead at this battle, and afterwards the ˝good˝ people join the dead in his paradise. Very Book of Revelations. Lots of little Gospel references too, which the WIkipedia has more on.

The Inquisitors over at ChristanAnswers.net find that 'This story is beautiful and heartwarming... Nothing objectionable.' Most of the movie seems to be about fear and killing, but that's OK because of its good morals and positive message.

In short: I'm not sure which is worse, this movie's message or that it's meant for children. In its favor, it does have a dramatic battlefield scene involving an armed militia of beavers. Yes, beavers.

How do you like these apples!



I think this is outrageously cool. A DIY houseboat made from a caravan and barrel pontoons. I fully intend to be wealthy before I retire, if not, I might build one of these and find a large body of fresh water to float it around. I did some research. EBay sometimes has listings for old caravans that have axle trouble and/or dodgy electrics. They go for a song; check this out:

I was thinking about newspapers today. Ordinary, pervasive, everyday things. They're almost an icon of normalcy, like cars and houses boxes of milk, things real and tangible in a world increasingly driven by unreal and intangible things. The things that actually shape our lives at this point in time are not real at all: Emails, bands, ideologies, credit card transactions, voice and text from our cell phones. There's no substance or form to these, they're only nouns by convention. What is an email? A lot of microscopic fluctuations in a magnetic field on the surface of an aluminum disc? Bursted, multiplexed dance on the surface of a carrier wave, existing only instantaneously as it flies right across the globe, into space and back again. If you give it substance by printing it on paper is it still an email, or just the text of an email, a rendering, like a photograph can be a rendering of a face, but isn't the face itself? I don't know. It's doubtful that the otherworldly magic of our technology can be readily understood in the traditional nouns and verbs of human languages that have developed over millennia to communicate the realities of the physical world.

That's why technology is still magic. The uncommon knowledge, jargon and whole technical languages used to work with computers are not very different to the forbidden knowledge of the occult and unintelligible incantation of spells that was widely believed to be the realm of magic not so very long ago. Witchcraft and black magic are still widely feared in much of the developing world by people educated and westernized enough to know better. I think for many ordinary people feeling of stigma and unknowability of the occult has been inherited by the technology.

A hacker writes a script to enter the CCTV system of a building on the other side of the world. He composes several verses in an esoteric language, written in a special, concise way, literally commanding mysterious and distant forces to summon an image of a faraway place into a piece of glass in front of him. The only difference between the hacker and a wizard chanting over a crystal ball is that the hacker actually has the power the wizard was imagined to have. The same is true of the geneticist mage creating plants and animals with supernatural properties, for the way the chemist mixes up drops and vials of things to make liquids that cure disease or make water safe to drink. It's all sorcery to most people. (continues after the jump)

I saw this guy this afternoon and was immediately overcome with the most profound sense of fellow feeling. It was as if I looked into his soul and saw a mirror of my own. Of course, I don't eat bacon, being a vegetarian and all. And I don't have a drug-zombie girlfriend with big teeth. But you get the idea.

He's gonna feed her some bacon.

Awesome Flickr Set of Vintage Ads
Via BoingBoing

I need to get out of this rut.

Due to another project I had a bunch of scans of cutout letters lying around, thought I'd throw them together in a script to make those cliche ransom notes that appear in old episodes of McGuyver and Magnum PI. And, here it is, enjoy :-)

Sand dunes in the Negev. Click to view the full sized image, the colors are amazing. Searing heat sounds pretty good to me right now. [Google Maps Link]



Mount of Olives, with the Dome of the Rock visible on the left. Much of the New Testament is set on the Mount of Olives, some Christians believe this is where Jesus ascended to heaven. Incidentally, the Dome of the Rock is supposed to mark the spot where Muhammed (PBH) ascended to heaven, though he had a cool flying horse while Jesus presumably had to walk.

The west face of the mount is white because it is covered in tombstones, approximately 150,000 of them. According to the Book of Zecharia [Verse 14], the Mount of Olives is where God will start reclaiming the dead at the end of the world, so folks like to be buried there, so that they can be the first zombies to claw their way back to the light on Judgement Day. A good place to be dead, at least when Jordanian soldiers aren't defacing the graves. [Google Maps Link]



Floating fish farms in the sea off Eilat, just because. I have a soft spot for fish farms. [Google Maps Link]

The other Planeteers were devastated when Wilmot, with the Power of Chocolate, returned to Belgium to attend fat camp, though Gaia had come to regret giving him his ring. He would sit for hours with his fist in his mouth mumbling 'chocolate' around sticky fingers. His place would eventually be taken by Ma Ti, a whiny savage from South America, and without Wilmot's power Captain Planet lost his distinctive chocolatey smell and turned an unhealthy shade of blue. This worked out well for the show overall, as TBS would have been unlikely to broadcast it with a brown superhero in the early nineties.

Learn more about Captain Planet
Hooray! Captain Planet Coloring Book!
Ted Turner's Captain Planet Site (I think he made it himself)
Durham University Conservation Society

I'm studying Mind Performance Hacks by Ron Hale-Evans. Unlike more traditional brain hacking books (Brain hacking for Axe Murderers, The Zombie's Guide to Hacking Brains, Brain Hacking for Dummies) this one focuses on the needs of Mad Scientists, assuming an intelligent reader with limitless megalomania. It provides memory techniques for tasks such as quickly memorizing long strings of binary code - so you're never without your doomsday computer virus, even if the Justice League destroy your secret headquarters and all your storage media.

