A charming interview with Hillary Clinton. "... among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans..."
A couple of days ago, I noticed this article about Tony Blair secretly controlling Gordon Brown, presumably in much the same way as Maggie secretly controlled John Major in later episodes of Spitting Image. I was immediately drawn to it by the wonderful photo of Cherie Blair, so bookmarked it. Cherie Blair is of course Tony's crazy wife; you can read about her wacky exploits here.
Have a look. The photo's pretty pedestrian, eh? And well it might be, because the BBC replaced the original with boring stock photography. The original was... brace yourself... a larger version of this:
I assume that all of this is part of the media conspiracy to imply that Tony and Cherie are actually humans, and not evil robots possibly designed by the Spitting Image version of Margaret Thatcher. Think about it. It makes sense.
Bonus: Here, we see the tragic results of XP Service Pack 3 being applied:
There's this horrifying show in MTV called 'My Super Sweet 16', in which a revoltingly well-off kid has an absurd birthday party, and make it very clear just what a horrible spoilt git they are. It's really shocking, but with that sort of train-crash, can't look away quality.
I wouldn't know much about the topic, mind you; I, regarding other kids as more objects of fear than companionship, never actually had any friends in school (those people who insist that school is the best years of your life are obviously dangerously insane), and in college (where people, in my experience, are rather more grown up, saner and less vicious) my birthday rather inconveniently tended to fall during end-of-year exams. Generally the day of a digital logic exam, by some bizarre, sick coincidence. In fact, this year will be the first that I can sensibly do something for my birthday, but the thought of being 23, horrifying as it is, is putting me off a bit.
Sweet 16's primarily an American thing, but MTV UK did make at least one series; one of the episodes is about Lorcan from Blackrock. That'd be Blackrock in Dundalk, by the way; I know, I was amazed too. He's horrible. It's really shockingly awful, and well worth a watch. I realise I'm a bit late here; it was a minor Internet sensation in Ireland a while back. Oh, well. For some reason, although all the other episodes are available to view on MTV's site, this one isn't out in the open; the first part of it is hidden away on their site here though.
He turns out to also have a bebo (knowledge gleaned from aforementioned Internet sensation), but I won't direct you there; you see, the young, well, they don't spell like us. My eyes still ache from punctuation used as letters.
The worst of it is, the very most dreadful of the UK/Ireland ones seem to be better than the US ones; in the US series, a fit of temper should be expected if the birthday present (generally a car or similar) is worth less than $50,000. Really. Welcome to the new, scary, consumertastic society!
And yes, I am watching a lot of crap TV this weekend, thank you for asking.
So, I'm watching the Apprentice; it's a guilty pleasure of mine. It's a show where people who incorrectly think that they are good businesspeople compete to win the approval of Sir Alan Sugar, the man who repeatedly tried to introduce overpriced, underspecced email consoles to Britain, at a time when people could buy a perfectly good personal computer for the same price. So, really, the person who makes the most absurd decisions should win.
The task was to buy a list of items in a Marrakesh souk; one of them a Kosher chicken. So... one team bought a dead chicken, then tried to have it blessed in a mosque. Because that's what Kosher means, obviously. I mean, there's stupid, and then there's, well, this.
Update: Alan Sugar was just as horrified as I was at their horrendous stupidity. The best bit; one of the members of the offending team was Jewish, and had put on the first paragraph of his CV that he was 'a good Jewish boy'. Now, I'm a not very good Atheist (of nominally Catholic background) boy, and I seem to have a better idea of what Kosher means than him. Admittedly, I do collect random information about nonsense, but still.
As you can see, I now have a 'say hi' widget on my blog sidebar. It's a new Google Talk feature which will let users of your site talk to you in a web browser window. It seems quite clever, but so far no-one seems to have used it. Well, one person did, but they disconnected before I answered.
Give it a go. :)
A bit of advice for all the giant web companies out there; don't allow this to happen to your major, popular, high-profile services:
Been like that for the past 20 minutes or so. I mean, do they want to lose their userbase?
I just looked at my online banking, to see this withdrawal:
Please note that this withdrawal happened next Monday; it can anticipate my actions!
Actually, of course, the withdrawal was yesterday evening, on my way home from work. I realise that banks don't really believe in weekends, but it's still a bizarre way to present it.
Oh, what fun! You can get a little widget from Google's site; it's lovely.
Heartily recommended.
Everyone's doing it! Within a few days of each other, both Sun and Apple bought a chip designer. Apple's makes low-power PowerPCs, Sun's makes (imaginary, as yet) low-power x86s.
Funnily enough, before the Apple/Intel deal, it was widely expected that they would use processors from said PPC designer in their laptops. Interesting... Apple, of course, have kept their options for fleeing to another platform quite open; just about all Apple applications are still compiled for PPC and Intel, which forces developers to consider endian issues and so forth, and a move back to PPC would be particularly easy. However, Apple seems to have most-favoured-vendor status with Intel at the moment, so a move at the moment doesn't look likely. Still, Apple has been known to dump chip makers rather publicly and violently (Motorola over the G4, IBM over the G5), so maybe they're keeping their options open.
Sun's move is more obvious. They bought a low power x86 company. They have a low-power many-cored UltraSparc (T1/2/2+/3) themselves, and would no doubt like to improve it with IP from the acquisition. They might also be interested in making many-cored, low-power x86s, stealing a march on Intel and AMD.
Interesting, nonetheless. I wonder who will be next to buy a weird chip designer? I'm sure Sun is eyeing Azul...
From the world's premier collection of chairs (yes, I know I'm stealing this from the Register, but Valleywag has been doing so too, lately, so I feel justified), comes this wonderful caption:
Well, yes, so it is. Quite frankly, they shouldn't have bothered.
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