We Saw a Chicken …

Category: goatee-stroking musing, or something

  • Scooby-Doo breaks cartoon record

    Scooby-Doo breaks cartoon record — but the BBC article is worth reading purely for the anti-Scrappy Doo feedback items alone.

    I have to say, Scrappy Doo was perhaps the most annoying cartoon character ever.

  • “If there’s one thing I really, really hate …”

    Just been listening to Bing Hitler – Live at the Tron, that being Craig Ferguson‘s early stage act, back when he was much funnier.

  • Uncertain Slogan

    Richard Iwanski phoned, and left me with this slogan:

    Martyrs for Mammon & the American Way of Life:
    a Vote for John Kerry is a Vote for Perpetual Purgatory

    He and I are both not quite sure what it could mean, or what we can do with it.

  • HCP UK drops Eddie Moore

    I can’t believe this, but HarperCollins UK are making General Reference senior editor Edwin Moore redundant. Eddie’s a true mensch, knows everything (and everyone) there is to know about publishing, and is everything that was good about Collins in Scotland. He and I used to cycle to the Bishopbriggs plant every day, braving Scotland’s, um, interesting weather all year round.

    As we were both active in the NUJ chapel, we used to wonder if the management, err, strategies of HCP UK were those of evil geniuses, or shambling morons. Now we know.

    (An indication of this is immediately obvious from HCP‘s website; they can’t spell Dr Seuss, and they’re repackaging yet another bloody commemorative edition of LofR.)

  • yay, yay, IPA!

    Something has just changed on my Gentoo boxes; I can now display Unicode characters properly. John Wells’s International Phonetic Alphabet in Unicode now displays as it should.

    Now there’s nothing stopping me making weak pronunciation-related puns like “… to /Éš/ is human …”

  • car bong

    A large chrome hash pipe has lain in the rather obsessively manicured lot of a local Ford dealer for the last few days. It looks almost, but not quite, like lawn-sprinkler hardware or piece of hydraulics from an SUV. I wonder when they’ll notice it?

  • let’s get confused

    Clay County Absentee Ballot 2004
    No wonder folks in the USA get confused with ballot papers — there are just too many choices.

    UK ballot papers are super-simple: list of candidates down the left, list of checkboxes down the right. More than one issue? More than one ballot paper. It’s not hard.

  • No, we really did!

    a chicken we saw
    As a memento of actually seeing a chicken in Wingham, I decided to own the domains wesawachicken.com and wesawachicken.info. They both point here.

  • Not that I do, of course

    Friends who orienteer are the best, given that you (and they) know where they are.

     — Jonas Wolff

  • half a turbine: wee deid speug

    We found a dead sparrow (= speug, in Scots, pr. sp-yug) outside the front window when we took the recycling out. It had hit the window. Sorry, little dude.

    So that’s me used six months of the avian mortality of the ExPlace wind turbine.

  • co-transiteers annoyance

    Two new annoying fellow travellers on the GO train yesterday:

    • The Clipper: she took about 10 minutes to get her nails just right … clip, clip, tick, clip … am I the only one who finds that kinda gross? I felt like making kapweeng! kapweeng! ricochet noises to go with it
    • The Thumper: Take a Stompin’ Tom Connors record. Remove the vocals and instrumental accompaniment. Slow it down 200 times. That’s what this youth was doing with his right foot: thump … thump …  … thump …  …  … thump … thump. He kept checking around to see if he was getting a rise out of anyone.

    Being the consummate commuter of course, I abided by the first law of transit annoyances: Sit there and do nothing, for cowardice is a virtue.

  • banjo blues

    I’m kinda stuck with my banjo playing. I can frail away an adequate Shady Grove, but — despite what my teacher Chris Coole says — I just don’t have the confidence to learn new songs from a book or CD.

    I get home late and tired, and very often the banjo gets neglected. This isn’t good. I enjoy playing, but I think everyone around me would appreciate it if I got some new tunes.

  • foaf?

    Do you have a FOAF? Or are you Nae Friends?

    This is my FOAF.

  • No sign of peace, order or good government here

    From the livejournal of giantlaser, a contractor in Iraq:

    • We have 10 guards on staff at all times. They live with us. They are Kurdish, from areas 200-400 km north. They have no local loyalties at all – no friends, no family, no one to apply pressure here. While it is always possible they could be compromised, it is far less likely.
    • We have house staff to do all local things we need, like run the generators, shop, fuel the cars, etc.
    • When we leave, the guards sweep the street and secure the immediate area.
    • We are armed at all times. On foot, with a pistol. In a car, with an AK-47 as well.
    • We now take two cars with at least 3 guards. And we’ve appointed the most experienced and capable guards as our personal ones.

    Doesn’t sound much like ensuring/enduring freedom or democracy to me.

  • the word “bummer”

    WordReference used to have all the Collins dictionaries available online, for free browsing. I was the main dictionary computing guy at Collins when this deal was made, and it was pretty cool to have a good, non-US English dictionary on the web.

    I gues the money has run out, as the Collins data has disappeared, and the English dictionary is derived from WordNet. While I think that WordNet‘s a worthy project, it doesn’t quite compare to the Collins English Dictionary.

    Oh well, it was good to know you, WordReference.

  • Singing is a radical act

    Would you call the singer of If You Want To Sing Out, Sing Out a terrorist? The US Department of Homeland Security has just deported Yusuf Islam.

    What a shower of hopeless gits …

  • ***TypeBlog***

    typewriter blog entry, 19 Sep 2004

    — The above written on an IBM Wheelwriter 10 Series II, using the Thesis PS printwheel.

  • Help, I’ve been traded!

    My blog appears to be a (very minor) commodity in BlogShares: We Saw A Chicken …

  • bad scene on Kennedy Road

    There’s a big do at the Salaheddin Islamic Centre this weekend. It seems that there’s some convention being held by the Muslim Ummah of North America. Yesterday, there was a small but very heated demonstration, with a group of people being very opposed to a particular person being present. Obligatory placards, shouting and police cars; you know the deal.

    I still haven’t been able to work out what this was about. If I find out more, I’ll post it.

  • The Specialist

    cover illustration
    I think this is out of copyright in Canada now, so please enjoy The Specialist, by Charles Sale.