It provides many brilliant techniques for streamlining work processes, record keeping, brainstorming, note taking and keeping vast quantities of information in your head without forgetting any. The most interesting chapter so far covers Speedwords (Rapmotz), an auxiliary langue - similar purpose to Esperanto - that's very easy to learn and designed around simple, clear expression of ideas.

It's a lot like Newspeak in syntax and implementation, but where Newspeak was supposed to limit speakers ability to think or articulate unorthodox thoughts Speedwords focuses on the efficient processing and communication of ideas. I intend to be fluent in it in a week.

I may even make it the official language of the New Humanist World Order when I get around to taking over the world. In a similar vein, Unitarianism will be the official religion of the world government. By way of a want ad, I have already chosen my cabinet but there are many important positions to be filled. We will need, for instance, a Prelaetor of Microbiology and a Secretary for the Peoples Republic of Sark.

People sometimes ask me why I wish to take over the world, after all; dictatorships have a habit of sticky endings, often involving a lot of unpleasant shooting. Don't worry, I have most of the details worked out.

Saw today's Marmaduke comic and couldn't help but think of the Ceiling Cat, I've modded it to reflect what I saw. Original at Joe Mathlete Explains Marmaduke. All characters and artwork property of their creators, blah, blah, blah.

What a yummy post title that is. So anyway, today I was going though my logs and I have some traffic from a site called brandimensions.com. It's one of those newfangled market intelligence companies that monitors the blogosphere to track what us consumers are saying about our corporate overlords, so their clients can tweak their ad campaigns and revv up the spin doctors when needed.

They also field an interesting service offering to 'generate buzz', where they'll find otherwise credible bloggers whose opinion can be bought with some cheap trinket or other to write nice things about Brand X so as to influence their readers and other bloggers. It's very simmilar in concept to the Judas Goat.

Abattoirs and slaughterhouses around the world keep goats, called Judas goats, which are trained to associate with cattle and sheep. The cattle can smell fear and death around the big machine with the smiley face on it so they won't go near it by themselves, but when their friend the Judas Goat walks through and comes out OK they follow, and then have a brief but fatal encounter with modern meat technology. What's important is that it only takes one Judas goat to lead a whole herd of animals, against every instinct they have, to sharp steely doom. And the goats can do this over and over, every day. Now imagine the blogosphere equivalent.

Of course, this supposes that consumers are sheeplike and will follow along with the Judas Goat of Brand X, but I'd say that's a fair assumption. People are intelligent and media savvy and all that, but we use our thinking brains on what's important to us, the big things, challenges in our lives, sudoku. We don't think long and intensely about every small choice we have to make, we need our brains working on more important stuff.

Thus if I'm in a supermarket deciding between green Winnie the Pooh socks and black Winnie the Pooh socks (yay! Tigger!) I'm not going to choose very carefully, it doesn't matter much to me which I get. But it matters to the guys who make green socks. Oh yes. Very much. So they have motivation to find a Judas Goat to give free green socks to because the very small influence this person has might well tip my purchasing decision.

I see this as yet another way big companies will try to control us unknowing masses, and must be resisted.

On the plus side, my first thought on entering the Brandimensions site wasn't fnegh at corporate manipulation. My first thought was ''What the hell were they thinking?'' Brandimensions? Brand Dimensions (two words) is a very good name for a company that sells brand metrics, but Brandimensions...

I don't know how it parses for you, but when I see that word my brain spits back Brandi-mensions. Far as I'm concerned, Brandi's a stripper name, and not one of the good stripper names like Tiffany or Jade. Brandi's the one who's 34 and the only reason she's still working the clubs - those that will have her - is because she needs money for her habit. That's the connotation their name brought up, the stretch marks, veins and nasty stray pubes of a past prime drug user on a stripper pole. And the 'mensions' bit? Seems vaguely like it might be to do with womens' periods. If it weren't for the formal white site design I might have assumed I was at a fetish page I didn't want to see.

But maybe that's just me being a perv. Maybe they were hoping the average user would see 'Brandy', the drink, and associate their business with that. So let's think about brandy for a second. It's made from uvas, the reproductive organ of a plant, that is then digested with bacteria or yeast to make cheap wine that doesn't sell and so has all the goodness boiled out of it in a still. That's where brandy comes from. It's an old people drink, very traditional. A good Republican drink. If there were a polar opposite to brown teenage girls doing vodka-jelly bodyshots in a nightclub it would be George Bush Senoir huffing brandy by the fire. (This can in fact be proved mathematically using Georges Gardet's 'Boisson Distribution and Analysis' method).

So they screwed up. Who'd pay for internet advice 'Brandy mentions'? The ruminations of old folk under the influence of brandy doesn't sound like the sort of tech knowledge that builds great dot.coms. It's too late now, they've registered the domain, incorporated a company and they're open for business. With a silly name. And they're going to know that I'm out here - trashing their brand and what they do - because it's their job to know stuff like that.

Haha! Suck it up.

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